The Things We Do to Our Friends(46)

Some golden-haired children threw a Frisbee to a tired-looking dog, its thick ears drooping to the ground.

“I think he enjoyed the conversation very much,” I said. I sounded terse, defensive—I could hear it in my own voice, and I saw that she heard it too.

“When you put it like that, I can see why it didn’t work,” she mused. “A siege isn’t very sensual, is it?” The words seemed accusatory.

“Ah well, that’s fine,” she continued. “We’ll do better next time.”

“Next time,” I repeated. Not as a question, just as a statement.

“Yes, next time,” she said, and her tone turned more serious. “You need to be confident in your own success for next time, Clare.” She sounded rattled.

“It’s not that, of course I’ll try harder. It’s just, it can’t go on forever, can it?” I said, faltering.

“What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

“We’ll need to get real jobs,” I said, unsure as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

“Real jobs?” Tabitha’s hand moved to her chest in over-the-top shock.

“Yes,” I said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Work in an office or something?”

“An office! I think we’re better than that. Or even if we weren’t, there are no jobs for us. What on earth would we be qualified to do? We’re learning about paintings and dates. We’re completely unemployable.” She stated this proudly. “I don’t think we’ll ever have jobs like that.”

“But we can’t do this forever?”

“Oh, this is just the beginning. And Perfect Pieces is going well, despite the name. It has the potential to be very interesting. Even if this ends, there’ll be something else. There’s always something else.”

What she said made sense. Tabitha would never work in an office. How could she? To think of Tabitha in an airless cubicle, or even catching the bus or the train at a set time every day, was impossible. She couldn’t take orders from anyone and, in a way, she was right. We weren’t employable, and we were going to graduate into a time when it would be hard to find a job.

“Even if we could do this for a long time, don’t you ever feel bad about it?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” She looked puzzled.

“The men.”

“Oh, God, no. I don’t feel bad for them at all. I know how they are. The comments, the digs, the cheating, the assumption that they’re better than us. They think they can get away with anything.”

All of this had been said quite offhandedly, but she sounded more serious when she spoke next. “What we’re doing. It’s partly about using our skills, about making things right, but it’s more than that. It’s about us too, pushing ourselves past the ordinary, into something unimaginably special. However far you think you’re able to go, you just go further. That’s what it’s all about. It’s what life is about.”

We lay there while the children ran circles until they fell over, dizzy and hysterical. One of them started to cry, but Tabitha didn’t seem to notice at all. She was in one of her states of stillness, lying as a dead girl, head thrown too far back over the side of the bench, as if her neck had been broken.





37


A new academic year began in September.

New notepads bought, new courses chosen: modern portraiture for Tabitha and me; more weepy landscapes for Imogen. When it came to non-work-related endeavors, it was important to Tabitha that we tried new things to broaden our horizons. To stretch ourselves, she said, and I thought of a body pulled at either end and stretched taut, until it reached the breaking point and snapped and splintered into two parts above the hips in a bloody mess.

Tabitha’s focus was on things that would help the business long-term.

“Clubs?” Samuel had thrown into the ring. No one asked him what kind of “clubs” he meant. He had started to mention girls who weren’t part of The Shiver much more by that point.

“Cookery classes?” Imogen had suggested hopefully.

Tabitha didn’t dignify the suggestions with a response, and it was an illusion that we had a say in the whole thing anyway. All other ideas were met with light derision.

She was prone to distraction, always drawn to any shiny scheme, and she did seem to recognize this in herself. She said she needed to stay focused on cash flow, which is why she decided that we should have a go at gambling. In a casino. With the money that we’d made over the summer. We’d made a lot, but we wanted more.

What to play? Poker was too fiddly. Roulette was just chance, really, and Tabitha didn’t like to bet on chance. We settled on blackjack. It was easy enough to get the hang of and, when we started, she had grand plans involving card counting. She thought we’d be excellent card counters. This was entirely misjudged. We were all predictably hopeless, while staying enthusiastic about playing in general as we sat around at night in the flat, going through round after round. Hitting and standing, and laughing the whole time. The end goal was a casino trip. None of us had been to a casino before.

We only went once, and I think that was always the plan. Sometimes they preferred the elegance of doing things once. Steal a cat from the street for the night, feed it milk, pretend it was ours, just once. Stay up all night on the roof, just once. And then talk about everything endlessly: the time we skinny-dipped in the North Sea; the time we counted cards at the casino. The memories of events became bigger and brasher, easy group folklore to dip into on demand and slide into conversation.