yes. Thanks.’
Her dad looked baffled and Meg frowned suspiciously at Edie, as if she might be doing the space cadet thing as London aloofness. They went on to give more detailed orders – ‘The Lemmy, vegan, plain wedges, American mustard side’ – that made Edie realise she hadn’t got into the spirit of the thing at all. She had ground to make up already.
‘And a portion of onion rings,’ she volunteered. ‘For the table.’
‘For the tapeworm,’ her dad said.
Don’t think about Jack, Edie instructed herself. He doesn’t deserve to be thought about.
Edie was thinking about him. Jack and Charlotte were back together. It wasn’t only that Edie resented them sorting it out and sparing Jack’s arse. It was that she knew what this meant for her.
If Jack had been restored by Charlotte, it’d make Edie the only real bad guy. Friends might mutter about Jack in private, but in public, it was disloyal to Charlotte. They’d have to redistribute the weight of their disapprobation and put it all on her. So now the official story would go: reunited against all odds, once the scourge of that hussy was eradicated. Charlotte could forgive Jack, but not Edie?
Ping, another Louis text.
PS Listen, I don’t know when the best time tell you this is but in wake of J & C sorting it out, Lucie put an email round everyone at work asking them to print out and sign a petition for you to be sacked. No one’s signed it though. Xx
… Yet. Edie sagged with the weight and shame of it. She couldn’t go back, no matter what Richard said. Even if Jack and/or Charlotte left of their own accord, she’d be hissed at. Why should she lose her job and not Jack, though? So he walked away with the job and the wife?
‘Do your work really need to get hold of you this often?’ Edie’s dad said, as she turned the phone face down on the table again.
‘It’s not work, Dad, at half seven at night,’ Meg said, faux-sweetly.
‘Oh.’ Her dad’s eyes widened. ‘Are you courting?’
‘No,’ Edie said, forcefully.
Then, with not inconsiderable effort:
‘Sorry. Being hassled about something work-related, by a friend. How was everyone’s day?’
‘Not bad, thank you,’ her dad said. ‘Radio Four and pottering. Have you clapped eyes on the elusive star yet?’
‘He’s saying he’ll see me at his parents’ house in West Bridgford on Sunday. Well, his PA says he’s seeing me. Believe it when I see it. Or him.’
‘Sunday? Funny hours you have to work.’
‘I have to be available whenever he’s available. I spent today reading more cuttings about him. God knows how you get a book’s worth of words out of a thirty-one-year-old’s life story. I’m going to have to do a lot of padding.’
‘It’s so stupid that we write books about people who’ve been in films rather than aid workers, and people who’ve actually contributed to society,’ Meg said.
‘Hmm yeah,’ Edie said, nodding. ‘It is. Or anyone who’s thirty-one, really.’
She said this before she realised it sounded like a dig at Meg.
‘Alright, Yoda.’
It was tiring, being around someone who not-so-secretly despised her.
The food arrived and Edie was glad of something that could unite them, the simple pleasure of stuffing your face. They carried trivial conversation through food and a second round of beers, with Edie asking a string of questions about things and people she’d missed in Nottingham. There was no foothold for Meg to complain about her being lordly.
‘Oof. I feel as if my innards are trying to knit me a beef vest,’ her dad said, exhaling and patting his stomach.
‘Your colon will be sluggish with decomposing animal protein,’ Meg said.
‘Not my colon,’ her dad said. ‘Business is brisk, let me promise you. Nice frock, Edith,’ he added, as the plates were cleared away. Edie was in a dark blue, long-sleeved cheap-buy dress that she’d pulled, crumpled, from her case. She’d not worn it much as it had a wide strip of lacy material across the bosom that acted as a cleavage viewing window. She reasoned no one here would be interested in taking the opportunity.
In a misguided attempt at paternal even-handedness, her dad added: ‘You’d look nice in that too, Meg.’
Meg wrinkled her nose. ‘No thanks, that’s a very Edie dress.’
‘Oh, an EDIE dress,’ Edie said, doing shock-horror palms. ‘What could be worse?’
‘You know. It’s a bit “Have you met my breasts?’’’
‘Megan!’ her dad said. ‘Settle down.’
Of all the things to mock Edie about at the moment, the idea she was a showy tart really was going to hurt the most. In front of their dad, too: cringe. She took a deep breath.
‘Why do you have to be so horrible, Meg? Do I ever say anything critical about your clothes? No.’
‘God, it was only a joke,’ Meg muttered. ‘Chill out, Cranky McCrankerson.’
‘And I’d have thought it’s not totally feminist ethics to comment on another woman’s chest like that, is it? Didn’t you just “slut shame” me?’
‘Oh, here we go.’
‘No, there you went.’
Meg squeezed the American diner style tomato-shaped tomato sauce holder and said, reflectively: ‘As George Monbiot said, if hypocrisy is the shortfall between our principles and our behaviour, it’s easy to never be a hypocrite, by having no principles.’
‘I have no principles?’
‘You called me a hypocrite.’
‘Well. Cheers. Thanks for dinner, Edie!’ Edie said, in sing-song voice.
‘Oh, what a surprise, you had to throw that in my face. I didn’t ask to come here.’
‘Actually, you did.’
Meg scowled and Edie tried to regain self-control because she was angry enough to say plenty more.
This had escalated quickly.
‘Sod this, I’m having a smoke,’ Meg said, pushing her chair back with a loud scrape.
She disappeared off, digging the Rizlas out of her kangaroo-like dungarees front pocket
