Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (2 page)

‘I know, I know, it is a bit much,’ I admitted. ‘But I didn’t actually buy them. They were a present from Dan.’

Jude sighed, cocking her head to one side and gazing at me, an expression of slight disappointment on her face. She doesn’t approve of Dan. Jude doesn’t approve of lots of things.

‘Really. And what’s he apologising for this time?’

‘He’s not apologising for anything, he’s just being sweet,’ I replied, a little unconvincingly.

Ali gave a disconcerting snort. She’s not Dan’s greatest fan either – it’s the one thing she and Jude can agree on.

‘Of course he was. And where is Prince Charming tonight?’ Jude asked.

‘Spearmint Rhino?’ Ali suggested.

‘He’s out with clients!’ I said indignantly. Probably at Spearmint Rhino, but I wasn’t about to admit that.

The thing with Dan is that, like most traders, he plays as hard as he works. And City boys play in a certain way – one that involves copious quantities of champagne, the occasional line or three, and the odd evening in what you might term “gentlemen’s establishments”. But they have to do that – it’s expected of them, to show their clients a good time. Not that Jude understands that – the City is all a bit of a mystery to her. And after the best part of a bottle of champagne,
I was not in the mood to get into the age-old debate about Dan’s suitability.

Luckily, yoga beckoned and Jude reluctantly resisted a comeback and headed off to get changed. Ali sighed heavily, and not for the first time I wished that my two closest friends could get along better. After all, they can’t be that abhorrent to each other. They have me in common.

I’ve known Jude for ever – we were at school together, although we were never really close. I wasn’t really part of the horsey set. We’d lost touch for years, but she was one of those people who popped up on Facebook asking to be friends and I felt it would be rude to say no. I would never in a million years have pictured myself living with her, but about a year ago I found the perfect flat, a smart little two-bedroom place above an art gallery just off Clapham Common. There was no way I could afford it on my own, and I happened to know (through the power of Facebook again) that she was looking for a place, and I just thought, what the hell. At first, she was sceptical.

‘I’m a student, Cassie,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be living in a soulless new-build with a plasma-screen telly and a Smeg fridge. Wouldn’t you rather find somewhere with a bit more character?’

‘If by character you mean damp in the bathroom and carpets from 1976, then no, not really,’ I replied.

Eventually I talked her round. And our place is not soulless. OK, so it does have laminate flooring, which I have artfully covered with rugs from Heal’s and
Designers Guild, and there is an excess of gadgetry – the kitchen taps have lights which make the water look red or blue depending on temperature (ideal for when you’ve taken so much cocaine you can’t tell hot from cold, Ali once remarked) – but I love the newness of everything.

‘It makes it really easy to keep clean,’ I said to Jude a month or two after we moved in.

‘Particularly when you have a cleaner who comes once a week,’ she replied. She thinks having a cleaner is self-indulgent; I think life is too short to clean skirting boards.

Clad head to toe in the Stella McCartney yoga wear I bought her for her birthday (she’d die if she knew what it cost), Jude popped back into the living room to pick up her keys. She frowned at the overflowing ashtray into which Ali was squishing her cigarette.

‘I’ll just empty this for you, shall I?’ she asked.

Ali pulled a face at her back.

‘Have you tried the Allen Carr method for quitting?’ Jude asked as she returned the emptied ashtray. ‘I hear it’s very good.’

‘No, I fucking haven’t,’ Ali mumbled and promptly lit up again.

Jude sighed and headed off to her class.

I served up the takeaway (sushi and sashimi, Ali’s favourite), and resumed my investigation into the state of Ali’s love life, which is frequently a complicated business.

‘Mr Inappropriate?’ I asked again. ‘Anyone in mind?’

Ali laughed. ‘Not at the moment, no,’ she said, but I noticed that as she said it she couldn’t quite meet my eye. ‘We should go on holiday,’ she announced suddenly.

‘Uh-huh,’ I said, now very suspicious at the way-too-abrupt change of subject.

‘I haven’t been anywhere for ages – we could do a spa thing or something. It would be fun. I could look for some cheap deals on the Internet.’

‘We could . . .’ I said, a little non-committal.

‘What? You don’t fancy it? Or you have to ask Dan’s permission?’

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘Just that I was sort of planning a surprise for him. I was thinking of taking him away for our anniversary.

‘What anniversary?’

‘It’ll be ten months in a few weeks,’ I said, slightly sheepishly.

‘Your ten-month anniversary?’ Ali looked unimpressed. ‘And where were you thinking of going?’

‘Rome. I’ve found some amazing places on the Internet – I’ll show you.’ I grabbed my laptop from the kitchen counter and brought it over. ‘This is my favourite,’I said, bringing up the site, ‘Hotel de Russie. It’s just across the road from the Spanish Steps and it looks totally amazing. And it has the best spa in Italy, apparently.’

Ali nearly choked on her champagne. ‘Yeah, for over four hundred euros a night I would bloody well hope so. Can you seriously afford that, Cass? You do know we’re heading into a recession, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I know. But we’ll be all right, won’t we?’ I said. ‘We’ve got good jobs, we work for a profitable company. Anyway, it probably won’t last that long, will it? These things go in cycles.’ I tried to sound as though I knew what I was talking about. Ali gave me a rueful little smile.

‘Well, I hope he appreciates it,’ she said. I didn’t say anything. Sometimes it’s better not to discuss Dan with Ali when she’s had a few.

I put Ali into a taxi at around ten – ridiculously early, but then she does have to be at work by six thirty. I rang Dan once or twice (oh, all right, three times) but his phone was off. So I put my shoes on (they even look great with my pyjamas) and, fuelled by an excess of champagne and armed with my credit card, decided to book the trip to Rome. Shunning Ryanair (it doesn’t really set the right tone for a romantic weekend away), I found some not-too-exorbitant tickets on Alitalia and a special three-night deal at the Hotel de Russie which I’d only be paying off for a couple of months. Maybe three.

Just as I clicked on ‘confirm’ to purchase the tickets, my mobile rang. Snatching it up in eager anticipation of seeing Dan’s name come up on the screen, I was mightily disappointed to discover that it was Celia, my older sister. I toyed with the idea of ignoring her, but as usual, my guilt got the better of me.

‘Hi, Cee,’ I said, with as much cheeriness as I could muster. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Why aren’t you coming up this weekend?’ she
snapped, immediately on the offensive. Despite its suddenness, this attack was not entirely unexpected. The coming weekend was my parents’ twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, and my sister had been planning the party for months.

‘Celia, I told you I can’t come this weekend, I’ve got plans I made ages ago and I can’t change them now.’ This was not entirely true. I did have plans to spend the weekend with Dan – he’d been away on two stag trips and one weekend training session in the past four weeks and I felt as though I’d barely seen him. ‘In any case, Cee, it’s not like it’s their thirtieth. Twenty-eight isn’t really a big deal, is it? Bet you don’t even know what gift you’re supposed to give for twenty-eight years.’

‘I’ve looked it up. There isn’t one.’

‘There you go then.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Cassandra,’ she said, knowing only too well that the use of my full name sets my teeth on edge, ‘it
is
a big deal. It’s twenty-eight years of marriage. And I’ve booked the function room at the Holiday Inn in Corby! You can’t do this to them, they’ll be
heartbroken
. Particularly after what happened at Dad’s birthday.’

My sister knows exactly how to push my buttons. Bringing up Dad’s birthday debacle was a masterstroke.

It happened a couple of months ago. My father had a birthday barbeque in the summer, to which Dan was invited.

‘We’re ever so keen to meet him, love,’ my mother had said on the phone. ‘You’ve been seeing this chap for months now. About time he and your father got acquainted, isn’t it?’

Not in my opinion it wasn’t. If it were up to me, Dan and my parents would never cross paths. Here is the awful truth – and it is
really
awful – I’m embarrassed by my family. I know that everyone goes through a stage when the idea of bumping into their friends when in the company of their parents is the very definition of hell, but you’re supposed to grow out of that stage when you’re about seventeen. I never did. And I don’t know which is worse: the embarrassment they cause me or the burning shame I feel because I am embarrassed by them.

My parents are not unpleasant people. They are kind and respectable, active members of the Kettering Rotary Club and their local Conservative Party. But they are unworldly. They live in a Britain which most of us left behind a long time ago, the Britain of the 1970s, the Britain of avocado bathroom suites, prawn cocktail starters and mushroom vol-au-vents, the Britain in which holidaying in Spain was seen as exotic and adventurous.

The Cavanagh family didn’t even get as far as Spain, in fact. When I was a child we stayed at the same bed and breakfast in Bournemouth every single summer with one exception. When I was fourteen I persuaded them to take us to France, on the pretext that it would be a good opportunity for Celia and me to practise our
French. We drove to Portsmouth and took the ferry to Le Havre (my mother and sister spent the entire four-hour journey throwing up in the toilets), and from there to a place called Granville, where we stayed in a tiny two-bedroom apartment with a view across the bay towards Saint-Malo.

On our second evening in Granville, we ventured out to dinner in a picture-perfect little brasserie near the harbour, complete with blood-red awning outside and a long, copper-topped bar. I vividly remember my parents’ terrified expressions as the stereotypically snooty waiter presented them with menus written
entirely in French
; Celia and I did our best to translate but we were not exactly what you might term proficient. We did, however, recognise the odd word –
agneau
and
côte de boeuf
stood out – and so Dad, Celia and I opted for the beef, while Mum ordered lamb. When it arrived she looked at it suspiciously; the pale, slightly spongy meat on her plate did not resemble the traditional roast to which she was accustomed. Gingerly, she took a bite. Then, her face blanching, she returned her fork to her plate and summoned the waiter.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, loudly and slowly so that he was sure to understand, ‘but are you sure this is lamb?
L’agneau
?’

‘
Oui, madame, ce sont des cervelles d’agneau
.’ He smiled at her warmly, enjoying the moment. ‘Zees are ze brains of lambs.’

And my mother was back in the toilet, throwing up
again. For the rest of the holiday we ate spag bol and fish and chips back at the apartment, with Mum complaining bitterly that it wasn’t much of a holiday if she had to cook all the time.

My parents are provincial. They are petit bourgeois. I love them dearly. But for as long as I can remember I have wanted to get away – not from them so much as from their life. The idea of Dan sitting on the sofa in the peach-themed living room of our mum and dad’s 1930s semi in the Kettering suburbs, drinking a pint of Tetley while admiring my mother’s collection of Royal Doulton figurines, or discussing the front-page story of the
Daily Mail
with Dad, was just too awful to contemplate. So when they invited us down for the birthday party I lied and said that Dan couldn’t make it – he had to visit his grandmother in Edinburgh who had taken ill.

I’d told Dan that he was invited but that he needn’t bother to come because he’d find it boring, and he put up no argument at all. However, for some inexplicable reason he decided that he’d earn some Brownie points – perhaps for use at a later meeting – by ringing up halfway through the afternoon’s festivities to apologise for his absence and to wish my Dad a happy sixtieth. He was so sorry he couldn’t make it, he said, but there was just no getting out of the annual Hamilton Churchill team-building weekend. The look on my father’s face will stay with me for a very long time.

And Celia knew it. With a resigned sigh and a heavy heart, I conceded defeat.

‘All right, Celia, I’ll cancel my plans. I’ll get the train up on Saturday. Can you pick me up from the station?’

‘Not on Saturday, Cassie. The party’s Saturday and I’ll be busy all day getting things ready. Come up Friday night. I’ll come and get you and we can go for a bite at the Harvester with the kids.’

Oh, joy . . .

Cassie Cavanagh
is homicidal

How would I like to kill him? Let me count the ways: stabbing, shooting, poisoning, shoving him beneath the next DLR train . . . I was ten minutes late this morning. Ten. And of course it wasn’t my fault – if you live in London, it genuinely almost never is. It’s typical though. I actually woke up before my alarm went off so I decided to set off for work earlier than usual so that I could finalise party plans and get a jump-start on the day. Ha. So much for early birds and worms and all that.