The Things We Do to Our Friends(35)

“So you trapped me somewhere I couldn’t get away and did it then.”

She threw her head back and laughed. “You’re right. I suppose I did. Anyway, look at this.” She handed me a piece of paper, carefully folded, with a breakdown of figures.

“This is what I expect you to earn in our first year,” she said.

It was a lot.

“More than you thought?” she asked.

I considered how to respond. At that moment, Samuel emerged from the house.

“Morning, ladies, you’re up early.” He stretched, letting out an over-the-top groan as his back arched.

“Samuel!” said Tabitha. “Brilliant timing. Clare, you’ve seen our website that’s in progress—but Samuel and I have been working on another one all year that I think you might find fun.” She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and handed him the laptop.

He took it and clicked around a bit, then he turned the screen toward me. I peered closer; it was hard to see in the sun. I could just about make out red fabric against a pale backdrop. Artful photography stylized with exaggerated shadows, but it wasn’t completely terrible.

I began to read out the accompanying text: “Red satin slip, worn by a twenty-year-old physics student. While she’s wrapping her head around the Schr?dinger equation, Elodie often wears this barely-there slip. She’s been known to get —”

“Hot and sweaty in passionate frustration as she rips it off blah blah blah.” Samuel finished my sentence. “I wrote it. Not one of my best, I’m more partial to the humanities ones, but we’ll probably get ?300 for that. Not bad for something I found on Tabby’s bedroom floor, eh?” He sounded impossibly smug, and in that second, I felt an overwhelming urge to give him a good hard slap.

“I threw it away. It had a hole,” Tabitha added very solemnly.

“Yes,” said Samuel. “A revelatory hole at the hip bone, so just a hint of flesh emerges, titillating a banker in Swindon, no doubt.” He sighed and flashed a smile at me. He was enjoying this part of it, I could tell.

Tabitha swatted at him. “Oh, stop it. Honestly, I’m glad that you looked at that one, some of the other ones are sordid!”

She clearly loved sordid.

Samuel parked himself next to me. “It has good margins and there’s a real market for it,” he explained. “The photography’s a work in progress. The descriptions are easier, pretty straightforward to construct. You just need to read a bit of erotica and steal the good parts, because most of it’s dross. I see it as an upmarket forum, no bidding or anything, we think that’s distasteful, plus discretion and all that.”

“All of it’s up for debate,” Tabitha chipped in. “Our customers are surprisingly lax about their contact details, which makes their occupations lovely and easy to track. We thought it might be worth discussing blackmail further down the line.” She grinned, and I must have looked horrified, because she changed tack and moved to a more comforting tone.

“I’m obviously joking! We’re not committing a crime here, it’s not nearly so black and white as that.”

Funnily enough, I hadn’t even considered any legal implications, I think because Tabitha was such a force of nature that acting outside of the law seemed quite natural with her protection.

She reached out and slammed the screen shut before I could see any more. “In all seriousness, the reason I showed you is that we’ve been playing about with these bits for the last year and the progression has been fine, but it’s also been a way to get necessary funds for our main project. Now you can see that we’re totally committed. We’ll keep Perfect Pieces running but this just shows we can do it, run something and make it work, because talk is talk—what matters is the delivery. What I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that we’re prepared.”

“Perfect Pieces?” I repeated. The phrase sounded grubby.

“Yes, in retrospect the name is a bit naff, isn’t it…Imogen came up with it.”

I imagined Imogen mulling it over for days and finally coming up with such an awful name, then presenting it to Ava and Tabitha, who would probably be laughing at her behind her back, but would let her have it—a nugget of goodwill.

“Okay.” There was a pause. The two of them watched me, gauging my reaction.

“What’s the matter, Clare?” she asked. “Are you just upset because we didn’t include you from the start?”

Oh, she was good. She read people, and she knew exactly when they were pulling away and when she was losing them. She had all the tricks to reel them back in. And she was right. With all of this, there was a huge element of being apart from it all. Left out in the cold while The Shiver schemed and plotted. I struggled to separate it logically from the unexpected nature of the work. Still, the longer I considered it, the work didn’t even seem that shocking. I thought of the photographs I’d found of myself. They’d clearly had me in their sights.

She squeezed my hand. “I trust you. I’m showing you everything. If you’re in, you’re all in.” She pushed her sunglasses back down over her nose and lay back in the sun to mark the conversation as over.



* * *



—

After the pitch, they let me be. They didn’t push or cajole or even bring it up again. Tabitha just waited for the week to pan out and, at the end of it, when we sat down to tear baguettes open and eat them with stubby little bottles of beer as a final picnicking feast, I said yes. I would join them.