‘Please don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. If you don’t feel well and you want to go back to the hostel, just say. I don’t mind.’
I drop the ice lolly back into his drink and bury my face in my hands.
A moment passes. ‘Um. I’m at a bit of a loss now.’ His lovely lilting voice is laced with worry.
I laugh into my palms and wearily lift my head. ‘You’re so nice.’
‘I’m too nice?’ he asks with confusion.
‘Nottoonice. Youarenice. I’m not used to it.’
‘Not used towhat?’ Now he looks alarmed.
‘People caring about what I want.’
He stares at me. His expression is disconcertingly grave.
I sigh and reach over to pluck the ice lolly out of his drink again. I’ve sobered up enough to know that I’ll be ordering one of these for myself before long, but I’m tipsy enough to still have my guard down.
‘Part of the reason I was upset earlier was because my parents have booked a flight home for me before I’d decided I was definitely giving up on interrailing,’ I explain. ‘They only knew I was considering it. I know I should be grateful. Iamgrateful—’
‘No,’ he interrupts, shaking his head. ‘They should have checked with you first.’
I’m taken aback by how serious he looks.
‘It’s just that … What if I’d changed my mind?’
‘You still can,’ he states.
I laugh at him. ‘Youreallydon’t know my parents.’ I said the same thing earlier, but I can’t stress it enough.
The server brings over our tacos. We thank him in Portuguese. Neither of us makes a start on eating.
‘Do you get along withyourparents?’ I ask.
He rubs his jaw. ‘My mother more than my father. He’s always so busy at work, he doesn’t have a lot of time.’
‘Does he make time for your brother, seeing as he’s going into the family business?’
‘Yeah, he does,’ he confirms wryly, reaching for a taco. ‘I don’t really care, though, because at least I get to have a career in the space sector. My dad used to say, “There’s speculation,wildspeculation and astronomy,” and then I went to uni and did a degree in it.’
‘Physics too, though, right?’
‘That’s the part he tells his friends.’
‘Sounds like we both have complicated relationships with our parents.’
He lets out a caustic laugh and takes a ferocious bite of his taco.
‘I think I take after my grandparents more than my parents,’ I muse, retrieving a taco for myself. ‘They were salt of the earth – Londoners born and bred. My grandfather was a carpenter and my grandmother was a seamstress.’
Ash regards me with interest, warmth returning to his expression as I tell him about how they built the family business from scratch, designing and making quality sofas and coffee tables that they sold out of a little shop in North London.
They taught my dad the family trade, but my father had bigger ambitions, and after meeting my mother at business school, the two of them scaled up the business and took it online.
It’s hard to explain how I can be impressed by my parents’ achievements and yet also deeply resent them for the way they went about growing their business. I don’t tell Ash that they remortgaged the house to send me to an elite private school so they could make more connections. When I think about how much of my happiness they were willing to sacrifice in order to social-climb their way to success, I could cry.
I still remember the misery of my fourteenth birthday. I’d wanted to go to the cinema with Stella –justStella, the one person I felt truly comfortable around – but my parents insisted on throwing me an excruciating whole-year party. I’d only started at my new school six months earlier, after they pulled me out of the state school I’d been attending with Stella, and I hadnofriends. Kids still came anyway – nowhere near as many as we’d catered for, but it was a free party and I think some of their parents were curious to see what my mum and dad could pull off after schmoozing their way through various social events.
