Underneath Grosvenor Square

“We can’t keep having this argument. I will love you from afar forever.” – James.
Read: 14th November 2004 - 8:22 p.m. AEST.

The last email Tasya had received from James, the words echoing over and over. The boy who set the standard for If he wanted to, he would - exactly two sentences long. 11 years of her best friend gone, over. Her addiction slammed another door shut.

Tasya shut the lid of her orange Apple clam-shell laptop. Her fingers trembled slightly as they hovered over the keyboard, but she couldn’t bring herself to respond. She grabbed the hip flask hidden in her clutch. Vodka. Exactly 250ml. The perfect number of calories and liquor to take the edge off without hurting the daily intake or pushing her over the day's allocation of kilojoules. She had four hours of her end-of-year celebration to get through tonight; an oxymoron of celebrating finishing school - like it had been an achievement in this backwater town her parents had trapped her in.

She took one last look in the mirror. Her high school sweetheart, Ash, was waiting downstairs. She could hear him laughing with her Papa, talking about the stock market as if he had a stake in the game. Tasya smoothed the silk skirt of her black-and-white MxM Couture corset gown, taking in all the details. A dress to turn heads, worth more than four times what anyone else would have paid; all to prove to someone she wasn’t sure about that she deserved to be in this room tonight. The cinched waist and strategic padding (IFKYK) made her look older, more grown-up. Perfect. For once, maybe Tasya wouldn’t be the weird kid in the corner - two years younger than the rest of her graduating class.

Her golden blonde hair was smooth and straightened. No up-do, no poodle ringlets like everyone else would wear. Her cheer coach had worked her magic; the tired, sunken eyes of her year were now hidden under a shimmery smoky eye. Her blue eyes sparkled for the first time in eight months. She just had to get through four hours before she could fake a stomach ache and head home instead of going to the after-party. She’d come home, alone, and respond to James.

At the ripe old age of four, James had opened the curtain of Tasya’s dressing room to introduce himself. It was the first day of the Harrods Winter Children’s fashion catalogue of 1992. Standing in their white singlets and underwear, he held out his hand to shake hers and declared himself James. No last name - just like Madonna. His mop of red hair had been gelled into a slicked-back side part for the ages, the contrast against his alabaster skin and the sparkle of his chocolate-brown eyes and a smile that could stop time forever.

Tasya, whose blue eyes and white blonde hair shone under the fluorescent lights, responded with a hearty handshake and a comment: “You’d better not cast a shadow over me today. I’m here to work.”

He laughed at her. They were instantly fast friends.

James was the first boy to ever hold her hand or kiss her cheek. Both events were heavily documented by their mothers and photographers at the end of a runway. They went on to grace the catalogues and runways in London for the next four years, before their friendship would become a long-distance affair for the ages.

Thick as thieves, they became inseparable. James, by coincidence, lived with his mother in a small two-bedroom cottage 500 meters south of Tasya’s parents' Grosvenor Street townhouse in Kensington. If they weren’t at home, they were at each other’s places. The polar opposite of Tasya, who had six siblings and two parents so in love it would make you sick to witness. Tasya took refuge with James in that cottage—away from the prying eyes of staff and nannies, away from the expectations of perfection from her Russian immigrant mother. If they weren’t working on photo shoots or attending castings, they were playing in the park with James’s mother close by. She had a way of keeping their 'work' a form of play. The contrast with her own mother was so loud.

Their families couldn’t be further apart in likeness, but that was where their differences ended. Between dinosaurs, theatre, superheroes, and Barbie castles, there wasn’t a thing on earth that James wouldn't share with Tasya—and her with him. He was her other half. They were married in an April park wedding in 1993. James’s Velociraptor and Tasya’s blue and pink teddies were the witnesses. They promised to love each other exactly this way forever. They had a high tea reception at the Hyatt. It was perfect. It was a photo spread for some magazine. They both earned $4,000 for the afternoon.

But this evening’s email wasn’t about the summers they spent in each other’s lives or the flights they’d take to support their best friend. Or the decade of modeling drama they’d endured and caused together. Those were stories for another time.

Tonight was about the finalization of the argument they’d been having since Tasya had met Ash two years ago. It was three weeks into Year Eleven. He was cheeky and charming, with a smile that still made her heart melt. He sat behind her in science class and spent weeks poking her with a HB pencil. It took no time for James to start voicing his concern about the changes he’d seen in Tasya over the last two years. Their emails, once filled with laughter and plans, had transformed into paragraphs of justification and accusations on both sides. The new habits she was collecting along the way, the situations she found herself in needing to be saved from.

For James, Ash meant Tasya losing her independence, her sparkle, all because she feared losing him. For Tasya, Ash became someone she needed—someone to prove she deserved to exist in the life she had built.

Tasya’s fingers hovered over the keyboard as she stared at the email. The weight of James’s words seemed heavier than ever. She hadn’t opened it yet. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was that she couldn’t. The last words she ever wanted to hear, written in a cold, final sentence. I will love you from afar forever.

She hesitated. Would tonight be the night she finally read it? Maybe she'd wait until the after-party, or maybe - just maybe - she could pretend it didn’t matter. Pretend like she didn’t need an answer.

Was she really living, or was she just floating through life, measuring everything in calories, in numbers, in expectations?

She could almost hear James’s voice, lighthearted and teasing, asking her why she cared so much about the image she was projecting. Would it matter to him? Would it matter if she wasn’t perfect? He had always seen her, truly seen her, in a way no one else did. He was the one person she thought would never leave.

But she knew. The end had been written long before this email arrived.

Click.

The screen flashed. There it was. James’s name, followed by those two sentences. She almost closed the lid again, but this time, she couldn’t. Not this time.