A Girl's Best Friend

by Lindsey Kelk

  ‘I’ll try,’ I promised.

  Five minutes seemed like an awfully long time.

  ‘Are you going to explain to me why you’re up there?’ Amy asked from the foot of the tree, four minutes later.

  ‘I was trying to take a photo,’ I explained. Of course Amy hadn’t asked how or why I’d broken into the park in the first place, just why I’d decided to climb a tree. ‘And then a policeman came and I got stuck.’

  Whatever frustrated energy had propelled me up the tree had disappeared and I couldn’t move my foot even an inch.

  ‘I can’t move,’ I said, closing my eyes and clinging tightly to the trunk of the tree. ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘Was he hot?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I called down. ‘But I do know we can get arrested for being in here if he finds us.’

  ‘Hurry up and get down then,’ she hissed. ‘You know I’m usually the first one to suggest a fun sleepover in a jail cell but I’ve got the presentation tomorrow and if we have to ask Kekipi to bail us out again, we might get sacked from being his bridesmaids.’

  ‘Getting up was easy,’ I said. ‘I can’t see my way back down. I’m going to fall, it’s too slippery.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t think about it, just do it. One foot after the other, I won’t let you fall. I’m here.’

  With a deep breath, I loosened my grip on the top branch, eventually finding something solid a couple of feet below. Slowly, I picked up my left foot and lowered myself down.

  ‘There you go,’ Amy cheered. ‘The first one was the hardest. You’re almost down.’

  ‘I am not almost down!’ I replied, staring at the lights flickering on and off in the skyscrapers across the park. ‘Don’t patronize me.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’re still a good twelve feet up a frozen tree. Try not to kill yourself and I’ll see you back at the house.’

  ‘I hate you,’ I muttered under my breath, knowing full well she wouldn’t leave me. ‘Don’t look at my arse.’

  ‘It’s basically blocking out the moon,’ she assured me. ‘I can’t miss it.’

  The sturdy branches I’d grabbed on the way up the tree all disappeared on the way down, replacing themselves with rubber chickens and icicles that threatened to bend and snap every time I put any weight on them at all. A couple of feet from the ground my foot slipped out from under me and I felt my whole body slam against the trunk of the tree, my knees taking the brunt of the hit and branches in my hands snapping clean off the tree, skinning my palms as I went.

  ‘There you go!’ Amy clapped as I collapsed onto my hands and knees at the bottom of the tree. ‘You’re down!’

  ‘What happened to “I won’t let you fall, I’ve got you”?’ I asked, rising to my feet and brushing off my filthy hands.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she replied, scratching her nose. ‘I suppose that bottom bit did sort of count as a fall. It was a dead classy one though, well done you.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said with a sigh as she wrapped her arm around my waist and helped me hobble back towards the path. ‘Thank you. I really did think I was going to be stuck up there all night.’

  ‘I don’t know what possessed you to get up there in the first place,’ she said. ‘That’s the sort of stupid thing I would do.’

  ‘I went to Nick’s apartment and a woman answered his intercom,’ I said. ‘And I’d had wine. All of the wine. Well, four glasses, that’s a lot for me.’

  ‘That’s all the wine as far as you’re concerned,’ Amy replied. ‘I thought maybe something had gone wrong at the shoot.’

  ‘Oh, it did,’ I nodded, picking bits of dirt and bark out of my palms. ‘It really did. But climbing the tree was a stupid reaction to seeing another woman in Nick’s place. Getting so smashed at dinner that I thought going to Nick’s apartment in the first place would be a good idea was because the shoot went so badly.’

  ‘So what you’re telling me is, you’ve had a busy day,’ she surmised. ‘Cup of tea and a bag of Maltesers?’

  ‘You wouldn’t kid a girl, would you?’ I asked, limping towards the streetlights.

  ‘I’ve got a secret stash under the bed,’ she said. ‘I cleaned out Heathrow on the way over.’

  ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Take me to your chocolate.’

  ‘What are best friends for?’ Amy asked. ‘Now, one more time, was the police officer hot or not?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next morning, I woke to find a cold cup of tea on the nightstand beside me, alongside a bottle of Advil and a bottle of water. Amy was nowhere to be seen.

  It only seemed like moments since I’d fallen into bed and no part of me wanted to get up. But once my eyes were open, the last twenty-four hours came flooding back, whether I liked it or not. Grumbling quietly to myself, I opened the headache tablets and shook two into my hand, only whining the tiniest bit when I struggled to open the bottle of water. As much as I might have wanted to, there was no time for wallowing. I need to fix my camera, I needed to find a computer with Photoshop so I could edit the Gloss photos and I needed to figure out what the flip I was going to do about my picture for the Spencer Gallery exhibition. The man I had spoken to at the gallery had assured me I could hand-deliver it as late as the twenty-fourth but that only gave me twenty-four hours and almost every photo I had taken since I arrived was on my broken laptop.

  Picking my jeans up from the floor, ignoring how crusty they felt against my skin, I pulled them on, and grabbed a soft blue jumper from the armchair. I’d seen Amy wearing it as a dress, which meant it would likely be the perfect length for me. There were occasional upsides to having a friend who was almost a foot shorter than you, not many perhaps, but this was one of them.

  Slicking lip balm on my dry, chapped lips and tying up my hair, I gave my reflection a determined look. It was time to go and see a man about a camera.

  ‘Ah, Ms Brookes.’

  Tony the Driver sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by sections of a newspaper and a mug of coffee so big I could have dunked my head in it. And it took all my restraint not to.

  ‘I just dropped Ms Smith off at the Armory. It’s nice having another early riser around, I’m going to miss her when you guys leave.’

  It was very odd to hear someone refer to Amy as an early riser. My Amy preferred not to get out of bed until McDonald’s had stopped serving their breakfast menu so she could start her day with a nice, healthy McChicken Sandwich. This new New York Amy was a different creature altogether.

  ‘Your rice is over there,’ Tony said, waggling his eyebrows up and down and nodding towards the kitchen counter. ‘I got my fingers crossed for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, holding my breath and picking up my camera. ‘I really appreciate this.’

  ‘Not my first rodeo,’ he assured me. ‘Miss Cecelia went through a bunch of cellphones before I learned this trick. If only there had been a way to stop her puking in the back of my car when I went to pick her up …’

  ‘Nice.’ I picked up the camera and weighed it in my hands. It felt OK and it looked OK. Tony brought his mug of coffee to his lips and held it there, not drinking as he watched. Wincing, I pressed down on the power button and endured the longest half-second of my life.

  ‘Yes!’ Tony yelled, spilling his coffee as the camera whirred into life.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ I breathed out as I began to scroll through the previous day’s photos. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy.’

  ‘What about the computer?’ he asked.

  I looked down at my sad MacBook and tried not to cry, but there had to be a chance, didn’t there? Emboldened by my success with the camera, I jabbed at the power button and prayed for the irritating chime to tell me it was still alive.

  But the chime didn’t come. The screen stared up at me, blank and vacant, with no signs of life.

  ‘I’m calling it,’ Tony said. ‘Time of death, eight twenty-three. Fifty-fifty ain’t bad, kiddo.’<
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  ‘I know,’ I replied, choking down a sob. If the laptop was broken, the photos were useless. I knew there was a computer in Al’s office but I doubted he had the programs I needed and I really, really needed them. What’s more, I really, really needed a laptop full stop. ‘Looks like I’m going shopping.’

  ‘You need a ride?’ he asked. ‘Because I know a guy who has a car.’

  ‘I might.’ I tried a half-smile while calculating how much room was left on my credit card. I’d worked so hard to get out of debt, all my student loans paid off, all my credit cards cleared and now I was more in the red than I’d ever been. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Gimme twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘And I’ll run you to the Apple Store.’

  ‘I might go and sort myself out then.’ I looked down at my cobbled together outfit and scraped-back hair. ‘The Apple Store is going to be busy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty busy,’ he nodded.

  ‘And if I have to prostitute myself to get a new computer, I’m going to have to look half decent,’ I said, cradling my sad electronics under my arm and heading back upstairs.

  Without the will to try much harder than a hairbrush and some mascara, I was ready inside five minutes and didn’t think Tony wanted to sit and watch me sob over a broken computer while he read his morning paper. Wrapped up in my borrowed coat, I shuffled upstairs to Al’s roof terrace, blinking into the early morning sunshine without my sunglasses. We hadn’t had any snow overnight and the air wasn’t so cold, just sharp and electric. High up on the rooftop, I looked out over Central Park and felt a burst of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Despite my frustration and underlying sense of doom, there was something else. I followed the pathways of the park with my eyes, looking for my tree, trying to spot where I had hopped over the wall, but I couldn’t quite work it out.

  Not that it mattered. There was plenty to see. The office buildings, apartments and hotels that lined the park jutted up and down, breaking up the bright blue of the sky with sharp grey lines, and on top of Al’s townhouse, standing in silence above everyone else, at eye level with concrete giants, even in my current predicament I felt untouchable. It was as though last night was a million years ago, a sad scene from a bad movie. Something like that could never happen to someone who lived here.

  The ordered cityscape gave way to a winter wonderland, all rolling hills and twisting trees dropped right in the middle of the structured streets. North and south, east and west – where else in the world could these two things exist so perfectly together? You would think walking out of your door to be swallowed up by this fantasy every single day would have been amazing, but as I watched the people below walking their dogs and rushing off to work, every single one of them had their heads down. I was the only one who could see how special it all was, as though Central Park had been made only for me, a magical world in the centre of a city and the real world seemed very, very far away. When I looked down on the park, it was like falling into a fairy tale.

  I turned my camera on again, still relieved when it whirred into life, and tried to find the perfect shot but it was too much, too vast. I wanted to take hold of the whole city and wrap it up in a bow but my camera could only capture tiny parcels at a time and it wasn’t enough.

  My eyes stung from the early morning sun and the wind that whipped around the edge of the terrace burned my cheeks, chasing me away to a group of comfy-looking couches surrounded by outdoor heaters around the corner where a giant gas barbecue just waited to be fired up.

  Settling myself on the sofa, I remembered one winter’s day back when I was little, before my dad left and when my mum still smiled easily. For reasons that didn’t need explaining to a six-year-old, Dad decided to cook Sunday dinner on the barbecue in the garage, with two feet of snow covering the garden. I remembered me and miniature Amy laughing like mad things, running back and forth from the garden to the kitchen, puffing out big clouds of frozen air and jumping from foot to foot while we waited for the next round of chicken drumsticks to be declared ready. I remembered thinking it was the most wonderful, ridiculous and spectacular thing that had ever happened.

  I made a mental note to make sure we found time for a rooftop barbecue in the snow before we left for Milan and wondered what six-year-old Tess would make of all this. A little girl who couldn’t even process the wonder of barbecuing out of season, sat on the roof of a townhouse in New York, spending Christmas on the Upper East Side before flying to Milan for the wedding of her Hawaiian gay best friend. It didn’t seem quite possible. Things like that didn’t happen to people like me.

  I opened my emails, hoping to find something inspiring, but instead I was faced with a message from my least favourite Spencer twin, demanding to know when she could expect my edited photos. My stomach rumbled, rolling in on itself and settling somewhere around my feet. Rather than dwell on things that made me want to lemming myself off the top of the townhouse, I opened a message from Paige, a forward of the daily Belle email blast with the subject header Bertie Bennett Rides Again. This had to be from the interviews he’d been doing the day before, I realized, happily clicking through, hoping to find something cheerful to brighten my morning.

  Bertie Bennett, one of the fashion world’s most colourful characters, returns to New York today with an off-season presentation of AJB, the first fashion collection designed by the retail magnate-turned-recluse.

  Recluse was a bit harsh, I thought. He had lost his wife and he had been cursed with a shithead for a son. I imagined most people would choose to hang out in their beautiful Hawaiian holiday home for a bit if they had the option after all that.

  Bennett was the mastermind behind Bennett’s department store, beginning in Manhattan in the early seventies and expanding worldwide, bringing high fashion to people across the globe. Bennett’s late wife, Jane, was known for working with young designers in each Bennett’s territory, acting as mentor and patron and giving them space in their stores to sell their early collections. Many of today’s leading designers owe their start in the industry to the Bennett family and there is no doubt that today’s launch has been the most highly anticipated date in the fashion calendar ever since Bennett announced his debut collection at a special event in Milan this summer.

  While few were surprised to see Bennett colouring outside the lines – the retailer-turned-designer will likely be remembered for his legendary parties as much as his revolutionary impact on the retail landscape – whispers inside the industry have cast doubt on whether or not Bennett should run the risk of tarnishing his legacy by branching out into design. It is understood the collection draws heavily on designs created by Jane Bennett, which some fear will appear dated, in spite of AJB design head (and long-time Bennett family friend) Edward Warren’s influence. Added to this, the appointment of Amy Smith, a newcomer to the fashion industry, as VP of Special Projects has certainly caused raised eyebrows. For the past decade, the Bennett retail empire has been primarily run by Bennett’s son, Archie, and even though age has no bearing on a designer’s sensibilities (Bennett Senior still clocks in several years younger than a certain Mr Lagerfeld), his absence from the fashion world and the potential disconnect from his wife’s dated designs has caused some to speculate as to how well equipped he might be to understand today’s buyer.

  Tonight, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, the fashion world will discover whether AJB will be Bennett’s greatest success or his deepest regret.

  Well, I thought. That wasn’t very nice. And why was an entire industry raising its eyebrows at Amy? Sure, she had no fashion industry stuff on her CV and, OK, her retail experience was a little bit patchy and primarily consisted of a couple of Christmas shifts on the checkout in Woolworths but she wasn’t the reason it had gone under. Probably. For all they knew she was an amazing VP of Special Projects. And actually, I realized, she was.

  I went back to the original email from Paige and noticed the sad face above the link. I replied with a considered and succinct ‘b
ollocks to this’ and hoped against hope that Amy and Al were both too busy to have checked their inboxes that morning.

  Looking at my watch, I realized it was almost time to hurl myself deeper in debt at the altar of Apple, but before I could heave myself up off the sofa I heard the lift ping as the doors opened and watched as Al trudged slowly over to the edge of the terrace. I opened my mouth to say hello but as he turned to stare out over the city, I saw an unfamiliar look on his face and my mouth snapped shut. His eyes were puffy and his nose was red.

  ‘Oh, Janey,’ he said, taking a deep breath and then leaning over the wall. The cityscape didn’t seem to have the same effect on Al that it had on me. ‘I cannot believe you’re not here today.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I could really use your advice now,’ he said, wiping a calloused thumb against his cheek and stretching his long legs out behind him. Even in this weather, Al could not be parted from his beloved board shorts. ‘I feel like such an old fool. What am I doing?’

  Even though I knew he was in his seventies and his white beard and frothy head of hair were hard to miss, it had never occurred to me that Al was old. We’d met on a surfing beach in Hawaii, me stumbling along the sand and Al leaping out of the waves with more spring in his step than your average Slinky, but today, he looked fragile and, for the first time, I realized he could break. He looked like something that could be broken. Without thinking, I picked up my camera and snapped.

  ‘Morning,’ I called, the weight of my camera around my neck nothing but a relief. ‘Have you been out here long? I was so busy with my camera, I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Ahh, Tess.’ A bright smile came over his face and whatever I had seen through the camera disappeared. Or he did a really good job of covering it up. ‘I should have known you’d have found your way up here. It really is the only place to find some solitude in this city.’

  ‘Not the only place,’ I said, glancing down at the park. ‘But definitely the most accessible. Are you excited about the presentation tonight?’