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stripped her down, stolen her clothes and left her locked in a dingy toilet?
    I needn’t have worried.
    ‘Did you find any coke?’ was her first question as I pushed open the cubicle door. Her pupils were the size of serving platters and the occasional droplet of blood from her nose stained Teri Hatcher’s face on my T-shirt.
    Relieved, I dragged Raven to her feet and bundled her out into the early morning air. Around us, addicts slumped in back lanes, while the young and the beautiful emerged from nightclubs all along the street. Raven, sans shoes, and me, sans sleep, fitted in perfectly. Never mind Wisteria Lane, this was one crazy neighbourhood.

If ever the Sartorialist was likely to be in Sydney, today was going to be the day.
    I couldn’t tell you how many working hours I’d lost to planning what I’d wear the day the influential blogger popped up in the Pacific on one of his visits Down Under. (A Jil Sander maxi skirt in orange, with a tight white Bassike tee and toting a matching Chanel 2.55 was my current favourite ensemble, incidentally.) But Murphy’s law said the Sartorialist was never going to be around when I was at my Jil Sander best. Oh no. Just as buttered toast that will always land face down and Joan Rivers will always land face up (all that collagen must surely make her facial features the lightest, most buoyant part of her anatomy, right?), the Sartorialist was sure to be in town on the day I looked like a train wreck.
    As I sat slumped in the front seat of a taxi at 6 am, glancing furtively around for any signs of his iconic camera, I prayed today wasn’t my shot at internet infamy. Not the way I looked off the back of three hours’ sleep. Not having spent the remainder of my night wrestling Raven out of a cab and into her suite at the Park Hyatt, where I removed her makeup, fed her water and painkillers and put her to bed. Not when I had only a couple of hours to turn myself around and haul my arse back to the office to face Diane. I tried to push all thoughts of the Sartorialist out of my mind because, with my luck, just thinking about the style-savvy snapper would be enough to conjure him up.
    As we pulled up in my driveway that morning, I half-leapt, half-fell out of the taxi in my rush to get inside. Going to pay, I fumbled through my bag for my wallet and found . . . nothing. What the fuck? Smiling apologetically at the cabbie I sat back down on the front seat to rummage properly. Makeup bag? Check. BlackBerry? Check. Business cards, Raven’s publicity schedule, spare business cards? Check, check, check. ‘I know my wallet’s in here somewhere,’ I said aloud, trying to reassure myself as much as the driver. It’s not like Raven would bother pilfering from a non-celeb (or ‘street person’, as she preferred) like me. As my hands felt frantically around the interior of my oversized Louis Vuitton Speedy 40 I felt a slit in the iconic brown lining and my hand wrapped around my wallet. Perf! Cursing ole Louie for his intricate design work, I reefed my wallet out of my bag and slipped the cabbie his fare. And then some. ‘Sorry, bud,’ I said and finally headed for my front door.
    Once inside, I made a beeline for the bathroom and a steaming hot shower. No time later I was schlepping through Paddo with my laptop, pausing only to inhale a skim mocha. Takeaway coffee was an indulgence in which I rarely partook, preferring to put my spare change towards the eBay piggy bank, but sleepless nights chaperoning cokehead celebs was a sound excuse to splurge. Taking a swig of my mocha, I threw five Nurofen tablets down my throat for good measure. I know, I know, Nurofen tablets, like designer shoes, are generally best when they come in pairs. Not in odd numbers and certainly not in clusters of five. But, again not unlike designer shoes, I found the effect the pain-relief medication had on my mental state was both soothing and uplifting. Serenity in a tab, if you will. Even if there