by Gemma Crisp
Steadying herself against the kitchen bench, she tried to remember how she’d ended up in this sorry state. It was all Johan’s fault, of course. He’d insisted on buying bottle after bottle of French champagne in the succession of bars they’d visited on Oxford Street. And that was after numerous beers and three bottles of wine over dinner. A somewhat subdued Tess had joined them for drinks at the Green Park and Una’s famous schnitzel, then made her excuses when it was obvious Johan was itching to pop his Oxford Street cherry, leaving the two of them to hit up the Colombian, Stonewall, Midnight Shift and Nevermind, before queuing up for Arq. Johan had been in his element, checking out the talent and loving the attention from the locals, who were always on the hunt for fresh meat. Nina had never felt so superfluous in her life – even when she’d been out on the gay scene with Johan in London, she’d always found someone to talk to while he was burning up the dance floor to his favourite cheesy house tunes. But here, she was practically invisible. Which was why she’d found herself necking multiple glasses of bubbles while he flitted from one group of new friends to another, his iPhone contacts list multiplying by the millisecond.
Peering over her shoulder to see if Johan was also on Struggle Street, Nina panicked when she saw that the sofa bed she’d made up the night before was empty, its sheets and pillows untouched. Where the hell was he? Surely she hadn’t lost her best friend on his first night in town?
‘Shit, where did I last see him? I’m sure it was at Arq, but maybe we went back to the Midnight Shift afterwards and I don’t remember . . .’ she thought, frantically wracking her dehydrated brain. ‘I don’t think he has our address written down anywhere, so maybe he’s wandering the streets of Potts Point trying to find his way home.’ Berating herself for leaving him to fend for himself in a strange city in the early hours of the morning when they were both liquored up to their eyeballs, Nina searched for her phone, desperately hoping he’d texted to say he was okay and not lying in a gutter somewhere. Eventually she found it in the fridge, where she usually kept her water bottle. She felt sick at the sight of the blank screen – no missed calls, no text messages. With shaking hands, she dialled his number but it went straight to voicemail.
‘Johan, it’s me. I’ve just woken up and you’re not here. I’m so sorry for ditching you last night, I don’t really remember anything after waiting in line at Arq. I don’t think you have our address, so I’ll text it to you in case you got lost trying to get home. Or maybe you’re still partying . . . I don’t know. Please call me and let me know you’re okay.’
Nina was tapping out their address in a text message when her phone buzzed. But instead of it being Johan, it was the other man in her life whose name started with J – Jeremy.
‘Jez, I’m the worst friend ever – I’ve lost Johan. We had a massive night on the sauce and the last thing I remember was queuing up to get into a club and I’ve just woken up and he’s not here and his bed hasn’t been slept in,’ she said breathlessly.
‘Settle down, I’m sure he’s fine. From what you’ve told me, he’s a big boy who can take care of himself. Maybe he got lucky and picked up?’
‘But it was his first night in Sydney – he doesn’t know the city and I left him by himself . . . Maybe he tried to walk home and got lost? What if he’s been bashed and is in hospital? Or arrested for buying drugs? I’ve just tried to call him but it went straight to voicemail. I don’t know what to do . . .’ she wailed.
‘Okay, calm down, honey – does he have your address?’
‘I don’t think so – I was in the middle of texting it to him when you called. And he doesn’t have keys either, because I forgot to get a spare cut. So he could have come home later than me but not been able to get in because I was passed out and didn’t hear him knock.’
‘Okay, I’ll get off the phone so you can send him the address and make my way over to yours, so you’re not sitting there freaking out by yourself. Sound like a plan?’
‘I guess,’ Nina mumbled, secretly grateful to be told what to do. Sometimes she really didn’t know what she’d do without Jeremy. Whether he was gently deflating her drama queen bubble, effortlessly fixing the pipes in their bathroom when they’d burst in the middle of the night, or whisking her off on a surprise trip to the Hunter Valley for a weekend of wine tasting, Nina sometimes thought that if Jake Gyllenhaal and MacGyver had a love child, Jeremy would be it.
Fifteen minutes later, Jeremy had arrived with a frosty cold Diet Coke and two McDonald’s hash browns – her favourite hangover cure. Nina nibbled at some of the deep-fried potato goodness, then pushed them away, feeling too sick to eat. She still hadn’t heard a peep from Johan and was now convinced he was lying in the morgue of St Vincent’s Hospital up the road. Just as Jeremy was trying to talk her out of calling the emergency room, there was a loud knock on the front door.
‘Daddy’s home!’
As Nina flung open the door, fully expecting there to be policemen on the other side, Johan made his grand entrance, looking somewhat dishevelled in his Saturday night outfit of black leather trousers and white sleeveless T-shirt, a deep V slashed into the neckline to show off his Thailand tan. Nina had never been happier to see anyone in her life, even though he was obviously as high as a kite.
‘Where have you been? Did you not get my voicemail or text? Why didn’t you call me? I’ve been freaking out, thinking you were lost or injured or something horrific had happened to you! I’m so sorry I left you all alone, I must have been really drunk and gone home without you. Are you okay?’
‘Honey, slow down! I’m fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine! So you don’t remember last night? Hang on, who do we have here? And why is he sitting on my bed?’ Johan had spotted Jeremy, who was perched on the sofa bed.
‘Johan, this is Jeremy. Jeremy, Johan. It’s not exactly how I pictured you two meeting, but I’m just glad you’re alive.’ Nina looked nervously at the two most important men in her life, hoping they’d play nice.
‘G’day, mate, great to meet you.’ Johan tried his best to give a macho Australian greeting, much to Jeremy’s amusement, as they shook hands.
‘And you. Nina’s told me a lot about you – mostly good, don’t worry. So you two had a big night last night, I hear . . .’
‘My first night in Sydney was never going to be small. But madam here got stuck into the bubbles and was quite the inebriated young lady by the time we got past the door at Arq. I’d already made some new friends, so I put her in a taxi and sent her home – quite frankly, I didn’t want her to cramp my style.’
Nina cringed; she must have been pissed as a nit if she didn’t remember Johan sending her home.
‘But where have you been all morning? How come you didn’t text me? Didn’t you get my voicemail? I’ve been worried sick!’
‘Sorry, my phone died. After the club closed at six am, we decided to continue the party at Ed’s place. I’m just going to have a shower and get changed, then I’m meeting him at a place called the Beresford – apparently it’s the place to be on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Sydney.’
‘Ed? Who’s Ed?’
‘Edward. I don’t know what his last name is. We met him last night at Stonewall when I was dancing on the bar, and then I hung out with him afterwards. Older guy? Looks a bit like George Clooney? Was wearing a pink-and-navy-striped Paul Smith shirt?’
Nina shook her head; she had no recollection of Ed whatsoever. Then again, Johan had met so many people last night, she’d given up trying to remember their names after the twentieth introduction – especially when it was obvious it was Johan they wanted to talk to, not her.
‘So how do I get to the Beresford from here? Can I walk?’ Johan emerged from the bathroom, smelling of Issey Miyake Homme and decked out in a preppy outfit of Gap chino shorts and a red Ralph Lauren polo shirt.
‘You can, but it’ll take you a while. What time are you meeting Ed there?’ Nina asked, trying not to feel peeved that he’d prefer to hang out with a random he’d just met rather
than spend time with her and get to know Jeremy better. With directions typed into his recharged phone, he was halfway out the door before she called out, ‘What time do you think you’ll be home?’, and immediately hated how she sounded like an overprotective mother hen.
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? But don’t wait up, children. Daddy hears there’s a lot of fun to be had at the Beresford.’ With an over-the-top wink, he was gone, the door slamming behind him. Nina sighed. Cyclone Johan had well and truly arrived.
thirteen
‘Nina, darling, schweedie! So happy you could make it; it wouldn’t have been the same without you! Trust me, the show is going to be AMAZE – wait till you see what Nathan, our style director, has done with the models’ hair. Loving your frock – Camilla and Marc?’ the fawning beauty publicist asked, kissing her on both cheeks while blatantly looking over her shoulder to check if any of the more important beauty editors had arrived at the runway show that was kicking off Australian Fashion Week for another year.
‘ASOS, actually,’ Nina replied, getting a kick out of the surprised look on the publicist’s face. She didn’t see the point in pretending she’d spent seven hundred dollars on a dress when it had actually cost seventy. Nina knew plenty of beauty editors who blew every single cent of their pay packets on designer gear, as demonstrated by the latest Marc Jacobs and Alexander Wang bags swinging from their perfectly manicured fingers, but she’d refused to succumb to the competition that was rampant among the beauty mafia. She didn’t want to be one of those girls who crammed canapé after canapé into their mouths at evening launches because they couldn’t afford dinner, thanks to investing in Prada’s electric blue fur tote that resembled Cookie Monster’s cut-offs and would be out of date three minutes after they carried it out of the Prada boutique.
It was almost one year into Nina’s beauty job, and as much as she hated to admit it, the gloss was beginning to wear off. Her bathroom cupboards were bulging with the latest and greatest moisturisers, fragrances and styling products; she’d been flown business class to Kuala Lumpur for the opening of the newest Sephora store; had more degustation dinners in Sydney’s three-hat restaurants than the Sydney Morning Herald restaurant reviewer; and her desk groaned under the weight of Jo Malone candles, Missoni homewares and multiple GHD hair straighteners. She was spoilt rotten, but she was bored. If she had to write one more word about mascara, her brain would morph into concrete – sacrilege really, considering how much Nina loved her mascara. As she flashed a fake smile at the beauty publicist and took her seat in the front row, she knew she had to talk to Kat about it soon. It wasn’t fair to all the other wannabe beauty editors who were snapping at her heels if she stayed in her job just because it was dead easy. And there were certainly plenty of girls who would take her place in the blink of a false eyelash – to an outsider, Nina’s job looked like the best job in the world. ‘And it is,’ she told herself. ‘Just not for me.’ She thought of all the endless boardroom product showings where they’d have to go into raptures about a new range of whitening toothpaste, or put up with the crude sexist comments from a beauty company CEO whom no one dared to complain about because it could jeopardise advertising dollars for their title.
As the lights dimmed, Nina smiled and waved to the group of beauty bloggers who were on the other side of the catwalk, sitting in the social death that was the fourth row – some beauty brands understood the importance of bloggers and didn’t treat them like second-class beauty citizens, but this wasn’t one of them.
In the darkness, music began blaring and models with chopstick legs started strutting down the catwalk, spotlights trained on the miserable looks on their childlike faces. Nina almost snorted as the first model posed in front of the photographers’ pit at the end of the catwalk – the entire back of her head was shaved, with the designer’s logo stencilled into the spiky regrowth. Thinking it was maybe just the first model who had gone through the indignity of being shorn and branded, she trained her eyes on the next model, then the next, and the next. All of them had suffered the same fate, making them unemployable by any other designer until their hair had grown out. ‘Wait till you see what Nathan’s done, indeed,’ Nina thought, remembering what the publicist had said before the show. ‘I reckon the wigmakers of Sydney will be getting some urgent phone calls from Sydney’s model bookers this afternoon.’
As the lights came up, Nina grabbed the goodie bag from under her chair and headed for the door. She couldn’t face the battle to go backstage and congratulate the designer on his ‘incredible’ show, or bother getting a sound bite from the hair and make-up directors about how they got the inspiration for the catwalk looks. ‘The less printed about that horrific hair, the better,’ she thought, feeling sorry for the models who were probably too young and naïve to put up a fight when Nathan had come at them with his clippers.
Waiting for a taxi, Nina tried not to listen to the sycophantic chatter from the fashion pack, who looked Nina up and down as she took her place at the end of the line, clocked that she wasn’t wearing anything by Céline or Christopher Kane, sniffed in disgust, then went straight back to dissecting the show, referring to the designer as a ‘visionary’ and making noises about shaving their own heads when they got home.
‘Kill me now,’ Nina thought, pulling out her iPad and checking her Twitter feed to stop her brain from atrophying.
‘Hi, Nina. Are you going back to the office? Want to share a taxi?’
Nina stifled a sigh when she saw Ellie, the beauty assistant of Femme, the luxury fashion title owned by PSRP, standing next to her in the taxi queue. The younger girl was new on the beauty scene and was starstruck by pretty much everything – the mammoth bunch of flowers that arrived with a press release for a new deodorant; the personalised stationery sent with a range of new eyebrow pencils; the French champagne that flowed like tap water at launches. Taking the beauty world way too seriously, she was also one of the girls who thought the discovery of Botox was up there with a cure for cancer.
‘Sure. So, what did you think of the show? Reckon there’s a stencil of the designer’s label in the goodie bag so we can all shave our heads at home?’ Nina joked.
Ellie looked at her, eyes wide with excitement. ‘Oh, I hope so! That would make my life. I just loved what Nathan did with the girls’ hair, I thought it was genius. So post-modern, don’t you think?’
Nina gritted her teeth. It was going to be a long ride back to the office.
When she got back to Nineteen’s headquarters, Nina dumped her bags on her desk and was logging on to her computer when she realised something wasn’t quite right. Her normally rowdy colleagues were unusually quiet, slumped behind their desks looking like they’d been punched in the stomach, while Kat’s office door had been stripped of its numerous posters of her number-one celeb crush, Robert Pattinson. Peering inside as she pretended to pick something up from the photocopier, Nina realised it wasn’t just Kat’s door that had been stripped – it was her entire office. Empty, except for her computer, desk and file copies of Nineteen dating back the last three years. Nina tiptoed back to her desk then dived into the fashion cupboard to find Steph, Nineteen’s long-time fashion editor.
‘Steph! What the hell happened while I was out? Where’s Kat?’
‘Gone,’ Steph replied flatly, adding a sequinned jacket to the outfit she was styling and looking at it critically.
‘Gone? What do you mean? She’s been sacked?’ Nina squeaked.
‘Nope. She got walked. She came back from a meeting with the publisher and told us that she’d accepted a job at Lulu. Because it’s published by one of our competitors, the publisher decided it was a conflict of interest, so instead of letting her work out her notice he had security walk her out of the building to make sure she didn’t take any of Nineteen’s intellectual property with her.’
‘Oh my God. I can’t believe it. Is she okay?’
‘Of course she’s okay! She’s getting paid to sit at home and do nothing for a month bef
ore starting a new job as editor of one of this country’s most iconic magazines, which is a huge step up from Nineteen. Why wouldn’t she be okay?!’ Steph stared at her as if she had the IQ of an ice block.
‘When you put it like that, I guess you’re right. It’s just so sudden, that’s all.’
‘For us, yes. But remember that Kat would have known all along that this might happen when she resigned. PSRP doesn’t muck around when it comes to staff defections, so if she’d had any sense, she would have already smuggled out whatever she wanted to take with her before she handed in her notice.’
‘Wow. It’s great for Kat, but who’s going to be our new editor?’ Nina wondered aloud, before asking, ‘Hang on, why weren’t you at the opening show for Fashion Week?’
‘Didn’t get an invite,’ Steph said with a shrug. ‘You probably scored one through the publicist for the hair or make-up sponsor, but I have to rely on the PR agency for the designer, and sometimes they decide Nineteen isn’t their cup of chai. Not that I’m particularly bothered – when you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, it’s actually a relief not to have to show my face. Plus, most of the shows are streamed on the internet these days anyway, so I watched it from the comfort of my desk rather than tottering around Circular Quay with all the other fashion tragics.’
Nina went back to her desk, trying to digest the news about Kat. While they didn’t socialise together outside of work, they’d become fast friends in the office, often swapping stories about their weekend antics in beauty meetings that ran way over their allotted time. Nina was going to miss her but she knew it was an opportunity Kat couldn’t refuse – Lulu was one of Australia’s best-loved magazines, targeting the twenty-something chick who loved her sun, sand, sex and half-naked guys. It was as Aussie as Tim Tams and Vegemite, but way more fun, and ridiculously more fashionable. It’d be hard to find an Australian woman who hadn’t bought a copy of Lulu at least once in her life.