Impossible to Forget(58)

Angie pulled at one of the silver hoops in her earlobe and flicked at it with her nail. ‘Actually, I’m expanding the one I already have,’ she said proudly. ‘So, I thought it might be better if I learned a bit of stuff first. It’s a treatment centre for holistic health. It’s been going for years and business is good, so I’m looking at opening at a second site. Trouble is, I’ve been basically making it up as I went along until now. I feel like I need to get a better handle on how things should be done. You know what it’s like when you don’t know what you don’t know?’

Hope nodded. She understood that completely.

‘And so here I am. How about you?’

Hope hadn’t really told anyone about her business idea. She had bounced the concept off her boyfriend, Daniel, but only in a vague way so as not to give him the chance to knock it down before she’d really worked at it. Now she felt suddenly shy at having to say it out loud. But what was the point of being here if she couldn’t even tell anyone what she was planning?

‘I’m going to start a business importing Italian swimwear,’ she said.

Angie nodded. She looked impressed, at least. ‘I don’t really follow fashion, as must be obvious,’ she said, gesturing to her clothing. ‘But from what I can tell, we don’t seem to have that much stylish swimwear here. The last costume I bought came from Marks and Sparks.’

Hope shuddered.

‘Well, that’s what I thought.’ Angie laughed. ‘But I wasn’t sure where else to go. And I’m assuming that you know a fair bit about the market,’ she continued. ‘You’re a model, right?’

Again, Hope was surprised, but this was so refreshing. This woman had just assumed that she was a model and stated it as if it were any other job. Most people got sucked into the glamour of it, asking her endless questions about where she’d worked and who she knew. Angie seemed to see her beauty as a commodity that she would obviously be exploiting – it was as simple as that.

‘Well, I was,’ Hope said. ‘Work started to slow down a bit and I decided I needed to diversify before it dried up completely. Your thirties are a bit of a dead zone for modelling and I’m nearly there. So, I thought about importing. I have the connections and I know what will look good on women and how to show it to its best advantage. And it’s definitely a gap in the market. But I know nothing about business. I don’t even have any GCSEs.’

‘Well, why would you when you look like you do?’ asked Angie. ‘I assume you didn’t need any qualifications to get work.’

Hope shrugged. ‘Well, no. But it’s not like I’m stupid or anything,’ she added, suddenly wanting to explain herself.

‘That much is obvious from what you’ve just said. I’d call it pretty astute actually,’ Angie said.

Hope could feel her cheeks blush in spite of herself. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

It felt great to have someone acknowledge her idea as at least having potential, and she already had the impression that Angie wasn’t in the habit of saying what she thought people wanted to hear.

The other students were starting to shuffle back into the classroom, brown plastic cups in hands, and take their seats. Hope turned back to face the front, signalling that the time for chatting was over, but, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t be too terrible to sit next to Angie for the next thirty weeks.





30


By week three of the course, Hope had concluded that Carl, the tutor, was irritating in the extreme but that he did actually know his stuff. Having decided that it wasn’t very satisfactory making notes on her laptop, she had invested in a lever arch file together with a set of coloured dividers, and the sections were filling up nicely. The pleasure that she felt at seeing the neat pages of notes was something new for her. This must have been what it felt like to be a swot at school.

She was still getting on well with Angie, too, although she had yet to turn up for class with her own equipment. Hope didn’t mind; she had bought enough supplies for both of them and doled them out at the start of each session, having worked out that if she gave paper and pens to Angie to look after then they wouldn’t make it back for the next class.

She had learned more about Angie in the fifteen-minute comfort breaks that Carl gave them mid-session. It appeared that she was a single mum to a twelve-year-old who, from the stories that Angie recounted, was wise beyond her years. There was no man on the scene, as far as Hope could tell. She had asked her about the child’s father, in a roundabout way to start with, and then more directly. Angie had sighed and looked a little wistful at the thought of him.

‘I think Romany’s dad was probably the love of my life,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t realise it at the time. If I had, I would probably have made a bigger effort to hold on to him.’

‘Did he not want to be involved with his daughter?’ Hope asked.

‘I think it was more that he didn’t really know what to do,’ Angie replied. ‘Even though we weren’t kids, the idea of commitment was all very new for both of us and we didn’t really think things through very well. Plus, Jax lived down south so I barely saw him as it was. And then when Romany was born it took us both by surprise. Not the fact of her. I mean, we knew I was pregnant. It was more the consequences. I should have worked out what I was expecting from him and told him straight away, but I didn’t and so he just kind of wandered off. It was more of an accidental thing really.’