‘Hah, well I never!’

‘I think his offer of the job gave him the whip hand.’

‘Ugh, can you imagine how awful it would be if I took that? Lording it over me, telling me off … he wants power over me like he has over Mum.’

‘Yes. I’ve told Mum, it’d be a recipe for disaster.’

I know a hefty dollop of me is in Esther’s Recipe For Disaster, so say nothing.

‘Can I ask you to consider something that you won’t have considered?’ Esther says. ‘Mum needs us.’

‘I know that.’

‘I mean, she really needs us, Gog. I think it’s a potentially abusive if not actually abusive relationship and if she’s ever going to find it in her to stand up to him, she can’t do that while she’s feuding with her daughters over him.’

‘You don’t think he …?’

‘Hits her? God, no. Or I’d be staging an intervention. But there are other types of abuse.’

‘What are you saying I should do differently?’

‘Keep Geoffrey sweet enough and things creaking along. There are bigger things at stake. He is who he is but he’s our stepfather and we can’t do anything about that. We can support Mum, and help her towards realising he doesn’t get to push her around, simply because the credit cards are in his name.’

I’ve arrived at work now and check my trendily throwback-slash-plastic cheap Casio watch, under the grubby cuff of pink fluff.

‘I dunno. I know you’re smart about these things, Est, but I don’t think me pretending not to loathe him is going to make much difference.’

‘Not true. He’s very susceptible to flattery. And you can be very dazzling when you try, even when it’s insincere.’

I guffaw. ‘Geoff’s got a better opinion of me than this! He doesn’t think I can fake charm at all.’

‘Look, I’m a head person and you’re a heart person and I love you for being a heart person a lot of the time, but I’m asking you to be more head on this.’

‘You’re asking me to give Geoffrey head?’

‘GEORGINA! Urrrrgh.’

‘Why can’t he treat himself to a nice big coronary? We’ll just have to serve him lots of extra brandy butter at Christmas and encourage him to buy a midlife crisis Harley.’

‘Midlife suggests Geoffrey is going to live to 134.’

‘God, please no. Embalmed in his own spite.’

‘In the meantime, will you answer your phone to Mum? She’s giving me loads of grief.’

This prospect gives me a hard pain in my throat.

‘I can’t face it for now. Geoffrey was vile about Dad as well,’ I gabble. I’m can’t get into this with Esther but I need her to understand the depth of my anger.

‘Oh, what did he say?’

‘… That he was useless.’ I can’t think of a substitute for ‘adulterer’ off the top of my head, another word which has the same impact without the information. ‘… That he let us down and Geoffrey’s better than him.’

‘Hmm, well. He shouldn’t have, but he’ll have heard Mum’s—’

‘Don’t say it. There’s no excuse for that man to run our dad down to me.’

‘You can’t pretend he was Husband and Father of the Year, Gog, and I miss him too.’

‘I don’t, but that’s for us to say, not that crypto-fascist with a comb-over.’

Esther laughs heartily and I feel much better. The conversation ends, and I switch the phone off, haul the door open and meet the dark, perennially accusing eyes of Lucas McCarthy.

‘Afternoon,’ he says, swigging from a coffee mug. ‘Everything alright?’

‘Yeah?’

Did I imagine a knowing look, an extra weight in his intonation? Could he hear me talking outside? Does he know Devlin told me about Niamh?

This is the first time I’ve seen Lucas since that revelation and I was planning on adjusting my attitude around him. Now, I decide if Lucas wanted to be treated like a newly widowed man, he’d have told me he was one, and I should respect that by giving him business as usual.

Dev pops up next to him, in sitcom surprise manner – he must’ve been doing something under the bar – points at me and says, ‘Oh my days, it’s shaping up for a turd!’

I startle, until I realise he’s pointing at Keith, tucked round the corner.

‘That’s just the way Keith sits. Unless you mean Georgina,’ Lucas says and Devlin laughs.

‘Shall I take Keith for a walk round the block?’ I say, to distract from the image of me defecating, putting a hand under his collar.

‘No!’ Lucas almost shouts, and then says: ‘No, no thank you, I’ll take him.’

He walks round the bar, clips his lead on and says: ‘Come on, boy. Uncle Devlin’s making accusations against you, let’s get some fresh air.’

As the door shuts behind them in a waft of some citrusy aftershave and slightly damp dog (a heady olfactory combination I never thought I’d appreciate), Dev says: ‘Ah, he’s very protective of that scragbag, don’t take it personally,’ which makes me feel worse because I hadn’t thought it was that obvious.

The memory of that afternoon in the park still lingering, I hope I never get drunk and bellow at Lucas: Well you seemed to want me to touch MUCH more than your dog, once upon a time.

26

‘What I am saying, is that she’s Monday through to Wednesday’ing me. I am not good enough for a Thursday through to Saturday. I am not priority boarding.’

Clem is trying to explain to Jo and I – while Jo does my hair – why her sort-of-friend Sadie is sort of a friend, and sort of not, based on when she suggests they meet up. The chicanery and machinations in the vintage fashion boutique scene is quite something.

‘Maybe those are genuinely the days she’s free?’ I say.

‘Pffft! No. She’s always out at weekends. I see the tagged photos. I mean, we all have second tier, third tier friends, but there’s no need to make it so explicit. It’s not classy.’

Clem often confidently claims we’ve all done this or we all secretly think that, and it used to intimidate me, until I learned she enjoys overstatement. As with her clothes. She is sitting, hair bouffed, eyes heavily kohled, legs crossed in gold tap shoes, Afghan coat and vape stick on, enveloping us in billowing clouds of vanilla steam.

‘You look superb, by the way, Clem – what is the look?’

‘Thank you. My look tonight is Anita Pallenberg arriving at Heathrow from New York in the late 1960s slash early 1970s with Keith Richards, small block of hashish hidden in her bag.’

There’s always a narrative. ‘Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface after she moves back home to Tulsa to go to rehab’ ‘Miss Moneypenny at Bond’s funeral – but she knows he’s not dead’ etc.

I’m glad Jo and I met Clem in our early twenties because she’d terrify me now. You get more risk averse as you age.

We’re good for Clem I think, and she’s good for us. She cuts like lemon juice and salt through the cloying consensus that Jo and I could so easily become, and we stop her hanging around with similarly angular limbed ‘influencers,’ who seem to be eternally trying to outdo and undermine each other. In looks and attitude, Clem is one of them, in her heart and soul she is not.

Apart from anything else, being a competitive prima donna seems so exhausting to me. One perk of underachievement is you don’t meet many of them.

We’re at Jo’s salon, as every so often, Joanna insists on doing mine and Clem’s wash and blow-dries before a big night out. Rav’s thirty-first is officially an occasion worth it. Clem waives hers as she’s going for the slept-in look. ‘Think transatlantic flight then a blizzard of Batiste.’

Jo loves a challenge, so tonight I’ve brought a diamante and pearl clip in the shape of trailing flowers and ivy that I found in Clem’s shop, and asked Jo to give me the ‘do to suit it.

‘You have some of my favourite hair in the whole world,’ Jo says, doing that stylist riffle with her fingers, pulling strands down straight at the front to check the length. ‘A starlet kind of shiny buttercup blonde you don’t see anymore.’

‘Yeah, you make me want to hit the peroxide again,’ Clem says, observing the magical effects of Jo’s rolling flicks of the wrist, with paddle brush and dryer.

Jo’s shop, between Crookes and Broomhill, is called, believe it or not, The Cut And Snark. I remember when she got the bank loan and the lease and I thought she was about to send it all up in flames with poor punning. I mean, chippies like Northern Soul and The Codfather love them, but …

‘That is a terrible idea and not just because of the Cutty Sark groan,’ I said at the time. ‘Snark makes it sound like you’ll be insulting the customers!’

‘It means you can get your hair done and moan about whatever you want. Chatty. Offload!’

‘Jo, really, no. It’s like a sausage shop calling itself Pork Swords or something.’

‘No it isn’t because that means penis, doesn’t it. This is clean.’

I face-palmed. She was resolute.