CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kelly has a phone. She has been crowing about this for weeks now but only to me, the first time she’s been able to keep something quiet in her entire life I would imagine. Rightly, since if the other women here knew they’d do anything to get their hands on it. Kelly guards it fiercely, like a terrier with a bone. She hunches over it and types constantly, her long nails clacking away and the glow of the little screen just visible from under the covers. I don’t ask where or how she got it. I imagine the gormless Clint managed to get it to her somehow, but I can’t think what they have to say to each other that would require quite so much back and forth. I fervently hope it’s not sexual. I cannot stomach sharing a tiny space with someone having text sex with a man who gels his fringe. Normally Kelly is quite generous with her things but she hasn’t offered to let me borrow her new prized possession once. I wouldn’t ask even if I had anyone to call. You don’t want to be in hock to someone like Kelly. She might be a prize fluff-head but she wouldn’t hesitate to call in a favour. I try to block out the sound with a pillow over my head, wishing fervently that I could do the same to her.
*
Do you want to hear something funny? The first time I met my sister was in a nail salon. There was no planning, no carefully orchestrated scheme conjured up so that I could bump into her in an unsuspicious way. It was a completely random encounter, if such a thing exists. I don’t believe in fate, it’s not weird that two women of roughly the same age would cross paths in central London. Chance meetings don’t mean anything – there’s nothing intrinsically interesting to them, despite what your mate Sarah who’s really into horoscopes and tarot might insist. But it was funny. It was nice to have the work done for me for once. She belonged to a family who travelled in chauffeured cars and private planes, who had security gates and security dogs and a security detail. They lived ten feet above the rest of us. Unable to colonise another planet quite yet, the ultra-rich might be forced to inhabit the same vicinity as everyone else, but they are never quite within our grasp. They might be on the same street as you （only if that street is the Kings Road） but they are not experiencing it in the same way. Shop doors silently spring open for them in nanoseconds, pavements are merely a runway towards waiting cars, restaurants reveal private rooms, museums open at any time. The way you see a place is not the way they do. They are already moving on to the next thing by the time you’ve shaken the rain off your umbrella and begged the ma?tre d’ for a table. You cannot touch them. And yet here she was, sitting next to me, asking for a gel manicure. Not saying please.
Bryony Artemis has one of those faces you’ve seen before. I don’t mean that she looks like a girl you know – she absolutely doesn’t – but she’s got a look that social media has made ubiquitous. Pillowy lips, a bundle of glossy, wavy hair, a body encased in athleisure wear – far too thin, but one that the owner would go out of their way to say was strong, emphasising their biceps, their ‘booty’。 The kind of skinny that some women profess not to think about as if it’s not all they think about. Women like Bryony look startlingly beautiful in photos but a bit ‘uncanny valley’ in real life. I love that description – the roboticist Masahiro Mori coined it in 1970 to describe our revulsion towards robots or computer-generated images that look almost like human beings … but not quite. The Bryonys of the world are flawless, their features plumped and filled and smoothed. In photos it works. In real life it’s deadening. It makes me long for the days of wonky breast implants and terrible facelifts when at least the insecurities that made women mutilate themselves were visible in their appearance. You could laugh at the Bride of Wildenstein or be sad that she did that to herself. This tribe can’t show anything with their faces, nothing that would drive you to feel empathy, pity, or even derision.
She was wearing the kind of expensive trainers that have never seen the inside of a gym, skin-tight leggings with electric blue stripes down the side, and her tiny top half was swaddled in an enormous puffer jacket, not zipped up but wrapped around her and held in place by a giant cross-body bag. She looked like every other girl on Instagram. Except that the bag was Chanel, and she’d embellished the look with gold rings, diamond studs, and a small Rolex. The markers which show you that you’ll never be able to ‘shop the look’ because the look costs more than you earn in a year. The look costs more than your parents paid for their house. The look costs more than you’ll ever scrape together to buy your own house. I’m kidding, you won’t ever be able to buy a house.