But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the little girl. To her pale cheeks a rosy smile was frozen, and frost clung to her feathery lashes; for all the world, she looked to be asleep. The morning sun rose over the rooftops, glittering with ice, and the little girl did not awake—huddled and small in her eternal rest.
I. The Little Matchstick Girl
New York in winter was a spectacle in its own: each perfectly polished glass window competed to be the best-dressed, showing off their rows of tinsel and pine wreaths; Christmas trees that still smelled of the woods and reaching for the ceiling, beribboned with baubles that sparkled like New Year's evening. Below their boots the snow might have been a grey slush, but above them the tower blocks glinted, and the sky was still fresh and new.
Take a few turns and give the bundled tourists with their creased maps a miss. Follow the girl with cigarette ash straddling her collar and fishnets ripped at her thighs. The Christmas lights have lost their way—windows blackened, sing your carols to the glass that litters the sidewalk, they will be your star of Jerusalem tonight.
-o-
"You're bleeding," her roommate says to her as Drew stuffs herself through the slim rectangle that suffices as the door. Angry techno music is blaring from the shop downstairs and she can see the throbbing lights dancing sporadically on the snow.
"I was bleeding," Drew snaps, reaching for a bottle of wine on the nicked table before her. "Where'd you get this?"
Dryad—a stage name—smiles wickedly, running her quick pink tongue over her teeth, taking away a trace of Russian Red left smudged there. "A happy customer," the mischief from her pixie-like features twists into concern as she watches Drew wince; what's even more pressing is that the girl hasn't thrown back a barbed comment.
"Why d'you keep going back to him?"
Removing the icy bottle from her bruised eye and taking a genteel sip without answering. When she puts the bottle back on the table, she thrusts her hand into her pocket and pulls out a crisp bill, winking, giving her tired eyes a shot at life.
Dryad lets her own eyes widen. "Shit. It just keeps on getting better, doesn't it? What's next—think he'll make it official? Marriage… three children, a penthouse in Manhattan…" A bitter laugh reverberates around the small room, the air stale and the walls shaking from the downstairs rave. Someone curses loudly, ecstatically. "How the hell d'you get all the luck, anyone? All I get is boys with big ideas and you get men?"
"Your bottle doesn't cut it, sweetheart?" Drew asks, settling herself down on one of two cots squashed against the walls. She fights a sudden, random desire to cry.
Dryad visibly winces at the slight. "Wow, bitch—at least I have standards, yeah? I don't do married men. Let alone those who have a fascination with beating me up."
This causes Drew to stand up before she even realises what she's doing and she runs a blushed nail over a thin line of mascara.
"A whore with standards," she says, voice filled with dark laughter. "Keep telling yourself that, darling."
Their heater gives a rattle and a crystalline draft shivers through the open window—it can't shut properly and it's too minimal a situation to eke out hard earned money for—and she decides she's had enough for this place tonight.
-0-
Just like any other pretty girl, everyone had been halfway in love with her as a child. When the gods speak, people listen—or at least, they watch the mouths as they move. Your face was made for billboards, they tell you—ever considered the cinema? Model in Milan, can you just imagine the jaunts to Macau?
But then they discover that maybe you're not smart enough, not eloquent or well-poised enough. Agencies are full up with their diverse castings of perhaps fifty variations of the same type of girl (some people are not cut out for us, love—it's more than just being pretty). Then she gets damaged, and she must have been just asking for it; second hand goods now.
One thing leads to another and you're out on the streets, another girl with bright eyes who tried to make in the Big City and couldn't reach the top, or even the lowest rung for that matter. You're skulking in alleys avoiding the police, and then you're skulking on the streets because the alleys are full of less than savoury characters. Did they tell you that New York is always cold?
Someone else tells you what you've always heard: you're a very pretty girl. He doesn't have your mother's smile and you know exactly what he means by very pretty because he's got a salesman's eye and the showiest products fly off the shelves and are brought to dark houses and rooms lit up with red bulbs. Here's a cigarette: I hope it helps you, because nothing else will save you tonight.
-O-
Climbing rooftops comes second nature to her, perhaps because she's always had an eye out for the skyline. No matter what any bitch says, Drew Tanaka does have ambition. The building she's on is a shop-house with a bustling Indian restaurant on the bottom floor. The Taj Mahal might be a generic name, but the food is anything but—they say it's a great-great grandmother's recipe, when she had come from Delhi fresh off the boat; there's something special about the food that draws in the crowds like nothing else. She can smell the rotis and curries even through the winter smog. Her stomach starts to rumble and she places a hand over it.
Across from her is a taller block of buildings, it's a row of flats and you can smell the money by looking at the glittering chandeliers through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the balconies copped off Parisian apartments. Through one of those windows she sees a huge family settling down for a presumably Advent calendar dinner. One of the party is a girl—lithe, pretty in a complacent, unmemorable way—and she excuses herself, coming out onto the balcony. Her family takes their seats and the girl walks out onto the balcony, leaning against the rails with easy grace. She pulls out a cigarette then slides it back into the box, thinking better off it. Someone else comes out—it's a guy this time—and wraps his arm around her waist and whispers something into her ear. The worry on her face falls back and laughing, they both re-enter the room. Drew wonders at the scene, making up stories: a newlywed couple, or perhaps meet-the-parents. Something like that, anyway.
-O-
It's a few hours later and she's on the subway, heading nowhere in particular, just trying to get somewhere. The train is yet to arrive and Drew sighs, leaning against a pillar, which is probably not the best idea, given how grimy everything is, but to hell with that—she's too tired. At intervals, people come in from the streets, bringing the cold in with them. Her eyes dart past them meaninglessly, until a certain face catches her eye.
Demure in a cashmere sweater that she wasn't wearing before, it's The Girl from the Flat. Her boyfriend isn't with her though, which makes Drew think that it must have been meet-the-parents. The girl looks happy though, content at least. Her eyes sweep down the platform and decides it would be safest to stand near to Drew—drunk uni boys are hogging the other end and all the benches are full. Their eyes sweep past each other and the girl gives Drew a smile that she returns—out of habit rather than meaning it, and she's sure that there must be some poison in it because the girl raises an eyebrow before settling on her book.
She might not be wealthy herself, but Drew can tell that she has some money, the girl—or maybe it's Christmas generosity—but it's probably her own money because the girl doesn't seem like she takes the subway often. She wouldn't have those expensive jewels lining her throat if she did. The girl catches Drew staring because she looks up from her book.
"It's great," she says, a light tone to her voice. Oh God, Drew thinks, she's a conversationalist.
"Yeah?" She puts ice in her voice but the girl doesn't catch on. How the hell did she survive meeting her boyfriend's mum with this level of oblivion, Drew wonders.
"Mm-hmm, I'm not usually into sci-fi but I was reading this and holy shit, you know?"
"I don't read," Drew throws another barbed smile her way—she shouldn't have, it encourages this girl, who smiles even more broadly.
"Well, yeah, but if you ever decide to—read this." A pause, "so—what brings you out tonight?"
Drew gives her a bemused look, "You were born in the City?"
To her credit, the girl laughs. "Everyone says I'm too friendly, 'you'll get mugged smiling at your assailant, Ellie!'"
"They weren't lying, honey, hate to break it to you."
The train rushes in, blowing their hair off their shoulders and sending the hem of the girl's periwinkle skirt fluttering. Drew—her waist and upper thighs barely covered by leather, doesn't have to put her hands over her own skirt to control it.
"Like I said," the girl half-shouts as they board, standing next to an a woman covered in an Afrika shirt and blasting New Wave, "I'm Ellie."
Drew hesitates but gives in, "Drew."
"Yeah? You're really pretty—you could be a model! And I fucking love your outfit."
So Ellie presumes that this style over necessity. There's something so naïve about her that wakes even Drew's (deep-buried) motherly instincts.
"God, I need a smoke," Drew announces suddenly, to herself. The stale air is playing with her mind, and Dryad must have spiked the wine for a kick because she feels very light and odd. Her cheek is beginning to ache again, along with all her other accumulated wounds—the gash in her stomach tightens and begins to throb and she clenches her abdomen, feeling madly light-headed.
"I was crazy for that too, earlier. Must be the weather, I guess. You've got how stops left?"
"A few and that's not the point," she's back to snapping—"I finished up my pack."
"Oh." Ellie scrunches her face and pulls out her camels, unfiltered. "A stick? Two?" She passes Drew the goods with another beaming smile and Drew gives her an uncertain look but accepts the gift.
"Thanks?"
"Hey," the train rattles to a stop and Ellie tightens her hold on the bag, suggesting that it's her drop. "it's Christmas. See you around." She gives a final wave before alighting, the doors clamping up again and cutting her off from view—a dark head lost amongst the other sixty commuters.
-o-
There's a church up the street and high pitched voices are joined in a carol. It's Hark the Herald Angels Sing, if Drew can remember her lower school Christmas projects. A guy walking past leers at her and she flips him off, fumbling in her pocket for a lighter.
"Skank whore! You're ugly, anyway!"
"And I still get more than you do, sweetheart!" Luckily for her, he's too mellowed out with drink to retaliate.
Unfiltered tastes a little bit odd to her but she draws on the cigarette anyway, letting the drift into her ears. She feels a need to go closer and she does. The Church is a shop-house, but it is lovely. Handmade angels line the window and she can see the Nativity. But it's the voices she wants to hear tonight, not the words in particular, just the sound of children without a care. They sound very happy. It feels strangely blasphemous to be puffing outside a place of worship so she stamps on the cigarette, crushing it under her spiked heel—yes, she's been walking around for hours in those, she's Drew Tanaka after all—and finding a spot against the wall, a little nook where she feels comfortable sitting if she draws her coat around her.
She once had biryani from the Taj Mahal and praise had actually escaped her that day—what makes it taste so good, she had asked. Her "date" had gone off to the loo and she was feeling lonely and out of place amongst the gathered finery. The waiter—a really good looking boy with curls and glorious cheekbones had laughed. The name Omar glinted in graceful print on his chest.
"They say that it was the great grandmother's recipe." His accent was foreign.
"India?" She had asked.
"Further North," he smiled easily, "Pakistan—I'm doing a degree at NYU. Crazy expensive, so thank God for scholarships,"
Drew had never been able to turn down charm with beautiful boys so she'd put on a bit of a show, even though it wasn't likely that this would take her out in that way. Even less likely with the bastard back in the toilets.
"The great-grandmother in question certainly knew how to do her stuff."
"It tastes like homesickness, doesn't it?" The boy said wistfully. "Sorry—it sounds silly, doesn't it? Bit sentimental, all of that."
She certainly hadn't expected to feel like taking a punch to the get.
"I get what you mean," she said softly.
"She must have missed it—home, I mean."
"And you know the feeling?"
"Me? God, yeah. Not for you though, I expect, you're from around here, I take it."
Drew smiled at him—genuinely—"Longing."
Nestling her head against the wall behind her, she heard the children reach the peak of the chorus. The voices sounding like a descent, sounding familiar in the way that things do when your heart feels bruised. She drank it in, her mind slurring, without catching their meaning and anchoring herself to their fragility, their freshness. She might have fallen asleep.