Fairytale of New York. Miranda Dickinson
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‘I’d like to say he’ll call you, but you know what he’s like, dear.’
‘Yes, so wrapped up in his own universe that no one else matters…’
‘He’s so wrapped up in his work commitments that he never has time to do the things he wants. Anyhow, darling, I must go…’
‘I expect this call’s expensive…’
‘It’s so expensive to call you at this time of night.’
I smiled. ‘Love-you-miss-you-bye!’
‘Love-you-miss-you-bye!’ The message ended. I shook my head and smiled before taking a long sip of coffee. For the tiniest second, I wished myself home with Mum in England again.
The last message was from Celia. There are normally several messages from Celia, their length, volume and coherence depending on how near a total breakdown she is at the time.
‘Rosie, it’s me. It’s six forty-five. Where are you? Call me the second you get this.’
‘OK, OK, wait one second while I get changed,’ I muttered, walking into my bedroom.
True to form, Celia wasn’t listening. No sooner had I kicked off my shoes, the phone rang.
‘All right, fine, seeing as you insist, I’ll talk to you first then,’ I sighed.
‘Rosie—thank goodness, honey. I was thinking something awful must have happened to you.’
I smiled despite myself. ‘I caught a bus to the deli and then walked home. It’s actually light this time of day in August, you know. What could possibly have happened to me?’
‘Anything, Rosie! My colleague has been working on a piece about how many single young women meet supposedly wonderful young men in bars after work, only to have their apartments ransacked once they’ve slept with them…’
‘Celia, listen to yourself! I’m fine. I haven’t slept with any supposedly wonderful young men today and everything in my apartment is just as I left it this morning.’
‘Well, I only worry because I care about you,’ Celia said, with more than a hint of offence in her tone.
‘I know—and I really appreciate it. Now, what can I do for you?’
‘I need you to come by the office tomorrow, if you can.’
‘Why?’ I asked carefully, picturing Ed and Marnie’s stern faces.
‘I want to feature you in our “West Siders” column. So many guests who met you at the Authors’ Meet have been asking about you.’
I frowned. This was the second time I’d heard that today and it seemed weird. All I’d done was have one conversation about lavender and take part in a lot of polite smalltalk. ‘Mimi Sutton said the same thing when I rang her today, Celia. Just who has been asking about me?’
‘Everyone, sweetie! Angelika, Henrik, Jane, Brent—in fact I spoke with Brent this evening and he said he’d seen you briefly at Mimi’s office. He’s very taken with you, y’know. He said you’re like an English Sandra Bullock.’
‘I look nothing like Sandra Bullock,’ I commented.
‘Oh, you do, Rosie! Everyone says it! Mimi said it at the party and I’ve heard that Ed from your store say it too.’
‘Ed said it?’ I repeated, making a mental note to challenge him on that tomorrow. ‘Well, I have dark hair and dark eyes, but there the similarity ends,’ I replied, ‘I mean, if Sandra Bullock put on a stone then maybe we’d be more alike.’
Celia was obviously getting tired of this subject. ‘Well, whatever, Rosie, you’re officially a hit! Just like I said you would be. Look, my editor asked me today to find interesting, upcoming West Side individuals for the new column and I thought what a great opportunity it would be to get the word out on you! Come by at one tomorrow and we’ll discuss it all. Love you, must go.’
And with that, she was gone and blessed peace was restored.
Slowly, I put the receiver down and reached for my diary, as my mind clicked into hyperdrive. Why had there been so much interest in me from the party? I couldn’t understand it. The question remained at the forefront of my mind as I grilled chicken and made a large salad. As I ate my evening meal, my eye kept returning to the open diary page for tomorrow. While I found myself quite excited at the prospect, an undeniable underlying note of caution sounded too.
Publicity can, I have discovered, work one of two ways. Either it can be incredibly successful, or it can backfire on you Big Time. Like the time my mum paid to place an advert in the local paper, informing readers that, ‘Eadern Blooms are taking 50% off prices for the first week of May’, yet somewhere between Mum faxing the details and the newspaper being printed, Eadern Blooms had become ‘Eadern Bloomers’ and for a week she was inundated with irate OAPs demanding cutprice underwear. Or, like the time my brother, James, was in the paper for one of his early business ventures. He was pictured with a girlfriend, who, the interview stated, had been going steady with him for three years and was looking forward to becoming Mrs James Duncan in the not-too-distant future. Problem was, four girls who he was also seeing at the time read that article too. They turned up at our house en masse and all hell broke loose. Still, James had always said he wanted to travel in an ambulance with its siren blaring and lights flashing…
With this in mind, I decided that I would go to see Celia as planned, and politely but firmly refuse her offer. We were doing fine at Kowalski’s: the neighbourhood business was as good as ever and now, with Mimi Sutton’s commission for the Grand Winter Ball, things were looking decidedly healthy on the event front. The publicity we could gain from me being in the ‘West Siders’ column might only serve to swamp us with work we were unprepared for—and the last thing I wanted was to run before we could walk. Right now the balance between day-to-day sales and special events was just about right. I wasn’t about to sell out and ruin what, in my opinion, set Kowalski’s apart from other, larger florists in New York. Decision made, I went to bed content and fell asleep almost straight away.
That night, my dreams were incredibly vivid. Images flashed through my mind at supersonic speed—Ed smiling, Mimi Sutton in her magnificent office, Brent’s wide grin, bumping into Nate Amie and Mum’s phone message about James. Then, suddenly, I could feel a man’s heartbeat, the warmth of his arms around me, his breath in my hair. It was wonderful. I felt…safe. I raised my head from his chest to look in his eyes…At first, I couldn’t make out his features. Then, I recognised him. The feeling of safety dissolved, replaced with a vice-grip of nausea. Suddenly, the scene changed. I was now standing in a garden, facing a group of familiar faces. They were smiling at me. I heard myself speak—voice full of emotion, fighting back tears: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…’
I woke with a start. Shafts of moonlight pooled in through the bedroom window. Breathing hard, face wet with tears and perspiration, I sat bolt upright and looked around to regain my bearings. Reaching across to the bedside table, I snapped the light on. A warm golden glow bathed the features of my room—the antique whitewashed chair by my bed with its flea-market-find patchwork quilt throw, the painting of Bridgnorth that Mum had brought on her last visit, the dark wood chest of drawers Celia had donated when I first moved here—familiar décor soothing my burning eyes. I wiped my brow and forced myself to breathe deeply. Slowly, the hammering of my heart eased. But the nausea sat defiant in my stomach.
‘Get a grip, girl,’ I chastised myself. ‘It’s just a dream. It’s gone now—it isn’t real.’
Well, it isn’t real now, said a voice inside my head. But it was once.