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

‘I mean it. There’s no future for us.’

‘You’re wrong, Izzie. This is special, what we have. It doesn’t come every day, please don’t throw it away. I just need more time –’

‘It’s not special enough any more,’ she said sadly. ‘If it’s that special, why do I feel so sad?’

He didn’t speak as he showered and dressed, although several times she caught him staring at her as she sat on the bed and watched. Watching the man she loved preparing to walk out of her life was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but Izzie knew she had to do it. It was her gift to herself, but God, it hurt.

When he was ready, he turned and came to the bed.

‘Goodbye, Izzie,’ he said and bent his head for one last kiss.

At that brush of his lips, Izzie felt her resolve collapse and she bit out the words: ‘Please go, Joe. Leave me alone.’

‘If it’s what you want,’ he said.

‘It’s what I want.’

He went. When the door shut, the apartment seemed to shrink to half its size. With him, it was the centre of the universe. Without him, it was a cage.

He’d left the thin navy silk scarf he’d been wearing, she realised. She picked it up, holding it to her face and smelling the scent of him, then she sat cradling it on her lap like a talisman of their life together. Only then did she allow herself to cry.

Tomorrow, she’d start her new life, but today was for mourning.

A month later, Izzie walked around the enormous loft, taking in the airiness of the space and admiring the high ceilings, pale oak floor and outer brick walls. It was the biggest loft she’d ever been in and it looked like it should have either a ballet barre at one wall and a mirror at the other, or else, it should be hung with vast canvases in progress, and a barefoot guy in paint-splattered jeans with a cigarette in his mouth staring at the walls.

‘Wow, imagine this as an apartment,’ sighed Carla, peering down at 34th Street below.

‘Nobody could afford this as an apartment,’ laughed Lola, who’d found the place for the casting, and was busy setting up camp at the large desk beside a small, very old stereo system. ‘It’s been everything from a gallery –’

‘I knew it,’ Izzie said, thrilled to be right. She’d felt art breathing in the space.

‘And some guy used it as a yoga studio. Asthanga? Whatever, I don’t know – I get those yoga types mixed up. It’s too big to ever make it as a home. The realtor says an ad agency are desperate to get it.’

‘Figures,’ Carla said, returning from the window to put her things down beside the table. ‘I can just see a group of anal-retentive ad types arguing over who gets the biggest desk space and where to put the basketball hoop, because they have to have a hoop so they’ll look like homeys, even though the nearest they get to a basketball court is wearing Air Jordans.’

‘Do I detect a note of bitterness about advertising men?’ Lola asked naughtily.

‘Bitterness? Me? Not at all,’ Carla laughed. ‘But if the ad agency guys who are interested in this place are called WorkIt Ads, then tell me so I can buy a couple of tuna steaks and hide them under the floorboards where a guy called Billy sits. Oh yes, and I want a standing order with the local porno video shop to send round dominatrix movies every afternoon. Come to think of it –’ She paused. ‘Billy’s probably weird enough to like that. Strike the porno movies.’

Everyone laughed.

‘Pity we can’t afford this for more than a day,’ Izzie sighed, mentally shaking her head to get Joe Hansen out of it. It was a futile gesture. He inhabited her every moment and it hurt more than she’d thought possible. If she hadn’t had the new agency to think about and all the organisation it involved, she’d have gone crazy.

So much had happened in the past month. She and Carla had given in their notice, Lola had said she wanted to join them, and suddenly, they were raising money, looking for premises and ready to cast their new models.

They had just signed the contract for the SilverWebb Agency’s first office suite. It was lovely but the location was so perfect that something had to suffer, and that something was floor space.

There was enough room for reception, a small conference room and a four-desk office, along with a tiny kitchen area. But there was no space for a start-up casting, hence their presence in the yoga studio.

‘If there’s anyone else you can wangle money out of, Izzie, then we can rent it,’ Lola said. ‘Where are all the Fortune 500 moguls now, huh?’

Carla shot Izzie a sympathetic look. They both had a certain Fortune 500 mogul in mind, but neither of them cared to phone him up and ask for a cheque.

‘When a man’s the answer to your question, you’re asking the wrong question,’ Carla joked, checking that the Polaroid camera was working.

Normally on a casting, the models had their own portfolios and model cards. Today’s was the result of a lot of adverts looking for ‘plus-sized’ models – Izzie hated the term with a vengeance as it summoned up visions of women too big to walk – so lots of the prospective models wouldn’t have model cards. Both Izzie and Carla liked Polaroids for instant memory-refreshing.

Izzie laid out sheets of paper and pens so everybody could write down their contact details.

‘I hope we get a good turn-out,’ she said to Lola anxiously. ‘There’s nobody here yet.’

‘There’s half an hour to go before the start time on the adverts,’ Lola said. ‘It’s only nine thirty. We said ten.’

‘Yeah,’ Izzie fretted, ‘but I’ve been to find-a-model castings where girls have been queuing all night to be first in line.’

‘That’s ordinary models,’ Lola shrugged. ‘They’re a whole different story. Too much caffeine and nicotine makes them jittery. Being normal makes you less desperate.’

Izzie laughed. ‘Hope that’s true,’ she said. It was so simple, it probably made perfect sense.

She thought back to her first casting years before when she’d been utterly in love with the world of fashion and modelling, and watched endless leggy gazelle-like creatures sway in and out of the room, each one more beautiful than the last.

When one girl had erupted into tears as they looked at her and the panel had raised collective eyebrows, the girl had rushed from the room and Izzie had hurried out after her.

‘It’s the zit, isn’t it?’ the girl had said, shaking with nerves and misery. She’d pointed to an almost invisible bump on her cheek, which she’d expertly hidden with concealer. ‘I knew they’d notice it, I knew it. And I’m so fat. Look!’ She’d reached down and tried to grab non-existent flesh around her concave belly.

She wore tight, low-rise jeans that revealed her bones jutting out like knobs on a Braque sculpture.

In a shoot for designer clothes, with her hair carefully windswept and a dusting of St Bart’s tan over her body, she’d look amazing. In the flesh and with tears on her hauntingly thin face, she looked like a fragile child-woman. Izzie had been horrified at the girl’s obvious self-hatred and by the easy way the other people on the panel were able to dismiss her.

‘But she’s so upset, Marla,’ Izzie wailed afterwards to her colleague from Perfect-NY when they all took a coffee break.

‘That’s why we’re not seeing her again,’ Marla whispered. ‘If she cries in front of us, what’ll she do in front of the client? It’s about more than looks, Izzie. She’s got to toughen up if she wants to make it.’

That was the first time Izzie had seen the reality of fashion. For her, it might be an exciting female-friendly industry where women’s beauty and brilliance was prized. But it could also be cruel.

By eleven that morning of the first SilverWebb casting, Izzie knew she’d made the right move. This was genuinely unlike any other casting she’d ever been at. It was like being in the backyard of Goddesses R Us, where Zeus was trying to find the perfect example of womanhood.

Women of every shape and colour crowded down one end of the loft, and whereas at normal castings wariness was a tangible currency, these women squealed and laughed and chattered at full blast.

‘I can’t believe I’m here!’ shrieked one woman.

‘This is what I’ve been waiting for all my life!’ yelled another.

‘I’m never going to be 00 but my daddy says I’m OhOh!’ laughed a third.

‘I’m going to get coffee.’

‘And cake?’