Be Careful What You Wish For

by Gemma Crisp

  Weaving her way through the crowd of teenagers flirting awkwardly with each other in front of the Tube entrance, Nina waved to the girls in the nail bar on the corner, trying to ignore the smell of weed mixed with acrylic glue, then turned right into Brighton Terrace. She’d moved here with Tess and Camille almost a year ago, much to the horror of Annika, who lived on a posh street in South Kensington and couldn’t fathom how Nina could contemplate taking up residence in South London, let alone in such a notorious area. She’d given up trying to explain that the Brixton riots of the eighties and nineties were practically ancient history and tried not to roll her eyes when people freaked out because of the high African and Caribbean population. As with a lot of the previously dodgy areas of London, Brixton was this close to taking the ‘Next Big Thing’ title off Dalston. In the short time she’d lived there, Nina had seen wine bars, art galleries and sushi restaurants squeeze themselves in among Brixton landmarks such as the art deco former-Woolworths-now-H&M building on the high street, the markets sprawled around Electric Avenue, and the longstanding Dogstar club on Coldharbour Lane. Every weekend without fail she could hear the crowds making their way up to the Brixton Academy and the Fridge, ready for a massive night out – and if she was on an early shift, she’d often see the same people at six the next morning, gurning away while waiting in McDonald’s for a comedown thickshake. Nina loved the energy and authenticity of Brixton; she much preferred it to the snottiness of Chelsea or Fulham, no matter how much Annika tried to convert her.

  ‘Hiya, I’m home’, she called out, dumping everything on the couch as she poked her head in the kitchen just in time to catch Tess hurriedly shoving the last of the Jaffa Cakes in her mouth. Nina screwed up her nose. ‘You don’t need to hide it from me, I don’t rate Jaffa Cakes at all. Give me a milk chocolate HobNob any day over those vile things. But you’d better replace the packet before Camille comes home,’ she warned, as Tess’s frantic chewing slowed its pace.

  ‘Jmmphofffemssssmvolllljchhhmmmlls,’ Tess mumbled through a mouthful of Jaffa Cake.

  Nina raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? Fascinating. I would never have guessed,’ she said sarcastically.

  Tess tried again. ‘Camille has gone to Pete’s place; she won’t be home for days.’ Since Camille had hooked up with Pete, a new chef at her hotel, Nina and Tess hardly saw her anymore. They tried not to take it personally – living in a one-bedroom flat with two other girls wasn’t ideal, especially given how tight Nina and Tess were. Even though the three girls often worked different shifts, there were still times when they found themselves getting on top of each other at home, so Nina didn’t blame Camille for grabbing some breathing space whenever she could. Especially when it meant she could sleep in a proper bed every night, rather than rotating between the two single beds and a fold-out mattress. Nina might have escaped the typical profession and postcodes of Aussies in London on a working-holiday visa, but she hadn’t been as successful in avoiding the housing cliché. ‘No wonder I’ve been single since moving here,’ she thought. ‘How am I supposed to bring a guy home when I share a bedroom with two other chicks?’

  Not that she’d suffered a total man drought, she reminded herself. There’d been Declan, the Irish restaurant manager from the Bickford, who she’d hooked up with a few times before they both came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the greatest idea, and she’d even been on a date with Rob, the hotel porter she was in lust with. Admittedly it hadn’t been the most successful date, due to the fact that, apart from the hotel, they had absolutely nothing in common. He was into Marilyn Manson; she liked Rihanna. He had a kid from a previous relationship; she was allergic to children. He was perfectly happy delivering bags to people’s rooms for a living; she was burning to get out of the hospitality industry. In a word: awkward. As much as she’d tried to talk it up to Tess afterwards, Nina had known there wouldn’t be a second date. But even though they were less suited than Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, she still found herself drooling over him.

  ‘How come you’re home late?’ Tess asked, shoving the magazines aside so she could take up residence on the couch. ‘Was there a rush of check-ins during handover or did you just happen to fall into H&M after you got off the Tube?’

  ‘Neither. I bumped into Johan after I finished, so we had a drink. But then one drink turned into several, especially after he worked his magic on the barman in Freedom. I swear our G&Ts tripled in strength after they arranged to hook up this weekend . . .’ Nina trailed off. She wondered whether she should tell Tess about Johan’s idea for her new career. Now that she was home, she felt a bit stupid for thinking she’d have a chance of breaking into the magazine industry. If it was that easy, why didn’t everyone do it?

  ‘Good old Johan; he doesn’t waste any time, does he?’ Tess laughed as she picked up the Marie Claude Nina had swiped from the bar and started flicking through it. ‘How come this page is tagged?’ she asked.

  Nina stalled for time by straightening the stack of magazines on the coffee table; she’d forgotten she’d stuck a Post-it note on the page where the internship details were. It was typical of Tess to notice; her cousin rarely missed a trick. While Nina cruised through life, Tess was meticulous in everything she did, even if it was just flicking through a magazine.

  ‘Ummm . . . I’m interested in some info that’s on there,’ she said vaguely.

  Tess looked at the page again. ‘What? The tweets about how fab the last issue was? Or the letter of the month from Pamela in Edinburgh about body image?’

  ‘No, not those.’ Nina didn’t know why she was so reluctant to tell Tess. Maybe it was because her cousin loved working in the hospitality industry and wouldn’t understand why Nina wanted a change. Or she’d look at Nina like she was coco bananas for thinking about pursuing a new career when she already had a perfectly good job and she only had a few months left on her working visa. Then she remembered Johan’s words – ‘What have you got to lose?’

  ‘I’m going to apply for an internship at Marie Claude.’ The words were out before Nina could change her mind. She pretended to be busy searching for something in her bag as she steeled herself for Tess’s reaction.

  ‘An internship? To do what?’

  ‘To work in the features department, so I can get some work experience under my belt and see if I like it,’ Nina muttered. Bloody Johan, she should never have listened to him and his crazy ideas.

  What about your job at the hotel?’

  ‘What about it? I’ve been there for almost two years; they can’t stop me from leaving,’ Nina said, hating the tinge of defensiveness in her tone.

  ‘So you’d quit? What will you do for money?’

  ‘I don’t know, Tess. To be honest, I haven’t thought about it,’ Nina sighed, trying not to get frustrated by her cousin’s practical nature. ‘I only just found out this afternoon that the internship exists. I’m sure they have thousands of applicants, so I probably won’t even get an interview, but I thought I may as well give it a crack. You’ve got to be in it to win it,’ she said, echoing Johan’s earlier encouraging words, more for herself than for Tess.

  ‘Well, I think it’s a great idea.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Nina raised her head from her bag to stare at her cousin.

  ‘I think it’s a great idea,’ Tess repeated. ‘You haven’t been happy at the hotel for ages and the longer you stay in the industry, the harder it’ll be to get out. I’ve always said you’re a total magazine tragic, so if you’re going to quit your job to try a new career, surely that’s the most obvious one. Plus, weren’t you the editor of your school magazine back in the day?’

  ‘Technically yes, but I hardly did anything; I was too busy chasing boys!’

  ‘So? The editor of Marie Claude, or whoever you have to apply to, doesn’t need to know that! It might not be the same as saying you’re Anna Wintour’s long-lost daughter, but it could give you a point of difference from the other candidates.’

  ‘True . . . and I do need al
l the points of difference I can get. So you really think it’s a good idea?’ Nina asked.

  ‘Life’s too short to be miserable,’ Tess said firmly. ‘If the hotel thing isn’t rocking your world anymore, then it’s time to move on. And if you don’t get the Marie Claude internship, I’m sure there are others you could apply for. And if none of them work out, it’s not going to kill you to keep working at the hotel for another couple of months until your visa expires. Especially with all the tips and presents you guys get,’ she added wryly.

  ‘I might need to sell all those presents on eBay if I get this internship, seeing it’s unpaid,’ Nina pointed out, while reaching under the couch.

  ‘Especially that one,’ Tess said dryly, as Nina pulled her iPad out from its pink leopard print Marc Jacobs cover; both were gifts from Herr Schmidt, an Austrian millionaire who regularly stayed at the Bickford and loved to splash his cash around.

  Logging into her email, Nina ignored all the magazine e-newsletters she’d signed up for and started to compose her internship application. Having read a ridiculous amount of magazines, she knew it was important to strike the right tone – chatty but not too familiar, informative but not boring. She needed to sell herself to them, so that it didn’t matter that there was a gaping hole on her CV where a journalism degree should be, or that she didn’t have any other work experience in the industry to her name. ‘Everyone has to start somewhere,’ she thought determinedly, tapping out sentences then immediately deleting them, rewriting again and again until she was happy. After almost an hour, she looked up. ‘Tess, can you read this for me and tell me honestly what you think?’ She handed her cousin the iPad. ‘Does it sound like I’m begging? Would you at least get me in for an interview if you were the features editor of Marie Claude?’

  Nina watched intently as Tess’s eyes scanned her letter of application. She paused a couple of times, replaced a word here and there, tweaked the opening sentence, then gave the iPad back to Nina.

  ‘It’s good. You’re not begging, you’re just explaining how passionate you are about magazines and how you’re willing to schlep around doing the coffee run every morning for three months if it means getting your foot in the door. I reckon they’d have loads of applications from people who think it’ll be twenty-four/seven glamour and assume they’ll be interviewing celebrities and sitting front row at fashion shows in their first week of interning – I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just happy to hear from someone who’s frothing over photocopying.’

  ‘Well, hopefully I’ll get to do a bit more than just fetching coffee and photocopying if I’m successful, but I get where you’re coming from. Okay, so I’m pressing “send”. There definitely weren’t any spelling mistakes, right? Maybe I should do another spellcheck, just to make sure. I don’t know if I’m one hundred per cent happy with the last sentence, maybe I’ll change it . . .’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake – it’s fine. If you’re not going to send it, I bloody will.’ Tess reached over and tapped ‘send’ before Nina could stop her. ‘There. Now it’s winging its way through cyberspace to Marie Claude’s features editor and there’s nothing you can do about it, so stop stressing. Here, distract yourself with these, seeing you’ve just bought them.’ She dumped the pile of new glossies in Nina’s lap. ‘You’d better memorise every single word in Marie Claude in case they spring a pop quiz on you in the interview.’

  ‘There’s no guarantee I’ll get an interview,’ Nina reminded her. ‘They might have a massive backlog of applications from candidates who have been doing work experience for years, so my email will probably be deleted before they get to the second sentence.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the right attitude to have,’ Tess said witheringly. ‘Talk yourself out of it before anything has even had a chance to happen. There’s something to be said for positive thinking, you know. I would have thought you’d be an expert on that, given the endless self-help articles that are in those magazines of yours.’

  ‘Oh shut up. As if you don’t read them, too! Go on, give me the Marie Claude then; I can’t read it when you’ve got it, can I? Here, you can have the Grazia – I know you can’t wait to find out about Angelina’s secret affair with her nanny . . .’

  four

  It was after midday when Nina emerged from the bedroom the next day. Tess had taken herself off to bed at a respectable hour, thanks to her alarm being set for five thirty am for the early shift, but Nina had been sucked into the magazine vortex until two in the morning. Or was it closer to two thirty? Her body clock had waved the white flag of surrender a few months after she’d started working shifts, so now she felt like she was permanently jet-lagged.

  Opening the fridge, she pulled out a half-full bottle of Diet Coke and swigged the lot, staring blankly at her reflection in the kitchen window. As usual, her mop of hair was all over the place – parched from repeated slatherings of peroxide, it had rebelled by morphing from dead straight to full-on frizz, no matter how many deep-conditioning treatments she fed it. If she was lucky, sometimes it would behave and curl itself into respectable waves, but most of the time it ignored her attempts to control it, giving Johan no reason to stop calling her ‘fluffball’. Smoothing her eyebrows, her fingers traced over her forehead, cheeks and chin, checking for any eruptions that might have occurred overnight. Having had bad skin as a teenager, Nina was constantly on high alert for the next breakout, and was always sceptical when people complimented her on what nice skin she had. If she had to choose, her favourite feature was her eyes – actually, her eyelashes to be precise. They were naturally Bambi-esque, but made thicker and darker thanks to the four different mascaras she slathered them in every day.

  Satisfied that the pimple fairy hadn’t paid an overnight visit, she chucked the empty Diet Coke bottle in the bin and started tidying up the scattered magazines, sorting them into piles of what she’d read and what she had yet to devour. Picking up a cushion, she found her iPad hiding underneath, its battery icon glowing red with less than twenty per cent power remaining. Plugging it into the charger, she left it on the coffee table and headed to the bathroom.

  Sitting in the bath as the water from the handheld shower dribbled pathetically over her shoulders, Nina longed for a proper stand-up shower like she’d grown up with back home in Australia. England’s obsession with baths didn’t impress Nina at all; they made her sleepy instead of waking her up like a powerful burst of hot water did. Plus, she hated having to sit in scummy water full of shampoo suds while waiting for the conditioner to penetrate her frizz. Then there was the problem of the building’s antiquated hot-water system – if one of the girls forgot to flick the hot-water switch on before they went to bed, they’d have to suffer through a freezing-cold bath in the morning. Not exactly ideal when it was five thirty am and zero degrees outside.

  After drying herself, Nina threw her wet towel over the bedroom door in a futile attempt to dry it in time for tomorrow’s shower-slash-bath then pulled on a pair of metallic black skinny jeans and an oversized grey marle t-shirt. Slapping on some moisturiser, she brushed her teeth then began her make-up routine. Liquid foundation mixed with a dab of illuminator, Touche Éclat concealer blended under her eyes and around her nose, a liberal application of bronzer to combat her London ‘ghost tan’, then a swipe of Topshop silver eyeliner and the requisite application of four different mascaras – one for thickening, one for lengthening, one for curling and the last for separating. Tidying up smudges with a cotton tip, she patted on a tiny amount of pink cream blush, pulled her hair up into a topknot, squirted on some Coco Mademoiselle, then switched off the bathroom light. Winding a chunky chartreuse-coloured scarf around her neck and shoving her feet into zebra-print pony-hair flats, Nina grabbed her bag and leather jacket and left the flat. She was halfway down the stairs when she realised she’d left her phone next to her bed. Pulling a quick one-eighty, she headed back along the hallway, unlocked the door and grabbed it. ‘May as well take one of the mags I haven’t read yet fo
r the Tube,’ she thought, making a beeline for the living room. Next to the stack of magazines was her iPad, with a much more respectable eighty-five per cent battery power, so she crammed it into her bag alongside the new Glamour she hadn’t got around to cracking open the night before.

  She took the Victoria line to Green Park Tube station, where she forced herself to walk up the endless series of escalators so she could kid herself that she’d ticked the ‘daily exercise’ box. Fighting her way through the crowd of tourists who were desperately trying to work out which exit was the right one for their afternoon tea booking at the Ritz, she sidestepped the guys selling tickets for the endless parade of open-top double-decker sightseeing buses that chugged their way down Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner, then dived into the nearest Pret A Manger, the ubiquitous English sandwich store, for a late breakfast. ‘Maybe if the magazine thing doesn’t work out, I can open a chain of Prets in Australia?’ she pondered while trying to decide which sandwich her tastebuds felt like. ‘Super club . . . Hoisin duck wrap . . . Coronation chicken – bleurgh, no way in hell . . .’ she thought, screwing her nose up at the lurid yellow mayonnaise seeping through the slices of bread. Selecting a sweet chilli chicken and coriander baguette and a honey and muesli yoghurt pot, Nina silently thanked the High Priestess of Pret that the lunch rush was over so she didn’t have to wait in an endless line to pay.

  Pulling up a stool at the window overlooking Piccadilly and Green Park, she dumped her bag on the bench and tore the wrapping off her baguette. Chewing on her first mouthful, she tried to shove her wallet into her bulging handbag, but it refused to swallow it. Pulling her iPad out to make room, Nina decided to check her email to see if her latest ASOS order had been dispatched. Her inbox appeared as the tablet automatically logged on to Pret’s wireless internet and started downloading messages. Seeing none of them were from ASOS, she was just about to shut it down, when her eyes locked onto an email from a name she didn’t recognise, but with a subject line she definitely did – ‘Re: Marie Claude features internship’. Her stomach did a clumsy somersault. Steeling herself for a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ reply, she opened the email.