glance to the side. A man charges towards me, stuffing a macaroon into his mouth. He grabs a pile of napkins and waves at the barman.
‘Water! Barman! Quick. We need help …!’ he shouts, spraying purple crumbs. ‘We need white wine!’
‘Leave it,’ I instruct. ‘Use a rub of Vanish later.’ I almost laugh at how pedestrian the words ‘rub of Vanish’ sound in this environment. ‘For the moment, rinse it through … as quickly as possible.’ Then I find myself adding—clearly, to expose myself as living a life of comparative suburban mediocrity where dealing with the removal of marks on fabric is part of my daily drudgery even though it isn’t and I would OBVIOUSLY take it to a reputable dry cleaner …—‘Time really is of the essence with stains.’
On the ‘st’ of stains, my ‘victim’ shuns the barman’s soda gun and the handful of serviettes her friend is flapping at her. She growls at him to buy her a T-shirt from American Apparel: ‘Men’s. Extra small, deep V-neck, not round or a scoop’, then spins round and strides in the direction of the toilets. I follow her. Which might not make sense, as overseeing the removal of a potentially ruinous stain on someone else’s designer top through to the end is a textbook ‘situation’. But another thing about me is that if I do get myself into a ‘situation’, I don’t like to come out the other side thinking I could have done anything differently. Guilt is not something I like to feel, on any level. It’s the combine harvester of human emotions. It breaks you down, churns you up, spits you out, but then spreads … and grows. Faster.
Inside the loo, the woman wriggles out of her top with no concern whatsoever about anyone else hanging around by the sinks touching up their make-up or doing their hair. I’m not surprised by her lack of inhibition. She has exactly the type of body you would expect from a fashionista. A deep-caramel pigment to her skin—the result of a blood line, not a spray booth—and a tiny, hard body. She probably picks at processed snacks and smokes cigarettes but is also a gym rat. And combines that with Bikram yoga, some sort of combat training, Cross-Fit, weights and Barry’s Bootcamp … girls like her don’t get the results they demand from doing one form of exercise any more, do they? They ‘mix it up’ so that all parts of their bodies are toned, honed, shrunk then stretched in order to achieve that perfect combination of muscular fragility. Then they are prepared for any sort of trend as soon as it arrives on the catwalk, or more specifically in …
… Catwalk.
Oh, my God. I grip onto the sink. Frozen, I watch as the woman’s head frees itself from the neckhole. A dark mop of glossy ethnic hair springs out first, then the delicate, fragile features which are at total odds to the personality I know lies within.
It’s her.
Her eyes are closed. When they open, she immediately focuses on the soap dispenser. She pumps some liquid onto the top.
‘I’m fine, you can go …’ she says, turning on the faucet.
I don’t move. I cannot say anything. Not even her name. Or mine. My purple heat rash is burning my chest.
Her mobile phone bleeps. She grabs it from her bag, checks the caller ID, adjusts it to speaker setting and goes back to holding the exact area of fabric directly underneath the gushing tap.
‘Yeah?’ she barks at her phone.
‘Hey …’ A man’s voice. He clears his throat.
‘I said ‘yeah’ … I’m here.’
At the sink next to her, another party guest finishes washing her hands, wrings them and turns on the dryer.
‘… you’ll have to shout. It’s noisy in here.’
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘About what?’
‘Maybe we could meet.’ The man continues. ‘No. We, erm, ought to meet. Now …’
‘I’m at a work thing,’ she replies.
‘It’s important. The, erm, report … you know … look, I’m at our … well, your … the flat. Can you get back here soon? We should go through it …’
‘Now? You think I won’t read it? Christ. Relax. I will …’
‘Seriously … we have to speak.’
She tuts, grabs her phone, turns off the speaker setting and puts it to her ear. With the other hand, she pulls her top away from the tap to check it. Just a cloudy mark remains. The dryer comes to the end of its cycle and the other guest leaves the room. She is quiet for a few seconds, then she calmly switches off her phone, squeezes out the remaining moisture from her T-shirt, puts it back on and stares ahead in the mirror at herself. Finally, she turns. Her eyes flicker up towards mine.
She sees me … flinches and gasps; but it is only a short, sharp inhalation—then her face becomes emotionless. The last time she looked at me like this, we were in the reception of the building where Catwalk is based.
It was a few weeks after I had finished my degree. I was about to start an internship at my favourite magazine. I’d bought every copy ever published. I was addicted to it from the first issue. I’ll never forget the launch copy. My best friend showed me it. The lead fashion shoot—set in a dilapidated mansion—was a glossy homage to what eventually became known in the tabloids as ‘heroin chic’. The models—dressed in flimsy, sheer, de-constructed fabrics—were draped across broken beds and chairs or lying on the cracked marble floor, as if they were abandoned garments themselves. But the ten-year-old me didn’t look at the pictures and think, ‘Yikes, they’ve had a heavy weekend on the skag …’. I didn’t even know what narcotics were, other than that they could possibly be disguised as fruit pastilles, as my father constantly told me: ‘NEVER ACCEPT ANY SWEETS FROM HER (my best friend’s) FAMILY—THEY COULD BE DRUGS!’
We—my best friend and I—stared at the shoot. She fell in love with the clothes; how everything looked on the surface. I loved what was going on beneath; the way each model was captured by the camera. Each one had a story to tell. But it was a secret.
The receptionist at the front desk puts a call through to the magazine.
‘Good morning, your new intern is waiting in reception. Shall I ask her to wait for you down here?’ He smiles at me from behind his sponge mouthpiece. ‘The Editorial Assistant will be right down.’
‘Ah, okay …’ I feel my purple heat rash spring across my chest. My dream job. This was actually happening. After everything that had happened. Life was about to happen.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ says the receptionist, mistaking my excitement for nerves. ‘She’s new too.’
But she wasn’t new to me. As the lift doors opened, I saw her before she saw me. Unquestionably pretty, petite—almost imp-like—and dressed casually but coolly in ripped skinny jeans, a grey T-shirt and Nike Air Max. Her hair was in a mussed-up high pony tail. I had ironed mine into a poker-straight bob. Typically for her, she looked at my shoes first. She stared at my ‘office smart’ kitten heels as if I had dragged in a rotting animal—no, human—carcass. I used this time to gather myself. It was only a few seconds … it was not enough. But an hour would not have been enough. Nor a day. Nor another year. And
