And as the horrible realisation slapped her in the face, that she had to get out of this hotel as soon as possible, that she was going to have to economise on cappuccinos from now on, Lola stuffed one hand into her mouth to suppress a little scream of fear.
She had absolutely no idea how to economise. None at all. What was going to become of her?
Chapter 9
‘I want her out, Lawrence! She was never supposed to move in here!’
‘Autumn—’
‘She’s a whore! She was screwing a rich guy for money!’
The sound of the argument hit Evie as soon as she stepped out of the bathroom, hair newly washed, skin freshly scrubbed, wearing round-the-house sweats. Autumn’s screeching didn’t surprise Evie. She’d known that bitch was gunning for a fight ever since Autumn had heard Evie was trying to sell her fur coats.
Evie checked her appearance. Fresh-faced, not a scrap of makeup, her big brown eyes doe-like and her blonde hair pulled back and shiny, she looked as if she were still in her teens, her skin peachy-smooth. As she appeared in the kitchen doorway, both faces turned to her. Even though the gigantic windows were filthy with decades of grime and pigeon shit, sunlight was pouring into the huge corner room through the dirty glass, and after the darkness of the unlit corridor, it was as if Evie were walking onto a stage.
Lawrence was leaning against the wall, holding a steaming cup of herbal tea, smiling at her fondly, while Autumn was striding up and down the living-room, her red-tipped hair flashing in the sunlight. She was wearing her usual hipster workout clothes – faded black vintage T-shirt, low-waisted black leggings rolled up to mid-calf, accessorised with a big silver-link belt hanging low on her waist – and her eyes were heavily rimmed with black liner. She stopped dead on sight of Evie.
‘You’ve had it really easy, Autumn, ’ Evie said, taking one more step into the kitchen. ‘I don’t think you’ve got any idea how easy you’ve had it. What are you, a nice suburban girl? Grew up in some nice little town in upstate New York?’
Autumn’s eyes narrowed, and Evie knew she was right.
‘Know how I figured that out?’ Evie asked. ‘Because it’s nice suburban girls like you who get all that crap done to themselves. Piercings. Tattoos where people can see them.’ She gestured at Autumn’s nose stud, her eyebrow ring, the sleeve tattoo on her arm. ‘Showing off how hip and radical you are. Because for you, it doesn’t really matter. You’re middle class. You got a good education, maybe even at some private school. You can stop living in a Bushwick slum anytime you want – Mommy and Daddy will bust their ass to throw money at you the moment you tell them you’re ready to quit being a vegan yoga-teaching alternative nut-job.’
Autumn, bubbling with fury, started to say something but Evie continued:
‘Me? I got no Mommy and Daddy to back me up. I was raised in a skanky project in Spanish Harlem and believe me, if you thought growing up in New Paltz or wherever safe little white-bread town you come from was bad, you’ve got no idea what I’ve been through, OK? The school I went to, we didn’t have nothing. All the money went on the metal detectors at the doors and security guards. Let me tell you, you wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in the life I grew up in.’
Autumn was looking good and guilty by now, exactly as Evie wanted her.
‘So yeah, I did what I needed to do to get out of the projects. I danced, and then I met Benny. I’m not going to apologise for it. I’ll kick you guys in some money for rent while I’m staying here, till I can figure out somewhere better. You still got a problem with that?’
Lawrence said very gently, ‘Autumn, you know we always talk about forgiveness and tolerance in our meditation practice? This would be a really good opportunity for you to work on that goal.’
He took a sip of grassy-scented tea, his calm gaze fixed on Autumn. For a moment, it looked as if Autumn was softening. She returned Lawrence’s stare, tilting her head to one side, her red-dipped fringe tilting too, thinking over what he had just said.
Then Evie stretched her arms above her head, cricking out her back, and Lawrence’s eyes went to her involuntarily. Seeing the way Lawrence was looking at Evie, Autumn snapped.
‘That’s all very well for you to say!’ she said angrily. ‘She’s screwing your brains out! No wonder you’re OK with her being here!’
Evie couldn’t help giggling.
‘She does sort of have a point there, Lawrence, ’ Evie said wickedly. ‘I mean, I am screwing your brains out.’
‘That’s it! You’re a total whore!’ Autumn, flailing her arms at Lawrence, completely lost it. ‘She’s out, Lawrence! It’s her or me! We agreed we’d keep this loft a special place, we agreed no long-term visitors without each other being OK, we agreed no meat or fur or cruelty-made products . . .’
Fuck this, Evie thought. I don’t need to hear this neurotic banging on about my coats again. She swivelled on her heel and slipped down the corridor to Lawrence’s room, where she rifled through her clothes and pulled out the Chanel suit she had bought with Benny’s credit card. She’d never really worn it: Benny hated it, thought it was too uptown for his downtown girl, and it wasn’t like she had many opportunities to wear Chanel.
But today, she was making one. Hair up in a twist, pale pink tweed suit, white silk tie-neck blouse, grey suede heels. Discreet make-up, Manhattan-style – which meant lots, but so carefully applied that she just looked magically perfect. Her Metrocard went in a little grey clutch bag. When she appeared in the kitchen again, Lawrence and Autumn were still at it: Lawrence was talking about inner balance and prana-yama-rama-something, Autumn was lecturing him on vegan values. They both turned and gawped at her as she clicked through the room. Hey, no one had ever accused Evie of not knowing how to make an entrance. Or an exit.
‘I’ll see you later, sweetheart, ’ she said, blowing a kiss at Lawrence, and exited the flat, a stunned silence at her transformation hanging in the room behind her.
God, she was jonesing for a cigarette. By the next landing down she’d already fished a pack of menthols out of her clutch bag. Pausing to light one up, she was nearly knocked over by someone stampeding out of the second-floor apartment.
‘Impossssible! Imposssssible! I cannot vork like zisss!’ shouted the stampeder, gesturing furiously in a way that made Autumn’s arm-flailings look like amateur hour. ‘Ve are not compatible! Not!’
She was tall and strapping, dressed in a grey tank top and black denim button-top dungarees, with shoulders like a linebacker. Her hair was straggly, in that layered cut that was very fashionable with sexually androgynous skinny hipsters.
‘Waltraud—’ yelled someone else from deep inside the apartment.
‘No! No more! I go back to Berlin! Today!’
Waltraud, hair falling over her face, eyes glaring, put her hands on her hips, and took in Evie’s presence on the landing.
‘Nice costume, ’ she said approvingly.
‘Um, thank you, ’ Evie said, taking a drag of her cigarette.
‘Oh my God! You are a woman! You are zo – zo’ – Waltraud gestured comprehensively at Evie’s Chanel suit and uptwisted hair – ‘zo kitsch, I zought you were in drag! Give me a cigarette.’
Evie handed her the packet. Waltraud took one.
‘Ugh, menzol! I hate menzol!’ she announced ungratefully. ‘It is like smoking toozpaste! I go now.’
She adjusted the strap of the big leather bag slung crosswise over her body and pounded away down the stairs. Evie followed her. Out in the street, she heard more cries of ‘Waltraud!’ and looked up to see someone leaning from one of the huge second-floor windows and yelling. Waltraud, legs wide, fists planted on hips, stood on the sidewalk, shouting back. Black binliners, filled with God knew what, began to rain down, thrown by the person on the second floor. Waltraud kicked them away contemptuously, insisting at the top of her voice that she vos going back to Berlin today, now, zis moment. The guys from across the street piled out of their engine room to watch appreciatively.<
br />
‘Fuckin’ artist shitbags, ’ said one. ‘Ruining the fuckin’ area.’
‘Oh man, they’re good TV!’ protested another.
‘Yeah! Like, is that a chick? Look at the shoulders on her! You think she wants a job here?’
‘She’d kick your ass, Mickey!’
In the commotion, Evie sneaked past without drawing any attention. She was nervous about getting beaten up on the way to the subway, dressed up as she was, but the worst that happened were a few incredulous stares and some boys cutting school on the opposite platform of the L train, who threw a cup of slushy across the tracks at her, yelling, ‘Rich bitch!’
Evie ducked aside, and the cup splattered over the edge of the platform. The boys hollered in amusement at having made her jump, but then their train mercifully pulled in and they slouched on, tugging listlessly at the baggy jeans hanging halfway down their butts, pulling faces at her through the window.
Never a dull moment in New York, Evie thought, as the L train to Manhattan chugged into the station. And this is the calm before the storm. She shivered at the thought of her destination. All dressed up, going to put her head in the lion’s mouth.
Chapter 10
No one would take Lola in. No one. As soon as they found out that she’d need to stay, not for a few days before she jetted off to the Bahamas with some fab new boyfriend, but indefinitely while she tried to claw some money out of her stepmother in Surrogates’ Court, they didn’t want to know. And word must have got around that she was desperate, because as she went down the list of people with New York apartments, her calls started going to voicemail, or, if they were answered, her so-called friends would launch into long and vivid explanations of how busy they were and how many people they had staying.
She kept working down the list grimly, but well before the end she knew how things stood. As a rich socialite, no matter how scandalous her life was, how many gossip magazines and tabloids snapped her falling out of limousines and into the latest clubs, everyone wanted to be friends with her. Even more so, frankly, now that she was notorious.
But as a poor girl, or at least one with no access to any of her money – well, they couldn’t brush her off fast enough. The friends she’d thought she had in New York were turning out to be barely social acquaintances. And the girls in London weren’t much better: one of them had sold those camera-phone photos of her to the Herald. Devon had had to chuck her out and, somehow, no one else had been able to put her up.
Lola was going to have to rely on her wits.
God, that was a joke, wasn’t it? Not a single person she knew thought she had any wits at all.
She stared at herself in the mirror. Wearing a featherweight black cashmere T-shirt and designer jeans, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail, Jean-Marc’s yellow diamonds in her ears, sprayed from head to toe with Stella perfume, she looked and smelled as expensively beautiful as ever. If she’d been born poor, her face would have been her fortune. So she had better muster up all the wits she had, and use whatever beauty she possessed, to get herself out of this hole.
Taking a deep breath, Lola picked up the phone in the room and buzzed for a bellboy to come and carry her suitcases downstairs. Then she threw her pale-yellow fur stole round her shoulders and left the suite without looking back.
She’d settled her bill that morning with a cheque, and, thank God, they hadn’t humiliated her by making her hang around until it cleared. Her impression was that Tai and the management were just grateful to have her out of the hotel. Downstairs, she got the bellboy to load her cases into a regular yellow cab, much to his shock. But he was even more shocked at the measly tip she gave him. Sliding into the beaten-up old cab, its seats partially slashed, its floor carpet stained, Lola blushed with shame at having practically stiffed the bellboy. He would tell them all how cheap she’d been. She could never go back there again.
‘Where to, lady?’
‘Seventy-second and Riverside, ’ Lola said, crossing her fingers and praying that this plan would work out.
If it didn’t, she literally had no idea of what to do.
The cab swerved, honked and ducked into Broome Street and over to 11th Avenue. As it bumped and jerked up 11th in fits and starts, heading uptown, Lola stared out of the window at the high-rises and ugly garages of Chelsea, the big new clubs, the shiny signs for strip joints. Maybe she’d have to get a job in one of those if everything else failed. Would they even hire her? It was the only job she could think of that paid well and might hire her just because she had a pretty face and a slim body. She had no qualifications at all, not a single one. All that money her father had spent on her English boarding school, and then the finishing school in Switzerland, and she’d come out of them both with rafts of beautiful friends, a smattering of languages, and the ability to ski.
Well, the friends were falling like flies, the languages weren’t enough to get anyone to hire her, and how on earth did you make money out of being able to ski? She might end up in a strip club after all.
Her destination was a large pale stone Beaux-Arts building on the Upper West Side, built in the 1920s and called the Anhedonia, after the then-current fashion that gave ocean liners and big apartment buildings equally imposing names. The buildings looked like an ocean liner, too: white, massive, and festooned with ornamentation in the form of hundreds of small balconies. The cab pulled up outside, neatly enough so that Lola could step out directly onto the dark-green carpet that ran up the sidewalk right to the front doors, sheltered by a wide green awning, in case it were raining.
The doorman at the Anhedonia could move fast, despite the weight of his heavy red uniform, frogged and epauletted with gold braid. He was bending down to open the cab door almost before the vehicle had come to a halt. By the time she’d settled up, he had Lola’s cases already stacked inside the red-and-gold lobby and was back outside, accepting a generous tip from her as he went.
‘Miss Lola!’ exclaimed Mirko, rising from behind his desk. ‘Miss Madison didn’t say you were coming to stay!’
‘Didn’t she?’ Lola asked, smiling at Madison’s doorman sweetly. ‘How silly of her! Can you help me upstairs with these, Mirko?’
‘Sure!’ he said enthusiastically.
‘Oh, and Madison forgot to give me her keys as well, ’ Lola said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind letting me in . . .’
‘Sure, Miss Lola, ’ Mirko said, with just a shade less enthusiasm.
Lola kept up a friendly flow of chat as they went up in the elevator. The weather, Miss Madison’s time in London, and Mirko’s wife Rosalka, kept them busy until they were inside Madison’s adorable corner apartment. Mirko lugged in her cases and stood waiting for Lola’s tip.
She cleared her throat.
‘Mirko, ’ she started. ‘I need to ask you a little favour . . .’
Mirko’s stolid Slovakian face immediately settled into a mask of impassivity, his eyes darting down to avoid meeting Lola’s.
‘It’s about Miss Madison not giving me the keys, ’ Lola said. ‘It’s, um, a little bit more than that. Miss Madison doesn’t actually know I’m here.’
Mirko’s fingers flexed as if he were about to pick up Lola’s cases and take them back down to the lobby.
‘I just haven’t been able to get hold of her, ’ Lola lied. ‘She’s travelling and her phone keeps cutting out. But she’s always said if I needed to crash here for a little while, that’d be fine.’
Mirko didn’t say anything. He just raised his head and looked directly at her, his eyes flat and expressionless.
‘So are we cool?’ Lola babbled. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t want Madison to know I stayed here without, you know, actually asking her first . . . so . . . I mean, you won’t mention this to Madison?’
Madison was still in London, of course. Lola had rung her a few hours ago, saying that she had to leave 60 Thompson because she needed to draw in her horns a bit financially, and waited for Madison to offer her place in New York, sure that she would.
But she hadn’t.
Mirko was still not saying a word, but his stare was making her distinctly nervous. She fidgeted until, eventually, she realised what was going on.
‘I’m really short of cash at the moment, Mirko, ’ she said, tilting her head and giving him her best smile. ‘That’s why I need to crash here. You’ve probably seen stuff in the papers . . .’
Mirko nodded slowly.
‘Yeah, I read some stuff.’ He paused, thinking it over.‘We’ll make a deal, you and me. You got no money?’ he said. ‘Then you gotta give me something else.’
And he nodded towards her, winking.
Oh my God! Lola thought. No! I won’t! I can’t! . . . I mean, he’s not the worst-looking man in the world, but still, no! And then I’d have to walk past him every day . . . or would he want to do it every day? How do these things work? God, no! I can’t! I just can’t! I can’t believe I’m even thinking about this!
Mirko must have taken her silence as assent. He walked towards her. Lola couldn’t move a muscle, paralysed by shock at what was happening, what her life had suddenly become. She had sunk so low so suddenly she simply couldn’t believe it. She had made herself so vulnerable that a doorman thought that he could blackmail her into having sex with him – put his hands on her—
Because Mirko’s hands were on her shoulders, caressing them. Lola squeezed her eyes shut. Could she actually let this happen? He was pulling at her fur wrap, taking it off – Oh God no, she couldn’t bear it, she just couldn’t!
‘Mirko—’ she said, her eyes snapping open, her voice high and panicky. ‘I don’t think – I can’t—’
He was stepping back, beaming at her.
‘For my wife, ’ he said, stroking the beautiful pale-yellow fur as gently as if it were still the live animal from which it had come. ‘For Rosalka. It’s her birthday next month. She always wanted a fur. A good one.’
Lola had been holding her breath. Now, full of relief, she let it all out in one go and then choked trying to inhale again, coughing so hard that Mirko had to pound her on the back.
Divas Page 14
