‘Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, even crappier, mega crap, crap …’
What felt like days later, I scrolled through the fruits of my photographic labour back in the cottage. I had downloaded – hundreds of shots to my computer – hundreds, and every single one looked shit. ‘Crap, crap. Mega crap. Super crap. The crappiest piece of crap I’ve ever seen. Oh, awesome, this one’s just regular old crap.’
I curled my legs up underneath myself and continued to scroll through the pictures, trying not to sob. I had a throbbing headache from last night’s cocktails and the epic quantity of coffee I’d mainlined to keep me conscious during the shoot. All I wanted to do was fill a bucket full of crystal-clear water and dunk my head in it, but there wasn’t time. Paige was due to come over and look through them with me any minute, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her seeing such shit. Objectively, they looked fine, I told myself. Objectively, there were shots where the models looked amazing, where Artie looked regal and elegant, where the hotel looked kitsch but classy at the same time. Photos where you could barely see the pineapples. Sadly, none of these elements occurred in the same photo. Not even once. I hoped someone back at Gloss was very, very good at Photoshop, because I wasn’t. I had no idea how Paige was going to react. I paused on a particularly awful picture of Ana posing on one leg, Martha sobbing and Artie checking his phone. At least my hangover hadn’t mattered. I could have turned up to the set, shot up in front of everyone and still struggled to get a usable image. It was almost funny. I’d been so worried about being the weak link in the chain, it hadn’t occurred to me that the chain would be about as strong as a roll of soggy Andrex in the first place.
‘All right, let’s see them.’
For a shocking change, Paige had let herself into my cottage without knocking. In her hand was a huge silver travel coffee mug which she held out to me. I shook my head.
‘It’s got whisky in it,’ she explained, holding it out again.
I took it, swigged it, retched ever so slightly and shuffled up the sofa so she could see the laptop.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, taking the cup back. ‘Oh dear.’
It wasn’t nearly as bad a reaction as I’d anticipated.
‘I know they’re awful,’ I said, starting slowly and holding my hand back out for the spiked coffee. It was amazing how quickly it took away my headache. ‘But I’m sure there must be something we can do.’
‘They’re not awful,’ Paige replied with as much diplomacy as she could muster. ‘They’re not my favourite pictures in the world, but they’re not awful. They’re not actually as bad as I thought they were going to be.’
I could tell she was trying to be nice after her outbursts on set. It was touching but unnerving. I sat looking at her, biting my bottom lip and waiting for her to shout, ‘Fooled you!’ then punch me in the face.
‘What do we do?’ I asked, letting her move the mouse back and forth until she settled on one shot for more than a second. It was one of the better images. For just one moment, almost everything had come together. The lighting looked soft and beautiful, Ana’s steely gaze set off the sad, faraway look on Martha’s face. Artie, on the other hand, just looked like a tosspot. ‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘This is what we’ve got,’ she replied carefully. ‘I’m just going to have to suck it up and go with it.’
It wasn’t really the gushing compliment I’d been hoping for, but it was better than the slap I’d been expecting.
‘That crown was a mistake, wasn’t it?’ Paige pulled a face and placed her thumb over the offending accessory. ‘I wonder if we can Photoshop that out.’
No one likes to hear ‘I told you so’, so I didn’t say it. At least, I didn’t say it out loud. In my head I was bouncing up and down, shouting it in her face and doing a very unappealing dance, very Tom Cruise on the Oprah sofa.
‘I’m sorry I was such a dickhead – I just panicked. And I never panic.’ She highlighted a couple of the pictures, the same ones I’d mentally cleared as ‘not the most awful’, and nodded slowly. ‘If you can do a bit of a clean-up on these, just basic stuff, I’ll send them over to Stephanie and she can get back to us. Nick should be able to file his interview tonight, and then we’re done. Thank fuck.’
‘We’re not doing the portrait?’ I asked, boldly adding one of my least hated pictures to the approved collection. ‘With Artie?’
‘After this afternoon, he suddenly doesn’t want to do it,’ she explained. ‘So right now, no. Honestly, I have no idea what’s going to happen when I speak to Steph tomorrow. The whole point of this feature was a retrospective on Bertie, not a big old wankfest over Artie. Everyone in fashion loves Bertie – he’s, like, one of the last of the old guard. But Artie … he’s got kind of a horrible reputation. I heard that once Anna Wintour called him a brat.’
‘Wow. Given what he’s like now, I can only imagine what he was like as a little boy.’
‘Oh no, this was in Milan last season.’ Paige raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t really helping earlier,’ I said. I could tell she was on the verge of giving up and I just couldn’t let her. If Paige went down, we all went down. I couldn’t let it happen. ‘I was just so worried about not cocking up the photos, I hadn’t really thought about the big picture.’
‘And I was focusing on you not cocking up the photos because I couldn’t deal with thinking about everything else,’ she said, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling and giving a wan smile. ‘I’m sorry I made it so hard for you. I know this didn’t exactly come about in a conventional way, but I’m glad it’s you here and not Vanessa. And not just because she’s an evil demon bitch from hell. You’re a really good photographer, Tess. I mean it. Shit, look at what you managed to drag out of this trio of defects.’
She waved towards the laptop and I felt a tiny glow light up inside me. Her words were almost all compliment, and it had been a while since anyone had had anything nice to say to me. Well, except for Al. And Nick. And when I thought about it, how long had it been since three different people had compliments for me? Hmm. It was a pleasant change not to hate myself for just a moment.
‘I’m sure Steph will understand,’ I said, not sure in the slightest, but it felt like the right thing to say. ‘I don’t see what else you could have done under the circumstances. You’re going back to London with a story and a photo spread. You can’t be held responsible for the invisible man, can you?’
‘No, I know.’ Paige leaned back against the sofa and knocked back the rest of the coffee with a whisky-fuelled wince. ‘But she’s fired people for less. And I like my job.’
‘I liked mine and they fired me for nothing.’ I pursed my lips and put the laptop to sleep. ‘It won’t come to it, you know it won’t – but seriously, if they fire you over you working your arse off to try and save a disaster situation, then bugger them. You’ll find someone else who actually appreciates what you do.’
‘Is that what you said when you got laid off?’ she asked, sitting the coffee mug on the white wooden side table.
‘I didn’t get out of bed for a week, got hammered at a family christening, shagged my best mate in my childhood bedroom – on a bunkbed, Paige, a bunkbed – and then ran away to Hawaii,’ I shrugged. ‘So I’ve set the bar pretty high for unpredictable behaviour in the face of a firing. I can’t see you doing quite so badly.’
‘I blame men,’ Paige announced. ‘Is there anything else to drink in here?’
‘There’s wine in the fridge,’ I said, watching her slink off in search of more booze. She really was perfect looking. If I hadn’t known what a neurotic crazy she was, I would have hated her guts. ‘I have to work on these pictures, though. I’m OK.’
A loud popping sound suggested she wasn’t really listening to me, unless she was planning to drink an entire bottle of champagne by herself. Not entirely impossible, I reasoned.
‘We should get some food,’ I suggested as she moseyed back over with an open bottle of Veuve Clicquot and two glasses. My headache coughed quietly in the back of my head, reminding me of our precarious truce, and my stomach rumbled so loudly, I was almost sure it would start a tidal wave and wash the island away.
‘I’m trying not to eat too much at the moment,’ Paige, the world’s skinniest girl who still had boobs, replied. ‘I’ve got to lose five pounds before fashion week. I know it’s clichéd, but seriously, if I want to go to the New York shows, I more or less need to look like I’m in recovery for something or I’ll get eaten alive.’
‘Which is ironic because there would be nothing on you to eat,’ I said, reluctantly accepting the champagne and wishing I wasn’t so painfully polite. Thank God no one had ever thought to offer me crack; I wouldn’t know where to put myself.
‘What’s more delicious, Tess – food or compliments?’ Paige asked.
‘F– ompliments?’ I offered. The look on Paige’s face suggested I had not got the answer correct. ‘No, it’s definitely food.’
‘I know it sounds horribly pro-ana, but I work in fashion,’ she went on, sipping the champagne and making such intense happy noises, I felt a little bit uncomfortable. She needed to get laid even more than I did. ‘I think it was Kate Moss who said, “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”’
‘Kate Moss is incorrect,’ I said, mentally telegraphing Kekipi to come over with some pork or sushi or chicken or a mouldy slice of bread he’d found on the side of the road a week ago. I was so ridiculously hungry. ‘Kate Moss has never eaten an entire Domino’s pizza.’
‘Coke does do wonders for curbing the appetite,’ Paige admitted before eyeing me awkwardly. ‘Allegedly.’
‘Allegedly,’ I echoed and clinked my glass against hers in a toast. ‘So. Why are we blaming the men for today’s debacle? Aside from the Bennett boys being a couple of tosspot drama queens?’
Emptying her first glass of champagne while she contemplated her answer, Paige rested her head against the arm of the sofa and stretched her long, denim-clad legs out over my lap. I looked down at them, not knowing quite what to do. Good to know we were back on friendly terms. She really was just another Amy in a slightly shinier package. And just as crazy, as she had proven at the shoot that afternoon.
‘Oh, Tess.’ She sighed my name and threw her hand against her forehead like a Jane Austen character. A rubbish, secondary Jane Austen character whose spunky sister would end up having to defend her honour and marry her off to some soft twat who had an income of more than a thousand a year. ‘I feel like such an idiot.’
‘Hands up who here doesn’t?’ I looked around the empty room. No hands up.
‘No, I’ve been a total moron.’ She dropped her head even further back so that her hair cascaded all the way down to the floor. ‘I told Nick I’ve got a crush on him.’
Oh noes.
Even though I sort of knew she was going to say something along these lines, even though I was kind of pushing her to admit it, hearing it first-hand did not feel good.
‘You, Paige Sullivan of undetermined age, told Nick Miller, thirty-six, that you have a crush on him?’ I asked. Just to make sure.
‘I’m thirty, so fuck off, but yes, we were supposed to go out for dinner last night, but he made me go on this stupid boat ride and I threw up over the side and he was so lovely about it that it just sort of came out.’ She loved a run-on sentence, did Paige. ‘And he was totally lovely about it, but he so isn’t interested, and now it’s dead awkward and I feel like I’m fourteen or something.’
‘He’s not interested?’ I asked, picking out what I considered to be the keynote of the rushed speech. ‘How do you know?’
‘Well, aside from the fact that I more or less threw myself at him, and even though we’re in Hawaii, and even though there’s no one else here for him to fancy …’ She paused for breath and to take in my slightly angry thin line of a mouth. ‘What?’
‘No, there’s no one else here. Carry on,’ I said tightly.
‘Well, no – it’s just he’s not into models, I know that,’ she explained, only succeeding in making matters worse. ‘And you’re all in love with that bloke back home, aren’t you?’
Her rationale was sound, and I understood why she would think that I wouldn’t be into Nick when I was supposedly so head over heels in love with Charlie – I was head over heels in love with Charlie after all, I reminded myself – but I couldn’t help but think she’d disregarded me as competition very easily. Not that I could blame her – she was beautiful, she was successful, she was funny and clever when she wanted to be, her hair was incredible, and when they were together, she and Nick looked like an ad for a very expensive denim brand. Like those really annoying print ads you always saw on the underground for Uniqlo that had ‘real’ people in who were a thousand times more attractive than anyone you ever saw on the Tube. I totally would have cast them in an ad to sell high-end kitchenware. Me and Charlie would probably have been booked for a job advertising Nando’s or something.
‘Go on,’ I said, taking one more tiny sip of champagne, just to see how it felt.
‘Well, yeah, so I threw up and he was being all lovely and funny and brought me water and stuff, and I said that he was going to make someone a lovely wife one day, and he said he should be so lucky, and I just sort of laughed and said, “Oh, I’d marry you,” and then we both laughed, and then I put my hand on his, erm, leg, and then he went a bit quiet, and then he said that he was “sort of seeing someone”, and then I laughed too loudly and said I was only joking and he said of course he knew that and then I left because I was absolutely mortified.’
It was a lot of ‘and thens’ for one sentence.
My first reaction was ‘poor Nick’. He’d come all the way to Hawaii to interview someone who didn’t want to be interviewed, and then spent his entire trip looking after girls who kept throwing up. It was not a dream come true. Unless you had a very particular fetish.
My second reaction was, ‘he was sort of seeing someone’. Wha?
‘Have you spoken to him since?’ I asked.
‘Only when he showed up this afternoon,’ she said, sitting back up to drink her champagne. ‘It’s fine. I just have to stop falling for knobheads.’
‘Oh, just that little tiny thing.’ I patted her leg. ‘Piece of piss.’
‘You can talk,’ she snarked, kicking me back. ‘Excellent choices you’ve been making lately.’
Oh dear God, I thought, forcing myself to laugh loudly. If only you knew.
‘You’re not, like, really, really into him, though, are you?’ I asked, my conscience really hoping for an answer that would help me sleep through the night. ‘Nick, I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’ She twirled a lock of hair around her finger and shrugged one shoulder. ‘I just haven’t really even fancied anyone since my ex, and Nick is just so, you know. He’s such a bloody man. And I know he likes to talk a load of shit, but my mate Jackie’s boyfriend is mates with his friend Steven, and Steven reckons he hasn’t had a girlfriend since this girl he went out with in America years ago.’
‘Right,’ I said, adding this information to the profile I was building slowly. The LA ex. The one who was too lazy to walk to the waterfall. ‘You don’t think that might be because he’s a filthy shagger who can’t keep his trousers on?’
‘I definitely think he’s a filthy shagger who can’t keep his trousers on.’ Paige’s eyes lit up and she looked positively thrilled at the prospect. ‘But men like that, they’re just waiting for the right girl. I know that sounds naïve, but you get to a certain age and you realize it’s true.’
She seemed so convinced, I didn’t have the energy or the heart to argue with her. But who was right, Paige or Nick? Were men just sitting around in their cave, scratching themselves and waiting for the love of a good woman, or were they out climbing mountain after mountain after mountain until they just couldn’t be arsed any more? Either way, it seemed like Cupid was out of a job. The recession really had hit a lot of people.
‘So you do really like him?’
‘You know, my heart says yes, but my head says probably not,’ she replied with a scrunched-up face. ‘Although my vag says something altogether different. Maybe I actually love him. Maybe I just want to cover him in Nutella and lick it all off. I don’t think anyone can actually make sane decisions about their emotional state when they’re wearing sunscreen. Just the smell of it makes you crazy.’
‘I’ve heard worse theories about holiday romances, actually.’ I had to admit, she might have been on to something.
‘I reckon when you get home, Charlie is going to be all turned around on this situation,’ Paige said, sitting up, pouring herself another glass of champagne, and topping me off, despite my refusals. ‘He’s going to be all freaked out that you went off and did something amazing without him, and he’ll be so jealous and so worried about missing out. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Tess.’
‘Does it?’ I wasn’t so sure.
‘Yeah, definitely,’ Paige said, agreeing with herself so aggressively that she was spilling champagne all over the settee. I surreptitiously grabbed a bit of kitchen towel and dabbed at the wet mark while she wasn’t paying attention. ‘Or at least, absence makes the dick get harder. Not to be coarse or anything. He’ll be all over you like a rash. A hot rash. He’s hot, isn’t he?’
‘He is.’ I folded up the damp paper and tossed it onto the coffee table, trying very hard not to think about Charlie’s penis.
‘Let me see a picture.’ She scrambled onto her knees and passed me my laptop. ‘Come on, just one. I want to see what’s so special about him.’
With all the enthusiasm of a beached whale, I logged onto Facebook and immediately found a thousand different pictures of me and Charlie. I’d been doing so well. It had to have been at least twenty-four hours since I’d looked at them, and now it did not feel good.
‘Oh, he is cute,’ Paige said with approval. ‘Tall, too. Really, like, boy-next-doorsy. I bet he’d be dead good at changing light bulbs and playing sport. You make a really cute couple.’
‘Hmm,’ was just about all I could manage.
‘Oh, shitting hell – I’m sorry,’ she said, slamming the laptop shut. ‘I’m doing it again. I’m not thinking. But really, I do think he probably just needs a bit of space to adjust to things. Coming here was the best thing you could have done.’
I nodded. Getting on a plane and flying to Hawaii may well have been the best thing I could have done. I’d found a great new friend in Paige, I’d remembered how much I loved photography, and, more importantly, it turned out that I was actually pretty good at it. That made me really happy. But I’d also effed my new friend’s crush, lied about my name and stolen my flatmate’s job. That made me a little bit concerned. So: swings and roundabouts.
My plan not to get wankered so I could work on my pictures was offset nicely by Paige’s plan to get absolutely obliterated so she could get right on my tits. Within an hour, she was three years deep into my Facebook photos and two bottles of champagne into her own personal pit of misery.
‘You all look really happy,’ she said with a telltale snort. ‘You and your mates. My mates are all arseholes. All my mates were my ex’s mates and now all I’ve got left are fashion mates. No one is mates in fashion, not really.’
‘But magazines?’ I tried to give her a glass of water, but she pushed it away and poured more champagne. Badly. I had to remind myself this was not my sofa and I was not responsible for the stains. ‘Aren’t there fun journo girls?’
‘I came in from the fashion side, though.’ She shook her head, clicking on a pic from Amy’s twenty-fourth birthday party. I took her to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs. She did not have as much fun as I did. ‘All the writers have known each other for ever. I don’t know, I don’t make friends that easily. Girls don’t like me.’
I took a momentary step back and watched the beautiful yet shit-faced woman knocking back booze on the sofa, still looking like she’d stepped off her own fashion shoot. She didn’t have so much as a wrinkle on her tissue-thin sweater, and it was white, for God’s sake. I was only allowed to wear white shirts on the days I only drank clear liquids. ‘I can’t think why,’ I replied.
‘Oh, it’s because I’m, you know …’ She waved a drunken hand at her general appearance. ‘Whatever. It’s fine.’
If nothing else, you had to admire her honesty.
‘I like you,’ I offered, taking the dead bottles of booze into the kitchen and putting on the kettle. Paige might be halfway to hangover heaven, but I was knackered and I still had stuff to do. ‘And I’m a girl.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t care, do you?’ She rested her head against the back of the sofa and gave me a sloppy smile. ‘You’re not competing.’
‘Right.’ I slapped my hand on her thigh, hard. ‘I think it’s time you nicked off back to your cottage and I got some work done. I’ll have the photos over to you in the morning.’
‘Fine,’ she said from inside the wine glass. A bottle and a half ago, she had realized she could get much more champagne in a red wine glass than a champagne flute. ‘I’m tired anyway. What is it, two a.m.?’
I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was half past eight in the evening.
‘It’s very late,’ I replied gravely. ‘You should probably go to bed.’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded, hoisting herself off the squishy sofa. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Tess.’
‘Get back safe,’ I called as she tottered out in her heels. The cow still looked amazing.
‘I’m going thirty feet away,’ she laughed, reaching for the door frame and missing. ‘You worry too much.’
Even as she was saying it, I was trying to work out the likelihood of her falling in the pool and drowning on her way home.
As the door swung shut, I closed my eyes, breathed out and thought, for all of fifteen seconds, that I might be allowed five minutes’ peace. Until my phone started to rattle across the tabletop. It had been on silent since the shoot and I’d forgotten all about it while I was managing my favourite new alcoholic, but now she was gone and there was no one loudly complaining about how hard it was to be so beautiful, I heard the quiet buzz of vibrating iPhone against paperback book and spotted a flashing screen over on the bookcase, where it was charging. All I wanted to do was let the kettle finish boiling, make my tea and pretend I hadn’t seen it. But it was Amy. And I had already hung up on her once in twenty-four hours. Twice absolutely would not fly. Better to just get it over with.
‘Hey.’ I pulled the charger out of the phone and flopped down on the settee, stretching out from top to bottom. ‘Dear God, today was horrible.’
‘Hi, Amy! How are you, Amy? Have you got a new job yet, Amy? I’m so worried about you, Amy.’ She started her rant before I had even finished my sentence. ‘I’m doubly sorry I’ve been ignoring your phone calls and haven’t been in touch for days, and I’m even more sorry that today you found out that your ex-fiancé got engaged again because his new girlfriend of half a fucking second is pregnant.’
‘Ohhh.’
‘But no, please do go on. Tell me all about your horrible day.’
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
‘Amy, I’m sorry.’ I didn’t really know where to start. I’d only been away for five minutes and it felt like a lifetime. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I’m not all right,’ she said with a choking sob. ‘He’s engaged. He’s having a baby. I haven’t got a job, my mother hates me, and I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing with my life. Come home, I need you.’
‘I’ll be home on Sunday,’ I promised. ‘Don’t get this upset over someone so rubbish. You don’t want to marry him, you don’t want to have babies with him. He’s crap, remember?’
‘I don’t know,’ she sniffed, her voice still woolly and unreliable. ‘It wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t unhappy.’
‘You weren’t happy,’ I reminded her, telling her everything that she had told me when she’d dumped him in the first place. ‘You were settling. You ended things because you’re brave and you know what you want and you’re better than a miserable relationship in a sad semi in Ruislip with a man you don’t love.’
‘It was a nice semi,’ Amy replied. ‘And how are things better now? Honestly, Tess?’
‘You’re not wasting your life?’ I wanted to shake her so badly. Amy wasn’t one to get maudlin and self-indulgent, but when the mean reds really took hold of her, it was impossible to drag her back out without a metaphorical kick up the arse and, on occasion, a literal slap. ‘You’re not plodding on day in and day out with someone else’s plan?’
‘I’d rather be with Dave than be on my own,’ she whispered.
It was a good job I was thousands and thousands of miles away. I really would have booted her up the backside for that one.
‘No, Amy. Just no.’
She let out one more reflexive howl, and I waited until her crying calmed to a ragged squeak.
‘I’ll be home on Sunday,’ I said again, closing my eyes and trying very hard not to think about what that would mean. ‘Don’t work yourself up over Dave. It’s been years. You know you’re happier without him.’
‘But how come he’s getting married and having a baby and I’m not getting married and having a baby?’
Ahh. Now we were getting somewhere. Her tears gave way to a temper tantrum and the volume of her voice went right up to eleven.
‘What did I do wrong? Why don’t I have someone?’
‘You know there isn’t an instruction manual for life, lovely.’ I was trying to calm her down, to sound as comforting as possible. My best friend needed a hug and I wasn’t there to give her one; it felt horrible. ‘Everyone gets there in their own time. I’m hardly waltzing down the aisle either, am I?’
‘Yeah, but that’s because you’re fucking stupid,’ she said bluntly.
‘Sorry?’ So much for trying to calm her down.
‘Oh, you know what I mean.’ I could hear her trying to flap away her insult down the line. ‘You don’t have a boyfriend because you’ve been waiting for Charlie to wake up and realize he’s in love with you for the last decade, and now what – the second you decide you’re over him, you’ve got some random bloke drooling all over you? I don’t exactly feel sorry for you.’
‘What, so I don’t deserve to be in a happy relationship because I’ve got legitimate feelings for someone?’ Didn’t seem exactly fair. ‘Sorry I haven’t been shagging my way around London for the past ten years, hoping to accidentally fall on The One’s penis.’
‘Are you calling me a slag?’ Amy went from loud to quietly pissed off. ‘Don’t beat around the bush, Tess, just say it.’
‘I didn’t call you a slag,’ I replied. I was far too tired and too stressed to have this conversation. ‘But it’s not like you haven’t done your fair share of research in the boyfriend department, is it?’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ she snapped back. ‘I know you’re happy being a sad nun, but some of us actually have a life. I’m sorry if that’s upsetting to you.’
‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ I said, and realized as I chose my words that they were more of a warning than an apology. ‘Today has been shit. I’ll be back Sunday. Either we can talk about this calmly now, or we can fight about it then.’
‘Oh, yeah, I forgot – please do tell me more about your dreadful day in paradise.’ Apparently she wanted to fight about it now. ‘Has everyone worked out you’re not actually a photographer? Probably didn’t take long. Were you as shit at that as you were at your amazing job that you were so amazing at that you got the sack for nothing? Or did your new boyfriend bin you off like Charlie?’
I didn’t even reply. Instead, I hung up and threw my phone across the room. And immediately regretted it when I heard the clunk, chunk, shatter of a broken iPhone.
‘That wasn’t about you,’ I said out loud, my blood pressure building and building until I thought I might actually start shooting Popeye-style steam out of my ears. ‘She was being mean on purpose. She was trying to hurt you.’
And she had succeeded. How dare she say that to me? She knew I was stressing out about all of this; she knew I was scared. In a heartbeat, I went from being so tired I could have slept on the kitchen floor to being so full of rage that every limb felt like it was going to shoot off in a different direction. My shoulders shook and my hands were clenched tightly into tiny little fists. If only there were something or someone in the vicinity to punch. I paced the kitchen and the living room, opening kitchen cupboard doors and slamming them shut again. Not even snacks could calm me down. It was serious. I wanted to do something drastic like cut all of my hair off or send her Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. Or maybe something in between that didn’t involve a sharp blade. In my temper, the light, airy cottage seemed too small and utterly claustrophobic. Not bothering with shoes, keys or any of the other dozens of items I usually couldn’t leave my house without, I stormed out of the door and out into the night air. The freshness of the ocean hit me like a wet slap with a cold kipper and stopped me dead in my tracks. Breathe, a quiet voice said in the back of my mind. Calm down and breathe.
‘All right there?’
Nick was sitting outside his cottage, book in one hand, drink in the other, his laptop on the table beside him and a bemused look on his face.
‘Something wrong?’
‘Everything,’ I replied, feet still frozen on the wooden slats of my veranda.
‘How are the photos?’ he asked.
‘How is the interview?’ I deflected.
‘Shit.’ He shrugged and picked up a pipe from the ashtray on his table. An actual, honest-to-God pipe. ‘Artie is an uninteresting, self-important tosspot.’
‘Photos are shit too,’ I admitted, the ragey wind starting to leave my sails. ‘They don’t look right. It’s just not what it’s supposed to be.’
‘The whole thing was bollocksed from the start.’ Nick struck a match and I watched as the orange flare lit up his features for a moment before fizzling down to a soft, golden glow. ‘Don’t feel bad about it. There’ll be other jobs.’
I laughed softly and felt my fingers unfurl. Easy for him to say.
‘I just wanted one thing to go right,’ I said, facing away, looking at the ocean. ‘All I wanted was to come here, do this and know I’d done it well. I wanted to know that despite everything else that’s been so utterly shit lately, I could do this.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t your fault,’ he said. ‘You get really stressed really easily, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’ I was trying very hard not to cry. It was a long time since I’d looked in a mirror and even longer since I’d applied so much as lip balm. Bright red eyes weren’t going to make me any more attractive. ‘I needed this one thing to go right for me.’
‘One shit shoot doesn’t make you a shit photographer, Vanessa,’ Nick replied, missing the point entirely. ‘It just means the next one will feel like a holiday compared to this.’ He waved his pipe around our luxury accommodation and smiled. ‘Which is, when you think about it, ironic.’
The sky was clear again, with dozens of constellations I didn’t recognize stretched across the sky as far as I could see. When we were little, Amy and I used to sneak off into the fields around the village on summer evenings and lie on our backs making up stories for all the stars. It was weird to think these were the same stars. I walked a little way onto the beach and lay down in the sand. It was still warm from the sunny afternoon that had been and gone. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t wished on the first star I saw every evening, and I could barely remember a time when that wish wasn’t ‘please make Charlie fall in love with me’. As angry as I was with Amy, as upset as I was with everything in my life, I could at least see one thing clearly. It was time for a new wish.
‘Do you have a nickname?’ Nick lay down beside me and looked up at the sky.
‘A nickname?’ I asked, quiet alarm bells starting to sound in my mind. Had he heard Paige calling me Tess?
‘Yeah, you can’t be Vanessa all the time to everyone, can you? It’s so dramatic.’ He laughed a little and flashed his hands above his head. ‘Vanessa.’
‘No nicknames,’ I replied. I wanted to tell him the truth so badly. I wanted to roll onto my side, prop myself up on an elbow and say, ‘Listen, it’s a funny story, but my name is actually Tess …’ But I didn’t. Because I was terrified. I just didn’t know why.
‘I’ll have to come up with one then.’ He crossed his legs and kicked off his shoes, burying his bare feet into the beach.
‘Were you really smoking a pipe?’ I asked. ‘Like, a proper old-man pipe?’
‘I was smoking a proper old-man pipe,’ he confirmed with that grin that made my entire body fill with helium and hyperactive kittens. ‘I find it relaxing.’
‘I bet you like jazz too,’ I said with a smile. He was so close, I could smell him. He was like a cross between catnip and prozac – just being near him made everything else seem totally insignificant. I was completely calm and buzzing all at once.
‘I love jazz,’ he said, his voice full of smiles. ‘Am I enough of a cliché for you?’
His fingers found mine in the sand and we lay there, quietly holding hands, not saying anything. I let my head fall to the side and rest on his shoulder, half expecting him to pull away and hoping that he wouldn’t. He didn’t.
‘So, a couple of nights ago,’ I whispered, not wanting to talk over the sound of the waves. Seemed rude. ‘You were telling me what an absolute bastard you were. Is that part of the jazz-loving, pipe-smoking bollocks?’
‘Ha ha.’ He knocked his head against mine gently and I buried myself into his shoulder. ‘I am a complete bastard. All of this is just a ruse to work my way into your good graces before I steal all your granny’s silver.’
‘My granny hasn’t got any silver,’ I said. ‘She’s got a lot of Argos catalogues and figurines of geese, but that’s about it.’
‘Why the geese?’ he asked.
‘Who knows?’ I replied. ‘Paige said you were seeing someone.’
Nick rolled onto his front, showering me in a light dusting of powdery white sand, and looked at me with narrowed blue eyes. I pulled my hand away from him and pushed it underneath my body to keep it warm.
‘Did she?’
‘Yeah.’ I didn’t know why I’d said it. I didn’t even know where it had come from. ‘I thought you might have mentioned it. You know, to me.’
‘If there was something to mention, I would have.’
‘Right.’
It wasn’t really an answer and I wasn’t sure I felt any better. Either he was lying to me or he was lying to Paige. Awesome. All I had managed to establish was that Nick Miller was a liar. I’d never had to deal with issues like these when I was sitting behind a desk for eighty hours a week, pining after my best mate and coming up with wacky slogans to sell cling film.
The evening was warm and quiet, and everything that had happened before I stepped out onto the beach felt like a million years ago. Fighting with Amy, hanging out with Paige, taking hundreds of terrible photos … for ever ago. The only thing that registered was lying on the beach with Nick and not wanting to move. It was not very Tess-like. Old Tess would have been back on the phone to Amy apologizing, whether she was right or wrong. She would have been sitting playing Bejeweled on her phone in Paige’s bed while Paige slept, just to make sure she didn’t choke on her own vomit in the middle of the night. Old Tess wouldn’t be crossing her legs and tensing her shoulders to force her body to stop thinking about how soon she could be having sex with this man she’d met four days ago. I looked upwards at Nick’s stubbly jawline and full bottom lip and wondered what he was thinking about.
‘So, any word from that bloke back home?’ he asked.
Ohhh.
‘Nope.’ I replied. ‘Not a peep.’
‘Are you going to call him?’ Nick rolled over onto his back again, moving slightly closer to me. I followed like a magnet, and for the first time in my life I did not want to talk about Charlie Wilder.
‘Was the interview really that bad?’ I asked, changing the topic as quickly as I could without even answering. ‘Artie was really that terrible?’
‘Really that bad, really that terrible.’ Nick apparently didn’t need an answer. ‘Nothing I can do now. Just like your pictures.’
‘Don’t remind me,’ I groaned, an image of Artie with his plastic crown and grumpy face flashing in front of my eyes. ‘I hate not being able to fix this. I hate being so out of control.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have let Paige take charge at the shoot,’ Nick suggested lightly. ‘Too late to try and play the control freak now.’
‘You’re not helping,’ I instructed, pursing my lips and wondering whether or not he was right. What would I have done differently? ‘Paige was the art director, it was her concept – what was I supposed to do?’
‘Oh yeah, you only had the camera in your hand,’ he said, pulling sharply on my hand. ‘What could you have done?’
‘Shut up.’ I could feel myself getting annoyed, and I didn’t want to be annoyed. I wanted to be orgasmic. Then hungry, then eating Cheetos, and then asleep. And then maybe orgasmic again. ‘You don’t know.’
‘Actually, I think it’s going to be good for you not to get your own way for once.’ He pushed his messy blond fringe back out of his eyes. ‘You clearly have some control issues that we need to work on.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied. I believe my tone could have been referred to as ‘haughty’.
‘It’s beyond me how you haven’t gone mad yet, if you let every last little thing get to you as much as this job has,’ he went on. ‘I know a lot of photographers who are perfectionists, but you’re taking this so personally. I don’t get why you’re so angry about stuff you couldn’t change when you didn’t change the things that you could have.’
‘Like what?’ I demanded. ‘What could I have changed?’
‘You could have told her the props looked like a joke instead of waiting for me to do it,’ he said. ‘You could have told her the clothes looked like shit. You could have got rid of that fucking crown.’
‘She really wanted the crown,’ I muttered, angry only because I knew he was right. I should have said something, I’d just been too afraid. ‘She thought it was a good idea.’
‘Well, Paige thinks a lot of things are a good idea,’ Nick said. ‘She’s not always right.’
‘Fine, I should have said something,’ I accepted, folding my arms over my chest. ‘It’s all my fault that the shoot was terrible and the pictures are awful and Paige is probably going to get fired. OK, is that better?’
‘Yeah, I think you’ve probably gone a bit too far,’ he relented. ‘It’s hardly your fault Bennett dropped off the face of the earth, is it?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ I shrugged. ‘Might be.’
‘And you couldn’t have been prepared for Paige fucking up the location. Or a freak rainstorm? Let alone those God-awful clothes Artie the Arsehole turned up with.’
‘It just stings that there’s nothing I can do now. If you’re dedicated and you work hard, you’ll always get to where you need to be,’ I said, repeating words I’d told myself over and over and over. Usually on the Saturday nights when I sat in the office ignoring Amy’s texts to come out and meet her. ‘I should be able to fix this.’
‘So everyone who works hard succeeds, do they?’ he asked, pulling my arm from across my chest and taking my hand in his again. ‘No one ever gets shafted, no matter how talented they are or how many hours they put in?’
Oh. Hmm. Bugger.
‘Because I worked really hard on this interview, and it’s still a piece of shit.’ Nick seemed to be losing his temper a little bit. This did not bode well for my getting laid. ‘And regardless of what I do or how late I stay up to work on it or what research I manage to pull out of my arse, it’s still going to be shit. It’s still going to be published and people will still read it and think I did a shit job.’
‘Maybe they won’t?’ It was the best I had.
‘Maybe they won’t think your photos are shit and maybe you won’t be embarrassed to see your name next to them.’
This definitely wasn’t the time to go into the whole ‘by the way, I’m not actually Vanessa’ thing.
Nick sat up, resting his arms against his thighs and staring out at the sea. ‘The last time I was here,’ he said, ‘I thought I had it all figured out. How is it that the older we get, the less we know?’
‘Since I’m so much younger than you, I should have an answer to that,’ I said, thinking that Al had said almost exactly same thing a day earlier. ‘But I don’t.’
He looked over his shoulder at me and gave me a half-smile that didn’t quite make it up to his eyes as I sat up to join him. It was too dark to really read his expression, but I could see he wasn’t happy and I knew there was so much more going on than he was going to tell me. Rather than say another word, he sighed, leaned forward and kissed me. I closed my eyes, letting the soft sweetness wash over me, and leaned into him, but his soft kiss turned into a determination that took me by surprise, and his second kiss knocked me back into the sand. He pushed down on top of me, his heavy, solid body holding me in place, and pinned my arms above my head while his stubble scratched against my face and his legs wound their way around my own. It was a blessing and a curse that we were both wearing jeans.
‘We should go inside,’ I said with a little cough to clear my throat. With dark eyes, Nick nodded, making a gruff agreeing noise.
‘I’ll be a minute.’ He rolled off me and stood up, looking away. ‘Wait for me in the bedroom.’
Wait for me in the bedroom?
What did he have to do that was so important – smoke another pipe? Before I could come back with a witty retort, he turned to me and raised that bloody eyebrow.
‘Don’t start without me.’
Muttering under my breath, I stood up, brushed off my jeans, and, on shaky legs, made for the bedroom in his cottage. I was in so much trouble.