Styling Wellywood: A fashionable romantic comedy (Wellywood Series Book 2)

Styling Wellywood

A fashionable romantic comedy

by

Kate O’Keeffe

Copyright
©
2014 Kate O’Keeffe

ISBN-13: 978-1500376895

Published by
Wild Lime Books

Styling Wellywood: A fashionable romantic comedy
is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

The author acknowledges the copyrighted trademarked status and trademark owners of the following word marks mentioned in this work of fiction: Coach, Dolce & Gabbana, Reiss, Coach, Todd’s, Top Shop, Lonely Planet, Mardle, Highnoontea, philippa&alice, Madame Fancy Pants, Wilson Trollope, Karen Walker, Trelise Cooper, Goodness, Rex Royale, Kimberley’s, Laura Ashley, Nine West, Chanel, Armani, Christian Louboutin, Burberry, Jaeger, Pringle, Samsonite, Andrea Moore, Robyn Mathieson, Sophie Voon, The Hobbit, Olympics, BMW, World of Wearable Arts, Ford Mustang, Nobu, Ancestral, Memphis Belle, Kirkcaldie & Stains, Carter Observatory, Mojo, Pravda, Foxglove, Foxtail Champagne & Cocktail Bar, Diet Coke, iPhone, Skype, Stella, Moët & Chandon, Wagamama, Addidas, Swarovski, Armani, Vogue, Nike

Jessica Banks
– Single. Twenty-eight years old. Practised in the art of avoidance and having a good time. Loves fashion and all things London.

Scott Wright
– Tennis coach. Serious contender for the hottest man on the planet. American. Sexy. Knows it.

Ben Pearson
– Good guy. All-round Kiwi bloke. Great friends with Jessica (pity he’s a boring lawyer).

Morgan Barker
– One of Jessica’s besties. Gorgeous, glamorous, successful. Fellow personal stylist at
Estil
.

Laura Moore
– Another one of Jessica’s besties. The sensible one. Married. Mother of two.

Lindsey Whitman
– The final in the quartet of best friends. Unpredictable. Fun-loving. Sometimes outrageous. Always a great friend.

Cynthia Jones
– Jessica’s uptight mother. More proper than the Queen of England. Always trying to ‘do the right thing’.

Jia Chan
– Successful. Beautiful. Lawyer. Not one of Jessica’s besties.

It happens as I’m sitting in my old high school hall, watching my cousin prance around the stage. She’s dressed as a wartime nurse, sharing the spotlight with twenty of her schoolmates and an assortment of boys imported from the local high school.

Admittedly my interest in the musical has begun to wane, particularly once the boy dressed
in a lemon polyester shirt and oversized grey suit professes his undying love for a girl who looks ten years his senior.

B
ut it takes me by surprise nonetheless.

I, Jessica Lo
uise Banks, of usually sound body and mind, am suddenly overcome by the quite simply terrifying realisation I’m back where I started and have achieved absolutely nothing with my life.

Zero, zilch, nada.
Nothing.

For all I’ve done in my almost three decades on this planet, here I sit, back in this familiar place, surrounded by the same old faces.

And as if it couldn’t get any worse, I’m out on a date with my mum.

I
clasp my Coach handbag and realise my brain and heart are in some kind of sick race to see which one can explode out of my body first.

Had this been a scene in a Nineteenth Century novel I may have swooned gracefully
with a sigh, only to be caught by a handsome suitor. We would instantly fall helplessly in love and live happily ever after.

But
sadly for me, this is Twenty-first Century New Zealand and unfortunately people don’t go in for that sort of carry-on much these days.

So I simply sit in my seat, clutching my bag for support, and wonder how I’d come to be here, living in the very city I’d fled and vowed never
to return to. 

***

Of course this wasn’t a new experience for me. I’d felt it in my jetlagged fog when my plane had touched down at Wellington International Airport this morning.

As Mum had driven m
e to our family home in Karori - my childhood middle-of-the-road oh-so middle class suburb - I’d gazed numbly out of the window. The city seemed so surreal - like I knew it so well, but didn’t know it at all.

“
… I swear the woman thinks she’s Karori’s answer to Kim Kardashian, dear,” Mum had complained. Evidently Lillian Schmidt’s tight, revealing ensemble at the previous night’s bridge game was a bit too racy for the suburban crowd.

“Oh,” I’d replied
noncommittally, unable to concentrate on what she was saying.

W
e whizzed past boggy sports fields and grim-faced pedestrians battling to keep their umbrellas intact in the face of a bitter Wellington storm.

My heart sunk.
After living an exciting life in London for four fabulous years Wellington felt so small, so quaint, so… well, so like home.

But after the life I’d been leading how could I ever really feel like this was home again?

***

When I walk through the
front door of my old family home I’m literally stopped in my tracks by the familiar aroma. You know the one - it’s a smell you don’t exactly consciously remember, but when you smell it it’s instantly recognisable, bringing a million memories flooding back.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be an altogether unpleasant walk down memory lane, but in my current state of mind
it’s one I could happily do without.

Mum rushes down the corridor in front of me towards my old bedroom
. “... and then they painted their fence an entirely inappropriate shade of beige. It’s
ruined
the street, dear. Absolutely ruined it.”

I lumber my heavy
suitcase, cabin luggage, handbag and much needed duty free vodka down the hall, banging into the walls as I go.

“
Careful, dear. Here, let me help.”

She
takes the lightest bag and opens the door of my old bedroom with an unnecessarily theatrical flourish to reveal a room decorated to within an inch of its life in lavender florals. Everywhere.

I
t looks like a group of elderly graffiti artists snuck in and had a tagging competition in the room.

She’d even managed to find a faux fur throw covered in an image
of purple kittens running through a field of lavender. Who would have known you could buy such a thing, let alone there would be people out there who felt it quite acceptable to manufacture it?

I can just see the product development people now at Bad Taste Faux Fur Throws, sitting i
n a meeting room together.

S
omeone called Marjorie, who wears her glasses on one of those strings around her neck, exclaims with excitement, “I know what we can print on our faux fur throws: lilac coloured kittens playing in a lavender field!”

So
a big thanks, Marjorie, for allowing my stylistically misguided mother to add your throw to my already
lavenderliscious
bedroom.

Looking around my old room it feels undeniably strange to be back in the place I’d left when I moved out after university.

Wow, that feels so long ago.

Of course I’d been back to visit, but there’d always been an end-date in focus, when I’d get on a plane and head back to my real life.

Now
this
is my real life, and it feels so depressing.

I guess the one saving grace of what can only be
described as this extreme floral makeover is the room doesn’t even remotely resemble my childhood bedroom anymore. To tell the truth it’s actually a small blessing.

I
n my current fragile state I really don’t think I could handle being smacked between the eyes by my teenage self.

Mum jolts me back to the present from my walk down angst teenage lane.
“I do hope you like the new decor, only I didn’t think you’d be moving back in now that you’re, well,
older
, and I was so tired of the room the way you’d left it all those years ago.”

My mother, love
her as I do, could never be described as subtle. All she wants is for me to meet a nice man, get married in a wedding ceremony of
her
choosing, and settle down to provide her with adorable grandchildren called Jonathan and Jemima.

OK
I’ll admit, I've no idea what she actually wants these imaginary grandchildren to be called, but you get the general picture. 

“
Oh, it’s errr…. lovely, Mum,” I reply as I look around the room, feeling dubious.

With an unpleasant shock I spo
t one of my old framed photos sitting on the windowsill. I immediately step over to it and turn it face down.

“
Oh lavender’s good for the soul, dear. And helps you sleep, too,” she replies with a smile.

“
Err, I think that’s the
scent
, Mum,” I reply, noticing my bed has been replaced by a small sofa. “So where exactly do I sleep?”

“
Oh this sofa is the sweetest thing, it just pops open into a bed. See?” She pulls on a lever and the sofa does indeed pop open into a single bed with soft pink coloured bed linen. Nice change from the sea of purple, I suppose, but a
single
bed?

God, I really am home.

“I’ll just pop into the garden to pick some flowers to help you sleep.” Before I can protest she walks with purpose out of the room in the direction of the garden.

That’s all I need, more bloody lavender.

But at least it gives me a moment to take a breath. I lived in this house, sleeping in this very room until after I graduated from university and got a flat in town with Morgan and Laura, two of my besties from school. I smile at the memory. They were such fun to live with. Morgan and I had both graduated, me with my bachelors in Classics and Morgan with her marketing degree. Although Laura was still at varsity studying law she moved in with us into the smallest room.

We were earning virtually nothing, spending what we had on clothes and wine, and having as much fun as a bunch of twen
ty-something girls can manage. Which really is quite a lot of fun, as it turns out.

Our other good mate, Lindsay, was always over too, but she still lived with her parents in
Roseneath, Wellington’s answer to Beverley Hills. We were inseparable, the four of us, and had been since high school, so it was entirely natural we’d all still hang out once we got out into the world.

Jerking me back to my current miserable reality, Mum walks back in holding the promised vase of cut flowers, which she places carefully on a
lace doily on top of the chest of drawers.

“
There, that should help you sleep well while you’re here.” Glancing quickly at the overturned photo she asks, “You’re seeing Morgan tomorrow, is that right, dear?”

“
That’s right,” I smile back at her, feeling my excitement rise.

My
one speck of hope is that Morgan and I’ve agreed to go into a sensational new business venture together as personal stylists.

I see it as my opportunity to bring my fabulous London life to Wellington, and I’m pinning all my hopes on it working out.

It was Morgan’s idea. She’d decided running marketing campaigns for large banks was about as interesting as watching your toenails grow, so had packed it in and gone back to school to study interior design. Along the way she’d ended up as a personal stylist after having helped a friend out at one of those mall fashion shows.

A
t my local pub on her recent visit to London I’d told her the devastating news I had to move back home because my British work visa was about to expire.

“Have you tried to find a cute Brit to marry
you?” she’d joked.

“Not likely,” I’d responded. “The closest I’ve ever come to being a criminal was when I stole
a chocolate bar from Patel’s dairy with you, Laura and Lindsay, remember? God I felt guilty about it for
months
.”

“Yeah, you’re not gifted in the ability to bend the truth, really.” She’d
shaken her head, smiling. “What are you going to do, babe?”

“I don’t know,” I’d replied morosely. “
I’ve got no money so I guess I’ll have to move back in with Mum and find a project manager job.”

Her face
had suddenly lit up. “How about you join me? We could be personal stylists together! Wellington’s answer to Trinny and Susannah.”

“Yes!”
Without a second though I’d literally leaped at the opportunity, right off my barstool and into the path of an unsuspecting waitress carrying a tray of drinks. Unfortunately I ended up wearing them, but I was too ecstatic to care.

You see I’ve loved fashion since I was ten years old and had teamed my Mum’s glittery platforms from the
Seventies with a Union Jack crop top and a pair of cargos in loving homage to the Spice Girls.

A
career change from IT project management - which isn’t exactly the height of glamour - into the world of fashion felt absolutely right.

I’ve got a million style ideas from my time
in London Wellington is just screaming out for, so I did an evening course in personal styling.

Morgan
came up with the name
Estil
, which she tells me is Catalan for style. Who knows why she chose Catalan, but as with all things Morgan does, it’s really chic and I love it.

Mum
’s voice brings me back to the present. “Such a shame things didn’t work out with that lovely fellow you were seeing. What was his name? Luke?”

Mum had met my ex-boyfriend, Luke just the once when she’d visited me in London last summer. We were an item for about a year, so I guess she
was hoping marriage and grandchildren were imminent.

“
Yes... Luke,” I reply quietly, feeling the fury his name evokes building in me like the steam in a kettle about to boil over.

“
Luke, that’s right. Such a nice young man, and very successful too, wasn’t he? A banker, isn’t that right? Well, I suppose you had your reasons, dear.”

“
Mmmm,” I reply, forcing myself not to react. “Thanks for the flowers, Mum, they’re beautiful.”

I’ve found the best approach with my mother is to ignore her comments, otherwise you can get yourself into conversations you just don’t want to have.

And anyway, I doubt she wants to hear Luke traded me in for another model seven months ago. Oh and there was
serious
overlap between me and the next girl.

One of my friends
literally stumbled over the two of them in the stairwell of the Warrington pub in Maida Vale, snogging like their lives depended on it. When I confronted him about it he didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed.

He just put his hands up in surrender and said,
“No contest. You got me.” It took all my strength not to slap the smarmy look off his face there and then.