Kate was silent, and then she said, ‘Well, it’s a long time ago, isn’t it.’
‘Yep,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s just a shame. We should get you two together before you have to go back, you know.’ She looked Kate over, appraisingly, like she was a prize heifer. ‘You haven’t seen him since – how long?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Kate. Keep your voice light, she told herself. ‘Is he –’ she opened her eyes wide. ‘Is he well, though?’
‘Yeah.’ Zoe nodded. ‘He’s OK. Got a bit of grey hair. Works too hard. Doesn’t talk about stuff much. But he’s OK. I know he’d love to see you.’
Kate looked around the bright, cosy room, feeling cold suddenly, and very tired.
‘It’s weird talking about this,’ Zoe said, sighing. ‘I never talk about it, about all of us any more. I’ll have to make the most of you while you’re here. It’ll be a while won’t it?
Perhaps you’ll love it back here so much you won’t go back. Yay!’
‘I am going back,’ said Kate. ‘Seriously. I love it there. I’ve got a new life, you know.’
‘I know you have,’ said Zoe. She crinkled her nose. ‘You needed it. I like thinking of you leading this super-glam New York life, meeting up with Betty for cocktails, running around like Sarah Jessica Parker. Sort of means I can’t hate you for not being here, Katy.’
Since her last birthday party had consisted of her mother, stepfather, and the Cohens (from down the corridor), and Maurice the doorman having a slice of cake out on the sidewalk, Kate didn’t know what to say to this. She smiled and nodded, sagely, as if hinting that a life full of incident and drama lay waiting for her across the ocean.
At eleven o’clock, Kate left, by then a little worse for the wine. As she was putting her coat on, Zoe opened the door and said,
‘Bye darl,’ Zoe said. ‘I love you. It’s so good to have you back.’
‘It’s good to be back,’ Kate said and then, that moment, as she hugged Zoe, it was.
When Kate got back home, the letter from Charly was still in her bag. She waited till she was in bed, face washed, warm chunky bedsocks from Bloomingdales, which her mother had given her last Christmas, enclosing her feet. Her old bedroom smelt faintly of familiar things, Coco perfume and peonies. Outside, someone somewhere was yelling at someone else, or perhaps at no-one, and away beyond her the city flickered, lights gradually going off one by one, still at its heart never asleep. Kate smoothed her hands over the duvet and blinked, the fatigue of the day finally catching up with her as her fingers fluttered on the glue of the envelope.
She drew out a letter. A letter and a photo. It was of Charly and Kate, dressed up before the office Christmas party, their first year at the magazine. Kate winced at her ill-advised Spice Girls-era black clompy platform boots, black miniskirt, waistcoat and hair in a high ponytail, and then, almost greedily, her eyes drank in Charly, glorious as always, her long, tousled hair tumbling around her tanned shoulders, the little black dress with spaghetti straps, the gorgeous, still-covetable knee-high black suede boots. It had been so long since she’d seen her, she’d forgotten how beautiful she was, how hilariously different the two of them were.
Hilarious, yes. That they’d been friends, so close you couldn’t slide a finger between them, so obsessed with each other it was almost like a relationship, so heartstoppingly sad that she hadn’t seen Charly for years, that Kate rocked back against the bookshelf, as if a ray of something had just shot out and hit her in the chest. That was the effect Charly still had on her, nearly eight years on, all those years since they’d first met.
Dear Kate
It’s been a while, hasn’t it. How are you?
I’m fine I suppose, working hard, not.
I found this photo of you and me at the Christmas party, the year you started at Woman’s World, thought you’d like to see it? What did we look like back then??!!
Kate I’m writing to say hello. Also to remind you I’m still alive. I wonder if you still care about that.
This is hard for me to write, you know I never was one for letters. I wanted to apologize. For everything I suppose. Well I thought I might as well try. Also, I’m writing because I wanted to let you know I’m having a baby. We don’t know what it is yet –
Kate didn’t read any more. She screwed the whole lot up, jumped up out of bed, and the cold hit her. She ran through to the kitchen, opened the little narrow french doors, and threw the letter, the photo, the envelope, out. She wondered, as if watching herself from above, why she hadn’t just opened her bedroom window, or thrown it in the bin. But it wouldn’t have been far away enough.
It was only when she felt something drop onto her chest that Kate realized tears were running down her face. In the dark corridor there was no sound. She crawled wearily back to bed, turned the light off, praying for a deadening sleep.
But the thoughts crowding into her brain danced there all night. She should have realized that those scenes would go through her head again, that she would dream about it all again. Back when she was starting her life as a grown-up, they all were. Look how it had turned out. She’d told Zoe, she never thought about it, she’d practically forgotten everything.
But that was a lie. Although she didn’t want it to be, it was imprinted on her brain, for always. How could it not be? And the dreams always ended the same way, with Kate realizing what, deep-down, she carried around with her every single day in New York. That she shouldn’t be here. She didn’t deserve to be here. That was why she didn’t let herself remember.
October 1999
‘Hey. New girl. I’m going to Anita’s for lunch. Do you want to come?’
Kate blinked up at the vision before her, and pushed her tortoiseshell glasses slightly further up her nose.
‘Er, yes, please,’ she said, shocked. ‘Thanks.’
‘I’m going now,’ the vision said. ‘I’m bloody bored, and Catherine and Sue are going to be gone for fucking ages on that conference meeting thing. Let’s get out of here.’
Nearly three weeks into her exciting new job at Woman’s World, and Kate had yet to have lunch with anyone; she was too terrified. She sat on a bench by Lincoln’s Inn each day at lunchtime, eating her sandwich and hiding behind a book if she saw anyone from the magazine. The offices were near Holborn, a big glass building housing all the magazines in the stable of Broadgate UK, and every morning the revolving doors sucked in these tall, gorgeous, glamorous stick-girls who strode past Kate, hair flowing in the breeze, expressionless and cool, and every evening it spewed them out again, as she flattened herself against the wall, trying not to get in their way. She spoke to her boss Sue, to Gary, the postroom boy, with whom she was insanely jolly and chatty, the way new people always are with the photocopying man, the postroom boy, the security guards. They’re men, they’re not bitchy, they don’t ignore new people as a point of principle.
To everyone else, however, she felt miserably that she might as well be invisible. If by chance one of the tall goddesses who hustled and bustled around Catherine Baldwin, the fearsome editor, should be forced to address her with some features-related query which only she could answer, Kate heard herself replying to their careless questions in a voice rusty with lack of use, and a tone hopelessly fulsome and inane.
‘Hi!’ she’d squeak. ‘Hi, there!