‘I was crying about being dumped but Liam dumped me because of my hair so I can see why you thought that.’ Grace hadn’t thought about Liam for at least an hour but it was already corralling the New York happiness to the furthest corners of her mind. ‘Or he said it was my hair when we both knew it was just a lame excuse. Hey, Lils, I love you but if you keep trying stuff on without undoing zips, I swear to God, I will kill you.’
‘Sorry! It’s just so sparkly.’ Lily stopped wriggling and stood stock still as Grace struggled to her feet so she could unzip the pink dress and carefully ease it down Lily’s sylph-like frame. There was a full-length mirror against the one piece of wall that wasn’t obscured by a clothes rail. Grace had spent hours tilting it by micro-degrees for the optimum flattering angle and now Lily smiled serenely at her reflection for a split second, then schooled her features into something more sympathetic.
‘OK, I’m done. Now, back to this whole dumping thing. I think Liam’s regretting his extreme lameness. He seemed very angst-ridden last night before he went to the pub with Dan. I can’t believe he dumped you on your birthday. That’s just rude.’
‘And did he tell you where he dumped me? In Liberty’s - and he punched a Marc Jacobs bag in a fit of temper.’
‘That’s awful,’ Lily breathed, eyes wide. ‘Was it one of the new season’s quilted totes? Why would he do that? Me and him are going to be having serious words. Oh poor Gracie, do you need a hug?’
Grace shook her head. ‘I’m OK. But if you really wanted to make me feel better you could call me in some Crème de la Mer lip balm.’
‘Consider it done. I’ll get them to send over some hand lotion too,’ Lily promised, and even though Grace had nixed the whole hugging thing, Lily gave her arm a quick squeeze.
There was something to be said for having a best friend who was a junior beauty editor. There was also something to be said for having a friend like Lily, though sometimes Grace felt as if they came from different planets. Maybe even different solar systems.
Grace could still remember the first time she saw Lily, because Lily’s celebrity lookalike was Marianne Faithfull before the Rolling Stones had got their grubby paws on her. She had the most perfect silvery-blond hair, which owed nothing to Clairol and everything to really good genetics, and she’d been wearing a tiny gold dress that shimmered in the strobe lights. So when she saw Lily hanging out in the DJ booth at a little hole-in-the-wall club Grace used to go to in Hoxton, Lily had made an immediate impression.
It had been strange because after that, Grace had seen Lily everywhere she went: rifling through a box of button badges at the next stall along when Grace was working at Shoreditch market, buying a bag of Haribo Starmix at Grace’s local Co-op, and even doing a sedate and elegant breaststroke at the Gospel Oak Lido with her head at an odd angle so she wouldn’t get her hair wet.
Grace didn’t normally go in for girl crushes but she’d had an out-of-control pash on for Lily because Lily was the stuff of dreams. The kind of girl you wanted to be if you weren’t the girl you were. But Grace had never even smiled at Lily, let alone spoken to her, until her first day at Skirt when she’d been skulking in the kitchen too scared to drink a cup of tea at the ramshackle intern desk in case she spilled it on some vitally important piece of paper, when Lily had strolled in.
‘Hey, it’s you! God, I see you everywhere I go!’ Lily had yelped in her breathy Surrey tones, while Grace had stared at her feet and felt her cheeks heating up. ‘Last time I saw you, you had the most adorable leather bag. Did you get it in TopShop?’
Grace had looked up to see Lily staring at her, blue eyes wide and friendly. ‘I found it in a Cancer Research shop in Worthing,’ she said shyly.
‘Oh, you’re one of those girls who have a freaky ability to source the really good vintage,’ Lily had sniffed. ‘I hate charity shops. They smell of old people who don’t wash properly. We should do lunch and maybe if I sit next to you, I might absorb some of the vintage ability. Y’know, like a radio signal.’
It had been the start of a beautiful friendship, because Lily and Grace had everything and nothing in common. They were both lowly magazine assistants, but Lily’s boss, the Beauty Director, adored Lily and regularly insisted that she accompany her to St Barts in the French West Indies to sip cocktails while they shot skincare stories.
Both girls had managed to run up thousands of pounds in credit-card debts, but Lily’s father, owner of several successful used-car dealerships in Surrey, loved writing huge cheques so his little princess didn’t have to put on a Polish accent and a quizzical expression when the bailiffs came round.
They both dated boys in the same band, but after three months, Dan had declared his undying love and moved into Lily’s Tufnell Park flat, which her father had bought her, while Liam had just dumped Grace.
They both wore a size eight, but Lily had a super-fast metabolism whereas Grace couldn’t afford to eat anything other than bananas and ramen noodles.
Yes, they were both the same. But different. And though Grace sometimes found it teeth-grindingly irritating that Lily was like some modern-day Pollyanna whose life was all puppy dogs and free spa treatments, she still couldn’t believe how much she’d lucked out in the best friend lottery.
‘So, if Liam realises that he’s been an arsehole, would you get back with him? If he really grovelled?’ Lily wanted to know, as she started wriggling out of the pink dress without unzipping it.
‘Stop right there!’ Grace growled, turning Lily round and sliding down the zip herself. ‘Me and Liam are done. My three months were up. I’m, like, the queen of the three-month relationship.’
‘Grace, don’t go all dark side on me. One day you’ll meet some foxy boy who’ll worship the ground you walk on. Seriously. He’ll get down on his knees to kiss your feet on a daily basis.’
‘Does Dan kiss your feet on a daily basis?’ Grace asked with a grin, as she made a concerted effort to shuck off her Liam-sponsored bad mood.
‘Not yet, but I’m working on it.’
Lily’s unwavering optimism was interrupted by the arrival of two guys from the postroom, wheeling in a trolley heaving with garment bags.
Lily clapped her hands in delight. ‘New clothes!’ she squealed.
Grace glanced at the trolley. The sight of an expensive cardboard bag with a designer name printed on it in an interesting font always perked her up no end. Perched precariously right on top was a gift box from Liberty’s.
‘This isn’t ours,’ she started to say because she hadn’t called the press office . . . then she saw the label: For Grace, aged 23 c/o Skirt Magazine.
Curious.
Kneeling down, Grace placed the box on the floor so she could snip away at the taped sides with her scissors. Then she lifted the lid and burrowed through the tissue paper until she caught a glimpse of tomato-red leather.
Curiouser.
Grace’s hands were shaking slightly now as she picked up the bag. The unfortunate Marc Jacobs bag which had been stroked, patted, punched, then wept over.
Even curiouser.
Maybe Liam had seen the error of his ways, knocked over a bank and was offering restitution. And maybe she was delusional. Grace ran reverent hands over the bag and her fingers closed round a piece of card tucked into the side pocket.
The tear stains have seriously compromised its resale value, someone had written in a slashing black scrawl. Happy belated birthday. V.
Vaughn. It had been four days since the strangest lunch-hour of her life. Grace hadn’t forgotten a single moment of her forced abduction but she’d been trying not to remember, because every time she replayed the memory of his unwavering stare, his cut-glass drawl, her stomach would lurch and she’d get the shivers.
She turned the card over.
J. Vaughn Acquisitions Consultant
There was a Mayfair address and a mobile number prefixed by the international country code.
What the hell was an acquisitions consultant? An arms
dealer? A white slave trader?
‘Let me touch it!’ Lily was already snagging the bag so she could see what it looked like hanging from her arm. Grace had to concede that it looked better. Everything always did. ‘What story is this for?’
Grace looked furtively over her shoulder. ‘It’s not for a story. It’s for me. From that guy.’ Her voice was an urgent whisper to match the gravitas of the situation.
‘What guy?’ Lily asked shrilly. ‘What guy has just bought you a one-thousand-pound Marc Jacobs bag? Why have you been holding out on me?’
‘Jesus, Lils, you have to start remembering the stuff I tell you when you’re drunk! The guy! The guy I met in Liberty’s two seconds after Liam stormed out, who dragged me off for champagne and cake and was just . . . weird.’
Lily’s face registered 10 out of 10 on the blank scale.
‘He was wearing a Dries Van Noten suit,’ Grace prompted.
‘No! Nuh-huh! I would have remembered that.’ Lily’s inner turmoil was written in each wrinkle in her forehead, even though she’d sworn off frowning the month before as a last-ditch attempt against preventative Botox at the suggestion of Maggie, the Beauty Director. ‘Wait! Something’s coming back to me - something about cufflinks . . .’
‘He asked me to help him out with his cufflinks,’ Grace reminded her, as she started to tick off items on the post docket.
‘Yeah? Then what?’ Lily was almost vibrating with the need to know.
‘Well, first he asked me to do him a favour and I thought he meant . . . well, I told him to fuck off. Well, I didn’t actually say it but I got really snippy.’
‘You give great snip!’ Lily hung up the discarded pink dress on a spare hanger. ‘Tell me everything and don’t skip bits.’
There wasn’t much to tell, Grace thought sadly - just a handful of details, which had been rattling around her head like Smarties in a tube. But she couldn’t wait to tell Lily every single one of them. Even if it was for the second time.
‘. . . and he was the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met,’ she finished ten minutes later.
‘Even more obnoxious than Kiki, because surely that can’t be done?’
Grace was forced to correct her last statement. ‘It would be a photo finish as to which one of them was more obnoxious.’
Lily was now lying on her back with her legs in the air so she could work her core muscles while she listened. ‘You have to admit, Gracie, it’s a little bit sexy.’
‘It wasn’t sexy.’ Grace’s face was a perfect match for the bag. ‘He was old.’
‘George Clooney old or, like, Hugh Hefner old?’
‘He wasn’t as old as The Cloonster,’ Grace admitted unwillingly, ‘but he wasn’t at all sexy. He was pointy. His face, the way he talked, and he just stared and stared at me.’
‘At your tits?’ Lily asked, sitting up so Grace got the full benefit of her horrified expression. ‘What a perv!’
‘Not at my tits. Just my face,’ Grace said, covering that part of her body with her hands in an effort to cool it down.
‘Well, I’d put up with some pointy creep staring at my face if I got a bag like that afterwards,’ Lily sighed. ‘Maybe it was birthday karma. The fashion gods sent you a Marc Jacobs bag to make up for Liam dumping you.’
‘He wasn’t a creep. Well, he was a little bit creepy. Oh God, I don’t know. It was all completely weird with added bits of weirdness and there’s no way I can keep the bag.’
‘Why? Because you’re worried that he’ll turn up and want to do more than stare at your face as payment for the bag?’ Lily giggled, because really the whole situation was ridiculous. Things like this didn’t happen to girls like Grace.
Grace didn’t giggle though as she waited for a wave of horror to knock her over at the thought of those long fingers on her, but no, she was still standing there on her own two feet.
‘Nothing like that,’ she insisted. ‘I’m probably going to eBay it for some spare cash.’
chapter four
The bag went home with Grace in a Peacock’s carrier.
It was like the designer equivalent of a heart buried under the floorboards. After Grace had wrapped it in plastic (a lesson learned the hard way after the damp in her flat had claimed a pair of Sass & Bide jeans as its first victim) and stashed it in her broken oven, which was doing time as an overspill accessories closet, she could still hear it. It seemed to emit a low-level static hum that left her twitchy and restless. As if something that had been asleep for a long time was slowly unfurling in the pit of her stomach.
For the next five nights, Grace would roll off her rickety sofabed and pad across to the kitchen so she could open the oven door and stare at the bag, as if it contained the mysteries of the universe. Not just a piece of card that she’d left in the side compartment.
It was still in the oven the following Saturday night. And even though Grace was six miles away from her flat in a grimy bar on the grimy Kingsland Road in the grimiest part of East London, it still had a freaky ability to make her palms itch.
‘You haven’t listened to a single word I’ve been saying,’ Lily announced querulously, and it was true. Over the ironic strains of Bing Crosby coming from the DJ’s decks, which were perched on orange crates, Grace had only caught every seventh word. Chemical. Square. You. Directional.
‘What’s directional?’ she asked, trying to sit up and look alert even though the sofa was sagging to the floor and was determined to take her with it. She gathered her hair in a loose ponytail with one hand in the vain hope of a cooling breeze on her neck.
‘Directions! I was talking about going to Bestival this year,’ Lily said. Her forehead was damp with perspiration, which was a Lily first. Normally she didn’t do anything as uncouth as sweat. ‘But my dad has to give me a car with Sat Nav first. Remember what happened last year.’
Last year they’d ended up in Devon en route to the Isle of Wight. ‘Yeah, Liam called me a stupid bitch because I screwed up the mapreading and we weren’t even going out then. Remind me why I dated him again?’
‘Because you fell in love with each other,’ Lily explained kindly.
But that wasn’t it. Not even close. Grace had fancied Liam and pestered Lily to set them up because he had dirty-blond hair and a dirty grin to match. (Once she’d got to know Liam, there had been dirty other things - like his standard of personal hygiene.) And he was in a band, which made up for a hell of a lot. Especially when they could curl up on her sofa on rainy afternoons and he’d strum Beatles songs on his guitar while Grace knitted and the rest of the world passed by outside. That had been nice, but it hadn’t been love.
‘I didn’t love him. I liked him. A lot. Really a lot, for the first two months. Then I didn’t like him quite so much but it wasn’t bad enough for us to split up over it, you know?’ Grace didn’t wait for Lily to agree because when Lily was seeing someone, they usually swore their undying devotion within the first five minutes. ‘Anyway, I don’t believe in love. Never have done. Never will.’
‘I’ve already told you that you just haven’t met the right guy yet,’ Lily said. ‘And I don’t think it will be awkward tonight if Liam turns up, because I really think he’s been missing you. Well, he seems like he’s been missing you.’
‘Whatevs. If he does turn up then I need more alcohol than the human body can usually withstand. Hold that thought.’ Grace fished around in her purse and came up with a handful of coins; none of them pounds. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ she announced sorrowfully, counting them out. ‘Seventy-eight pence. Let’s buy a bottle of wine and put it on my card.’
Technically Grace only had one credit card left out of the eight wedged into her purse that wasn’t maxed out, but amid the scary brown envelopes that she never opened, there’d been a letter from a finance company offering her a shiny new one with only thirty-five per cent APR, whatever the hell that was.
Lily folded her arms and tried to look disapproving. ‘Are you having money problems ag
ain?’
‘When am I not having money problems? It will be OK. No one’s phoning up yet . . .’
‘And if they do, you just change your phone number. That’s what I’d do if I was you,’ Lily said blithely, as she stood up. ‘I’m going to the bar. I’ll get the drinks.’
‘No, you always get the drinks,’ Grace said doggedly, because if there was one thing worse than being broke, it was being tight. Anyway, she was used to being broke - the word had long ceased to have any meaning. And spending a tenner on a bottle of bad white wine wasn’t going to make much difference to the ungodly amount of money she owed. ‘Just take my card.’
‘Gracie, I don’t mind. Honest.’
‘Lily, I appreciate the offer but take my card or else I’m only going to drink tapwater and you’ll have to get pissed on your own,’ Grace said triumphantly and slapped her card down on the table.