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CHAPTER SEVEN

Saturday, 7 July: Twenty-Seven Days to Go

East London was a strange place. When Rebecca and I were younger, it felt so dangerous to venture out past Old Street. When she was a student and I was still in secondary school, this was where we’d come to do things we couldn’t tell our mum about. Gigs at the Macbeth, dancing at 93 Feet East, never-ending dumplings at the Drunken Monkey. But now the area was just a giant bundle of contradiction. Old and new, shitty and expensive. You want a bit of genuine exposed brick with your macchiato? That’ll be five pounds, please, and yes we can do a babyccino, will that be with cow, goat, almond or oat milk? Where me and Becks had run full throttle down the dark streets just in time to catch the night bus, mums and babies strolled happily with their three-wheeler pushchairs on their way back from the gym. I could hardly remember a time when Shoreditch felt dangerous.

But West London … now there was a case for concern. I clambered up the steps at St Margaret’s station, turning my head to avoid making eye contact with the Tesco Express in the corner. Too much temptation to fill my pockets with Haribo like I would on my way home from school. In East London, people were at pains to tell you everything about themselves from the very first time you laid eyes on them. Here, everything was camouflaged with matching sofas from Heals, Le Creuset cookware and the very finest ensembles Boden had to offer. I didn’t even know where my top was from. I’d borrowed it from Miranda which meant it could be anything from haute couture or handmade. Hopefully no one would ask.

When we were kids, Becks was the rebel. She was the one who bleached her hair, the one who stayed out all night, got caught shoplifting, stole a full bottle of Malibu from the drinks cabinet, and yet here we were, twenty years later and she was living in a lovely three-bedroom semi, two roads over from where we grew up. Complete with a perfectly trimmed privet hedge, glossy red front door and a battered Cozy Coupe parked outside. She was living the suburban dream, just like the house next door and the house next door and the house next door and the house next door. And she claimed I was the one who had never dealt with our parents’ divorce.

‘Annie!’

Alan, Rebecca’s perfect husband, opened the front door before I could knock and pulled me inside the dark hallway with a slightly manic look on his face.

‘The baby is sleeping,’ he whispered loudly, pushing me through the tastefully decorated house. ‘Rebecca is in the back garden with your dad and Gina.’

I was twenty minutes early and I was still late. Brilliant.

‘There she is,’ my dad called from behind his giant Ray-Bans as I blinked, blinded, back out into the sunshine. ‘What time do you call this?’

‘Twenty to one,’ I replied, leaning down for a half-hug and kiss on the cheek before smiling politely at my latest stepmother. She did not get the kiss or the half-hug. It had only been two years, I liked to wait until he’d made it past three years of marriage before I committed. I’d learned my lesson. ‘Aren’t I early?’

‘Dinner was supposed to be at one,’ Rebecca called from the outdoor dining table she’d set up at the end of the garden. ‘I thought you’d be here earlier.’

My carefully set little sister smile did not budge.

‘I brought wine.’ I held up two bottles, one white, one red, both of which I’d nicked from the office. ‘Shall I put it in the kitchen?’

Becks frowned, tucking her curly hair behind her ears. A morning slaving over the stove had left it frizzy, but this didn’t seem like an opportune moment to mention the bottle of fancy hair serum I’d left in her bathroom last month.

Before anyone else could make me regret my decision to get up and drag myself across London on a Saturday morning, Alice, my wonderful niece and one of the top five people in the world, stuck her head out of her Wendy house and hit me with a massive, toothless grin.

‘Auntie Annie!’ she squealed, barrelling across the garden and spearing me into the grass. ‘Mummy said you weren’t coming.’

‘I said you might not come,’ Becks corrected on her way back into the kitchen. ‘Not that you definitely weren’t coming.’

‘We were almost late ourselves,’ Gina said, all confessional and apologetic when there was no need. ‘There was a nasty accident on the A3. Sat there for half an hour, didn’t we, Mal?’

My dad nodded his agreement from his fancy wooden lawn chair. My sister’s garden furniture was nicer than anything I had in my actual living room, I realised with shame.

‘At least we’re all here now,’ I replied, forcing my smile out wider from my prone position on the grass.

I’d promised Becks I’d try harder with Gina but, really, she didn’t make it easy. You’d never seen a woman so basted with fake tan. You might think you had but it wasn’t possible. In fact, I wasn’t even sure there was any fake tan left in the world because Gina appeared to be wearing all of it.

‘Is the baby still asleep?’ she asked, dropping her voice an octave and over-enunciating each word, the way people do when they’re talking about babies. ‘I’m desperate to see him. We haven’t been over since before Kefalonia, have we, Mal?’

My dad shook his head.

Worryingly, next to my dad, Gina looked quite pale only his tan wasn’t fake. It had been a long time since I’d touched his face but I had to assume it had transcended skin and become hide some time ago.

‘He’s asleep,’ Alice replied, still lying on top of me. ‘He’s always asleep. I’m not allowed to sleep as much as him, ever.’

‘That’s because you’re a big girl,’ Gina said, shifting registers to her high-pitched, little-girl voice. Incidentally, the same one she used with me. ‘And Basil is still a baby.’

Basil. Thirteen months ago, my sister had given birth and seen fit to name her baby Basil. Yes, I knew it was Alan’s favourite grandad’s name, but I had to assume if there was a heaven, somewhere above us, there was a kindly old man throwing his hands up in despair at the fact my nephew’s life had already been ruined before he could even string together a sentence. Basil the Baby.

‘Have you told Dad about the TechBubble awards?’ Becks asked, hurrying back from the kitchen with a bowl full of freshly sliced baguettes. ‘Annie’s been nominated for an award.’

‘Three awards,’ I said quickly, sitting up as Alice scampered off down the garden. ‘Best new agency, best boutique agency and best campaign. It’s kind of a big deal to be nominated for best boutique agency the same year you’re nominated for best new agency.’

‘All I hear about these days is start-ups going under,’ he said without removing his sunglasses. ‘Would have been a better idea to stay at that big place you were at. Work your way up, think about your pension, get early retirement. That’s what I did, and look at me.’

You couldn’t not look at him really. He was positively radioactive. He was the most tanned man I had ever seen. In fact, was George Hamilton still alive? It was possible my dad was now the most tanned man on earth.

‘But then I wouldn’t have been nominated for three awards, would I?’ I asked while googling the health and well-being of George Hamilton.

‘When will you find out if you’ve won?’ he asked.

‘Start of next month,’ I replied, brushing blades of grass off the arse of my jeans as I stood. ‘The awards are on the second.’

‘Shame you won’t know earlier.’ Dad pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his polished mahogany head. ‘I could have included it in the club newsletter.’

‘Surely the tennis club newsletter should be about news from the tennis club,’ I said. Gina took Dad’s glasses, pulled a case out of her handbag, cleaned them with a little cloth and them popped them away. ‘You could mention the nominations, if you liked?’

‘But what if you don’t win?’ he asked.

‘But what if we do?’ I replied.

‘But what if you don’t?’ he said again. ‘And then I’m out with your Uncle Norman and he says, how did Annie do in those awards? And I have to say, she didn’t actually win any of them, Norman, and then we’re all going to feel foolish, aren’t we?’

I pursed my lips and ran my tongue over my teeth. In for out, out for six.

‘I love your top, Annie,’ Gina said. ‘Where’s it from?’

Dinner was a blissfully swift affair. Lasagne, Dad’s favourite; trifle, Alan’s favourite; and wine, my favourite.

‘Doing anything exciting tonight?’ Rebecca asked, absently stroking Alice’s hair as her daughter scraped a spoon against the bottom of her bowl. ‘Seeing Mir?’

‘She’s got a date,’ I replied. If that was what you could call her plan to ‘maybe kind of probably get a drink with Martin if he’s around or whatever’. Date was quicker. ‘I have a load of work to catch up, I’ll probably just do that.’ The vague thought of Sam’s unInstagrammed life gave me a small lurch in my stomach.

‘No date for you?’ Alan bounced Baby Basil on his knee, without even the decency to make eye contact while opening Pandora’s box.

‘Annie’s too busy for boys,’ Dad said, laughing as though he had just made the funniest joke in the world. ‘Aren’t you, darling?’

‘Just busy in general.’ I stared longingly at the sweaty bottle of white, still half full in the middle of the table, and briefly wondering what Charlie might be up to. ‘You know me.’

‘What about Matthew and that bloody stunt at the World Cup,’ he said, looking across the table to Alan for support. ‘Can’t believe you let that one get away. Me and Alan could have been at the quarter finals right now if you’d played your cards right there.’

‘I feel just terrible about the whole thing,’ I replied, reaching for the wine bottle. ‘Apologies, Dad.’

‘Alice, have you shown Auntie Annie your new tree house?’ Rebecca asked, taking the bottle out of my hand before I could fill my glass to the brim. ‘I’m sure she’d like to see it.’

Alice stood and obediently held out her hand.

‘It’s at the bottom of the garden,’ she informed me while her mother changed the subject. ‘Up a tree.’

‘Controversial,’ I replied, throwing my sister a grateful glance as we skipped off down the garden.

‘They make me go away when they want to talk about me,’ Alice explained as I heaved myself up the steps and into her really rather nice tree house. Two chairs, an iPad and some lovely Cath Kidston curtains. If she could find her way to adding a mini fridge and corkscrew, I’d have been tempted to move in.

‘I think they’re probably too busy talking about me,’ I told her, holding out my hand to accept a tiny plastic teacup that she filled with non-existent tea. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

Alice considered this and decided it was probably right as she poured herself a drink and made herself comfy on the second wooden chair.

‘Now we can have a proper chinwag,’ she said, a conspiratorial wink in her eye. ‘Did Mummy tell you I put Persil in the fish tank?’

‘No,’ I replied, not sure what to be more afraid of, her use of ‘chinwag’ or the fact that I was alone in a tree house with a tiny sociopath. ‘Why would you do that?’

She shrugged and sipped her fake tea.

‘I was trying to clean it,’ she said, as though it were obvious. ‘But it didn’t work and then we had to get new fish.’

Clever Alice, skipping over the part where they all died.

‘Why haven’t you got a husband?’ she asked, opening an empty Quality Street tin and offering me an imaginary biscuit.

‘Not everyone has a husband,’ I said, taking care to select the right one. She’d tell me off if I took the imaginary Orange Club. ‘Granny hasn’t got a husband.’

‘That’s because Granny is too old,’ she assured me. ‘Daddy said so. And she used to be married to Grandad Mal, didn’t you know?’

As my mum liked to say, Alice was six going on sixteen. I couldn’t remember being quite so precocious when I was her age but, to be fair, the only thing I really remembered about being six was wetting myself on the way home from Alton Towers and my parents’ divorce. Hardly a banner year for me.

‘I did know that,’ I replied, following her lead and nibbling on my fantasy biscuit. ‘I don’t have a husband because I haven’t found anyone I want to marry yet.’

‘That makes sense,’ she said. ‘I’m going to marry Kofi from my gymnastics class. He can do four somersaults in a row.’

I’d definitely dated people for less.

‘I’ll find someone when I’m ready,’ I said, watching my niece cross and uncross her legs until she felt she’d found a suitably grown-up position. It would have been more effective if her dress hadn’t ridden up in the process, revealing her pants to the whole world. ‘There’s no rush.’

‘Daddy says you’re getting old too,’ she replied. ‘And that you’d better get a move on because you’re not getting any younger.’

‘Did he now.’ I pulled back the curtains and shot Alan a death stare across the garden. ‘And what else did your daddy have to say?’

‘He said everything started to go downhill for Mummy after thirty-five and that you ought to try to get a ring on it well before then.’

Note to self. Literally never open your mouth in front of a child over the age of one.

‘Well, I know this is probably going to be a strange thing to say, but your daddy doesn’t know everything,’ I said. ‘Especially about girls.’

‘Oh no, I know,’ Alice assured me. ‘Mummy tells him that all the time.’

‘Good,’ I said, sipping my tea. ‘Mummy is really very clever.’

‘I know,’ she replied happily. ‘She tells me that too.’

She went back to her play kitchen for a moment, faffing around with pots and pans, making all the prerequisite not-quite-swears she’d heard from her own parents as she prepared our second course.

‘I’ve done some sandwiches,’ she announced, turning around with a plate full of Matchbox cars. ‘But you’re not to have too many in case it makes you fat.’

‘You shouldn’t be worrying about things like that,’ I said, the blood draining from my face at the thought of someone destroying my six-year-old niece’s body image with one wrong word. ‘Fat isn’t a bad thing, you know. Some people are fat and some people aren’t.’

‘Yes, but you don’t have a husband,’ Alice repeated, in case I wasn’t already aware. ‘And getting fat certainly won’t make finding one any easier.’

‘Thank god your mother is a therapist,’ I muttered, accepting a single red Hot Rod from the platter. ‘You’re definitely going to need it.’

Dad and Gina had to leave earlier than Rebecca had hoped. Lesley from badminton was having her retirement do at the club and they absolutely had to show their face, Dad explained, otherwise they might be a no-show at the end-of-summer party and she’d done the catering on exact numbers.

It took me longer to make my escape and before I knew it, I’d sat through bathtime, bedtime and bedtime story time. Alan was already flicking through Netflix by the time I started faking yawns.

‘Stay,’ Rebecca insisted. ‘I’ll make up the spare bed.’

‘Yes,’ Alan echoed with zero enthusiasm. ‘Stay.’

‘I’d love to but I can’t,’ I said, picking up my handbag, tote bag and refillable water bottle. The holy triumvirate of Modern Women’s Things. ‘I’ve got a really early yoga class in the morning and it’ll be a nightmare to get across town at that time on a Sunday.’

‘Oh, good for you,’ Becks said, bundling me into a hug and a borrowed cardigan. It had turned cold after the sun had set. ‘Do you need Alan to run you to the station?’

‘I’ll get the bus,’ I said, much to Alan’s relief. ‘Or maybe I’ll walk, burn off that trifle. Wouldn’t want me getting fat, would we?’

He didn’t even look away from the TV.

‘I can’t do lunch this week,’ my sister said, buttoning up the cardi for me. ‘But we’ll see you at Dad’s party next week.’

Of course. Dad’s surprise sixtieth birthday party. So that was why Mum had nicked off to Portugal and gone completely incommunicado. We’d had quite the performance over his fiftieth birthday celebrations. She’d shown up at my halls of residence and refused to leave for a week. She spent most of it half-cut on Taboo and lemonades and in all honesty, I didn’t even know they made Taboo anymore but it was amazing what a woman could find in a provincial off-licence if she was truly committed.

‘Don’t give me that look,’ Becks warned. ‘You’re coming, end of.’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ I promised, patting myself down for my Oyster card and earphones. ‘Talk to you later.’

‘Text me when you’re in,’ Becks called as I headed out for the bus stop. ‘And don’t you dare think about missing that party.’

As if I would do such a thing.