Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  And Grace had just been imagining that her gaucheness was going to pass unnoticed. ‘Did you hear what I just said about the drinks thing being totally revoked?’

  ‘Give me your exact dates.’

  ‘God, you’re pushy.’ Grace sighed without much bite, because there was something to be said for a man who got what he wanted and didn’t just wheedle and whine until she did it for him. Like, say, Liam.

  ‘Determined,’ Vaughn corrected firmly. ‘Dates: sometime before the end of the year would be preferable.’

  Grace rattled off the relevant information after a few false starts because Kiki had been changing the dates and times on an hourly basis. ‘I probably won’t return your calls,’ she warned him. ‘Just so you know.’

  ‘Of course you won’t,’ he agreed cheerfully. ‘It’s very late, you should get some sleep. Being tired obviously makes you cranky.’

  And then he rang off before Grace could give him an example of just how cranky it made her.

  chapter five

  When she was little, Grace used to think that there really was a big apple hidden somewhere in New York. She imagined a maze in Central Park, and glowing somewhere right at the very heart of it was a golden apple waiting for her to take great, sweet bites of it.

  But she was older now. Not wiser, but definitely jaded. She knew that the golden apple of her childhood was false advertising, but still it would have been nice to get to Central Park and see for herself. And it would have been even nicer to do all the touristy things that Vaughn had sneered at, like taking the Circle Line tour or falling down on her knees and kissing the ground outside Bergdorf Goodman and eating cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery and going drinking at this bar that was styled like a fifties beauty parlour and all the million other things that Grace had promised herself she’d do when she finally took Manhattan. But the only remotely touristy thing she’d done was seen the steam rising up from the manhole covers just like it did in the movies and been verbally abused by numerous cab drivers as she forgot which way the street numbers ran.

  So far, New York had been three days of fetching, carrying, faxing and phoning. That was usually before Grace even got to whichever studio they were shooting at. Then she’d steam clothes, coo over skittish models and put out every single one of Kiki’s fires. Grace had already resigned herself to the fact that her boss’s voice would never register below a scream for the duration of the trip.

  Grace was currently star-fished on the roof of the Industria Studio Complex in the Meatpacking District, which was the centre of the NY fashion universe and only a hop and a five-minute dash to the Marc Jacobs shop on Bleecker Street in the West Village, not that Grace had visited its hallowed portals. And she was also smoking, because she’d had to hurl herself back in the loving arms of the Marlboro Lights as an alternative to a stress-induced heart attack. It was either that or crying - and Grace knew that once she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  The day had got off to a good start. Grace had loved the cavernous space that was Studio 5 with its vaulted ceiling and the sun beaming in through the huge skylights. It even had a decent-sized dressing room and not the usual alcove with just enough room for a clothes rail and a really skinny model. Kiki had a breakfast meeting so Grace could wolf down several cherry Danishes without being screamed at for having grease smears on her fingers. And Michael, the photographer’s junior assistant, was a foxy, tousle-haired boy who recognised her as a kindred spirit from the global put-upon assistants’ club.

  Even the huge number of satin dresses that had all needed to be painstakingly steamed to get the creases out couldn’t put a damper on her day. The stereo had blared early Motown, Michael had totally been checking out her arse in her skinny jeans; all was right in Grace’s world.

  When Grace had first started coming to shoots, she’d been amazed at the vast number of people involved. Then she’d been amazed that they didn’t actually do any work but lounged on the leather sofas that every photo studio had, drinking coffee and leafing through German fashion magazines. Today was no exception. There were two make-up artists, two hair stylists - none of whom had even opened their cases. The photographer had two assistants. There were three guys from the studio fiddling with Coloramas and computers. Two catering assistants. One handyman. And a fat bloke in a baseball cap who’d wandered in and started making himself a sandwich but didn’t seem to have anything to do with anyone.

  The day had started to career downhill soon after Kiki had arrived and proceeded to spend hours arguing with the photographer over the position of a teeny, tiny sidelight. Grace had made a mental note to keep out of her way as she wrangled the models: three lanky teenagers who had collective annual earnings of £5 million and about five brain cells apiece. Grace had spent the next couple of hours on her knees pinning hems, helping them on with their shoes and holding mobile phones and cigarette lighters and generally genuflecting at regular intervals.

  It was the same old, same old, but at least Grace was doing it in New York, rather than in some draughty studio on an industrial estate near King’s Cross, which automatically made it more exciting. Even when one of the models had a high-volume argument with her boyfriend on her iPhone, then locked herself in the toilet, Grace had managed to keep her cool. Or rather she’d got Lucie to coax the girl out with the promise of some Xanax, after all of her own pleading and threats had fallen flat.

  Finally there were no more frocks left to steam, no more models to pander to, and Grace had just been looking forward to sitting unobtrusively on one of the sofas so she could watch the shoot, when Posy had hurried over with a grim look on her face. ‘Gracie, Kiki wants you,’ she said urgently. ‘There’s a problem with one of the Marchesa gowns.’

  The words ‘Kiki’ and ‘problem’ in the same sentence didn’t bode well. Grace hurried into the dressing room to find Kiki tapping the floor with one pointy toe. ‘What colour is this?’ she demanded without preamble, carelessly grabbing a handful of dress that Grace had spent ages steaming.

  ‘Red?’ Grace asked uncertainly, because Kiki liked trick questions almost as much as oxygen facials.

  ‘It’s not red - it’s scarlet.’ Kiki thrust the dress at Grace. ‘I told you to call in the crimson!’

  ‘It is the crimson,’ she said, without first weighing up the pros and cons of disagreeing with Kiki. ‘It looks scarlet but it photographs as crimson. I had a whole discussion with the publicist about it.’

  ‘It’s not the same dress I specifically marked in the LookBook,’ Kiki growled, which was a nice change from the continual screaming. Maybe that was why Grace was lulled into a sense of false security and kept making words come out of her mouth. ‘It’s practically orange when I wanted a bluey red!’

  ‘Look, it’s got the same beading on the bodice,’ Grace enthused eagerly. ‘Same gathers, even has the pleating detail at the back. It’s Number Seven in the LookBook - I’ll show you.’

  ‘Are you arguing with me?’ Each word an ice cube tumbling down Grace’s back. ‘I just wanted to be clear, because after two decades in fashion, I think I know the difference between crimson and scarlet.’

  ‘I’m not saying that you’re wrong,’ Grace clarified quickly, when actually she should have just shut the fuck up. ‘Just that the dress photographs a different colour, and if you let me get the LookBook . . .’

  Grace had been one nanosecond away from rummaging on the counter for the right brochure, only to be stopped in her tracks by a box of costume jewellery flying through the air. She just had time to think that Kiki normally had too much respect for Kenneth J Lane to use any of his pieces as projectile missiles, then she’d ducked.

  It was too late. A chunky ring had glanced off the bridge of her nose and a bracelet narrowly missed her right eye, but a turquoise, tendrilly necklace hit her square on the cheek. The sharp edges of the strands whipped and scratched enough to surprise a squeaked, ‘Fuck!’ out of Grace as the necklace clattered to the floor in several separate pieces
.

  Kiki had the decency to look ever so slightly shocked as Grace clutched her cheek and felt something wet coat her fingers. Kiki might have looked even more shocked if she hadn’t had her biannual Botox a week before. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that. It barely touched you,’ she said in a voice that wasn’t quite so filled with loathing. ‘I really can’t deal with you right now, Grace.’ She stalked out and left Grace staring in dismay at her bleeding face in the mirror. It wasn’t a gushing wound that required stitches but it still counted as actual maiming.

  ‘Shit! Are you all right?’

  Grace turned to see Posy standing in the doorway with a gratifyingly horrified expression on her face.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what kind of bloody red that dress is. She’ll get one of the art team to Photoshop it anyway.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Posy was all right when the rest of the fashion team weren’t around. She gave Grace a quick, surreptitious hug. ‘You know Kiki really gets her bitch on when she’s shooting.’

  ‘God, I always have to open my big mouth and make a bad situation even worse,’ Grace lamented. ‘And now I’ll have to call the press office and tell them that we’ve damaged some of the jewellery.’

  ‘Actually, Gracie, I think you’d better stay out of Kiki’s way for at least an hour,’ Posy advised. She rummaged through the debris on the counter top. ‘Look, take my ciggies and make yourself invisible for a while. I’ll get Lucie to talk Kiki round. I think she’s got some more Xanax.’

  And so there Grace was, lying on the roof with gravel digging into her back as she tried to remember how to blow smoke rings. She wasn’t going to be allowed to watch the shoot now, which sucked. Sometimes she thought it was the only part of her job that she liked, apart from the clothes, which never argued back.

  Grace loved standing on the sidelines, watching the nuts and bolts of the production - the ornate sets they built which were usually held together with staples and sticky tape, the models seamlessly switching poses in clothes that she’d painstakingly steamed and pressed, the photographer seeing something extraordinary through the camera lens that wasn’t apparent to anyone else. It all seemed like a lot of effort for not much and then Grace would sneak a look at the Polaroids and there would be this fantasy, fairytale world of beautiful girls in beautiful outfits. And she’d remember why she was sticking this out; so far down on the fashion food chain that she wasn’t even an amoeba - maybe just the waste product of an amoeba. But one day, if she was really good and managed to get out from under Kiki’s Prada jackboot, she’d be the one who made the fairytales happen. The one who got to sprinkle magic dust over the whole mind-numbing process. Who’d create these inviolate, unworldly images so that girls like she used to be would rip out the magazine pages and stick them on their suburban bedroom walls and to hell with the Blu-Tack stains.

  Grace drifted back from her very favourite daydream, the one where she shot couture at a Roller Derby, to find her phone ringing. If it was Kiki or someone else from downstairs bitching about anything, she was going to order a bottle of Valium and some razor blades on room service when she got back to the hotel, and expenses be damned.

  She groped for it one-handed. ‘What?’

  There was a startled cough. ‘Grace? It’s Vaughn.’

  Grace sat up as her mood went from dejected to excited to nervous and back to excited in nanoseconds. ‘Oh! Hey! Hi! How are you?’

  ‘All the better for you sounding so pleased to hear from me.’

  Grace turned on her side, so she could roll her eyes more effectively without sun glare. She really had to start engaging her brain cells before she opened her mouth. ‘Been to any good gallery openings?’

  ‘One or two and several very bad ones. Talking of which, are you free tomorrow night?’

  ‘Hang on,’ she mumbled so she could light another cigarette and not check her schedule. ‘What’s happening tomorrow night?’

  ‘You owe me a drink and then I’m going to take you to dinner,’ Vaughn said smoothly. ‘Maybe Pastis - I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for right now.’

  Grace didn’t want to be impressed, but she so was.

  ‘But first, there’s an exhibition opening. It will probably be dull as mud, but that can’t be helped.’

  There was another pause because for the life of her, Grace didn’t know how to respond. This kind of situation had never come up before.

  ‘So, Grace, how’s your diary looking?’

  She made some rapid mental calculations. A friend of a friend’s boyfriend was DJ-ing at a bar in Williamsburg, which meant no free food and one comped drink if she was lucky. ‘Well, maybe I could shift a couple of things around,’ she hedged, because she didn’t want to sound too eager.

  ‘Good. I’ll pick you up at eight,’ Vaughn said. ‘It would be helpful to know where you’re staying.’

  Something was seriously wrong when Grace couldn’t muster a snappy comeback. ‘Soho Grand,’ she answered dully. ‘Y’know, I could just say thank you for the bag and then we wouldn’t have to—’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

  Half an hour later when she was enjoying her enforced exile to the dressing room and silently contemplating the chipped polish on her big toe, she realised he hadn’t even waited for her to say yes.

  Yesterday, the cut on Grace’s cheek had simply been an angry red mark, but during the night it had scabbed over nicely. The thing that made it the best wound in the history of work-related accidents was the look of horror on Kiki’s face the next morning as she stared at it in all its crusty glory.

  ‘I just wanted to thank you for all your hard work this week,’ she said carefully, both eyes fixed firmly on Grace as if she expected her to bolt at any loud noises. ‘You’ve really been a star.’

  Kiki was never going to apologise - she just didn’t roll that way - but this was the closest she’d ever come and Grace was going to savour every last sweet second of it.

  ‘Just doing my job.’ Grace absent-mindedly reached up to prod at the cut with the tip of one finger and allowed herself one tiny, ouchladen shudder. Anything else would have been overkill. ‘So, what dresses do you want for the first shot?’

  ‘Why don’t we get Posy to do all the prep work and you can help me with the styling?’ Kiki suggested, as she patted Grace’s shoulder without visibly wincing. ‘And I want you out of here no later than five tonight. You deserve some time off.’

  Grace had had many hours to whip herself into a state of near-hysteria about spending the evening with Vaughn. The sheer giddy thrill of wining and fine dining had slowly ebbed away to be replaced with white-knuckled terror at the thought of Vaughn staring at her and making sarcastic remark after sarcastic remark while she babbled and burbled. Finally at dawn o’clock, Grace had come to the happy conclusion that Kiki would have her slaving over a warm iron all day and most of the night too, and she’d have no choice but to leave Vaughn an apologetic message and bail on him. Because assignations with arrogant older men were one thing when they led to Marc Jacobs bags, but a dinner date was something else entirely - and who knew where that would lead. Nowhere good.

  However, Kiki was as good as her word and as the studio clock edged towards five, Grace was frog-marched out of the door by an indignant Posy.

  ‘Kiki says you have to go now,’ she informed Grace sourly. ‘And I have to pack up all the returns. God, I wish she’d inflict GBH on me occasionally!’

  Grace tried to keep the fear at bay as she swiped at her legs with a razor, while she lay up to her neck in Malin+Goetz’s Bergamot-scented bubbles. At least she was getting a night out in New York instead of returning clothes to designers’ ateliers until the only place that was open and that she could afford was the Duane Reade on Broadway where she’d buy a bag of Doritos and a jar of salsa dip for dinner. So why not get gussied up and have her first square meal in six days and get to see the bright lights of the big city in the company of an enigmatic and not-so-bad-looking man who
probably didn’t even look at the prices on the menu? Why the hell not? And just like that, she was excited all over again.

  Half an hour later, Grace stepped back to stare down her reflection in the mirror. Her dress for that evening was a raspberry chiffon number from Moschino Cheap & Chic, which she’d ‘borrowed’ from the rail of shoot clothes in her room. It was a demure, polite frock in theory. But there was something special about designer dresses that could silk purse even the most pig-like of ears. It rippled down Grace’s body, which hadn’t seen the inside of a gym for several months, skimmed politely over her tummy and clung gently to the curve of her hips in a way that was suggestive and promising. But not, repeat not, slutty.

  Even the colour did wonders for her skin, transforming it from bedsheet white to the creamiest shade of porcelain. Or maybe it was just the lighting in the room. Her hair was already pinned up with a handful of sparkly clips so Grace concentrated on applying a sweep of liquid eyeliner and some lipgloss that was exactly two shades darker than the dress. If she wore anything brighter, then Vaughn was bound to get the wrong idea.