or just throw myself out of the window. At least not without calling her first and giving her a fifteen-minute warning. She’d already skipped out on one shift to come and find me, I didn’t want her to get in any more trouble, but a Ghostbusters/Ghostbusters 2 marathon supplemented with about three pints of Ben & Jerry’s really wouldn’t have gone amiss.
The people below me were literally walking down the street pouring bottles of water over their heads and watching the drops sizzle on the pavement. Even the spire of the Chrysler Building was fuzzed out of focus way up in the heat haze. I was not made for this heat. Or for getting dumped. Or for making many major life-changing decisions in a very short space of time. Next month I was definitely going to try to keep it down to one. Maybe two tops. I really didn’t know what to do. The last few weeks had been amazing, but what was the point in being in New York if it was even harder than being in London?
And how fantastic would it be to go back, to be all super Sex and the City’d up with my fab new wardrobe, my gorgeous handbag and my amazing dream job? I knew in my heart I’d moved on from Mark, I wasn’t afraid of seeing him. Mum and Dad would be, well, they’d like to know where they could find me in case they needed a cat sitter when they went on holiday. And Louisa and I would work everything out. Things would have to be different now. I was different.
‘I’d be completely mad,’ I whispered to myself. ‘If I don’t do this, I’m completely mad.’
I peeled my thighs off the windowsill, leaving several layers of sunburned skin behind, and began the search for my passport. It wasn’t in my (fabulous) handbag and it wasn’t at the back of my bedside drawer. There was only one other place I could think of. Kneeling down, I pulled my travel bag out from under the bed. All that was in there was my passport, my old handbag and a screwed-up hunk of coffee-coloured taffeta.
My bridesmaid’s dress.
I dragged it out into the light and held it up in front of me. Having done nothing but eat for the last three weeks, it looked tiny. For the first time in months, I had no idea what I weighed. Jenny didn’t believe in scales, they had a ‘negative impact on her self-esteem’, and all my new clothes were so fabulously smocky. Couldn’t hurt to try it? Even if going back to London feeling like a porker would take the shine off my triumphant return.
The fabric was cold against my sticky skin and the bodice felt uncomfortable, as if it had been rinsed out with wallpaper paste, but it wasn’t as tight as I had expected. In fact, it wasn’t tight at all. Apparently you can do all the eating as long as you’re doing all the walking around New York and all the shagging of the hot boys. After stumbling over the hem twice and actually going the full length of the room once, I slipped on my Louboutins and teetered over to the mirror, pulled my hair back from my face and held it up into a tight chignon. My eyes were still red and swollen, the dress all scrunched up. It wasn’t a good look, but it was a familiar one. All that was missing was my engagement ring, and I really wouldn’t want to put that on again, given where I had left it.
Jenny had stuck photographs from the last couple of weeks all around my mirror to ‘help me live in the now’. My after photos from Rapture, when Gina had transformed my hair. Me, Jenny and Erin at karaoke. The photo Jenny had snapped of me and Alex at his gig. But the girl in those pictures wasn’t the same girl looking back at me right now. The girl looking back at me was Angela Clark from a month ago. It was the Angela Clark who had slept in this dress and woken up sobbing every twenty minutes. It was the Angela Clark who ran as far away as possible when things got hard. But that was all that I remembered about her. Did I really, honestly want to go back?
The Angela in the photos looked happy. Yes, she was a little bit drunk, but she was happy and healthy and she had pretty good eye make-up. And in the post-haircut photo, she looked positively ecstatic. I pulled down the photo of me and Alex and tossed it onto the floor. No point making myself more miserable by leaving it up there. Nope, even without the hot boy pictures, this girl was much happier.
I wriggled out of the bridesmaid dress and shuffled it across the room and into the bin with my gorgeously shod feet. It felt good to be out of that dress. It felt weird to be in my underwear and Louboutins. Pulling on a T-shirt so as not to scare passing pedestrians, I tottered back to the window. The glass was cool against my fingertips even if the weather was scorching. Everything should still be so exciting and new, the steamy sidewalks, the psychic who hovered outside Scottie’s Diner, the twenty-four-hour deli below us, but all I could think was that we were out of milk. Completely random thought, but completely comforting. Before I knew it, I realized my face wasn’t wet from the lack of air con in the apartment, but because I’d started crying. Crying at the thought of never going to get milk from the twenty-four-hour deli again. Well Angela, I thought to myself, wiping the tears away, well done, you’ve reached a new and pathetic low. You’re crying over milk, and it’s not even spilt. It’s not even bought yet.
I bent down to slip off my shoes, and spotted the picture of me and Alex peeking out from under the bed. Looking at it now, even I was surprised by the expression in my eyes. Looked a lot like love. Alex was beautiful, even in a guerilla shot taken precisely two minutes after he had come off stage. Couldn’t help but notice he looked pretty happy too.
I was already finding it hard to picture Mark clearly. I might have been living with him just three weeks ago, but I hadn’t looked at him for months. I could close my eyes right now and see every strand of Alex’s hair. Taste that insanely strong coffee on his breath. Hear him singing to himself in another room. Feel the callouses on his fingers against my skin. But he was gone. And maybe so was the Angela in the other photos.
So I wouldn’t be Mark’s Angela if I went back to London, and I couldn’t be Alex’s Angela if I stayed in New York. But I could be someone new. Someone I didn’t know yet. And I could go and get the milk. It was a start.
‘I am completely mad,’ I whispered out of the window. ‘Completely, bloody mad.’
EPILOGUE
It had been snowing solidly for three days, and New York was tucked in under a beautiful sheet of thick white snow. Each day, the city turned out and turned the snow into slush. And each evening, a new blanket was laid out. Criss-crossing the streets and avenues, drifting up the park, icing the skyscrapers. To a new New Yorker, it was breathtaking. But as pretty as the snow might be, it was a shock. After a mild Christmas full of strappy dresses and parties, January was terrifying. And they said it was cold up north.
I sat at my desk tapping away, in jeans, a hoodie, fingerless gloves and Ugg boots.
Inside.
With the heating on full.
It hardly made it easy to write an article about feeling frisky in spring time. Luckily, the DHL man was in cahoots with my procrastination and rang the doorbell as I apple-A, apple-Z’d the whole thing.
‘Wouldn’t fit in the box,’ he said, handing over a wide flat package in a yellow plastic bag, ‘but it says urgent on it.’
‘Thank you,’ I smiled, snatching up the package and ripping it open. There it was, the first ever UK edition of The Look. I gazed at the front cover for a moment. With shaky (and not just from the cold) hands, I turned to the staff page.
There I was.
My name, my picture and my title.
Angela Clark, editor-at-large, New York
‘Is it here?’ Jenny wailed from the bathroom. She came running out, toothbrush in her hand, wearing only a towel. ‘Is that the magazine?’
‘It is,’ I held it back at a safe distance, ‘and you’re not touching it until you’re dry.’
‘What, you’ve got like twenty copies,’ she gestured to the other three magazines in the plastic bag. ‘Shit, look at you! You’re so my hero, doll.’
‘Come on,’ I said, taking the spare copies and stashing them on a shelf next to the US edition of The Look in which my columns had already featured.