About a Girl (32 page)

‘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?’