Any luck re Clara? read one.
Rose? All okay?
Rose, I’m worried. Please call me back.
Rose closed her eyes and tried to remember if she had spoken to Clara about the party. They seemed to have spoken about absolutely everything else, like how she was going to leave Mark and become a hatha yoga teacher in Ubud. And how she would make that film about her life with the terrible singer as the director. And she would cast Tara Reid as her best friend to rehabilitate her image.
Rose couldn’t recall talking to her about Milo, which meant she probably had not.
She could remember that Clara was the one who had found her on the bathroom floor. And after that, which could have been minutes or hours later, they had somehow ended up in a kebab shop stuffing cheesy chips into their mouths faster than they could breathe. Clara kept calling her a lightweight – did she say something about a drinking problem? It was probably one of the only times in Rose’s life she’d be grateful someone assumed she was an alcoholic.
She decided to text Clara.
Hey. Last night was fun and strange. Thank you for taking care of me.
Clara replied immediately: Of course! Excited to see you at the launch.
Okay. So she wasn’t a completely useless person. Perhaps she’d raised the question of the launch in between mouthfuls of cheesy chips. Or in between drags of cigarettes – that was it! They’d found a full packet of Marlboro Lights on the floor as they left the party and smoked them one after the other on the way to the kebab shop that Clara was adamant they visit. She said something about being in disguise, which might have explained why she was wearing a baseball cap that definitely wasn’t hers. Rose decided it was best not to ask questions about how or why she’d managed to get her to agree to come to the launch and just accept that she’d done her job, albeit in a slightly unconventional way.
Looking forward to seeing you then, she replied.
Rose called Minnie back but there was no answer.
Yes, all good. Clara is in, Rose wrote on WhatsApp. Sorry for being out of comms all day yesterday. I’m going to work from home today if that’s all right. We have someone coming round to look at the boiler.
Great! Well done. Fine by me, Minnie replied.
Later, Rose tapped through Clara’s Instagram Stories. The photos from the hotel had been deleted, presumably because of the Daily Mail article. All that remained was a picture of her smooth, scarlet gel manicure posted this morning that surely must have been old. Thank you so much @NailsByFlo for this gorgeous shellac mani, read the caption.
Rose typed Luce’s name into the search bar. She scrolled through Luce’s profile until she reached her very first posts (this didn’t take long seeing as Luce barely used Instagram except to look at photos of sausage dogs and baby goats). At the very bottom, she recognised three overly saturated snaps of sunsets from their trip to Luce’s family’s holiday home in the south of France. There was a picture of the two of them together that Rose could remember Luce’s mum taking. They were sitting on a bench perched on top of the mountain their house was on, arm in arm, facing out towards a pink and orange sky.
I’m so sorry. I miss you. Rose sent the message within seconds and stared at her screen, waiting for the tick to go blue. But this time, it stayed grey.
There was an obvious solution to all this: tell Luce the truth about Milo. Rose wasn’t sure why she still felt compelled to keep it a secret. It wasn’t as if she owed him anything, or that telling her was going to somehow make its way back to him. Still, every time she felt the urge to be upfront with Luce about it, something would stop her, a voice in the back of her head that was particularly loud today. Sometimes it would tell her she was only obsessing over Milo because he was famous, or that no one forced her to go to his house. Other times it called her a whore. The worst was when it said she’d made the whole thing up.
Are you still going then? Luce’s reply flashed up on her phone.
Rose gasped with relief. To what?
OMG. The hen, Rose?
Oh fuck.
Rose had archived the ‘Give her a shot, she’s tying the knot’ group months ago because the notifications had become incessant. Pippa’s hen do seemed a lifetime away then; why did she need to vote on which penis game was the most family friendly for Pippa’s mum six months in advance? Or at all? Rose had not seen Pippa Ver de Veux in two years. They were part of the same friendship group at school, in so much as they sat around the same tables at lunch and went to the same parties on weekends. But they would struggle to get through any kind of meeting if it was just the two of them. It wasn’t that Rose didn’t like Pippa; she was fine. She was just very different from Rose. Loud, crude and always in a never-ending cycle of sexual escapades, she was the group’s unofficial ringleader. She was certainly the most sexually adventurous, having famously had a threesome with two boys when they were in the sixth form. Hence the irony that, out of everyone, she was the one getting married first.
Pippa had met her fiancé, Mike, at Glastonbury. Rose had only met him once. An insurance broker with a permanently ruddy face and protruding belly, he was hardly in line with the bevvy of models and actors Pippa had bedded over the years. But maybe that was a good thing. And it wasn’t like she needed to marry for money; Pippa came from a legal dynasty. Ver de Veux & Partners was a magic circle firm that had been in her family for decades. Whenever she told anyone she’d gone to school with a Ver de Veux, they were impressed.
They were ‘pure-bred old money’, as Luce would say. Pippa wasn’t too obnoxious about it. Of course, there was the lack of self-awareness people have when they come from money like that – whenever they went shopping for clothes as teenagers in charity shops, Pippa would wait outside because she didn’t like ‘the smell of old clothes’. But, generally, she was kind and warm, if a little ignorant.
Did you forget about it? asked Luce.
Maybe.
You’ve been in your celebrity bubble for too long. Come back to the real world. Those notifications have been driving me mad.
Rose told herself that Luce had every right to be rude to her given the context; she was just grateful for the communication.
I might have archived the chat.
I’m not coming. Have fun.
Wait, what? Why can’t you come?
Because my mum is hosting a garden fair here and I’m helping her out.
You’re going to tell Jessie that you’re trading a hen do for a garden fair?
No, obviously not. I’m going to tell her someone has died.
Isn’t that bad karma?
Lol. Whatever’s going to happen to me here can’t be worse than what would happen at that hen do.
Luce and Pippa had a fractious relationship; it was surprising she’d even been invited to the wedding, let alone the hen. They’d been close growing up in the way wealthy families always are. But in year ten they had both fancied the same boy and things started to turn sour. They fell out for good when Pippa caught Luce giving him a blow job in the school theatre.
I don’t know how I’ll cope without you, said Rose.
You’ll be fine.
