Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  When I opened my eyes, she was looming over me, examining me quizzically, as if I were a UFO she’d stumbled upon in the back garden. “About time,” she said. “Listen, some of us are going to Portobello, and if you’d care to join us, you’d best shake a leg. Mum just popped out to the market, so this is our only chance!”

  While I would’ve happily attended another Saturday lunch, I was flattered by Imogen’s invitation. I was eager, too, to check out the Portobello Road market she’d mentioned the other night. She and Tunisia described it as an outdoor shopping extravaganza, with vendors peddling everything from 1950s lace gloves to African fruits. “Sounds great,” I said. “Is Lily coming?”

  “Right here.” Lily stepped out from the doorway, already showered and dressed. “Just waiting on your lazy bones.”

  “Meet you downstairs in five,” Imogen said. “Seconds, that is.”

  I threw on a corduroy shirtdress and my dark red cowboy boots and hurried down to the kitchen, where Robin Fox was clipping newspaper articles. A radio debate on a proposed overhaul of Scottish agricultural subsidies droned in the background. “Where are you off to?” he asked sleepily when his daughter blazed into the room. “Lunch will begin presently—your mum has been in a tizz since well before dawn.”

  “Oh, but Daddy,” Imogen said, turning to catch my eye, “I’ve fallen madly in love with a three-legged donkey and I absolutely must introduce him to my mates!”

  “Right, then,” Robin murmured, bringing his antiques supplement closer to his face. “There’s my lass.”

  When we got out of the Tube station, Imogen called her friends, who told her they’d decided to hang out at a pub instead. “We’ll come round in a bit,” she said before clicking her phone shut. “It’d be mad not to have a look-see.”

  The three of us spent the next few hours wandering around the market, admiring old dishes and trying on costume jewelry. Lily bought a leather headband and Imogen a vintage poncho with rainbow-fringed embroidery. We then walked north, away from the action, to a Portuguese wine bar on Goldhurst Road, where Imogen’s friends had installed themselves on benches outside. Like Imogen, they were dressed with expensive indifference, in outrageous color combinations that would horrify my mother. Only , one of the girls—the real beauty of the group—wore all black, but then she looked about a decade older and more sophisticated than her friends, with her diamond tennis bracelet and straight auburn hair that fell halfway down her back.

  Most bars in New York seem geared exclusively to customers between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, but surrounding us were barflies of every demographic: elegant ladies in pearls, old men with canes, loud young guys, and several clusters of young parents on double dates, their kids left to kick and drool in their strollers.

  “Arabella,” Imogen said to the gorgeous girl in all black, “budge up, will you, and make room for the Yanks?”

  Once we’d squeezed onto the bench, Lily, who was already acquainted with Imogen’s friends, introduced me to Hattie, Emma, Tamasin, Billie, and Arabella. Most were either on their gap years or preparing to start “uni” (a.k.a. university) in the fall. Only the girl sitting on my left, the beautiful Arabella, was pursuing an alternative avenue. Immediately upon finishing school, she’d decided to “have a go at modeling.”

  “She’s going to be massive!” Billie said with conviction. “She’s already been in loads of adverts all over the telly.”

  “Yes, have you seen the one for the linen sales at John Lewis?” Hattie asked. “She played the sleeping beauty under the goose-down comforter. She was brilliant—stunning, wasn’t she?”

  Next to me, Arabella lifted her shoulders modestly, and the conversation soon turned to the only member of the gang absent that afternoon, Tunisia, and her rugby-obsessed boyfriend, Bob. Having dined with the couple the previous night, the girls had much to discuss. “Tamasin behaved just appallingly,” said Billie. “She refused to speak to him—and they were sitting next to each other!”

  “Yes, well, and what do you suppose we might’ve chatted about?” Tamasin wanted to know. “The last rugby match he watched? Bloody hell, he is such hard work.”

  “For Tune’s sake, I do hope she’s not contemplating marrying him,” Imogen said. “The idea of a wedding cake that’s been done to look like a rugby ball is too horrid to contemplate.”

  Arabella snorted. “Imo’s always going on about weddings this and weddings that,” she told me. “She’s positively mad for matrimony—ever since we were little girls, she loved dressing up in white sheets and playing wedding.”

  “Yes, and have you seen her trousseau?” Hattie asked. “It’s frightening, really.”

  It was true that Imogen talked more about weddings than the great play she was supposed to be writing, but she clearly didn’t enjoy her friends’ jibes. She was scowling at the group, Lily and me included, when Arabella stood up and said, “I think I’ll have another Pimm’s. Anyone else fancy a top-up? You,” she said, pointing at me with a beautiful girl’s sense of entitlement, “come inside with me, we’ll have a chat.”

  Pleased with the attention, I stood up and like a lap dog followed Arabella inside. While we waited at the bar, she revealed her reason for singling me out: she wanted to talk about New York, where she’d lived for a year. “I miss the energy there; it is so exciting. Everything there’s just different.”

  I told her that was exactly how I felt about London, and asked her when she’d been in New York.

  “Oh, dunno, maybe fifteen?”

  “You lived there when you were fifteen? We must have just missed each other.”

  “No,” Arabella said, picking up her bright red drink and plunking down money on the bar. “Sure you don’t want one?”

  I shook my head no arid asked her again when she’d lived in New York.

  “Fifteen years ago,” she said impatiently. “But I still remember it vividly.” She moved over to a small round table and kicked out a seat for me. “It’s bloody hot out. Let’s cool off.”

  I sat down across from Arabella, basking in her beauty. She really was exquisite, with her mahogany hair and luminous complexion. For a time I contentedly answered her questions about New York, describing the all-you-can-eat sushi joints in Midtown and the free rides on the Staten Island ferry and the fancy little consignment shops on the Upper East Side. “We were on the Upper East Side,” Arabella recalled, “with all the punks.”

  “Punks on the Upper East Side?” I repeated incredulously. “Are you sure you don’t mean the East Village? Because the Upper East Side is about the least punk neighborhood in New York. Just ask Lily—she lives there.”

  “I wouldn’t ask Lily the time of day, frankly,” Arabella said frostily. “Sorry, I know you’re good mates, but honestly, she’s not to my taste. She thinks—at least it seems so to me—she thinks she’s so clever.”

  “Lily? Thinks she’s clever? But that’s not true at all. Lily’s one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met.”

  “Oh, well, try talking to her about her bloody drama school sometime. Honestly, just because I decided not to get formal training, she needn’t patronize me. She’s always going on about bloody St. Botolph’s, as if I couldn’t have gone there myself if I’d wanted!”

  “I’m sure she’s just trying to find common ground with you,” I said, but Arabella only stared at the wall.

  When she got over her sulkiness, she turned to me excitedly. “Listen, Mimi,” she said. “I’ve had the most brilliant idea! I live just up the road and I’d love to show you my portfolio.”

  “Your portfolio? What do you mean?”

  Arabella paused. “But isn’t your dad a top fashion photographer? That’s what Imo told me—I thought you might have a look at some of my headshots and, you know, pass the word along if any strike your fancy.”

  “He’s not a fashion photographer,” I said—in vain, it turned out. My companion had already gotten up and walked to the door of the pub. I stood looking
at her, self-possessed and unquestioning. At last, it all made sense. Arabella hadn’t befriended me because she liked my red cowboy boots or missed New York. She’d befriended me because she thought—rather stupidly—I could advance her modeling career. The realization made me angry at, and a little sorry for, Arabella.

  On the benches outside, the girls were considering what colors to dye their hair when they reached old age. “I think white is so much prettier than old-lady blond,” Lily said, smiling up at me. “Don’t you, Mimi?”

  “Nah, I prefer bright blue,” I said and gratefully sat down next to her.

  “Mimi!” Arabella said. “Come along now, we haven’t much time!”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.” I turned to Lily. “Arabella wants me to come to her house and look at some of her modeling photographs, but I told her we have to leave for Harry’s play pretty soon.” I bulged out my eyes to convey my nonenthusiasm.

  “Oh, you lucked out,” Lily said to Arabella. “Mimi practically grew up in a darkroom. She has a well-trained eye.”

  “Are you sure there’s enough time?” I asked, rolling my eyes meaningfully at my friend.

  But Lily still didn’t get the hint and nodded her consent. “Of course,” she said—too loudly. “Just be back in an hour, OK? The play starts at seven, and it’s almost five. And have fun!”

  Nodding, I lingered for a second before, with a sigh of resignation, I stood and begrudgingly walked over to Arabella.

  Kings and Queens

  IT WASN’T MY FAULT, REALLY, IT WASN’T. I must have interrupted Arabella’s portfolio tour a dozen times to remind her of my plans with Lily, but my hostess wasn’t interested. “Oh, shelve it, would you,” she kept saying. “We’re almost to the end. Oh, here we are—this one’s fab. That was real Balenciaga couture, you know. Or some posh designer; my memory’s an absolute sieve when it comes to names. I do remember that I was too short for the skirt and I was perched on a chair. An assistant had to steady me from behind. You can almost make out his shadow.”

  By the time Arabella had displayed every glossy photograph ever taken of her, the sky outside had darkened. Rain misted my hair as we left her house and hurried back to Goldhurst Road. Though Arabella had insisted that she lived “just up the road,” we were at least a dozen winding, identical blocks from the Portuguese bar. When at last we got there, it was almost ten to seven, and the picnic tables outside were empty.

  I was too upset to speak, but Arabella didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, look,” she said easily after pulling her cell phone out of her black shoulder bag. “We’ve missed several calls.”

  “What?” I cried. “When?”

  Arabella shrugged. “Don’t know, I keep it on silent.” She squinted while listening to her messages. Then, after clicking the phone shut, she told me, “Right, Lily called.”

  “Oh, thank God. Can I hear the message?”

  “Oh, sorry, I always delete messages automatically—otherwise my voice mail’s a mess. But not to worry, she just said you should meet up with her when you got it.”

  “Did she say where?”

  Arabella screwed up her face. “Oh, bollocks. Why must I have the worst memory for names? She said the theater was somewhere on . . . Gold Street? Or Old Street?” Then, seeing my devastated expression, Arabella said, “I know. If it’s a play, surely TimeOut will have a listing for it. Shall we pop round to a newsagent and investigate?”

  “Yes—great idea!” I tried to high-five her, but Arabella seemed unfamiliar with this practice.

  We doubled back to Ladbroke Grove and bought the magazine from a small store filled floor to ceiling with various publications. Once outside, I scanned the theater listings again and again for Lambeth Nightingale, but Harry’s masterpiece was nowhere to be found. “Well, perhaps the production was too small to get in the listings,” Arabella said, closing the magazine. “There must be hundreds of shows that nobody writes about. Besides, if it’s all the way in Whitechapel, you couldn’t possibly get there in time. Why don’t you join me and the other girls at the pub?”

  I wanted to kill Arabella, and it took every ounce of self-control not to scream. Instead I told her I should probably just head back to Bridge House. When I got there, about half an hour later, I found Pippa at the kitchen table, nursing a glass of wine and-plowing through stacks of what looked like official BBC reports.

  “Any chance Lily called?” I asked without much hope.

  “Lily? Afraid not. Should she have done?” Pippa flipped a few pages and added, “If you fancy a glass of claret, I’ve just opened a bottle. I’d get up and pour you some, but I have loads of paperwork to get through and I’m absolutely knackered. Right after lunch, an old friend of mine came over in quite a state. She’s being hounded by the tabloids suddenly and can’t peel herself off the floor.”

  There was an inverse relation, I realized, between the attention span of most celebrity magazines and the lifespan of their repercussions. While my coworkers at A-ha! were in constant flux, always moving on to the next big scoop, the stories they—we—wrote stuck to their subjects like tattoos, and not the temporary birthday-party variety.

  “Not that I blame her,” Pippa said. “They can be barbaric, those magazines, absolutely inhumane.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “I work at one of them.”

  “That’s right, and for one of my oldest mates. You’d scarcely believe it, but before he became lord of all rubbish, Charlie used to be quite a formidable music critic—he wrote the most thoughtful, well-informed pieces. He’s lucky we knew him when.” Pippa smiled and returned to shuffling her papers.

  Seeing she wanted to be left alone, I excused myself and went upstairs to watch TV in the den. With precious Lulu curled up at my feet, I was soon swept away by a BBC courtroom drama about a schoolteacher with an underage love interest and a shady criminal record. The plot reminded, me of one of the Law and Order episodes that Quinn and I had watched together on Barrow Street, but these trial scenes took place in the Royal Courts, where lawyers wore woolly white wigs and addressed one another as “my esteemed colleague.”

  I waited for Lily until midnight, then gave up and went to bed. The next morning, I took a deep breath as I let myself into her room to excuse my disappearance. “Lily,” I said, “we came back and you were gone. Arabella deleted your message so I didn’t know where to go.”

  Lily didn’t say anything. Still beneath her covers, she flipped over to face the wall.

  “So did you go?”

  “Mmmph.”

  “Should I come back later, then, let you sleep?”

  “Do whatever you want,” Lily said, burying her head beneath a fluffy down pillow. She was clearly finished with the conversation.

  I remembered those grueling weeks last December when the contents of my diary were made public and my Baldwin friends disowned me. In comparison, missing Lambeth Nightingale seemed a very small transgression, but Lily was sensitive—sometimes, I thought, excessively so. Though too well raised to be openly rude to me, she was furious and I knew it. About an hour after our “conversation,” she left the house, claiming she had to spend the entire day in rehearsals. The rest of that overcast Sunday dragged on interminably. To pass the time, I took a long walk along the canal, all the way to King’s Cross. It took about two hours each way, but I was still home by the early afternoon, with nothing to do but worry. In my depressed state, I fell asleep early, before Lily had even come back.

  On Monday I e-mailed her overwrought apologies from the office but received two-word responses along the lines of Sure thing and What. Ever. She again stayed out late at rehearsals, and the next night, when I brought a tray of milk and McVittie’s digestive biscuits up to her room, she brusquely refused the treat: “Thanks, but I’m watching my weight. My show’s in three weeks.” She insisted she wasn’t mad at me, though she sure wasn’t acting unmad.

  Then, on Thursday, I scored an awesome invitation to the annual “Kings and Queens” gala at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts. Knowing that Lily couldn’t resist an event where transvestites dressed up as their favorite members of the British royal family, I decided to invite her in person. “Royals of the living or dead variety,” I said to tantalize her at breakfast the next morning, “which means Queen Victoria will be there and both Queen Elizabeths.”

  Her interest piqued, Lily looked up from her bowl of mushy Weetabix.

  “We’re talking all the King Georges and about a million Diana impersonators,” I went on. “Anthony says last year they borrowed all the wax royalty from Madame Tussaud’s.”

  “It does sound sort of funny,” Lily said. “Do you think we could go together?”

  I didn’t understand what she was getting at. “Obviously, I’m inviting you.”

  “You promise you won’t leave me stranded by the coat check for two hours?”

  “Oh, Lily, I’m so—” I stopped myself. I knew how Lily operated: the less said, the better. “How’s this for commitment? I’ll leave work early and pick you up at school so we can walk to the ICA together.”

  “That works,” Lily said, putting down her spoon. “The ICA is only a five-minute walk from St. Botolph’s. My last class ends at seven. Can you be there by five after?”

  “Not a second later. I swear on all the enchiladas in Mexico.”

  On the way out of the A-ha! office that afternoon, I declined Anthony’s offer of a Tube companion. Though tempted by the prospect of goofing off in the Underground with him, I couldn’t risk being dragged into a pub for some “nerve poison” (as he called his customary pre-party cocktail). I had to be on time for Lily.

  The sky was a dazzling blue when I disembarked at the Covent Garden station. Having gotten there half an hour early, I walked through the adjoining shopping arcade, a slate gray structure filled with expensive soap and accessories shops. On the brick street outside, jugglers were performing for groups of tourists. I wound my way to St. Botolph’s Theatre Academy, situated in a narrow Georgian house on Long Acre. I was still early, so I just sat outside on the steps, contentedly watching the passersby board the bus, their shopping bags swinging every which way. When Lily emerged from the building at five after seven, it was with a forgiving grin on her face. I smiled back and flashed her my VIP passes to the fancy transvestite shindig.