‘Yeah, whatevs …’
There was a lurch as we left the ground and no matter how many times I’d flown I couldn’t unclench until I was sure we were properly airborne and weren’t suddenly going to plunge to our deaths. I was so tensed up that I didn’t even realise, until there was a ping and I went to unfasten my seatbelt, that Michael had been holding my hand the whole time.
So we flew over the Atlantic for about seven hours. Michael watched three films and I ate Haribo and worked on my presentation. When it was time to give my speech, I’d appear to be winging it when, in reality, I’d rehearsed it so many times that I was word-perfect and didn’t even need to look at my notes. I’d throw in a few ums and ahs because nobody likes a smartarse seventeen-year-old, and I probably would fall over my sentences at the start from nerves but then I planned to be funny and insightful and the voice of my generation, which wasn’t difficult as my generation was woefully inarticulate.
Eventually we disembarked and started walking through miles and miles of corridors, until we were standing in the queue to have our passports checked. It was then that Michael started to get very antsy at the thought of having his fingerprints scanned and his photo taken.
‘But why?’
‘To make sure that you’re not a member of Al Qaeda or on any no-fly lists,’ I hissed.
‘Of course I’m not,’ he whispered back. ‘Do they keep our information?’
‘Well, of course they do.’ I had no idea whether they did but then Michael shuddered and light dawned. ‘I promise they’re not going to phone your parents to tell them you’ve entered the United States.’
‘I know that,’ Michael said huffily, then he sighed. ‘On one level I know that but on another level, where I’ve never lied to my parents on this kind of scale before, I expect vengeance to heap down upon me.’
‘You’re not taking drugs or binge drinking or committing random acts of violence so vengeance doesn’t even come into it,’ I said, as we reached the top of the queue and a customs official gestured to a booth. I tugged Michael with me. ‘It will all be good. Now shut up and let me do the talking.’
It was another hour before we’d been reunited with our luggage, gone through ‘Nothing to declare’ and were in the back of a proper yellow New York taxi cab. There was absolutely no way I could have got us to our hotel via the subway and not ended up detouring via The Bronx.
By now it was almost six and night had fallen as we travelled through the urban sprawl of Queens. Then we were on the BQE and when we looked out of the window, across the river, we could see the island of Manhattan all lit up and glittering like some futuristic mirage on the horizon.
‘Wow,’ Michael breathed. ‘New York. It looks magical.’
It wasn’t quite so magical having to sit in rush hour traffic but finally our cab was weaving through the narrow streets of the trendy Meatpacking District and pulling up in front of the Gansevoort Hotel. Before I’d even paid the driver, one of the doormen was getting our luggage out of the boot and we were ushered into the hotel which was all glass and tubular steel and luxurious in a sleek, modernist way that was exciting but also really scary, especially when Michael was in a leather jacket, hoodie and jeans and I was wearing a pair of golfing shorts over pink woolly tights and a faux-fur leopard-print anorak.
The receptionist, who looked as if he modelled for GQ, didn’t blink an eyelid but checked us into a junior suite, handed me a pile of conference-related bumph, a wad of phone messages and our room key. Five minutes later we were standing in the sitting room of our suite staring wide-eyed around us at the huge plasma TV and the breeze machine and the Andy Warhol Marilyns on the wall and the view. Oh, the view! Skyscrapers and neon as far as the eye could see.
‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.’ It was all Michael could say. ‘Oh my actual God.’
‘God had nothing to do with this,’ I said, and he looked at me with awe and wonder in a way that no one had ever looked at me before.
‘This conference, Jeane, is it a really big deal?’ He gestured at the splendour of our surroundings. ‘Are you a really big deal?’
‘Well, I know a lot of stuff and I’m good at talking and theorising about the stuff,’ I explained, because I could hardly start banging on about how I was reckoned to be an innovator and a one-girl zeitgeist and the queen of the outliers, which was how the conference organisers had described me in their publicity material.
‘Look, it’s just a bunch of people who are doing new things in their fields. Like, there’s some social network people from Palo Alto and fashion designers and a graphic artist from Tokyo and this guy who’s big in molecular gastronomy and a science dude and we’re talking to this audience of corporate suits and venture capitalists about the future. I’m going on at the end like a palate cleanser to represent for the kids, you know?’
Michael shook his head. ‘I didn’t really understand any of that. So, like, they’re paying for all this, the conference people?’
‘Well, yeah! You don’t think I’d spend weeks working on a presentation out of the goodness of my heart, do you? Damn right they’re paying me.’
‘They’re paying you as well as the flights and the hotel room and …’ He trailed off and collapsed into a leather armchair.
This wasn’t the time to tell Michael that I was getting paid ten thousand of our English pounds and was generally considered to be something of a bargain on the conference circuit. His mind, it would be totes blown – besides, it was tacky to talk about money. So I just crouched down in front of him and put my hands on his knees.
‘Are you tired?’ I asked. ‘It’s about midnight English time.’
‘I’m too wired to even think about going to bed.’
‘And are you hungry?’
Michael shook his head. ‘They kept thrusting food at me on the plane.’
‘Right, so you don’t want to sleep and you don’t want to eat and if we stay here you’ll keep saying “Oh my God” under your breath in a really annoying way, so let’s go out and explore New York.’
I expected protests because Michael seemed so far out of his comfort zone that he might as well be on the moon, but a smile slowly appeared on his face.
‘Can we go on the subway? And can we get a ginormous pretzel from one of those street carts and, oh! I want to take a picture of the Empire State Building all lit up, not that I can show it to anyone, because nobody else knows that I’m here.’
‘That’s all doable,’ I agreed, standing up so Michael could get out of the chair, but he caught hold of my hand and lifted it to his mouth so he could press a kiss to the backs of my knuckles.
‘Thanks, Jeane, for all of this, I really mean it,’ he said earnestly.
‘Oh, don’t be so wet,’ I complained, pulling my hand free. ‘Come on, chop-chop, and put a proper jacket on. It’s cold out there.’
We did as much of New York as it was possible to do in five hours. I took Michael on the subway to the South Street terminal so we could get the free Staten Island ferry and see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty en route, before we headed back to Manhattan.
Then we subwayed up to Herald Square and Macy’s and I introduced Michael to Old Navy, which was way cheaper than his beloved Abercrombie & Fitch. He was so excited about his super-sized pretzel that he didn’t mind that every time we took the subway I managed to get on the wrong train or the wrong line or the wrong platform. New York is very hard to navigate. Yes, I know it’s on a grid but I can only work with left and right, not east and west, and using Google Maps was eating my iPhone battery so we jumped in a cab and headed to Chinatown so we could have dim sum served by fabulously rude waiters.
‘They’re even ruder than the waiters in London,’ Michael announced with glee as we cracked open our fortune cookines. He read his message and sniggered. ‘I can never tell if these things are deeply significant or randomly selected by a fortunecookie message-generating algorithm.’
‘Let me see.’
/> He handed over a tiny piece of paper that proclaimed: You will stumble on to the path that will lead to your happiness.
‘Well, you’re sitting in a dim sum bar in Chinatown, New York, and you look pretty happy to me so maybe there’s some truth in it,’ I said lightly, but I felt a surge of pride. Michael’s current happiness was entirely my doing. I had made him happy, which was not something that I usually excelled at. I was good, really good, at all kinds of things but not making other people happy.
‘What does yours say?’ Michael asked.
I unrolled the little slip of paper and although it was randomly selected by a fortune-cookie message-generating algorithm, when I saw the words my heart jolted like when you dream that you’re falling: Don’t cry, life is pain.
‘It says, “you are destined for greatness,”’ I lied, though it wasn’t really a lie because I was destined for greatness. I mean, obviously. I screwed up my fortune and signalled the waiter for our bill.
‘Oh, come on, I showed you mine, aren’t you going to show me yours?’ Michael complained as I tried to catch someone’s eye. All the waiters were pointedly ignoring me so I had no choice but to stand up and wave my arms around while shouting, ‘Can I have the cheque, please?’
It was super-late, almost midnight, which meant it was almost five in the morning back in London, and Michael’s voice sounded tetchy the way it always did when I kept him up long past his bedtime.
There was only one thing that shifted his mood when he was tired and cranky. I lowered my lashes and looked at him. ‘I’ll show you mine when we get back to the hotel,’ I said, and he perked up instantly because I wasn’t talking about anything that came in a fortune cookie.
26
When I woke up at 8.30 to my first New York morning, Jeane was already awake and bashing away at her laptop. There were three empty coffee cups next to her and it looked as if she’d stripped the minibar of all its snacks.
‘How long have you been doing that?’ I asked as I struggled into an upright position.
She barely glanced up from the screen. ‘A while,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m meeting the conference coordinator and the tech guy in half an hour to go through my stage specs and everything’s going wrong.’
Jeane was still in her Bikini Kill T-shirt and polka dot sleep shorts and her hair, which she’d subjected to a lavender rinse the week before, looked as if it had been caught in a wind tunnel. Her eyes were swollen and red too like she’d decided that she didn’t need to sleep, even though not sleeping made her really snippy. Then she’d drink tons of coffee and get really hyper. It was going to be a very long day.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘Hang on,’ she said, and typed even faster. Then she frowned and stopped. ‘Can you ring room service and ask them to send up a vat of very strong coffee and their most sugarific pastries?’
Jeane had explained last night that everything was comped, from the cab fares to the hotel room to the contents of the minibar to room service (‘as long as we don’t go mad and start ordering, like, six bottles of champagne and caviar and lobster and stuff’), but even so it made me feel uncomfortable. The woman who took my order was really nice but I half expected her to suddenly say, ‘You’re eighteen, I refuse to let you order room service. Don’t be so ridiculous!’
Not that Jeane noticed. In fact, she didn’t notice anything until the coffee and pastries arrived and she finally smiled at me. And when I helped her fix one of the slides in her PowerPoint presentation, which wasn’t doing what she wanted it to, she even gave me a hug.
‘Right, I’m done,’ she said, as she saved the document five times just to be on the safe side. She picked up one of the fluffy robes that the hotel had provided. ‘I’m going to do my soundcheck. I’ll be about an hour, OK?’
‘You’re going to meet them in a dressing gown?’ She was already walking to the door with her laptop tucked under her arm and looking at me as if I was the unreasonable one.
‘Well, yeah. The conference doesn’t start for another hour and a half and it’s not like I have time to change.’
She slammed the door behind her and was back in the time it took me to sulk, have a thirty-minute power shower that was one of the single best experiences of my life, brood, look up places for brunch on the internet, and I’d just finished the long process of getting my hair just right when Jeane returned with the most ferociously furious look on her face that I’d seen yet and that was saying something.
‘How did it go?’ I asked dutifully, even though I was dreading the rant that was sure to follow. She could rant for hours and I was really hungry and it would be much better if she could get washed and dressed and then I’d let her get her rant on halfway through brunch.
She held up her hand. ‘Don’t. Even. Ask.’
‘Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad,’ I insisted cheerfully, but she just rolled her eyes and slammed the bathroom door behind her.
She was in there for ages so I had plenty of time to realise what a bad idea this trip had been. Not just because of the web of lies I’d had to spin to get here but because I was at the tender mercy and mood swings of a girl who spent seventy-five per cent of our time together arguing with me.
I couldn’t do what I did when she was getting on my nerves back home, which was to leave her to get on with it while keeping a close eye on her Twitter feed until I knew she was over her snit. I was stuck with her.
Oh God.
Jeane was still pretty tight-lipped when she emerged from the bathroom an hour later. She was back in the fluffy towelling robe but her lilac-tinted hair was pinned up and she’d applied full make-up, glitter all over the show, bright red lipstick and thick, winged eyeliner. She completely ignored me as she began to rummage through her unpacked suitcase for something Day-Glo and mismatched to wear.
‘Do you want to get some brunch?’ I asked. I already knew the answer would be no but I wanted to remind her that I was still there in the room, breathing the same oxygen as her.
‘I can’t. I have to attend the morning session of the conference,’ she muttered. ‘I did tell you.’
‘Well, you kinda didn’t.’
‘Yeah, but you should have realised. I mean it’s just, like, rude if I don’t.’ She looked up from her suitcase to glare at me more effectively. ‘You don’t have to though. You can go out and get lost on the subway trying to find the Empire State Building if you want. I don’t care.’
‘I get that you’re nervous, I really do. I feel the same way when I’m taking part in a debate at—’
‘This is nothing like debating capital punishment with the sons and daughters of Tory scum from the posh school at the other end of the borough and I am not nervous. I’ve appeared at hundreds of conferences. Hundreds.’ She jabbed a finger in my general direction. ‘Look, you have to leave now. You are doing my head in.’
‘I’m doing your head in? I don’t know why you even wanted me to come to New York with you—’
‘Neither do I!’ Jeane contorted her face into a grimace so twisted it looked as if it was causing her a thousand immense agonies. ‘Just … GO!’
I went. It wasn’t exactly a hardship. It was exciting. I had all of New York City to myself and it looked just like it did in the movies, steam rising up from the manhole covers, the streets stretching towards the horizon and on this cold, crisp day, the sun glinted off the skyscrapers and yellow taxi cabs hooted and everyone I walked past had an American accent and when I went into Starbucks to get a cappuccino and a muffin the barista really did ask me, ‘How you doing?’
Also, the subway was really easy to use. Like, super-easy. New York’s laid out on a grid and most lines went uptown or downtown and a few went crosstown. It was simple: any fool could figure it out. I went to Central Park, which was pretty much a big park, and then I walked up to The Museum of Modern Art because I felt like I should do something cultural, even if I did spend most of my time in the gift shop. After that I jumped back on
the subway and went to Dylan’s Candy Bar, because the interwebz said it was the best sweetshop in New York.
I owed Jeane candy – not that she deserved any, but I couldn’t wait to see the sheepish look on her face as she stumbled through an apology when I presented her with a great big jar of sweet and sour mix and chocolate-dipped jelly beans. But mostly I wished Melly and Alice were with me because they would have both thought they’d just died and gone to sweetie heaven.
I bankrupted myself loading up on lollipops and Pez sets and gummy bears and Wonka chocolate bars because they were both obsessed with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My allowance was dependent on doing chores and admin work for the parents, and I was going to have to put in overtime so I could afford Christmas presents. It wasn’t like I got paid to bore on about all the crap Jeane liked to bore on about.
It was lunchtime so I decided to head back to the hotel to dump my stuff and see if there were some leftover pastries from Jeane’s breakfast that I could eat – I was now too broke to even hit up Burger King. Unfortunately, when I got back to our suite, it was a pastry-free zone, and though the minibar had been restocked, I was damned if I was going to make any dents into Jeane’s bill. As it was, I was probably going to sleep on the couch tonight.
Not sure what to do next, I drifted back down to the lobby. I found myself following the signs that pointed to the conference and, when no one stopped me, I wandered into a little ante-room where there was a lunch buffet set up. Score!
I walked casually over as if I attended conferences all the time, grabbed a plate and quickly started to fill it with sushi. Then I swiped a bottle of Coke and was about to scurry for the safety of our suite when a woman rushed over. She was dressed all in black and had her hair cropped in a severe cut that matched the equally severe expression on her face.
There was nothing I could do except dredge up some rusty Cantonese if need be and pretend that I had no idea what she was talking about, but she was already looking down at her iPad. ‘You’re Jeane’s guest? Michael Lee? Did you know you’ve already missed the morning session?’