I was absorbed into Zanna’s “girls”, ones I’d watched shimmering and shining and parting crowds of men at the uni bar like a biblical sea. The induction was made about six weeks after we met.
“The girls and I were thinking you should come to dinner with us.”
My stomach fluttered.
“Come round to mine to get ready first,” Zanna said, giving me the time of five o’clock.
When I got there, Zanna had Lana Del Rey’s debut album on, sounds of glamour and sex. She wore a slinky dressing gown and the top section of her hair sat in three large rollers.
“Yay! I’m so glad you’re here, come in!” She threw her arms around me. She pressed her whole body against mine, the soft silk of the dressing gown wafting against my hand and her powdery perfumed sweetness enveloping me, engulfed into her world, where finally someone was genuinely happy to have me — not just happy, thrilled.
She drew me into the small kitchen at the end of the long hallway, giving me prosecco in a pink flute. I followed her back into her bedroom at the front of the house with a large bay window, shielded partially from the quiet road outside by foliage, drink in hand. The scent of shea body butter, biscuity fake tan and the more acidic and brittle-sweet notes of perfume filled the room. And human smells, the musk of sleep on her pillows, the slight tang of a laundry basket, lacy thongs hanging over the top.
If Zanna was an eau de parfum (and she absolutely would insist on being at least an eau de parfum and certainly not an eau de toilette), a beauty editor would describe it like this: head notes of peppy orange, uber-feminine peony, the sparkling mint of really clean teeth and nose-wrinkling curiosity of expensive hairspray give way to a heart of Moroccan-souk-purchased incense and proper leather handbags. Finally, indulge in a base of rich girl body lotion, deep comparison of the self to others, and tonka bean.
I had my overnight bag, which I’d been instructed to bring. It had a thong for the next day and a T-shirt. I had my outfit for dinner on.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” my hostess asked.
“No,” she said before I could answer. “Paige, we’re going to Sushi Samba, not Slug and Lettuce.”
“I didn’t bring anything else.”
“Never you fear, my dear,” she smiled. She dug in a bag by the end of the bed, one of those posh, wide paper bags with ribbon handles you get from designer shops. Pulling out a long, hot pink, silky dress, she tore the tag off with aggressive enthusiasm. The tag hit the bag and flopped to the floor. I read the name, Alexander Wang. “Put it on,” she said, thrusting it at me.
“Is it going to fit?”
“Yeah! We’re the same size, silly.”
We were the same size, but here the physical similarities ended. While the skin on Zanna’s stomach pulled tight like skin on a drum, mine had the squishy give of an old leather sofa. I hoisted the dress above my head and let it fall over me, cool on my skin like a breeze.
The doorbell went, and a flock of women filled the flat. There were kisses on cheeks. Zanna poured more prosecco into more pink flutes.
“Wait. Is that the dress you bought when we were shopping the other day?” Sara, an icy blonde in all possible manifestations, asked, addressing Zanna.
“Yeah,” Zanna said, shrugging, “looks better on Paige, I think.”
“It’s so nice! Where is it from?” shortish, squattish Maggie asked, stroking the soft, shimmering fabric. She’d met me with the warmest smile.
“Alexander Wang.” The words were strangled coming out of my mouth and I cast a glance at Gianna, her gaze cold. Jealousy.
That night the sushi wasn’t the kind I’d had before, the kind you buy in ready-meal boxes from M&S or Tesco. Brought out on trays, rhubarb pink strips of fish entwined with creamy avocado the colour of a perfect, ripe Granny Smith apple, wrapped in rice. On some of the rolls sat blobs of a yellow sauce with slivers of chive, each one identical in size and shape. On another balanced a dollop of seventies bathroom-suite pink with tiny perfect pink balls. Fish eggs, like those Nemo hatched from, before he had to be found. I ate strange and beautiful food, served on a communal dish in the middle of the table, an edible kaleidoscopic mosaic. The restaurant crowned the top of a tower so tall that riding the lift, shooting heavenward and sending the lights of the City of London far, far below me, left me dizzy.
“I love it here,” Zanna sighed as we checked our coats in the cloakroom, my New Look faux leather jacket among a row of thicker, more expensive versions.
The girls ordered off the menu like they were speaking a foreign language. I said as much. “It’s Japanese, you idiot!” Zanna said.
Sara added, “It’s Japanese, Brazilian and Peruvian.”
“Where actually is Peruvia? Is it Europe?” Gianna asked, after making her wish for a dry white wine known.
We ordered some starters, including some green pods I didn’t know how to eat, spelled out phonetically to me by Zanna as “ed-ah-mah-may” and a bottle of “san-saire”.
“She is actually such a stupid hoe,” Zanna said after Gianna excused herself for the toilet.
“A moron. She’s lucky she’s so hot,” Sara agreed. They looked at me, the message clear. Join in, or set yourself apart.
“A shocking indictment of the British education system,” I said.
Zanna lolled. As in, she actually shouted, “Looooooool,” in a drawn-out screech.
“Oh my God.” Sara put a hand over her mouth and leaned forwards, stifling a laugh. Even Maggie smiled. A glow, a warmth emanating from within me. Zanna’s friends liked me. Her eyes twinkled at me over the arm of a waiter pouring white wine into her glass, her maternal smile telling me I did well. Of course, I wanted the other girls to like me, but only to be close to Zanna. Until then, Zanna was the only person I cared about.
I wanted whatever Zanna wanted, I was more than happy to quickly make her dreams my own, as she manifested some of mine. A group of glamorous friends, dinners in towers. So, when she suggested I ghostwrite for her new blogging venture, about six months into my university course, I was flattered, my heart fluttering at the idea that above all the other people she could have asked, Zanna asked me.
In only a few months we had amassed more followers than I could have imagined, and paid opportunities were coming down like April rain. We were ready to take it to the next level, we agreed. But my boomer-generation parents did not understand.
“You’re writing someone’s website for them?” my mum asked. “And they pay you for that?”
“And you’re writing about lipsticks?” my dad said, frowning.
“It’s a fashion, beauty and lifestyle blog,” I told them. “And we’re up to over fifty thousand followers on Instagram. That’s really good.”
Eating pizza at a Bella Italia on Shaftsbury Avenue, close to Euston so they could easily catch their train, I tried to explain it to them, my nonplussed parents who thought I’d be interning at a newspaper by now. I couldn’t bear to travel home, out to that abysmal suburb, and my parents were not natives to London and viewed the city with hostility. Mum, who had a bad knee, refused to get the Tube, worried about bombings. Dad categorically would not pay the extortionate taxi fares, worried about being ripped off, making a fifteen-minute walking radius from Euston the limit. Nix Wagamama and Wahaca — Mum didn’t like “funny” food — and your options were limited.
“Honestly, it’s a new media thing. These blogs are the new magazines. A lot of real-life magazine websites don’t have anywhere near fifty thousand readers.”
“Sorry, Pooh Bear, when your aunties ask what you do, I don’t know what to say.” My mum looked older, I observed. “You know, Sheila’s daughter Talia is doing really well at the estate agency. It’s lovely after everything she went through. She’s on a really positive path, now.”
I rolled my eyes at the mention of Talia, an old school cohort. She’d been my friend at primary school, until come secondary she turned into one of the many who bullied me in those drab, never-ending comprehensive hallways of grey walls and blue locker doors. I still refused to make the trip back to Birmingham to see my parents; the memories were like ghosts.
Dad sighed and said, “Just make sure you’re getting paid properly and it doesn’t get in the way of your real work — your degree. And call your mum more often, she worries about you.”
Sweating in my seat, I struggled with a pepperoni pizza, in anticipation of a coming storm. Even in my early twenties, being in my father’s company transported me back to those late nights in a small house where the front door slams closed at night and drunken steps make their way unevenly up the stairs. Hitched breath. When does the shouting start?
“Mum, Dad, there is something else.” Fiddling with a crust, I couldn’t bring myself to look them in the eye. “I’m leaving university.”
“Oh no, Pooh Bear,” Mum whispered, collapsing into her hands, eyes already beginning to leak.
Dad froze, fork in hand. “You better be joking.”
My silence said it all, and he banged his fist on the table, mild shock rippling round the restaurant.
“Look what you’re doing to your mother,” he said, gesturing at my mum with a huge, rough hand. Her greying blonde hair, blow dried in a style not altered since the eighties, bounced with her sobs.
“Please don’t cry, Mum.”
“Well, that’s rich. What are you thinking of? You’re daft!”
“Dad, it’s the future.”
“You were the first person in either of our families to go to university, Paige. Your mother was so proud.”
What about you?
I stayed mute.
“Alright, you bloody idiot. And don’t think you’re welcome back at home. We’ve put enough of our time and hard-earned money, the little of it there is, into you,” he said, before asking for the bill.
Later, Zanna dried my tears with a glass of prosecco and a reiteration of the original sales pitch she came to me with when she had the idea for me to leave my course and work with her full-time.
“Paige, no offence but your parents, they don’t know anything about the media and publishing.” She tucked her manicured feet under the sofa and gesticulated with her iPhone in her hand. “This is where everything is going, social media. Magazines are dying. If you say you built a huge social media platform, they’ll hire you in an instant because at the moment we are stealing all their advertising.”
She soothed my fear. After all, if uni was so essential to success, why were my work experience applications overlooked while my peers with parents who “knew someone” walked right in the door? On the occasion I was bestowed with the honour of doing a week’s free labour, they shoved me to the back of the newsroom with transcriptions while my middle-class male cohort got taken out for drinks by the news editor.
With Zanna, I wrote words that were engaged with on a daily basis by a collection of fans. And it wasn’t just that. We arrived at events and had our names on a clipboard for the man on the door to check. We walked into events where paparazzi were waiting at the door. We left events with goodie bags. We were so important, someone else paid for our taxis. We were part of something big, even though when I explained it to my parents, and a host of other people including the unimpressed head of journalism when I told her I’d chosen to leave the course, they exhibited blank faces.
More importantly than that, as Zanna sat with me and soothed me the evening after the argument with my parents, I got to sit in her arms with her soft, expensive jumper around me. Not only making the best career move of my life, Zanna assured me, but working with her, my very best friend. Detaching myself from an old life and starting a new one, with Zanna. With her. We were together. A team. My first and only real friend and now my colleague.
Leaving university meant leaving halls. So when Zanna asked me to move in with her in a flat near London Fields, I said yes immediately. Of course, it wouldn’t be the two of us. She had a boyfriend. Jealousy panged in me whenever she mentioned him; whether of her or him, I remained unsure. We’d yet to meet. This was the perfect opportunity, she said.
As she got ready for a date one night in early summer she told me how they met. “He was the best-looking boy in town, it was him or no one.” Naturally, she would be with the best-looking boy, there was simply no other way. The world accepted things just so.
She told me how her boyfriend had the most wonderful penis possible for a man to have. Then she described his body, perfect, “toned but not too big”. She told me how now he had lived with his dad, her lip curling slightly.
“It’s only so we can save for our dream home,” she told me. “And his dad can do loads of the work for us for free. He’s a carpenter. His dad doesn’t speak English, really, so he feels like he has to stay to be there for him, you know? His mum left when he was little. It’s sad. Dads leave their kids all the time. Mums? Not so much. I was worried it was going to make him kind of hostile to women and a total psychopath or something when I found out. But he’s amazing to women, you know. Has so much respect for them. If anything he’s too good to women, if you know what I mean.”
I lay on the bed as she talked and talked, tittering, as she dug through drawers stuffed with makeup for the perfect colour of nail polish. She’d been looking forward to this dinner for weeks, at a French steak place she raved about to me, and which I’d read a review for in the Sunday Times Magazine.
“You have two courses of steak, it’s amazing,” Zanna said.
She painted her toenails khaki, her body divided by the slabs of bright sun streaming through the tall windows of her soon-to-be former flat like a magician’s Zig Zag Girl — lacerated with shadow. She painted the nails, neatly clipped and squared off, on top of a fashion magazine spread, where models posed wearing a similar shade. Scattered around her on the floor were scraps of cotton wool soaked with nail polish remover and stained coral — last week’s shade. The acrid, but not unpleasant, bite of the remover stung my nose and eyes a few metres away from where Zanna sat, carried further by the suffocating, dense and warm summer air beating in through glass pulled shut specifically to keep it out. A cheap fan sputtered in the corner, pointless.
“Won’t the remover damage the wooden floors?” I asked. Zanna shrugged, paying little attention, focusing on preparing for her date. Her eyes set on her work, her face beautiful but as inflexible as the hardware on a Chanel bag, hair glistening so bright I thought the room would fill with smoke if you pressed your fingertip to it.
Behind her, a cool blue satin dress hung off the top of a mirror, expelling the light that beat through the windows with a vengeance, cascading it in all directions in a rainbow-white light. On the hanger, around its tapering neck, fell a multitude of sparkling strings, her chosen jewellery. Tucked underneath where the glitzy dress hung were gold sandals with a bedazzlement of straps that wound around the ankle like spun gold when laced.
Zanna had said, “You should hang out until he comes to pick me up, help me get ready. I could do with your expertise. You have great natural taste. And then you’ll finally meet him, and you can check each other out before we all move in together. Future roomies!”
I lolled on her large bed with its curling, old-fashioned headboard, wordlessly watching as she got dressed and talked to me all about her boyfriend for the millionth time.
“When I first met him,” she’d started saying, returning from the shower with a white towel wrapped around her wet body, water like oil giving her the glossy sheen of Charlize Theron in a Dior perfume ad. “When I first met him, he was ugh.” She sat down on the floor in front of the tall mirror and put her hands up like a mafia boss reluctantly surrendering.
“Urgh,” she repeated, pushing her hands out again for further emphasis, “a mess. For our second date I spent all day cooking the most incredible Greek meal you could ever imagine. I did my hair and makeup perfectly. Dressed up. I was like an amazing domestic goddess. Guess what he did?”
“Was he late?” I asked.
“No, he was on time but he was wearing shorts and a vest, and flip-flops. Flip-flops! He’d come from the park. I was so fucking pissed off.”
As she went on, it struck me Zanna had a lot of complaints to make about a man who was, at the same time, allegedly perfect. He wasn’t ambitious, he didn’t appreciate good food, he wasn’t cultured, and he didn’t understand art. He did everything for her. Drove her here, there and everywhere, bought her a vintage pouffe she had loved at the market, took her to Paris on his own dime, although she complained he’d got them a hotel in the wrong “arrondissement”. I dreamed of setting foot in an arrondissement, never mind being taken there by someone who loved me.
By the time the doorbell rang and lazier sun loitered around chimneys across the street, turning Zanna’s hair, thick yet weightless, tourmaline brown, I had such a conflicting report of her boyfriend I had no idea what to expect of the man I was about to meet. Zanna checked her makeup in the mirror and fluffed her hair, before leaving the bedroom to answer the door, hips swinging with excitement and anticipation.
“Hello,” she answered the phone in the hall, both syllables soaking with sensual promise. “Come up.”
The buzzer hummed and the door outside opened and swung closed. Heavy feet sped up the stairs and the upstairs door swung open too.
“Hello,” Zanna cooed again, the sound of rustling plastic and then arms being wrapped around bodies. “My friend’s here,” she said, the sound muffled and yet coming closer and she stomped towards the bedroom in the dazzlingly sexy sandals she probably would not take off later when she came back to this very bed.
The realisation struck as the “best-looking boy in town” walked towards me, and here I sat on a bed with a swollen, red face like one large popped spot from the hay fever, wearing a sweaty white T-shirt with no bra and basketball shorts. Zanna, on the other hand, shone like an invitee to the Vanity Fair Oscars After Party. With seconds to spare, I sat on the bed and crossed my legs. But my stomach had rolled up, poking out under my top. I uncrossed my legs, and at this moment — as I sat prone on the bed — Zanna walked back into the room, followed by the world’s most perfect man.
Zanna carried a bouquet of yellow roses, which she later told me were the best roses “because red and pink are too girly and cliché”. Now it’s sadly prophetic, they’re also funeral flowers.
He stepped into the room behind her. Not wearing shorts and a vest now, he had on a pair of black desert boots, black faded jeans and a light tan shirt in a corduroy sort of fabric. This was how I took him in, feet to face, fascinated to know what sort of footwear Zanna’s boyfriend wore post flip-flop ban. Upon coming to his face, it didn’t matter one bit to me what this man wore.
His face was a roadmap to the original man if God’s blueprint was perfect. His skin tawny, his eyes umber. If being around Zanna was like riding a rollercoaster on a hot day, all stomach flips and slightly scorching, being in his presence for the first time was like falling into an icy plunge pool.
“This is Paige,” Zanna said, sweeping her arm out in my direction, presenting me. “Paige, this is Shane.”
They were dressed for a night on the tiles, and I was sitting among the bedsheets with my hair tied like a pineapple, like an ape in an exhibit. Shane cast a glance at me, smiled a smile that enhanced the strong, blunt shape of his jaw and said simply “Hey” before turning his eyes back to Zanna, ready to take the next cue. His eyes focused on her so intently, with so much adoring love. He drank her in, I — and the rest of the world — barely there.
On the way out, Zanna shut the flat door behind the three of us and turned to me.
“You know how to get home from here, right?”
“Yeah, I’m going to get the bus.”
“Cool, see you later.”
She waved. Shane smiled and waved. As they walked away, the vague outlines of her body shimmering perfection in the blue dress, he raised a hand, slipping it behind her hair where it wrapped around the back of her neck. That hold said, “You’re all mine.” It made something in me twitch. To be touched like that, to be wanted like that. A new type of cold emptiness settled down in my stomach to rest. I’d been thrown out of a club I was never in. I’d never wanted a hand on my neck so badly.
Zanna and Shane walked away, two people who simply lived in a different place and time to where I spent existence. While it seemed as though we inhabited the same world, we never would, due to barely understandable laws of class, beauty and luck. Amber sun still lingered on the pavement, like me, cold now. It was warmer wherever Zanna went with him.