Bad Girls (8 page)

Fifty minutes later, the Bentley set down at the Battersea heliport, the pilot jumping down to hand out Amber and carry her luggage to the limo parked a short distance away. Tony kissed her goodbye.

‘I’m heading straight off, babe,’ he said. ‘Hopping over to Stansted to catch a ride back to the States with some oil guys on their Gulfstream. The car’ll take you home, or wherever you want to go. And, hey –’ he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope, which he pressed into her hand – ‘I know Jared takes care of bookings for you, but I wanted to give you an extra present. You deserve it, OK? Pick yourself up something really nice.’ He grinned at her. ‘My fantasy girl. I’ll see you soon, babe.’

He stroked her cheek wistfully, sighed, and swung round, striding back to the helicopter, raising a hand to her in farewell. Amber climbed into the limo without looking back. The weekend was over.

‘Green Street,’ she said to the driver, and slid open the minibar as the car smoothly pulled out onto the road. Selecting a gold shiny bottle of Pommery Pop, she pulled off the foil and untwisted the wire, popping the cork, pouring the champagne into an equally chilled glass. She washed a couple of Xanax down with the fizz before she slid a manicured nail under the flap of the envelope and prised it open.

She always needed a little Dutch courage for this moment. Reaching for her glass, she took another long sip.

Fifty-pound notes. Probably three grand worth. And that was just the tip; Tony had paid her modelling agent much more than that for her company this weekend.

By the time the limo took a right off Park Lane, in Mayfair, onto Green Street, Amber had finished the Pommery and was feeling much better. The limo driver carried her bags through the marble-tiled hall and into the lift. The apartment she currently rented was the top two floors of this Georgian house, and it was exquisitely decorated, with pale yellow walls and polished wood floors. The lower floor was a huge living room overlooking Green Street, with a luxurious kitchen and dining room at the back. Upstairs were two bedrooms with Turkish travertine ensuite bathrooms, and a roof terrace above with a patio heater and trellised gazebo covered in trailing wisteria. The estate agent had described it as superb for entertaining, which was ironic, as Amber hadn’t had anyone visit the entire two years she had lived here.

‘
Matka!
I’m home!’ she called, wheeling in her cases.

‘Amber? I didn’t expect you this early!’ her mother exclaimed.

Slava was, as always, ensconced in front of the TV in the kitchen. The living room was furnished with a set of brocade sofas and armchairs around an elaborately carved coffee table. The apartment had been rented furnished, and the decorators had added the final touches: arrangements of dried flowers and blown-glass spheres in the fireplace and in waist-high vases in the corners of the room. Huge matching brocade curtains draped the floor-to-ceiling windows that led out onto the wrought-iron balcony. It was a stunning room, a real showpiece, and Slava only ever entered it to keep it polished and dusted and to water the flowers in pots on the balcony. She said it was too smart for her.

Slava didn’t like to go out. She spent ninety per cent of her waking hours in the kitchen, in her comfy old armchair, knitting and doing embroidery, watching daytime TV. It was no surprise to Amber to find her mother in her usual place, a circular wooden tapestry frame on her lap, a wooden sewing box by her side, its lid open to show skeins of silk arranged by colour.

‘Tony had to get back to the States by tonight,’ Amber said, coming into the kitchen, kissing her mother on her forehead. ‘He had a lift with some oil guys in their jet.’

‘So glamorous,’ Slava sighed approvingly. ‘But you always come back to your old mother in the end. Did you have fun,
láska
?’

Slovakian by birth, Slava prided herself on her good English, but still larded it with endearments and emphases from her mother tongue, which meant that she and Amber often slipped between English and Slovak without realizing it.

‘Yes,
Matka
,’ Amber said, responding automatically with the Slovak word for ‘mother’.

Amber took a glass tumbler from the drainer and slid it into the dispensers in the front of the Sub-Zero refrigerator, filling it with crescent-shaped pieces of ice, then filtered water.

‘Give me some Lucozade,’ Slava said. ‘I’m thirsty. My throat is always dry.’

‘It’s the pills, Mum,’ Amber said, reaching into the fridge for the open bottle of Lucozade, which was one of the few items it contained. ‘They’re dehydrating.’

‘Well, at least I don’t smoke,’ Slava said as Amber brought over her glass. ‘Do you want to watch a film? They have new ones to buy on the film channels.’

‘In a couple of hours,’ Amber said. ‘I should unpack now.’

‘Oh, yes!’ Slava looked animated, her green eyes sparkling. ‘Your beautiful clothes, you must take care of them!’

She shook out two Vicodins from the prescription container on her side table and swallowed them with the Lucozade. Her fingers were heavy with rings; Slava was inordinately proud of her jewellery, and the first thing she did every morning was to reach out to her bedside table and slide on the rings, with their crusted gold and diamond settings and bezel-cut stones.

‘My back is bad again,’ she said.

‘You should go for a walk,’ Amber responded. ‘It’s a lovely day. You could walk round Grosvenor Square. Even go to Green Park.’

‘Maybe later,’ Slava said, turning back to the television.

Amber knew this meant ‘never’. She leaned against the door jamb, finishing her water, looking at her mother’s profile. Slava was as elegant as ever, dressed up so smartly that any observer would think that she was about to go out to tea with girlfriends at the Ritz: slim shantung trousers, a beige silk twinset, a big necklace of cultured pearls to hide the wrinkles on her neck that she was very sensitive about, her ash-pale hair, as thick as Amber’s, piled on top of her head. Slava’s hair was carefully dyed by one of the most expensive colourists in London, streaked in delicate shades of grey-blonde that looked as natural as possible. Her eyebrows were pencilled in, and her cheeks were dusted with light pink blush.

Slava had been a good-looking young woman, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Amber. Amber had the same slanting green eyes as her mother, but Slava’s eyelids were hooded and heavy-lidded; her jaw was a little square, her nose a little too wide for beauty, while Amber had a prettily rounded chin and a long, straight, perfect nose. Slava had always been slender as a wand, but Amber, though slim, had the curves that made people’s palms sweat: firm, high breasts, gently rounded hips, and a tiny waist. Slava’s eyebrows had been faint, before they’d faded almost completely; Amber’s were two perfect straight lines, rising fractionally at the outer corners, slanting upwards in parallel with the slant of her thick-lashed green eyes.

‘Just you and me,’ Slava said comfortably. ‘That’s all we need in the end. Just you and me, so cosy together.’

It was a regular incantation, what Slava always said when Amber returned from a shoot away, or a weekend date, and Amber responded as she always did: ‘Just you and me,
Matka.
’

Slava nodded happily. ‘You’re still here?’ she asked, her eyes on the television. ‘Why are you still here, silly girl? You said you need to unpack your pretty clothes.’ Slava waved her hand. ‘Don’t look at me. It’s not worth looking at me,’ she added. ‘Go and look at yourself in the mirror. God was only practising when he made me. With you, he got it right.’

Amber was still smiling as she went into the hall and carried her luggage upstairs to her bedroom. She looked at it for a moment, then pulled her Cartier gold and enamel cigarette case out of her pocket and unlocked the door to the roof terrace. There was a light breeze blowing, and she settled onto the wooden bench in the little trellised gazebo.

I’ve got so much to thank
Matka
for, she thought, pulling out a Silk Cut and lighting it up. I wouldn’t have any of this if it weren’t for her. And what other mother would say ‘God was only practising when he made me,’ and actually mean it?

This was a favourite expression of Slava’s, and, crucially, it never contained a shred of self-pity or fishing for a compliment. Slava was brutally realistic. Amber’s father had walked out when Amber was only a baby, but Slava had coped bravely, despite being a penniless immigrant with a limited command of English. Not once had his name been mentioned between them that Amber could remember. Slava had moved out of London for a fresh start, to Margate, a flea-bitten seaside town in Kent, once a lively resort, now run down and dispirited. With no real skills, Slava had taken jobs cleaning offices at night to support her and her daughter, living in a hostel at first, and then a series of one-room rented flats above newsagents and bookies and fast-food places. Always noisy, always poor, always grimy and often mouse-infested, no matter how much Slava cleaned.

Amber’s memory of those years was of her mother watching over her like a hawk during the day, walking her to school, picking her up, then locking her in every night when Slava went out to her cleaning job. Slava had alluded darkly to all the bad things that could happen to unattended girls, things she saw on the night streets as she went back and forth to work. She was determined to keep Amber safe. No teenage pregnancies or drug habits for her daughter; Amber wasn’t going to turn out like most of her classmates, knocked up at sixteen, trying to get a flat off the council, planning to live off benefits for the rest of her life. Slava saw the big picture, always. Her ex-husband had been a very handsome man. Slava herself wasn’t so bad. Maybe the daughter they had made would inherit their good looks; maybe Amber would be her passport out of poverty.

But when it came, it was much earlier and much faster and infinitely more life-changing than Slava could ever have anticipated. At fourteen, Amber hit puberty, and everything changed. The gangly, awkward, skinny teenager, ignored by all her classmates, suddenly sprouted, almost overnight, into a pin-up girl. The high cheekbones, the full lips, the long legs, all the features that had got her nicknamed ‘Duck-Mouth’ and ‘Skeletor’ now turned her into an object of such desire that Slava was quick to pull her out of school. The boys weren’t the problem so much as the girls. Amber was already getting threats from jealous prima donnas who’d been the centre of attention before Amber blossomed into a sex object. Amber’s face was clearly going to be her fortune, and Slava didn’t want it sliced up with a box cutter by some envious rival.

She did her research, took Amber up to London, and walked her round what was planned to be a circuit of the top model agencies. But the second one snapped her up, and after that Amber’s life changed so completely that Margate was just a distant memory to her by now. The girls at school, shoving their acne-spotted faces at her, hissing threats at her to stay away from Daz and Kevin and Matt; the last flat above a Chinese takeaway, stinking of old frying oil; the nights waking up as Slava came back in at five in the morning, but pretending to be asleep, because Slava would be cross if she knew she was awake . . . all that might have happened to another girl.

They had travelled all over the world: they’d lived in Paris, Milan, New York, Slava always by Amber’s side, chaperoning her, keeping the predators who circled around young models well away from her. Amber had some tutors assigned to her by her model agency, as she was legally required to keep studying until she was sixteen. But it was mostly for show, and Amber was kept too busy to bother much with textbooks. Fourteen was young then, but as soon as they put makeup on Amber, as soon as they curled her hair into big heavy waves, she looked more than old enough to be a model.

And
Matka
kept me safe, Amber reflected with gratitude. Even when I started wanting a bit more freedom, even when I started going out with guys, she was always watchful. And she made sure I didn’t get into any of the bad stuff. When I got nervous doing catwalk, or lingerie shoots, all the other girls would tell me to drink, or do some lines. But
Matka
made sure I had legal stuff instead, pills to help with the anxiety. Stuff I could travel with safely, because I had prescriptions for it. I never had to worry about getting busted at airports, or scoring, or taking something that was cut with crap and getting sick.
Matka
took care of me . . .

Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her pocket, glancing at the screen to see who it was.

Jared, her agent. She snapped it open.

‘Hey, babycakes!’ came Jared’s three-pack-a-day croak. ‘Just checking in to see how your weekend went!’

‘Really nice,’ Amber said, lighting a second cigarette from the butt of her first. You’d think that the sound of Jared’s ruined vocal cords would put her off smoking, but it never worked that way.

‘Did he give you a present?’

‘Yes,’ Amber said, thinking of the envelope stuffed in her handbag.

‘Double excellent! So everyone’s happy. Now, more good news: you’ve got a catalogue shoot on Tuesday. Very high-end. Swimsuits and cruise wear. You’re in swimsuit shape, aren’t you, sweetie? We don’t need to panic?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ Amber reassured him.

‘Weight?’

‘One twenty, like always.’

‘Good girl! OK, I’ll email you the details. And Amber, sweetie? It’s been a while since a modelling gig came up for you.’ He coughed, a long, hacking rasp. ‘Give it everything you have, sweetie.’

The jasmine growing over the pergola was coming into flower, its scent delicate, its flowers small and white. The pale smoke of Amber’s Silk Cut blended with it, the tobacco somehow picking out the floral notes of the jasmine. Amber loved to sit up here; she’d bring out cushions and pile them on the bench and sit there, flicking through fashion magazines, London’s most beautiful hidden gardens and elegant architecture laid out below her, the rich grass spread of Green Park just at the end of the street.

I need to earn enough to buy this place, she thought. I need security for me and
Matka
. I’m making way more from the dates I go on than the modelling jobs, but
Matka
mustn’t ever realize that. She must never find out about Tony and the other guys. She must never know that they rang my agency and asked how much it would cost to take me out, and that Jared sets my rate for that just like he does for magazine and catalogue and advertising work.