I’m sure it’s not necessary to say this, but in the circumstances I’m going to go belt and braces.’
‘Yes?’
‘The advice was about getting under his skin, not his clothes, and let’s set aside the “real meat” thing entirely. For fuck’s sake, don’t get off with Elliot Owen.’
Edie paid first class to get back to Nottingham, even though it was an extravagant amount extra, travelling on a Monday. The last luxury for the condemned woman, a Big Mac and large fries on Death Row.
It was tough, she knew, to equate her native city with the Electric Chair. Nevertheless.
In their twenties, everyone who’d escaped to The Smoke had shuddered at the thought of moving back to wherever they’d come from. Edie had fitted right in. They were the ones who’d got away, and they revelled in their success every weekend. On Fridays, when Edie drank in Soho pubs, everyone spilling out of the doorways, she felt she was at the centre of the universe.
Then slowly but surely, the tide turned. People married and planned babies, and wanted good schools and a garden. They didn’t go out to explore the capital’s cultural riches and superior shopping at the weekends anyway. Even those who didn’t have families got sick of the commute, the cut-throat competitiveness, the gargantuan property prices, the way London geography made social spontaneity impossible.
Gradually, the very same people who’d proclaim loudly after a few pints that the rest of the country was a backward dump full of UKIPers, began to romanticise home. Being in striking distance of the grandparents, being able to have a dog, a friendly local where everyone knew your name. It taking ten minutes to get into town was a desirable convenience, not a sign you were in Shitsville, Nowhereshire.
As Charlotte said, when justifying St Albans, Now you can get a decent coffee and a cocktail most places, you don’t need to be in London.
And Edie once again was the odd one out, because she didn’t feel like that. London wasn’t about drinks. It had always felt a huge achievement to her, and carried on feeling like one. London was anonymity, London was freedom. London was where Edie had reinvented herself. A London address, albeit a cramped one-bed rented flat in Stockwell, was almost everything she had to show for living, aged thirty-five. Yes, every friend she’d made at the agency prior to Ad Hoc had moved out. It became a social exodus, after thirty. But Edie stood firm.
As the countryside sped past the train window, she kept thinking: STOP. You’re heading in the wrong direction.
She only went home at Christmas, if she could get away with it. It was bleak, for Edie. It was particularly hard as it felt as if everyone else she knew returned to some Cotswolds vision from a supermarket advert, in holly-wreathed timber-beamed farmhouses with spray-on frost edging the windows. There was excited discussion about traditions: smoked salmon and fresh pyjamas on Christmas Eve, Frank Sinatra while you opened your presents, champagne and blinis and Monopoly and snowflakes on smug kittens.
Standard procedure for Edie went like this: she would invent a reason why she had to work until Christmas Eve morning (cursing the years where it fell on a weekend, and elongated her agony).
She’d feel guilt at the disappointment in her dad’s voice when he’d say: ‘Oh, can you not get away any earlier? Oh, OK.’
Richard would have to shoo her out when he saw her in the office.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she’d lament.
‘You’re condemned to a green and pleasant city with a university boating lake, not fucking Mordor. Now get lost – you’re only reading the BBC News site, and the cleaners want to get in.’
Edie would catch the train at St Pancras, ending up on the service that was crammed with inebriated last-minuters. On arrival in Nottingham, she’d go straight to Marks & Spencer, buy as much food as she could carry and a large bunch of flowers. Then she’d clamber into a taxi to Forest Fields, about ten minutes’ drive north of the city centre.
She’d get the cab to drop her at the end of the street, so her sister Meg didn’t hear the rumble of a Hackney engine and give her a lecture on how it was ecologically much better to get a bus, here, LOOK. (Having the timetable thrust into her hands as soon as she was through the door made Edie want to go everywhere on a motorised golden throne powered by unicorn tears.)
Trying not to let spirits sag as she entered the poky, ramshackle semi, wreathed in fag smoke, books stacked against the walls and on the stairs, wallpaper peeling. Edie would hug her father, Gerry, hello. He was always in a moth-eaten jumper, his craggy face like an Easter Island statue. You would never guess that Edie, her dad and Meg were related, they looked completely dissimilar. (Edie couldn’t help think that was telling.)
Meg had a very round face to Edie’s pointed chin, small cornflower blue eyes to Edie’s vast and doll-like dark ones, and patchily bleached mousy hair, which she wore in matted dreadlocks, gathered into a pineapple-style ponytail.
Edie would unpack the food into the fridge, while Meg loitered and complained at the Oakham chicken touching her tofu wieners, generally acting as if Saudi royalty had come to stay.
Meg was a militant vegan and if Edie wanted anything resembling a Christmas roast, she had to bring it herself and fight for its right to party. (She’d offered to take them to a pub for lunch in the past, but Meg thought it was outrageous exploitation of the proletariat who had to work on a public holiday.)
With relief, Edie would chuck her flowers in a jug which, in the chaotic tip of a kitchen, was akin to pencilling a beauty spot on a corpse. Then she’d faux-cheerily open a bottle of wine. Glugging it took the edge off, and helped abort the annual argument about whether her father and sister smoking stood in the back doorway, freezing faggy air rushing in to the kitchen, did in fact constitute ‘not smoking in the house’.
They’d long ago cancelled the gift giving on Christmas morning. Edie’s father was on an academic pension and Meg was mostly unemployed, and no one had a clue what to get for each other anyway. So they got half-drunk while Edie tried to make seven dishes in a small kitchen without anything meat or dairy so much as looking the wrong way at Meg’s spartan ingredients.
Meg would slowly build up a head of steam at the fact that Edie dared trample on their ‘cruelty-free lifestyle’ in this insensitive way, and cava-pissed Edie would stop herself from saying it felt pretty cruel to appetites.
With her sister and father parked in front of a rerun of The Snowman, Edie had to clear the piles of mouldering New Scientist magazines from the only-used-once-a-year dining room table and cobble together clean crockery that sort of matched.
They’d eat a botched-together lunch with a Gaza Strip in the middle made of candles, separating Edie’s Henry VIII food from a glowering Meg’s bean banquet. If Edie’s dad recklessly praised anything on Edie’s side of the table, Meg would say: ‘The succulent flavour of murder. The lovely taste of unethical slaughter. I’m having to eat with death filling my nostrils.’
Edie would likely snap: ‘Well we’re having to eat with hippy grief filling our ears,’ and Meg would rejoin: ‘Yes, anything other than your choices is hippy. Why don’t you just join the Bullingdon Club, Bernard Matthews.’ And so on.
And
