Precious Things (25 page)

‘Really, Margaret,' said her mother, glowering. ‘Are you rewriting history? You're the one who left.'

Maggie stood up abruptly. ‘When's Pearl's birthday, Mum? How old is she?'

‘I— This is ridiculous, Margaret. I won't have you talk to me like—'

‘No really, Mum, I want you to say. When did I have her? Do you know
anything
about her?'

Her mother stood up too, the mug on its tray sloshing over beside her. ‘I don't need an interrogation from you, not now of all times. Your father's left and you want me to make
you
feel better? If you had any idea what I've been through . . .' Tears glistened in her eyes.

Maggie's heart went out to her, the intense stab of anger dissipating. ‘Oh, Mum . . . but don't you see? You should have thrown him out years ago . . .'

‘No! I'm not listening to you. Just leave. Get out.'

Maggie grabbed her bag. Awkwardly, she tried to pat her mother on the arm, but Valerie twisted away from her. As the door slammed behind Maggie, she realised that things were irrevocably broken between them.

ULRIKA: Istanbul, 1974

‘Miss, miss! Turkish delight, special price for you.' The hawker's voice joined a chorus of calls as she wove her way through the stalls amid colourful spices, handmade leather shoes and racks of jewel-toned silk shawls. Ulrika ran her hand lightly across the embellished scarves as she walked past, and they chimed with a thousand tiny silver bells. Slowing to brush a wisp of chiffon, she closed her eyes to the sensation of fabric, light as a feather on her fingertips. The heavy velvet carpet bag slipped down her shoulder.

Quick as a rat, the hawker was at her elbow. ‘Miss, miss, you buy, you buy . . .' He was jabbering and pointing at her face. Ulrika looked down at the oiled black hair, the sheen of sweat. His pocked forehead and ruined teeth. A wave of disgust hit her. Careening to avoid the aggressive stallholder, she half-collided with two men on footstools, drinking tea from tannin-stained glasses. A hookah pipe sat on the table between them. They glared at her uncovered head and pale straight hair, spitting words of rebuke across the narrow alleyway. A
ripple of fear coursed through her. She didn't belong here. Ulrika's mounting unease made her walk faster as she heard again in her mind Richard's warning.

‘This is the big one,' he'd said a few weeks earlier as he'd passed her the airline ticket and sheet of paper with its typed itinerary. ‘American
Vogue
. Celine Thompson. She's hard to impress but if she likes you, you're in. Don't fuck it up.' He pointed an accusing finger at her. ‘Don't talk to them about theology or existentialism or anything else, just smile. Get along. And don't go anywhere on your own.'

Ulrika smiled serenely, humouring him. She wasn't a child any more – she was twenty-one, for Christ's sake. And she'd been living in seedy, chaotic, dirty, wondrous New York working as a model for almost two years now. Which made her a card-carrying citizen of the world.

Richard tapped the vast white desk with a pen as he continued to lecture her, all twitchy, pent-up aggression in his worn denim jeans and black leather jacket, faded black tee peppered with holes. His Lou Reed get-up. Ulrika made her face studiously blank as she glanced at the showy pop art on the office walls – the massive, comic book Lichtenstein and the Warhols – before shifting her gaze past her booking agent to the buildings and neon-lit signs below. In all likelihood he'd been partying with a teenage rent boy on Bleeker Street until well into the early hours. That probably explained the glasses. She couldn't see Richard's eyes through his darkened lenses, but she'd bet they were bloodshot, the irises no bigger than pinpricks. He would have spent the night at CBGB, his new favourite haunt. Ulrika tried not to let her amusement – at the thought of dissolute Richard playing the stern guardian – show on her face.

‘I'm serious, Rika. They think women travelling alone are whores. Don't be fooled, it's not much better than the Dark Ages over there. Do me a favour: stay in the hotel, will you? How would I explain it to your parents if anything happened to you?'

Just thinking about her parents and their expectations of her made Ulrika feel queasy. In her first month in New York she'd earned more than her father's annual wage as a factory foreman back in Colchester.
Wet, miserable England. She'd started regularly sending them money, and he now treated her with the kind of awed respect he'd show an equal. This made her feel powerful and also, somehow, as though she'd just been orphaned.

Ulrika wasn't sure why, but when she arrived in Istanbul, speeding through the winding streets in the back of a taxi towards the hotel, her first thought was to call her mother. The gloriously exotic sense of it, the mix of old-meets-new in the architecture and advertising billboards and young people walking the streets in their T-shirts and flares (and miniskirts!
Not like the Dark Ages at all, Richard
, she scoffed to herself) – Ulrika needed to share the experience. But, as was always the case between them, the weight of her mother's need for her to be someone other than the person she was left her feeling depressed.

‘Istanbul? That's nice, dear. Sounds . . . interesting,' said her mother when Ulrika finally gave in and called her from the small hotel suite a week before she was scheduled to leave. Ulrika sighed inwardly. Why couldn't she just be impressed, and leave it at that? God knew there was no one else on the shoot she could talk to. They were all too jaded and far, far too cool to let their excitement show.

‘Will you be coming home for Christmas?' her mother asked in the next heartbeat.

‘I don't know,' she replied. ‘Maybe. Richard says there might be a shoot in Rio . . .' The pause stretched taut between them.

A high-pitched, insect-like droning started up in Ulrika's head. She could see her mother standing there in her neat perm and unobtrusive pink lipstick, the A-line terry cloth house dress. Where
was
home, anyway? All she wanted was to stay in her rented apartment in the East Village and hunker down with a few records and a pile of books for the holidays. She had new novels to get through by Madeleine L'Engle, Kurt Vonnegut and Martin Amis – a sex-obsessed romp called
The Rachel Papers
which Jack, the photographer, had recommended (of course). And two others by Carl Jung and a yogi who'd denounced his Western values to live like a pauper.

‘Dad will be sorry you can't make it,' said her mother, her barely concealed disappointment making Ulrika squirm. ‘He finally finished the conservatory . . . I know he'd like you to see it.'

Ulrika checked herself. Yes, the cloying familiarity at the thought of her mother's pot roast still trumped any guilt she felt. Christmas in New York would be lonely, but the thought of spending it with her parents was even worse. The forced jollity at the table between them, leaning over to pull their limp crackers at exactly the same time . . . She couldn't face it. Not this year.

‘Tell him I'll see it in May,' she answered. ‘I'm still flying back for Gran's seventieth.'

‘Do you think you'll be done by then? How much longer?' asked her mother.

‘I don't know. I'm still saving,' said Ulrika. ‘Maybe another year?' She tried to keep the irritation from her voice, her mind tripping over internal mathematics. Five hundred more pounds would help her mother buy a car, so she could stop walking to the station when her evening shift finished. A couple hundred more and they could take a holiday together for the first time in years. Her mother had always talked about one day visiting Paris.

Her mother fell silent on the line, and then ventured after a few moments, as if the thought had just occurred to her and it wasn't the third time they'd spoken of it, ‘You know, you can always come back to the hospital when you're finished. I'm sure they'll have you . . . At least you still have your training'.

Ulrika couldn't help it – the response came out of her mouth before she could stop herself, ‘And maybe, if I'm really lucky, I'll be made ward sister in ten or fifteen years.'

‘It's a good profession, Rika,' her mother admonished. ‘Don't forget that. Nursing might not be as glamorous as modelling, but we help people.'

Ulrika's mind flashed back to changing the stinking bedpans and dressings, and working the graveyard shift – the pain in her lower back from all the heavy lifting. All pretence of calling for an easy chat had
disappeared, but she felt almost relieved. So this is what it boiled down to: her mother thought she was wasting her time. But Ulrika hadn't the foggiest idea what else she should do, if modelling wasn't it. This year, she'd swap the Yorkshire pudding for champagne, she thought, noting her jutting hipbones in the mirror as she pulled the telephone cord tightly across her lip. What would her mother think about that? Indeed, what would she think about the way Ulrika looked? She was skinnier than ever, but Richard encouraged it. He liked her thin.

‘You have something strange and beautiful about you, Rika. Ethereal. Otherworldly,' he'd said, when he'd discovered her on Portobello Road sifting through second-hand clothes. ‘You're very modern.' Ulrika had been confused by the praise; she'd always felt so tall and gawky, like a stick insect. That's what they'd called her at school.
The praying mantis.
He hadn't taken so long to convince her parents, but Ulrika knew they hadn't really expected things to take off the way they had, and so quickly.

‘Your father is a little worried, love . . . Are you still enjoying New York? Have you made any friends? It's just, apart from working, you don't seem to get out much.'

‘I'm seeing the world, Mum!' Ulrika said with exasperation, ignoring the question. ‘I wish you could be here. It's amazing. And the food! Dad would freak at the amount of garlic they use.'

Ulrika knew the cost of the long-distance call from the hotel would be astronomical, but she kept her mother on the telephone for a full fifteen minutes anyway. Maybe her mother was right and she was even more starved for a connection than she'd realised?

After their conversation ended, Ulrika leaned out of the small suite's one window. The stifling tension pressed down on her, because of all the things left unsaid. She scanned the teeming spires and brightly lit domes, and all the mouldy tenements and grey buildings stacked between them. Her eyes fixed firmly on the crescent moon above, which hung, tantalisingly, like a shiny gold pendant in the sky.

A few days later they sailed down the sapphire waters of the Bosphorus. Ulrika was draped over a local fisherman called Orhan, pouting for all she was worth. Celine had chosen him for his sharp cheekbones and chiselled face, but he spoke little English and smelled of fish. Jack snapped away behind the camera all the while, shouting his encouragement. She could only see his shaggy blond head and one eye squinting, as the other hid behind the lens. Those blunt square fingers, wrapped around the shutter button.
I want them on me
, she thought with a shiver, unsure she could stand much more of this tension between them.

‘Perfect. Relax your mouth, Rika. More. That's it. Sexy, baby. You're the harem favourite,' Jack called.

She lifted her chin haughtily, imagining him at her heels. In her mind, she brandished a sword.
Die, infidel
, she told him silently as she narrowed her gaze, feeling dead sexy for a moment, despite the billowing layers they'd swaddled her in. And then Celine crossed to reposition her limbs (like a butcher rearranging steak on a slab, thought Ulrika) and coldly appraised her behind those huge, tawny-lensed sunglasses, dressed head-to-toe in sleek Yves Saint Laurent. Her silk shirt and cropped culottes looked svelte and expensive, and Ulrika wondered how they'd managed to stay so well pressed throughout the shoot.

Did Celine know, Ulrika wondered, what was happening between her and Jack? Wasn't it obvious? The fashion editor with her shiny brown waves, not one hair out of place, whispered something in Jack's ear. He barked a laugh in response. Ulrika strained towards the words but heard nothing above the slap of waves against the boat, the sea offering up its smirking applause.

They passed small villages abandoned in the midday heat, still so steamy even in the last weeks of September. As she posed with heavy nets and buoys, Jack alternated between taking photographs of her and the other model, a stunning African-American girl with an accent Ulrika found impenetrable, and stills of the shore. Orhan fed her small fried fish from a metal café table, which she pretended to eat, pouting
her lips. ‘Wait for the light – there,' Jack murmured. Then he shouted ‘Brilliant!' as the shutter clicked rapidly. ‘God, you're gorgeous,' he said, and Ulrika flushed with pleasure. She worked hard to keep the satisfaction from her face, ignoring Celine's pinched look.

Later, the two models lolled languidly against the blue and white tiled walls of a mosque, as Jack continued snapping away. Ulrika felt the familiar boredom creeping in. The queer little insect inside her mind rubbed its legs, restless, unsettled. Did Pam, the other model, feel the same way? She wasn't sure how long she could keep doing this. But what else could she do? Her mother's words came back to her from their earlier conversation:
You can always come back to the hospital
. . . And therein lay the problem, Ulrika thought. She wasn't ready to. Not yet. Maybe not ever.