face bumping into him at a gig, with some skinny hipster girl on his arm and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the ‘let’s just be friends’ nonsense. What I hadn’t reckoned on was bumping into him right there and then. I froze, my heart lodged in my throat. There he was, staring back at me, slight smile on his face, hair perfectly dishevelled, his green, green eyes staring right into mine. It was a great photo. I picked up the magazine and flicked to the interview without thinking. Quickly, I paid at the counter and abandoned my CD mission, heading for Starbucks. Before I could cross the road, thinking I would go and say hello to Johnny, I realized I was opposite Max Brenner’s. I looked down at the picture of Alex on the magazine and across to the hot chocolate Mecca.
Running across the road and dashing into the wonderfully warm restaurant, I flipped through the pages. For half a second, I looked around, wondering if he would be there. Of course he wasn’t, why would he be? It was eleven-thirty on a Monday morning in January. He would still be in bed or in the studio or … I shook my head and smiled at the hostess, yes, table for one. Thinking about Alex wasn’t getting me anywhere. Not thinking about him had been getting me along quite nicely, and it had taken a good month of cold turkey (Jenny had confiscated my iPod and CDs and deleted my Stills albums from my iTunes) before I could even get through a day without wondering what he might be up to. Once my hot chocolate arrived, I grasped my mug gratefully and sipped the thick chocolaty soup, opening up the interview. I skipped through their art school beginnings, the first two albums achieving critical acclaim. Like every other underappreciated New York band, they had a huge UK following. Slight exaggeration, I thought, but I’ll let it go. But now they were releasing their third album. I put down my drink and read on. It was a more deconstructed sound, the sound of a band that had stripped themselves apart and put themselves back together again.
‘“If it sounds that way, it’s because that’s what it’s about,” says lead singer, Alex Reid.’ I whispered out loud to myself. ‘“The album was written really quickly and recorded in a couple of weeks. It’s just what we were going through as a band, some stuff I was going through personally. It’s about what happens when you have your whole life pulled out from underneath you and how you go about working out your place in the world again. I think pretty much everyone can relate to that.”’
I pushed the magazine across the table, closing it and turning it over. He hadn’t called me and I hadn’t called him. I’d thought about it, a million times. I even thought I’d seen him at a welcome back party we threw for Gina at some hip club on the Lower East Side before she upped and left for Paris permanently. I tucked the magazine into my bag, knowing I should just throw it away. But I was so proud of him. His face peered out of my bag, next to my copy of The Look UK. He would be so proud of me.
I took a deep breath and rustled my phone out of my pocket. Before I had a chance to talk myself out of five months of aversion therapy, I dialled.
‘Hello?’ he answered on the first ring.
‘Hey,’ I said softly, thrown by his voice. ‘Alex?’
‘Angela?’ he asked. He sounded sleepy.
‘Yep,’ I smiled. When was I going to learn to think about what I was going to say on the phone before I called people? ‘I was just thinking about what you said? About seeing the city when it snowed. And I saw the interview. About the new album.’
‘Interview? Snow?’ he yawned. ‘Angela, are you in New York?’
‘Yes,’ I said, hopefully. ‘Actually, I’m in Max Brenner’s. I was thinking about – about, well, you.’
‘You were?’ he asked. I hoped I could hear a smile in his voice.
‘I wondered if you fancied a hot chocolate?’ I asked, crossing as many of my fingers as gripping my phone would allow.
‘Uhh,’ he paused for half a moment. ‘Angela?’
‘Yes?’ I said. Please don’t hang up, I prayed silently.
‘You took a really long time to call me,’ he said. ‘But I’m really glad you did.’
‘Me too,’ I said happily. ‘Now get your arse out of bed and come meet me.’
I hung up and put my phone in my bag, taking out The Look. I opened it on my page and looked at the intro.
The Adventures of Angela. Twenty-something ex-Londoner, Angela Clark, guides us through life and love, finding friends and finding her way in the Big Apple.
It wasn’t a very complete description, I thought, but at least it was somewhere to start.
Seventeen shades of thank you to everyone that made this book happen, especially Lynne Drew, Claire Bord and Victoria Hughes- Williams, I heart the second floor. Thank you to Katie Fulford for not putting my manuscript in the bin and telling me she’d read it in the first place. Thank you to Ayshea for putting your foot through that glass door and sending me to New York for the very first time. Thank you to everyone in the children’s team (past and present) for putting up with me for so long and keeping quiet from here on in. Thank you to Beth and Janet for putting up with me every time I need to ‘research’. And thank you to the dollar for being so weak for the last eighteen months. And thank you to Marc Jacobs for your never-ending parade of pretty. I owe you everything.
For Big Bear and Little Mouse
(not as nauseating as it sounds, honest)
CHAPTER ONE
