Picture Perfect (34 page)

Purple and blue flowers have been wound around everything – around white linen tables, around marble columns, around seats covered in white muslin – and in the corner a girl in a pale blue dress plays a white harp so the room is filled with a tinkling, water-like sound.

It’s so beautiful, so other-worldly, that for a few seconds I can’t even speak. I feel
exactly
like Cinderella.

Cal and Kenderall don’t appear to be quite so bowled over.

“Nice,” Cal says as he hands our bags in at the cloakroom, then grabs a tiny canapé from a silver tray gliding past.

“Not bad,” Kenderall says, shrugging. “Oooh, is that the editor of
Vogue
? I must go and introduce myself.”

She glances at me.

“Stay here,” she adds firmly, “and try to turn around as much as possible. If anybody asks, I styled you, OK? Give them these.”

She hands me twenty or thirty business cards from her tiny orange handbag.

Kenderall Angel Dua

Top Model-Stylist-Pig Owner

Bring your BRAND to LIFE

BE UNFORGETABLE

I’m not entirely sure whether to tell her she’s spelt ‘unforgettable’ wrongly or not.

Although at least that’s one way to achieve it.

Instead, I nod obediently and take them. There’s nowhere in this dress to put them, so I grab a stretchy gold bangle off my wrist and strap them to my arm instead.

“HELLO?” Kenderall shouts across the room. “SUSAN? It
is
Susan, isn’t it? What a
spectacular
dress. Why don’t you reconsider the shoes you’re wearing with it?”

And she stalks towards a woman wearing a gold gown and a darkening expression on her face.

Cal leans forward. “Can I just say,” he says underneath his breath, “that of all the pretty girls in the room tonight, you are by far the most—”

“Bubba-lloo!” a familiar voice interrupts. Wilbur skitters towards me, dressed in a silver suit, covered in thin, translucent sequins. From a distance, he looks somewhat like a portly tuna. “Don’t you just look …”

And then he stops and his eyes widen.

“What the
billybuttons
are you wearing, Munchkin? You look like somebody accidentally tried to play paintball with a parrot.”

“Kenderall did it,” I say as loyally as I can, handing him a business card. “It used to be white, but she dyed it and added the feathers for a more unique take.”

“Oh,
sugarmonkeys
,” Wilbur sighs, staring at the card and then looking around the room. “Nancy is going to
kill
me.”

On the other side of the room, Kenderall shouts: “Babe, that dress is just
foul
. You need
help.
Call me on 858 …”

Wilbur shivers.

“My mistake. I should have sealed that invitation with wax or arsenic,” he says. “Or just given it to you directly, like a non-insane person.”

Then he looks at the space behind me.

Cal is no longer holding on to my arm: he’s lurking a few metres away, staring at a space across the room.

“And what,” Wilbur says sharply, “are
you
doing here?”

“I’m
her
guest,” Cal says, shrugging and pointing at me.

I blink in surprise.
Is he?
Just how many Plus Ones was I allowed?

“
Are you?
” Wilbur echoes with slightly less surprise. “Well, that’s lovely, my little Mould-toes, but why don’t you go somewhere else for a bit?”

Cal takes a few small steps away.

“Further,” Wilbur says, gesturing with a hand.

Cal takes another few steps.

“Much further.”

Cal takes six or seven more.

“Tell you what,” Wilbur says cheerfully, “why don’t you go to the other side of Manhattan and just keep walking until you hit the river and then don’t stop?”

Cal scowls and walks over to the canapé table. Wilbur looks back at me. “Where’s Prince Charming?” he says sternly. “I sent him an invite two days ago and told him you’d be here. Why aren’t you together?”

Cows have four stomachs.

I’m suddenly glad I don’t, because just one spinning over is uncomfortable enough.

We could have been at a
romantic ball
together, and Nick
still
went to the other side of the continent?

“Oh,” I say as airily as I can, trying to remember the list.
Be cool. Be mysterious. Be breezy and happy, all the time.
“He’s in California … on a shoot.” I clear my throat. What would Kenderall say? “Couples need to give each other
room to breathe
, babe.”

Wilbur stares at me as if I’ve just sprouted feathers and am preparing to lay an egg. “Did you just call me
babe
, Harriet?”

I’m saved from the answer by a soft kiss on my cheek.

“Darling,” Nancy says. “Don’t you look … umm … extraordinary. I
so
want to introduce you to some people. Can I whisk her away, Wilbur?”

Wilbur frowns.

“
Certainment
,” he says. “Just hang on a tickety-boo.” And he bends down on the floor and – with the speed of a professional chicken plucker – rips all the badly glued feathers off the bottom of my dress, pulls the gold scarf from around his neck, spreads it out into an enormous sheet and wraps it tightly around my shoulders, knotting it at the front like a short kimono. “There,” he says. “Marginally more acceptable.”

“Thank you,” I say, chewing my lip.

“And I’ll be having words with
you
later,” Nancy adds, lifting an eyebrow at him and glancing at Kenderall who is now attempting to stick sequins on the face of a lady with grey hair.

“Yes, Pumpkin-moo,” Wilbur sighs. “I thought you might.”

And as we walk away, I can still feel him frowning behind me.

ll I know is I have half an hour.

Thirty minutes before I must leave this party and start heading home, or I’ll be grounded for so long in ten or twenty years somebody will have to climb up my hair and let me out of my bedroom again.

Except it doesn’t work like that.

After fifteen minutes, I begin to make my excuses.

“Of
course
,” Nancy says sweetly, hugging my arm. “Let’s just
quickly
meet the Fashion Director of
Elle
? I’ve told her
all
about you and she’s
so
interested.”

After twenty-five minutes, I try again.

“
Absolutely
,” Nancy agrees. “But let’s just say a quick hello to the Editor of
Cosmo
. I think you might be
just right
for this new shoot they’re doing and …”

So I try again after forty minutes.

Then again after an hour.

Then after two.

Three hours
later, I’m still being led around the party, trying unsuccessfully to remember names and holding conversations I am nowhere near equipped to deal with. And I’m still handing out Kenderall’s cards.

All of which get thrown straight on the floor: by the end of the third hour it looks like I’m just leaving a trail of orange rectangular breadcrumbs, like a neon-obsessed corporate Hansel and Gretel.

“Ah,” a woman in a glittery black dress says as Nancy makes the billionth introduction of the evening. “The girl with the red hair. I’ve been waiting to meet you all night.”

I look down.

Seriously?
I spent nearly
two hundred dollars
on a pair of shoes that look like dead lobsters and my brand is actually something I had growing out of my head for free?

“I recognise you from somewhere,” she continues. “But I just
can’t
put my finger on it.” She tilts her head and gazes at me. “I don’t suppose you’ve been covered in octopus ink at any stage in the last year, have you?”

Nobody is ever going to let me forget about that, are they? It wasn’t
totally
my fault. Some of it was definitely Charlie’s. Not that people like it when you blame a totally ruined fashion shoot on an octopus.

“No-oooo,” I lie in embarrassment, looking desperately at the exit.

“You have! I knew it! You’re the girl Yuka Ito keeps going on about!”

“Umm …” I glance anxiously at the clock on the wall in a panic. It’s now past 9pm. “It’s funny you should say that, because in German folklore the paranormal double of a living person is called a
doppelganger
and there might be one of me wandering ab—”

Then my eyes land on a girl in the corner.

I fall totally silent.

Fleur is in a pale pink beaded dress. Her hair is tied into a side-knot, and she looks amazing.

Ethereal. Incandescent.

And also like she wants to rip my face apart with her fingernails.

“Hi,” I mouth silently, lifting my hand and waving at her.

Fleur stares at me in disgust, and then turns around and starts picking at one of the canapé trays.

The woman in black sequins is still talking. “Nancy, we should set up a meeting. Who’s your agent?”

I force myself to look back at her. “My agent?” I say blankly. “I don’t really have—”

A hand touches my arm.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Cal says smoothly. “But there’s something
really
important I have to tell this girl.”

“But—” the woman in black protests.

“It can’t wait any longer,” he says, blinding her with his megawatt smile.

And before I can object, Cal grabs my hand and pulls me into the hallway.

’m so grateful, I don’t even ask where we’re going.

I allow myself to be led through the hallway, and then back round the other side of the party, into a corner behind some blue chiffon.

Finally.

Finally
I can make my escape.

I glance at the clock again. 9.25pm. If I go
now
, I can catch the last train to Greenway.

The lights of the party are in soft focus behind Cal, flickering behind the curtain. You can still see colourful shapes of people, but they’re softened: blurred by the blue sheet, as if they’re under water.