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
