‘Vacation?’ he asks, fiddling with the neat collar of his uniform. As he does so, he skews the neckline, revealing creases: he’s only ironed the visible parts, which endears him to her suddenly.
‘Yeah.’
He turns, raising a hand behind his back to her in a wave. Right until he leaves the threshold, she is telling herself that it isn’t too late to ask for help. To shout it out to him.
But then she hears him finish reprimanding the speeding driver, and, a few moments later, drive off himself. She stays in the hallway just listening and waiting until everything is quiet again. And, looking at the welcome mat, the cheap laminate floor and open door, Simone wonders if she could turn up there tonight and do whatever it is they ask. If she could be brave enough to do it.
She has always done precisely what her gut told her to, but, really, when it comes down to it, she can’t think of a parent who wouldn’t do that. Except, evidently, Damien. This thought lands fully formed and horrifying, like a splatter of blood on her face.
CHAPTER 7
The Dishes business account springs to life on the laptop on the kitchen table and Simone finds herself looking into it. Just to see what they’ve got. Nothing more than that. She isn’t necessarily going to go to meet these people. She just needs to know if she can.
The wooden table is rickety and the laptop moves around as she navigates the bank account. All around her is a silence so deep it throbs her ears. She has less than twelve hours in which tobe prepared to do a deal. And isn’t she preparing? Isn’t that all this is?
That the money belongs to her anyway crosses her mind, which is an unfair thought to have, but one she feels regardless. The restaurant is almost as much a part of her as Lucy is. Damien might do the books and the HR, but Simone does the cooking, and what else matters without that?
Damien will see any withdrawals, but Simone’s nerves are on a high boiling panic, and she no longer cares. Or, rather, can’t even bring herself to consider it. A disagreement with five thousand miles between them is less urgent than her other, immediate, problems.
She and Damien met when they were both twenty-four, a few days before Christmas: he at a forced networking event, she serving him at the bar she worked in called After Midnight, which had a red awning and fairy lights in the windows year-round.
They’d both worked for other people for several years, Damien in HR in a law firm. He was Oxbridge educated, straight As and a straight-cut suit that strained at the shoulders; Damien is six-five and broad.
Simone had been making a cocktail for a lawyer so rude he addressed her as ‘You!’ and then added, ‘I need a drink.’ Simone, who had encountered many lawyers during the social-work proceedings against her parents, hadn’t been particularly surprised. She had struggled not to tell him to go fuck himself, but she needed the job and the money. Instead, she made the cocktail so outrageously beautiful that he had been forced to tip her.
It was six o’clock, long dark and deep into December. The time of year that is romanticized but actually bleak: constant illness, tiredness, everybody pissed off with the admin of Christmas. Simone had been living in a flat in Clapham Junction with two workaholic junior doctors who were rarely home and used to practise injecting oranges with saline solution when they were. She had nowhere better to be than work on the last Thursday before Christmas, but she absolutely did not want to be there, either.
Damien was next in line at the bar. Drinks were on his law firm, but he had a lemonade. He didn’t drink, never has, doesn’t like the taste or the sensation, or how people get casually addicted to things, he says, something Simone has always greatly admired about him, for obvious reasons.
‘What do you do – law?’ she’d said, as she had filled his glass up with lemonade on draught that came out so frothy it looked like a jacuzzi.
He had waved a hand, like it was irrelevant. ‘Send emails.’
He was huge – Simone later found out he’d had that suit of his custom made, and it still didn’t fit – with dark hair, dark eyes, a dark beard, said that he worked in HR because he likedpeople and talking. Simone, who didn’t then like people at all, had stared at him for several beats after he had told her this.
‘What about you? This?’ he had said, his tone not disparaging.
‘This,’ she’d said. ‘But I want to do something better.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘I don’t know.’ The place was so packed with suits that Damien had to lean right over the bar to hear her. ‘But something. Not this.’
Simone had left school at fourteen when social services finally stepped in about her parents’ habits. She had not a single qualification and had failed, too, to ‘work her way up’ in the way one is apparently supposed to do in order to turn around that sort of bad luck.
But, at the time she met Damien, she had just created and sold a website for ten thousand pounds. It had been the beginning of something, for Simone. She’d always known she could be entrepreneurial. She’d had an idea for a dating website,Fruitful, focused on men and women who wanted to meet somebody in order to have a family. Everybody had said it wouldn’t work because it would have more women than men on it, but that hadn’t borne out. When she had sold it, it had been the first time it had felt like this was how things were supposed to be for her. Not a dead-end job. Not bar work. Something else.
They used that money, much, much later, to seed the restaurant.
‘I’m supposed to be exchanging business cards with people,’ Damien had said. ‘Want one?’ And this was – and is – how Damien played things: open and clear. But something else, too, perhaps naivety: the optimism of somebody who had never been rejected.
He slid it across the bar before she could say anything.
Damien Seaborn. She liked a man with an interesting surname. She didn’t give him her own number, but she tucked the business card into the pocket of her apron and, much later that night, remembered to take it out.
‘Do you ever think,’ Damien had said, outside, after last orders, three lemonades later, ‘like, if teenage me could see me now …’ he paused, and Simone had thought he was about to say something self-aggrandizing, but he didn’t, ‘he’d think, God, what are you doing? Rotting at a desk.’
A sigh of deep, satisfied understanding had rushed out of Simone, swirling in the damp, cold December air. A potted Christmas tree sat just to Damien’s left, its lights hazy in the mist.
