She didn’t usually drink, but the first thing she had done this evening was stride straight up to the bar, order a double brandy, and gulp it down in one. She hadn’t taken drugs for decades, either – when she’d started at Home, the girl she did shifts with on the coat check would offer her a little bump to help her stay awake – but there was pretty much nothing she wanted so much in the world now as a fat white line of coke to sharpen her senses.
She couldn’t stay in here all night, she knew that. Taking a deep breath, then letting it out slowly, she rose to her feet and reached for her jacket.
She was just about to open the door when she heard Lily McAlister’s voice outside.
Oh God. Of all the people.
Of course, Nikki had known she would be here. Lily McAlister was always at Home’s parties, always did that thing of frowning and pretending initially to have to think where she knew Nikki from. Always – if someone important was there too – then told the story of how she and Nikki knew each other as if that fact itself was innately comic, that one of them had ended up as a PA and the other one . . . well, the other one was Lily McAlister.
How often, back in the nineties, when they were both teenagers （Nikki was sure she was once a year or two younger than Lily, even if Lily’s Wikipedia page now claimed the opposite）， had they bumped into each other, each with a portfolio clutched under one arm, at the same model castings? Not that they had exactly bonded, even then. It was a solitary job, modelling, so there was rarely a lot of small talk, but even by model standards, Lily was icy – barely nodding in acknowledgement on the stairs of walk-up magazine offices, occasionally deigning to nick a Marlboro Light as they waited outside some self-consciously edgy designer’s Clerkenwell studio, perhaps enquiring who Nikki had seen that week while working at Covent Garden Home. Both scouted for the same agency by the same guy （Nikki in McDonald’s on Oxford Street, Lily shopping in Fenwick with her mum）， both tall （although only Lily quite tall enough for a catwalk career）， flat-chested and narrow-hipped, both dark-haired, both similarly pillow-lipped and high cheekboned, it was no wonder they had crossed paths so often, had frequently found themselves in direct competition for the same jobs. That was a strange thought. It was almost always Lily who actually got the jobs. Who had just got back from a shoot in Budapest or Tokyo or Berlin. Who was heading off straight after the casting to be in a music video.
It was also true that their lives had followed very different trajectories since. The thing was, whatever Lily or anyone else assumed, never once had Nikki felt the slightest sliver of envy of her – or of any of them, really, these members, the famous ones. What more obvious proof did you want of how horrible life in the public eye must be, how happy they were to avoid that harsh glare, than the very existence of somewhere like Home? No, she had never envied Lily any of that. The phone taps. The cloud hacks. The guy who’d got over the wall of her Brooklyn brownstone and into her backyard with a backpack full of duct tape and cable ties.
Given all the creeps and crooks and slimeballs that Lily had spent her career dealing with – the photographers, the managers, the bookers, all those other middle-aged men who made your scalp tingle and on whose approval the careers of young, hungry, hopeful girls depended – Nikki had always thought she was pretty lucky, only having to put up with Ned. She had certainly felt lucky he’d taken a chance on an unqualified teenager whose only proven professional ability was putting coats on hangers and handing them back – had always wondered what it was about her that had made her seem perfect for the job.
People often joked about Ned being married to the club, and it was striking how few of his inner circle had partners, children. But it did also mean something to have watched Home grow from one club to two, from two to ten, each new project better, more ambitious than the last. Also just to have worked for so long, at such a high degree of intensity, with these people. No one would ever have been cheesy enough to compare Home to a family, but there were similarities. Not similarities with her own family, of course – the mother she hadn’t spoken to since she’d been kicked out of home aged fourteen for daring, finally, to hit her back, her bags drunkenly packed and furiously thrown over the concrete balcony of their tenth-floor Margate flat with the farewell, ‘Fuck off then, Nicola. Let’s just see if you can make more of your life than I did.’ No, her own family was the sort where nobody cared if you ran away and sofa surfed with people you barely knew, spent weekdays shoplifting in Topshop just for something to wear. In comparison, Home felt like the sort of big, complicated family you saw on TV and there had always been something comforting about that. The weird intimacy of it. The shared jokes. The ebb and flow of warmth and resentment. The way you felt you knew exactly how everybody’s brains worked – even though it turned out she had been very wrong about that.