What a Girl Wants (26 page)

Kekipi had been right about one thing: the food was delicious. Unfortunately he had been either misinformed or lying through his back teeth about everything else. Wine did not make everything better and the pasta did not soak it right up. Two bottles later and Amy was struggling to wind her spaghetti onto her fork and Kekipi’s eyes had taken on a distinctly glazed look. I was still nursing my first glass, very keen not to throw up or lose my shoes again. I could only abandon them so many times before they started to take it personally.

‘Still no word from Nick?’ Amy asked, attempting to spear a slice of sausage from her plate before giving up and diving in with her fingers. ‘Nothing at all?’

I shook my head and filled my mouth with fish.

‘You two are fantastic,’ Kekipi contributed while sawing up his steak. ‘You’re my second favourite couple after Kim and Kanye. Why can’t you see what’s so obvious to everyone else?’

‘It’s confusing,’ I said, pushing up my long sleeves for the thousandth time. Silk might look pretty but it did not stay put. ‘One minute he says he hates me, the next minute we’re kissing.’

‘The next minute you’re shagging like rabbits,’ Amy added. ‘The next minute he has vanished without a trace. Oh my God, do you think he’s married? That he’s got three kids and a wife? Two wives? Seven kids?’

I dropped my knife and fork on my plate and stared while she shovelled food into her mouth. ‘I didn’t before but I do now.’

‘Just a theory,’ she shrugged. ‘It’s that or he is just actually properly mental.’

‘He’s got some trust issues,’ I said. ‘Things were bad with the ex, I think.’

‘You think? You don’t
know
?’ Kekipi clicked his tongue. ‘Honey, you need to talk to that man and get some sense out of him. We can all see he likes you, we can all see that you like him. Call him. Call him right now.’

‘Ooh, yes, call him!’ Amy came to life, clapping like a toddler who had eaten an entire tube of Smarties. ‘Put him on speakerphone, I’ve got some questions for him.’

‘I’m clearly not going to do that,’ I said, sitting on my bag to prevent Amy from doing it for me. ‘I’ll speak to him tomorrow.’

‘And say what?’ Kekipi asked. ‘Not to be difficult, but you said he has trust issues, no?’

I nodded, assuming I would not like where this was going.

‘Have you told him about your suitor back in London?’

And I was correct.

‘He knows bits,’ I said, eyes down. ‘We haven’t really had a thorough update on the situation. Mostly because he keeps bloody disappearing before we can have a proper conversation.’

‘And when you have that proper conversation, what exactly are you going to say?’ He popped a huge piece of cow in his mouth, giving me a five-second respite. ‘Hmm?’

Hmm, indeed.

‘I was sort of planning to wing it?’

‘No, you’re being a pussy,’ Amy said, in between swallows of wine. ‘About all of it. Make a bloody decision, Tess.’

‘You’ve got to love the mouth on this girl,’ Kekipi said, his mouth still full.

‘First you love Charlie, then you love Nick. First you love advertising, now you love photography.’ She swung her hands from side to side to illustrate her point but only succeeded in knocking a basket of bread out of the hands of a passing waiter. ‘You can’t have everything and you can’t just stay there on the fence. What do you want?’ She narrowed her eyes. Payback time.

Surrounded by a shower of bread rolls, for the wont of a snappier comeback, I shrugged. What I really wanted to do was whine and cry and ask her why she was being so mean before going to my room and taking all my toys with me. But I was twenty-eight and sitting in a restaurant in Milan and I didn’t have any toys with me, so that wasn’t really an option.

‘Life isn’t just about what you want,’ I said, shifting on top of my clutch bag. Beading was not comfortable to sit on. ‘You can’t just do what you want and hope everything will turn out for the best. You’ve got to plan for the future, think ahead. It’s not about what might sound like the most fun now.’

‘Wow!’ Amy closed her eyes and smiled. ‘It’s like sitting here listening to your mum.’

All the colour drained from my face and suddenly, I felt very, very sick.

‘Can you even hear yourself?’ Amy asked. ‘You’re actually sitting there, telling me that what you want doesn’t matter, what makes you happy doesn’t matter. Is that what you want? Marry Charlie, give up your dreams and slog away day in and day out at the agency so you can turn into a bitter, resentful old cow like your mum?’

‘Do I need to go to the restroom again?’ Kekipi asked, switching his stare from me to Amy and back again. ‘Because I didn’t really need to go last time and I’m worried one of the waiters thinks I’m trying to pick him up.’

‘No,’ Amy threw her arm out in front of him, effectively sticking him to his seat, ‘you don’t need to do anything.
She’s
the one who needs to think about what she just said. You don’t know, Nick or Charlie. You can’t decide, agency or photos. You
can
decide and you do
know
but you’ve spent so long listening to, and believing, all your mother’s shit that you don’t believe it.’

She paused for breath and wine.

‘You don’t trust your gut. This is the first time in your entire life you’ve had to make a difficult decision and you’re trying to wimp out of it, but you can’t. If I lived by your logic, I’d be married to Dave and as miserable as sin, maybe even divorced by now. Or worse, I’d be your mum and Brian, sitting around the house, hating each other. Is that what you want? Just be fucking brave for once in your life.’

I stared across the table at the girl who had been my best friend for as long as I’d been alive. When Gareth Hunter pulled her skirt out of her knickers while we were doing handstands, I was the one who chased him round the playground and kicked him in the balls. When I was too embarrassed to get changed for swimming in year nine because my boobs were already enormous, Amy was the one who had performed a Spice Girls’ song-and-dance routine on the other side of the changing room so I could put my cossie on in peace. When Caitlin McGarry, my year ten nemesis, told everyone in the village that Amy had called off said wedding because we were secret lesbians, Amy turned around, grabbed my boobs and announced to the whole church that she could do a lot worse. Which would have been bad enough if we hadn’t been in church at the time. At midnight mass. Completely stinking drunk.

But at that exact moment, I didn’t know her at all. Or at least I didn’t want to know her.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, pushing my chair away and standing up, suddenly too hot and too confined and too desperate to be anywhere other than there. ‘I need to go.’

‘Tess …’ Amy stood up to follow me but Kekipi blocked her path. ‘Come on, I’m sorry. Sit down.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I called out behind me, ricocheting through the tables and grabbing hold of the backs of empty chairs on my way out. ‘Sorry.’

It was dark outside but still so humid that I could feel the sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades and pooling in the small of my back. I felt sick and dizzy and confused and I needed to not be there. The pavement was practically deserted and motorbikes and push bikes lined the streets, suggesting that the bars and restaurants and grand old houses all around me were filled with all the cheering, laughing people I could hear somewhere outside my head. Every so often, I lifted my head and saw lights flickering on in high up windows, or curtains being drawn, closing me out of the happiness inside. Or maybe that was just how it felt. Perhaps they were closing the curtains on their own arguments and dramas. Everyone had their own crises, didn’t they? And everyone felt as though theirs was the most important in the whole wide world.

After a few minutes of careening blindly down the street, I saw a park appear to my left. I had accidentally found my way home, or at least I had found my way to the palazzo. It wasn’t my home; I didn’t actually have one of those. With the park on my left and the palazzo on my right, I did exactly what Amy wanted me to do. I made a decision. Even though I was tired and upset, I was still me and being raped and murdered in an unknown city park in the dark wasn’t at the top of my list of things to do in Milan so I slipped through the gate and sat on the first bench I found, close to the railings that separated the park from the street and let myself breathe.

Why were things never easy? Why were they always either boring, exhausting or so hard I wanted to run into the nearest wall, headfirst, and have the hospital put me in a medically induced coma until it was all better? I rubbed my clammy hands up and down my jeans and tried to clear my head. Everything was shouting in there and I couldn’t concentrate. Charlie and his chickens and Nick and Al and the photos for the party and what was Artie doing at Edward Warren’s and what if Amy let Al down and poor Kekipi, losing his one true love all those years ago?

‘One thing at a time, Tess,’ I whispered, my voice strange against the quiet of the trees around me, and the passing scooters that whirred down the Corso Venezia. ‘One thing at a time.’

Without knowing why, I put my hand into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out a napkin that I’d scribbled on the night before Milan to try to marshall my thoughts. A four-point plan. Get a camera, go to Milan, come home, win the Perito’s pitch. Had I been smoking crack that day? Had I really thought it would be that easy?

It almost made me laugh that the one thing that I had been so sure of, the Perito’s pitch, was the one thing I felt the most defeated by. No one was ever going to accuse me of being an expert in how to deal with men, and even fewer people would send you my way if you needed a top photographer, but advertising was the one thing I knew. Only not this time. I’d spent all afternoon reading the brief over and over and I had nothing. I didn’t want to let Charlie down, but even more than that, I didn’t want to fail. I never failed at anything. But then again, how many things had I actually tried?

At the same time, I was having the best time taking the photos for Al’s project. Shooting Jane’s clothes, their designs, Warren’s samples – every time my right finger clicked the camera, I felt a buzz. It was exciting. But did that mean I should give up everything I’d ever known? A career I’d worked hard for? You didn’t walk away from something just because it wasn’t exciting any more or because something else seemed shiny and new. But there had to be a compromise, a middle ground between the Amy way, chasing after life like a kitten with a ping pong ball, and my old way. Or, as much as I hated to admit it, my mother’s way.

Amy was right, life was supposed to be lived, not endured. If Al hadn’t chased after Jane when she was engaged to another man, I wouldn’t be sitting in this slightly creepy park in Milan on my own in the dark. OK, that wasn’t the best example, but if Al hadn’t taken his chance when it came along, I would never have got the call to work for him in the first place, I would never have borrowed-slash-stolen my camera and I would never have met Nick. Maybe it was time to give the path less travelled a proper look.

I stood up, screwed the napkin up into a ball and tossed it in the bin at the side of the bench.

‘Don’t be a wimp, Tess,’ I told myself, biting colour back into my lips and heading back to the palazzo. ‘It’s time to be brave. Don’t be such a chicken.’

I stopped dead in my tracks, feeling my eyes widen with delight.

‘Don’t be a chicken,’ I repeated, the smile that had started in my eyes finding its way down to my mouth. ‘Be brave.’

Sometimes, I thought as I raced across the street and ran through the gates of the palazzo, I was so good, I scared myself.

It was late when I finally turned off my computer but I was incredibly happy. One problem down, only about fourteen left to figure out and I would be sorted. I had been working in the dark, in too much of a hurry to even bother turning on my bedroom light, so I knew Amy had come home a while ago. The lights in the living room had flickered on, sending a sandy gold beam under my bedroom door before they went out again just as quickly. I felt sick to my stomach at arguing with Amy; I never felt myself when things weren’t right between us and while I knew waking her up would mean taking my life in my hands, I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d said I was sorry.

Tiptoeing out of my room and across the living room, I tapped gently on her door before letting myself in.

‘You awake?’ I asked, trying not to bump into any more furniture. I already had glorious bruises blossoming on both hips from my pinball-esque exit from the restaurant. ‘Skankface?’

‘No,’ she replied, the duvet pulled right up over her head. ‘Piss off.’

‘I would but I need to say sorry,’ I said, settling on the edge of her bed, just about managing not to shove my bum in her face. ‘There’s this really annoying thing where I can’t sleep if you’re mad at me.’

‘I’m always mad at you and you sleep like a baby.’ Amy pulled the covers down, her mascara all smudged and her eyes red raw. ‘A giant baby with stupid boobs.’

‘You’re the baby,’ I said, a relieved half-laugh burbling out of my mouth, mixed with a fresh rush of tears. ‘When are you going to start taking your make-up off before bed?’

‘Last night’s eyeliner is good enough for Debbie Harry so it’s good enough for me,’ she said, rolling over the bed and making room for me to put my cold feet under the covers. No matter how hot it was outside, the bedrooms in the palazzo were air conditioned to the point of frigidity. ‘I’m sorry I was such a cow.’

‘I’m sorry I freaked out.’ I wiped my own mascara smears away with the sleeve of my shirt. ‘And you know, you were right. My brain got stuck and it needed a bit of a shake. Maybe not quite such a loud one in a restaurant before I’d even had my pudding, but still …’

‘The pudding was amazing,’ she replied, reaching out for my hand and giving it a squeeze.

‘You actually stayed and had pudding after I walked out?’ I shook my head in the darkness. ‘Honestly.’

‘Yeah, what are you going to do?’ Amy said with a sniff. ‘Now either shut up and go to sleep or sod off back to your own room. I’m tired.’