Chapter Four
On Thursday morning at precisely ten fifteen, Ellie was waiting patiently on the corner of Delancey Street and Albert Street with her matching Orla Kiely wheeled duffle bag, humungous tote and laptop case, and her beloved Mulberry handbag clamped to her chest.Her mother had said to be ready at nine sharp, but Ellie knew her mother from way back, and there was probably still time to nip to the newsagent to buy more tissues because you could never have too many at a festival, and she might just as well check that the weather forecast was still predicting blue skies and sunshine, even though she wanted to go easy on her phone’s battery because God knows when she’d have a chance to charge it again.
For one reckless minute Ellie thought about dragging her luggage back home and locking the doors, but her mum had a spare set of keys and anyway, she was being silly. She should stop thinking of Glastonbury as a weekend spent outdoors with rudimentary toilet facilities and a lot of unwashed people wearing ridiculous hats, and think of it as a mini-break. Ellie loved mini-breaks.
She heard the toot of a horn, then Chester’s van was pulling up alongside her. Before it had even stopped, Ari jumped out.
‘Give Mama some loving,’ she demanded as she pulled Ellie and her handbag and laptop case in for a hug. ‘How’s my best girl?’
‘I’m fine. How’s my favourite mother? Apart from being shockingly late as usual.’
‘Darling, have you ever known me to be on time for anything?’ Ari asked, stepping back so she could survey Ellie’s luggage with a slight frown. ‘Planning to move to Glastonbury permanently then?’
‘This was my fifth attempt to whittle everything down to essential items only,’ Ellie said. ‘I have to have options.’
‘Of course you do,’ Ari agreed, but when Ellie opened the van’s sliding door she saw the battered leather holdall held together with ancient ‘Access All Areas’ and ‘Artists Only’ stickers that contained her mother’s clothes, toiletries and make-up. Ari managed to achieve a high maintenance look with a lot less product than her daughter.
Even without her cat’s-eyes sunglasses on, Ari could pass for thirty-five in direct sunlight. Not that she ever ventured out in direct sunlight without slathering herself in sunblock to protect skin so pale it was positively vampiric. With her long London bus-red hair and the huge tattoo on her left arm of her beloved Les Paul Melody Maker guitar, it was hard to believe that she was going to be forty-nine on her next birthday. Ellie might have been biased but she thought Ari looked incredible and never mutton-y, not even in her fifties sundress, adorned with poodles, and Converse high tops. Ellie felt positively frumpy in her Topshop shorts, stripy Sonia Rykiel T-shirt and . . .
‘Wellies? Why are you wearing your wellies when there’s a big shiny yellow orb up in the sky? It’s called the sun, darling.’
Ellie looked down at her green Hunter wellingtons, then back to Ari’s amused face. ‘I don’t want to end up with trench foot if it rains torrentially all weekend.’
There was a hearty chuckle and, ‘You owe me a tenner, Ari,’ from the driver’s seat, and Ellie scowled at Chester. It wasn’t much of a scowl because she loved Chester.
That was why when she got into the van, sitting in the middle seat between Ari and Chester – because that was where she always sat – she let him gather her up into an enthusiastic hug. Chester was all ribs and elbows and the smell of Creed Green Irish Tweed aftershave tickled her nostrils and made Ellie want to sneeze but it was Chester and she’d known him her entire life, and a hug from Chester always made her feel everything was all right in the world.
‘That’s enough, Chester,’ Ari said, as she climbed up next to Ellie and slammed the van door shut. ‘Girl needs to breathe.’
An hour later, after picking up Richey, Ari and Chester’s friends, Tom and Tabitha, and enough alcohol to see them through the weekend, they were on the motorway with the windows wound down and happily listening to a Stax compilation if only Ari would shut up.
‘I’m just saying, Ellie, that luxury yurts aren’t what Glastonbury is about. It won’t be the end of the world if you can’t straighten your hair for a couple of days.’
‘It will be the end of my world,’ Ellie said, and she fingered some sample strands of hair to make sure they were still straight and silky smooth. ‘If God had wanted us to sleep in tents, he’d never have invented luxury yurts, and I take it you won’t be coming round to borrow my hairdryer and charge your phone, then?’ she added slyly.
‘Of course I will, but I’ve earned my Glastonbury stripes.’ Ari smiled smugly.
‘If you’re going to behave like a brat all weekend, then no yurt privileges for you,’ Ellie told her mother sternly. Ari opened her mouth to argue the point but Chester rapped on the dashboard to get their attention.
‘Hey, do you think it’s going to be as hot as it was in 2010? Do you remember, Ells, you nearly passed out during the Pet Shop Boys set?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tom piped up from the back of the van. ‘It was pretty hot in 1999 too.’
Chester nodded. ‘Manic Street Preachers.’
‘And Blondie!’ Ari and Tabitha chorused, because Deborah Harry was like a god to them, and they were off. Someone would shout a year and someone else, usually Chester, would reel off a long list of bands that had played that year, with other fun facts (‘and wasn’t that the year Mad Glen fell over and broke his foot in the healing circle?’) being thrown in from the cheap seats.
‘Then there was 1993 and 1997,’ Tabitha announced.
‘Very special years because . . .’
‘Ninety-seven was the year of the mud,’ Ellie reminded everyone with a shudder.
‘Yeah, but it was still a good year and so was 1993 because those were the years that I played Glastonbury,’ Ari said with a slightly injured tone.
‘Did you really?’ Richey asked. He’d been quiet up until then, but every time Ellie had turned round to make sure he was all right and that the stories of Glastonburys past weren’t boring, Richey had grinned like he was enjoying himself. ‘You’ve played Glastonbury twice?’
‘Well, not on the main stage,’ Ari admitted sadly. ‘But yes, in 1993 I was in a Riot Grrrl band called The Beauty Queens and we played one of the smaller stages, and by ’97 it was all Britpop and I was playing guitar with these muppets called Bloomsbury.’
Richey gave a long, low whistle. ‘They got quite big, didn’t they?’
‘Yeah, just after they kicked me out because they decided they’d be better with an all-male line up.’ Ari sighed. ‘Story of my fucking life, isn’t it?’
There were murmurs of agreement. Although Ari was an amazing guitarist and a pretty good singer (and that wasn’t Ellie cutting her some slack, there were actual reviews, even one from the Guardian, supporting that claim), success had always remained just out of reach. Sooner or later, usually when whatever band Ari was in was on the verge of signing to a major label, Ari would be told it wasn’t working out. ‘Musical differences’ were usually mentioned, but Ari had forgotten more about music than most of her band-mates would ever know and she’d been on the scene – on countless scenes – for so long that A & R always wanted to go with a fresher face. Or a face that wouldn’t call them on it when they were acting like corporate, soul-sucking twats.
Ari would rage for a couple of weeks, then dust herself down and scout around for another band to join, always hopeful that this time it would be different, that this time she might get a shot at the fame that had always eluded her, that this time she’d finally get her dues.
It still hadn’t happened, but Ellie hoped she’d inherited just a fraction of her mother’s grit and determination. ‘I loved The Beauty Queens,’ Ellie declared, though they’d been very shouty. ‘They taught me about third-wave feminism and bought me loads of Hello Kitty stuff. I think Glastonbury was their best ever gig.’
Ari beamed at her. ‘We did rock it out, didn’t we? And that was one of the best Glastonburys ever anyway because the Velvet Underground headlined, and I wanted you to see them once before they all started dying.’
‘Have you been to every Glastonbury then?’ Richey asked, interrupting the mother–daughter bonding.
Ari had been to every Glastonbury since 1984. ‘Well, apart from 1996.’
There were murmurs of agreement, as they’d all boycotted that year too in solidarity, but Richey wasn’t to know why they’d been a no-show or what Tabitha meant when she said, ‘Well, that was the year you-know-who was headlining.’
Chester made a sound in the back of his throat that conveyed exactly what he thought about you-know-who, because again, apart from Richey, everyone else in the van knew that only Voldemort and Ellie’s dad were the two names that you never, ever mentioned.
‘Have I missed something?’ Richey looked perplexed.
‘Who headlined in 1996? Shall I google it?’
‘No!’ Ellie turned round again so she could glare at Richey, then at Tom and Tabitha for good measure. ‘Can we please change the subject?’
‘Honestly, Richey, it’s not worth talking about,’ Ari assured him. ‘Though I like to think that Ellie was a gift from the angels, she does actually have a father.’
‘Mum!’ Ellie wrenched herself round, so she could now glare at her mother. But Ari was immune to Ellie’s glares.
‘So, yeah, Ellie’s dad is . . . well, kind of a big deal. Elder statesman of rock. The godfather of cool. You know the type? But he wasn’t that famous when I knew him.’ Ari’s eyes were hidden behind her shades, but Ellie knew she was rolling them and she knew that Ari wouldn’t say much on the topic because she never did, so it was best just to let her mother say what she had to say. ‘I’m not knocking him; he’s shifted a metric fuckton of units and raised millions of pounds for starving children, and I can’t argue with that, though he only organised that global concert because he had an album to plug, but whatever . . . Anyway, we fell madly in love back in the day, then we fell madly out of love, then he became household name famous, and I certainly wasn’t going to pay good money to see him do his tired old man of the people shtick . . .’ Ari drew a deep breath. ‘So that’s why we didn’t go to Glastonbury in 1996.’
The silence was absolute. Even Richey had stopped asking questions because anyone with a passing know - ledge of the British music scene could work out who Ellie’s father was, and Richey had a lot more than a passing knowledge. After all, the album that her father had released six months after he left Ari, Songs For A Girl, was the eleventh best-selling UK album ever and always topped the ‘Greatest Records Of All Times’ polls in the Sunday supplements. And the most famous single off that album, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, was one of those songs as instantly familiar as ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Dancing Queen’. It was embedded into the national consciousness, had been used to advertise everything from lipstick to cars, and the man who’d written it was known only by his first name. Since he’d been knighted two years ago (though, as Tabitha and Tom continually pointed out, David Bowie had been cool enough to decline his knighthood), he was also known as Sir. So, there was no doubt about it, Richey could confirm who her father was with one click in the Google search box.
‘Just one more question?’ Richey asked timidly. Ellie sank down in her seat. They hadn’t had the Dad conversation, other than to establish that neither of theirs had stuck around, so why couldn’t he just let this go? ‘How come you’re so straight, Ellie, if your parents are so rock ’n’ roll?’
Ellie grinned. ‘I think the rock ’n’ roll DNA skips a generation. You’d know that if you’d met my grandparents.’
‘Ellie is not straight,’ Ari argued. ‘She just pretends to be straight when she’s working at that stuffy gallery, don’t you, dollface?’
‘Well, I am a little bit straight but it’s OK because you’re rock ’n’ roll enough for the both of us,’ Ellie said, and it was time to shift the mood. She reached forward so she could jab at the iPod hooked up to the dashboard. ‘I’m sick of this compilation. Any requests or shall we listen to Magic FM?’
There were good-natured howls of dissent, then a fierce debate about what constituted the perfect road trip soundtrack and soon they were all sucking on lemon sherbets and nodding their heads in time to a Doo-Wop playlist.
*
Two hours out of London, they stopped at a service station. Ellie saw everyone off to purchase coffee and snacks while she stayed behind to check her email.
Chester came back with her Diet Coke as Ellie was frowning over an unintelligible message from Inge. ‘Everything all right, princess?’ he asked. He called Ari ‘duchess’, but as far as Chester was concerned, Ellie would always outrank her.
Ellie frowned a little harder. ‘I can’t get a 3G signal.’ She held her phone out like she was divining for water. ‘It’s very frustrating.’
‘You shouldn’t have to work over the weekend.’
‘If I refused to work over the weekend, Vaughn would sack me and then I’d be poor,’ Ellie said, as her phone decided that it would send her email into the ether with a whooshing sound.
‘They’d never fire you. You run that place singlehandedly,’ he said proudly. ‘But I actually meant is everything all right with you and Richey?’
It was no surprise that Chester knew about Richey’s misdemeanours. Ellie told Ari everything and Ari usually fed the information back to Chester because they’d been friends for thirty years. ‘He’s like a faithful family pet,’ Ari had once said to Ellie. ‘I love the guy to death, but he’s not what my heart wants, you know?’
Ellie thought that Chester’s dogged devotion had to count for something. He’d stuck by Ari through thick and thin. Even after one of Ari’s attempts to cook had hospitalised him with the worst case of food poisoning the A&E doctor had ever seen. That was why Ellie still held out hope that Ari would one day finally realise she’d never find a man who was worth even a fraction of Chester.
‘Richey’s fine,’ she said with conviction. ‘We had a talk and it was all a fuss over nothing. He promised it would never, ever happen again.’
‘It better not,’ Chester said grimly and predictably. ‘Otherwise me and Richey are going to have to have a little man-to-man chat.’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Ellie assured him quickly, because even though Richey had twenty years on Chester, Chester had his own roofing business and was wiry, street-smart and tough. Ellie could still see the scar that bisected his eyebrow after an altercation with a scaffolder and a crowbar. ‘Really, he’s been on his best behaviour ever since we talked about it,’ she added.
‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’ Chester didn’t sound as if he was and he watched intently as Ellie opened her can of Diet Coke in case her face gave her away.
‘I am sure,’ she said after she’d taken several icy gulps. ‘Stop doing your heavy-handed dad routine, or I won’t get you a Father’s Day present this year.’
‘We go through this every year,’ Chester said, but he ducked his head and tried not to smile. ‘It’s not like I’m your real dad.’
‘But you’re my faux dad so you get a faux Father’s Day present,’ Ellie said. She shrugged. ‘Deal with it.’
‘Well, if I must.’ Chester sighed and played along. ‘As long as you haven’t made me aftershave out of crushed up bay leaves and hot water again.’
‘I was nine. I had a lot to learn,’ Ellie said and there was just time for a faux father/daughter hug before they heard Ari’s voice calling to them and they were done with their special moment.
Glastonbury, as ever, was the best and worst of times. On the Friday, it had almost been Ellie’s best Glastonbury ever, though a lot of her good cheer was down to the luxury yurt. It had a proper door and walls covered in billowing white cloth and, best of all, a proper bed with duvet and pillows. It would have been absolutely perfect if there’d been an en suite, but at least there were luxury toilets and showers in the gated yurt enclosure, which was patrolled 24/7 by security guards, and a restaurant providing meals made from locally sourced ingredients. It was like Ellie had never left North London.
Even Richey had wondered aloud if they could stay in and around the yurt all weekend, but the sun was shining so they decided to venture out among the riffraff who weren’t lucky enough to be staying in a luxury yurt enclosure.
It was impossible to stick to a schedule at Glastonbury, but sometimes not having twelve hours of your day diarised was fun. Mostly Ellie and Richey ambled along, saw some bands they wanted to see, but not all of them, hung out with some people they’d planned to hang out with, but not all the people they’d arranged to meet, and spent a lot of time entwined on the grass behind the Healing Field working on their tans when they weren’t engaged in mild PDAs.
But on Saturday there were stormclouds. Not actual stormclouds rolling across the duck-egg-blue skies, but metaphorical stormclouds. They’d started before ten on Saturday morning when Ellie and Richey had had a slight contretemps because she didn’t want a pint of lager with her breakfast burrito. It wasn’t like she minded if Richey wanted to start drinking before lunch, it really wasn’t, though she did think that he should pace himself. Then Richey had called her uptight, and if there was one thing Ellie hated, it was being called uptight. She worked very, very hard never to give off an uptight vibe.
They’d separated for a few hours, and while Ellie hung out with Lola, whose friends were appearing in the cabaret tent (though Ellie also thought it was a bit early for a full burlesque show), Richey had texted her to say that he was sorry. Then he texted her to say that he was with his friend Spencer but he’d meet her at five at the entrance to the Acoustic Tent. Ellie was unmoved. She was also suspicious because Spencer was less a friend and more a partner in crime. Maybe she should have listened to Tess and Lola; not allowed herself to be swayed so easily by Richey’s easy charm and easier smile, she thought as she watched one of Lola’s friends shimmy her nipple tassels. But then Richey had texted her to say that he loved her. They’d never said that to each other before, and Ellie thought that it might also be too early for ‘I love you’ but it was just what she needed to make her feel better, and why she waited at the entrance to the Acoustic Tent with an expectant smile.
The expectant smile was long gone when Richey stumbled towards her twenty minutes later than scheduled.
‘Sweetheart! Sorry! Maybe I’ve had a little bit too much to drink,’ he slurred in her ear when he reached her side, and then he’d made a grab for her arse, which made Spencer, his leather jacket unzipped to reveal a pallid pigeon chest, snicker.
Richey was drunk. Very, very drunk. Maybe not just drunk because his pupils were pinned, his top lip was sweaty and he kept rubbing his thighs and licking his lips and talking absolute bollocks about things that he patently knew nothing about, in this case the God particle, and got really aggressive when Ellie challenged him.
‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing, I don’t even want to know, but can you snap out of it?’ she’d demanded, and Spencer had snickered again.
Richey had pointed at himself with an exaggerated ‘who me?’ face. ‘Babe? Babe! Don’t be so fucking uptight.’
It took two hours, a spliff and a portion of Thai noodles before Richey was back to mellow. ‘Too much booze and too much sun,’ he insisted. Ellie wasn’t that naïve but she didn’t want to fight in the middle of a field on a Saturday night when they were meant to be sharing a luxury yurt for another twenty-four hours. She also didn’t want to confront her dating demons when she was so far away from any of her comfort zones, so she’d had a few puffs on the joint too (which totally didn’t count as giving in to peer pressure because she never, ever inhaled) before they headed over to Ari and Chester’s traditional Saturday night Glastonbury cocktail party. The dress code was festival glam, which meant swishy dresses in bold prints for the ladies and Hawaiian shirts and drainpipe trousers for the men. They’d rigged up a sound system to play Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and somehow, some way, they were able to serve ice-cold Martinis.
When she’d been little, Ellie would waltz around on Chester’s shoulders or stand on Tom’s feet as he tried to do a quickstep, but now she was all grown up and quite capable of foxtrotting under her own steam with Allison, the bassist from The Fuck Puppets, or doing the salsa with Lola, who kept asking her if something was wrong, ‘’cause you’re looking kind of pissed off, Ells.’ She was kind of pissed off, especially when Richey went AWOL again, but drinking quite a lot of ice-cold Martinis took the edge off her irritation.
Ellie could remember staggering back to the yurt compound at an ungodly hour, via a long detour to the Tipi Field where she got lost. Then collapsing on her double bed in a drunken stupor only to be woken up after what felt like five minutes by Richey. Or more accurately, Richey ‘and a few friends’. It had felt as if there were fifty people all crowded into the yurt although, in reality, there were no more than six, but they were very drunk and very loud. Spencer had started chopping out lines on Ellie’s laptop case and when she‘d asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, he and Richey had shared a conspiratorial look, then Spencer had said, ‘Stop being so fucking uptight.’
The two girls and the other guy with them had all laughed and Richey had made this big deal out of giving Spencer a bollocking. ‘You shouldn’t do coke, Spence. It’s not big and it’s not clever, and it makes Ellie mad at me.’
It was true, Ellie was mad at him. Furious. Fists clenched so tight she could feel her nails digging into her palms. She hated feeling so helpless and out of control, but there was nothing she could do right then. Whatever she did, short of hoovering up the coke herself, would have her labelled as uptight yet again and it wasn’t the time or place for a serious discussion with Richey. Not that he’d take any notice when he was starfished on the bed and kept nudging Ellie with his foot.
‘Cheer up,’ he stage-whispered. ‘You’re bringing everybody down.’
Just as Ellie decided that she could take no more and she was going to throw everyone out, even if they did think she was uptight, they were interrupted by the yurt compound’s crack security team, who removed the gatecrashers, though Spencer refused to go until he’d attempted to knock down the yurt, and screamed a string of obscenities at the stars.
It wasn’t until the security guards came back to warn Ellie that if she sneaked in anyone else, both she and her possessions would be forcibly ejected from the compound, that she realised that Richey had left with Spencer and the two girls, who couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
Now it was ten o’clock on Sunday morning and the alarms on her phone, iPad and MacBook were beeping to remind Ellie that she had a brunch meeting in an hour. An hour to repair the ravages of last night when she’d stared up at the billowing white folds of the yurt and begun to grieve the end of another relationship. They hadn’t officially broken up and she hadn’t actually got any proof that Richey had done anything harder than some weed, but she couldn’t think of a way that they’d come back from this.
Yes, they were at Glastonbury and the normal rules didn’t apply, and yes, she was sometimes a little uptight, but if Richey wanted to really be with her then he was going to have to lose his loser friend with the coke habit. But Ellie wasn‘t good at issuing ultimatums, especially not when Richey was MIA and she needed to take a meeting in one of the backstage restaurants with a hip-hop mogul in an hour. In Ellie’s experience, moguls were usually at least thirty minutes late, but she daren’t risk it.
Ellie showered and frantically blowdried her hair straight as she went over her talking points, tried to remember the names of the hip-hop artists the mogul represented and work on her poise, which was currently nowhere to be found. Then she piled on concealer and tinted moisturiser to try to hide the fact she’d had no sleep. Oh, and if she tied her vintage Hermès scarf round her head, it would offset any potential frizz and her Nars Orgasm highlighter would make her look perky even if she didn’t feel it.
It was a point of pride that at exactly five minutes to eleven Ellie was sitting down at an empty table in an organic restaurant backstage. It was also a point of pride that she was wearing a pristine white, broderie anglaise dress, nipped in at the waist, with a full skirt.
It was a trick she’d learned a long time ago – when all around you was chaos, you needed to find some area of your life that you could control and let that define you. It didn’t matter that she was on free schoolmeals and had a mother who wore leopard-print catsuits and dressed her in charity-shop clothes, when Ellie had the neatest handwriting in her class and was homework monitor five years in a row. Or when she had a tidier bedroom and better manners than her many cousins, who all lived in twoparent, semi-detached splendour in Belsize Park. When your boss was giving you hell and your flatmates were fighting and you’d been dumped again, there was something cathartic and peaceful in spending the afternoon in your pristine, minimalist office, rearranging your reference books by height and colour. So, a girl who could parade around Glastonbury in a spotless white dress was a girl who was calm and in control. Sometimes you had to fake it to make it.
She was back in her Hunter wellies because it was rare to get through a festival without being rained on, but there were lots of girls wearing wellies – it was accepted festival chic – and secure in the knowledge that her outfit passed muster on all counts, Ellie could settle down and wait for her hip-hop mogul.
Ninety minutes later Ellie was still waiting, still trying to appear calm and in control as she gazed at her laptop screen as if she was diligently working and not staring blindly at her email inbox in the hope that a message would suddenly arrive from the absent mogul apologising profusely for his no-show and promising to turn up in the next five minutes. Ellie tried to ignore her misery, her hangover and her urgent need for coffee. She knew that if she had coffee, she’d then need to pee and of course he’d turn up while she was braving the loos.
The longer she waited, the more tearful Ellie became. How dare Justin E. Peary keep her hanging for nearly two hours? Did he think that her time didn’t matter, compared to his time? That she might have better things to do than sit in a glorified canteen and listen to the members of a mid-level American rock band at the next table boast of last night’s sexual exploits? Why did people think they could walk all over her, treat her like shit and that she’d be OK with it?
Just as Ellie was biting her lip hard to stem the first wave of angry tears, there was a flurry of activity at the restaurant entrance and a skinny young man in red trousers, white shirt and a truly astounding pair of snakeskin loafers walked into the restaurant flanked by several minders, who were each the size of a small outbuilding and equipped with lots of chunky gold jewellery and walkie-talkies.
Ellie thought that maybe her eleven o’clock had arrived one hour and fifty-two minutes late. She stood up and mustered a big smile and a half wave.
The man and his entourage changed direction. ‘Sweetheart! Do you hate me very much?’ Justin E. Peary seized Ellie’s hands as soon as he was in grabbing distance and clasped them to his chest. ‘Sorry I’m late. Here, let’s sit. Bono and Jay-Z were meant to be flying in so we had to land the helicopter in a field right out in the boonies. Cows and sheep everywhere. I mean, what the fuck? And there was no cellphone reception and you’ve been waiting all this time. Have you ordered? You should have ordered. All English food sounds really fucking rude. Bangers and mash. Toad in the hole. Spotted dick – I don’t even want to know what that is. Shall we have a bacon butty? Do they do decent coffee?’
It was a verbal onslaught. All Ellie could do was nod, shake her head and smile. She and Justin E. Peary had been emailing back and forth for a couple of months because he wanted to leave his current art dealer (‘’cause I work with rap artists he thinks all I want to buy is graffiti art. For fuck’s sake. I’ve got a degree in History of Art and Visual Culture from RISD, and yeah, I blew my first few mill on bling and Bentleys but I’m not a fucking philistine’) but they’d never actually spoken before. Not that they were really speaking now. Ellie was still nodding and shaking her head and smiling while eating a bacon butty, which was either going to be kill or cure on her hangover, while Justin did all the talking.
Ellie suspected that once you stripped away the brashness and the bravado, there was a sharp operator who could sniff out bullshit at fifty paces. So it wasn’t a surprise when she finally and hesitantly began to talk that they had an in-depth discussion about Rashid Johnson and post-black art. Then she showed him the pieces she’d picked from their roster of artists. Justin didn’t go for the big names or the flashiest pieces for his new Tribeca penthouse but honed in on the photo collages from a young artist Ellie had only just signed.
He looked at the fifteen images. Asked Ellie to get the guy on the phone, then pinned her with a look. ‘What kind of discount for a bulk buy?’
‘Ten per cent,’ she said as decisively as she could.
‘Twenty-five,’ countered Justin. Now he decided to go quiet on Ellie to unnerve her. It was kind of working.
‘He’s only just starting out so you’re already getting him at a bargain rate.’ She hated negotiating. It always made her feel nauseous, even when she didn’t have a hangover. ‘I could do thirteen per cent and then he’s just breaking even.’
‘Or you could waive your commission if you’re that worried about him.’ Justin allowed himself to blink. ‘Twenty-two per cent.’
Ellie could waive her commission but she wasn’t going to. ‘I cannot go any lower than fifteen per cent, but I will let you have first refusal on any new work and I could probably get him to do a one-off personalised piece if you wanted to sit for him next time you were in London.’ She folded her arms and tried out a flinty-eyed look of her own. ‘If I went any lower than that, then I wouldn’t be representing the best interests of my artist.’
Justin tried his best to stare Ellie down. The effort to resist made her eyeballs throb, then he shrugged. ‘OK. Fifteen per cent, I get first look at any new pieces and we’ll make arrangements to fly him to NYC. Shall we shake on it?’
They shook on it, though Ellie wished that her hands weren’t quite so sweaty, then it took five minutes to arrange a wire transfer and they were done.
‘It’s been great, Ellie. This could be the start of something really beautiful,’ Justin called over his shoulder as he was spirited away by his entourage. ‘Let’s diarise soon.’
Ellie sank back down on her plastic chair and willed her hands to stop shaking. As soon as they did, she called Nathan, the artist, to tell him the good news. Then, with the help of the calculator on her phone, Ellie worked out her commission, which was nearly three thousand pounds after tax, and if she hadn’t been in such a public place then she might even have allowed herself an air punch. She settled for a slow, luxurious stretch, realised it was nearly three o’clock and leaped to her feet.
Right on cue, her phone beeped with a plaintive text message from Ari: Awful hangover. U 2? Fancy getting head massage? Am @ John Peel stage. Where U @?
There was no way Ellie was letting anyone touch her hair with fingers coated in oil, even an essential oil, but she’d have a shoulder massage to keep Ari company as she got some advice about the Richey situation. Just thinking about him made her stomach clench into a painful knot.
Coming to find you, she texted as she hurried out of the restaurant. Been backstage. Let’s meet @ phone recharge place halfway between. Hangover almost go . . .
She looked up momentarily to see where she was going and her gaze was immediately riveted to the two girls on her right. They were both dressed in floaty tops and teeny, tiny denim shorts that showed off long, tanned legs, as they were interviewed by a TV crew. Just as her father was never mentioned by name, his two daughters – his other daughters, Ellie’s two half-sisters – weren’t mentioned either. Ellie thought about them often, though. It was hard not to when she saw their pictures every time she bought a magazine. And there they were, twenty metres away from her.
Ellie could feel her mouth hang open, the shock of seeing them like a sudden but vicious punch to the gut. They both suddenly tossed back long, blonde hair in unison and smiled at each other, and it felt like another blow aimed directly at her solar plexus. She’d never had anyone smile at her like that; with affection and acceptance and a little bit of resentment, the way that sisters did.
She needed to look away and start walking because she was causing a bottleneck, but even as she took a step forward, then another and another, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from Lara and Rose and . . .
‘Oh!’ Ellie gasped, as she cannoned into someone and a hand shot out to steady her.
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