‘Great, that’s all we need.’ Paul set down the bags and tipped up the hood of his jacket as it began to rain hard. ‘Look at the bus queue. I hate this bloody country—the rain, the roadworks, the sheer bloody incompetence, everyone looking so miserable all the time, rattling between the shops and the pub as if they were on rails, and now the summer’s gone, there’s just months of bloody rain to look forward to.’
She nearly said then you should have travelled when you had the chance, but this time she caught the words before they could escape her lips. She knew he regretted working through his gap year, not going around the world as his brother had, and now the baby story was backfiring on her, trapping him, pushing them further away from each other.
When they arrived back at their third-floor flat, they found that the front-door lock had been changed. Paul went downstairs to see the landlord and lost his temper, while Kallie sat on the gloomy landing surrounded by her shopping bags, trying to stay calm. As the shouting continued, the police were called.
She didn’t understand how it could have all gone wrong so quickly. She had been modelling and making a decent living, but after her twenty-fifth birthday the work was harder to come by, and she found herself being downgraded from style magazines to catalogue jobs as the unsubtle ageism of her career made itself felt. Paul worked in the A&R department of a record company that was going through a rough patch. The era of superclubs and celebrity DJs was over, and there was a possibility that he would be made redundant. Nothing was quite as easy as it had been when they first met, and she hated the effect it was having on them, a gentle but persistent dragging at the edges of their life that robbed them of small pleasures, making laughter less easy to come by. Paul was two years younger, and had developed the annoying habit of treating her like an older woman, expecting her to sort out his problems.
On the evening of the Sunday they were locked out of their flat, they went to stay with Paul’s brother in Edgware, and after two weeks of sleeping on his expensive and uncomfortable designer leather couch, with Paul sinking into a kind of stupefied silence, Kallie decided to take matters into her own hands before something irreparable occurred between them. She went to see her former schoolfriend for advice. Heather Allen was nuts, everyone knew that, but she was ambitious and decisive and always had answers. She owned a nice house and had made a successful marriage; there were worse people to ask.
‘Who died?’ Kallie asked as Heather ushered her into the hall of number 6, Balaklava Street.
‘Oh, the funeral car. Not many flowers, are there?’ Heather peered out of the front door. ‘Shame. I wondered what the noise was. The old lady next door passed away. We hardly ever saw her, to be honest. She couldn’t go out. Her brother always came around with her groceries, and he’s no spring chicken. Come into the kitchen. I’ve been baking.’
Kallie found it hard to imagine her former classmate tackling anything domestic, but followed her.
‘Well, I was attempting to bake because of all these bloody cookery programmes you see on telly, but I couldn’t keep up with the recipe. Some cockney superchef was rushing all over the kitchen tipping things into measuring jugs, and I didn’t have half the ingredients I was supposed to have, so I started making substitutions, then he was going “Lovely jubbly” and waving saucepans over high flames and I totally lost track. God, he’s annoying. Nice arse, though. You can try a piece, but I wouldn’t.’ She shoved the tray of flattened, blackened chocolate sponge to one side and tore open a Waitrose cheesecake. ‘Don’t sit there, use the stool, otherwise you’ll get cat hairs all over you. Cleo somehow manages to get white hairs on dark items and vice versa, it’s the only talent she has. A legacy from George. My God, you’re so thin. Is that a diet or bulimia? I take it you’re still modelling.’
‘I was supposed to be working today, but I threw a sickie,’ Kallie admitted. ‘I don’t do it very often, God knows we need the money, but things were getting on top of me, and I wasn’t in the mood to stand around in thermal underwear smiling like an idiot for five hours. They said I could pick up again on Monday. We’ve been kicked out of Swiss Cottage.’
‘That awful little flat? A blessing, surely?’ Heather never appeared to think before she spoke. She reboiled the kettle, grabbed milk and, more oddly, sugar from the fridge, and started rinsing cups. Whenever Kallie thought of her friend, she imagined her doing three or four things at once. The kitchen was so immaculately tidy that it looked like a studio set. Heather possessed the kind of nervous energy that made everyone else feel tired. There was too much unused power inside her. She was competitive in a way that only women who were never taken seriously could be. Consequently, her enthusiasm was ferocious and slightly unnerving.