Lindsey Kelk 5-Book 'I Heart...' Collection (33 page)

‘I’d be completely mad,’ I whispered to myself. ‘If I don’t do this, I’m completely mad.’

I peeled my thighs off the windowsill, leaving several layers of sunburned skin behind, and began the search for my passport. It wasn’t in my (fabulous) handbag and it wasn’t at the back of my bedside drawer. There was only one other place I could think of. Kneeling down, I pulled my travel bag out from under the bed. All that was in there was my passport, my old handbag and a screwed-up hunk of coffee-coloured taffeta.

My bridesmaid’s dress.

I dragged it out into the light and held it up in front of me. Having done nothing but eat for the last three weeks, it looked tiny. For the first time in months, I had no idea what I weighed. Jenny didn’t believe in scales, they had a ‘negative impact on her self-esteem’, and all my new clothes were so fabulously smocky. Couldn’t hurt to try it? Even if going back to London feeling like a porker would take the shine off my triumphant return.

The fabric was cold against my sticky skin and the bodice felt uncomfortable, as if it had been rinsed out with wallpaper paste, but it wasn’t as tight as I had expected. In fact, it wasn’t tight at all. Apparently you can do all the eating as long as you’re doing all the walking around New York and all the shagging of the hot boys. After stumbling over the hem twice and actually going the full length of the room once, I slipped on my Louboutins and teetered over to the mirror, pulled my hair back from my face and held it up into a tight chignon. My eyes were still red and swollen, the dress all scrunched up. It wasn’t a good look, but it was a familiar one. All that was missing was my engagement ring, and I really wouldn’t want to put that on again, given where I had left it.

Jenny had stuck photographs from the last couple of weeks all around my mirror to ‘help me live in the now’. My after photos from Rapture, when Gina had transformed my hair. Me, Jenny and Erin at karaoke. The photo Jenny had snapped of me and Alex at his gig. But the girl in those pictures wasn’t the same girl looking back at me right now. The girl looking back at me was Angela Clark from a month ago. It was the Angela Clark who had slept in this dress and woken up sobbing every twenty minutes. It was the Angela Clark who ran as far away as possible when things got hard. But that was all that I remembered about her. Did I really, honestly want to go back?

The Angela in the photos looked happy. Yes, she was a little bit drunk, but she was happy and healthy and she had pretty good eye make-up. And in the post-haircut photo, she looked positively ecstatic. I pulled down the photo of me and Alex and tossed it onto the floor. No point making myself more miserable by leaving it up there. Nope, even without the hot boy pictures, this girl was much happier.

I wriggled out of the bridesmaid dress and shuffled it across the room and into the bin with my gorgeously shod feet. It felt good to be out of that dress. It felt weird to be in my underwear and Louboutins. Pulling on a T-shirt so as not to scare passing pedestrians, I tottered back to the window. The glass was cool against my fingertips even if the weather was scorching. Everything should still be so exciting and new, the steamy sidewalks, the psychic who hovered outside Scottie’s Diner, the twenty-four-hour deli below us, but all I could think was that we were out of milk. Completely random thought, but completely comforting. Before I knew it, I realized my face wasn’t wet from the lack of air con in the apartment, but because I’d started crying. Crying at the thought of never going to get milk from the twenty-four-hour deli again. Well Angela, I thought to myself, wiping the tears away, well done, you’ve reached a new and pathetic low. You’re crying over milk, and it’s not even spilt. It’s not even bought yet.

I bent down to slip off my shoes, and spotted the picture of me and Alex peeking out from under the bed. Looking at it now, even I was surprised by the expression in my eyes. Looked a lot like love. Alex was beautiful, even in a guerilla shot taken precisely two minutes after he had come off stage. Couldn’t help but notice he looked pretty happy too.

I was already finding it hard to picture Mark clearly. I might have been living with him just three weeks ago, but I hadn’t looked at him for months. I could close my eyes right now and see every strand of Alex’s hair. Taste that insanely strong coffee on his breath. Hear him singing to himself in another room. Feel the callouses on his fingers against my skin. But he was gone. And maybe so was the Angela in the other photos.

So I wouldn’t be Mark’s Angela if I went back to London, and I couldn’t be Alex’s Angela if I stayed in New York. But I could be someone new. Someone I didn’t know yet. And I could go and get the milk. It was a start.

‘I am completely mad,’ I whispered out of the window. ‘Completely, bloody mad.’

It had been snowing solidly for three days, and New York was tucked in under a beautiful sheet of thick white snow. Each day, the city turned out and turned the snow into slush. And each evening, a new blanket was laid out. Criss-crossing the streets and avenues, drifting up the park, icing the skyscrapers. To a new New Yorker, it was breathtaking. But as pretty as the snow might be, it was a shock. After a mild Christmas full of strappy dresses and parties, January was terrifying. And they said it was cold up north.

I sat at my desk tapping away, in jeans, a hoodie, fingerless gloves and Ugg boots.

Inside.

With the heating on full.

It hardly made it easy to write an article about feeling frisky in spring time. Luckily, the DHL man was in cahoots with my procrastination and rang the doorbell as I apple-A, apple-Z’d the whole thing.

‘Wouldn’t fit in the box,’ he said, handing over a wide flat package in a yellow plastic bag, ‘but it says urgent on it.’

‘Thank you,’ I smiled, snatching up the package and ripping it open. There it was, the first ever UK edition of The Look. I gazed at the front cover for a moment. With shaky (and not just from the cold) hands, I turned to the staff page.

There I was.

My name, my picture and my title.

Angela Clark, editor-at-large, New York

‘Is it here?’ Jenny wailed from the bathroom. She came running out, toothbrush in her hand, wearing only a towel. ‘Is that the magazine?’

‘It is,’ I held it back at a safe distance, ‘and you’re not touching it until you’re dry.’

‘What, you’ve got like twenty copies,’ she gestured to the other three magazines in the plastic bag. ‘Shit, look at you! You’re so my hero, doll.’

‘Come on,’ I said, taking the spare copies and stashing them on a shelf next to the US edition of The Look in which my columns had already featured. ‘You’re going to be late for work.’

‘And you’re never going to get that spring fling piece to that psycho Brit bitch if you don’t do it today,’ she reminded me needlessly. ‘Did your mom see it yet?’

‘They’re still on the Christmas cruise.’ I closed up my laptop and slipped it into my (slightly battered but still amazing) Marc Jacobs bag. ‘They won’t be back for a couple of weeks.’

‘She’s gonna freak when she sees you in a magazine!’ Jenny danced around the living room in her towel. ‘Last time we talked, she was so excited for you.’

‘I can’t even begin to tell you how uncomfortable I am with the fact that you two have weekly chats,’ I smiled, taking off my hoodie, layering up several Tshirts and finishing up with my coat. ‘How is the life coaching going?’

‘She’s my best client since you. Seriously, if you would talk to your parents without my having to start the call every week, I wouldn’t have to know about Avon’s special offers and Anne-next-door’s curry night, would I?’

‘We talk.’ I sighed, throwing underwear at Jenny. Our weekly Sunday evening phone calls home had become a ritual for Jenny and I, whether I liked it or not. ‘I just don’t think I need to talk to my mother every time you speak to yours. It’s not a requirement of my visa. Now get your knickers on, Lopez. We’re leaving.’

We walked arm-in-arm, trying not to slip in the snow, all the way down to The Union, where I hugged Jenny goodbye and left her at the door. Union Square Park looked picture perfect in the snow, but it was too cold to go and sit right now. Every time I went outside at the moment I remembered Alex’s promise to take me back up the Empire State Building to see the city in the snow.

No, bad Angela, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about him. I turned left and tiptoed down to the music shop on the corner, hoping some new CDs might inspire me to go home and get it on with my laptop. God knows I hadn’t got it on with anyone else in months. As I passed through the security gates, I beeped loudly, attracting the attention of the guard, but I smiled, holding up my mobile phone.

‘Just a text message,’ I said. He smiled back, but he also followed me into the store.

Just got my copy of The Look. I’m so proud of you! Louisa

x x x

I re-read the message a few times until I had burned it onto my retinas, then I stashed my phone back in my pocket overly dramatically for the security guard’s benefit.

I browsed contentedly for a few moments. I’d been sort of out of the music loop since the summer, all part of my Alex Reid cold turkey programme prescribed by Dr Jenny Lopez. I hadn’t called Alex and he hadn’t called me. As much as I knew he was right, that it was all too much too soon, I really didn’t think I could face bumping into him at a gig, with some skinny hipster girl on his arm and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the ‘let’s just be friends’ nonsense. What I hadn’t reckoned on was bumping into him right there and then. I froze, my heart lodged in my throat. There he was, staring back at me, slight smile on his face, hair perfectly dishevelled, his green, green eyes staring right into mine. It was a great photo. I picked up the magazine and flicked to the interview without thinking. Quickly, I paid at the counter and abandoned my CD mission, heading for Starbucks. Before I could cross the road, thinking I would go and say hello to Johnny, I realized I was opposite Max Brenner’s. I looked down at the picture of Alex on the magazine and across to the hot chocolate Mecca.

Running across the road and dashing into the wonderfully warm restaurant, I flipped through the pages. For half a second, I looked around, wondering if he would be there. Of course he wasn’t, why would he be? It was eleven-thirty on a Monday morning in January. He would still be in bed or in the studio or … I shook my head and smiled at the hostess, yes, table for one. Thinking about Alex wasn’t getting me anywhere. Not thinking about him had been getting me along quite nicely, and it had taken a good month of cold turkey (Jenny had confiscated my iPod and CDs and deleted my Stills albums from my iTunes) before I could even get through a day without wondering what he might be up to. Once my hot chocolate arrived, I grasped my mug gratefully and sipped the thick chocolaty soup, opening up the interview. I skipped through their art school beginnings, the first two albums achieving critical acclaim. Like every other underappreciated New York band, they had a huge UK following. Slight exaggeration, I thought, but I’ll let it go. But now they were releasing their third album. I put down my drink and read on. It was a more deconstructed sound, the sound of a band that had stripped themselves apart and put themselves back together again.

‘“If it sounds that way, it’s because that’s what it’s about,” says lead singer, Alex Reid.’ I whispered out loud to myself. ‘“The album was written really quickly and recorded in a couple of weeks. It’s just what we were going through as a band, some stuff I was going through personally. It’s about what happens when you have your whole life pulled out from underneath you and how you go about working out your place in the world again. I think pretty much everyone can relate to that.”’

I pushed the magazine across the table, closing it and turning it over. He hadn’t called me and I hadn’t called him. I’d thought about it, a million times. I even thought I’d seen him at a welcome back party we threw for Gina at some hip club on the Lower East Side before she upped and left for Paris permanently. I tucked the magazine into my bag, knowing I should just throw it away. But I was so proud of him. His face peered out of my bag, next to my copy of The Look UK. He would be so proud of me.

I took a deep breath and rustled my phone out of my pocket. Before I had a chance to talk myself out of five months of aversion therapy, I dialled.

‘Hello?’ he answered on the first ring.

‘Hey,’ I said softly, thrown by his voice. ‘Alex?’

‘Angela?’ he asked. He sounded sleepy.

‘Yep,’ I smiled. When was I going to learn to think about what I was going to say on the phone before I called people? ‘I was just thinking about what you said? About seeing the city when it snowed. And I saw the interview. About the new album.’

‘Interview? Snow?’ he yawned. ‘Angela, are you in New York?’

‘Yes,’ I said, hopefully. ‘Actually, I’m in Max Brenner’s. I was thinking about – about, well, you.’

‘You were?’ he asked. I hoped I could hear a smile in his voice.

‘I wondered if you fancied a hot chocolate?’ I asked, crossing as many of my fingers as gripping my phone would allow.

‘Uhh,’ he paused for half a moment. ‘Angela?’

‘Yes?’ I said. Please don’t hang up, I prayed silently.

‘You took a really long time to call me,’ he said. ‘But I’m really glad you did.’

‘Me too,’ I said happily. ‘Now get your arse out of bed and come meet me.’

I hung up and put my phone in my bag, taking out The Look. I opened it on my page and looked at the intro.

The Adventures of Angela. Twenty-something ex-Londoner, Angela Clark, guides us through life and love, finding friends and finding her way in the Big Apple.

It wasn’t a very complete description, I thought, but at least it was somewhere to start.

Seventeen shades of thank you to everyone that made this book happen, especially Lynne Drew, Claire Bord and Victoria Hughes-Williams, I heart the second floor. Thank you to Katie Fulford for not putting my manuscript in the bin and telling me she’d read it in the first place. Thank you to Ayshea for putting your foot through that glass door and sending me to New York for the very first time. Thank you to everyone in the children’s team (past and present) for putting up with me for so long and keeping quiet from here on in. Thank you to Beth and Janet for putting up with me every time I need to ‘research’. And thank you to the dollar for being so weak for the last eighteen months. And thank you to Marc Jacobs for your never-ending parade of pretty. I owe you everything.