11 #2
Essie had a rough day too. She slept in, which is both good and bad, putting her out of sync with the rest of the world.
Her phone showed no new messages, and it’s as if she’s vanished from Edinburgh.
Her group WhatsApp chats continue without her, organising brunches and gallery events.
Essie had typed Just taking a little MH break, guys, back soon , and left three groups, but now she regrets it, feeling isolated.
It seems like the world is moving on without her.
Essie had scoured her mum’s cupboards for food – nothing.
There was no Uber Eats or Deliveroo either, and it was freezing.
She managed to get the heating on and took a long bath to warm up.
But then, back wrapped in her duvet, she checked Connor’s Instagram.
And there he was, at a party in a kilt, surrounded by others in kilts, trews or black tie, along with girls in ballgowns.
He’d told her he was going, but she’d been too busy complaining.
It should have been her at the event, but she’d forgotten about it.
They would’ve had a fun weekend together.
Then she spiralled down a rabbit hole of what happened if you weren’t in a committed relationship by the time you were thirty and what to do when the head-hunter hasn’t called you and looking for big bank jobs that didn’t require German – there weren’t any, although there were plenty of pension administrator jobs – and tortured herself reading articles about how impossible it was to get on the housing ladder and how it wasn’t going to get any better, ever, because the boomers would die and hand their city houses to their kids, who could then get all the good jobs, and otherwise all jobs were open to every human being in the entire universe, and AI would filter your CV before anyone even bothered reading it.
She didn’t even get dressed, just mooned around, eating everything she could find, throwing her phone down in disgust, then picking it up again.
She was absolutely in the depths of misery, barely noticed the day slipping away.
She had a Zoom call with her recruiter at three p.m. and did her best to at least dress her top half.
‘So. A lot of the jobs we’re looking at,’ said the recruiter, ‘they need an MBA?’
‘Seriously?’ said Essie, who had spent a lot of time at Sinclair feeding figures into algorithms and looking for differences in results. It didn’t feel quite like MBA behaviour. ‘I’m not sure I can get one of those in time.’
‘Then the normal procedure is four or five interviews and a presentation.’
‘Four or five interviews in Edinburgh?’
Essie had got her last job by doing work experience, turning up hours early, staying hours late, and being so cheeky to Hari that he had taken her on as an assistant.
Once again it really stung that he wasn’t taking her to Berne.
And she couldn’t afford to intern again.
Last time she’d only managed by working two jobs through the summer and being a student guidance counsellor so she could live cheaply in halls. This seems . . . impossible.
So she is not in the best of moods when she hears Janey come in and slam the door behind her. Oh, God. She isn’t in the mood to face her mum right now, she really isn’t. Things are already bad enough. She feels terrible.
‘Essie?’
Her mum’s voice sounds pissed off. Oh, for God’s sake. She’s in a rotten situation, she’s been home for five minutes; can she not have someone else be annoyed with her too?
‘Essie!’
‘Yeah?’ Her voice is full of truculence.
‘Could you come down a sec?’
Huffily, Essie gets up and brushes down the crumbs from her pyjamas.
Okay, it was a bit mad that she hasn’t got dressed all day but .
. . come on, she’s clearly depressed. She needs a duvet day, not a row.
And she doesn’t want to tell her mum, and she doesn’t want to ask, but she hasn’t heard from her dad at all, apart from a You’ll be fine!
message, which was frankly the reverse of encouraging.
‘Hi,’ Essie says in a gloomy Ross-from- Friends voice, descending the stairs.
Janey can’t help her face getting pained when she sees her gorgeous, messy daughter. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she says.
‘What?’ says Essie, irritably.
‘Nothing,’ says Janey quickly. ‘It’s . . . how was your day?’
‘It was awful,’ says Essie, sullenly.
‘Iknow,’ says Janey. Then, ‘Err . . . can I ask you not to mess with the heating too much?’
‘But it’s a stupid complicated mechanism.’
‘I know,’ says Janey. ‘I’ll put instructions on it.’
‘Also, I’m in the house all day. I can’t freeze to death.’
‘I know,’ says Janey again. ‘But you can burn the peat to keep warm, it’s much cheaper.’
‘But it’s hard to light . . . ’
Janey struggles to hold on to her patience. ‘Come on, sweetie,’ she says. ‘You had to open a window .’
‘Fine,’ says Essie, rolling her eyes and closing the window.
‘So, dinner . . . ’ Janey says. It’s seven-thirty in the evening.
‘Oh, yeah, can we order in?’ says Essie.
‘Where from?’ said Janey, incredulously.
‘Isn’t there a Domino’s? I thought surely you’d have one by now.’
‘Well, no, there isn’t,’ says Janey. ‘And if there were, I probably wouldn’t want to eat pizza on a Tuesday.’
‘Fine,’ says Essie. ‘It’s my fault. Sorry if my life is in ruins and that interferes with your precious eating schedule.’
‘Essie,’ says Janey. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know I should have moved in and just started behaving like your servant. I know I’m not welcome here,’ she says.
‘Of course you are!’ says Janey. ‘Of course you are! Now you’re just being dramatic.’
‘But a very dramatic thing has happened!’
Janey can’t help her lips twitching. ‘Yes . . . to my lamb chops.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says Essie. Then, grudgingly, ‘I’m sorry I ate your lamb chops.’
‘That’s okay,’ says Janey. ‘I shall call it fasting.’
Essie sniffs. ‘I ate them quite a while ago,’ she says. ‘You don’t keep any food in this house.’
‘I don’t,’ agrees Janey. ‘If I have it, I eat it, so I find it’s best not to have it. Why didn’t you just go to the Scot Nor?’ This is the local supermarket, which does a fine line in Empire biscuits and extremely localised crisp flavours.
‘I didn’t want to get dressed.’
‘Frankly these days I think they’re not that fussed,’ says Janey. ‘People started wearing their pyjamas to the Scot Nor during the pandemic and it kind of caught on.’
‘Classy,’ says Essie.
Essie doesn’t say the real reason: everyone in this town knows her, or at least knows Janey, who is popular, and they’d all want to know what was up. But Janey realises.
‘What do you say,’ she says finally, ‘to baklava for supper?’
And she digs out the baklava Abdul’s grateful parents had pressed into her hands as she’d left, and boils the kettle, and puts Kirsty and Phil on the television, and they pretend everything is fine, though the ways in which they both feel they are failing are like pins in the sofa.