by Lulu Taylor
Allegra looked envious. ‘Oh my God, so you get to live in Paris? Go shopping? Have dinner parties with the cool people your parents know?’
They all knew that the de Lisles, with one foot in the world of art and the other in shipping and international business, mixed with the cream of world society: famous artists, esteemed writers, the leading politicians of the day, along with singers, actors, directors, and people who were famous simply for being beautiful, rich and carefree – they all dined at the de Lisles’ magnificent Paris flat, stayed at the wonderful properties all over the world, holidayed on the de Lisles’ yacht or on their private Greek island of Chrypkos.
‘Do you really want to stay here instead?’ asked Imogen, finding it hard to believe.
Romily looked agonised. ‘Of course I do!’ She sank down on to Allegra’s pink leather pouffe and wrapped her arms round her bare knees. ‘I know my life sounds fabulous – and I’m very lucky, I realise that. The stuff my grandfather left …’ She trailed off. She didn’t need to explain. Everyone knew that Vincent de Lisle’s legacy of hundreds of canvases was worth millions. He was one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, and his work continued to break records in sales-rooms all over the world. Romily had owned several pictures in her own right since she was born; that alone made her worth millions, even without her mother’s shipping inheritance. ‘But my family’s life isn’t like other people’s. Wherever I go, I have to have bodyguards and protection if I’m not on private property. Before I was allowed to come here, my parents paid for perimeter fencing and cameras round the whole school, and a security lodge where everything is monitored by guards on duty twenty-four hours a day.’
‘Really?’ Allegra looked astonished. ‘You never said anything!’
‘It’s all kept quiet,’ Romily said unhappily. ‘It was one of my guards who found Sophie that night. He knew we smoked up there – I had to tell him so they didn’t report seeing smoke. Then I had to beg him not to pass on what we did in the attic to my family. I didn’t want anyone here to know about the guards. I’d never have heard the end of it. The first thing I learnt in life was always to be discreet and not draw attention to myself unnecessarily. And that’s what I love about being here – I get to be normal. Just like everyone else. No one really knows or cares who I am here. Once I’m out, I’ll never hear the end of it. That’s why I want to stay. I feel safe. To you it might be shabby and boring and the end of the world, but to me, it’s just … home.’
Imogen went over, put her arms around her friend and hugged her. Romily was right: school was about what made them the same, not what made them different. Stuck inside this old place, she easily forgot that Romily came from another world. But how sad it was that, to her, this was home! No matter how much Imogen loved Westfield, to her it was nothing like home and her own room and her mother and father who cherished her. If school was better than Romily’s home, what did that say about her family life?
Romily leant her head on Imogen’s shoulder and sniffed loudly. Just then there was a knock and the senior house prefect put her head round the door. ‘OK, guys! That’s enough now. Back to studies for prep, please.’
‘Midnight meeting tonight!’ whispered Allegra as the other two got up to obey instructions. ‘In Romily’s room.’
The girls had not met at midnight for a long time now. The activities of the Midnight Girls seemed too closely bound up with the tragedy that had shaken the school, and none of them had wanted to recall that terrible night. They did all in their power to avoid remembering: not one of them had walked across the patch of ground where Sophie had fallen, or even looked at it.
The news that Romily would be leaving Westfield was important enough to resurrect the habit, however. As the old clock in the hall ticked round to midnight, two pairs of feet ran lightly down the corridors and into Romily’s room. It was definitely the nicest study in the whole boarding house, partly because Romily’s mother had somehow secured permission for her own interior decorator to come to Westfield during the summer holidays and make it over. While the other girls had standard issue magnolia walls covered in posters and pages from magazines, mud-brown curtains and Formica-veneer desks, along with a well-trampled dark carpet that might once have been patterned, Romily had pale green walls, curtains in cream silk sprigged with tiny green and gold flowers, and delicate antique furniture. She slept in a single mahogany sleigh bed, with a lusciously downy silk duvet like a mound of whipped cream. Most important, though, was the built-in wardrobe that stretched along one entire wall, in which Romily’s fantastic clothes were carefully stored.
‘I wonder who’ll get this when you’re gone?’ Allegra said, as they settled themselves down on the bed.
Romily shrugged. ‘It’s my legacy, I suppose. Maybe they’ll let you have it, Allegra, if you want it.’
She shook her head. ‘It would be too weird. Besides, it’s everything about you that makes it so lovely: your furniture, your clothes, your style. Once you’re gone, it won’t be the same.’
‘Papa wanted me to have one of Grandfather’s paintings on the wall – just a small one. But Miss Steele wouldn’t allow it. Too much of a security risk.’
‘I’m not surprised!’ exclaimed Imogen, laughing. It was hilarious to imagine a real Vincent de Lisle hanging in one of the sixth-form studies.
‘Shhh!’ Allegra gave her a warning look. ‘I know it feels safe in here, but we never know who’s creeping along the corridors.’
‘I can’t believe we’re going to be separated,’ Imogen whispered, serious now.
‘It was going to happen anyway,’ Romily said in a brave tone. ‘Once A-levels are finished, you two will go to university here. My parents don’t want that for me. My mother is determined to have me home so she can start preparing me for life beyond school. She thinks eighteen is plenty old enough to start getting on with the serious things in life.’
‘Like what?’ asked Allegra.
Romily shrugged. ‘Social life, I suppose. Society, fashion, the seasons …’
The other two stared at her. It seemed strange to them that anyone could pretend such things were a serious pursuit, a worthy way to spend one’s life. Society was simply frivolous fun, wasn’t it? Parties were indulgences, not things to devote oneself to.
‘But we thought we had another whole year,’ Imogen said wistfully. ‘Anything could have changed in that time. Now you’ll definitely be leaving.’
‘The thing is,’ Allegra said in a low voice, giving the other two a solemn look, ‘we need to make a promise between ourselves. About what happened.’ She bit her lip and a troubled expression passed over her face. ‘We’re the only ones who know the truth about … about Sophie. We are the only witnesses. We have to make a solemn vow, that we’ll never, never tell. We must promise on everything we hold sacred – on our lives – that it will stay a deadly secret, and that we’ll stay friends forever.’
They were all quiet for a moment as they recalled the scene in the attic above the dormitory. It was almost a year ago already. They had only just begun to recover from the horror of it.
Allegra may have been the driving force behind what had happened, but we were all guilty, thought Imogen. We were all there. We could have stopped it. We could have done something. But we didn’t.
They stared around, each seeing her own feelings reflected in the gaze of the other two. Their shared secret bound them together, they all knew that.
Romily broke the silence. ‘I promise I’ll never tell. Never, ever. It will always be our secret.’
‘I promise too,’ Imogen said quietly, ‘on my life. I’ll never tell a living soul.’
‘Me too. I promise as well.’ Allegra put her hand on to the snow-white duvet. ‘Put your hands here. Let’s all swear we’ll be friends for ever. Remember how we used to call ourselves the Midnight Girls? It was a bit babyish, but … well … we’ll always be Midnight Girls now. Like the Musketeers – one for all and all for one. Agreed?’
/> Romily put her slim brown hand on top of Allegra’s and smiled. ‘Agreed.’
Imogen added hers. ‘Agreed,’ she echoed fervently.
‘I feel much better,’ Romily said, smiling. ‘Now I know that we can always trust each other. That we’ll always be friends. I don’t feel so lonely. You must come and stay with me in Paris, OK? There’s so much room in our house.’
‘Paris? We’d love to!’ Allegra muffled her squeals of excitement in a pillow and the three of them bounced silently about on the bed, overcome with anticipation of the life that awaited them beyond the grounds of Westfield.
Chapter 10
New York
Autumn 2001
BECAUSE HE SMOKED heroin and avoided injecting, Mitch told himself that he wasn’t really a user. He was one of the lucky ones who would be able to stay in control. To demonstrate this, he only allowed himself to smoke heroin occasionally, when he felt like he really deserved it. It gave him the sense of staying on top, and he needed that.
‘I don’t want to end up like junkie shit!’ he told himself sternly. The longer he lived in New York, the more he saw it: people reduced to dope-addicted wrecks, their veins collapsed, their money all spent on heroin or crack or whatever their drug of choice was. People disappeared out of the world of restaurants and kitchens as quickly as they entered it, falling away and forgotten before the night was out. There was always someone to replace them. When Mitch was made second-in-command in his kitchen, he soon started avoiding giving jobs to anyone who looked like they were using. Drinking was OK as long as it was confined to the hours outside the kitchen – and, hell, they were all drunks as soon they stepped out of the door – but the druggies were totally unreliable and as dishonest as they came. Mitch found he preferred hiring immigrants, who had no interest in drugs at all. They expected to work hard and uncomplainingly for little money, and put their backs into their jobs. He knew their wages were supporting families or being sent back to wherever they came from, and that pleased him even if it made him a hypocrite for investing a sizeable portion of his own pay in bags of dope.
Little by little, his addiction began to grow. He found it harder and harder to resist the lure of a smoke after work, the delightful comedown that melted away all his tensions and removed every care he had in the world. He had a girlfriend for a while, a sweet, pretty girl called Vanna who was a student at NYCU, but as his dalliance with heroin grew ever more serious, her love for him waned.
‘You’re an asshole when you’re using this shit,’ she shouted at him. ‘I hate you when you’re doing this!’
She had just discovered that he’d emptied her purse of money because he needed some cash for a fix and couldn’t wait a second longer.
‘You stole it!’ cried Vanna, her green eyes flashing with anger.
‘I’ll pay you back,’ he said, affronted.
‘Yeah, right! Anyway, it’s not the point. You went through my purse and took my money.’
‘Ah, fuck off,’ Mitch drawled, happy when she’d slammed out of the apartment, knowing he could now be alone with the substance that was fast becoming the love of his life.
‘Why do you do it, Mitch?’ she’d asked later, when she’d come back and they’d made up with a short but intense fuck, and were lying in each other’s arms on his futon. ‘What’s the appeal?’
‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like … getting high is like having sex, great sex, while simultaneously soaking in a delicious hot bath and eating the most sublime food in the world,’ Mitch had replied, but she’d just stared at him, uncomprehending. She was still a creature of the real world, a normal girl with a normal job, who preferred real sex to dopamine-induced ecstasy. But then, she wasn’t part of the kitchen world, with its nocturnal rhythms and craving for escape.
When Vanna dumped him the following week, he didn’t even worry about all the sex he’d be missing out on: his addiction was replacing any physical desire he’d once had.
He still loved to cook, though. That passion was the only thing that heroin didn’t touch. He could do anything outside the kitchen: fuck the waitresses, buy shit from pushers, chase his little dragons all night long (one smoke wasn’t enough now, it didn’t produce the required effect any longer), but when he was back at his station or at the pass, running the kitchen when Chef was absent, he was wholly and entirely focused on creating wonderful food from his rack of ingredients. When he was in the kitchen his world shrank to the metre or so of stainless steel that was his bench, and the shelves with his carefully prepped tray of seasonings and ingredients, and his knife.
Mitch wasn’t working on the day the Twin Towers fell. He was shaken awake by Herbie who was grey-faced and sweating.
‘Huh? What is it?’ grumbled Mitch, rolling back into his sheets. ‘Why’re you up so early?’
‘I ain’t been to bed. There’s some crazy shit going on, man! A plane’s smashed into the World Trade Centre! You gotta wake up.’
‘What?’ Mitch scrambled out of bed and they switched on the television. The screen showed the towers alight, great billows of grey smoke sailing up into the brilliant blue sky. ‘Holy fuck!’ he breathed, dazed. Was it real? He ran to the window of their apartment, and saw the huge columns of smoke to the south, climbing upwards, bigger, denser and blacker than they looked on the TV. The air around the towers was shimmering with the clouds of debris floating downwards, clouds of office paper fluttering like falling leaves. The gashes that had been torn into the towers glowed orange where the fires burned. Fear rushed through him. What did it mean? Was the whole city under attack?
‘What should we do, man?’ Herbie said, his hands shaking and his eyes wild.
‘I dunno. Stay here, I guess.’
Herbie looked agonised. ‘My pal Bobby’s in the North tower. He’s working at Windows on the World, and so’s his wife, Maria. Look, the whole place is on fire right underneath them. How’re they gonna get down?’
Mitch went back to the television. He could see people at the windows of the upper floors, waving desperately, pleading for help. Then he saw that some were falling or jumping, small black stick figures floating downwards. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘The whole city fire department is there, and the police. They’ll get ’em all out, I know they will. Those guys know what they’re doing. Oh, Christ. I can’t believe it.’
‘I wanna get out of here,’ Herbie said, panicking. Sweat glistened all over his face. ‘They’re trying to fuckin’ kill us!’
I gotta keep him calm. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Hey, let’s have a smoke and take the edge off this thing. There’s nothing we can do.’ Mitch went to a drawer and took out a pouch of powder and his drug gear.
‘Yeah,’ Herbie said, looking relieved, ‘we’ll have a smoke. That’s what we’ll do.’
By the time the first tower fell, they were so stoned they didn’t even feel the ground shaking or the massive rumble as the hundreds of tons of concrete, steel and glass collapsed. As the second tower went, they were still anaesthetising, chasing another flame across the hot tin foil. When they came to, it was to a strange deathly quiet and an apartment covered in thick grey dust. It was all over.
In the aftermath, Herbie and Mitch were both out of a job. Their restaurant closed, first because it was choked with filth and dust from the nearby site of destruction; then because, when the restaurants began to open again, no one wanted to eat out.
Herbie said he was going to leave, go home, move to the sea, just escape the ruptured city with its atmosphere of grief and mourning. He was shaken by the way Bobby and Maria had died, trapped at the top of the burning building with no way out, waiting for help that never came and then pulverised in the mighty collapse. But Mitch wasn’t ready to give up on New York yet. I’m gonna stick it out, he decided. He felt in an obscure way that the city needed him to keep going, keep working, that he owed it to the place to stay focused and act as normal. He persuaded Herbie to stay on with him, they found some temporary work in th
e kitchens of a big hotel, and gradually the dust and debris were cleared away, and the city began to recover.
The restaurant trade started up again, and they moved to a new place and then another.
If we can survive this, we can survive anything, Mitch told himself. But he could only face it with the help of his little bags of medicine.
Chapter 11
Paris
July 2002
‘ALLEGRA, ALLEGRA! OVER here!’
Allegra turned and saw Romily pushing through the crowd towards her.
‘What are you doing here? I was going to get a taxi.’
‘Don’t be stupid. I brought the car. The driver will take us home.’ Romily hugged her friend, her eyes bright. ‘Come on, we’d better get out of this place as soon as possible. You must be dying for a shower.’
‘I am a bit.’ It had been a long journey from Scotland the night before. She had taken the train to London, stayed in Kensington, and then taken the first Eurostar train from Waterloo to Paris. The journey from London had been relatively swift but she still felt tired and grubby. Romily looked entirely different, standing out like a beacon from the people around her. Her simple outfit of a blue skirt and white jacket over a blue and white striped T-shirt, teamed with white, navy-capped Chanel pumps, was so stylish and expensive, she looked like a princess visiting a rundown corner of a deprived city.
‘I’m so excited you’re here!’ she cried, giggling. ‘We’re going to have so much fun. Come on, let’s find the car.’
She led Allegra through the milling crowd of people to the pavement outside, where a sleek black Mercedes purred quietly at the roadside. A uniformed driver got out and opened the door for the girls and they got in quickly. A moment later, the car was gliding through the Parisian streets, heading for the central arrondissements. Allegra and Romily chattered all the way, about Allegra’s journey and everything that had happened since they’d last seen each other. Romily was eager to catch up on all the gossip from the year she had missed at school and to find out what had happened to their old classmates. Allegra filled her in on where everybody was going now that school was over.