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

‘Grown-up clothes on little girls?’ Carla said knowingly.

‘Exactly,’ agreed Izzie.

As a single career woman living in her own apartment in New York, she had to look after herself, doing everything from unblocking her own sink to sorting out her taxes and then being able to play hardball with the huge conglomerates for whom her models were just pawns.

Yet when the conglomerates showed off clothes aimed at career women like Izzie, they chose to do it with fragile child-women.

The message from the sleek, exquisite clothes was: I’m your equal, Mister, and don’t you forget it.

The message coming from a model with a glistening pink pout and knees fatter than her thighs, was: Take care of me, Daddy.

‘It’s a screwed-up world,’ she said. ‘I love our girls, but they’re so young. They need mothers, not bookers.’

She paused. Lots of people said bookers were part-mother/ part-manager. For some reason, this bothered her lately. She’d never minded what she was called before, but now she felt uncomfortable being described as an eighteen-year-old’s mother. She wasn’t a mother, and it came as a shock that she was old enough to be considered mother to another grown-up. Why did it bother her now? Was it the age thing? Or something else?

‘Yeah.’ Carla abandoned her lunch and started on her coffee. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to work with women who’ve had a chance to grow up before they’re shoved down the catwalk?’

‘God, yes,’ Izzie said fervently. ‘And who aren’t made to starve themselves so the garment hangs off their shoulder blades.’

‘You’re talking about plus-sized models…’ said Carla slowly, looking at her friend.

Izzie stopped mid-bite. It was exactly what she was always thinking. How much nicer it would be to work with women who were allowed to look like women and weren’t whipped into a certain-shaped box. The skinny-no-boobs-no-belly-and-no-bum box.

Carla wrapped both hands around her coffee cup thoughtfully. The familiar noises of their fire-escape perch – the hum of the traffic and the building’s giant aircon machine on the roof that groaned and wheezed like a rocket about to take off – faded into nothingness.

‘We could –’

‘– start our own agency –’

‘– for plus-sized models –’

They caught each other’s hands and screamed like children.

‘Do you think we could do it?’ asked Izzie earnestly.

‘There’s definitely a market for plus-sized models now,’ Carla said. ‘You remember years ago, nobody ever wanted bigger girls, but now, how often are we asked do we have any plus-sized girls? All the time. The days of plus girls being used just for catalogues and knitting patterns are over. And with lots of the big-money design houses making larger lines, they want more realistic models. No, there’s a market, all right. It’s niche, but it’s growing.’

‘Niche: yes, that sums it up,’ Izzie agreed. ‘I like niche. It’s special, elite, different.’

She was fed up working for Perfect-NY and having daily corporate battles with the three partners who’d long ago gone over to the dark, money-making side. The agency’s Dark Side Corporates didn’t care about people, be it employees or models. Any day now, time spent in the women’s room would involve a clocking-in timecard and a machine that doled out a requisite number of toilet-paper sheets.

Besides, she’d given ten years to the company and she felt at a crossroads in her life. Forty loomed. Life had run on and – it hit Izzie suddenly what was wrong with her, why she’d been feeling odd lately – she felt left behind.

She had all the things she’d wanted: independence, her own apartment, wonderful friends, marvellous holidays, a jam-packed social life. And yet there was a sense of something missing, a flaw like a crack in the wall that didn’t ruin the effect, but was still there, if you thought about it. She refused to believe the missing bit could be love. Love was nothing but trouble. Having a crack in her life because she didn’t have someone to love was just such a goddamn cliché, and Izzie refused to be a cliché.

Work was the answer – her own business. That would be the love affair of her life and remove any lingering, late-night doubts about her life’s path.

‘I’m sure we could raise the money,’ Carla said. ‘We haven’t got any dependants to look out for. There has to be some bonus in being single women, right?’

They both grinned. Izzie often said that New York must surely have the world’s highest proportion of single career women on the planet.

‘And it’s not as if we don’t know enough Wall Street venture capitalists to ask for help,’ Carla added.

This time, Izzie laughed out loud. Their industry attracted many rich men who had all the boy toys – private jets, holiday islands – and felt that a model on their arm would be the perfect accessory.

‘As if they’d meet us,’ she laughed. ‘You know there’s a Wall Street girlfriend age limit, and we’re ten years beyond it, sister. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘not ten, more like fifteen. Those masters of the universe men with their Maseratis and helicopter lessons prefer girlfriends under the age of twenty-five. They are blind when women of our vintage are around.’

‘Stop dissing us, Miz Silver,’ Carla retorted. ‘When we have our own agency, we can do what I’m always telling them here and have an older model department. And you could be our star signing,’ she added sharply. ‘The masters of the universe only keep away from you because they’re scared of you. You’re too good at that “tough Irish chick” thing. Men are like guard dogs, Izzie. They growl when they’re scared. Don’t scare them and they’ll roll over and beg.’

‘Stop already,’ Izzie said, lowering her head back to her wrap. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I scare them or not: they prefer nineteen-year-old Ukrainian models every time. If a man wants a kid and not a woman, then he’s not my sort of man.’

She didn’t bother to reply to the remark about her working as a model. It was sweet of Carla, but she was too old for a start, and she’d spent too long with models to want to enter their world. Izzie wanted to be in control of her own destiny and not leave it in the hands of a bunch of people in a room who wanted a specific person to model a specific outfit and could crush a woman’s spirit by saying, ‘We definitely don’t want you.’

‘Could we make our own agency work?’ she’d asked Carla on the fire escape. ‘I mean, what’s the percentage of new businesses that crash and burn in the first year? Fifty per cent?’

‘More like seventy-five.’

‘Oh, that’s a much more reassuring statistic.’

‘Well, might as well be real,’ Carla said.

‘At least we’d be doing something we really believed in,’ Izzie added.

For the first month after the conversation, they’d done nothing but talk about the idea. Then they’d begun to lay the groundwork: talking to banks, talking to a small-business consultancy, and drawing up a business plan. So far, nobody was prepared to loan them the money, but as Carla said, all it took was one person to believe in them.

Then, two months ago, Izzie Silver had found love.

Love in the form of Joe Hansen. Love had obliterated everything else from her mind. And while Carla still talked about their own agency, Izzie’s heart was no longer in it, purely because there was no room in her heart for anything but Joe.

Love had grabbed her unexpectedly and nobody had been more shocked than Izzie.

‘If it all works out, we won’t be the backbone of Perfect-NY any more,’ Carla had said happily just before Izzie had set off for New Mexico. ‘Imagine, we’ll be the bosses…and the bookers, assistants, accountants and probably the women who’ll be mopping out the women’s room at night too, but, hey, we won’t care.’

‘No,’ agreed Izzie, thinking that she didn’t give a damn about anything because she was so miserable at having to fly to New Mexico and be away from Joe. Once, she’d have loved this chance to leave the office for a shoot in a far-flung location. Now, thanks to Joe, she hated the very idea.

‘Catalogue shoots are tough,’ Carla added. ‘Pity you weren’t sent to babysit an editorial shoot instead. ‘Cos it’s going to be hard work, honey.’

She was right, Izzie thought, standing in the New Mexico heat, watching the Perfect-NY model work.

Catalogue shoots were hard work. Hours of shooting clothes with no time to labour over things the way they could on magazine shoots. On magazine shoots, Izzie knew it could easily take a day to shoot six outfits – here, they might manage that in one morning. The models had to be ultra professional. The girl with the cheekbones, still-eyed and silent, was just that.

During the morning, Izzie had watched Tonya in an astonishing seven different outfits, transforming her silent watchful face into an all-American-girl-next-door smile each time. It was only when the cameras were finished, and Tonya’s face lapsed back into adolescent normality, that Izzie thought again and again how incredibly young she was.

Now it was lunchtime. The photographer and his two senior assistants were drinking coffee and gulping down the food brought in from outside; the other two assistants were hauling light reflectors and shifting huge lights.

No lunch for them.

The make-up and hair people were sitting outside, letting the sun dust their pedicured toes and gossiping happily about people they knew.