Page 71 of The Island of Lost Girls

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Tatiana has her own make-up artist. By the time she’s finished proper contouring, Gemma looks eighteen, easy. And once she’s in the dress Julia fetched from the agency wardrobe, she looks twenty-one and change. Still looks twelve, too, though, and she still worries she won’t get past the bouncers.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Tatiana, in the taxi. ‘Loads of people pay good money to look as young as you do. And we’re not going to, you know, Wetherspoons.’

‘So where are we going?’ she asks.

‘Issima,’ says Julia.

‘For real?’

Julia looks amused.

‘I’ve been there,’ she confides. ‘With my friend Naz. At Christmas. It’s lush.’

The dress is really tight and she’s finding it quite hard to balance on the seat. And it’s short, so she has to keep her knees together. Eventually she works out how to brace herself, by spreading her feet out and pressing her knees together and hanging on to the door handle. She looks like Bambi, finding his feet.

‘What, upstairs?’

She prickles. There’s a proper private club upstairs. Meant to be a big hush-hush secret, but everybody knows it exists. You can’t miss the glass-walled lift with the bouncer on the door and the roped-off red carpet that leads to it, for starters.

‘No,’ she says. ‘The club.’

‘And you got in?’ asks Julia.

Gemma nods, enthusiastically.

‘And that, my dear, is why we use the top floor,’ says Tatiana.

They inhabit another world. She hears all these words and names fly about the cab – cryotherapy, George and Amal, Denpasar, Giancarlo, Pavel, Upper West Side, Darling – and little of it means anything to her. But it sounds so … exclusive. She looks at Julia and Tatiana and marvels that they have taken her under their wings so readily. I want to be like them, she thinks. They may be old, but they really live.

The bouncers’ eyes light up as they alight from the taxi. And then they’re breezing past the rope, and the VIP greeter has already called the lift and got it open by the time they’ve passed the empty early evening dance floor. She feels dizzy with the thrill. Sucks in her tummy and follows her hosts, and everyone smiles.

And then they’re inside the glass box lift and she’s gazing down over the banquettes and the bar and the podium-cages where she and Naz had a drunken dance at Christmas, and she’s wondering what could possibly better a place like that.

Not the balcony where the lift lets out, for one. Gemma is massively disappointed. It’s like opening a Christmas present and finding that it’s socks. It has chairs and seating from which one can watch the swarming ants below, but there’s hardly anyone here. A bored-looking bartender polishes glasses and a solitary waiter carries cocktails to the only occupied table.

But they don’t stop. Tatiana leads the way, and she sees that there’s a door at the far end. She sees Tatiana pause and key in a PIN, then she’s led up a flight of quiet, very velvety stairs into paradise.

Gemma gasps. I never knew there were so many blues, she thinks. How can there be so many blues?

The domed ceiling is a gigantic reproduction of that Van Gogh painting, Starry Night. A wild expanse of whirling comets, a thousand twinkling LED stars; far beyond her reach, yet tantalisingly close. It’s the room she always dreamed of. Filled with people she only barely believed existed. Faces she’s seen on TV, faces she knows she’ll never see on TV. Tables and banquettes and cushion-padded day beds. Little Bedouin tents with drop-down curtains, where candles flicker in hurricane lamps. Staff in uniforms so black they eat the light, circulating quietly with their trays.

She glows with wonder as a maître d’ comes straight to them and leads them towards a great glass wall where, glowing in the last rays of the evening sun, a green, fecund Italian garden, all paths and poplars and sunflowers, beckons tantalisingly. All across the rooftops, hidden from the street. Taking up half the block.

This world, she thinks. This. World. I knew it was here somewhere. I knew. This is what I want. This …

She stares at her hosts with newly opened eyes. Who are you? she asks silently. How did you get here? Because only gods can live in a world like this.

The gods are welcoming. And some are even her age. A girl, Sara, sits with three men at a long teak table. Only a bit older, but a world away in sophistication. She wears her bandage dress as though it were a second skin and her earlobes glitter.

The men are all older. She recognises one. He’s always on the telly: an avuncular sort who’s fond of clipboards and the EU. Her mother likes him. He sucks on a vape like a spliff, and stretches an arm along the back of the bench proprietorially as he watches Sara in a manner that’s a long way from avuncular.

The men leap to their feet with cries of ‘Ahhh!’. Not Sara. Sara stays seated, one hip jutting and a glass of champagne in her hand, though her smile broadens.

Air kisses. I must learn this, she thinks. How to kiss someone enthusiastically without ever touching their skin. They kiss Tatiana and shake hands with Julia, and just like that she realises that Tatiana is queen and that, though Julia talks a good game, she is the junior partner.

I need to hang on to Tatiana, she thinks. Julia may have found me, but Tatiana is my future.