doors and explore the apartment. The kitchen is shiny and full of brand-new high-end appliances and there’s a dining table big enough to host a dinner party for twelve.
‘How on earth did you find this place?’ I marvel, opening the cupboard doors and admiring the fine china and delicate wine glasses on display.
‘Airbnb,’ Kate answers, pulling open the refrigerator to reveal bottles of sparkling water, milk, eggs and coffee. ‘I think the owner lives in the apartment downstairs. He owns this one too and rents it out.’
‘How much was it?’ I ask, slightly tentatively.
‘Don’t worry about that.’ Kate smirks. ‘Toby’s paying.’
I glance sideways at her.
She shrugs. ‘He forgot to take me off one of his credit cards. Don’t worry, he won’t notice.’
I shake my head but can’t help laughing.
‘Bastard owes me,’ she mutters and I silently agree. I never liked Kate’s ex, Toby, much to begin with but after he cheated on Kate I gave up pretending I ever had. He isn’t even good-looking, which isn’t to say that if he had been I could have forgiven him, but it is hard to see how a man of his very mediocre looks could cheat on a woman like Kate, who is ten million miles out of his league.
I never understood what Kate saw in Toby, with his dome-like bald head and contradictory masses of thick black body hair, though I suppose he has got charisma, and as Kate liked to joke, short, bald men work harder to please in the bedroom. Not that I want to imagine that.
There are two enormous bedrooms in the apartment: a master bedroom with a marble en-suite bathroom and another smaller bedroom that is still far nicer than any hotel room I’ve ever stayed in. Everything is white – the cloud-like duvet cover, the pillows, the walls, the Eames armchair in the corner, the linen curtains – but whoever decorated the place has also added bold splashes of colour to stop it from looking too clinical. Blue and yellow patterned pillows are perfectly aligned on the bed, as though arranged using a protractor, while one wall is tiled with beautiful blue-patterned ceramic tiles. It’s like something you’d see in Condé Nast magazine.
‘You take the big room,’ Kate says to me.
‘Oh no,’ I say, ‘I’m fine in this one. It’s great.’
‘I insist,’ Kate argues. ‘You deserve it.’ And before I can say another word she wheels her suitcase into the smaller room. Kate’s suitcase is huge enough that she needed to put it in the plane’s hold, while I only brought a carry-on. She said she had too many shoes and too many toiletries to fit in a carry-on-sized suitcase, which is typical Kate, who used the second bedroom in the flat she lived in with Toby just to house her clothes and the third bedroom to store her shoes and handbags.
I wheel my own scruffy bag with a broken wheel into the master room, which is done in much the same colour palette as the smaller bedroom, and I collapse down on the bed. Through the window I can see puffy white clouds wafting across the bruise-coloured sky. It feels glorious just to lie here, feeling the stress of the last couple of years already starting to melt away. It’s amazing how a comfortable bed and the prospect of a weekend of lie-ins and laughter can do that.
Kate wanders into my room a minute later and flops down beside me on the bed, her arm brushing mine. We lie there in silence, staring at the clouds, which are starting to turn the colour of candyfloss.
‘I’m so happy we did this,’ I say after a minute of contented silence.
‘Me too,’ Kate answers.
I turn my head in her direction and am taken aback by the sadness etched on her face as she stares out the window. For a moment I wonder if she’s been crying but then I figure it’s just the pink evening light filtering into the room. Kate doesn’t do sad. Whenever she’s upset about something she turns to dark humour to survive. She never mopes. Back before she met Toby, if a boy dumped her she’d never cry about it, she’d just laugh and whip out a Kate-ism: ‘Onwards and upwards, plenty more dick in the sea.’
If she ever lost a client she’d pick up her phone and go about finding an even bigger fish to net. Even when she found out that Toby had been sleeping with escorts on his frequent business trips