Lindsey Kelk 5-Book 'I Heart...' Collection (134 page)

‘It does make checking email difficult,’ Jenny said with sympathy. ‘You’re right, though. The monthlies are too heavy and the weeklies suck.’

‘Right?’ Sadie looked relieved to get Jenny’s approval.

‘So then what? Websites?’ I asked, curious. ‘I just really love the feeling of turning the pages on a magazine – it’s the ritual as much as the content.’

‘I’m gonna start my own eventually,’ Jenny declared. ‘It’s all part of the New Oprah plan. My magazine isn’t out there yet.’

‘Can it not weigh twenty pounds?’ Sadie asked. ‘Though I guess it’s a good bicep workout.’

‘You should still definitely do Belle, though,’ I told her. ‘It’ll be a good experience. Even if it’s shit.’

‘Yeah, I’m actually excited.’ She looked surprised. ‘I do love modelling, but I know it’s not for ever. I’d forgotten how much fun it can be to do something new. Like the first day of school.’

‘You enjoyed school, right?’ Jenny asked.

‘Sure.’ Sadie nodded.

‘Cheerleader?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Figures.’

The traffic was nose to tail on the Strip, leaving us sitting right outside the Venetian for far too long. I stared out of the window and felt my eyes sting and my nose tingle. He was up there somewhere. I flicked my hair forward until it covered my face and breathed in the scent of my shampoo until I had composed myself.

‘Did you speak to him?’ Jenny asked, tucking my hair back behind my ears and brushing away my good work with one hand.

‘He’s staying an extra night.’ There, that wasn’t too hard to say. ‘Did you speak to Jeff?’

She stretched her long legs out across the back of the limo and looked up at the sliding roof. ‘Yeah.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘No.’

She still wasn’t wearing the ring, but it was only when she started talking that I realized she wasn’t wearing any eye make-up at all. Jenny never left the house without mascara. She even made the ambulance wait for her to put eyeliner on when she was taken in with suspected appendicitis. Clearly, we were anticipating tears.

‘Are you going to be OK?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t sound convinced, but at least she’d said it. Sadie looked at me with her giant Snow White eyes, clearly desperate to know more, but I shook my head slightly. She’d tell us when she was ready. Knowing Jenny it wouldn’t take long.

‘He’s going to see what we have to do to have the wedding annulled.’

Not long at all.

‘He doesn’t think it’s legal anyway because we didn’t get a licence. And he wants to talk when we get back.’ She laughed a little bit. ‘He’s not sure it’s fair to his fiancée to call things off at the last minute.’

‘Wouldn’t it be less fair to make her marry an arsehole?’ I asked. ‘Or for him to marry someone he doesn’t love?’

‘But he does love her,’ Jenny replied evenly. ‘He loves both of us. He’s very confused. Everything got out of hand because we were in Vegas. He needs time to think.’

A common theme of male guests of the Venetian. Clearly the top hotel for self-reflection. I shrugged. Jenny shook her head. Words seemed a bit redundant.

‘Screw that.’ Sadie thought otherwise. ‘Vegas always takes the blame for a lot of dumbass people doing dumbass things,’ she pointed out in another startling display of insight. ‘No one holds a gun to your head and says “hey, you’re in my town, you dumb shit, now do twenty-five tequila shots and fuck a donkey or I’ll shoot”.’

It was a good point, well made.

‘I love this city,’ she said, taking Jenny’s lip balm out of her bag and slicking it onto her own pout. ‘It’s a chance to get away from reality, not an excuse to act like a dick.’

The limo started to move forwards and I said my silent goodbyes. Bye Venetian, bye Bellagio, bye great big volcano. In spite of everything, I was surprised at how sad I felt. Sadie was right. The city didn’t make people do stupid things, they managed that all on their own. Vegas just provided a more colourful backdrop than usual and that seemed to encourage eccentric behaviour. Maybe it was because there was such a high concentration of tigers in one place. Tigers I had not seen. Sad face.

But I wasn’t leaving empty-handed. I had enough material for a hundred blog posts, about seventeen tea bags I’d nicked from the suite and, most importantly, I had an idea. Pamela, Sadie and Jenny had sparked off something exciting in me, and while I desperately wanted to demand we stop at the Mirage so I could play Siegfried & Roy (before the accident), I couldn’t wait to get home and see what it could be. So that was nice.

And then there was the fifty thousand dollars I’d just won on the slot machine. That was quite nice too.

I didn’t tell Jenny about the win until we were safely on the plane so she couldn’t make the limo driver turn around and make me put it all on red. She stared at the stash of readies for a few minutes before starting a new and revised Christmas list. I tried to explain to her that as much as I loved her, the odds of me ever buying an Hermès Birkin were slim to none, regardless of my high-roller status. We were looking at a Euro Lottery rollover before I spent five grand on a handbag for anyone. Well, for Jenny. The rest of the flight was spent in comfortable silence, Sadie fast asleep, me sketching out my big plan, and Jenny intermittently pulling my handbag out from under the seat in front and staring at my money.

New York was cold, but my apartment was warm when I got home and the first thing I did was light up the Christmas tree. There. Now nothing could be wrong. It glowed reassuringly in the corner as I went through the motions of unpacking. Put the kettle on, strip off my plane clothes, plug in my phone charger, even though I didn’t have a phone. It was late but I wasn’t ready to go to bed. Maybe because I’d taken caffeine tablets the night before. Maybe because I had a bundle of fifty-dollar bills in my handbag that amounted to more money than I’d ever had in my entire life. Maybe because when I went to bed I would fall asleep, and when I woke up it would be Monday. Monday was one day closer to D-day. As in D for deportation. But now I had my plan. My plan and fifty thousand dollars. I was staying in this bloody country whether they liked it or not. I just hoped I still had something to stay for.

All unpacked, suitcase hidden under the bed and my dirty clothes strewn across the bathroom floor, I collapsed on the sofa in my favourite flannel PJs. Alex claimed they didn’t offend him, but I tried to save them for nights he wasn’t around. I’d worn a lot of button-up pyjamas in my last relationship, and that had not ended well. I stared up at a picture of the two us on the fireplace and hoped I wouldn’t be wearing them too much in the near future. And by too much, I meant all the time.

Jenny had taken the photo at Erin’s wedding. It was out of focus, a little bit blurry and set at a weird angle. It was my favourite. We were hiding out on a balcony overlooking the reception, and Alex was whispering something to me, his hair falling down, green eyes flashing while I pressed a hand to my face and laughed. I couldn’t quite remember what we were talking about, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t something to be shared with the wedding party. Le sigh. For the want of something else to do, I grabbed my laptop and opened up my blog. Might as well start getting everything down on paper while it was fresh.

Adventures of Angela

What Happens in Vegas …

If there’s one thing we can all agree on as a people it’s that ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ is the most stupid saying ever uttered by man. Fabulous marketing campaign, terrible idea. Believing you can behave in whatever way you see fit and suffer no consequences just because you’re in Sin City has less merit than a baby covering its eyes and thinking it has become invisible.

And, having just spent four very educational days in the notorious city I’m almost certain that not only is it a silly saying, it’s also very untrue. A more accurate statement would be ‘what happens in Vegas comes right home with you and cocks up your entire life’. There is an argument for ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas as long as you’re an unconscionable knobhead’, but that’s not nearly as catchy. I can see why my alternatives might not catch on.

Having said all this, on reflection, I did some things in Vegas that I would never have done in New York. Stepping out of your life for a moment always makes some ideas seem more permissible, just like being drunk. Before you know it, you’re lashed on Las Vegas and you lose your usual frame of reference. That’s when the bad decisions kick in. Like taking a handful of caffeine pills, doing tequila shots then swapping clothes with a stripper so you’re dressed up as an elf. Or, you know, you might do something really stupid. In reality, most people don’t do anything too crazy, they just get drunk, gamble away money they don’t have or marry Britney Spears.

But that would have been too simple for me. On a scale of one to ten, I managed to find an eleven. Instead of a regular Vegas cock-up (example – putting $100 into the Dirty Dancing slot machine) I went for a big old life-altering fuck-up. The difference between a cock-up and a fuck-up is epic. A cock-up is something that happens in a Carry On film or when your dad brings the wrong thing back from the supermarket. A fuck-up, on the other hand, is what happens in a Guy Ritchie movie or when your dad brings the wrong baby home from the hospital. It invariably ends in tears, if not the loss of a limb.

As I’ve already explained, what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. It follows you home and continually pokes you in the shoulder while you’re sleeping, while you’re showering, while you’re walking down the street until you turn around and confront it. So I’m getting ready to confront my Vegas vagaries with a huge apology and possibly some sort of bribe. Because wherever you are, what happens, happens, and that’s not a cliché, it’s a fact.

Alex never read my blog. At least he claimed never to read my blog. I had to imagine he flicked over it from time to time. Usually it didn’t make a lot of difference – I never wrote about us any more; I’d learned that lesson the hard way – but this wasn’t so much a blog about us as a practice acknowledgement of just how stupid I had been before I could bust out my face-to-face moves. Everything seemed very clear now I’d got Las Vegas out of my system. Sober Angela knew what a bad idea it was to ask Alex to marry her for a visa. In truth, I’d known it all along; I just hadn’t known why it was such a bad idea. My motivations had been entirely selfish: I was scared he’d say no. I was scared I would end up alone. At no point had I put myself in his shoes. The look on his face during the world’s worst proposal was something I would have to live with for ever. He was hurt. I had hurt him. And now I had to fix it. And I would, if he wanted to let me.

The relief of waking up in my own bed the next morning was short-lived. There was too much to be done to wallow in sleepy self-doubt so I fumbled for my nonexistent phone on the night stand, knocking books, a bottle of nail polish and my empty pill packet onto the floor. Our bedroom was really still Alex’s bedroom – nothing had changed since the first time I’d visited. The low futon had the same white bedspread, the acoustic guitar lay by the bed, books were still stacked all around and tea lights skittered around every surface. Only now, sometimes, under Alex’s patient tutelage, I played that guitar, some of those books were mine, and when they burned out, I replaced the tea lights from the giant sack of Ikea candles that we kept under the sink. It wasn’t that I didn’t have stuff in the apartment; I did. Closets full. But as far as this room was concerned, it was my shrine to our relationship – I’d kept it this way on purpose. Whenever I came in here, I wanted to feel the same way I had the first time. His damp, fresh-from-the-shower hair brushing against my skin. His lips on my lips. His fingers entwined with my fingers. I shivered just thinking about it.

James’s telling off echoing in my mind, I got up and went through to the living room, logged onto Facebook and clicked through my messages. Hmm. Nothing knocked morning horn on the head like a missive from your mum. Was I really sure I wasn’t coming for Christmas, because she was in Tesco looking at turkeys and they only had big ones or crowns, and if it was just her and dad she was going to get a crown. She’d sent it five hours earlier, at four a.m. New York time. Presumably she was high at the time. I tapped out a quick response to say I hoped she’d gone for the crown and then set to on my emails. Jenny’s horror at being back in the office. Louisa’s horror at her belly button popping out. The edges of my mouth quirked up in a smile as I tapped out my replies. And then on to The Plan, arch nemesis of The Letter. Today was going to be a good day. Whether it liked it or not.

As the reigning queen of procrastination, I made a list of everything I wanted to do before Alex got home. I needed to write some emails, call Lawrence the Lawyer and start putting together a presentation. I also needed to do some Christmas shopping before I spent my fifty gees on Jimmy Choo over-the-knee boots and pedigree kittens. I wasn’t a total shambles – I sent my emails first before layering up to hit the shops and pulling on my boots, aka Erin’s hand-me-down Haider Ackermann from last season. She wouldn’t be seen dead in last year’s over-the-knee boots, whereas I would happily be seen dead, alive or mid-zombie apocalypse. They were amazing.

No one had told Manhattan about my ridiculous weekend away and so business was going on as usual when I emerged from Union Square, and my heart soared at the sight of the gingerbread house stalls set up for the holiday market. Christmas in Vegas was intense. It was Slade turned up to ten with a dubstep remix. It was that guy from finance who always wears mistletoe on his belt at the office party. New York was different. It was Miracle on 34th Street and Bing Crosby. It was proper Christmas. Chestnuts were roasting on a licensed and approved open fire, Jack Frost was nipping at my nose and I didn’t even mind.

My shopping plan was simple. Start at Urban Outfitters on Sixth, head straight down to the village to the Marc Jacobs shop, pop into Alex’s favourite guitar shop on Bleecker, short stop at Manatus to refuel and then wind up at Bloomingdale’s in Soho to get my last bits and pieces. Then home to finish work on my presentation and wrap everything. By the time Alex got in, whenever that might be, the house would be full of freshly baked sugar cookies, beautifully wrapped gifts and me wearing an apron and a smile. And other clothes too; I’d learned that lesson the hard way as well.