Free Killer Heels by Rebecca Chance Page A

thought, swiftly consigning that word to the dustbin as well. It’s my accent. Posh girls can swear as much as they
want – ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘bugger’ sound brilliant in their
accent. But in my bog-standard one . . . not so much.
‘The fashion director had food poisoning,’ Coco told her
sister, ‘the photographer went AWOL with two local rentboys,
and the model was freaking because her medication got confiscated by Cuban customs.’
‘What kind of medication?’ Tiff’s eyes were wide. ‘Oi!’ she
shouted at a nearby waiter. ‘I’ll have another one of these
Singapore thingies. I need to get bevvied up.’ She looked at
Coco and Emily. ‘You two want another? My shout.’
‘No, thanks,’ they said in unison.
‘Bor ring !’
Tiff was well on her way to being drunk now. Coco knew
the pattern. Tif would get louder and more friendly, try to
dance on tables, start molesting waiters, and then, with little
warning, crash like a giant oak. Coco would have to make sure
that was her last cocktail, then pour Tiff into a frighteningly
expensive cab. They’d have missed a direct Luton train from
London Bridge, and no way could Coco manage to manoeuvre
Tiff, in her drunken state, on and off the two tube trains it
would take to get them from Waterloo to King’s Cross, then
haul her over to the St Pancras platform for the late-evening
Luton train.
God, I’d love to be able to afford to live in London, or at
least on a tube line, Coco thought wistfully. But low-level fashion magazine jobs paid practically nothing. That was why the
magazines were mostly staffed by girls like Emily – ones with
private incomes and parents who bought them flats or subsidised their rent.
‘Let’s get some food into you, Tiff,’ Coco said, reaching for the
bar menu.‘Oh, look, spicy chips. Shall I order you some of those?’
‘Mmn, chips,’ Tiff said, grabbing the menu. ‘Yum! We all
getting some, then?’ Even in her tipsy state, she couldn’t fail to
see the recoil of both Emily and Coco at this suggestion.
‘Oh, no thanks,’ Emily said swiftly. ‘I’m actually really full
from lunch.’
‘Yes, me too,’ Coco chimed in. ‘I had a big plate of brown
rice salad.’
‘You had a plateful of brown rice ?’ Emily said unguardedly.
Oh bollocks, Coco thought gloomily. I thought that was a
healthy choice – it’s full of fibre, isn’t it? And there were
peppers and spring onions in it – and some feta. Well, quite a
lot of feta, I suppose.
She put her hand defensively over her tummy, which bulged
out more than it had done this morning. Getting down to a
size 10 hadn’t been that difficult, driven as she was; she’d eaten
more sensibly, cut out Danish pastries and sausage rolls, banned
herself from picking up breakfast from her local Greggs bakery,
chosen fruit salad for dessert and stopped drinking full-fat
milk in her coffee. In addition, she’d found a studio called
Pilates HQ in Islington that offered a free starter class, and it
had been such hard work that she’d known straight away it
was doing her good.
Coco had never been sporty, and so she had no idea about
how to exercise properly; the few Pilates classes that she’d
done so far had left her sore, activating muscles she’d never felt
before. The teacher said that Pilates gave you a corset of
muscles, tightened up everything, as if you were wearing an
invisible pair of Spanx. She could already feel the difference;
her waist was nipping in, her love handles were harder to
pinch. By the time she’d started at Style , she was wearing size
10 skirts – and not size 10 from one of those shops that did
vanity sizing to make you feel better, but proper size 10s from
French Connection and Karen Millen.
Until the Pilates corset was fully formed, Coco was wearing
Spanx constantly – okay, not actual Spanx, because they were
very expensive and she couldn’t afford them, but the M&S
version. That wasn’t a