CHAPTER 7
The Dishes business account springs to life on the laptop on the kitchen table and Simone finds herself looking into it. Just to see what they’ve got. Nothing more than that. She isn’t necessarily going to go to meet these people. She just needs to know if she can.
The wooden table is rickety and the laptop moves around as she navigates the bank account. All around her is a silence so deep it throbs her ears. She has less than twelve hours in which to be prepared to do a deal. And isn’t she preparing? Isn’t that all this is?
That the money belongs to her anyway crosses her mind, which is an unfair thought to have, but one she feels regardless. The restaurant is almost as much a part of her as Lucy is. Damien might do the books and the HR, but Simone does the cooking, and what else matters without that?
Damien will see any withdrawals, but Simone’s nerves are on a high boiling panic, and she no longer cares. Or, rather, can’t even bring herself to consider it. A disagreement with five thousand miles between them is less urgent than her other, immediate, problems.
She and Damien met when they were both twenty-four, a few days before Christmas: he at a forced networking event, she serving him at the bar she worked in called After Midnight, which had a red awning and fairy lights in the windows year-round.
They’d both worked for other people for several years, Damien in HR in a law firm. He was Oxbridge educated, straight As and a straight-cut suit that strained at the shoulders; Damien is six-five and broad.
Simone had been making a cocktail for a lawyer so rude he addressed her as ‘You!’ and then added, ‘I need a drink.’ Simone, who had encountered many lawyers during the social-work proceedings against her parents, hadn’t been particularly surprised.
She had struggled not to tell him to go fuck himself, but she needed the job and the money.
Instead, she made the cocktail so outrageously beautiful that he had been forced to tip her.
It was six o’clock, long dark and deep into December.
The time of year that is romanticized but actually bleak: constant illness, tiredness, everybody pissed off with the admin of Christmas.
Simone had been living in a flat in Clapham Junction with two workaholic junior doctors who were rarely home and used to practise injecting oranges with saline solution when they were.
She had nowhere better to be than work on the last Thursday before Christmas, but she absolutely did not want to be there, either.
Damien was next in line at the bar. Drinks were on his law firm, but he had a lemonade. He didn’t drink, never has, doesn’t like the taste or the sensation, or how people get casually addicted to things, he says, something Simone has always greatly admired about him, for obvious reasons.
‘What do you do – law?’ she’d said, as she had filled his glass up with lemonade on draught that came out so frothy it looked like a jacuzzi.
He had waved a hand, like it was irrelevant. ‘Send emails.’
He was huge – Simone later found out he’d had that suit of his custom made, and it still didn’t fit – with dark hair, dark eyes, a dark beard, said that he worked in HR because he liked people and talking.
Simone, who didn’t then like people at all, had stared at him for several beats after he had told her this.
‘What about you? This?’ he had said, his tone not disparaging.
‘This,’ she’d said. ‘But I want to do something better.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘I don’t know.’ The place was so packed with suits that Damien had to lean right over the bar to hear her. ‘But something. Not this.’
Simone had left school at fourteen when social services finally stepped in about her parents’ habits. She had not a single qualification and had failed, too, to ‘work her way up’ in the way one is apparently supposed to do in order to turn around that sort of bad luck.
But, at the time she met Damien, she had just created and sold a website for ten thousand pounds.
It had been the beginning of something, for Simone.
She’d always known she could be entrepreneurial.
She’d had an idea for a dating website, Fruitful, focused on men and women who wanted to meet somebody in order to have a family.
Everybody had said it wouldn’t work because it would have more women than men on it, but that hadn’t borne out.
When she had sold it, it had been the first time it had felt like this was how things were supposed to be for her.
Not a dead-end job. Not bar work. Something else.
They used that money, much, much later, to seed the restaurant.
‘I’m supposed to be exchanging business cards with people,’ Damien had said. ‘Want one?’ And this was – and is – how Damien played things: open and clear. But something else, too, perhaps naivety: the optimism of somebody who had never been rejected.
He slid it across the bar before she could say anything.
Damien Seaborn. She liked a man with an interesting surname. She didn’t give him her own number, but she tucked the business card into the pocket of her apron and, much later that night, remembered to take it out.
‘Do you ever think,’ Damien had said, outside, after last orders, three lemonades later, ‘like, if teenage me could see me now …’ he paused, and Simone had thought he was about to say something self-aggrandizing, but he didn’t, ‘he’d think, God, what are you doing? Rotting at a desk.’
A sigh of deep, satisfied understanding had rushed out of Simone, swirling in the damp, cold December air. A potted Christmas tree sat just to Damien’s left, its lights hazy in the mist.
‘I really do understand that,’ she said.
‘Nice to meet somebody who does. Most people just pretend to love their jobs.’
‘Not me.’ And there, by the Christmas tree, she thought she hadn’t just found her husband. She had found a real, true friend.
They moved in together quickly. Most Mondays, he had said to her that he didn’t want to go to work, that HR was more about inhuman relations than human. Most Wednesdays, he texted her, saying, Hump day – we’re wasting our lives!!
It was after they had Lucy that they left the rat race.
Used Simone’s seed fund, ring-fenced in a locked saver and topped up by an enormous loan from HSBC.
They opened a restaurant despite having almost no experience in it.
They wanted to do something tangible, something that mattered.
Not emails. Damien said he wanted to give people an experience, eating in their restaurant, a line Simone had loved so much she had stolen it and repeated it as her own to other people.
Damien knew how to run a business. Simone knew how to make a good cocktail, but that was it.
And then she learned to cook alongside their hired chef. And that led to the review in The Times that changed everything.
That first Monday, in charge of Dishes, Damien had turned to her and said, ‘I am looking forward to going in, you know.’
There’s five and a half thousand in the business bank now, and bills to pay. Simone didn’t bring the company debit card with her. Damien has it. She risks a text to him, not caring about the consequences. Can you access the business account?
She looks at the screen, wondering if she could transfer it somewhere. She has four thousand dollars with her, cash, for camping supplies and for the campsites. Luxurious, but they wanted it to be.
But it won’t be enough for a ransom.
As she’s thinking this, the burner phone beeps. It creates a physical reaction in Simone’s body, a wrecking ball through her nervous system.
Bring nothing and bring no one. You will be checked. No police. Or else: bang.
Simone stares at the phone. Bang. She can’t think straight. Nobody could. But what do they mean, bring nothing? What deal is to be done if not financial?
She touches the keypad on her own phone, but, this time, doesn’t even dial 911 and delete the numbers, because Damien calls. ‘I’ve got a flight,’ he tells her when she picks up. ‘I’m at Heathrow. Just about made it. Getting the ESTA now. You can apply for some last-minute one.’
‘OK.’
‘It has a connection in New York. Late tonight. Then on to you.’
‘Right,’ Simone says woodenly. For the first time in two decades, she doesn’t know what to say to her husband. And then he asks it: the question that changes everything.