Let Down Your Hair (20 page)

“Sixteen,” she whispered.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a daughter?”

Her lips were trembling. “Because I … I didn’t think you’d …”

Dirk’s face darkened. “You didn’t think I’d what?”

Frightened by what I’d done, I stepped in, trying to smooth things over. “We weren’t in touch. My grandmother—”

“
Honey!
” Emmeline’s voice lashed me like a whip. “Dirk and I need to talk. Alone. Please go.”

Still reeling, I stumbled out on shaking legs and poked the button for the elevator. When it reached the ground floor, I ran to the station, as if something monstrous was chasing me.

Blurred music wafted along Ryan’s street. Everything looked menacing and vivid, as though the houses and fences had been sharpened. I focused on the pavement squares under my boots until my jolting heart ebbed to a slow thump of dread.

Had Ryan really abandoned me, less than a week after cracking Andrea’s files and calling me beautiful? Surely his phone was just broken or lost, his emails to me bouncing for some reason. Surely he’d be home now, designing a T-shirt in the room where we’d danced and made love.

The music grew louder as I approached Ryan’s gate, where someone had tied two balloons. They head butted each other as I opened it and waded through the feathery weeds to the door. I rapped the knocker, first lightly, and then with all the strength I could muster.

The door opened, and a loud wave of music poured out around a woman of about nineteen. She had dreadlocks, and a ring through her lip as well as several on her fingers, which were wrapped around a plastic cup of punch.

“Hiiiii,” she said. “Welcome to the party. I’m Ange, and
you
,” she pointed at me, “are one of Felix’s friends.”

My body stiffened. I didn’t want to tell Ryan I was pregnant in a house full of half-drunk guests. “Uh, actually I’m not. I’m looking for Ryan, Shell’s housemate.”

“Oh,
are you?
” said Ange, as if this was the most interesting thing she’d heard all night. “I don’t know him, sorry. I’ll find Shell for you and see if he’s here.”

I followed Ange’s swaying dreadlocks down the hall, which smelled of strangers and smoke and spilled wine. Ryan’s door was closed, and an unfamiliar Buster Keaton poster had been blu-tacked to it. An ominous chill lodged inside me.

The kitchen lights were off, but the windowsill and shelves were lined with tea-light candles. In their wavering light, I saw the annoying man from the doorstep, now in a velvet tuxedo, accompanied by a man with a straggly beard and very tight jeans. Installed in the beanbag was a woman in a 1960s mini-dress. Her voice was loud, and she spoke every syllable with a languid, husky precision. As I entered the room, her elaborate gestures narrowly missed my thigh.

“Hiiiii.” Ange issued a limp wave. “Do you know where Shell is?”

The men glanced my way and did a gaping double-take that made me wish I’d changed out of my figure-hugging dress. The annoying one showed no sign of recognizing me now I had long hair and full model makeup.

Conscious that her audience was distracted, the woman looked over and did her own double-take. Her scarlet lip curled a little. “I think she’s outside,” she said, turning back with a toss of her sculpted retro curls.

Ange and I steered around a bathtub full of drinks and melting ice and opened the sagging back door. Twenty or so guests were sitting on stumps and mismatched chairs around a fire built inside an old oil drum. As we stepped outside, they peered through the wood smoke and all did the same double-take.

Shell was lolling by the fire, a joint in one hand and a marshmallow on a stick in the other. She stared for a moment and then blinked with recognition. “Sage! Sorry, I’m just a bit … spun out by your new look.” Her marshmallow caught fire, and she shook it into the coals with a puff of burning caramel.

The small woman next to Shell gave a wide, false smile. “You must be one of Felix’s friends.”

The ominous shadow darkened, tinted with a sense of unreality. Where was Ryan, and who on earth was Felix?

“Nah, she’s Ryan’s girlfriend,” said Shell. “You know, the guy who used to live in Felix’s room.”

My body went cold, and the crackle from the fire turned suddenly loud, as if someone had turned up the volume. “Shell,” I said, “can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

“Sure.”

She handed her joint to the woman with the false smile and I led her inside to a quiet spot near the front door.

“Shell, where’s Ryan?” I said, clutching her sleeve. “I need to see him. Urgently.”

Shell gazed at me with stoned, earnest eyes. “Have you guys like … broken up or something?”

“No,” I said, a bit louder than I’d intended. “Why?”

“Because Ryan’s moved out. He got his stuff on Tuesday, and Felix moved in Thursday night. You know, the guy in the tux.”

Her words rang in my head. Across the hall, Buster Keaton stared down, his face a baleful blank. “Did … did Ryan leave a forwarding address this time? Or a number?”

Shell’s expression turned from nonplussed to shifty. “Yeah, I think so.”

“What do you mean you
think so?
”

She pinched her lip uneasily. “He gave me a bit of paper,” she said, “but I forgot to put the stuff on it in my phone.”

I wanted to kill her. Why hadn’t I thought to leave
Ryan
a note at this house instead of relying on this idiot?
Why?
“Can you
find
the bit of paper, then?
Please?
”

Shell’s brow crinkled, as if I’d asked her to move a piano single-handedly. “Can’t it wait? It’s Felix’s housewarming party tonight, and—”

“No, it
can’t fucking wait
.” The curse word spilled from my mouth, spiky and unexpected.

With a long-suffering sigh, Shell trudged into her room and started rustling about. Nausea reared up, and I bolted for the toilet. I retched and retched until the sickness subsided, then sat and cupped my forehead in my hands. A couple of feet above me, glass louvers let in cold air and conversation.

“My
God
, Felix, you have all the taste of a
footballer
,” said the voice of the languid woman in the mini-dress.

“I didn’t say I’d want to
be
with her,” Felix protested. “I just said she was striking. In a commercial sort of way.”

“She looks like a Barbie doll,” said the woman with the false smile who’d asked if I was Felix’s friend. “Skinny, blonde and plastic.”

Cold sweat broke out all over my body. Suddenly I was nineteen again, huddled in the toilets of the karaoke bar with Caitlin and Kayla at the mirrors.

“You think she’s had work done?” Felix sounded fascinated.

“
Darling.
” I could almost see those languid eyes rolling. “Most women who look like that have had work done. Nose jobs, boob jobs. Two hours a day with a personal trainer and a lettuce leaf for lunch. Personally, I’d rather drink
cask wine
than walk on a treadmill.”

Hooting laughter, like a trio of hyenas. I curled into a ball like a hunted animal.

“Actually,” said False Smile, who’d stopped hooting first, “we shouldn’t laugh. Did you see her Fendi clutch?”

Emmeline had lent me a handbag for the shoot. Its rectangular clasp was made from two long Fs, and it didn’t have a strap, so one hand was always occupied with holding it.

“Those,” went on False Smile, “are
eight hundred dollars
. Of which the sweatshop worker probably got fifty cents. It’s criminal.”

The clutch fell to the floor with a
clunk
. When I walked out on Andrea, I thought I’d claimed my independence. Instead I’d just gone from being Andrea’s puppet to being Emmeline’s. From a sheltered, frumpy loser doing a PhD she hated, to an overdressed doll who’d walked out on her first job as a model. And still,
still
I was being sneered at behind my back. My brain clouded over.

“
Personally
,” said Languid in a portentous tone, “I just feel sorry for women like that. This dress cost me twelve dollars in a charity shop. And it’s
authentic sixties
.”

I’d heard those opinions before. From the mouths of eighteen year olds in first year Women’s Studies, full of sophisticated airs. And themselves. Indulged by arty middle-class parents and thinking themselves superior to everyone. What would they know about me?

I slammed down the toilet lid so hard it sounded like a gunshot, and marched out into the kitchen, taking grim pleasure in seeing the shock on their faces. For a long, cool moment I stood, arms folded, staring them down. Then I turned my back and strode into Shell’s room, where she was lounging on her bed sending a text.

“You didn’t find Ryan’s number, did you?” My voice was so harsh that she dropped her phone.

“Ohhh, um, no, I didn’t, sorry. Give me your cell number and I’ll text when I find it.”

Another silent, violent curse at myself for being too scared to get my own phone. “Forget it,” I said in disgust. “I’ll find him some other way.”

I stomped out, slamming first Shell’s door, then the front door behind me.

The penthouse was unnaturally dark and silent. The living room lights were off, and the leather couches were hunched like ogres against a tapestry of stars.

My eyes found a needle of light under the master bedroom door. I padded toward it and knocked, very softly. When there was no response I opened the door a crack and peeked inside. The covers and pillows on the king-sized mattress lay tangled on the carpet around it. Facedown in the middle of the bed was Emmeline, streaky blonde hair strewn round her head like a broken halo.

I stood in the doorway, afraid to come closer. “Em?”

She didn’t answer. I crept among the covers to the side of the bed. “Em? Emmeline?” I laid a tentative hand on her shoulder. “
Mom?
”

She shoved my hand away and sat up. Her face shocked me. When she’d cried before, her features had been delicate and controlled, as if crying for a scene in a movie. Now she was broken and blistering, with eyes like black holes.

“Why,” she said in a tear-ravaged voice, “did you tell Dirk you were my daughter?”

I backed away, and she grabbed my wrist with a grip that would leave bruises. “Because … so he’d understand why you—”

“Spent money on you? Is that why?” She shoved past, grabbed the heavy quilt with both hands and began wrenching it back onto the bed. “For Christ’s sake, honey, a few thousand is nothing to Dirk. He has millions of dollars.
Millions
.”

I bent to help her, shaking so hard I could barely grip. “Is he … might you two split up?”

Emmeline yanked the quilt from my hands and dumped it on the bed. “Why yes, Sadie,” she said with vicious sarcasm, “we might.”

A lightning bolt of horror crackled through me. “
Why?
Because of me?”

“Like I said,” she hurled a pillow onto the bed, “image is everything to a man like Dirk.” She grabbed another pillow and hurled it so hard it knocked over a bedside lamp. “Before he had this perfect girlfriend. Now he’s going out with a single mother with a pregnant daughter.”

Her words hit my guts like a club. “But …”
But you aren’t a single mother. You’re a woman who gave up her child. This week is the only time in your life you’ve had to look after me.

“And don’t even think about telling me I’ll find someone else. I’m thirty-eight. Thirty-
eight
.” She plonked the lamp on the bedside table, and turned to me, fighting for composure. “So, how was the shoot?”

My heart turned to quicksand. “I … I quit.”

“
Quit?
”

“I was … it was the photographer. He made us pose in lingerie in the cold, and abused this sixteen-year-old girl about being fat, so I—”

“Oh, for fuck’s
sake!
” She dropped face-first onto the bed again, her shoulders heaving. I stood by the bed, a pillow dangling from one hand. Finally she raised her face. “Yes, Sadie. Sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes photographers are pricks. But if you want to be a model, you smile, suck it up and deal. Especially when it’s a client as big as La Carina.”

“Then I won’t take jobs with big clients,” I said, my hand closing on the pillowcase. “I’ll only work with—”

“You won’t be offered any more work, honey.”

The pillow I was holding fell to the floor.

Emmeline gave a small, bitter smile. “Once word gets around that
Fabian de Carlo
got you a job with
La Carina
and you quit, no agent will take you on. Ever. You’ve fucked up. You’ve fucked everything up. My life, your life, Fabian’s reputation.”

I wanted to say something, but no words came.

Emmeline climbed off the bed again, and began straightening the covers. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, turning so her back was facing me, “but I can’t have you staying here any more. Not after what you’ve done.”

Something in my stomach began to tremble.
What I’d done?
I’d stood up for better working conditions for models. I’d tried to protect a young girl from a bullying employer. “But I haven’t got anywhere to go. And I’m pregnant.”

“That’s not my fault.” She placed the pillow I’d dropped at the head of the bed.

Two hot tears poured down my face. “But you’re my mother!”

“My mother threw me out when I was seventeen. Stay with a friend.”

She didn’t throw you out. You walked.
“But I don’t have any friends.” My voice cracked with the shame of this confession.

“Then go back to
Nanna
.”

The tears were rivers now. “I can’t go back to Andrea. You know I can’t.”

“You think she’ll turn you away? She wouldn’t dare.”

“But—”

“Look, I don’t
care
where you go, OK?” Her face was contorted with fury and grief, and she flicked a hand at the window as if telling me to jump through it. “Just GO!”

The world turned to ash. The person my feet carried to the guest room wasn’t me. It was the ghost left behind while the rest of me broke apart and fell through the city air like splinters.

A knock at the door. “Sadie?”

Dirk’s voice. He’d never addressed me by name before. The room resurfaced. The Fendi clutch on the floor. The suede high-heeled boots, one by the door, one by the bed. The makeup smudged on my knees. I didn’t know whether hours or minutes had passed.

A second knock. “Sadie? Are you still there?”

Hatred flamed. I got up, planning to rip open the door, attack him, blame him, but it opened just as I was reaching for the handle.

Dirk’s face was curiously neutral. I stood in front of him, blazing hostility, and he looked past me at my clothes, old and new, hanging in the half-open wardrobe. His gaze returned to me, cautious and cool. “Are you leaving tonight?”

Another blaze of hatred. “Yes. As soon as I can.” I wasn’t beholden to this man any more. I could be as rude as I liked. “I wouldn’t want to live off a man so shallow he’d dump a woman for having a daughter.”

Dirk’s lips thinned. “That’s what Em told you, is it?”

“She did. And if you think—”

“I have two daughters, Sadie.”

The rest of my sentence collapsed.

“They live with their mother in Hong Kong. I fly there to see them once a month.” His eyes wandered to the window, as if looking through the glass into a former life. “Did Em see you when you were growing up?”

“She … she wrote me letters.” I tried to imagine my life with those letters and drew a total blank. “I didn’t get them, though. My grandmother hid them.”

“But she didn’t check? Or visit you?”

“No.” The tears were gone now. Everything had been emptied out.

“Not even once?”

I shook my head, and Dirk’s face darkened. He slid a slip of paper out of his breast pocket and took out a slim silver pen.

“So why not? You were living in the same city.” As he wrote I noticed the faintest of stripes on his left ring finger. How long had he been divorced? Had he still been married when he started seeing my mother?

“Probably because she didn’t want to see Andrea. Her mother. She hates her. Thinks she’s twisted and abusive.”

“I see.” He finished with a sharp, jabbing full stop. “So she gave her her daughter to bring up. And pretended she’d never had a child. Nice.”

My skin prickled. I hadn’t put things so baldly before.

Dirk looked up from his writing. “What’s your surname? It’s not Rae.”

Emmeline had modeled as Emily Rae. “My real name’s Sage. Sage Rampion.”

He asked me to spell it, wrote something more on the slip of paper and held it out. It was a check for ten thousand dollars. “To tide you over. I’ll book you a hotel room while you sort yourself out. Give my name to Reception.”

I backed away, my mind full of Matti, paying off his teenage lover and going home to his wife.

“Go on, just take it.”

He tossed it on the bedside table and walked out. The zeroes on the check stared up at me like the eyes of a venomous spider.

I turned on the computer, googled “removing extensions” and found a website with video instructions. I stripped off the outfit I’d worn to the shoot, wrapped myself in a towel, found tweezers in the bathroom cupboard and started pulling out the hair extensions. When the last one was out, I tied them in a disembodied ponytail, left them on the bed and went to wash my hair and remove my makeup. After my shower, I hung everything bought with Dirk’s money in the wardrobe. Last of all, I took out the contact lenses, donned my glasses and went back to face the check.

Ten thousand dollars. With that much money and a room in this hotel, I could afford to take my time. Find a job and a place to live, track down Ryan, figure out what to do about being pregnant. Andrea and Emmeline would never know.

But I’d know.

I shouldered my bag, picked up the check and walked down the hall to the lounge. Dirk lowered
Business Review Monthly
, startled by my appearance, but I lifted my chin, strode over and placed his check on the coffee table.

“I can’t accept this.” I plunked his whiskey glass on the spider eye row of zeroes.

“Don’t be silly,” he said, pushing off the glass. “What about your babies?”

He tried to give it back to me, and I stepped out of reach. “I’ll manage.”

“Look,” said Dirk, “you’re not being realistic. If you—”

“I’m not taking your money, Dirk.” I’d never addressed him by name before either.

“Why not?” He sounded genuinely bewildered.

“Because I don’t want to be a kept woman like my mother.”

He hesitated for a moment, check still in his hand, and then replaced it carefully on the coffee table. “Well,” he said, a bemused expression on his face, “in that case, good luck. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t.”

For the last time, I walked down the hall to the door with the gold number 1 screwed in the center. “Bye, Dirk.”

“Bye, Sadie.”

As I left, he lifted a hand in farewell, with an expression that looked almost like respect.