Midnight Girls (13 page)

Allegra may have been the driving force behind what had
happened
, but we were all guilty
, thought Imogen.
We were all there. We could have stopped it. We could have done something. But we didn’t
.

They stared around, each seeing her own feelings reflected in the gaze of the other two. Their shared secret bound them together, they all knew that.

Romily broke the silence. ‘I promise I’ll never tell. Never, ever. It will always be our secret.’

‘I promise too,’ Imogen said quietly, ‘on my life. I’ll never tell a living soul.’

‘Me too. I promise as well.’ Allegra put her hand on to the snow-white duvet. ‘Put your hands here. Let’s all swear we’ll be friends for ever. Remember how we used to call ourselves the Midnight Girls? It was a bit babyish, but … well … we’ll always be Midnight Girls now. Like the Musketeers – one for all and all for one. Agreed?’

Romily put her slim brown hand on top of Allegra’s and smiled. ‘Agreed.’

Imogen added hers. ‘Agreed,’ she echoed fervently.

‘I feel much better,’ Romily said, smiling. ‘Now I know that we can always trust each other. That we’ll always be friends. I don’t feel so lonely. You must come and stay with me in Paris, OK? There’s so much room in our house.’

‘Paris? We’d love to!’ Allegra muffled her squeals of excitement in a pillow and the three of them bounced silently about on the bed, overcome with anticipation of the life that awaited them beyond the grounds of Westfield.

Chapter 10

New York
Autumn 2001

BECAUSE HE SMOKED
heroin and avoided injecting, Mitch told himself that he wasn’t really a user. He was one of the lucky ones who would be able to stay in control. To demonstrate this, he only allowed himself to smoke heroin occasionally, when he felt like he really deserved it. It gave him the sense of staying on top, and he needed that.

‘I don’t want to end up like junkie shit!’ he told himself sternly. The longer he lived in New York, the more he saw it: people reduced to dope-addicted wrecks, their veins collapsed, their money all spent on heroin or crack or whatever their drug of choice was. People disappeared out of the world of restaurants and kitchens as quickly as they entered it, falling away and forgotten before the night was out. There was always someone to replace them. When Mitch was made second-in-command in his kitchen, he soon started avoiding giving jobs to anyone who looked like they were using. Drinking was OK as long as it was confined to the hours outside the kitchen – and, hell, they were all drunks as soon they stepped out of the door – but the druggies were totally unreliable and as dishonest as they came. Mitch found he preferred hiring immigrants, who had no interest in drugs at all. They expected to work hard and
uncomplainingly
for little money, and put their backs into their jobs. He knew their wages were supporting families or being sent back to wherever they came from, and that pleased him even if it made him a hypocrite for investing a sizeable portion of his own pay in bags of dope.

Little by little, his addiction began to grow. He found it harder and harder to resist the lure of a smoke after work, the delightful comedown that melted away all his tensions and removed every care he had in the world. He had a girlfriend for a while, a sweet, pretty girl called Vanna who was a student at NYCU, but as his dalliance with heroin grew ever more serious, her love for him waned.

‘You’re an asshole when you’re using this shit,’ she shouted at him. ‘I hate you when you’re doing this!’

She had just discovered that he’d emptied her purse of money because he needed some cash for a fix and couldn’t wait a second longer.

‘You stole it!’ cried Vanna, her green eyes flashing with anger.

‘I’ll pay you back,’ he said, affronted.

‘Yeah, right! Anyway, it’s not the point. You went through my purse and took my money.’

‘Ah, fuck off,’ Mitch drawled, happy when she’d slammed out of the apartment, knowing he could now be alone with the substance that was fast becoming the love of his life.

‘Why do you do it, Mitch?’ she’d asked later, when she’d come back and they’d made up with a short but intense fuck, and were lying in each other’s arms on his futon. ‘What’s the appeal?’

‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like … getting high is like having sex, great sex, while simultaneously soaking in a delicious hot bath and eating the most sublime food in the world,’ Mitch had replied, but she’d just stared at him, uncomprehending. She was still a creature of the real world,
a
normal girl with a normal job, who preferred real sex to dopamine-induced ecstasy. But then, she wasn’t part of the kitchen world, with its nocturnal rhythms and craving for escape.

When Vanna dumped him the following week, he didn’t even worry about all the sex he’d be missing out on: his addiction was replacing any physical desire he’d once had.

He still loved to cook, though. That passion was the only thing that heroin didn’t touch. He could do anything outside the kitchen: fuck the waitresses, buy shit from pushers, chase his little dragons all night long (one smoke wasn’t enough now, it didn’t produce the required effect any longer), but when he was back at his station or at the pass, running the kitchen when Chef was absent, he was wholly and entirely focused on creating wonderful food from his rack of ingredients. When he was in the kitchen his world shrank to the metre or so of stainless steel that was his bench, and the shelves with his carefully prepped tray of seasonings and ingredients, and his knife.

Mitch wasn’t working on the day the Twin Towers fell. He was shaken awake by Herbie who was grey-faced and sweating.

‘Huh? What is it?’ grumbled Mitch, rolling back into his sheets. ‘Why’re you up so early?’

‘I ain’t been to bed. There’s some crazy shit going on, man! A plane’s smashed into the World Trade Centre! You gotta wake up.’

‘What?’ Mitch scrambled out of bed and they switched on the television. The screen showed the towers alight, great billows of grey smoke sailing up into the brilliant blue sky. ‘Holy fuck!’ he breathed, dazed. Was it real? He ran to the window of their apartment, and saw the huge columns of smoke to the south, climbing upwards, bigger, denser and
blacker
than they looked on the TV. The air around the towers was shimmering with the clouds of debris floating downwards, clouds of office paper fluttering like falling leaves. The gashes that had been torn into the towers glowed orange where the fires burned. Fear rushed through him. What did it mean? Was the whole city under attack?

‘What should we do, man?’ Herbie said, his hands shaking and his eyes wild.

‘I dunno. Stay here, I guess.’

Herbie looked agonised. ‘My pal Bobby’s in the North tower. He’s working at Windows on the World, and so’s his wife, Maria. Look, the whole place is on fire right underneath them. How’re they gonna get down?’

Mitch went back to the television. He could see people at the windows of the upper floors, waving desperately, pleading for help. Then he saw that some were falling or jumping, small black stick figures floating downwards. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘The whole city fire department is there, and the police. They’ll get ’em all out, I know they will. Those guys know what they’re doing. Oh, Christ. I can’t believe it.’

‘I wanna get out of here,’ Herbie said, panicking. Sweat glistened all over his face. ‘They’re trying to fuckin’ kill us!’

I gotta keep him calm
. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Hey, let’s have a smoke and take the edge off this thing. There’s nothing we can do.’ Mitch went to a drawer and took out a pouch of powder and his drug gear.

‘Yeah,’ Herbie said, looking relieved, ‘we’ll have a smoke. That’s what we’ll do.’

By the time the first tower fell, they were so stoned they didn’t even feel the ground shaking or the massive rumble as the hundreds of tons of concrete, steel and glass collapsed. As the second tower went, they were still anaesthetising, chasing another flame across the hot tin foil.
When
they came to, it was to a strange deathly quiet and an apartment covered in thick grey dust. It was all over.

In the aftermath, Herbie and Mitch were both out of a job. Their restaurant closed, first because it was choked with filth and dust from the nearby site of destruction; then because, when the restaurants began to open again, no one wanted to eat out.

Herbie said he was going to leave, go home, move to the sea, just escape the ruptured city with its atmosphere of grief and mourning. He was shaken by the way Bobby and Maria had died, trapped at the top of the burning building with no way out, waiting for help that never came and then pulverised in the mighty collapse. But Mitch wasn’t ready to give up on New York yet.
I’m gonna stick it out
, he decided. He felt in an obscure way that the city needed him to keep going, keep working, that he owed it to the place to stay focused and act as normal. He persuaded Herbie to stay on with him, they found some temporary work in the kitchens of a big hotel, and gradually the dust and debris were cleared away, and the city began to recover.

The restaurant trade started up again, and they moved to a new place and then another.

If we can survive this, we can survive anything
, Mitch told himself. But he could only face it with the help of his little bags of medicine.

Chapter 11

Paris
July 2002

‘ALLEGRA, ALLEGRA! OVER
here!’

Allegra turned and saw Romily pushing through the crowd towards her.

‘What are you doing here? I was going to get a taxi.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I brought the car. The driver will take us home.’ Romily hugged her friend, her eyes bright. ‘Come on, we’d better get out of this place as soon as possible. You must be dying for a shower.’

‘I am a bit.’ It had been a long journey from Scotland the night before. She had taken the train to London, stayed in Kensington, and then taken the first Eurostar train from Waterloo to Paris. The journey from London had been relatively swift but she still felt tired and grubby. Romily looked entirely different, standing out like a beacon from the people around her. Her simple outfit of a blue skirt and white jacket over a blue and white striped T-shirt, teamed with white, navy-capped Chanel pumps, was so stylish and expensive, she looked like a princess visiting a rundown corner of a deprived city.

‘I’m so excited you’re here!’ she cried, giggling. ‘We’re going to have so much fun. Come on, let’s find the car.’

She led Allegra through the milling crowd of people to
the
pavement outside, where a sleek black Mercedes purred quietly at the roadside. A uniformed driver got out and opened the door for the girls and they got in quickly. A moment later, the car was gliding through the Parisian streets, heading for the central arrondissements. Allegra and Romily chattered all the way, about Allegra’s journey and everything that had happened since they’d last seen each other. Romily was eager to catch up on all the gossip from the year she had missed at school and to find out what had happened to their old classmates. Allegra filled her in on where everybody was going now that school was over.

‘And you and Imogen both going to Oxford!’ Romily said admiringly. ‘You lucky things.’

‘Mmm – if we get the right A-level grades. We’ll know next month.’

‘Is Imogen excited?’

‘Oh my God, she’s over the moon, and so are her parents. She definitely earned her place. I’m not so sure about me.’

‘Why not? Of course you earned it – how else would you get in?’

Allegra stared out of the window and said nothing for a while. Then she sighed and said, ‘Oh, ignore me. I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘And you’re both going in September. Didn’t you want to take gap years?’

Allegra shook her head. ‘We both agreed we didn’t want to waste any time.’ She looked over at Romily with a meaningful look. ‘We just wanted to get on with things, get away.’

Romily looked down at her lap, her fingers twisting on her skirt. ‘Mmm,’ she said quietly.

Allegra changed the subject, saying in a jolly voice, ‘But you’ve been having a splendid time, we hear! No nasty A-levels for you.’

Romily had kept up a stream of letters and postcards to Westfield sent from grand private homes and large hotels all over Europe, telling the other two about her hectic social life. They had even begun to see her in glossy magazines, pictured attending parties and glamorous functions. She was captioned ‘socialite’ or ‘heiress’ or ‘fashion-leader’, and was snapped in Versace, Nina Ricci, Chanel, and a host of other designers.

‘It’s been so busy,’ Romily said almost wistfully. ‘I can’t think where the last year has gone. It’s just melted away.’

‘But you’ve had fun?’ Allegra glanced over at her friend. She seemed older, even more polished, a world away from the schoolgirl Allegra had known. But one look into those brown eyes and Allegra knew it was the same girl, still Romily: cool, confident and determined.

‘Oh, yes, lots of fun.’ She grinned. ‘But I don’t have any partners in crime! That’s the only problem.’

‘That’s why I’m here. So, what have we got lined up?’

Romily looked excited. ‘Well, first we’re going back to my parents’ house. Then we can relax and get dressed before dinner tonight. It’s just the usual Friday night thing: not a big deal, about fifteen guests. Tomorrow we’ll go shopping! On Sunday we’ll see some sights, and then on Monday we’ll go shopping again. Just fun and relaxation for the whole week. Maybe even longer.’

‘I’ve got to catch the train back to London next Friday,’ Allegra warned.

‘Of course, of course, don’t worry,’ Romily said, shrugging. ‘You’ll be back in good time. Everything will be just fine.’

Allegra suspected that Romily didn’t quite take her need to get the return train to London seriously, but she also had the feeling that in Romily’s world everything ran smoothly and things adapted themselves to fit her needs, rather than
the
other way round. Little things like return tickets and timetables meant nothing to her.