Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Yeah. Well, I’ve kind of moved in with him. With Vaughn. The bathroom pipes froze and the water in the toilet bowl iced up and someone still peed and turned the ice yellow,’ Grace rambled, as she carefully squeezed past Lily who was motionless in the doorway. ‘It was one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Eeew,’ leaked out of Lily’s mouth before she could rein it back in. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘Vaughn has a guest sui—a spare room so I’m staying there for a bit. Hey, I saw Laetitia the other night and she asked after you.’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t seen her for ages,’ Lily said a little wistfully. But then she remembered that Grace was a terrible person who deserved all the yellow ice that God saw fit to send her way. ‘She was more your mate than mine,’ she clipped out. ‘I don’t want to get into anything with you, Gracie. I just came to give you the message.’

  ‘I know,’ Grace sighed. ‘But nice to catch up.’

  Lily rubbed her belly again, which seemed to have replaced tugging on a silky lock of her hair as her new nervous gesture. ‘You’ve still got my blue tunic,’ she said, before beetling off to the safety of the beauty department.

  As Grace knocked quietly on Kiki’s office door, she could feel panic welling up. What had she done wrong now? Actually she hadn’t done anything wrong in weeks, which meant that Kiki must have been saving up all Grace’s minor transgressions for one gigantic bollocking.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’ Grace stood at the door and tried hard not to shake, as Kiki, Lucie and Courtney all stared at her like she’d had a spider’s web tattooed on to her face during her lunch-hour.

  ‘We have a problem,’ Kiki purred, and it was hard to judge what kind of mood she was in, though there was a cut-glass tumbler on her desk that would make a really good missile. ‘And for once, you’re actually the solution, hard as it is to believe.’

  ‘I am?’ Grace stood in front of Kiki’s desk with her hands behind her back so no one could see her twisting her fingers nervously. ‘Do you need me to call something in?’

  ‘It’s Nadja Stasova - we’re trying to book her for the main May fashion story, but her agency says that she’ll only shoot for Vogue.’

  Grace pressed her lips together so she didn’t start smiling. Nadja was constantly filling Grace in on her plans for total world domination and how they didn’t include shooting for magazines without international editions. ‘Is a waste of time if they not syndicate the pictures,’ she’d sniffed after snubbing the Editor of an American magazine at an opening in New York.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Grace said, trying to sound surprised. ‘Do you want me to start pulling in comp cards for other girls with a similar look?’

  ‘No, Grace, I don’t,’ Kiki said irritably. ‘My sources tell me that you know this jumped-up little tart socially.’

  Yes, but she lets me call her Nadja. ‘Well, yeah, her boyfriend knows um . . . mine . . .’ Grace ground to a halt as she always did when she tried to define exactly what Vaughn was, but Kiki’s glare had managed to circumvent the Botox and was making her look positively demonic. A casual observer would never have guessed that only a few hours before, she’d been giving Grace a tutorial on cleavage and cocktail dresses. ‘We’ve hung out a few times.’

  ‘You have her personal number?’

  Nadja had programmed it into Grace’s BlackBerry under H for hot bitch. ‘I don’t know her that well,’ Grace lied, because when her Vaughn life merged with her Skirt life, things always got complicated. ‘Maybe you could try her booker again.’

  Kiki didn’t even blink. ‘You phone her right now and get her to agree to the shoot and I’ll let you style an advertorial. She’s just bagged the new Prada campaign and they’re making noises about only advertising with Elle and Vogue this year.’

  It wasn’t like Kiki to offer Grace any sweeteners. She was obviously desperate. Grace was all set to give serious phone, when she remembered Vaughn telling her that she had to make the most of opportunities that came her way, and this was an opportunity with a caps lock O.

  Grace surreptitiously wiped her sweating palms on her arse, because hadn’t Vaughn also said that she was crap at follow-through? ‘I don’t mind phoning Nadja, but I’d really like to style the pictures for the Hot Trends pages.’ She tried to say this without a hint of anything that might sound like whining.

  Kiki picked up the tumbler thoughtfully and Grace instinctively ducked but she just took a sip of water, then placed it safely back on its coaster. ‘Are you trying to blackmail me, Grace?’

  ‘No! I just . . . I thought . . .’

  ‘I’m not letting you loose on actual models. You can shoot the accessories still-lifes for Snapshot and if you get Nadja Stasova, I’ll let you assist and give you a styling credit.’ She tapped her lacquered nails on the desk. ‘Of course, if you don’t get Nadja then that’s a whole other conundrum, isn’t it?’

  But it turned out that when Grace phoned Nadja, she was in the midst of a very long hair appointment and only too happy to hear from ‘my little Gracie with the coloured tights’.

  Grace had to suffer a long diatribe about how the girl doing Nadja’s hair had taken four attempts before she managed to mix the dye to the exact shade on the swatch Nadja had supplied, until it was time to plead, implore, and if that failed, cry loud noisy tears. Sometimes Grace found that having no dignity worked really well.

  ‘I get the cover, yes?’ Nadja wanted to know.

  ‘Well, no, but it’s the main fashion story, twenty pages, and we’re shooting in Barcelona. We can hang out and drink Sangria and go shopping.’

  Grace heard Nadja snapping at someone. ‘They have Cavalli in Barcelona?’

  ‘Lots of very cool shops and a great vintage market.’ Grace tried to seal the deal.

  ‘I never wear second-hand clothes. Make sure they fly me first class and I have best room in best hotel. We share and have a sleepover.’

  Grace didn’t know whether to feel elated or scared. ‘You’ll do it then?’

  ‘Call my booker and she tell you my new day rate. Is very expensive. And Sergei and me we in London soon so you take me out to the cool places. I go now before this bitch ruins my hair. Ciao, like they say in Spain.’

  Later, when Grace told Vaughn, he laughed and pinched her cheek. ‘See? I knew you had it in you.’ He was all smiles like she’d just discovered the next Damien Hirst. ‘Leave it a couple of months and I’ll give you some pointers on demanding a promotion and a pay rise.’

  ‘I might cock up my shoots,’ she said hastily. ‘Probably will. Kiki’s so picky about still-lifes and I’m going to have to juggle Lucie and Nadja when we—’

  Vaughn clamped a hand over her mouth. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Your biggest downfall is your defeatism.’ He pressed his thumb against Grace’s bottom lip and his lashes swept down when Grace nibbled at the tip of it. ‘You have an excellent eye, and if you can put together an outfit then I don’t see the problem with shooting shoes or bags or whatever’s in this month.’

  Grace kissed his hand before pulling away. She prodded the little pile of DVDs on the coffee-table with her toe. ‘You can watch your boring German film while I sketch out some rough layouts,’ she decided, ignoring Vaughn’s faint moan of protest. ‘And then we need to talk about this party for Noah. I was thinking end of March, which is only three weeks away.’ She picked up her notebook with the true fervour of the list geek that she was, and turned to a fresh page. ‘How do you feel about sausage and mash instead of canapés?’

  Her first shoot turned out to be rather an anti-climax for something that Grace had hungered for ever since she’d started at Skirt. There’d been a sticky moment when a courier had gone MIA with some really expensive purses, and Lucie had barely glanced at Grace’s painstaking sketches, and didn’t feel the need to come to the studio in case something went horribly wrong. But the photographer did what he was told, which was rarer than being fast-tracked up the queue for a Hermès Birkin, and tho
ugh Grace waited anxiously to be bawled out for using cupcakes and fondant fancies as props to complement the new spring colours, it never happened. Instead the page layouts suddenly appeared on the gigantic flat-plan that took up a large part of one wall and Lucie decided that it would free her up to talk on the phone to her friends and book spa appointments, if Grace oversaw the accessory still-lifes for every issue. Grace had never thought getting ahead was so simple, but apparently she’d been wrong.

  The party planning was going really well too, after Vaughn had loaned her Piers to run round East London looking at potential venues, interviewing DJs and commissioning graffiti artists to paint backdrops. Grace suspected that Vaughn was to Piers what Kiki was to her, but without the fashion advice. Either way, he was only too happy to do the heavy lifting and Vaughn was happy because Piers was out of his hair for a week or so and Grace was happy too.

  Grace didn’t like to dwell on her happiness, which she thought of as a Ready brek-style warm glow, encasing her in a little cocoon where the bad stuff couldn’t get to her. But she was the happiest she’d ever been, not that she had a lot to compare it with. Life was good, really good - and Vaughn was a huge part of that. Grace could hardly believe that he’d become all things to her in a few short weeks: lover, confidant and friend. Maybe even her best friend, because the one not so good thing about her life was the Lily-shaped hole in the middle of it - but Lily would crack soon, Grace could tell. Then her happiness really would be complete, which was a scary thought, and as soon as she’d thunk it, Grace knew she’d jinxed her new-found joy.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise then to get a phone call later that afternoon from her grandmother, demanding to know why a parcel of yarn she’d sent to Grace had been returned with Not known at this address stamped on it.

  Having to tell her grandmother that she’d moved two months ago and had forgotten to tell her, made that little warm glow disappear pretty damn quick.

  ‘I don’t understand how we can speak every week and yet the fact that you’d moved house seemed to slip your mind. Really, dear, you met this man five minutes ago and now you’re living with him,’ her grandmother said, as if she understood only too well and didn’t like it at all. ‘I think it’s very rash.’

  ‘It’s been five, nearly six months,’ Grace pointed out. ‘He had a spare room and he’s away on business a lot so it just made sense when I had no hot water.’

  ‘So you sleep in your own room, do you?’ Scepticism fairly oozed down the phone line.

  ‘Please, can we not even go there?’ Grace begged, because her grandmother knew she was deflowered but chose to file it in her selective memory, along with the whole Rock Hudson turning out to be gay thing. ‘I don’t think either of us really wants to talk about that. Vaughn’s place is huge and—’

  ‘Vaughn?’

  ‘Yes, Vaughn. That’s his name, Gran.’

  ‘It sounds like a surname.’

  Grace put her hand over the mouthpiece so she could sigh. ‘It is his surname. He goes by only one name, like Madonna.’

  ‘But what’s his first name?’

  Vaughn’s first name wasn’t important, except that Grace didn’t know what it was, and when she tried to explain that to her grandmother, it made Vaughn seem like some sketchy figure who could torture Grace for days, then bury her body in his back garden and nobody would ever find out. Her grandmother was the queen of worst-case scenarios.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of you living with some man that I’ve never even met, Gracie. And when I think of some of your previous boyfriends - well, you’re not the best judge of character, are you?’

  Grace hadn’t introduced her grandmother to any boyfriends in the last five years so it was kind of unfair to bring up her teen romances. ‘He’s very nice,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll bring him down for Sunday lunch some time soon.’ Some time never.

  ‘Not good enough,’ her grandmother stated. ‘Grandy’s going on a golfing weekend this Friday so I’m coming to London.’

  ‘This weekend is really tricky, and . . .’

  ‘I’ll get the eleven o’clock train on Saturday, and you and this Vaughn fellow will meet me for lunch. You can send me one of those text thingies on the phone to let me know the details.’ It was her grandmother’s ‘don’t fuck with me’ voice that she’d used to great effect when the local cinema had tried to stop their Silver Screen concession rate for OAPs. There was no point in arguing.

  chapter twenty-nine

  Vaughn booked a table at J Sheekey because it had been his grandmother’s favourite restaurant, but that didn’t mean he was completely on board with the lunch arrangements. In fact, he’d tried his best to wriggle out of it. First he’d muttered something about possibly being in New York, before he remembered that he was an important art dealer who didn’t have to deal with people’s grandmothers if he didn’t want to. ‘It’s out of the question, Grace,’ he’d said flatly. ‘In fact, it goes against the entire spirit of our agreement.’

  ‘But she doesn’t know we have an agreement. All she knows is that her beloved granddaughter is shacking up with some man who doesn’t have a first name . . .’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s James.’ Grace had simultaneously gaped at him and spilled tea down her new top. ‘And if you ever call me by that name, I’ll have you out on the street faster than you can blink.’

  ‘James? I thought it was something really awful like Jethro or Jebediah. Don’t know why you’re so weird about it.’

  ‘It was my father’s name.’ Five words, but there was a world of agony in Vaughn’s absolutely deadpan delivery, like he didn’t trust himself to put even an ounce of feeling into them. Grace had taken the hint and had launched into a whole series of inducements from sticky toffee pudding and blowjobs to watching back-to-back German films, until Vaughn had finally capitulated.

  ‘I’ll see you there against my better judgement,’ he sighed unhappily on Saturday morning when Grace left to pick up her grandmother at Victoria because the thought of her braving the tube on her own and getting accosted by chuggers and dodgy Eastern European beggars made Grace break out in a cold sweat. It also meant her grandmother would have plenty of time to harangue her about living in sin, but them were the breaks.

  Fortunately her grandmother had had an argy bargy with one of her rambling buddies, which meant she talked about that all the way to Leicester Square without pausing. Vaughn was waiting for them in the restaurant foyer, hanging back as her grandmother looked around suspiciously. Once she’d decided that the place passed muster, she allowed a server to take her coat. She was wearing the navy-blue Betty Barclay suit again - so she meant business. Grace threw Vaughn a sidelong glance, relieved that he was wearing a suit and not his usual weekend jeans and jumper combo.

  ‘Gran, this is Vaughn. Vaughn, this is my grandmother, Jean.’

  They shook hands, because her grandmother’s generation didn’t do air kisses, and then sized each other up like two dogs warily circling each other, before one of them decided to go for the throat.

  ‘Grace has told me a lot about you,’ Vaughn said politely, his face wearing a smiling Vaughn mask that didn’t even look like him. ‘It’s good to finally meet you.’

  ‘Well, she’s told me very little about you,’ her grandmother replied because she’d survived a war, one stillbirth, a daughter who’d got knocked up at seventeen and ten years of a Labour government, and she didn’t take shit from anyone.

  Vaughn did his best to be charming and deferential but Grace could tell from her grandmother’s tightly pursed lips that she thought he was smarmy. When he suggested that they had caviar as a starter, that was profligate, which was right up there with adultery in her book.

  Thankfully, the smoked haddock put her in a better mood and Grace carefully steered the conversation around to walking holidays abroad and what she should get her grandfather for his birthday. Vaughn remembered to adhere to Grace’s list of strictly forbidden topics, which included politics and an
ything relating to Grace’s degree (or lack thereof) and her job.

  By the time they were waiting for their puddings, Grace allowed herself to relax slightly, leaning back in her chair until her grandmother folded her napkin, told Grace not to slouch and fixed Vaughn with the beadiest of eyes.

  ‘So, how old are you?’ she asked him baldly.

  ‘I’m forty-one. Eighteen years older than Grace,’ he added with the merest hint of a challenge, while Grace was forced to readjust the number in her head, which had hovered around thirty-seven. Forty-one seemed a lot older than thirty-seven, but then Vaughn was older than her. It was a simple truth - and the four extra years didn’t matter that much.

  ‘And I suspect you’ve been married at least once before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because if you have children with Grace you’ll be in your sixties before they’re even thinking of leaving home.’