Chapter 3
3
I n the time it took Marc to drive off, Cassie realised that she didn’t want to walk home.
It had nothing to do with the hill – it was impossible to go anywhere in their part of north London without encountering a really steep hill – or the fact that it was now too dark to safely cut through the park.
It had everything to do with Cassie not wanting to be alone with her thoughts. The main road was still humming with activity as she walked towards the bus stop. The bus wasn’t crowded but there were enough people on it, enough life, to distract Cassie, but all too soon she was getting off and it was a short walk home to a little crescent behind Muswell Hill Broadway.
The flat was empty. Her flatmate Savita was back home in Manchester with her wife for the weekend so she wasn’t there to take a perceptive look at Cassie’s frozen face and say, ‘You look like you need a drink. Also, I’ve made brownies.’
Cassie had had three huge glasses of rosé on an empty stomach and the thought of more alcohol … absolutely not.
It wasn’t even nine thirty. Too early for bed when Cassie felt so restless. Far better to be productive and deep clean the kitchen.
It wasn’t as if she and Savita were slobs. They were professional women in their late thirties who always did the washing-up after dinner, then ran a damp cloth over the worktop and cooker. Still, Cassie was undaunted.
She even emptied the toaster’s crumb tray and took all the shelves out of the fridge to wash them in the sink, but the deep clean really didn’t take that long. The kitchen, like everything else about the flat, was very small. There was a sink, cooker and fridge along one wall, and some very shallow cabinets attached to the opposite wall. Two people couldn’t fit in the sliver in the middle unless they stood side by side.
Cassie moved on to the bathroom with her bucket of cleaning supplies. The bathroom was marginally bigger than the kitchen, though not big enough for an actual bath. Cassie knew a brief moment of joy when she lifted up the shower drain cover and, with a special implement bought for this exact purpose, hooked up a long, slimy, matted hank of hair. Mostly her hair. Cassie didn’t believe in guilty pleasures – if something gave you pleasure, Christ, why feel guilty about it? But even she had to admit that if they did exist, then cleaning her own gunky strands of hair out of the shower was the guiltiest pleasure of them all.
Once the bathroom was gleaming, it was still only eleven o’clock. Cassie had a shower, then decided to do her full ten-step skin routine with a lot of the little sample products that were always cluttering up the bathroom cabinet, much to Savita’s annoyance. It was one of the few things that they bickered about.
Working with high-end fashion and beauty brands and having had free access to a fully stocked beauty cupboard for most of her adult life meant that Cassie had the product stash and skincare regime of a much, much wealthier woman. By the time she’d finished with the hot-cloth cleansers and the retinol and the serums and the facial oil that cost more per ounce than gold, she couldn’t put it off any longer.
Her room had enough space for a double bed (not even a king-size) pushed up against the wall, a skinny bedside table on the other side, a couple of free-floating shelves above the bed and that was it – or almost it. Because Savita had the biggest bedroom, they’d agreed that Cassie could have the hall cupboard where she kept her clothes and accessories, and though she could have spent a good hour editing and decluttering in there, she really had to stop procrastinating.
Cassie lay down on her bed even though she had absolutely no intention of sleeping. Her heart was still slightly racing and as soon as her head hit the pillow, her mind geared up for its usual night-time sprint.
It was time for The Fear. Because Cassie was thirty-seven and no one loved her. Or rather, people did love her – she wasn’t entirely loveless or unlovable: her family loved her, despite Cassie’s complicated place within its branches; her friends loved her – not all of them, of course, but the majority of them liked her a lot; so, familial love, platonic love, great. But romantic love? Nope. Nada. Zilch. There wasn’t even the prospect of finding a man, another person, who wanted to throw their lot in with Cassie.
Every time Cassie fired up the apps – Tinder, Bumble, Hinge – she felt nothing but a grinding despair at the thought of trying to find a connection with men who were always shorter, older, balder and much angrier than they’d seemed on her phone screen. Not that they thought Cassie was much of a catch herself.
Which meant that Cassie now transitioned seamlessly from contemplating her loveless state to wondering what was wrong with her. Objectively, she was attractive, thanks to the premium beauty products and being old enough to be mostly comfortable in her own skin. She loved her thick, long hair, which she kept in a state of relative glossiness, again thanks to premium products. It was a rich brown, which she tended to titivate with lighter-coloured highlights when she could afford them. She liked the natural arch of her eyebrows and her big, brown eyes, and she knew she was lucky to have been blessed with full lips and equally full breasts, which were still fairly perky. There were other bits that Cassie liked less but she didn’t dwell on them as she had done when she was younger and believed her life would be infinitely better if she was taller, thinner and didn’t have such a high forehead.
So, looks, OK. Personality, also OK. Cassie tried to be a good friend, a good granddaughter, a good niece, a good aunt. She wasn’t a great daughter but Alison wasn’t a great mother and they’d both made their peace with that. Cassie hoped that she was kind, loyal, funny, caring.
She also knew she had many flaws and toxic traits. Her ability to bear a grudge was positively elephantine but that didn’t make her a bad person.
This was now Cassie’s cue to think about all the bad people she knew and how quite a large number of them had life partners. Lucy’s sister, Heather, was a monster but she’d managed to get married. Although as Lucy said, ‘It’s not so much that even Heather is married, but more that the only person who wanted to marry her was Davy.’
Cassie definitely didn’t want to be married to a man-splaining, manspreading, handsy man like Davy, but time was marching on relentlessly. Thirty-seven was edging into dangerous territory. Being in your late thirties, even early forties, was a frantic merry-go-round, and many of Cassie’s friends had blindly jumped onboard because they didn’t want to miss the ride.
Cassie wasn’t even sure that she wanted children. She appreciated her friends’ and relatives’ babies in much the same way that she appreciated Henry Cavill. She was happy that he made other people happy but he did absolutely nothing for her.
If she was with someone, and that mystery someone wanted children, then Cassie might decide that she wanted them too. Perhaps she didn’t want children because she wasn’t with someone and circumstances were making the decision for her.
Maybe Cassie would get to forty or forty-five, even fifty, and regret all the roads not taken. Especially the road that led to Jojo Maman Bébé, soft-play centres and a whole other world that she’d forever be denied access to because she’d left it too late.
Then, as now, to lessen the panic and the fluttering in her stomach, Cassie tried to focus on all the rich experiences that she could have because she didn’t have a partner, children. The career opportunities. The travel. The adventures! But that simply made The Fear intensify.
There was no money for travel or adventures. At thirty-seven, Cassie was living in precarious rented accommodation – every penny she’d saved up to buy her own place had gone when her corporate event-planning business imploded during the pandemic. She was still paying off the loan she’d taken out so she could give her staff redundancy payments.
To the casual observer, Cassie had a glamorous, well-paid job. She was the ‘Director of Experience’ at a well-respected boutique PR agency with a roster of fashion and beauty clients. Cassie headed up the team who organised product launches and influencer lunches, press events and parties. So many parties. It was a demanding job but the perks were phenomenal, like the bathroom cabinet full of premium beauty products and Taylor Swift tickets. But even earning a decent salary, with her debts and the cost of living crisis, every month Cassie was forced to live leaner and leaner. Then there was the surcharge you had to pay, mostly to Transport for London, for daring to even exist in the capital.
Round and round it went in her head. With detours for the time that she’d been engaged to a man who owned his own house. If she hadn’t broken things off, she’d be married now with at least two children and even though her breasts would no longer be quite so perky, she’d probably have her name on the deeds to the house.
There were so many different lives that Cassie could have lived but tonight, serenaded by the creak of her fan, she thought about the life that she did have. In a variety of ways, both very bad and very good, it wasn’t the life she’d expected. But she loved and she was loved, and she had a job that she adored, and she no longer had to pay VAT and business rates which was a huge bonus, and every day was full of small and precious joys.
The problems that kept her awake at night, even The Fear, were an indulgence. To worry that her life wasn’t quite right in a variety of ways when Cassie had the luxury of, hopefully, years and decades to come to achieve the life she wanted. To simply live.
Secretly, deep down, she’d always been envious of Lucy and Russell. Mostly because of the depth of love they had for each other but also because they’d both led such charmed lives. They’d grown up nestled in the wealthy cushion of the upper middle classes; prep school and public school and riding lessons, and long holidays where they always stayed with godparents or relatives who had houses in sunny locations like Cornwall or Corsica. They’d started dating at university, got married soon after that, established careers with comparative ease, and their lives had continued to follow the same safe, comfortable pattern.
Cassie loved both of them, loved Fleur and Joni. She’d never begrudged them their good fortune because they were good people – warm-hearted, caring, generous – but she’d also wished that her life could be charmed too. A little less full of rejections and scrimping and working so hard all the time. It had taken her years before she finally realised that working really fucking hard didn’t guarantee success if you didn’t have the right accent or you hadn’t been to the right school and you didn’t have parents who would pay the deposit on a flat.
As Cassie lay there in the sweltering darkness, occasionally sitting up to turn her pillow over, she realised none of that was important right now. Because Russell, who filled up every room he was in with his relentlessly sunny nature and his terrible jokes, was … Cassie couldn’t even say the word in her head.
Not Russell. It was impossible. Unthinkable. Cassie couldn’t even let her thoughts wander in that terrible direction. She’d much rather think about how she wasn’t at all where she expected to be at the age of thirty-seven. And, really, genuinely, what was to become of her?
Sleep was absolutely not a thing that was going to happen. Cassie had been in bed for nearly an hour now and was staring wide-eyed and dry-eyed into the darkness when there were several loud thumps at the window.
She sighed. ‘Oh my God, it’s open enough for you to wriggle through, you fat lump.’
A plaintive meow was the only reply.
Cassie scrambled to her knees so she could haul up the sash window.
Still yowling indignantly, Koita jumped from the windowsill to Cassie’s bed. He was a truly magnificent tuxedo cat, all black apart from his white bib and paws, who was named after a Malian footballer. Cassie wasn’t sure which one – she’d tried googling but it turned out there were quite a few footballers from Mali with the same surname.
She left the bedroom, Koita winding through her legs, in danger both of getting stepped on and of knocking Cassie off her feet. ‘Yes, yes, I’m going to feed you,’ she complained. ‘It’s not like you’re starving. You could live off your fat deposits for a good few weeks.’
Koita begged to differ. He kept up his meowing as Cassie opened a tin of gourmet cat food into his bowl and made sure he had fresh water. After all, it was in her best interests to make sure that Koita was kept in the bougie style to which he was accustomed. It was because of Koita that she and Savita paid well below the market rate in rent. All the way through the cost of living crisis, when Cassie’s friends who were still renting had almost universally experienced massive rent hikes and sudden evictions, Cassie had been spared.
The flat and Koita had originally belonged to the late Mr Sidibe. When he’d died in early 2021, his son, a private chef in New York, and his daughter, an academic living in Australia, had wanted to keep the flat in case either of them relocated back to the UK. They’d also wanted to keep Koita, who their father had doted on.
So when Cassie was looking for a flat, along with her friend Beth, another old colleague from Skirt , their references from previous landlords weren’t as important as how well they got on with Koita.
Cassie was not a cat person. She’d been bitten by a neighbour’s Siamese when she was little and had never warmed to the species after that. Beth, however, had grown up in a feline-ruled house, which sounded like it had been covered in cat hair and reeked of cat piss. They’d even joked that maybe Beth should secrete a few Dreamies in her pockets to get the cat onside.
Of course at their interview with Mr Sidibe’s son, Roman, and the estate agent, Koita had ignored Beth in favour of climbing onto Cassie’s lap with legs akimbo, until she gingerly petted his tummy. Typical bloody cat.
Once she’d been anointed as Koita’s designated slave, the tenancy agreement was signed and now a generous amount was deposited into Cassie’s bank account every month for Koita’s food, pet insurance and miscellaneous items including his catnip supply and toys. Cassie couldn’t quite believe her luck. Whenever anything broke in the flat, rather than contacting either of the Sidibe siblings, in case they were suddenly reminded that they should increase the rent, she either replaced or repaired it herself. Her finest moment had been re-enamelling a small chip in the shower tray.
Or rather her finest moment was the three years that she’d kept Koita alive. He wasn’t just surviving but thriving, even though he was very much an outdoor cat and Cassie had conniptions any time he was late home from tarting about the neighbourhood.
When Beth had moved out and Savita, another so-called cat person, had moved in, Koita still preferred to lavish his attention on Cassie. She suspected that it was because she was always the one who fed him, and the hand that controlled the Dreamies supply was the hand that ruled Koita’s world.
Though Cassie would never be a cat lover, it did make her feel quite special that Koita had singled her out as his person. She had grown quite fond of him.
Now she watched as he ate, washed up his bowl as soon as he was done then picked him up and carried him back to her room.
‘You can sleep on the bed, but no touching,’ she told him sternly, something that she’d said to other males on other occasions.
Of course as soon as she lay down, Koita padded over to Cassie and draped himself over her chest.
‘Please no, it’s too hot,’ she whimpered, but he was already making biscuits on her tummy and purring, because she really was Koita’s person and he had an unerring knack for sensing when she was down.
And somehow, against all the odds, Cassie fell asleep.