6. SIX
Maybe this would be the new pattern of Poppy’s life. Every weekend spent regretting the Friday night before, dreading the Monday after.
“What’s cooking, Poptart?”
And every day spent regretting every life choice that had led her to live in this flat with Lecherous Dave.
“Unfortunately, not your liver.”
“Oh, I pickled that long ago.”
His big blond smug self stepped further into the kitchen and promptly occupied eighty percent of it. In fairness, it was a very small kitchen, but mostly he was very large. Not in the healthy, vital way of certain furiously indignant caramel-haired gentlemen, but in a big beefy steroidal sort of way. Like those cows fed on growth hormones and late-stage capitalism.
He leant against the counter, right next to the hob where she was batch-cooking her week’s dinners—more money-efficient, both in terms of energy usage and ingredient cost. He picked up the wooden spoon—but not because he wanted to taste her food. He had already declared it bland stodge on numerous occasions but given her key ingredients were lentils and hope, she didn’t take that too personally. No, he picked up the spoon merely because he knew she needed it and tossed it in his hand. Like a tosser.
“Can I have the spoon, please?”
“Mm… What you gonna give me for it, Poptart?”
“How about leprosy?”
Maybe it was living with Lecherous Dave that had skewed her view of men to something so transactional. It had become apparent soon after she moved in six months ago—mainly because he openly propositioned her—that the amazingly low rent he was charging was because he was expecting her to sleep with him. She hadn’t, of course. And he was too lazy/unfoundedly optimistic to bother kicking her out and getting a new flatmate. Instead, he made her do all the housework, doubled her contributions to the utilities and…leched. She would have moved out long ago, but she simply couldn’t afford to.
With an angry huff at his refusal to hand over the spoon, she reached for a different one and stirred her stew. Soup? Dhaal? Generic food substance.
“Always so touchy,” Dave chided. “But never touchy-feely.”
“It’s Saturday. Shouldn’t you be at work?”
One of the very few benefits to Lecherous Dave was that he worked in a mobile phone shop and often worked weekends. He had once, in the distant past, before the financial crash, been an account executive or something with Goldman Sachs. They were the guys who schmoozed the big clients whose money people like Roscoe Blackton would manage. But his so-called glory days were long gone. Poppy suspected they were “glory days” in the same way that bigots mourned the days before political correctness.
“Nope,” he said with another toss of the spoon. “No work today. How about we entertain each other?”
“Sure. You talk. I’ll laugh at you.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to be nice, would it? Smile those pretty smiles at me? That face is wasted on you.”
Lecherous Dave was also, she realised, the type of man she had assumed Roscoe Blackton to be. She had assumed they were cut from the same greedy, arrogant, grasping, immoral, entitled City Boy cloth. And it had been a fair assumption, hadn’t it? So many men were like that, especially where she worked. And there were all those rumours. It had been easy to believe.
Or had it just been easy to believe she was worth so little?
“Dave,” she said, snatching the spoon back. “My face is wasted on you.”
She slammed the lid on the bubbling pan and left it to simmer.
Once her dinners for the week were cooling in their reusable plastic freezer trays—more energy efficient to keep a freezer full—she made the long journey from the outskirts of north-east London to Lewisham in south London where her mum and brothers lived. Luckily, she could use the monthly travel card she used for her work commute so it didn’t cost her anything. But she stopped at the budget supermarket on the way and spent some money stocking up on a few essentials for her family. Which brought her remaining bank balance down to ten pounds and thirty-seven pence.
Her mum and brothers lived in a one-bedroom flat. The street itself wasn’t too bad. The flat was privately rented—they had been on a Council housing waiting list for years, but the only place they’d been offered was right smack in the middle of the area they’d been desperate to leave. They’d been here for years now, and Poppy barely even noticed the way it fell to pieces day-by-day, the landlord doing nothing but inexorably increasing the rent.
She let herself in and found her youngest brother Harvey sitting on the living room floor playing a video game.
“Where’s Mum?” she asked.
“Work.”
“Oh. Maybe she texted. My phone died. Charger’s broken. Is Mum’s charger in the kitchen?”
Harvey just shrugged. He was thirteen years old and his conversational skills had been lacking even before puberty hit.
Poppy went into the kitchen and unloaded the little bit of shopping she’d bought, frowning at the half-empty cupboards as she folded the carrier bag, stowing it back in her handbag to reuse.
She found her mum’s charger in the kitchen drawer, glad they still had the same make of phone, and plugged hers in.
Was a mobile phone a luxury? Could she do without it? Work contacted her on it. And her laptop was so old and slow—and virus-prone—that it was much easier to access the internet through her phone. She used it to study—reading whatever she could of The Economist and the Financial Times and Morningstar and Bloomberg and Investment Weekly. Some of it was behind paywalls, but there was a lot of information available for free. Dizzying amounts of it, really.
Back in the living room, she sat on the sofa bed and watched Harvey race a gaudy rally car on the screen.
“Did you know a new phone charger is fifteen quid?” she asked Harvey.
He grunted.
Fifteen quid. Which meant that now she’d bought those groceries, she couldn’t get one until she got paid. She’d even asked Dave if he could get her one cheap from work, but of course he’d said no. Actually, what he’d said was: “You know what you need to do, Poptart. You scratch my back…” She had declined the offer.
“Do you have fifteen quid?” Harvey said, not looking around from his game.
She felt a little surge of fondness that he was taking an interest in her plight as she looked at the back of his head, his short, fuzzy, dark brown hair. He had thick dark eyebrows, too, and other than sharing pale, freckled skin, looked nothing at all like her, taking mostly after his dad. She looked a bit like her mum, who was strawberry blonde, but she had no idea what her dad looked like, except one old, blurry school class photo taken when he was fourteen or so. He basically looked like all the other boys. A bit of puppy fat. Navy blue school uniform jumper. Crooked tie. Round white face and short brown hair. Indistinguishable, really, from a million others. Her other brother Liam’s dad was Ghanaian and the only one vaguely still in their lives, turning up once or twice a year. Liam’s birthday. Sometimes Christmas.
When they went out together—Poppy, her mum, her two brothers—nobody ever thought they were a family. Leaving aside their varying appearances, her mum looked almost young enough to be her sister, and Poppy looked almost old enough to be Harvey’s mother—if she’d got pregnant at fifteen, like her mum had.
“No, I’ve got nothing until I get paid,” she told Harvey. “I’ll have to buy the charger then.”
“Do you have ten? Only I need it for a school trip.”
Oh. That’s why he was asking. “A school trip? Have you asked Mum?”
“Yeah, but she said she can’t ‘til next week. But school are saying they need it Monday or I can’t go.”
“Where’s it to?”
“I dunno. Some museum or something.”
“Is it important?”
She winced at her question. Of course it was important. School was important. Her grandparents had drilled that into her daily. They’d basically raised her for thirteen years, while her mum finished her own schooling then started work. To them, education was the route to a better life. No one in her family had ever gone to university. But her grandparents didn’t want Poppy to get trapped the way her mum had. They had aspirations. Desperately wanted Poppy to be smart, do well at school. And they had fairly old-fashioned notions of how to go about it. They didn’t let her watch much TV—except Countdown and other quiz shows and the news—and they insisted on having Classical FM on the radio. They did puzzles with her: crosswords and word searches and sudoku. They read books. They went to the library. A lot. (It was free.) And they always, always made her do her homework. No excuses. Ever.
“Any homework this weekend?” she asked Harvey.
“Nah.”
Ought she press him? Because she didn’t believe him. But she wasn’t his mum. And it was hard sometimes to have the energy to do all the right things—to be the awkward one, always pushing. Did you check out the food bank this morning? Did you fill in that form? Where did the money go that I gave you to top up the electricity meter? Where did Harvey get that video game?
Her grandparents hadn’t nagged. Or she didn’t remember it. They seemed to lead by example. They’d been working class themselves, lived in a council house—but how big that house had seemed: semi-detached, three bedrooms, a garden at the front and the back. And her grandad had worked most of his life, until he did his back in. And her grandmother had worked in a shop, until Poppy was born. And somehow there had always been sweets and ice creams and trips to the seaside—on the train down to Kent, to Whitstable. Things had been pretty OK. A normal sort of life.
That’s all she wanted to give her family, really. A normal sort of life. But even handing over half her paycheck barely kept them fed. Her mother’s wages covered the rent. Just. Liam’s went on utilities. Her contribution paid for everything else.
She sometimes wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed in school, gone to university like her grandparents hoped. Would that have been the better option? Or just landed her with debt? It was irrelevant anyway. Eight years ago, she’d found her mother crying in the kitchen, and there had been no food, and her brothers were hungry…
But she didn’t want Harvey to have to make that choice in a few years’ time. Little as he cared about school now, she wanted him to be able to stick at it. Go to college. Or get an apprenticeship. An internship. Something, anything, that gave him options.
“I can give you a tenner,” she said. “For your trip. I’ll walk down to the cash machine.”
And then she’d be left with thirty-seven pence to feed herself until she got paid. But her grandparents would have done the same for her.