Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Being late is never, ever fashionable.

Matilda Beam’sGood Woman Guide, 1959

Before I get a chance to turn the key in the lock, the front door is yanked open by my boss, flatmate and Celebrity Rear of the Year Runner-Up 2011, Summer Spencer.

‘Did the new neighbour just call you a slapper?’ she asks, observing his retreating form.

‘I prefer sexually cheerful.’

‘I suppose that’s one way to put it.’ She raises a fashionably thick dark eyebrow. ‘How are you even late, Jess? Seriously. Today of all days? Possibly the biggest day of my – of our − entire career? We’ve got to leave for London in less than half an hour and you’re a mess, quelle surpreeeeze.’

Mr Belding, our tiny black and white kitten, winds his way around my legs. Picking him up, I hold him close, like a protective shield against Summer’s grump bullets. I look at his head. What’s she done to him this time?

‘I know.’ I grimace. ‘Sorry, Sum. I did mean to have an early night. I even wrote it on my hand. Look!’ I hold out my palm to show her the smudged blue biro scrawl reading Have early night! ‘I just … after you left, the beer garden got dead busy and everyone was playing Twister and it was so sunny and warm and they do that lovely pear cider . . .’ I rub my eyes. ‘I can barely see right now, I lost my conta—’

‘Yeah, I’m sure it’s all another delightful adventure in the amazing responsibility-free world of Jessica Beam.’ She blows the air out through her cheeks. ‘But maybe you can tell me on the train down south? Just shower, will you?’ Leaning forward, she gives me a delicate little sniff. ‘You reek.’

‘Do I have time for a quick run first? Twenty minutes max? Just to clear away the cobwebs? I feel a bit pukey.’

‘No! Jesus, Jess.’

Summer holds her arms out to take Mr Belding back. He scrambles up me, his paws clinging desperately to my top. She narrows her eyes in deep suspicion.

‘Hmm. I don’t get why he likes you so much when I’m the one who spends so much time with him. Styles him, manages his career.’

Mr Belding is a burgeoning Internet star. A model cat. Summer dresses him up in little outfits and together they pose for pictures, which she posts online for likes and retweets.

I pointedly eye the specially made feline top hat that Mr Belding is wearing. ‘I don’t know,’ I say innocently. ‘Maybe he just wants to grapple back a little creative control?’

Summer tuts. ‘Oh, it’s all such a laugh, isn’t it? Just hurry up, will you?’ She sighs loudly, spins on her heel and clicks back across the hardwood floor, closing the living room door more forcefully than usual.

She’s so moody lately.

I grasp tightly onto the dado rail and feel along it until I reach my cosy, cupboard-sized bedroom, where I finally put on my old faithful tortoiseshell glasses.

‘Praise be!’ I cry to the ceiling as sight is restored.

Plugging my iPhone into the docking station, I flick on my favourite rock anthems playlist − which never fails to get me in a brilliant mood − and speedily pull off last night’s clothes, chucking them in the general direction of the already overflowing laundry basket. Really must get round to putting some washing on.

Tomorrow.

Definitely tomorrow.

Jumping into the shower, I do the fastest shampoo I’ve ever done in my life because Summer has already used this week’s quota of hot water for the twice daily holistic baths she’s been reading about on goop and the water is turning into icicles before it even hits me. From downstairs she yells:

‘Double-brush your teeth, Jess. Maybe triple.’

‘Absolutely!’ I call back in a shivery voice, immediately reaching outside the shower screen for my toothbrush and getting to work on an extreme mouth cleansing.

‘Don’t forget to wear underwear today,’ Summer shouts again, this time from outside my bedroom door. I half expect her to suddenly appear in the bathroom Ninja-Cat style to make sure I’ve cleaned behind my ears.

‘Definitely will wear pants!’ I call back.

I wonder if it’s normal to be a little bit afraid of your best friend? Not like in a murdery way, of course, but sometimes, when Summer gives me this stony-eyed, ice-cold look, my heart plummets to my knees. If I’m extra tiddly or extra flirty or extra gobby, Summer’s frosty stare comes out, and that’s when I know I should probably rein in it. Every so often I try to get sensible. I go cold turkey on fun: stop with the boy crazy, end the boozing, press pause on eating only Pot Noodles with a side order of McCoy’s crisps and a pudding of Haribo for dinner, and start going with her to the horrendous Saturday spinning class and taking my make-up off before I go to sleep and trying to understand that fashion is about much more than which sparkly top makes my boobs look the most awesome. I usually manage fine for a few days. But then, soon enough, life feels quite grey and empty without a party going on, and whether I like it or not I’m back to what Summer refers to as my ‘ridiculous Jessica Beam adventures’. She reckons I’m still living life like I’m eighteen instead of twenty-eight, but what’s so wrong with that? As Tulisa Contostavlos sang so soulfully, ‘we’re young, we’re young, we’re young’. And as I always say: life is too blummin’ short not to have a giggle while you can.

‘Jess! Get a move on!’

‘Five mins!’

I try to super-speedily shave my legs, which is a grave error of judgement and leads to unsightly shin cuts that sting like a mofo. I hop about and mutter all the swear words until the pain subsides.

A sweet prog rock keyboardist I saw for a few weeks last year asked me why on earth I cared so much about what Summer Spencer thought. And I told him exactly why: Summer was there for me at a time when no one else was. Which sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s a true fact. Because when I was eighteen my mum, Rose, died. I was in my first year at Manchester university and Summer was on the same English Lit course as me. When I’d failed to turn up to lectures for three weeks, she came to my halls to find out why I’d disappeared. To be fair, up until then I’d been helping her with the assignments (I still don’t know how she got on the course – she thought George Eliot was a dude), and she’d been getting rubbish marks in my absence. But still, out of everyone, Summer was the only person who’d even noticed I was missing.

When she discovered me holed up in my room eating an undercooked frozen garlic bread, doing a Rosemary & Thyme DVD marathon and swigging shit boxed wine directly from the plastic tap on the box, she said to me, ‘This is the saddest scene I’ve ever witnessed. Put on some lipstick, let’s go out and get ridiculously fucked.’ Which, at the time, I thought was the worst, most insensitive idea in the world. But as it turned out, going out and having fun was the most effective distraction I’d had in weeks. From then on we were inseparable. Summer took me under her wing and introduced me to her crowd of cool friends, who eventually became my crowd of cool friends too.

I’d never met anyone like Summer Spencer before. Even at eighteen years old she was the most confident, popular person in most rooms. She’d wear stylish new hairdos and fashion before they even hit the magazines, always had an innate sense of where the best parties were going on, and the fact that she wanted to hang out with me was supremely flattering. Still is. And I didn’t mind writing the odd essay for her, or even doing what eventually turned out to be most of her dissertation – I loved the books we were studying, and a stressed-out Summer was nowhere near as much fun. And I’ll never forget that if she hadn’t dragged me out of my bedroom that day, I’d probably still be in there now, going mouldy.

Outside the bathroom door I hear the growly opening riffs of one of my favourite Led Zeppelin songs blare out of the iPhone. I can’t resist a quick air-guitar moment before rinsing the conditioner off my head.

So, after graduation, Summer and I lost touch for a few years. She was super busy in New York trying to make it as a fashion designer and dating Anderson Warner – he of the twinkly eyes and MTV movie award fame − and I was travelling across Europe, not really trying to make it as anything but having some pretty epic adventures along the way. Later, when Summer’s fashiony dreams didn’t quite come off and Anderson chucked her for a South Korean model, she came back to the UK and set up a blog called Summer in the City.

In the beginning it was mostly just daily duck-faced selfies of Summer at different parties and product launches. It barely had any traffic, and no income to speak of. She called me and asked if I’d like to write for her. I was in Morocco at the time having a ball, but she needed a favour and I owed her big time. And now here we are. The wages aren’t quite enough for me to rent my own pad, but Summer lets me live cheaply in the Castlefield apartment Anderson bought her. This is where I’ve been ever since, and over the past two years of working together, Summer in the City has become this gorgeous, popular lifestyle blog based on Summer’s adventures in Manchester. I do the bulk of the writing, but Summer’s the tastemaker. I mooch along to all the restaurants, cocktail bars, boutiques, gigs and product parties, and together we blog about it. Me the voice, and Summer the face. The work’s easy-peasy, and we get to go out a lot for free. I never really made any grand plans for a career, so to have fallen into this, I’ve got to admit, is a sweet deal.

Hopefully it’s about to get even sweeter because today we’re going to London to pitch to Valentina Smith – non-fiction editor at the Southbank Press. They’re interested in turning Summer in the City into a glossy lifestyle book!

OK: clothes.

I dry myself off with the only towel I can find until I do some washing – a teeny green hand towel − and open my wardrobe door to find that the line of plastic coat hangers that are supposed to hold my clothes are all empty except for one, which displays a slutty Cleopatra costume from last Halloween.

Probably not that.

Rifling through my drawers I find, amongst the odd DVD case, a half-empty bottle of rum, the beloved gold bra I thought I’d lost, a slightly crumpled, kind of low-cut but otherwise perfectly all right turquoise and pink floral cotton dress.

Is this even mine?

I give it a sniff.

Not bad …

I liberally spritz it with Febreze just in case and pull it on. It’s quite short, just about covering my bum and fully exposing my razor-doomed legs.

Dammit. I probably should have prepared better for this. The dress does look kind of awesome, though, as long as everyone’s eyes remain firmly above the waist.

‘Jess! Hurry uuuuuup!’

Right, it’ll just have to do.

‘Sorry, Summer! Nearly there!’

I dab loo roll on the cuts, blast my white-blonde hair extensions dry, draw in my eyebrows, put on my favourite silver flip-flops and head out to an increasingly impatient Summer.

* * *

‘What are you wearing? No. Noooooooo.’ Summer panics as soon as she sees me.

She’s in our living room looking perfectly groomed in a coral shift dress and a short leather bolero jacket with some high-heeled ankle boots. Her dark ombre’d hair is softly waved and swept over to one side. Around her neck she’s wearing a necklace with a gold Sonic the Hedgehog charm. I don’t get it, but we wrote about it on the blog last week and apparently it’s really ‘on trend’. Behind her, draped across our faux-distressed leather sofa, is Summer’s boyfriend Holden. He looks me up and down over the top of his big square knobhead glasses which make him look like a knobhead.

‘I’m wearing a dress, like you said to!’ I explain, fingering the short skirt.

‘That’s not a dress, sweetpea, it’s a tragedy.’

Holden sniggers. I shoot him my best withering glance, which I’ve checked out in the mirror a few times. It’s pretty withering.

‘But isn’t it your dress?’ I ask. ‘I don’t think it’s mine … ’

She’s offended by the mere suggestion. ‘Why didn’t you just buy a new one like I asked you to?’

Shitbags. She did ask me to get a new one just last week. I wrote it on my arm. Buy sensible dress!

‘Is this really so bad?’ I ask. ‘It’s all floral and shit. You like flowery things, don’t you? That designer person you said you love … Cath Kidston! It looks exactly like that.’

‘I did not say I love Cath Kidston,’ Summer fumes, tapping a foot speedily against the floor. ‘I said loathe. I loathe Cath Kidston. Loathe. And why are you wearing your glasses? Put your contacts in.’

I push my glasses up my nose. ‘Oh, I lost my contacts last night. Haven’t had a chance to order some more yet.’

‘Most people order these things in advance!’

‘Do they? Don’t worry. If 80s teen comedies have taught me anything, it’s that people wearing glasses are much cleverer than other people. Glasses make me look more bookish. They are perfect for a trip to a publisher!’

‘This isn’t a trip, Jess. It could be the difference between being winners in life or sad losers. I know which one I’m going to be. This is important. Why can’t you take just one thing seriously?’

I roll my eyes, but I do know how important it is. I’ve worked really hard on the pitch for today. Nonetheless, as my mum always used to say, if you want something too much, it’ll probably go wrong. So I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to be cool. Cool like a fool in a swimming pool.

‘Don’t stress so much, Sum.’ I pat her on the arm. ‘They probably won’t even notice what we’re wearing. They’re interested in us for our brains.’

Summer tuts, glances at her retro Minnie Mouse watch (I’ll never understand why people wear naff old things when they can get shiny new things) and stalks over to the coat cupboard. ‘It’s too late to change you now, though you’d think my sartorial finesse might have rubbed off just a teensy bit after all these years following me around. And your legs. The fake tan is all patchy around the knees and … is your shin bleeding?’

I peer down at my legs.

‘Oh, um, yeah. It was bleeding a teeny bit, but it’s stopped now. You can hardly even notice it. It could be just a bit of red fluff for all anyone knows.’

‘Red fluff? Why would you have red fluff on your shin?’

‘Errr … ’

I can think of no believable reason.

‘Here. Put this on.’ She flings me my long black cashmere winter coat, the sheer weight of which makes me stumble backwards into the wall.

‘But it’s July!’ I eye the heavy fabric with horror. ‘I’ll stew in my own juices.’

Summer puts hand to slender hip and glares at me.

‘I’m going to make the wild assumption that you have no other clean clothes ready, and you absolutely can’t wear jeans for this. I’m, like, a model-tall size eight, maybe even a six now, and you’re a five-foot-three size ten, so it’s not like anything of mine will fit you. Shit, Jess. Just put the coat on. We need to go.’

Fuck. She’s getting really upset.

Before I’ve even got one arm in the sleeve of the coat I can feel the beads of sweat begin to form on my forehead. My estimation for full slide-offage of eyebrows is approximately ten minutes.

‘Have fun in Londonski, guys,’ Holden twangs from the sofa, lighting his Gauloises cigarette. ‘Say hi to the ol’ LDN from me, yeah? Good town. Good town.’

Summer sashays over to give him a kiss, being careful not to get her eye poked out by the drumstick he keeps tucked behind his ear. ‘Wish us luck!’ she trills.

‘Good luck,’ he purrs, taking a sip from his jam jar of artisan beer before pulling her onto his knee for a full-on snog. ‘Go do you, babydoll. Go do you.’

‘I love you more than tea and kittens and apricot gin,’ Summer murmurs, making a heart shape with her hands and giggling as Mr Belding jumps between the two of them with a hiss.

‘I love you more than Mumford and Sons,’ Holden says solemnly.

My body starts feeling itchy, like it always does when anyone gets overly emotional in my presence. I have no problem with public displays of affection; I have partaken in many varieties in all different kinds of locations. But public declarations of everlasting love? Yeuch. Get me outta here.

‘See you laters, Crocodeelios,’ Holden croons, smirking as Summer finally leaves his knee. As she turns away, he blows me a moustachioed kiss and a pervy wink.

Barf.

‘Come on, Summer,’ I say, flipping Holden the bird behind Summer’s back. ‘Let’s go to London and seek our fortune!’