Picture Perfect (21 page)

And then I get to the final page and pause.

It’s a photo of the same girl again, jumping in the air with a boy. A gorgeous boy with dark curly hair, sharp cheekbones, a big navy jacket and narrow, glowing eyes. The girl’s feet are bare, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are bright and she looks the happiest any girl has ever looked, ever.

No biggy
.

My chest suddenly pings so badly I’m slightly worried the wire on my tiny bra may have poked through and stabbed me
.

This is my portfolio. I hadn’t even seen most of these photos before.

“You’re not bad at this old modelling lark, Possum,” Wilbur says, raising an eyebrow. “So don’t think I’m doing you any favours, because I’m not. If anything, it’s the other way round.”

And then he pulls up his sunglasses and gives me a look.

A human can make more than 10,000 facial expressions, and I’m suddenly so embarrassed, so pleased, so grateful, I’m not entirely sure which one to pick.

So instead I flush and pull my phone out of my satchel.

Then I pause. “Why, Wilbur?”

“Why what, my little Carrot-cake? Did I fall asleep and miss a chunk of dialogue? I’m always doing that.”

“Why do you always rescue me?”

Wilbur laughs. “Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother, Baby-baby Panda,” he says, shrugging and putting his sunglasses on. “But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back.”

ccording to statistics, three billion phone calls are made every day in America.

This is the only one I care about.

“I’m sorry,” I say the second Nick answers. “Before you say anything, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise, Harriet. It was an important day and I screwed up badly.”

“But you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“But I did screw up.”

“But not on purpose.”

My boyfriend laughs. “Do you want to fight? It’s not your birthday any more, Manners, and I’ll take you down. Verbally, with my sharp wit and free internet calls.”

I smile. “Where are you?”

“The middle of Manhattan, between fittings. But I was thinking I could try to get to Greenway this evening? Although I probably won’t blow the balloons up until I get
off
the train this time. Electronic doors are surprisingly difficult to negotiate.”

“You could,” I say, smiling a bit harder. “Or you could stay here.”

“Here?” There’s a pause and then, “As in America?”

“As in
here
.” I hold my phone into the air so he can hear a fire engine screeching past and the blare of a thousand taxi horns.

“You’re in
New York
?”

When I put my phone back to my ear I can hear the faint echo of a siren getting louder. If it’s the same one, judging by the speed it was moving and the direction it was going in, Nick’s probably less than half a mile away.

My entire stomach feels suddenly full of electricity.

My internal octopus is about to get fried.

“Uh-huh,” I grin. “I want to talk to you about something.”

“About what?”

“Anything,” I say, beaming at the tiny, far away sky. “I just want to talk to you, Nick. About anything at all.”

think it’s safe to say that plans matter to me.

Lists, schedules and itineraries: they’re the cement that holds me together. Without them, I’m scared that I’ll just dissolve into an illogical mess that makes no sense.

That I won’t be
me.

But as I turn the corner and see Nick, I suddenly couldn’t care less about any of them.

His curly black hair is huge and sticking up everywhere. His grey T-shirt is crumpled, and his hands are slung into the pockets of grass-stained jeans. He’s leaning against a wall – head cocked to the side – and as I approach his smile gets bigger and bigger until it breaks his entire face in half.

“Hi,” he says as I get close.

“Hi.” I put my arms around his waist and lean up. He smells of cinnamon for once. “Did you know,” I say as I touch my nose against his, “that the energy Americans expend every day when chewing bubblegum would light a city of ten million people for a day?”

Nick laughs, takes out his cinnamon gum and neatly lobs it into a nearby bin. “In that case, for the sake of the environment, I should look into getting a bigger mouth.”

I had so many plans for us.

We’re supposed to be at the top of the Empire State Building. We’re supposed to be on a boat, in the middle of a lake in Central Park. We’re supposed to be holding hands on an ice-skating rink outside the Rockefeller Center (despite it not actually being built yet, which I admit was a massive oversight in my itinerary).

We’re supposed to be in a field with a tree and blowing corn and sunshine and a random dove or at least a clean-looking pigeon.

There’s supposed to be a sunset or a sunrise.

But there’s none of that.

Instead, any sunshine is blocked out by an enormous cement skyscraper, and it’s cold and weirdly dark.

When I look down, I see we’re on top of a grate blowing warm, stale-smelling air into the street and up my dress, making it flutter around my knees.

We’ve stopped next to the back of a restaurant: dubious-looking water is running down the pavement, and there’s a bit of mushy bread stuck to the edge of my flip-flop. A truck pulls up and starts yelling at the truck next to it for blocking the road, and a man walks past with his finger up his nose.

I can smell cooked cheese, cabbage, detergent and something that may or may not be a blocked toilet.

I feel nothing like Marilyn Monroe.

But – as Nick leans down and kisses me – all of my romantic lists, schedules and itineraries disappear.

My plans evaporate, and I don’t care.

e wander around New York for the rest of the day.

We walk down Fifth Avenue, past Cartier and Saks and Trump Tower and all the tourists wearing trainers and not buying jewellery in Tiffany & Co.

We walk through Times Square and see the flashing neon lights, with the enormous ticker showing the news and Madame Tussauds and red stairs that lead nowhere.

We walk past the Grecian-looking New York Library, and pop in to see the original
Winnie the Pooh
, which apparently has been taken out of England and not given back again.

At which point we discuss notifying the British Embassy.

We walk past the white, ship-like Guggenheim Museum and the Rubin Museum of Art and Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace, with its brownstone walls and tourists and American flag.

We keep going past Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and Joe’s and Lombardi’s and Katz’s and Scott’s and I point out just how fond Americans seem to be of places that belong to people, and how nice it is to see apostrophes in all the right places.

We walk through Little Italy and the buildings painted green and white and red, and Chinatown with its bright reds and turquoises, and the shiny roasted ducks hanging upside down in the windows.

We spin round every few minutes so Nick can make observations about the Empire State Building getting smaller behind us: looming from behind the skyline like tall, pointed royalty.

And I barely see any of it.

I might as well be in the local park behind my house for all the attention I give to New York.

I see the little black curl at the back of Nick’s head, and the tangle of his eyelashes. I see the points of his sharp teeth and the little line next to the right side of his mouth. I smell the warmth of his cheek and the greenness where his forehead meets his hair. I feel the dip in his shoulder where my head fits, and the way he beats a tune on my thumb as we walk.

And New York slides past behind him like an enormous, expensive backdrop. As if it’s been put there, just to give us something to walk through.

We hold hands a lot. We kiss a lot.

A
lot
.

And we talk.

We talk about the blacked-out windows of his car in Africa and the hairdresser in Greenway and how if two rats were left alone for eighteen months they would have a million descendants and about the first time Nick learnt to surf and how the man who had the longest beard in the world stepped on it and broke his own neck and isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?

We talk so fast and for so long that I barely notice that it’s dark, or that we’ve walked right through the city.