Chapter 17 #2
Today, with no friends insisting I remembered this, it was impossible not to feel the sting of guilt about the distance I’d deliberately created between us.
Even worse, as I spent yet another night pacing the floor with my fractious son, I couldn’t help wondering that if I’d listened to them more, maybe I wouldn’t have found myself living in the disaster zone of my own making.
* * *
For the five years the ShayKi founders lived in that first, terraced house, we ploughed almost everything into the business, setting aside a modest amount on top of living expenses for our sacrosanct fun-fund.
While I worked in the background, crunching numbers, dealing with suppliers, keeping us legal, Shay and Kieran networked, charmed and were downright pushy, until an influencer took a shine to our bags, and things exploded.
We soon learned that hiring more staff meant rethinking our entire way of operating, as we brought in a branding expert, created marketing and sales teams, logistics and HR, and eventually opened up a trendy office and flagship store in the city centre.
We made a ton of mistakes, almost lost everything one year, then scraped it back again.
Yet, through it all we stuck together. Shay and Kieran revelled in the kind of blazing rows that involved drinks tossed in faces and sample fabrics ripped in two, but I was always there to broker the peace deal and bring some much-needed perspective.
I continued to wonder if behind this passion lay more than a lifelong friendship.
However, Shay remained resolutely determined to stay single.
She would go on dates, but the moment things started to turn serious, she’d end it, citing her commitment to the business as the reason.
Kieran carried on with a string of relationships, mostly lasting a few months, the longest ending up with two years living together while Shay and I bought our own newbuild apartment with amazing views across the city.
The one thing Kieran’s girlfriends had in common was that they were the kind of women Shay couldn’t stand – fawning, opinionless, requiring minimal effort.
There were days I dreamed about holding the two of them hostage in a register office until they’d signed the marriage papers and put all three of us out of our misery, but as the years went by and we crossed into our thirties, I eventually let it go.
Meanwhile, my parents didn’t try especially hard to hide their consternation that their daughter was continuing in a commercial career.
Our recycled products, ethical suppliers and generous employment packages couldn’t outweigh me dedicating myself to making money from people, rather than helping them.
‘Lifestyle porn’, they called it. Not to my face, but in a message meant for my brother but accidentally sent to our family group chat, shortly before I removed myself from it.
One year, I persuaded them along to our annual awards evening, where we showcased our partnerships with local charities and our latest innovations to achieve sustainability.
They stood stiff limbed amongst the unashamed shimmer of a room of people who loved expressing themselves through fashion, and any hope that they might finally realise what we’d achieved was crushed beneath their disdain.
I told myself that I didn’t need them to feel proud of me. I was proud of myself, and how my input into ShayKi was not only making it into something my parents should have been proud of, but causing ripples across the whole industry.
I was lying. My whole life I’d failed to impress my impressive family, and it still hurt.
So I dealt with it by not talking about my work, and they handled the shame of a daughter who’d sold her soul to capitalism by not asking.
All of us were constantly busy, so it was easy to let weeks go by without talking, months without meeting up, and when they accepted a contract to replicate the prisoner rehabilitation project in Chicago, I made a vague promise to book a trip to visit them at some point, and got on without them.
I didn’t miss my family, if I was honest. I didn’t miss feeling inadequate, their impossible standards or the very idea that happiness was a frivolity, and how dare we waste an evening laughing our hearts out when other people were suffering?
After all, I had the ShayKi family now, who thought I was fabulous, and the feeling was mutual. Christmas, Easter, summer barbecues and other celebrations were mostly spent in the gorgeous house that Shay’s parents had bought, thanks to tiny investments near the beginning paying off.
Mum and Dad were also consistently lacklustre about my romantic life, which was far less exciting than my job.
I had three semi-serious boyfriends in my twenties – an economics student, an engineer and a commercial solicitor – followed by a string of first dates, before accepting that most of the time I’d rather be at home with my friends, instead.
And then I met Leo.