I Heart Paris (28 page)

‘But she’s really amazingly gorgeous and just super sexy and—’

‘Shut up before I come over to Paris to kick
your
ass,’ Jenny threatened. ‘Angie, you’re freaking out. I mean, obviously it’s all my fault because I wasn’t there to talk some sense into you, but this bee-yatch is obviously just trying to get you out of the way so she can make her move. Alex values his dick and his kneecaps way too much to hurt you and piss me off. I made my position on his looking after you super clear before I left.’

‘But what about all the “I don’t think I need to get married to be happy” stuff?’ I twisted a strand of tangled hair between my fingers. Really this conversation ought to be reassuring, but as the train chugged along, I was starting to feel more and more sick.

‘Angie, he just turned thirty, he’s feeling his age,’ Jenny reasoned. ‘And nothing makes guys feel older than the idea of marriage and babies. He’s acting out. Also you’re the one that’s been refusing to move in with him for just about for ever. He’s probably confused about stuff and trying to protect himself. Like, he’s thinking, well if she doesn’t want to move in with me I’m gonna tell her I don’t want to marry her, then she’ll see I don’t care.’

‘That sort of makes sense,’ I conceded, the sick feeling growing. ‘I suppose.’

‘Damn, I need to stop spending so much time being the new Rachel Zoe and get back into being the new Oprah,’ Jenny said, a dream filling her voice. ‘Or maybe the first ever Rachel Zoe/Oprah hybrid…sorry, back to you.’

‘Thanks,’ I muttered, attacking the other thumbnail. ‘So what do you think I should do?’

‘You go back to the hotel, if he’s not there, you call him and you tell him to meet you, the pair of you talk all this shit out and then call me to tell me I was right.’ Jenny made it sound so simple. ‘And if you want to kick the shit out of this Solène bitch then go for it, although karma will totally have her ass. She’s not worth it. Just remember she isn’t part of the problem, not really. Any decisions Alex makes, he makes for himself.’

‘I know you’re right, ‘ I conceded.

‘Well, duh,’ Jenny snorted down the phone. It was amazing how she could be incredibly helpful and completely obnoxious at the exact same time.

‘There might be a bit of a problem,’ I said, finally deciding it was time to abandon the train toilet. It really was quite disgusting. Which I didn’t think would bother the line of five really, really angry-looking people outside. Bless them for not kicking the door in. Must be English. ‘Just with the whole getting back to the hotel thing.’

‘Where are you?’ Jenny asked over a now crackly line. ‘You keep dropping out. Connection in Paris sucks.’

‘I’m on a train,’ I said, staggering back up the aisle towards Sasha and Tania who were bouncing up and down in their seats like Tigger. If Tigger had been drinking Vitamin Water and eating Haribo for the last hour. ‘I think we’re about to go into a tunnel.’

‘Tell me you’re on your way to the festival, Angela,’ Jenny had a warning in her voice. ‘Say it.’

‘Well, no. I’m not. I sort of freaked out a bit and erm, I’m on my way to London,’ I admitted, resting my forehead on the metal luggage rack in the middle of the carriage. The scream that echoed down the line was not helping my headache at all.

‘You’re what?’ Jenny yelled. ‘Angela Clark, get your ass off that train right now. I do not believe you sometimes.’

‘But I didn’t know what else to do,’ I tried to keep my voice down, but it wasn’t easy. ‘I thought Alex was cheating on me, I thought you weren’t talking to me, I might lose my job – it was just easier to take myself home rather than go back to New York to get dumped, evicted and deported. What would you have done?’

‘You freaking asshat,’ Jenny moaned. ‘Are we actually going to have to schedule a daily call from now on so I can check that you’re not doing anything supremely dumb?’

‘Yes?’ I shrugged. It certainly would make my life easier.

‘Angie, why do you always assume the worst?’ I could almost see her shaking her head at me. ‘Why are you going there?’

I bit my lip. ‘Because I didn’t know where else to go, so I just thought, you know, home. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’

‘Yeah, but London isn’t your home any more, Angie,’ Jenny said. ‘Is it?’

‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ I repeated, quietly this time and with tears starting to trickle down my cheeks. I turned my back to the twins, ignoring their audible impatience.

‘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 comingout 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.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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.