Sequins, Secrets, and Silver Linings (6 page)

And, golly, those eyes of his. I have a feeling I may need to see the movie again soon, to appreciate the full depth of his performance—obviously.

Over the last few days, the glossy celebrity magazines have been hitting the shelves with full-page spreads about the London premiere. I buy every one. They all agree that the movie is good, but their real focus is on the red carpet and what everyone is wearing. HSCA, in their matching Armani, are sparkling. Every possible opportunity is taken to ogle them from every angle. Joe Yule, playing it cool in his Zac Posen jacket and tie to match his eyes, is perfect in every way.

Jenny features heavily, too. Most magazines have found space for an article about her father, the multiple wives, and news of Jenny’s struggle with zits and boobs. Each one is illustrated with the cherry tomato. Somehow the pictures and the articles seem to suit each other perfectly, as if she had deliberately chosen the dress to highlight the plight of the chubby, miserable teenager. She makes it into the “hit and miss” pages, too, where she is an outright car crash in every one. And this week she’s up against a pregnant glamour girl in
head-to-toe leopard skin and a pop star in a yellow Lurex micromini and Uggs.

It’s different when it’s someone you know on those pages. I feel so guilty buying the magazines, but sadly it doesn’t stop me. The images seem to be everywhere. Even Mum, who normally sticks to
Vogue
and
Art Monthly
, notices. She doesn’t usually pay much attention to my friends, but she likes Jenny. She saw her in
Annie
at school and thought she was incredible.

“What that girl needs,” Mum says, “is corsetry.”

What that girl needs
, I think,
is therapy
.

The New York premiere of
Kid Code
is shown live on an entertainment channel on cable. I have to stay up late to catch it, accompanied by Harry (still no Zoe), Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream, and chocolate-chip cookies. (It drives Jenny potty that I can eat anything and always remain extremely skinny, but my metabolism is the one useful thing I’ve inherited from Mum.)

The hosts are already raving about the movie, which promises to be as popular in New York as in London. Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive are looking chic in yet more Armani. They must have some kind of deal going. Joe Yule is achingly gorgeous, as ever. He’s got Hottie Girlfriend with him this time and she’s clinging to him
like a limpet, wearing the smallest microdress I’ve ever seen to show off her perfect legs.

Jenny’s legs, on the other hand, are nowhere to be seen. Pablo Dodo has decided that this time she is best served by a bubblegum-pink maxi-dress that skims her ankles after bulging around her boobs and hips. This is accessorized with flat sandals and a floaty boa thing that she’s hugging to herself like a life jacket.

Joe Yule is ignoring her again. Jenny’s father, not surprisingly, is banned. HSCA are so busy being mobbed by journalists and photographers they don’t have time for her. She stands there alone, clutching her boa thing in the flashing lights, panicking.

I glance across at Harry, who’s watching her through his fingers, as if he can hardly bear to look.

No need to ask him what he thinks. And I decide not to share my thoughts, either. Because she reminds me of nothing so much as a giant, pink, miserable jellyfish. In a boa.

Chapter 9

D
on’t
ever
tell her I told you that,” I say menacingly.

“I won’t, promise!” Edie splutters. Her voice is muffled by a bunch of purple and green things in cellophane.

I’m deeply regretting sharing the jellyfish image with Edie. We were texting each other and I was trying to give the full impact of the sheer awfulness of the maxi-dress disaster. For an instant, I forgot that Edie’s cleverness and her reliability with embarrassing information are at opposite ends of the scale.

But it’s too late now, and anyway, we’re busy. We’re in a grubby building just off Gloucester Road, standing on the staircase that leads up to Crow’s flat. Her auntie Florence wants to meet us.

The smell is the thing I notice most of all. I think something must have died in the apartment downstairs. Possibly a mouse. Or maybe a family of them.

“Perhaps on cold days it’s not so bad,” says Edie
hopefully. She’s lucky. She’s holding the bunch of flowers we’ve brought with us and she can shove her face in them, like an Elizabethan lady with a nosegay.

Crow says the invitation is to say thank you for the reading stuff and helping her out with the new fabrics. Edie suspects it’s to make sure we’re not a couple of sweatshop bosses or child kidnappers, and I think she’s probably right. So I’ve borrowed one of Edie’s skirts and a blouse-thing to look respectable. The skirt is hanging off me and the blouse-thing is straining over even my modest boobage, so they’re not having quite the effect I was after. I look more like a wild gypsy princess than a budding royal. Edie, as usual, looks as though she’s dressed for tea at the British Embassy.

The door opens and a tall, elegant, but exhausted-looking woman lets us in. Edie offers her the flowers and she thanks us with a smile. I’m guessing she doesn’t get them on a regular basis.

“I’m Florence,” she says. “Pleased to meet you.” We shake her hand.

Inside there is a main room with a couple of doors leading off it. The kitchen is in one corner. Another corner has a low table and a couple of chairs and a stool, where we are motioned to sit.

“Elizabeth!” the woman calls loudly, as if the sound
might have to carry down a couple of corridors. A door opens about a foot away and Crow appears. Apparently, Crow is Elizabeth. Confusing. Behind her, I can see a tiny room, hardly bigger than the bed, hung from floor to ceiling with knitwear and dresses in various stages of design. How Crow can even breathe among that lot, I can’t imagine.

She comes through obediently and helps her aunt bring a couple of paper plates from the kitchen area. We’re treated to chips and cookies and cups of super-strong tea. I notice the lack of anything on the walls. Coming from a home that is practically an art gallery, I find this physically painful. There are just two photographs in little wooden frames. One is of a tall, elegant man who looks like the male version of Florence, with a woman and a little girl—Crow’s family, I assume. The other is a school picture of Crow, looking sullen and watchful and under-accessorized.

Florence explains how grateful she is to us for providing some company for her niece. She doesn’t seem to be worried about the sweatshop thing at all.

“I have two jobs. I work every day, unless I’m sick. I’m hardly ever here to talk to Elizabeth. She’s a hard worker, too. Every day she’s always making something. She has Yvette”—the woman “from Dior”—”but she’s
an old, old lady. Crow needs people her own age. She needs children.”

We smile respectfully. Fourteen-year-olds love being categorized as children. Yes indeedy. Totally with the program.

Edie picks up the photograph of the man, the woman, and the little girl.

“Your brother?” she asks.

“Yes. James. He’s a teacher. A very responsible man. He’s passionate about England and anything English, isn’t he, Elizabeth?”

Crow nods. I’m struggling with the Elizabeth–Crow thing. It’s a strange nickname and not linked to her real name at all. Edie says she’s asked and Crow won’t talk about it. Clams up like Harrison Ford in an interview (Edie didn’t say that, of course, but that’s the impression I get). Odd.

“His little girl is Victoria,” Florence continues. “English queens, you see? He’s so proud that Elizabeth is here, getting a proper English education.”

I spot Edie flinch. She’s talked to Crow about this and she knows the education is not exactly perfect when there are thirty of you in the class and you can’t read ninety percent of what the teacher writes or anything in your textbook. Crow mostly just sits at her desk and
doodles on her notebooks, praying she won’t be asked a question. She likes art, though.

“Will James come to England, too?” Edie asks.

“Oh no. He teaches in a camp for displaced people. He can’t leave them. And Grace can’t leave him, and little Victoria can’t leave Grace.”

“Why …?” I don’t know how to put it exactly, without being rude. I struggle. I just don’t understand how it could possibly be better for Crow to be in this tiny flat, with an aunt who’s never there, instead of at home, with her family. It seems such an important question it’s almost too obvious to ask. And yet I can’t find the words to phrase it.

Edie notices me struggling and puts a hand on my arm. For once, she gives me the look I’ve so often had to give her: the “don’t go there” look. I’m still desperate to find out more, but when I give “the look” to Edie, I seriously mean “shut up,” so I take a dose of my own medicine and ask instead about how Crow’s getting on with all her new materials.

This is obviously the right decision. Crow leaps up delightedly and takes me into her room to show me. We leave Edie and Florence to talk.

I don’t know what to take in first. There’s the size of the room—tiny; the furniture—a few bits of old
office stuff, including a filing cabinet; the walls—covered in fabulous illustrations of dancing girls, pictures by Victoria, and torn-out pages from magazines; and the sculpture skirts and dresses—everywhere.

Crow must be obsessed. They’re piled several layers deep. Paper patterns. Practice versions in cheap cotton. Violent-colored nylon examples and now delicate silk versions that look like melted works of art. They’re hanging from the curtain rod. Hanging from the handles of the filing cabinet. Draped on the bed. Folded on and under the tiny desk, where the only object I can recognize between the piles is an old, black, hand-operated Singer sewing machine.

“How long have you been making these?” I ask.

“Two years,” Crow says. “Before, I just knitted. It was so cold when I came to London. But then I went to the V&A with Yvette. I saw Balenciaga. Vionnet. Now I practice.”

Good grief. I usually think that removing a collar or slapping on a few sequins (or Wite-Out) is pretty creative. Next to this kid I’m obviously hopeless and destined not even to be allowed to make the tea for a designer. I find a small spot on the floor to sit down, lost in wonder and sad contemplation of my future career at McDonald’s.

I have an idea, though. There may be one other thing I can do to help.

“Can I borrow a couple of things?” I ask. “I promise I’ll bring them back.”

Crow gives a shrug that I interpret as a yes. I take one of the new silk skirts and a couple of Crow’s sketches that are lying in an untidy pile near the sewing machine. Needless to say, they’re brilliant. Bright, spiky dancing girls cavorting around the pages in light-as-air dresses and vertiginous heels. The kind of thing I’ve been trying to draw since I was six. Crow doesn’t ask what they’re for, but although she thinks I’m slightly barmy, she does seem to trust me, which is encouraging.

As we leave the room, Edie and Florence hurriedly wind up their conversation. Both of them are mopping their eyes.

“Thank you,” Florence says, wrapping me in a bear hug with her strong frame. She does the same for Edie.

“That girl’s a genius,” I tell her. “Seriously.”

Florence smiles thinly. “Her school says she needs extra help. She’s special needs.”

“She’s special, all right.”

Now it’s Florence’s turn to shrug. We leave them in the tiny flat and make our way back past the smell of dead mouse. Three streets away, all the houses are owned by millionaires. London is crazy.

Chapter 10

S
o?!”

Edie looks innocent. “So?”

“So what did Florence say?”

We’re back in Edie’s room and it’s late. Her little brother, Jake, went to bed hours ago. I’m sleeping over and her mum has just informed us that “sleep means sleep,” but we have far too much to talk about. We weren’t really in the mood on the way back from our visit, but now I feel ready to catch up and Edie is busy on Google and Wikipedia, looking up the missing facts in the story she got from Florence.

“She said what I suspected,” Edie says, with more than a hint of smugness.

“Which was?”

“Well, I tried to talk to you about it before, last week, but you said it was dull and distasteful.”

“I think I was trying to watch
Gossip Girl
at the time,” I point out.

“Obviously you had better things to do.”

“It was a major episode. Anyway. Tell me now.”

Edie hesitates. I can tell part of her doesn’t want to, because I wasn’t listening the first time. But another part simply loves explaining things to people who don’t know stuff, and this is the part that wins.

“Well,” she begins, “lots of Uganda is perfectly safe and normal. The queen’s been there. But Crow comes from the north, near Sudan, and things are different there. The government’s been fighting a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army for years and years. The rebels hide out in the bush and use children to fight. When things were really bad, they used to kidnap boys from their homes at night and make them maim and kill people. Even their own families. The girls were made to have the soldiers’ babies. So children who lived in remote villages used to walk miles and miles every afternoon to somewhere safe in a town, where there were people to protect them. They did it night after night, sleeping where they could. They were called Night Walkers.”