Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming

Breaking up with Joe had more or less cured two addictions, Izzie realised after a few days at home in Tamarin. She was going cold turkey on Joe and the ensuing misery meant she no longer checked her BlackBerry fifteen times a day in case she had email messages.

Before, she’d known exactly why it was nicknamed ‘CrackBerry’, because it was clearly almost as addictive as the deadly rock cocaine. But currently work, New York and Joe were all mingled together in her head and she looked at her BlackBerry warily, as if it might impart some more news with the power to hurt her.

Instead, there was a message from Carla, written in her usual crisp style.

Stefan from Jacobman keeps wanting to know when you’re going to be back. Everyone here is wild about the competition for the girl to be the face of SupaGirl! – it’s going to be worth millions. Best news is Stefan promises Laurel and Hardy won’t be on the team.

Izzie grinned, Stefan was a brat. They’d both have their knuckles rapped if anyone heard them talk that way. She was sure there was a piece of equality racism that forbade naming irritating colleagues after a couple of lovable clowns.

He says they can fire his ass, he doesn’t care, he wants you back. How cute. I’d say it must be love, if he wasn’t such a hound.

She and Carla had often talked about Stefan’s roving eye.

Have you talked to your Uptown Man? Hope not, but whatever happens, I’m here for you. Take care, tell me if you need anything, Carla.

It was brusque, to the point, and very Carla, emanating warmth and friendship, with a bit of careful advice buried in there: Stay away from Joe, he’s no good for you. Yeah, well, Izzie had worked that one out for herself by now.

Hi Carla, great to hear from you. Glad you’re coping with it all – if Stefan acts up, treat him like a dog. I think that’s the only way to deal with him. Give him simple commands and he’ll roll over!

No news from Uptown Guy. I haven’t contacted him and that’s the way it’s going to stay.

If her willpower held out, that was. She felt so emotionally fragile that she longed to hear his voice, but she knew she couldn’t allow that to happen. It wasn’t just that Joe was bad for her, he was bad for every woman in his life. Since Anneliese had told her about Nell and Edward, the reality kept throbbing in her skull: her uncle Edward had left someone as wonderful as Anneliese because he was in love, but damn Joe Hansen hadn’t been able to leave his wife – a wife he allegedly was no longer really with – for her.

Therefore he didn’t love her, despite what he said. And she was no longer sure she believed what he said about his marriage being over – although she’d been so certain he was telling the truth about that. If it really was over, why couldn’t he just walk away? The fact that he couldn’t made her think what he’d said was just a handy excuse. Joe respected nobody except himself.

The alternative was that he did love her and still couldn’t put her first. Which was worse?

I am over him, she wrote. O.V.E.R.

Gran isn’t great. There’s been no change since the first day and Dad says he’d understand if I want to get back to the US. She could stay like that for a long time, nobody knows.

I hate to leave, though. I want to talk to her again, and though Dad says I could hop on a plane quickly to come home if she improves, it feels like abandoning her if I go back to work. But he’s got a point. I can’t do anything here except sit with her and hold her hand and –

Izzie hadn’t said this to her father or Anneliese

– it feels like she’s not there. Like she’s already gone.

Even writing it made her shiver. She couldn’t quite imagine a world without her grandmother in it and yet, that world was already there. Despite sitting at Gran’s bedside every day, there was no sense of the woman she’d loved all her life. No, she couldn’t think that.

Better go,

Love, Izzie

She quickly emailed Stefan back. Of course they were thrilled. Being involved in a huge campaign to find the next SupaGirl! model would mean both prestige and publicity for the agency. The publicity would make them top of the list for aspiring models. As a bonus, they’d get first dibs on any good candidates from the competition.

The girl who won the competition would need a specific look for SupaGirl!, but the search would draw out plenty of runners up whom Perfect-NY could then sign. Well-advertised competitions that made TV news drew out girls with model potential much faster than ordinary model searches that involved trailing around cities looking for prospective girls. Everyone in the industry talked about how the America’s Next Top Model series had taken off. Izzie knew that a lot of those girls would not have come forward without the bonus of TV and the excitement the whole thing generated.

Carla said you would be picking a good team for us to be working with

she added, grinning. She dared not use the words Laurel and Hardy.

Really looking forward to working with you, let’s talk when I get back, thanks, Izzie.

There was an email from Lola, who worked alongside her and Carla in Perfect-NY. A feisty Latina lady who had come into the industry working as a make-up artist, Lola had been with Perfect-NY so long that she was practically management. She was in her early forties but looked younger and was a tiny sprite of a thing, just five feet, and made Izzie feel like a giantess beside her.

Hi Izzie, just checking in to see how you are and how your grandmother is. We’re all thinking about you here and hope you’re OK.

Business is quiet right now. There is only one blot on the landscape and it’s a pretty terrible blot. You know Shawnee, that girl from Florida with the cute gap-tooth look and the short platinum crop? She’s very sick, and I feel like it’s totally my fault. She’s always been very thin, worked really well in editorial. She had that edgy, androgynous look going, but she didn’t get picked for a couple of jobs recently and she’s taken it badly. She collapsed yesterday because she hasn’t been eating. She’s in hospital all wired up and they’re checking her for heart problems, not enough potassium in her system, of course.

I just feel like it’s my fault, I should have been watching her better. She’s so young, for all that she does that cool ‘I can handle it’ trip. Sorry, didn’t mean to lay this on you, just needed someone to talk to I guess. I tried to say it to Natalie –

Natalie was the company’s boss

– but she just doesn’t see it the same way that I do. Shit, Izzie, it’s a tough business out there.

Hope you’re OK, give us a call.

Lola

Lola’s email was a sobering wake-up call for Izzie. Her grandmother might be in a hospital bed looking like a fragile little collection of bones beneath papery fair skin, but at least she was an old lady who had lived her life. Izzie knew exactly which model Shawnee was. She had an almost photographic recall of all the models on the agency’s books, which was what made her so good at her job, because she never forgot a face, and therefore was always able to work out which model would work for which booking.

She’d never have figured Shawnee for someone who would end up in hospital. Shawnee seemed so together, so happy: all lightly sun-kissed skin and those amazing pale green eyes that gave her the edgy look Lola had talked about. And now she was ill, weighing who knows what, all because she’d felt that she hadn’t got the last few jobs because she wasn’t thin enough.

And it was all about being thin. Beautiful was important too, but thin was almost as vital, no doubt about it.

When she’d first started in the modelling industry, Izzie had been irritated by people who had spoken about how crazy it was to have these incredible slim women striding up and down catwalks, showing off clothes.

‘Why are they so thin? Why don’t you use real women?’ was the complaint, and Izzie would roll her eyes and look for another industry person to back her up by explaining how it all worked.

‘They need to be thin to show the clothes to best advantage,’ she’d say patiently. ‘That way, you see the clothes and not their bodies. It would be different if they all looked va-va-voom, J-Lo-style. You’d be looking at them, not the garments. That’s partly how the supermodel thing went out of fashion – it became all about the models and not about the clothes they were wearing.’

Sometimes people got it.

‘I see what you mean,’ they’d say.

Sometimes they didn’t.

‘That’s bullshit,’ a woman said to her at a party once in Washington. Izzie had been with her Irish friend, Sorcha, who lived in DC, and they’d attended the launch of a book of political speeches. The crowd was very different from the sort of people Izzie usually mixed with and she’d been cornered by a woman with a bad haircut who wore a very masculine-cut suit and T-shirt and managed to make this fashion statement look drab.

‘The fashion industry is bullying women to make them powerless,’ the woman said. ‘Wear this, eat this, don’t eat this, be thinner. It’s all bullshit to sell clothes. Thin is a feminist issue. Actual women don’t have flat stomachs and no tits. The fashion industry is conspiring to turn real women into powerless little girls. You people should be working from the inside to change it all.’

Izzie cringed to think how she’d responded.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she’d snapped, fed up with this politics-obsessed city where nobody ever talked about anything except Capitol Hill.

‘Let’s go, Sorcha,’ she’d said to her friend. ‘I’ve just been yelled at by this nutcase in a suit. I work in fashion – I’m not the industry spokesperson. Sometimes a dress is just a damn dress.’

But that woman had been absolutely right, she thought sadly. At the time she’d dismissed her words, assuming that a woman without fashion sense couldn’t possibly grasp what the industry was really about, but in fact the woman had put her finger on the problem with great accuracy.