I dropped my chicken onto the sand.
‘Why am I what now?’ I hoped she was drunk enough that a grammatically awkward question might flummox her.
‘Why are you pretending to be Vanessa Kittler?’ she repeated with careful and precise enunciation. ‘Because you’re not her.’
‘I am,’ I replied, forcing a laugh. ‘Of course I am. Who else would I be?’
‘Fucked if I know.’ Paige shrugged and leaned forward, arms across the table. ‘But you’re not that bitch Kittler. So I’ll ask you again and hopefully you’ll have an answer that won’t involve the police or the need for me to call them. Why are you pretending that you are?’
Shit. Shit shit shit.
‘Oh God, I should have known this wouldn’t work,’ I said, giving up on trying to think of a good excuse and hoping she was feeling charitable. ‘But the quick version is, Vanessa is my flatmate, she was out of town, I’d had the worst week on record, then I took the call from her agent about the job and this all seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘What, flying to Hawaii, lying to a bunch of people and pretending to be Vanessa?’ Paige asked. ‘Not to mention an evil, slaggy bitch no one in the industry can stand?’
‘Yes?’
She waved at Kekipi’s drink-delivery buddy and waited for him to bring over a fresh coconut before she said anything else.
‘Vanessa Kittler shagged my ex-fiancé about two years ago.’ She started slowly and I could tell she was trying very hard to remain calm. ‘He wasn’t my ex at the time. He was my fiancé.’
‘Sounds about right.’ I didn’t want to say too much. There was still too much opportunity for this to go horribly wrong. ‘Sorry.’
‘When the picture desk told me they’d got her for this job, I went mental. I’m sure they’d tell you that would be putting it politely. But it was all so last-minute. I was away last week and no one else was free. Allegedly.’
She stopped to neck almost half her drink in a oner.
‘Obviously I tried to get her taken off the job. Because, you know, it’s not just that I hate her, she’s a shit photographer. Yeah, OK, she took, like, four really good photos once upon a time, but that’s it. People only book her now because they want to shag her. It’s pathetic.’
‘Again, all sounds about right,’ I replied. ‘Apart from the four good photos bit.’
‘Years ago.’ Paige flapped her hands around. ‘They’re, like, legendary. In that they’re absolutely beautiful and everything else she’s ever done has been shite. Not that I’ve actually seen them because I won’t work with her. Which is handy, given that you’re not her.’
‘So what now?’ I stared through the wooden slats of the table at my toes, a crushing feeling weighing heavy in my stomach. ‘Are you sending me home?’
‘How can I?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have another photographer. I can’t take the pictures. Unless one of these beautiful, beautiful men happen to be a proficient photographer, I would be even more fucked than I am now, wouldn’t I? Do you have any idea how hard it was to get this interview organized?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I admitted. ‘I know this is insane. Or at least I am.’
Paige rubbed invisible worry lines away from her forehead and stared at me.
‘I didn’t say anything earlier because I was trying to work out what was going on. I thought maybe there were two Vanessa Kittlers, or that maybe you’d just dyed your hair and, I don’t know, had a complete personality makeover. Like, maybe you’d had a stroke or something. I tried to find her on Facebook, but of course she’s not on Facebook because she’s too fucking cool. But wow, this is actually happening. You are not Vanessa Kittler. But you are pretending to be Vanessa Kittler. In Hawaii, on a photo shoot, even though you’re not actually a photographer.’
‘That would be it in a nutshell, yeah.’ It was hard to have such a serious conversation with One Direction as a backing track, but somehow we managed.
‘Are you at least a good photographer?’ she asked. ‘Jesus, you are actually a photographer, aren’t you?’
‘Let’s just go with yes.’ I winced at Paige’s hopeful expression. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really know what else to say.’
‘Say that that you’re going to take some fucking brilliant pictures of Bertie Bennett, that I’m not going to get fired, and that come Monday, when we land in London, this is all going to seem like it was a very strange dream.’ She looked as serious as it was possible to look for someone who had been drinking bootleg Malibu out of hollowed-out coconuts for two hours.
‘I’m going to take some fucking amazing pictures of Bertie Bennett, you’re not going to get fired, and come Monday, I really hope we find out this has been a dream, otherwise I’ve got a really difficult week coming up,’ I replied. ‘And if it helps, Vanessa isn’t not on Facebook because she’s too cool; she deleted her profile because people kept leaving really, really horrible comments on her wall and she hated having to untag unflattering pictures.’
‘How do you live with her?’ Paige asked. ‘Why do you live with her? Aside from this psychotic episode, you seem like a relatively normal, nice person. Do you hate yourself or something?’
‘Or something,’ I confirmed. ‘Definitely or something. And maybe I’m not that keen on myself.’
‘Right then – glad we’ve got that out of the way, Vanessa.’ She raised her drink in the air. ‘Can you please just tell me what your actual name is? Even if it’s probably best if we don’t tell anyone else about this.’
‘It’s Tess.’ I clunked my coconut against hers, so relieved to have told someone, anyone, the truth. ‘Tess Brookes.’
‘Cheers, Tess,’ Paige toasted. ‘God, it’s going to grate me calling you Vanessa in front of the others.’
‘Just call me bitch,’ I suggested. ‘We’ll pretend we’re in RuPaul’s Drag Race.’
‘I like your thinking,’ she said, straw wedged in her mouth. ‘Let’s just hope I like your photos too. Thank God I’m an amazing art director.’
‘Thank God,’ I agreed.
‘Oh, you have to dance with me! I love this one.’ Paige pushed her chair away from the table too quickly and it tipped backwards into the sand. ‘If another one of those blokes grinds on me again, I’m going to trip and fall on his penis.’
‘I’m fairly certain they’re all gay.’ I let her lead me onto the smoothed-out sand of the dance floor while Maroon 5 blasted me from all angles. ‘All of them.’
‘I don’t care,’ Paige shouted back. ‘Gay men love me.’
It was good to know where she drew the line.
They say time flies when you’re having fun, but when you’re having fun drinking and dancing with Hawaii’s most fabulous, it vanishes into a black hole and comes out again shaking maracas and dancing a cha-cha. It was almost one when I looked at my watch and refused my first drink of the night. Paige had long since decided it was time to take a nap face down on one of the tables. I’d tried to take her to bed, Kekipi had tried to take her to bed, assorted half-naked men had tried to take her to bed. She had declined any and all invitations, claiming each and every time that she was ‘waiting’. We just didn’t know for what.
I was deep in a vintage Madonna groove when I noticed we had a gatecrasher. Nick was standing at the edge of the party, half hidden by a palm tree, wearing his standard self-satisfied expression. The first thing