Divas (4 page)

Lola’s headache was like a vice now. She was literally unable to process all the information Carin was throwing at her. Grief was bubbling under the panic. She could sense it down there
somewhere, far below, but it hadn’t reached her yet. Could Carin truly be behind Lola being locked out of her own house.

But, according to what Carin had just told her, it wasn’t her house at all . . .

‘How could you
do this
?’ Lola gasped. ‘How could you think – Daddy’s really sick and instead of looking after him, you actually got someone here to
change
the lock on my house
—’

Carin’s voice sharpened to a point.

‘I think I just explained that it isn’t your house, Lola! You have a fiancé – go and stay with him! Your father’s supported you for long enough – it’s
someone else’s turn now!’

‘But I’ve got
all my stuff
in there!’ Lola wailed, too hungover and spongy-brained to come up with any better riposte, though she was dimly aware that there must be
hundreds.

‘I’ll make arrangements for you to get your things, ’ Carin said airily. ‘Now I must go, I’m afraid. I have so much to organise!’

A click on the line signified that Carin had hung up, but Lola, unable to believe it, kept saying: ‘Hello? Carin?
Hello?
’ for at least a minute afterwards. Then, frantically,
she searched her phone for Jean-Marc’s number. Five minutes later, having left three frenzied messages begging him to call her as soon as possible, she slumped back against her pretty
pale-green front door, which wasn’t her front door any more, apparently. Her headache was pounding at her temples with a croquet mallet, and her brain was so overloaded she thought that if
she had to take in one more unbelievable piece of information, grey ooze would start pouring out of her ears.

She was almost convinced that this was some awful joke Daddy and Carin were playing on her. It couldn’t really be true. Her father couldn’t really be in a coma! Maybe this was some
kind of Swedish custom, messing with the bride the day after her hen night? Some awful, psychotic, evil Swedish custom, of course—

And why wasn’t Jean-Marc calling her back?

Across the little mews, a front door burst open and Raisin-Face came running out, waving something. Having changed into slippers and velvet lounging trousers, she reached Lola in a matter of
seconds.

‘Do you
know
? Do you
know?
Have you
heard?
’ she gasped, flailing with the paper.

‘It’s in the
Standard
?’ Lola grabbed the paper. ‘Daddy’s in the
Standard
?’

But the headline that greeted her wasn’t about her father.

‘
PLAYBOY HEIR IN SEX SCANDAL OVERDOSE!
’

Lola’s legs gave way under her. She sank down to the cobbled pavement, one of her Jimmy Choos twisting and snapping off a heel as she collapsed. But Lola was far, far beyond realising that
her last pair of shoes had just broken. She was staring at the photograph on the cover of the
Evening Standard
, which showed someone being carried on a stretcher out of the nastiest-looking
council estate staircase Lola could imagine. His face was blurred, but the golden sweep of hair over his forehead was horribly familiar.

Lola realised why Jean-Marc’s phone was going straight to voice-mail.

‘
STEEL HEIR JEAN-MARC VAN DER VEER OVERDOSES IN TRANSSEXUAL LOVE PAD!
’ the cover screamed. ‘
FIANCE OF “IT” GIRL LOLA CAUGHT WITH TRANNY
LOVER!
’

And just then, from the main street, a woman came running into the mews, her face lighting up as she spotted Lola.

‘Lola!’ she yelled. ‘Caroline Francis from the
Sun
! Am I the first to catch you? What are your feelings about Jean-Marc’s overdose? Had you heard? Did you know he
was seeing a transsexual prostitute?’

Raisin-Face grabbed Lola’s arm and dragged her up.

‘Run!’ she said. ‘Come on,
run
!’

And so, hopping grotesquely from a four-inch heel to a flat foot, her head feeling as if it were about to explode, her only refuge the house of a woman she didn’t even know, Lola
Fitzgerald ran from the home that wasn’t hers any more, pursued by a
Sun
reporter yelling unbelievable allegations about her fiancé.

They barely made it back to Raisin-Face’s house in time. She literally slammed the door in the eager face of Caroline-Francis-from-the-
Sun,
and turned to Lola, completely unable to
disguise both her excitement at being in the middle of such a juicy tabloid story, and her joy at Lola’s humiliation.

‘
So!
’ she said, her over-stretched face trying so hard to move that it looked as if it might pop at any moment. ‘
Did
you know about the transsexual
prostitute?’

Lola did the only thing left to her. She burst into a flood of hysterical tears. And then she fainted.

E
vie was halfway up her pole and contemplating what to do next. She hung there, head down, her ponytail a pale line of hair pointing towards the
ground. Her ankles were wrapped tightly around the pole, her knees clamped one on either side in a double-lock that ensured she wasn’t going anywhere.

Hmm. She tried a Caterpillar, holding onto the pole with both hands and levering herself up, rubbing her upper body along the pole so her bottom rose up suggestively, repeating it in a long slow
sexy loop of movement that she knew would send anyone viewing it into an instant wash of desire, watching her taut buttocks lift closer and closer to her crimson stack-heeled shoes, then descend as
the front of her body caressed the pole. After a couple of Caterpillars she checked her lock and changed her grip and pushed herself up and away from the pole into a Swan, gripping for dear life
with her legs, using her considerable abdominal strength to hold her in a deep arch, arms out to either side, breasts pushed forward like a figurehead on a boat.

It felt good, but it was a little too gymnastic to be sexy. Evie crossed her arms in front of her chest. Was that better? No, too coy, a bit like a statue on a tombstone. . . She lifted her arms
again and played with her hair, flicking it lightly, swaying her upper body fractionally from side to side, and knew she had the move now. Sexy mermaid. Cool. She could always sense it as soon as a
move worked, as soon as it connected with her crotch, like someone pulling lightly on her G-string. Instantly she felt sexy, as if a hundred male eyes were on her and fifty men were breathing fast
and deep, watching her play with her hair and twist her body into shapes that made their palms sweat and the blood rush to their groins.

Jesus, her ankles were killing her, and the muscles along her spine were burning up . . . Evie came out of the Swan, loosening the locks at knees and ankles just enough to slide gently down the
pole till she could put her palms on the floor. Then she let the locks go completely, straightened her legs against the pole, and used it to kick herself over into a bridge. Careful not to bang her
face into the pole – she’d nearly broken her nose once doing that – she stood up from the bridge, her back groaning after holding the extreme arch of the Swan for all that time.
She dropped to all fours and did some cat stretches, pushing her lower back as high as she could, forcing it to round out, and finally it stopped complaining.

Then she looked at her ankles and winced. She was really working hard on all her extreme hanging poses, and it showed. Benny would freak. He was obsessed with her feet being smooth. He paid for
twice-weekly pedicures, threw hissy fits if he ever saw her with bare feet – even in the apartment – and had bought her so many velvet slippers, marabou mules, softening foot lotions
and pumice stones that even if those were the only possessions she owned, her bedroom and bathroom closets would have been bulging at the hinges.

It wasn’t all she owned, of course. Benny had bought her plenty more than that. Which was why the spare bedroom had been converted three months ago into her walk-in closet. Evie loved that
room, with its cedar panelling, its sliding drawers, its revolving clothes rails, its recessed lighting that switched from day to evening so you could assess the true colours of the clothes you
were choosing, its shoe shelves reaching to the ceiling with the built-in stepladder for getting right up to the top.

Shoes. All those shoes. And the entire set of drawers right next to the shoe rack which were all for stockings, hold-ups and knee-highs. Benny loved that room even more than Evie did: he could
spend hours in there pulling things out and selecting outfits for her. She was his little dress-up doll. With a special emphasis on the leg and foot area.

Evie grimaced, looking down at her ankles with the hard red lines running across the front of the bones, where the pole had bit in. She’d have to put on some opaque stockings for Benny
this afternoon, or he’d have one of his tantrums. God. Benny was a wonderful guy – so sweet, so generous – but you’d think a guy as smart as he was could figure out that a
girl he’d met hanging upside down on a hard metal pole by her ankles might have a few scrapes and bruises every so often as she pursued her art.

Benny didn’t think that way, of course. He’d seen a girl who could do all those moves in a pair of flame-red patent heels, stacked six inches high, and fallen in lust in twenty
seconds. Hard and fast, the best way. He’d had Evie out of the Midnight Lounge and into this Tribeca penthouse loft quicker than you could say ‘billionaire tycoon’. And Evie, like
every other girl she’d worked with in the Midnight Lounge, could get those words out pretty damn quickly. Benny saw Evie as a delicate, fragile creature, slender as a wand (years of
gymnastics at high school, you needed to be skinny to compete), big dark doe eyes, slender wrists and ankles, small pointy breasts – his little gazelle, he called her sometimes.

Actually, Evie was lean and strong as a steel wire, tensile and hyper-flexible, with clearly defined muscles in her arms and back from all that taking her weight on her hands, and she needed to
be that thin to do the pole moves she did. Curvier girls looked even better on a pole, those luscious breasts and asses wrapping round it seductively, but they could rarely do the hardcore flips
and climbs, or hold the poses for long. They were carrying too much weight for full-on routines, it strained their arms and back too much and cut into their ankles really bad. Whereas slim light
little Evie could haul herself up that pole in seconds and hang off it for what seemed like hours. She had the wiry build of an athlete. And for a Latina, she was pale, pale enough for her blonde
hair to be plausibly natural.

But Benny, bless his heart, chose to see Evie as a frail soft-petalled naturally blonde orchid whose petals had been gently bruised by the cruel world. An orchid that Benny needed to put in
water and cherish like a precious jewel. And Evie was more than happy to let him have his fun.

She undid the cruel stacked stilettos and took them off, flexing her feet. Other girls practised in bare feet, but not Evie. Nothing to do with Benny and his particularities on the subject; no,
she’d always thought that if she started training in bare feet, she’d get too nervous to do some of the scarier moves when she put her shoes back on. If she always wore the wicked
spiked heels, took them for granted, allowed herself no possibility of trying any move without them, then she eventually forgot the fear that comes with knowing you’re kicking above your head
in stilettos that could take your eye out if you aimed one wrong.

The clock on the wall said ten of twelve. Evie felt her lower body soften, melting down in pleasurable anticipation. Lawrence was always punctual to the minute. She hadn’t realised how
much she was looking forward to seeing him till this precise moment.

She stood up, suddenly half a foot shorter, and kicked her shoes across the room. They were just practice heels, banged up already, it didn’t matter how scuffed they got. For the rest, she
was already dressed for it; a black racerback sports bra and high-cut short shorts, covering the minimum amount of flesh possible. You needed bare skin on the pole: it gripped ten times better than
any fabric you could ever find. Evie swivelled a tad to catch sight of herself in one of the full-length mirrors. One thing this apartment wasn’t short on: mirrors. It was like a cross
between a dance studio and a, well, a mirror showroom. You’d have thought Benny sold the things for a living. He sure did like to watch.

And so did Evie, though in an utterly different way. Benny looked at her and saw fantasy: Evie, merchandise. As she did several times a day, she stared at herself now with narrowed, assessing
eyes. With the shoes off and her hair tied back, she could be taken for a gymnast still, her stomach flat, her small breasts pretty little points flattened slightly by the sports bra. She was
short-waisted, which meant she had to work really hard on keeping that stomach flat, as there wasn’t much space for all her internal organs, and that tended to make your tummy bulge out, even
without any fat over it. But the plus side of being short-waisted was that you got lovely long legs. Even though Evie wasn’t that tall, in her heels it looked as though her legs went on for
days. All the women in her family had good legs, but hers, after all the exercise and stretching, were perfect now.

Almost perfect. She bent down, critically pinching at a small swell of flesh on the inside of each knee. It wasn’t fat, of course not, it was solid muscle, but it needed to go just the
same, so her line was totally smooth. Well, that was what she had Lawrence for. And at the thought of his name, her lower body softened again. Lawrence, her personal trainer, who would be here any
minute, and who would gaze into her eyes and make her sweat from every pore of her body . . .

Just on time, the buzzer went. Evie crossed the floor to the intercom and said:

‘Yes?’

‘Miss Lopez, it’s your noon appointment, ’ said Henry, the doorman.

‘Send him up, ’ Evie said, and disconnected. She used to be all polite with Henry and the other doormen and the cleaning staff and the delivery men and everyone else she had working
for her since Benny had established her here, high in the air at the bottom tip of Manhattan, where all the action was. Only, after a few weeks, she’d started realising that everyone else in
this building, where one-bed apartments went for millions of dollars, was short with the staff, if not downright rude. And that the staff seemed to give them a hell of a lot more respect than they
gave Evie.