Chapter Nineteen
Piccadilly Circus/Blackpool Illuminations
After this disappointing turn of events, I am glad to escape to London a few days later for theLusciousmagazine shoot. I have to leave painfully early to be in Shoreditch at ten a.m. Well, painfully early for me, which appears to be the same time everyone else is commuting into the city. I don’t tell Nandy I’m coming. It’s the first time I’ve been to London without telling her since… I can’t remember. I send her a sticker of Pakora though. Her dog, not an actual pakora.
I’m in First Class again (thank you kindly, Yuvana), although at this time of day, the expensive seats seem to be taken up by ‘city types’ as Josie would call them, who are either talking loudly on their phones about how WE’RE EXPECTING SOLID RETURNS BY Q3, RUPERT or gawping at me. I’m very, very slowly getting used to this now. Unlike Gabe, it seems, who hasn’t been in touch at all since I saw him on the footpath. I wonder what the returns policy is at Victoria’s Secret.
The studio is five minutes from Old Street, an airy loft with exposed beams and white walls, chosen to make the most of the limited hours of daylight in February. Walking in, all I can think is, holy crap, the world and his wife is here. ‘The world and his wife?’ I’m glad I didn’t say that out loud. I make a mental note not to use such middle-aged expressions, especially when I’m pretending to be young, which I’m not today – everyone on the shoot knows my real age. But nobody under forty says things like ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus/Blackpool Illuminations in here.’ They say, ‘it’s lit’ and I know that because Channing said it in an emailand I looked it up. He also said, ‘it’s sick’ but that was about my basil plant, so I’m fairly sure on that occasion he was referring to the brown edges on most of the leaves.
Aside from the photographer himself (a gruff Scottish man in his forties called Hugh), pretty much everyone – stylists, make-up artist (who is, to my delight, only bloody Mary bloody Greenwell – a friend of Merlyn’s, of course), wardrobe assistants, an art director, and a few people fromLuscious– coos and fusses over me. They touch my face, hair, they stare and marvel, they talk and whisper about me from every corner of the studio, they bring me coffee and pastries, and oddly some Mexican food, which for me is not a ten a.m. thing at all. Quesadillas aside, it is the most attention I’ve had in a long time, and to be honest, after what happened the other day with Gabe, I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it one little bit.
The outfit they’ve chosen for me is a sequined bodysuit with a roll neck, which I think looks pleasingly Taylor Swift – until I put it on behind the screen and realise that despite my wobble-free new body, I look more like a sausage about to do some burlesque. Luckily, according to one of the stylists, Chaz (who is inexplicably wearing a harness – did they think he might run away?), it will only be just visible in the shots and is simply so that I can ‘serve futurism’. He also tells me he is ‘obsessed with me’, which feels a bit much. TheLusciousart director then mentions that the cover headline is going to beBack To The Young School, which in my view is a very poor pun.
The shot they choose is me caught off guard, at the start of a laugh – Hugh deliberately made me snigger by telling me he often gets mistaken for David Tennant, which is funny because he just wouldn’t, ever. The background is an icy blue, to set off the sequins, and in the photo, which I look at on the little screen on the back of Hugh’s camera, my skin is gleaming, my eyes are bright and my lips are shiny. I don’t look beautiful, because I’mnot. (I’m not looking for compliments – I know I’m not.) But I look young, and that’s the shot they want, of course.
In the last half-hour of the shoot, I see Merlyn creep in, wearing fur après-ski boots and enormous white sunglasses. She hugs Mary Greenwell as Hugh takes some final shots to go inside the magazine with the advertorial. I wave and Merlyn blows me a kiss.
And then I am done, and once I’ve changed out of my body suit (and toned down the make-up which is a little too ‘Peach Jumpsuit’ for my liking), Merlyn whisks me off for a late lunch in her car, which waits outside with her driver wherever she goes. We head south-east, not Merlyn’s usual preference, but for me, it’s a free lunch so what the hell.
Half an hour later, we’re in a noodle bar called Professor Wok, surrounded by students who all look like Chaz the stylist. Everyone seems very ‘hip-hop’, as Mother Pells would say. After I pretty much inhale my beef broth, and Merlyn daintily eats some Jianbing, I tell her about Nandy and Josie – and Gabe. She doesn’t really say much though, just tilts her head, nods, and says ‘Erica my dear’ a few times. Then she pays and guides me out of the door, murmuring that she has ‘something to show me’. I can’t think what it would be, but don’t ask as we walk a few streets, past giant murals and shops selling plants and coffee, Merlyn picking her way along the pavement in her giant furry boots, not at home at all outside her two natural habitats of Holland Park and central London.
Going south of the river always makes me think of Kofi. Well, most places in London do, but I remember we went to the Millennium Dome a few times, as it was called then, to seeBasement Jaxx, and Faithless, I think. We came down to Tate Modern not long after it opened too, for that weather exhibition – the one with the giant sun. We lay on the floor, not just us, lots of people did, holding hands for ages and just staring at it. We were stoned, I think.
There were still parties at the flat in Camden, although it was mainly me organising them, not Kofi. Pete’s decks were gone but I’d make a playlist on my iPod and we’d connect it to the speakers and dot some tea lights around the place. The usual suspects would turn up, but not as many as the old days. One night, after a pretty wild party where there had been some Es going around, most people had left. There were five or six of us, hanging out, smoking weed, drinking beers, listening to chill-out music.
A friend of Kofi’s called Owen, who I didn’t know that well, had gone to sleep sitting on our sofa. He had long, curly hair in a ponytail, and a goatee beard. ‘Let him sleep,’ Pete said, ‘he was pretty wasted earlier on.’ I was pretty wasted too, and had the giggles from the weed, so I balanced an empty beer bottle on Owen’s shoulder. ‘Leave him,’ Kofi said. But I didn’t. Another bottle, one on his knee, one on his foot, one on his head, then I found other things in the room, decorating him like a Christmas tree with the fairy lights from the fireplace, laughing, thinking I was so funny. I even took a photo with a disposable camera. He didn’t wake up.
I suppose it was about half an hour later when we realised that Owen was dead. Pete called 999 and Kofi took the bottles and lights off him. He didn’t say anything while he did it, his face was fixed with his lips tucked in, as if he was biting down on them. I was crying so hard when the paramedics wheeled Owen out on the trolley, all covered up. When the police finally left, Kofi went to bed. It was getting light and I sat on the bathroom floor, being sick until it was just this bright yellow stuff, and mystomach made noises like a monster. How right that it should – I was a monster. Maybe I could have saved him. But look what I did instead. Just look.
After that night, the floor always seemed sticky, like an aftermath we couldn’t ever clean up. The flat was tainted, and everything smelt of bile and death. After Owen’s funeral, nobody came round as much, and Kofi never seemed to look at me in the same way again. We didn’t want to be there anymore, and handed in our notice to the landlord. I told Kofi I was going back to Wiltshire – he just looked like he wanted to be anywhere else than with me. And that was what happened. That was the awful, awful thing, and why I went home, even though I didn’t really want to.
Merlyn and I arrive at a huge, architect-designed development of flats, with balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows. ‘My granddaughter Devon lives here,’ she says, waving a fob at the door, which opens slowly.
I just nod. I haven’t heard of Devon, but that’s Merlyn, she doesn’t hold her cards close to her chest – she keeps them in a safe at an undisclosed location. I prefer this. I’d hate to find out she has a husband from Huddersfield called Brian.
We get the lift to the top floor. I wonder why Merlyn is letting herself in, but as we walk into the duplex flat, I can tell nobody is living there, although it is fully furnished, with a huge open plan living area, a kitchen island, and engineered wood floors.
‘She’s in New Zealand for a year,’ Merlyn says as she leads me out onto the balcony, which looks right across the London skyline. I can see the skyscrapers of the city in the distance, bathed already in the pinkish light of a late winter sunset.
I take it in for a minute then turn to look at Merlyn, trying to convey, ‘What are we doing here?’ in a single expression. I need to get back to Wiltshire.
‘It’s yours, if you want it, Erica,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘All ready for you to move in. No rent required. I thought it might make things easier for you than hiding away in your little cottage.’
I shake my head. ‘No… no, thanks. I have a home, near my family. And I have friends there. And a boyfriend.’
Merlyn pushes her giant sunglasses up onto her head. ‘And how’s all that going, my dear?’
