Air Kisses (5 page)

Her facial expression looked as though it were modelled on an illustration from a book on how to fake body language. She was doing everything to look genuinely concerned, but unfortunately her eyes were screaming, GOSSIP, GOSSIP! I NEED IT! FEED IT TO ME! FEED IT TO ME
NOW
!

I managed to utter, ‘Um…two years…’ How would she have even known I was Jesse’s girlfriend?

‘Oh, sweetie. That’s so awful. And to have it written about for everyone to read. I saw him at a function earlier this week, actually. You should probably know that he
was
there with Lisa Sutherland – she’s a friend of a friend – but it was on a table of Channel 3 people, so that’s totally kosher. And they weren’t acting like a couple. I swear it. Anyway, I’m here if you need to chat. Oh, what a
silly
! I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Jill. I’m at
Fame
magazine. If there are no place cards at the table, sit next to me, okay?’

With one final patronising gaze, she spun around and
stalked off to chat to a platinum blonde who knocked her head back to finish off her champagne before whisking a new one off a waiter’s passing tray. The bomb Jill had just dropped suddenly asserted itself somewhere near the top of my throat. Jesse and Lisa Sutherland.

Jesse and Lisa Sutherland. Gorgeous, flirty Lisa Sutherland and my Jesse sitting together at charity lunches, toasting their new love in between silent auctions. But that can’t be.
He’s supposed to be asking me to take him back any day now.

I wanted to run.

I didn’t belong here.

I wanted my old life back.

I wanted my old job and my boyfriend and my life to be easy.

I felt a flush travel up the back of my neck and was a little bit shocked because it implied that, physiologically, I was close to tears. I stood there, still clutching my bag and looking around, trying to maintain composure. Please, someone rescue me from here. Anyone.

Suddenly the volume of some hyper-hip music was turned up and all the beauty editors’ voices quietened down. Liz and Phoebe and Francis, who was looking understated in gold cowboy boots, a snakeskin waistcoat and a lot of bronzer, had taken to the stage.

‘Francis, fresh from New York fashion week, is now going to talk us through Fire’s new spring collection.’

A PowerPoint presentation came up and Francis highlighted a trend called ‘Mascufemme’, which to me looked to be about making young, pretty models look as frightening as possible. They all had angry, thick brows painted on, no blush, and nude, dead-looking lips. After what seemed like an
hour, and a million slides of backstage models wearing very theatrical make-up, Francis bowed, and Liz announced we would now eat.

We were all place-card seated at three long tables, and I was very pleased to find that I was between two sweet young girls who seemed as reticent as I’d become since being bamboozled. They were beauty assistants, I discovered. The wine flowed, and the first course – duck and pureed orange on buckwheat pancakes – was served. One girl on my table, a blue-eyed blonde with a pixie haircut, was talking loudly about her fashion editor’s habit of thieving clothes from shoots. She downed her wine as though it were water and clearly loved the attention. I simply sat and watched. I was aware that first impressions counted, but I was too deflated to care. I felt sick. Maybe it was the duck. Or maybe it was the stupid wench who felt it was appropriate to discuss my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend at a work function during our first conversation.

At 2.52 p.m. I headed back to the office. I waited until at least three others left before making my move. It was amazing how the chain reaction worked – it took the noise of just one chair scraping backwards to get these girls out the door.

Once back in the Beckert compound, I decided that a coffee would make me feel happy again. It might also make me a shaking, excitable psycho who couldn’t fall asleep till 1 a.m., but I was willing to take that risk. I ordered my latte from the espresso bar across the road, and noticed the barista staring at me as he frothed my milk.

‘You have beautiful eyes,’ he said.

I frowned. ‘What?’ I replied in an irritable tone.

He smiled. ‘I
said
that you have beautiful eyes.’

‘Oh…thank you,’ I replied, blushing.

‘Do you work around here?’

‘I do.’

‘Well then, hopefully I’ll see you and your pretty eyes again sometime soon.’

‘Well, I’m not going to leave them at home, now, am I?’ I said without thinking.

He recoiled slightly.

As I walked back to work, taking a sip through the plastic lid’s hole thingy and retreating from the heat of the liquid and the pain my now-burned tongue was experiencing, it dawned on me: I had absolutely no idea how to flirt. I hadn’t even realised I was being flirted upon.
I didn’t even know how to use the word ‘flirted’ correctly in a sentence.

Chapter Six

I had forgotten Dec was flying in from Amsterdam today. There was some big music event he was putting on, so he
was staying with Iz for a week or two. I felt a teeny shiver of butterflies. As usual.

I think it was more my body performing a memory response from the heady days of high-school crushes rather than a genuine shiver of nerves, but it always happened when I heard his name. I was so used to it I barely noticed it now. I was excited to see him; it was always nice to have Dec around – he substantially inflated our cool factor just by being in the same hemisphere. I was sure it would lift Iz’s spirits too, although she never let a guy faze her for long. It usually took Iz around twenty-four hours to get over a guy if he gave her a) the shits, b) too much attention, or c) a marriage proposal.

I wondered, though, if this latest guy of Iz’s might have slipped quietly under her skin, because she’d decided last night, after we’d agreed that Project Mansion could wait another year until I was more established in magazines and she’d paid off all of her credit cards and loans, that she might like to stop being single and have a ‘real-life’ relationship.

I’d have to remind her that she always has the most fun with the inappropriate ones. The ones who throw rocks at her windows at 4 a.m. The ones who take her to Disco Bowl-a-rama on the first date. The ones who want to have sex in public places.

I put the final touches to my minimal, ‘un-made-up’ make-up. I was aware that after work I would only be going over to Iz’s, but if Dec was going to be there, I had to, of course, look pretty. Just to show him how much I’d grown up, and how well I could blend my foundation now. I dabbed some Benefit Hollywood Glo onto my cheekbones, which I loved because it made me radiate as though I’d never seen the sun, alcohol or a cigarette in my life. It was my newest discovery and current
beauty love, which was saying not too much as I had taken to falling in love with at
least
one new product every day. Last time I had worn it I received several compliments from other beauty editors, which was kind of a big deal as they weren’t easily impressed. That said, I now realised beauty functions were the praise equivalent of a war zone. Compliments came shooting in from everywhere, flattery flew from all angles, and just when I thought I wasn’t looking my best – bang – a sniper was there saying they loved my shoes.

And people said magazine girls were nasty. Tsk tsk.

Of course, I wasn’t sure yet if all the flattery was genuine, but everyone else did always look quite excellent. Naturally, I was at least four train stops from looking as put-together as the other beauty eds, but I was learning more each day about how to dress in a world where we permanently looked like we were off to a birthday party.

It had been two weeks since Jesse had asked for space and I still had not heard from him. As two weeks had been my self-imposed deadline, he was now officially dumped. Even if he wanted to get back together, I was so disgusted at the way he had just slipped off into oblivion that I would reject him on the spot. And probably throw a large piece of office equipment at him, too.

Ultimately, all of this rage had worked in my favour. At work, I was feeling the best I had in weeks. I even knew how to use the colour printer now. I’d become very close to Jay and had taken to going out with her after work on a fairly regular basis.

Karen was happy with my work, or at least she said she was. I was putting in 400 per cent so as to make sure she neither regretted her decision to hire me, nor fired me. I read
Harper’s
and
Allure
and
Glamour
and
Elle
and
Cosmo
’s beauty pages in a manner usually reserved for the pious; and they gave me some amazing ideas.

Like the shoot I’d just done with twenty mascaras entwined in electrical cord under the heading ‘Electrifying Lashes’, and my feature on the danger of DIY peels, which featured a shot of a girl peeling back a mask with hazard signs all over it. Karen had liked that. Me good employee.

My next feature was about cleaning out your make-up bag, and the art director and I were going to shoot a mess of smashed-up, filthy cosmetics as the opening visual. It was going to look wicked. The month after was our party issue, and next week I had booked two top models to wear my make-up looks, which would be done by Justin Havlen, the hottest make-up artist around at the moment. One of the models, Paola, had just been on the cover of UK
Vogue
, so I was thrilled she’d said yes to
Gloss
. Of course, she’d only said yes because she was dating the photographer, Lloyd Montagne, who I was also lucky enough to land. It was an audacious shoot, but Melina,
Gloss
’s fashion director, said she would come along and help out, and thank baby Jesus’ cradle for that, as I was starting to flip
out
with nerves.

Of course, to get all of this done on top of 678 launches a week, I was overcompensating with fourteen-hour days. My whiteboard, which I affectionately called Ron, was so swamped in details for each day’s functions and meetings that he looked as though he were displaying a mad scientist’s equation-solving scribble. But Ron was always a pigsty. As he showed five weeks at once, and the space for each day was tiny, he was covered with abstract scrawl like
9 a.m., Dove @ doppio
, or
6.30–8.00 p.m., Art Gall, Elizabeth Arden
, all
of which ran into each other, or were written in shorthand so that they made no sense to anyone in the office trying to figure out where the office phantom was when Karen needed to see her five minutes ago.

But it wasn’t like I wanted to sit at home and reflect on the fact I had been completely abandoned by the man who I’d thought might father my children. I wanted to be busy, needed to be busy.

An email suddenly popped up from the PR for Flaunt make-up, snapping me back to the present. There was an attachment. I opened it. And was greeted with a quicktime of an obese black man stripping.

‘
Hannah!
You’re a sicko!’

Jay had crept up behind me without me noticing.

I clicked the window closed and flushed a deep shade of crimson.

‘I didn’t know that was going to come up! A PR sent it. Can you believe it? You’d think twice about sending that to a close friend let alone a client you barely know. Jesus.’

‘Some PRs are freaks, aren’t they? One invited me to her wedding, and I’d only met her three times.’

I shook my head in bewilderment. I didn’t believe in science fiction, but I was starting to believe that some of the public relations girls were actually aliens. They were so…strange.

One had left thirteen messages in one day asking when her new self-tanner would appear in
Gloss
. One had emailed me a detailed account of a fight she’d had with her boyfriend and how miserable she was. And then there was the one who’d sent our porcine stripper friend.

At least the odd ones made an impact, I suppose. There were just
so many of them
, all trying to lock me down for
coffees or launches or brand overviews or interviews with obscure facialists from Iceland called Gjorg. And too much of anything is always scary, as Joan Rivers’ face kindly demonstrates.

‘But there’s no use complaining, Hannah. We have to be nice to them, even if they’re freaks. Now, are you ready?’

‘For what?’

‘That big hair awards thing we all have to go to tonight. Karen said we’re leaving at six…which is, uh, three minutes from now.’

Panic gripped me. I did not know about any big hair awards thing, and, as I had no functions or meetings today, I had elected to wear my no-effort outfit: man-style tweed pants, a black vest and a baker-boy cap.
I looked like a boy.
Oh, and there were
flats
on my feet. I didn’t care what those osteopath people said, I loved heels, adored heels, wore heels every day because they made me feel confident. Except this day. Nice one.

A swipe of mascara, some blush, a spritz of fragrance and a dab of gloss later, I was cramming into a taxi with Karen, Jacinta and Eliza, on our way to the big hair awards thing being held in a derelict – and thus achingly hip – warehouse.

As we walked down a lit-up pathway covered in floral arrangements, I felt an urgent prod in my back. It was a Jacinta finger-jab.

‘Keep walking,’ she said through her lips. ‘I’ve just seen Jesse, but keep walking and he won’t see yo—’

‘Hannah!
Hannah!
Hi!’ Jesse jogged over to where we were standing. My heartbeat thundered and I flushed with the embarrassment and shock and utter surprise of it all. I quickly tried to think of some of my Hardcore Man Rules. Of
course, just when I actually had a real-life situation to engage them, they had slunk off to the part of my brain that handles Year Four maths equations and second-verse national anthem lyrics. I turned for support, but Jacinta had traipsed upstairs with the others. Thanks, Jay.

I licked my lips and tried to make sense of things. I couldn’t believe he was standing right in front of me. After weeks of thinking about him incessantly, now he was actually here
in front of me
. He was wearing a black suit and an open-collared black shirt. His eyes were shining, his hair was cut short, and he looked healthy, happy,
hot
.

‘Um, hi,’ I muttered, looking down, hating that he had popped up today when I’d dropped the vanity ball. Especially as I’d had such a tight grip lately. Since having an ex-boyfriend floating around the same town, I had become one of those girls who always ‘puts on her face’. When you see your ex, you’re supposed to look so stunning that they remember what they’re missing. But mostly when you see them, you will look like shit.

‘So,’ – deep breath – ‘how are you, Han? Are you…are you doing okay? I mean, you look great, you look awesome, what I meant was – how’s the new job?’ he said, stumbling over his words as though they were jagged rocks and he was barefoot.

I looked wistfully, desperately to my stroppy fellow employees and boss waiting for me at the top of the stairs, and mumbled that I had to go. I wasn’t equipped for this situation; I had to abandon ship. It was sinking anyway, so what would it matter. I belted up the stairs, got my name ticked off the list by a gorgeous girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen, and tried to stop my body from shaking. I looked around to
see if he was in the room. The cocktail of adrenalin, shock, embarrassment and upset inside me refused to calm.

‘Honey, are you okay? I left because I thought you two might want to be alone, I wasn’t abandoning you…’

‘I know, Jay, it’s cool. I’m just a little rattled, that’s all. That’s the first time I’ve seen him, since, you know…’ I trailed off, knowing tears would surely follow if I kept going.

She squeezed my hand and promised she wouldn’t leave my side again. The lump in my throat snuck up another few centimetres.

Suddenly, from deep in the haze of loud, laughing, tipsy people, I saw Jill heading towards me with nosy questions and thinly veiled gossip-hunger. I leapt behind Karen to hide, and tried to focus on Jacinta’s calm, soothing words. I couldn’t help skimming the room for Jesse as I listened. I didn’t trust my composure at this point. It had a distasteful habit of skipping off at the exact moment I needed it.

As my mind spun, Jacinta kept on. ‘Hannah, you look beautiful, you do.
He
even said you look great. So what if you’re wearing flats? I think you look adorable.’

After three oily canapés and eighteen minutes of torturous chatter with happy people whose ex-boyfriends were not at the same party, I backdoored it. I quickly snuck down the stairs and out onto the pavement. I was aware that the consequence of my premature exit might be that Karen scratched my eyeballs out, but I didn’t care. As I walked at lightning pace to the cab rank (flat shoes can be good in some ways, I
guess
), relieved that I could now cry in solitude, I saw a couple walking in front of me.

I bet they nick the first cab, I thought. Screw that.

I walked faster. When I looked up again, I stopped dead.

It was them.

Jesse and Lisa Sutherland.

She looked stunning. Of course she fucking did – she was a weather girl, for God’s sake. She was wearing a long black-and-white dress with her long black hair loosely curled just so, and she had one of those stupid tiny clutch purses. How can anyone seriously fit everything in there? My mobile wouldn’t get a start. Keys would be a struggle. A lone tampon
might
just fit. Only elegant, grown-up women could master the clutch. More reason to hate her.