No, not her mom’s. No turning back. Move on or die, that was Evie’s motto.
There was only one person who would take her in. Only one person she could bear to ask for a favour.
She knew she couldn’t afford a car service. All she had was the cash in her wallet and the stash she’d been keeping in the cistern – the cops-are-coming, get-out-of-town money. She didn’t want to dip into that unless she absolutely had to. So, dragging the suitcases half a block, then coming back for the pole, sweating under the heavy coats, Evie lumbered gradually along Harrison, heading for the West Side Highway. Tribeca, the best place in the world to live if you belonged here, gleaming loft buildings inhabited by black-clad multi-millionaire hipsters, film stars and Masters of the Universe like Benny. Superb restaurants, hip boutiques, bars where a glass of champagne could set you back twenty-five bucks easy.
But it was the worst place in the world if you didn’t have the money to live the lifestyle. The glances Evie got were horrified, then blank, eyes forward. No one wanted to know. She was a bag lady in one of the richest areas in the world. She might as well have had leprosy.
She tried her cards at a Chase Manhattan branch, but it not only denied access, it ate them up, one after the other. Evie watched the machine swallow her plastic and felt her blood pressure spike with fury. Those precious plastic rectangles, one black, one gold, had been her passport to Benny’s world of luxury and ease. All gone now, all cleaned out.
She set her chin and reached down for her suitcase handles once more. Only one more block to go, manoeuvring round FedEx trucks and loading bays, black garbage bags, deliveries for warehouses close to the river. Traffic blared down the West Side Highway: Mack trucks, yellow cabs, limos, private cars, weaving in and out at high speed, chasing each other’s tails down to Battery Park.
Streetwise in the ways of New York, Evie propped her suitcases on the sidewalk, her pole beside them, and waited. Various yellow cabs slowed down, but she shook her head at all of them; she was holding out for an illegal, unmetered, gypsy cab. Eventually, a battered Lincoln Town Car veered across two lanes of traffic, causing a riotous blare of horns from the trucks it had cut off, and squealed to a halt next to Evie.
‘Where you going?’ the driver, a sweaty middle-aged guy, called over the roar of traffic.
‘Bushwick, ’ Evie said reluctantly.
He looked her up and down.
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘I wish. I really do.’
‘Seventy bucks, ’ he said, looking at her handbag, her expensive suitcases.
Evie stepped closer so he would focus on her pretty face and not her Vuittons.
‘Hey, don’t go by those! They’re all knock-offs, I bought them on Canal!’ she lied. ‘I got forty, that’s all.’
‘Forty to Bushwick in rush hour? You are kidding.’
She’d known he wouldn’t take that. But always start low and bargain up was her rule. She sighed, pushing back her hair, letting the coats fall open so he got a good look at her body in the clinging T-shirt: she hadn’t had time to put on a bra.
‘I could maybe manage fifty, but that’s it, ’ she said helplessly. ‘Come on, buddy, help me out, won’t you?’
He groaned and popped the trunk.
‘Just cause you’re cute, and it’s change-over shift time, ’ he said. ‘Fifty it is.’
Evie’s legs were strong and flexible as steel, her abs taut and powerful. Lifting and hoisting the cases into the capacious trunk of the Lincoln and arranging her pole crosswise on top of them was no big deal for her. She slid into the back and the driver pulled into traffic, the horns blaring again because he hadn’t bothered to indicate.
Evie didn’t even notice: this was standard for New York. She was fully occupied rummaging in her big Tod’s bag for her phone. There was still a dialling tone; she scrolled through the stored numbers, hit one, and heard, with great relief, that it was ringing. Thank God, Carin hadn’t had her service cut off yet.
Disappointingly, though, it went straight to answerphone. Lawrence must be training someone, his phone turned off.
‘Babe?’ she said. ‘It’s me, Evie. I need to crash at yours for a little while, OK? I’m on my way there now in a cab. Are you coming back soon? Can you call me when you get this? I just don’t want to be sitting out there for hours, you know? Call me, OK?’
Evie slumped back in the seat, the coats itchy and uncomfortable with the sweat she’d worked up prickling at her. The driver was swinging the car up the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. Evie practically never crossed the bridges that connected Manhattan to the rest of New York, or, God forbid, Jersey. Why would she need to? She was Manhattan born and bred. And now she was taking all her worldly possessions to Bushwick, of all godforsaken places. She had become bridge and tunnel, like the rest of the New Yorkers who dreamed of living in Manhattan but had been priced out decades ago. They had to catch the subway or the Jersey PATH or drive in over the glittering bridges – Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg – for the hip restaurants and bars and clubs that had the cachet of being on Manhattan, the tiny sliver of island packed in so tight with seething humanity you often wondered why it didn’t sink under the sheer weight of people and traffic and fifty-storey steel skyscrapers.
Bridge and tunnel. It was so depressing Evie couldn’t stand to think about it.
They turned onto the BQE – the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway – firing the Lincoln Town Car through tiny gaps between swaying trucks and coaches heading for the airport. It was such an ugly highway that Evie closed her eyes, but even when she opened them a few minutes later, as they raced down Metropolitan Avenue, with its burned-out lots and seedy storefronts, the view was no better. God, she couldn’t believe what she was being reduced to.
All she knew about where Lawrence lived was that he rented a room, or a space – he hadn’t been specific, and she hadn’t cared enough to ask – in a warehouse building that wasn’t zoned for domestic use. But when the Lincoln Town Car pulled up outside the building, even the driver looked dubious.
‘You sure this is the right address?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, ’ she said, heaving a deep sigh. ‘He’s got some illegal warehouse let.’
Evie tried Lawrence’s number again. Still nothing. Reluctantly, she climbed out of the car. The front of the building looked like a prison: steel bars, grey industrial paint. The number was scrawled on the steel door with what looked like Magic Marker, and the buzzers by its side were so chipped and scratched Evie wasn’t even sure that they worked. She knew Lawrence was on the top floor, so she tried the top buzzer, but could hear nothing inside the building.
It was as grim and forbidding as if it were derelict, totally uninhabited. On either side were similar buildings, one set back behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Behind it, Evie could see a pair of Alsatians on thick chains, lying slumped by a corrugated-iron shed. She pressed the buzzer again, and, waiting for some reply, she made a 360-degree turn, surveying the street. Across the road was a steelworks, a pair of huge gates swung open, and, staring into the dark interior, she could see a group of men hooking a rusty-looking piece of metal onto a chain hoist. Whines of factory machines, big electric saws, scraped through the air. The street itself was filthy with litter and discarded drink cans.
Evie shuddered.
‘Hey!’ called a woman’s voice from up above.
Evie tilted back her head to see who it was: one of the big windows had been pushed open on the top floor, and a girl was craning out of it.
‘What do you want?’ she called down.
‘I’m a friend of Lawrence’s, ’ Evie yelled back. ‘I need to come in and dump my stuff.’
‘You’re a friend of Lawrence’s?’
‘Yeah!’ Evie was growing irritated, standing out here looking like a fool on the sidewalk. ‘Look, come down and let me in, OK?’
The girl’s head disappeared. Evie went over to the back of the car and started pulling out her pole and he
r suitcases.
The driver got out to help. ‘Hey, baby, I’d take you home with me in a heartbeat!’ he said, throwing his arms wide, showing the sweat stains under his arms. ‘But my wife, she might throw us both out, you know, and then we’d be right back here—’
There was a clanking sound from the door, and Evie’s head jerked round eagerly.
‘Who are you?’ the girl from upstairs demanded.
She was average height and quite pale, her dark hair pulled up on top of her head in a messy ponytail, dressed in leggings and layers of T-shirts. Her skin had a light film of sweat, and her cheeks were bright pink: it looked as if she’d been working out. Despite the paleness of her skin, the shape of her dark almond eyes, her flat chest and long, squarish torso suggested to Evie that she had some Korean blood in her. From her time working the Midnight Lounge, Evie was very used to assessing other women: her eyes zipped up and down the girl in the doorway, picking out her strong and weak points as if she were a horse in an auction, checking out the competition.
‘I’m Evie, ’ she answered. ‘A friend of Lawrence’s. He’s talked about me, right?’
From the narrowing of the girl’s eyes, Evie saw that her gamble had paid off: Lawrence had mentioned her.
‘He might have, ’ the girl said reluctantly. ‘So what?’
‘So I’m crashing here for a few days with Lawrence, ’ Evie snapped.
‘He didn’t say anything about it to me, ’ said the girl, starting to close the door,
Her heavy fringe was tipped in bright red, as were the ends of her ponytail, as if she’d dipped them both in scarlet dye. She had a silver hoop in her eyebrow, a stud in her nose, and on the arm pulling the door was a heavily patterned tattoo curling up from the wrist to the elbow. It gave her conventional prettiness the edge she’d doubtless wanted: she probably thought all this ornamentation made her look cool and hip. And tough.
Well, she was wrong there. Evie would put her money any day of the week on a hustler from the Midnight Lounge against a would-be urban hipster. She pushed back against the door with such a shove that the girl’s eyes widened as she involuntarily took a step back.
‘You really think that if Lawrence comes back and finds me sitting out here on the street, he’s going to be happy about it?’ Evie said from between clenched teeth.
The girl sighed.
‘OK, I’ll let you in, ’ she said, making it sound as if she were doing Evie a favour, rather than having been muscled into it. ‘But you’re not going to like it, ’ she added smugly, looking at Evie’s expensive Vuittons.
‘What’s your name?’ Evie asked the girl as she heaved her suitcases into the building.
‘Autumn, ’ the girl said.
It figured. Hippie parents.
‘Well, Autumn, can you take this for me?’
Evie handed her the pole in its plastic carrying case. Autumn staggered slightly under its weight.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s my pole, ’ Evie said shortly, bending down to pick up one of her suitcases.
‘Eew!’ Autumn dropped it on the concrete floor, pulling a disgusted face. ‘No way I’m carrying that! Pole-dancing’s so anti-feminist!’
So Evie had to make three trips up the rickety old stairs to the fourth and final floor, where Autumn had left open the huge steel door for her and retreated to what Evie supposed they called the kitchen. It was a gigantic open room, flooded with light.
That was the good part. The only one. Because the kitchen was an ancient gas cooker and an equally ancient fridge, standing next to an industrial steel sink, which was piled so high with washing-up that Evie could barely see its outlines. Autumn was sitting at a huge Formica table which was so badly chipped and dented that it must have been salvaged from a skip. Looking around, that went for the rest of the furniture: the kitchen chairs, the sofas, the coffee tables, were all the kind of scrap that people had put out on the street like trash. Salvation Army charity shops would have split their sides at the suggestion that they take this crap. The coffee table was missing not one, but two legs, and was propped up on crates. The walls were bare brick, but not the lovingly tended kind that was fashionable right now because trendy interior designers considered it authentic: this was the real deal, crumbling, ugly, and damp.
It was the standard artists-and-performers deal. Priced out of anywhere decent, they took over the places no one else wanted to live in and landlords couldn’t rent out to industry: the cold-water flats, the rat-infested warehouses with barely basic plumbing. The landlords turned a blind eye to the fact that their tenants were actually living in their alleged work studios, which of course meant that they could be evicted at any time.
‘Lawrence and I want to do this place up and make a yoga studio here, ’ Autumn informed Evie. ‘It’s our dream.’
‘Oh really?’ Evie countered. ‘That’s news to me. Lawrence never mentioned you at all.’
Evie knew this girl wasn’t Lawrence’s girlfriend. No way was Lawrence the type of guy to cheat on a steady, someone he was committed to. Even if Lawrence and Autumn hooked up occasionally – and Evie figured that Lawrence was too sensible to do it with a roommate – Evie was sure he hadn’t ever agreed to be exclusive with her. Lawrence, bless him, was honest to the core.
Autumn glared at her.
‘You can throw your bags in his room, ’ she said, nodding down the corridor.‘It’s the last one on the right. And the bathroom’s next to it.’
She smiled maliciously.
‘It won’t be much by your standards, ’ she added, picking up a copy of a yoga magazine and starting to flick through it. ‘Oh, and you might see the occasional rat. Lawrence and I don’t believe in putting down poison for them. We’re very strict vegans.’
Dragging her bags down the corridor, such as it was – the residents had put up cheap partition walls, open at the top, to divide the vast space into separate rooms – Evie reached Lawrence’s room. It was at least exquisitely neat, and someone, probably Lawrence, had built a big platform for a loft bed at the rear, plus long wooden shelves and a hanging rail for clothes. Books were arranged on the shelves, and Lawrence’s clothes, mostly in shades of khaki, taupe and beige (i.e. colours that could be achieved without bleaching, using natural dyes) were ranged in tidy piles further down. There was a desk and a chair, a sisal rug on the floor, and some Japanese scroll paintings hung on the walls.
That was it.
Not a single real creature comfort.
Slowly, she took off her coats, one after the other, and hung them over the chair. Then she sat down on one of the rungs of the wide ladder leading up to the sleeping platform, and stared ahead of her blindly, barely even seeing the particle-board wall. Everything had happened so fast. She was still barely able to process the wreck of her life – how far and fast she had fallen since she had woken up this morning in her beautiful penthouse, cosseted, beloved, wrapped in 400-count sheets, cashmere blankets and silk bedspreads, scented with expensive moisturiser.
She was busting for a pee, but she couldn’t face investigating the bathroom. From the way Autumn had smirked at her, she could tell it would be very bad.
Footsteps came down the hall. Could it be Lawrence? Had he picked up her message and rushed back to see her? Evie’s heart raced with anticipation. Lawrence was all she had left: she hadn’t realised till this moment how eager she was to see him.
But it was Autumn who put her head round the door, Autumn who said, with the triumphant air of a woman who is just about to score a major point over her rival:
‘Oh, by the way, I noticed that’s a leather bag you were carrying. And those suitcases are leather too, aren’t they?’
Her gaze went to the chair over which Evie had carefully draped her coats, and her eyes widened in horror.
‘Oh my God, is that real fur?’ she breathed.
She walked into the room and bent over the chair for a closer look at Evie’s shaved mink, letting out a scream when sh
e confirmed her suspicions. Turning to Evie, she put her hands on her hips.
‘We’re a cruelty-free household, ’ she declared. ‘Every animal product you own will have to go by tonight. And that includes products tested on animals!’
Turning on her heel, she stormed out, her red-tipped ponytail swinging in an effect that Evie had to admit was dramatic.
Evie almost felt like laughing. Her situation was so comically appalling. Stuck in a building that wasn’t fit for human habitation, probably with rats crawling over her in the night – she had the horrible feeling that Autumn had been serious about that – and now about to have 90 per cent of her worldly goods confiscated on moral grounds. She put her head in her hands.
And then, as her palms grew damp, she realised she was crying.
Evie never cried.
But she climbed up the ladder and buried her face in Lawrence’s pillows just the same, because the last thing she wanted to do was give that bitch Autumn the satisfaction of hearing her cry her heart out.
Chapter 5
‘This is the last straw, Dev! The last straw!’
Someone was shouting so loudly that Lola, carefully plucking a hair that threatened to unbalance the perfect symmetry of her eyebrows, put down the tweezers and tilted her head in the direction of her bedroom door.
‘Not one more night! It’s gone beyond a joke!’
Worried now, Lola stood up and crossed the room, pushing open the door. Voices floated up from the marble hallway below, and, leaning slightly over the corridor balustrade, she could see the golden heads of Devon and her husband Piers, Marquis of Claverford.
‘I simply won’t stand for it!’ Piers was bellowing. ‘She’ll have to leave! Today!’
Oh no . . . Lola’s heart sank to the floor. She might not have any A levels, but you didn’t need formal education to work out who Piers was referring to.
Devon’s softer voice was barely audible, but she was clearly pleading for Lola, because Piers’s response was a roar of anger.
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