Chapter 2
The Heir - Chapter Two
IVY
I stoop to pick up the broken-off handle of the china mug with shaking fingers. The crazy thing is that, as it flew straight at me, my first reaction wasn’t oh shit, it’s going to hit me in the face.
No.
It was more like oh shit, that’s Dawn’s favourite mug.
Wills’ and Kate’s faded, fractured faces smile up at me from the gilded shards on the floor.
Even with my cheekbone breaking their journey, they didn’t make it.
Dawn bought that from the Buckingham Palace gift shop soon after their wedding, along with a commemorative tea towel.
It’s her pride and joy. She makes her tea in it every day, and it’s only a good weekly going-over with bicarb that stops it from being disgustingly stained inside.
Sorry Wills. Sorry Kate. Looks like you won’t be part of her morning ritual anymore.
I put my spare hand to my smarting cheekbone—that’s definitely going to bruise—and flinch at the pain as much as at the thought of how utterly unrecognisable my lovely stepmother’s morning routine will be in a week’s time.
And now she’ll have one less familiar item around to ground her. To comfort her.
Jesus.
I glance at her as I straighten up. If I’m worried that the smash of china against our tiled kitchen floor would trigger her, I needn’t be. She’s staring as blankly at the heir to our throne and his bride as if she had never seen them before.
As if she doesn’t have piles and piles of Hello! with Kate on the cover next to her bed.
As if the bloody mug hasn’t had a strict hand wash only edict on it for the past decade or more.
‘It’s okay,’ I murmur, as much to myself as to her. ‘It’s okay—I’ll get the dustpan and brush.’
Her brown eyes fix on me, hard and unseeing. The twins have her eyes. Her mouth is pinched, producing wrinkles that belong on a much older woman. She takes a step towards me and then stops, frozen in her cruel prison of immobility.
‘Little slut,’ she hisses.
The tears spring instantly to the surface, which is ridiculous. Right now, my lovely, warm stepmother doesn’t know my name, let alone my profession. It can’t mean anything.
It doesn’t mean anything.
Even if she’s not wrong.
I am a little slut. I even make a living from it.
I still have the stupid china handle in my hand. I’m rolling it between my fingers like a stress toy. I force myself to set it down on the cabinet where Dawn’s treasured collection of porcelain figurines lives and hold out my hands in surrender as I approach her slowly.
‘It’s me, Dawn.’ I lick my lips desperately. ‘Ivy. It’s all okay.’
Her eyes dart to the floor and then back to me. ‘The mug,’ she whispers.
I reach her and put my hands oh-so gently on her upper arms. She’s skin and bone. ‘Yeah. But it’s alright. I’ll get you another one from the palace gift shop. They always have those commemorative ones in stock. Maybe we can go together.’
All lies. The only tea Dawn Cooper will be drinking in the near future is from a plastic sippy cup with an easy-grip handle, and the only trip she’ll be making is the upcoming journey in a community ambulance to a relentlessly average but extortionately expensive care home that is, thank fuck, equipped to manage the various complexities and indignities of her condition.
My stepmother has LBD, or Lewy Body Dementia.
Her eventual diagnosis has been a relief, actually, because every health professional on the planet seemed to disagree with what was actually wrong with her for, oh, I dunno, two or three years.
At first they thought it was Rheumatoid Arthritis.
Then Alzheimer’s. Then Rheumatoid Arthritis and Alzheimer’s.
Then Parkinson’s. And I probably can’t blame them, because the symptoms of LBD are a mind-fuck of epic proportions.
Anyway.
There’s no point in dwelling on it, because even if moving Dawn out of her home and away from her family is totally fucking unthinkable, it can’t be worse than what we’ve all—especially Dawn—had to endure these last few years.
The twins can’t take seeing their mum like this anymore, and I can’t take the guilt and worry that eat away at me twenty-four seven because caring for the woman who’s been the only parent I’ve had for the past few years is killing me.
My only comfort is that Dad isn’t alive to see her like this. Not his Dawny. Not the woman who put him back together after Mum died, who gave him two more daughters and ensured that he passed away surrounded by love.
‘Let’s have a sit-down, shall we?’ I say in the overly bright voice that I hate even as I hear it come from my lips. The real Dawn would despise the both of us if she could hear me.
With slow steps, I walk her backwards until she’s standing in front of her favourite armchair and, gripping her under her armpits like the pop-in carer from a few months ago showed me, I lower her awkwardly back down.
One of the many shitty parts of LBD is that your muscles get really stiff, so your limbs go all rigid.
I’m tucking a soft blanket around her legs when she lays a shaky hand on my arm.
Her tremors come and go, but they’ll get worse now that she’s sitting still.
‘Thanks, love,’ she mumbles. Her speech is growing more and more garbled these days, but I can still understand her. ‘My Ivy. Such a good girl.’
I press my hand against hers, holding her palm to my cheek. These moments may be nothing but chinks of light in the dark fog of her terrifying deterioration, but I’ll take them. I’ll take every single one of them.
With a tight grip on her hand, I turn my mouth so I can kiss her palm.
There are all sorts of legal workarounds at Alchemy, the super exclusive Mayfair club I work at, to prevent them getting into hot water for employing sex workers.
And, if I gave enough fucks, I could use the same workarounds to persuade myself that I’m not actually a sex worker—I’m just a fun-loving young woman who works at a swanky members’ club as a skimpily clad host and occasionally (read: nightly) bends over for said members in return for a hefty salary and some very decent cash tips.
But we both know I’d be kidding myself.
I’m not ashamed of what I do, exactly. It’s honest work that’s kept the lights on at home since Dad died, and the owners look after us all really well.
The other hosts are cool, too. There’s no competitiveness—everyone’s a team.
A family. The real beauty of this gig, though, is that I can work late at night and be around to care for Dawn during the day.
So no, I’m not ashamed at all. Nor am I under any illusions that I’d get even a fraction of this money working in a shop or a café.
I bailed on my A-Levels when Dad died. I’m not exactly a professional hotshot.
It’s more that I’m… resigned to it, I suppose. No one wants to believe they’ll fuck entitled pricks for money when they grow up. Then again, my dream was always to be a painter, so a cold, hard dose of reality was always going to be in my future, no matter what happened with my A-Levels.
I probably care less about my profession than I should.
The truth is that I like sex. I like it a lot.
I’ve never fucked anyone I don’t want to fuck in here, and, even if it’s not good, I have a whole host of mind tricks that can help me escape in the moment.
I can be tied to a cross in reality, while in my head, I’m sitting in Monet’s gardens at Giverny, painting water lilies.
If I’m being honest, I feel less guilty about the actual sex-for-money thing than I do about the secret fact that, much as the general level of privilege in this place pisses me off beyond belief, it also galvanises me, I suppose. I don’t know if galvanises is the right word, but it inspires me.
If I can’t have wealth and luxury in my own life, it’s nice to have some second-hand exposure to it.
It’s like going to Harrods—you never want to leave, even if you are secretly judging the customers who make it look like buying three-hundred-pound face cream is the biggest hassle ever.
The luxury is infectious. It seeps into your pores and you can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, you’ll catch a case of it yourself. Maybe, one day, it’ll stick.
That sounds so stupid. I’d like to think that, dreams of painting French waterlilies aside, I’m a practical person.
I have too many real-life problems to waste my time mooning over fancy handbags and overpriced food halls.
It’s more the vibe that gets me than the actual objects, and it’s the same at Alchemy.
It’s not that I want to be any of the patrons, exactly. It’s more that I’d like to live here.
The worse things get at home, the sicker Dawn gets, and the scarier our bills grow, and the more trying to keep on top of housework and the twins’ homework gets me down, the more of a relief it is to close that heavy front door at Alchemy behind me and know that, for the next few hours, I’m in this fancy place where everyone’s biggest concern is how many orgasms they can have.
The really clever thing about this place, you see, is that it doesn’t feel slutty.
Or if it is, it’s a glamorous, powerful kind of sluttiness.
Like, intentional boss-bitch sluttiness.
It’s in this incredible townhouse on a posh street in Mayfair, and the founders have gone to so much trouble to make every detail of the experience feel super luxurious.
Nothing about it is seedy or sordid. All the furnishings are gorgeous (even if the ones in The Playroom are all wipe-clean), and it even smells amazing.
They spend a fortune on candles from this crazily expensive French brand called Diptyque so that no one has to endure the scent of jizz, which I’m a fan of.