Lindsey Kelk 5-Book 'I Heart...' Collection (96 page)

‘Angie, I’m so sorry,’ Jenny said. ‘Seriously, I really feel like this is my fault. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.’

‘Jenny, no,’ I choked over my words a little bit. ‘I’m just a total idiot. I was running away again. Thing is though, even if I have a chance of sorting stuff out with Alex, it’s still really possible that I’m going to lose my job. I might still be better off in London right now.’

‘You know how we just talked about you assuming the worst?’ Jenny reminded me gently. Well, as gently as Jenny was able. ‘Angie, do you want to go back to London?’

I bit my lip and thought about it for a moment. Louisa, EastEnders, fish & chips. Yes. Mark, my mum, the number 77 night bus. No.

‘Because if you really want to go back, really, desperately, deeply in your heart of hearts, then go back,’ she carried on. ‘But if you want to be in New York with Alex, working as a writer, you might have to fight for it this time. But if that’s what you really want, it’ll be worth it.’

‘Oh God, Jenny, I don’t know, I just need to think for a minute—’

‘Hello?’ The line crackled once, twice.

‘Jenny, can you hear me?’ I shouted down the line before I noticed that the view of the beautiful rolling countryside had been replaced with pitch black. We were in the tunnel. Swearing slightly too loudly for the company I was in, I weaved up the aisle back to my seat.

‘I’m sorry, we got cut off,’ I said passing the phone back to Tania, not really remembering which twin the phone belonged to. ‘But, uh, she said that I should give you her email address and she’ll answer all your questions for you.’

The girls made excited mewing noises and pulled out matching Smythson notebooks, to scribble out Jenny’s address. She forgave me for the clothes, she would forgive me for this. Eventually.

‘And she said you should email her right away because she’s going to be busy for the next couple of weeks and she really wants to hear from you,’ I lied again. Really, I needed some peace and quiet while I tried to sort my head out, and answering Sasha and Tania’s questions about how best to snag a rock star boyfriend was not going to help me get that.

I rested my head against the window and closed my eyes. Crossing my fingers under the table, I hoped that feigning sleep would convince them to leave me alone.

‘Angela?’ one of them whispered.

‘Shut up!’ the other cut in. ‘Can’t you see she’s asleep?’

‘No need to hit me, you cow,’ the other sulked. ‘I want to ask her about James Jacobs.’

‘Let her sleep,’ her sister said after a moment’s consideration. ‘She really looks like she needs some sleep. Sort her out a bit.’

‘Please, Sash, a coma couldn’t sort her out,’ the first, presumably Tania, giggled. It was pretty much all I could do not to kick her really, really hard under the table. ‘I can’t believe we met her though. Amazing.’

‘Want to go to the buffet and get a Diet Coke?’ Sasha said after a short pause.

‘Yeah, come on,’ Tania agreed, hustling her sister out of the seat.

Once I was certain they were gone, I popped in my iPod headphones and stared at my reflection in the darkened glass of the window. OK, so Tania was right, I looked like living crap. My hair was limp, my skin was grey and my eyes had more baggage than I did, but it was to be expected right? I thought back over what Jenny had said and more importantly, what I’d said to Jenny. When she told me she had to move out of Daphne’s place, I hadn’t asked her to come back to New York, I’d told her to come home. And I had meant it. It was home.

So, worst-case scenario, if Alex decided to break things off and I lost my job, would I still want to stay in New York? I pouted at my reflection. How would being single and unemployed in New York be worse than being single and unemployed in London? And really, I didn’t know that I was going to be fired. Maybe I was going to get a roasting from the Belle team, but Mary wasn’t going to fire me. I’d explained what had happened, she knew what Cici was capable of, and anyway, I hadn’t cocked up that job, I’d still been blogging. Jenny was right, I always assumed the worst. And if I had to fight to get another opportunity at Spencer Media, I would. Maybe somewhere else even. I was still the girl that got the James Jacobs coming-out story. Maybe I could get him and Blake to adopt. That would be a big story. Probably incredibly unethical and the worst thing in the world that could happen to any child, but still. Well, maybe not the worst thing, it would have impossibly immature parents, but it would be exquisitely dressed.

And as for Alex, Jenny was right about that. I shouldn’t be giving up on him easily. The only part she wasn’t right about was when she had said it wasn’t worth kicking Solène’s ass. Given how satisfying it had been to give Virginie a slap around the chops, I couldn’t even begin to imagine how great it would be to get into some serious hair-pulling action with Solène. Not that I was a violent person. Well, maybe just for one day a year.

But the pull of Louisa and the baby and X Factor marathons was still there. It would be so easy to bury my head in the sand and disappear into suburban south London for a while. As long as I didn’t have to deal with my mother. Or my ex. Or my unemployment. Maybe I could be Louisa’s nanny. She wouldn’t mind that I’d never so much as held a baby without it bursting into tears, would she? I could take it for walks and make sure it took lots of naps and watch Teletubbies with it. I just wasn’t sure about the dirty nappies. And the crying. And the sleepless nights. OK, I couldn’t be a nanny. Maybe I could just work in a coffee shop or something. Work on my novel. Not that I was writing a novel. I could always go on the game like Daphne, I thought for a second. Hmm, probably not my best idea, given that I was already terrified of telling my mum I was out of a legitimate job, let alone considering entering the oldest profession on earth. And with my hair and arse in the state they were in, I was a long way off high-class hooker. Lower-middle-class call girl didn’t really have the same ring to it.

I spotted the girls strutting back down the carriage, armed with Diet Coke and even more Haribo. I was pretty sure that was what they lived on. It would make a lot of sense. Chemicals and sugar. I closed my eyes and resumed position against the window, counting down the seconds until the train pulled in to St Pancras. I still had a lot of thinking to do and not a lot of time to do it in.

After exchanging numbers with Sasha and Tania (realizing too late that I’d given them my real number as I was too distracted to think of a fake) and promising to talk to ‘people at the mag’ about getting them their own blogs, I ran through Customs, and stopped dead in the middle of the station concourse in front of a payphone. Instead of picking up the handset, I looked upwards for inspiration. But instead of seeing some holy light, I saw the world’s longest champagne bar.

‘Are you really open?’ I asked, plopping myself on a tall stool and staring around me in wonder. ‘It’s not even half-eight.’

‘We are.’ The girl behind the bar smiled politely and set down the glass she had been polishing. ‘We open at seven. And we’re busy from seven.’

‘I can’t believe people just sit here in public drinking champagne at seven o’clock in the morning.’

It was honestly a wonderful thing. I had never seen so many bottles of champagne in one place. And I had seen a lot of bottles of champagne, having lived with Hurricane Jenny for the best part of a year.

‘Well,’ the girl gave me a terse smile, ‘can I get you something?’

‘Oh, erm, yes?’ I said, not sure what to order. She wasn’t going to make me a cup of tea, was she? I picked up the champagne menu, fully aware that none of my all-time great decisions had been made under the influence, but perversely keen to put off making any decisions in any way possible for as long as possible. It wasn’t as if I was drinking White Lightning under the slide in the park. I would be enjoying a civilized and elegant flute of champagne. At eight-twenty-two in the morning. ‘I’ll go with the Taittinger.’

‘Absolutely.’ The girl poured my glass of champagne expertly then backed away to carry on polishing glasses. It felt strange. If I were sitting alone at a bar in New York, the bartender would always try and chat with me, it was a prerequisite of the job. If you didn’t want to chat, they would immediately take the hint (a smile and a nod at their first lame joke), but they would always try. Thankfully, today was a day when I was more than happy for a bit of British reserve.

I watched the bubbles break on the surface of the champagne, a steady train at first and then a slower, one-by-one. Pop, pop, pop. I took a sip. It was delicious. Not what I’d usually go for at this time, but it never hurt to try new things. I thought back to the last time I’d drunk (too much) champagne. Erin’s wedding. Alex had been amazing that day, so attentive, so loving. He’d sat through hours of awful banking talk with a smile on his face just to be there with me. Not that he hadn’t got his reward, I thought, a small smile breaking on my own face. That was the first time I’d ever really honestly thought about the fact that we might possibly one day do the deed ourselves. Get married, obviously. The other deed was well taken care of. And the last big champagne event before Erin’s wedding had been Louisa’s. Not nearly as romantic an occasion.

‘Oh bloody hell, what am I doing here?’ I asked myself out loud.

The girl behind the counter gave me a slightly concerned look that she tried to turn into a smile, only not quite quickly enough. I didn’t have the energy to give her a reassuring cheery grin and instead scrunched up my face and rubbed my eyes hard.

‘Can I please get the check?’ I asked. ‘I mean, the bill?’

‘Of course, madam,’ she passed over a small white receipt on a silver saucer, ignoring the daggers in my eyes at ‘madam’. How many more times?

I dropped my credit card on the saucer, only then to spend two minutes faffing around, trying to get back in the habit of a chip and pin system. I picked up the champagne flute, ready to swig it down – ever the classy lady – before setting it back on the bar. Seriously. Just Say No. Before I could change my mind, I stood up, grabbed my bag and sprinted back down the escalators, as quickly as I had come up them.

Planting myself in front of a blatantly barely used payphone, I marvelled at the fact that it took credit cards and picked up the receiver. With the champagne bolstering my confidence, I tapped in the first number, waiting for the call to connect and closed my eyes.

‘Hey, this is Alex,’ his voicemail kicked in immediately, not even ringing once. ‘Leave a message if you want, but you know I never check this thing.’

‘Alex, if you get this, it’s me, I need to talk to you,’ I rambled into the handset after the beep. ‘Uh, I guess you’re on your way to the festival or something, but oh, bloody hell, I really need to talk to you. Except I don’t have a phone. So I’ll call you back. Just, yeah, I will. I’ll call you back.’

Hanging up, I looked around the station. It was still only eight-thirty in the morning, but it was already busy. It felt strange to conceive that I was actually in England for the first time in a year. There was a WH Smith to the left of me, a Foyles on my right and oh, M&S! I could actually see an M&S. The pang of homesickness that had been popping up every now and then in Paris hit me hard in the gut. There were British accents all around me and football shirts as far as the eye could see – and not just Manchester United ones like in New York. It was beyond weird. Utterly familiar and yet completely novel. But there were still a lot of things that were the same everywhere, Starbucks cups in every other hand, white cables peeping through shaggy haircuts and lots and lots of skinny jeans. But they didn’t make me feel better. They didn’t make me want to stay. The only thing I felt for certain was that I needed a wee.

Picking up the receiver for a second time, I ran my credit card back through the slot on the phone. The dialling tone gave way to a ringing and the ringing gave way to a click and an answer.

‘Hello?’

‘Louisa?’

‘Angela?’

I smiled, it still felt great to hear her voice. ‘Yeah, I, erm, I’m in London—’

‘Oh, babe, that’s amazing!’ Louisa squealed down the phone. ‘Annette! It’s Angela, she’s in London! She’s coming home!’

‘Shit, Lou, are you talking to my mother?’ I screeched. ‘Why on earth is she—’

‘Yes of course I’ll put her on, Angela, it’s your mum,’ she said as her voice pulled away and was replaced by a very pissed-off-sounding Annette Clark.

‘Angela? It’s your mother,’ she announced, entirely unnecessarily. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m …’ my lips set themselves in a grim line. ‘I’m in Paris.’

‘Then why is there a London number showing on the phone screen?’

Bugger.

‘I mean, I was in Paris. I’m at St Pancras,’ I admitted. She’d been watching too much Morse.

‘Well, you want to get yourself to Waterloo,’ she said, as though I was stupid. ‘Do you remember how to get there? They’ve got these special cards that get you on the trains now, Oysters or something. Do you have any money? Can you get one?’

‘Mum, they’ve had Oyster cards for ages,’ I sighed. ‘I have one. And yes I know how to get from St Pancras to Waterloo. I’ve done it before.’

‘Well I don’t know, do I?’ she replied, grumpy. ‘You’ve been off fannying around in America for bloody months and it’s not like you told me you were coming home, is it? Your dad would have come and got you, you know.’

‘I know,’ I replied. The idea of my dad rocking up in the Ford Focus right now was too much. He would probably take one look at me and drive me straight to rehab. ‘But I’m not actually coming home.’

Which was a fact I wasn’t even sure of until I’d said it out loud.

‘Yes you are. Louisa told me you were,’ she stated. ‘What time will you be here? Do you have something decent to wear to the party or should I get the box of clothes out of the loft?’

‘What box of clothes?’ I asked, completely lost with my mother’s train of thought.

‘The clothes I picked up from Mark’s when you pranced off to New York,’ she explained. ‘There’s probably something in there. Or you can borrow something of mine.’