Half A Rainbow

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

All depressed women should be prescribed lipstick, thought Cassidy, triumphantly slashing her mouth with Violent Vamp and instantly feeling a boost to her spirits. She smacked her lips together, blotted them gently with a tissue, then looked critically at herself in the bathroom mirror. The line wasn’t quite straight. Her hand must have jerked as she reached the left-hand corner of her lower lip.

“s**t, I’m going to be late,” she said out loud, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t be seen on the Tube with crooked lipstick. She would just have to wipe it off and start again.

It was Friday morning in Kentish Town, north London. Soon, she would face another Friday night with nothing to do. When she was a teenager, and even when she reached her early twenties, not to have anything to do on Friday and Saturday nights was social suicide. You wouldn’t dare admit it to anybody. You would have to make something up. Anything, no matter how outrageous or unbelievable.

I wish Leah was still around, she thought, tidying the already perfectly folded towels heaped on the glass shelf next to the tall chrome bathroom storage cabinet. What on earth’s happened to her? Was it something I said? Something I did?

How could a friend – a good friend at that – simply disappear without trace and without a word? It was just what her mother had done when she was ten. Having left a note to the effect that she had met someone else, she simply left one day while Cassidy was at school, leaving her husband to bring Cassidy up alone. As an only child, there was nobody close in whom Cassidy could confide. She couldn’t talk to her dad as he had made it quite plain that her mother’s name was never to be mentioned again. There were no cousins nearby, no uncles or aunts or even parents of school friends, to whom she could spill out her confused, angry, hurt feelings. She felt sure that in some way she was to blame for her mother’s desertion. Was she a difficult child? Was she selfish? Had she not shown her mother that she loved her?

Now, as an adult, she could see that her mother had simply fallen in love with another man and run away from her responsibilities at home. She had been the selfish one. Yet somehow Cassidy knew that, emotionally, she remained stuck in the past and, even at the age of twenty-eight, was still that hurt, bewildered young girl who wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love. She had decided years ago not to let anybody get too close to her in case she got hurt and let down again, but when she had met Leah through a joint project that both their companies had worked on, she had liked her so much that she had let her guard down.

Now Leah had abandoned her, too and all that deep-seated hurt and those bitter, anguished feelings had surfaced again. It just served to underline Cassidy’s long-held belief that money was safer and more rewarding than love and friendship, because money couldn’t plunge a dagger into your heart the way a treacherous human being could.

When a week had passed without a phone call or text from Leah when she was used to almost daily contact, Cassidy had left a host of messages. Was she ill? Had an accident? In hospital? Then the mobile number had suddenly ceased to work and her emails had begun bouncing back. That was when Cassidy had gone to Leah’s office, only to be told by the receptionist that she had left.

“Left? But why? How? Wasn’t she on three months’ notice?” The questions stumbled off Cassidy’s tongue and she found she was trembling as the girl repeated that she couldn’t help her… that Leah had left the firm and no, there was no forwarding address or phone number they could give her.

She had travelled across London, to Ealing, to Leah’s rented flat. Nobody was in. She took herself off to a local pub. When she went back after two vodka and tonics and a stale sandwich and rang the bell again, a stranger answered, a girl who looked blankly at her and told her she had just moved in and didn’t know anybody called Leah. She had rung hospitals, messaged her on f*******:, tried every way she could think of to make contact, but it seemed that all routes to Leah were closed. She had vanished as successfully as Cassidy’s mother had and the pain of rejection was fresh and keen and hideous.

That was four months ago and Cassidy still hadn’t come to terms with it. She still tormented herself by playing their last couple of meetings over and over in her memory, examining in detail every look, every scrap of conversation, finally concluding that there was nothing, absolutely nothing that she had done wrong. She couldn’t be the reason for Leah’s disappearance. But the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that something had gone very wrong in her friend’s life.

Leah had been most cagey about her love life over the last couple of months. Normally, they shared almost every detail of their relationships, pleased for each other when things were going right, commiserating when things went wrong. This time, though, despite much probing, Leah’s boyfriend had remained a mystery man. She had been briefly enamoured of some guy called Stephen, but had only mentioned him once or twice so Cassidy thought the fling must have died a death. All Leah would tell her about the mystery man was that he was away a lot and worked in something hush-hush. MI6? A mobster? A cop in deep cover? Cassidy was fascinated but couldn’t get any more details out of Leah, although she sensed that, whoever he was, he wasn’t making Leah very happy. She had made excuses, avoided several good nights out and parties. She had seemed preoccupied, a bit depressed. She had looked different, too; thinner, drawn, tired, perhaps even ill. Was that it? Had she developed some dreadful disease, or… ? She didn’t dare contemplate the worst case scenario.

There was a huge mystery to be solved, but overshadowing it was the fact that Cassidy missed her friend and playmate dreadfully. Cassidy was a man’s woman, not a woman’s woman. She didn’t make female friends easily, unlike some women she knew who had a whole pack of them. All through her life she had had just one best friend at a time, a close, intense friendship with a kindred spirit who became like a sister – no, more like a twin. And now that Leah had gone, she felt as if she had had a limb amputated.

She shook her head and sighed. “Work!” she told her reflection decisively. She didn’t want to be late. She had an interview to write up. She smoothed lip gloss over her freshly applied lipstick, brushed imaginary flakes of dandruff off her shoulders and teased out a strand of over-moussed hair with the handle of her comb so that it didn’t look quite so cardboardy. That was the trouble with boring brown hair, she thought; if you weren’t careful, it could let the rest of you down so easily. Perhaps it was time to go chestnut. Leah’s shade, maybe; thick and rich and shiny. She had never believed Leah’s colour was natural, anyway. All she needed to do was find the right dye.

If only she could just pick up the phone and ask Leah. Not having her around to have fun with, to have sisterly gossips and shopping trips with, was nagging at Cassidy. There was a Leah-shaped gap in her life. She had nobody to go on holiday with now. No-one to whom she could tell the crazy stories of what had happened when she’d picked up the latest man. It just wasn’t fair of Leah to do this to her. What was she punishing her for? Damn Leah!

Huffing to herself, Cassidy clicked out of the bathroom, her high heels echoing on the shiny black slate floor, picked up her enormous red Mulberry bag that weighed a ton but looked the business, and left the house, ten minutes later than she should have done.

The office where Cassidy and her team put together a monthly high profile business magazine was in Blackfriars, close to where Leah had worked. That last time they’d seen each other was so odd, thought Cassidy, as she sat squashed uncomfortably in the joggling Tube carriage. They had met for a drink in a wine bar, but, for the first time since she had known her, Leah had drunk only mineral water. She had looked… well, Cassidy could only call it ‘haunted’; like a woman with secrets. Piaf had had that look, and Garbo, and Judy Garland, and even Princess Diana had had some of that pained, guarded aura about her.

There had been a time when Cassidy, under the influence of some old movie or other – Dr Zhivago, was it? Or Elvira Madigan? – had tried to engender the same look in herself. She cut down on food, smoked and drunk more, deliberately stayed up late for ten nights running, but had ended up looking less like a haunted Cathy pining for Heathcliff and more like a raddled old sot.

But then, Piaf and Garland had been raddled old sots, too – raddled old sots who were riddled with talent. Unlike me, Cassidy thought wistfully, pulling her Mulberry bag closer to her chest as a man sitting opposite seemed to be staring at it a bit too intently. Then she rallied. She did have a talent, though it wasn’t for singing or acting. Cassidy’s talent was for attracting men; gorgeous, sexy men. She had high standards when it came to choosing the ideal partner. First, the man had to be good-looking. Second, he had to be rich. Not just earning a good salary, but rich-rich. Possessed of at least one massive house plus a holiday home somewhere exotic, a fleet of expensive cars, a private jet – why not? – and, if not a title, then a hefty dose of celebrity.

She hadn’t yet met anyone who qualified, but she had a plan. She was certainly not going to waste her life running a boring business magazine for ever. At least Leah’s job in an advertising and PR agency had brought her into contact with some famous people, not just business suits and number-crunchers.

As the carriage shuddered towards the Tube stop before her own, Cassidy let her mind drift off. She pictured herself in a palatial house with a huge marble hallway; a film star house with its own gym and swimming pool, and extensive grounds where she could keep a horse; no, a whole herd of horses. Racehorses, show jumpers, polo ponies. She would never have to work again, never have to travel on the smelly, horrible, dangerous Tube. She thought of her special savings account. For three years now, she had been squirreling money away. She called it her Future Fund and she intended to use some of the accumulated cash for self-enhancement. As soon as she had enough, she was going to have a boob job, Botox, give up her lease and rent a more expensive flat in a good area for meeting rich men, like Chelsea or Westminster, join the right gym, wear the right clothes, be seen in the right places and ensnare a prime catch and marry him before she reached the age of thirty-five. After that, she knew it would be too late.

She played her game of, ‘if the world was about end and I had to choose one man in this carriage to make love to for the very last time, who would it be?’, and decided on a chilled-looking black man in an immaculate navy pin-striped suit and beautifully shined, scuff-free shoes. He wore trendy red-framed spectacles and clutched a briefcase on his lap, as shiny-black as his shoes. Perhaps he was a government official. Damn it, he’s probably a bloody insurance executive, she thought as the train jerked to a halt. Then: Oh, bloody hell, I’ve missed my stop!