Divas (10 page)

E
vie lumbered out of the lift like a big awkward bear in the three coats she was wearing one over the other. It was complete humiliation.
Especially as she was bent over, dragging first one, then the other suitcase, and finally the pole, out of the lift, as its doors repeatedly tried to close on her. At least she was so padded by the
coats that she barely felt the thuds.

Catching her breath, she stood in the lobby for a moment, looking around her. Its granite floor, flecked with sparkling mica, glittered under the huge glass lighting feature. The sight of the
lobby had never failed to make Evie’s tiny hard heart sing with happiness. It always reminded her of how far she had come from those filthy projects. You were lucky if the graffitied lobby
there didn’t stink of piss and sweat, and the only receptionist was a crack-head or two slumped on the floor, vials crunching under your feet as you picked your way gingerly around them.

Normally, Henry, the day guy, would have jumped to help Evie with her cases. But clearly Benny’s wife (that
bitch
) had informed him that Evie was being evicted, and Henry barely
turned his head to look at her as she reached down for the pull-handles of the suitcases and started to drag them across the lobby, the wheels scraping on the granite floor because the suitcases
were so weighted down with stuff.

Suddenly, she was nothing. Dirt on his shoes. This man – who’d
grovelled
to her for tips and his Christmas envelope – was treating her as he would a food delivery guy:
like she was invisible.

Evie had never been invisible. Girls who looked like Evie were never invisible.

Till now.

It was another item to put on her hate-list against Carin Fitzgerald.

She was brainstorming where she could possibly crash, tonight at least. As soon as she’d left the Midnight Lounge, she’d dropped the girls she worked with there: she was determined
to better herself, and she wouldn’t do that hanging out with those wild party girls, who’d just have got high, spilt JD and coke over her suede sofas, and tried to steal her meal-ticket
sugar daddy.

So, no friends from the Lounge would take her in. Her mom would, but Evie would starve in the street before she went back to Mariluz’s. Because of the shame of it, crawling back home years
after she’d defiantly declared that she didn’t need anything from her mother, that she’d make it all on her own; and because it would be a huge step back, returning to that
one-bedroom apartment fifteen stinking floors up in the sky, sleeping on her mom’s couch, just like she had throughout her childhood.

No, not her mom’s. No turning back. Move on or die, that was Evie’s motto.

There was only one person who would take her in. Only one person she could bear to ask for a favour.

She knew she couldn’t afford a car service. All she had was the cash in her wallet and the stash she’d been keeping in the cistern – the cops-are-coming, get-out-of-town money.
She didn’t want to dip into that unless she absolutely had to. So, dragging the suitcases half a block, then coming back for the pole, sweating under the heavy coats, Evie lumbered gradually
along Harrison, heading for the West Side Highway. Tribeca, the best place in the world to live if you belonged here, gleaming loft buildings inhabited by black-clad multi-millionaire hipsters,
film stars and Masters of the Universe like Benny. Superb restaurants, hip boutiques, bars where a glass of champagne could set you back twenty-five bucks easy.

But it was the worst place in the world if you didn’t have the money to live the lifestyle. The glances Evie got were horrified, then blank, eyes forward. No one wanted to know. She was a
bag lady in one of the richest areas in the world. She might as well have had leprosy.

She tried her cards at a Chase Manhattan branch, but it not only denied access, it ate them up, one after the other. Evie watched the machine swallow her plastic and felt her blood pressure
spike with fury. Those precious plastic rectangles, one black, one gold, had been her passport to Benny’s world of luxury and ease. All gone now, all cleaned out.

She set her chin and reached down for her suitcase handles once more. Only one more block to go, manoeuvring round FedEx trucks and loading bays, black garbage bags, deliveries for warehouses
close to the river. Traffic blared down the West Side Highway: Mack trucks, yellow cabs, limos, private cars, weaving in and out at high speed, chasing each other’s tails down to Battery
Park.

Streetwise in the ways of New York, Evie propped her suitcases on the sidewalk, her pole beside them, and waited. Various yellow cabs slowed down, but she shook her head at all of them; she was
holding out for an illegal, unmetered, gypsy cab. Eventually, a battered Lincoln Town Car veered across two lanes of traffic, causing a riotous blare of horns from the trucks it had cut off, and
squealed to a halt next to Evie.

‘Where you going?’ the driver, a sweaty middle-aged guy, called over the roar of traffic.

‘Bushwick, ’ Evie said reluctantly.

He looked her up and down.

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘I wish. I really do.’

‘Seventy bucks, ’ he said, looking at her handbag, her expensive suitcases.

Evie stepped closer so he would focus on her pretty face and not her Vuittons.

‘Hey, don’t go by those! They’re all knock-offs, I bought them on Canal!’ she lied. ‘I got forty, that’s all.’

‘Forty to Bushwick in rush hour? You
are
kidding.’

She’d known he wouldn’t take that. But always start low and bargain up was her rule. She sighed, pushing back her hair, letting the coats fall open so he got a good look at her body
in the clinging T-shirt: she hadn’t had time to put on a bra.

‘I could maybe manage fifty, but that’s it, ’ she said helplessly. ‘Come on, buddy, help me out, won’t you?’

He groaned and popped the trunk.

‘Just cause you’re cute, and it’s change-over shift time, ’ he said. ‘Fifty it is.’

Evie’s legs were strong and flexible as steel, her abs taut and powerful. Lifting and hoisting the cases into the capacious trunk of the Lincoln and arranging her pole crosswise on top of
them was no big deal for her. She slid into the back and the driver pulled into traffic, the horns blaring again because he hadn’t bothered to indicate.

Evie didn’t even notice: this was standard for New York. She was fully occupied rummaging in her big Tod’s bag for her phone. There was still a dialling tone; she scrolled through
the stored numbers, hit one, and heard, with great relief, that it was ringing. Thank God, Carin hadn’t had her service cut off yet.

Disappointingly, though, it went straight to answerphone. Lawrence must be training someone, his phone turned off.

‘Babe?’ she said. ‘It’s me, Evie. I need to crash at yours for a little while, OK? I’m on my way there now in a cab. Are you coming back soon? Can you call me when
you get this? I just don’t want to be sitting out there for hours, you know? Call me, OK?’

Evie slumped back in the seat, the coats itchy and uncomfortable with the sweat she’d worked up prickling at her. The driver was swinging the car up the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. Evie
practically never crossed the bridges that connected Manhattan to the rest of New York, or, God forbid, Jersey. Why would she need to? She was Manhattan born and bred. And now she was taking all
her worldly possessions to Bushwick, of all godforsaken places. She had become bridge and tunnel, like the rest of the New Yorkers who dreamed of living in Manhattan but had been priced out decades
ago. They had to catch the subway or the Jersey PATH or drive in over the glittering bridges – Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg – for the hip restaurants and bars and clubs that had
the cachet of being on Manhattan, the tiny sliver of island packed in so tight with seething humanity you often wondered why it didn’t sink under the sheer weight of people and traffic and
fifty-storey steel skyscrapers.

Bridge and tunnel. It was so depressing Evie couldn’t stand to think about it.

They turned onto the BQE – the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway – firing the Lincoln Town Car through tiny gaps between swaying trucks and coaches heading for the airport. It was such an
ugly highway that Evie closed her eyes, but even when she opened them a few minutes later, as they raced down Metropolitan Avenue, with its burned-out lots and seedy storefronts, the view was no
better. God, she couldn’t believe what she was being reduced to.

All she knew about where Lawrence lived was that he rented a room, or a space – he hadn’t been specific, and she hadn’t cared enough to ask – in a warehouse building that
wasn’t zoned for domestic use. But when the Lincoln Town Car pulled up outside the building, even the driver looked dubious.

‘You sure this is the right address?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, ’ she said, heaving a deep sigh. ‘He’s got some illegal warehouse let.’

Evie tried Lawrence’s number again. Still nothing. Reluctantly, she climbed out of the car. The front of the building looked like a prison: steel bars, grey industrial paint. The number
was scrawled on the steel door with what looked like Magic Marker, and the buzzers by its side were so chipped and scratched Evie wasn’t even sure that they worked. She knew Lawrence was on
the top floor, so she tried the top buzzer, but could hear nothing inside the building.

It was as grim and forbidding as if it were derelict, totally uninhabited. On either side were similar buildings, one set back behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Behind it, Evie could see a
pair of Alsatians on thick chains, lying slumped by a corrugated-iron shed. She pressed the buzzer again, and, waiting for some reply, she made a 360-degree turn, surveying the street. Across the
road was a steelworks, a pair of huge gates swung open, and, staring into the dark interior, she could see a group of men hooking a rusty-looking piece of metal onto a chain hoist. Whines of
factory machines, big electric saws, scraped through the air. The street itself was filthy with litter and discarded drink cans.

Evie shuddered.

‘Hey!’ called a woman’s voice from up above.

Evie tilted back her head to see who it was: one of the big windows had been pushed open on the top floor, and a girl was craning out of it.

‘What do you want?’ she called down.

‘I’m a friend of Lawrence’s, ’ Evie yelled back. ‘I need to come in and dump my stuff.’

‘You’re a friend of
Lawrence’s?
’

‘Yeah!’ Evie was growing irritated, standing out here looking like a fool on the sidewalk. ‘Look, come down and let me in, OK?’

The girl’s head disappeared. Evie went over to the back of the car and started pulling out her pole and her suitcases.

The driver got out to help. ‘Hey, baby, I’d take you home with me in a heartbeat!’ he said, throwing his arms wide, showing the sweat stains under his arms. ‘But my wife,
she might throw us both out, you know, and then we’d be right back here—’

There was a clanking sound from the door, and Evie’s head jerked round eagerly.

‘Who are
you?
’ the girl from upstairs demanded.

She was average height and quite pale, her dark hair pulled up on top of her head in a messy ponytail, dressed in leggings and layers of T-shirts. Her skin had a light film of sweat, and her
cheeks were bright pink: it looked as if she’d been working out. Despite the paleness of her skin, the shape of her dark almond eyes, her flat chest and long, squarish torso suggested to Evie
that she had some Korean blood in her. From her time working the Midnight Lounge, Evie was very used to assessing other women: her eyes zipped up and down the girl in the doorway, picking out her
strong and weak points as if she were a horse in an auction, checking out the competition.

‘I’m Evie, ’ she answered. ‘A friend of Lawrence’s. He’s talked about me, right?’

From the narrowing of the girl’s eyes, Evie saw that her gamble had paid off: Lawrence
had
mentioned her.

‘He might have, ’ the girl said reluctantly. ‘So what?’

‘So I’m crashing here for a few days with Lawrence, ’ Evie snapped.

‘He didn’t say anything about it to me, ’ said the girl, starting to close the door,

Her heavy fringe was tipped in bright red, as were the ends of her ponytail, as if she’d dipped them both in scarlet dye. She had a silver hoop in her eyebrow, a stud in her nose, and on
the arm pulling the door was a heavily patterned tattoo curling up from the wrist to the elbow. It gave her conventional prettiness the edge she’d doubtless wanted: she probably thought all
this ornamentation made her look cool and hip. And tough.

Well, she was wrong there. Evie would put her money any day of the week on a hustler from the Midnight Lounge against a would-be urban hipster. She pushed back against the door with such a shove
that the girl’s eyes widened as she involuntarily took a step back.

‘You really think that if Lawrence comes back and finds me sitting out here on the street, he’s going to be happy about it?’ Evie said from between clenched teeth.

The girl sighed.

‘OK, I’ll let you in, ’ she said, making it sound as if she were doing Evie a favour, rather than having been muscled into it. ‘But you’re not going to like it,
’ she added smugly, looking at Evie’s expensive Vuittons.

‘What’s your name?’ Evie asked the girl as she heaved her suitcases into the building.

‘Autumn, ’ the girl said.

It figured. Hippie parents.

‘Well, Autumn, can you take this for me?’

Evie handed her the pole in its plastic carrying case. Autumn staggered slightly under its weight.

‘What
is
it?’ she asked.

‘It’s my pole, ’ Evie said shortly, bending down to pick up one of her suitcases.

‘Eew!’ Autumn dropped it on the concrete floor, pulling a disgusted face. ‘No way I’m carrying that! Pole-dancing’s
so
anti-feminist!’

So Evie had to make three trips up the rickety old stairs to the fourth and final floor, where Autumn had left open the huge steel door for her and retreated to what Evie supposed they called
the kitchen. It was a gigantic open room, flooded with light.