by Adele Parks
No, actually she didn’t understand that. Not fully, not ever.
After a few minutes of determined reading of her barrier book, Pip felt the man’s gaze fall from her as he seemed to settle into reading his newspaper. Good. Phew. That was a relief. Now she could concentrate on what she’d planned to concentrate on during this journey, she could prepare herself for this meeting.
She might never have an opportunity like this one again. This could be huge, she simply must not blow it. She wanted to reach into her bag and fish out her designs but didn’t want to move in case that was interpreted by the not-a-teacher-man as an invitation to talk. Besides, she knew the designs like the back of her hand. All she had to do was think through her pitch. Remain focused. Be eloquent. Appear considered. Keep a cool head. And turn her life around.
Oh crap.
3
Kirsten pouted into the mirror. Held the pose, admired the gorgeous young woman pouting back at her, winked, grinned and then blew her a kiss. Yes, she was stunning. It was official. Even in the hideous, ugly, old-fashioned mirror she looked a.maz.ing.
No wonder they couldn’t resist her, thought Kirsten, giggling with glee. Somehow, somewhere on a subconscious level, she continually acknowledged her spectacular youth and beauty, although if quizzed she might have said she was giggling at the thought of drinking champagne tonight and staying in a decent bed, rather than the dismal, lumpy, skinny apology for a bed that she had to sleep in in this lousy flat share.
She glanced around her bedroom. It really was quite pathetically miserable. The furniture was from the ark. Her mother had chuckled when she saw it and commented, ‘I used to have this exact suite! Your nan bought it for me from MFI.’
Suite! Suite? When Kirsten talked about a suite she meant a suite of rooms, like they’d once had when they went on holiday to Los Angeles or the suite of rooms she’d once got Jules to upgrade to at Highview. Mummy meant three-piece suites (which were so over, everyone knew an eclectic mix of chairs and a daybed were the thing nowadays) or she meant this bloody repulsive, veneered dressing table, matching headboard and chest of drawers that crowded Kirsten whenever she had to stay in this dingy room.
Mummy liked to reminisce about the old days. Nothing she liked more than to remind them all of what they had come from. She was always going on about stuff like buying furniture from MFI, or being excited at finding a Clementine stuffed in an old pair of tights at Christmas time, or the strikes that she’d endured throughout the seventies which had led to mountains of rubbish piling up in the streets and meant people had to share baths or something. Kirsten didn’t quite get why the binmen going on strike meant that her mother and such needed to use candles, or why people stockpiled loo roll. But then, she didn’t really listen that carefully when Mummy took a trip down memory lane – frankly it was all a bit of a bore. Kirsten didn’t see the point; talking about how you were once poor and had crap stuff was deathly. Kirsten liked all the lovely, expensive things her daddy had lavished on her since she was a tiny girl; at least he realised that the only point to being filthy rich was for you to enjoy it. What could be more fabulous than splashing your cash around and wallowing in it? If her mother had her way, they’d still be in the poky flat that her parents had rented when they first married, the claustrophobically small place that her mother still referred to as ‘cosy’.
Kirsten definitely preferred her father’s way of doing things. He’d buried his appalling accent and now sounded a little like Prince Charles, he was a member of the right clubs and friends with the right people. Admittedly, her mother’s accent wasn’t terrible, it was friendly, but still not something Kirsten aspired to. Kirsten had been careful to round her vowels, careful to call her mum and dad Mummy and Daddy, and careful to finesse a languid drawl so that she had fitted right in at her lovely little chi-chi girls-only independent school, Queen Charlotte’s School for Girls.
Kirsten had just turned twenty-two, which seemed really adult to her although Mummy often said she didn’t seem to have the sense she was born with. Mummy was always going on about the fact that in her day girls were much more independent and savvy but Kirsten thought her mother was wrong about this too. After all, she’d started having Brazilian waxes when she was seventeen and now she’d had the entire area lasered except for a tiny thin runway line. She was never in the embarrassing position of having to turn down an invitation to go swimming or to a jacuzzi because the odd stray hair might spoil her day, whereas her mother (with all her common sense and supposed savvy!) had to rely heavily on sarongs whenever they were on holiday. But then, maybe this wasn’t a terrible thing, if you considered her mother’s age – forty-six! Wearing a sarong was probably the most dignified option if she was going to insist on going on a beach at all.
Kirsten worked in the city, as a personal assistant to a group of hedge fund managers. She did her job well enough not to get fired, although probably not well enough to ensure she would be promoted to PA of a CEO or even a CFO. Not that Kirsten was planning on hanging around that long; the PAs to the CEOs were really old, like thirty-four, or thirty-five. Kirsten planned to be married before she was twenty-five and then she wouldn’t need to work ever again. Kirsten could never understand why her mother had tried to ‘keep her hand in’ with the family business once they could afford a proper PA to do all the boring filing and stuff, why would Mummy want to bother? Kirsten’s father didn’t like it at all. He argued that his wife didn’t need to work, that it was a man’s job to provide for his family; he said she showed him up by coming into the office, and in the end she’d finally listened to him and stayed away. Although her mother still occasionally grumbled that she missed the buzz of office life. Buzz! Ha, that was a joke. Her parents’ office was on a sleepy industrial estate, there was no buzz! All there was in the office was parched spider plants and a wall calendar, with undecipherable critical deadlines. Daddy didn’t spend any money on interior decorating because none of his clients ever saw it. If he wanted to shake on a deal he took his clients to his members-only club in London.
At least there was some sort of atmosphere in Kirsten’s office. Kirsten knew it made sense to work in the city, if she had to work at all (which apparently she did now!). The city was where all the money was. The money men. Potential husbands. Kirsten had been a bit surprised that there were women hedge fund managers too. She didn’t have a problem with that, if some girls wanted to charge around getting stressed about stuff, that was their lookout but she’d never fancied the idea. It looked like a lot of effort and effort wasn’t her thing. She supposed they must like their jobs because they all got to wear beautiful suits (designers such as Joseph and Calvin Klein), they got to carry Gucci bags and they always wore absolutely stunning shoes with killer heels! But it wasn’t for her. She’d once tried to read those huge newspapers but what did it mean, ‘BASF set to buy Cognis for more than €3bn’? What was an equity? Or a capital market or bond buying, come to that? And was it really necessary to use quite so many initials in these newspaper reports? ‘ECB seeks tougher eurozone rules’? ‘Iran bars IAEA inspectors’? She would have had a better chance at understanding something if the journalists had bothered to write out the words in full.
Maybe, maybe not.
She’d only managed a very average C grade for her GCSE in maths. She’d hated her maths teacher at school. She was such a bore, her catchphrase was, ‘Sit up, Kirsten, and do try to be serious.’ Why would she want to be serious? Serious people tended to wear hideous clothes and often had frown lines on their forehead. Her headmistress had been very stroppy with anyone who got Cs as Cs brought down the school average. As if Kirsten cared about the crappy school average. That was their problem. They should have taught her better. Daddy had paid them enough over the years. It wasn’t as though she was a total idiot with numbers, she always knew how much she had in the bank (or rather how much she didn’t have in the bank, right now she was £408 overdrawn and she had £742 on her credit cards). This was modest com
pared to some of her friends, or compared to Mummy, come to that. She often put over a thousand on the credit card in a single transaction and Daddy just paid it off at the end of the month. No biggie. He was loaded. He used to do exactly the same for Kirsten and could again if he wanted to.
Problem was he didn’t want to. Not any more.
After twenty-two years of complete and utter indulgence the cashmere rug had now been pulled from under Kirsten’s feet. It wasn’t fair!
The oldies had both got a thing about her becoming more independent. Daddy had grumbled that he wasn’t going to work like a Chinaman to feed her drug habit. It was ridiculous, of course, to say such things. Kirsten had pointed out that his comment was racist and inaccurate. He liked working, he’d done nothing else for as long as she could remember! Besides, no one could call the odd spliff a drug habit. The real issue was neither of them had forgiven her for throwing a party at their place when they went on the cruise for their silver wedding anniversary. They said it was ‘the straw that broke the donkey’s back’. Kirsten was at a loss as to exactly which other straws had previously stacked up to lead to this catastrophe. Surely, the various suspensions from school, the bumps in the cars and even her going on an impromptu holiday to the south of France with that gang of hippies she met at Glastonbury were all discrete incidents that had been forgiven and forgotten. They’d really overreacted to her holiday, calling the police and yabbering on about abduction or elopement – as if! It was just a bit of fun. It was unfair to bring up all that ancient history as examples of her supposed irresponsibility.
And a cruise! What a cliché. They’d written the script by being so ridiculously, predictably middle class. Since they were such a cliché, she felt duty bound to act within stereotype too and have a party that would inevitably be crashed and get out of hand, especially as she’d posted an open invite to it on Facebook. Retrospectively, that had guaranteed interesting guests, she supposed. But knowing everyone at your party was so boring!
It wasn’t just her to blame either. Darryl had brought about a dozen friends home from uni and they’d been the ones that drank Daddy’s cellar dry. Not that anyone ever got cross with goody-two-shoes Darryl; her baby brother who’d got a place at Oxford to read Politics couldn’t put a foot wrong. You’d think he was already prime minister the way they idolised him and hung on his every word. Admittedly, it was her friends that were most likely responsible for peeing in the aquarium, but who knew it would alter the pH balance of the water so drastically and all the fish would die?
But, after the party, Daddy had turned purple (it was finding vomit in his Burberry shoes that really finished him off) and he started demanding she got a job, move to London, share a flat with someone. Who? The same losers that had peed in his precious fish tank? That didn’t seem right. He said it was time for her to stand on her own two feet. He’d made some weak joke about her two feet no longer being clad in Kurt Geiger, now that he wasn’t paying. Ha bloody ha.
Frankly, Kirsten had thought her father’s reaction was quite hurtful. She’d always assumed he liked having her around. She was his little girl. Maybe not as bright as Darryl but significantly cuter to look at. That’s what he was always saying, what a pretty little thing she was.
Daddy liked to tell everyone that he got her the job in the city but that wasn’t true. She had a degree from Thames Valley University, didn’t she? OK it was a third class but still it was in Events Management and Hospitality which had come in really handy when she was helping to organise the office Christmas party. Everyone talked about how cool it was to serve the canapés from mirrors and that had been her idea. She did have a flair for that sort of thing; when she was married and had a gorgeous house, she’d throw the best parties. She’d be the hostess with the mostest! She’d invite her parents and Daddy would be really proud of her then, when he saw her glittering in the middle of all her exciting friends. It really was annoying that, even though she had her degree and everything, Daddy still took the credit for her getting a job in the city. He said she got it because of the strings he’d pulled with the men he’d dined with for years.
He might be on to something there, thought Kirsten, grinning slyly. It was certainly about something being pulled! The old men that her father played golf with and had lunch with and sat across boardroom tables with had taken an interest in her. An exceptional interest. Not because of her degree in Events Management and Hospitality, admittedly, and not because they did business with Daddy. She knew the most likely reason for their interest was that she had silky, long, blond hair and silky, long, bronzed legs. The guy at the interview barely looked at her CV, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her double Ds. He didn’t care about her A level results or coursework average, the only statistics he was thinking about was 34, 22, 34. It was gross if you thought about it. The HR guy was probably Daddy’s age!
She could tell the woman doing the interview was grossed out too. She kept sighing deeply and rolling her eyes. Kirsten felt a bit sorry for her. It was clear she took her job really seriously, she’d prepared a whole list of questions for Kirsten and Kirsten wouldn’t have minded answering them but she never got the chance. The old bloke kept saying, ‘Oh, I’m sure Kirsten has plenty on her CV which she can be proud of. I bet you’re a girl who likes a bit of extra-curricular, aren’t you?’ The woman had muttered something about inappropriate behaviour and lawsuits but he’d just laughed. Kirsten thought it was a good thing the woman interviewer took her job so seriously though because, to be honest, she was so plain it was probably the best thing she could do.
Daddy was right in a way, working had broadened her horizons and made her grow up. Not that she’d learnt that much about standing on her own two feet though, what she’d learnt was that it was much better to lie flat on her back.
The thing was, it was expensive living and working in the city. Take Friday, for instance. Her cab drive into work had cost thirty quid. She’d had a hangover and just couldn’t face public transport. The thought of all those people who smelt of farts and garlic and didn’t take baths pushing up unnecessarily close to her was so disgusting. Even the sweet-smelling girls, who douched and doused themselves in perfume, were annoying because sometimes one of them was prettier or better dressed than she was and that could put her in a really bad mood all day. In fact, she might get a cab in today too. She just loved looking at all the beautiful things in the shop windows as she drove past.
And there were so many beautiful things! There were Alexander Wang handbags to die for, Agent Provocateur lingerie that left her hot and flustered, Burberry coats that were eternal classics, Stella McCartney dresses to flatter, Miu Miu shoes that she’d trample over her granny to get hold of. It was just too exciting to be constantly surrounded by utterly fabulous things all the time! Kirsten wanted it all. She needed it all. And her salary of twenty-one thousand, three hundred pounds a year didn’t go anywhere, not after paying for rent, food and taxis. Kirsten couldn’t understand how some of the girls she knew from Queen Charlotte’s managed on what they did. Gemma Kirk was working as a journalist and earned sixteen thousand. That seemed weird, why would she agree to that? She’d always been a brainiac. And Ellenor Carter-Jones wasn’t even earning yet because she was at med school and that took years and years to finish! Duh, what was she thinking? By the time she completed training, her ovaries would have practically dried up. Then there was Rebecca Ellis, who was on about eleven thousand, working for a charity! Madness! And to think all the teachers at Queen Charlotte’s School used to go on about how those particular girls would go far.
So, yes, Kirsten knew that some girls managed on less, just not girls like her.
It wasn’t as if she took hard cash off any of her boyfriends, she wasn’t a prostitute. But if they wanted to buy her gifts, why would she stop them? And if they didn’t really understand her hints as to exactly which gifts she’d like bought, then was it unreasonable to ask them for a store card instead? She’d been working in the city for e
ight months now and she hadn’t had to buy much more than cereal and Tampax for most of that time. Men loved dressing her up almost as much as they loved undressing her. It was a territorial thing, maybe. She saw most of her boyfriends just once a week, which fitted in with their families’ lives and her social life. They liked to imagine her wearing their gifts on the days when they didn’t get together. They bought her coats to keep her warm, underwear to get them hot and just about everything else in-between. What did her brother call it when he saw the Tiffany bracelet that Brian gave her? Darryl had asked her where it was from and when she told him to mind his own business he’d guessed its origin. He was pretty cool though. He didn’t threaten to tell Mummy and Daddy. He’d said she should look at it as an economical redressing, men are paid more than women, most times, for doing the exact same job and that’s not fair, is it? She was just getting a bit of that back. It was her due. She was quite the feminist, really, if you looked at it like that.
Kirsten liked her brother’s way of looking at the matter. So she didn’t point out that she never had sex with men who did the same job as she did (as though she’d look at a PA!). Plus, the other reason she wasn’t a prostitute was that she liked all her boyfriends, at least she liked them well enough, more or less. She had three at the moment, it was four until last month but she’d had to ditch Alan Edwardson because he was getting a bit too involved, he kept talking about wanting to leave his wife for her. Why would he think she wanted that? Madness!
Alan had been the first lover she’d taken in the city and truthfully he was a low-grade starter. It wouldn’t be unfair to compare him with a very average prawn cocktail, smothered in cheap mayonnaise, and now she’d moved on to much finer delicacies. For a start Alan was the least senior out of the men she’d screwed, he was also the least good-looking and the most boring. As such he’d been so flattered by her attentions that he’d practically begged her to let him buy her stuff. Ugly men were always the easiest to seduce. Duh, no-brainer. But while she didn’t mind him buying her stuff, she had to eventually admit that she didn’t particularly want a balding husband with glasses. His wife might be consoled with the house in Chiswick and then the cottage in the south of France but Kirsten wanted the whole package. Money, yes, there was no shame in that. But besides the cash, when she got married she wanted to net a handsome husband, someone a bit more like Jules. He was easily the most handsome out of the four. Easily.
