4
Things came together quickly. My boss was surprisingly relaxed when I asked him if I could take a last-minute long weekend. In fact, he’d been delighted. Apparently HR had made enquiries about my unused vacation time and were about to open an investigation into whether or not I was being bullied in the workplace. Ben agreed to cover my cases while I was away and even promised to keep a running tally of the number of times Jim and Christine – an office romance just on the verge of ripening – made vaguely sexual overtures towards each other at the tea station.
Christopher, for his part, looked completely stunned when I told him. He’d actually asked if I felt all right, as if I’d told him I had a rash rather than vacation plans. I’m fairly sure he would have rolled a glass across my arm if I’d let him. He adapted pretty quickly, though, and was helping me pack within the hour. ‘Are you sure a long weekend is enough?’ he’d asked as he’d tossed me my bathing suit. ‘Maybe you should take the full week.’
Isla sent me an e-ticket for my flight and a link to a website – she’d booked a suite at the Paris Hotel in the hope that it would make me ‘feel at home’ because it was ‘like Europe only baller’ – and before I knew it, Christopher was driving me to the airport in our little Peugeot, my case shoved in the back seat.
He sailed past long-stay parking – extinguishing the small hope I’d been harboring of him seeing me off at security – and pulled up to the drop-off lane outside Terminal 5. He kept the engine idling. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, tossing an arm around the back of my seat. ‘Maybe this break is a good thing.’
‘It’s not really a break,’ I said, checking my reflection in the flip-down mirror. I looked borderline undead. ‘It’s just a long weekend.’
‘What about – just a thought here – but what if we did think of this weekend as a break?’
I watched the hinge of my jaw go slack. ‘You mean, a break from us?’
He put his hands up in the air, as if the idea was something that had flown out of his head of its own volition. ‘It’s just a thought, but – well, things have been a little heavy between us recently, and with you going off to Vegas like this, it just feels like a natural sort of … sort of …’
‘Sort of what?’
‘Break, I suppose.’
I thought briefly about screaming, but I’d never liked causing a scene. So instead I just sat there, knees shoved against the glove compartment, and stayed silent.
I couldn’t believe it. Christopher being unsure about marriage was one thing, but now it seemed he was unsure about me, too. About us. I could see our life together starting to crumble, like a sandcastle at high tide.
He caught the desolate look on my face and grabbed my hand. ‘Look, just forget it. Forget I ever said anything. You go and have fun.’
A man in uniform knocked on the window and gestured for us to get a move on. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. I opened the car door and stepped out onto the pavement. Christopher got out too, pulled the suitcase out of the back, and settled it next to my feet. Around us, families were saying their goodbyes, hugging each other and wishing them safe journeys. A tall man held a young woman as she sobbed in his arms. ‘It’s only for a month,’ he said into her hair, but this only made her cry harder. Christopher and I exchanged looks. It hadn’t been that long ago that we’d been that couple, living in two different countries, our hearts pulled across the Atlantic like saltwater taffy.
Now, he leaned down and tried to kiss me. I gave him my cheek. ‘Have fun,’ he said. ‘Send my love to Isla.’
I nodded and walked through the wide glass door of the terminal building, my suitcase bumping against my heels as I went. I didn’t turn around.
Soon I was folded like an origami crane into seat 34B, sandwiched between a teenage boy munching his way through a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch (Why, God, why?) and a middle-aged man in a fedora whose foot had already migrated into my leg room. The air-conditioning vent blasted cold air directly at my center parting, and I could already feel my contact lenses soldering themselves to my eyeballs. A voice came over the loudspeaker. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please be advised that this flight is full, so do store any handbags and coats under your seats rather than in the overhead compartments. Please make your way to your seats as quickly as possible as our flight is scheduled to depart in ten minutes.’
I pulled out the paperback I’d brought with me, but the words swam in front of my eyes.
What was it he’d said exactly? A break. That we should take a break. How long had he felt like this? This was the man who I was supposed to spend my life with. I’d moved across an ocean for him, to a country where everything smelled like wet wool, and people put vinegar on French fries. I’d left a whole life behind for him. I thought of the couple standing outside the terminal, devastated by the thought of a few weeks apart. That had been us once. Now he couldn’t wait to shove me on a plane.
I felt the engine rumble to life underneath us. ‘Cabin crew, please take your seats for departure.’ The plane lurched forward and began accelerating down the runway. The nose lifted, and soon we were airborne. I leaned forward and tried to see past the teenager and out the window to the ground below. The teenager responded by pulling down the shade and settling a pair of enormous headphones over his ears.
I lay back and closed my eyes. In eleven hours, I’d be in Las Vegas. But more importantly, I’d be with Isla. And Isla, however crazy she might seem, always knew exactly what to do.
It had been dusk when I’d left London, and now, an eleven-hour flight plus an hour winding my way through immigration and baggage claim later, I stepped out of McCarran International Airport to find myself at the beginning of the same night I’d left behind. The sun had set a few hours ago, but the heat still punched me in the chest as the glass door slid closed behind me and left me stranded on the sidewalk. My eyes were grainy with tiredness and my feet felt like a pair of water balloons strapped to stiff legs. I wanted, briefly and very badly, to turn around and get straight back on the plane, but then I remembered that I wasn’t sure I still had a home in London. Judging from the lack of texts from Christopher, probably not. And then I thought about crying.
‘Jenny! Over here!’ I looked up to see Isla standing up in the front seat of a bright red convertible, waving her arms like a maniac. ‘Hurry, before the goddamn Gestapo come back!’ She jerked a thumb towards a frowning traffic warden.
I waved back and wheeled my suitcase over to the car, heaving it onto the back seat next to Isla’s duffel bag. She was still standing up inside the car, waving her arms around excitedly and jigging up and down. Her white-blonde hair was a Medusa’s nest of curls, the dark roots just peeking through. She’d kept her natural blonde until her sixteenth birthday – after that, it had been all peroxide. ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ she shouted, one eye on the traffic cop. ‘Come on, get your ass in here!’ I opened the door and threw myself inside and she floored the accelerator and peeled out of the lot.
I’d forgotten about Isla’s driving.
‘Motherfucker!’ she screamed as she cut off a minivan. She turned to me and beamed. ‘I’m SO happy to see you. How are you? How was your flight? How goddamn baller is this car? How bad do you want a drink?’
She merged onto Paradise Road and a pickup truck blared its horn as it sailed past. ‘Isla, watch the road!’
‘It’s fine!’ She swatted the thought of our impending death in a fiery inferno away like a gnat.
‘What time did you get in?’ I asked as I double-checked that my seat belt was securely fastened.
‘A couple of hours ago. I picked up the car and drove down the Strip before I came to get you, just to get the lay of the land. Wait till you see it – it’s completely insane. It’s like Disney Land on ketamine. Speaking of which …’
I shook my head. ‘Absolutely no ketamine allowed.’
‘Whatever, MOM,’ she pouted.
I’d spotted the Strip from the airplane as we’d come in to land. The vast empty black of the desert and then the gridded lights of the suburbs punctuated by the singular, spectacular color of the lights. Even the surly teenager had gaped at the sight.
‘What do you want to do first?’ Isla asked. ‘You probably want to take a shower, right? Wake yourself up after the flight? So let’s check into the hotel, unpack over vodka tonics, and then get dinner.’
‘Perfect.’
We were on the Strip in no time. Turns out the airport is basically in the middle of Las Vegas – that’s what you get when you plan an entire place around tourists, I guess. Particularly tourists who are there to do nothing but gamble, see strippers, and get drunk. Although, as the pamphlet I’d picked up at the airport pointed out, it was also the home of the Pinball Hall of Fame, so …
‘We’re here!’
I looked up to see the Eiffel Tower looming above me, lit up in the night sky by thousands of golden bulbs. ‘Wow,’ I muttered.
Isla was already out of the car and tossing her keys to the valet. ‘Come on!’ she urged, charging through the gilded revolving doors. I scrambled to catch up, briefly squashing my suitcase between the door and the wall until the doorman came to my rescue and I was flung, at speed, into the marble lobby.
Isla was already at the front desk haggling with the check-in clerk about an upgrade, so I took a minute to look around my surroundings. There was gold, a lot of it, and a lot of marble, too. Ornate chandeliers gleamed from the corniced ceiling, and every five feet, an elaborately-plumed historical figure glowered out from an oil painting. Imagine Louis XIV had decided to jazz things up a little, décor-wise, and you’ve got the idea.
‘Got it!’ Isla brandished two plastic card keys in her hand. We sped through the lobby, past the Swarovski boutique and the shop selling high-end cigars, and sailed into an elevator. Isla pressed the button for the thirty-third floor, and then reached over and hugged me. ‘I’m so glad we’re here,’ she said, giving me a squeeze.
I inhaled the familiar smell of her – Marlboro Lights, LA Looks and Shalimar – and felt myself relax. ‘Me too.’
The elevator doors opened and Isla led us down the hallway to a door marked with a gold plaque. ‘The Marie Antoinette Suite?’ I read.
She shrugged. ‘I guess they don’t have much of a sense of irony in Paris.’ She zipped the card key through the sensor and the door clicked open.
The door swung open to reveal not a hotel room, not even a hotel suite, but basically a hotel mini-village. Red-flocked hallways led to door after mystery door. The living room had a full three-piece suite, complete with a television the size of my entire flat back in London. There was a formal dining room. Each of the two bedrooms were furnished with heavy wooden wardrobes, elaborately-carved writing desks and so many throw pillows I briefly worried for the goose population. There were two bathrooms, one with a Jacuzzi. ‘Well,’ Isla said, flicking on the bidet. ‘It’s good to know we can wash our assholes while we’re here. Drink?’
I nodded and watched her head over to the bar. That’s right, the bar. There was a bar inside the hotel room. ‘Vodka or tequila,’ she asked, brandishing a bottle in each hand.
My stomach turned at the mention of tequila. ‘I think I’ll start with a beer.’
‘Suit yourself,’ she said, pouring herself a shot of neat vodka and tossing it back. In case you hadn’t clocked it yet, Isla is not a health freak. In fact, she seems to actively go in search of new and innovative ways to kill herself. She told me once, after taking a long drag on her cigarette, that carving up so many bodies in med school had done something irrevocable to her sense of mortality. ‘Basically,’ she’d said, ‘I realized we’re all fucked, so I might as well enjoy myself before I get fucked for good.’ It hadn’t been a particularly comforting conversation.
‘How did you swing this?’ I asked, gesturing around the suite. ‘You’re not paying for this, right?’
She laughed and handed me a cold Heineken. ‘Nah, I did the old twenty-dollar bill trick.’
‘The twenty-dollar bill trick?’
‘You know. When you slide a folded up twenty-dollar bill in between your credit card and your driver’s licence at check-in. Works like a charm.’
I shook my head in disbelief. I’d forgotten what it was like to live in a country fueled so nakedly by capitalism. In London, it would never occur to me to bribe someone like that. People either did things for you or they didn’t, and their reasoning seemed propelled entirely by their own personal preferences rather than outside incentives. Christopher had tried to explain the rules to me a thousand times, but they never quite sunk in. Sometimes, out of some deeply ingrained sense of duty and guilt, I’d stick a pound coin on the drip mat at the pub after buying a round. It would disappear without acknowledgement, like it was some kind of contraband substance rather than a tip.
‘Okay,’ Isla said, curling herself precariously on top of a bar stool. ‘Tell me everything. What’s going on with Christopher?’
As soon as she said his name, I was hit with an enormous wave of exhaustion. ‘Can we talk about it tomorrow?’
‘Of course. We have three whole days, remember? Whenever you’re ready, we’ll talk.’ She studied my face for a minute. ‘Just make sure you don’t leave it too long. Remember what happened after the day of the flying ants.’ I took a sharp breath. She knew better than to mention the day of the flying ants, especially when I was at such a low ebb. She saw the stricken look on my face and reached out to rub my arm. ‘Sorry. I promise I’ll leave you alone, okay? You don’t want to go out to dinner now, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Jenny, you’ve been awake for – what? – twenty-six hours now?’
I counted in my head. ‘Thirty, actually.’
‘I think I can let you off for wanting to crash tonight. Let’s just order a shit ton of room service and watch a movie.’
I took a shower in the gold-tiled bathroom while she ordered burgers and fries. I turned the water up as hot as it would go and watched the glass cubicle fill with steam.
It was tomorrow morning in London already. Christopher would be waking up and heading to work. The Tube would be emptier than usual – it always was on a Friday – and his co-workers would be asking him about his weekend plans. What would he tell them? What did he have planned for his first weekend as a possibly single man?
‘I ordered cheesecake, too!’ Isla hollered through the door.
‘Great!’ I shouted back, and then pushed my face under the water and let the tears be washed away as quickly as I cried them.