It’s quiet, thank the Lord. As I approach a cubicle, the imminent purging causes a slight anticipatory spurt – I can barely get the door closed and my pants down before Niagara Falls gushes forth. Oh, the relief. The cubicle is fairly grimy, and there’s no paper, but I think it’s the nicest and best toilet I’ve ever had the privilege of urinating in. I feel like writing a note of thanks on the wall, which is already liberally scribbled on. Charmaine was here, apparently; Billy and Danika are forever; and Boris can suck my dick. What a refuge this is; I might just stay here, reposing on the now-warm cracked seat. When I left the office this morning, I wanted to find comfort in stillness and solitude, and I’ve found it, here in this lavatory. Or loo, as my mother would say. As the last drops dribble out, I scroll on my phone, enjoying this rare moment of uninterrupted bliss.
Thanks to my unavoidable pre-pee trickle, and the lack of toilet roll, my pants are wet for the second time today, but my joy is profound. I skip to the boutique, enjoying the feel of the full skirt swirling around my new sandals, chucking my old clothes and shoes in one of the bins on the way. I feel like Jack Reacher hitching a ride out West – free, unfettered, and about to get into a fight. I wonder if the police have arrived yet?
Breezing into the shop, I hold my bank card aloft. ‘I’m back!’ I announce cheerily, slapping it down on the counter.
There’s a burly security guard standing next to Cruella, looking strapping and impassive. She sneers, then turns to him, gesturing towards me dismissively. ‘This is the shoplifter.’
He looks me up and down, so I give him a little twirl. ‘Do you like it? I think it suits me.’
If possible, he looks even more inscrutable. Maybe he’s Jack Reacher. A British Reacher would definitely be working in security at a Bristol shopping precinct. Just as a day job while he hunted down gangsters in Knowle by night.
Cruella sniffs. ‘You stole it.’
‘But I’m right here. In a stealing situation, he’d be chasing me down the high street, calling for back-up.’
A tight smile creeps across her face. ‘We apprehended you in the nick of time.’
‘Capital!’ I’m finding the Regency style of this dress quite inspiring. ‘Should he get me in some sort of chokehold, to make the story stick?’
Cruella’s smile fades. ‘He has the authority to make a citizen’s arrest. With force if necessary.’
Reacher’s inscrutable expression tips towards boredom – it’s clear he doesn’t take his low-level crime-fighting role particularly seriously. I bet he’s got bigger fish to fry. Probably a gunrunner operating out of the docks on Harbourside. A real nasty piece of work. Forget citizen’s arrests; Bristol Reacher will be pulverizing a trafficker later.
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Only if there are reasonable grounds. And I think you’ll find my peaceful presence here indicates there aren’t.’ Did a bit of googling on my phone in the bog, among other things, and it’s paying dividends. Emboldened by my new legal nous, I carry on. ‘I’m here, ready and waiting to pay. If you want to drag this out, then we could call my lawyer?’ Robbie deals in intellectual rather than sartorial property, but she doesn’t need to know that.
Her brows snap together; she’s both angry and nonplussed, and it’s time to wrap this up, particularly since I have no other clothes to wear, having thrown my old ones in the bin. I rest my elbows on the counter.
‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to pay for the dress, and we’re going to agree it was a misunderstanding. Or else . . .’ I get out my phone, fount of knowledge, source of information, locator, identifier, amplifier, online warrior.
‘Or else what?’ She’s breathing hard now; she’ll need moment in the back room staff toilet when this is all over.
Keeping my back to the stony-faced security guard, I discreetly show her my Instagram page. The hipster at Avon House was some kind of influencer with two million followers and I’ve picked up over fifty thousand of them since 11 a.m., thanks to Petroc tagging me. Obviously, I’m only on there because Vince insisted we ‘get with the memes’. Never mind that my page is just photos of our cat, Grizelda, perching on various precarious spots around the house, or that the only story I ever put up was an accidental screen grab of all my weather apps. It seems everyone is keen to view a clip of a middle-aged woman kicking against the pricks in a posh swimming pool. I’m sure my newfound fame will fall off a cliff along with my fertility, but right now it can be useful.
‘I can be very kind to you here,’ I murmur. ‘Or I can be . . . mean.’
There’s a long silence as she looks at the figure on my phone. I lower my voice, conspiratorial, chummy. ‘I really want to be kind. Let me pay for this gorgeous frock, and we can all get on with our day.’
She meets my eyes, and there’s grudging respect there. When you’re a bitch, meeting a superior bitch can be a salutary experience. Nodding a dismissal to the guard, free to go back to his day job stopping teenagers nicking the condiments in Nando’s, she takes my bank card from between my fingers.
‘I can give you a ten per cent discount,’ she says, and I pat her on the arm in a motherly way.
‘That would be splendid,’ I say, and we complete the transaction.
My mother doesn’t know it, but the wedding dress she chose for me had a fitting end. Last year, Hazel got invited to a Halloween party – it was fancy dress, but she didn’t find out till the last minute, and had nothing to wear. After covering her face in talcum powder, together we unearthed my £1500 meringue, and slashed it to ribbons. Then I took a lighter to the veil, making the netting furl and blacken. Hazel sailed off as the Corpse Bride and when she came back, the hemline was muddy and the bodice drenched in Red Bull. I rolled it all up, stuffed it higgledy-piggledy in an old suitcase and left it to decay in the attic, feeling electrified by the vandalism, animated by a belated rebellion which would go entirely unnoticed. I wondered what Rose would say if she knew?
Outside in the sunshine, I do another twirl and take a perky photo of the swish for my new fans. Not Emily in Paris but Clover in Bristol. I’ve got a great new dress, and my bladder is gloriously barren. What next?
14
I grew up in a genteel Oxford suburb, far enough from the city that we could afford a detached house, as my mother considered semis lower-middle class. One of my earliest memories is going to some sort of play group when I was tiny. It was a drop-off thing – Rose would leave me with them to get her hair done and then collect me at lunchtime. Maz wasn’t there – I think she got left with a woman who lived down the road. I must have been about four, so don’t remember much about it, just that there was a floaty dressing-up skirt that me and another girl used to fight over, and they gave you milk in blue plastic cups.
But one day I do remember, I was playing with a particular toy when my mother came to pick me up – it was a drill, and if you pressed a button the chuck actually moved around. I loved it, and was running round firing it at people, in the swishy skirt I’d managed to wrest off the other girl. But there was a boy who wanted the drill who was following me round, whingeing. He kept trying to take it off me, grabbing it and pulling it – sometimes pulling my hair too. I suppose we would have worked it out somehow, but Rose had arrived and decided to get involved. She marched up and held out her hand to me.
‘Now, please.’
My mother didn’t ask twice, so I handed it over. She immediately gave it to the boy, who ran off with it. Then she found a toy supermarket trolley, and closed my fingers around the handle, her rings pressing into my skin as she bent to whisper in my ear.
‘Much better for you,’ she said. Then she went and had a cup of tea with the other mums, while I pushed the trolley around aimlessly. We went home shortly after, and I didn’t know what to make of it, but I suppose on some level I did. Give them what they want. Your place is behind the trolley. Every time I wanted something, wanted to stand up for myself, say no, I’d feel her rings pricking my skin, pushing me back.
The window intruder dream didn’t start until years later, but I feel like she loosened the catch, left a way in. That Larkin poem about your mum and dad fucking you up. That’s what they do. Or they ensure that someone else can.
The swishy skirt though. I loved that skirt.
AFTERNOON
15
After all this excitement, it really is time to slow things down a little and have the restful moment I’ve been craving since I face-palmed Red Eye’s eager lawyer. I decide to head back to Queen Square near the office, get a drink, have a sit and watch the world go by. Maybe I’ll even read my book, get past page 48.
On the way along the river, I treat myself to another peek at my Instagram page. I’m now up to 70K; I wonder if I can get one of those blue ticks that mean you’re a better-than-average human being? Someone has commented ‘SPLASH THE PATRIARCHY!’ Perhaps I should provide some more #content for my new followers, solidify my status as a swimfluencer. Scrolling through my photos, I upload a selfie I took inside the giant shell in the gallery: ‘LOVE ART_ANDRA!’ and add some emojis as that seems to be what the kids are doing these days. Studying the picture again, I’m struck by how relaxed I look in it. Famously unphotogenic, usually the camera picks up the underlying tension in all my facial muscles, making me appear rictus and off-centre, like a Madame Tussauds version of me. In all our family shots, Robbie looks as urbane as he is, whereas I have the air of someone with an uncomfortable bowel complaint. So I’m pleased with this selfie, and think it will endear me to my new fans.
‘Clover Hendry, as I live and breathe!’
Interrupted admiring myself, I’m further irked to see the woman waylaying me on Welsh Back is Glynis Johnson, an absolute busybody who lives down the road from us in Keynsham. When we moved in, she was always popping round to see if we needed anything, and massively outstaying her welcome. Once she lingered for an entire afternoon telling me about her niece Octavia’s gap year, when I was desperately trying to prepare for a pitch meeting. Then she started inviting me to her book group – all the women in it are at least fifteen years older than me, and only talk about three things: 1) ongoing roadworks along the high street 2) what they bought this week from the local Waitrose and 3) gynaecological issues. The book doesn’t get a look-in. I know this because I’ve endured several of these meet-ups and lost the will to live at every single one. Never having time to read entire novels, I swotted up on Guardian reviews and Wikipedia entries, and considered myself fully prepared to wing it, so it was therefore galling to sit through three hours of traffic light/Essential Kale/UTI chat without ever getting round to the sodding point of the evening.
‘Uh, hi.’ I’m hoping she takes the muted nature of my greeting as a prompt to make herself scarce, but of course she barrels on. Glynis is the kind of woman who talks with her eyes closed, to ensure she’s oblivious to any conversational cues.
‘Just the person I wanted to see! We’re doing kitchen sups at mine next week to talk about the new Sally Rooney – not the filthy one, the one with the letters. You in?’
Old Clover would stutter and prevaricate before the inevitable capitulation. Such a waste of time. ‘No, thank you.’
Glynis’s peepers pop open. ‘But I haven’t told you when it is yet.’
‘It doesn’t really matter when it is.’
‘Oh, are you going away?’ Holidays are one of the few topics that allow them to deviate from talking points 1, 2 and 3. They tend to favour Florida, and Chewton Glen.
‘No, I just don’t really want to come. Thank you for inviting me though.’
Glynis’s brow puckers as she processes the information. ‘You . . . why not?’
‘I didn’t enjoy it last time.’ It seems best to tell the truth, so that she won’t broach the subject again. No point making a lame excuse, because that would just prolong the agony for everyone.
Glynis fingers the wattle at her neck. ‘You didn’t?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Well . . .’ Blinking rapidly, Glynis studies the cobbles below. Although I didn’t particularly want to see her, this encounter has been useful, in saving me from future book group boredom, and possibly further unwelcome visits. If it feels like a lot for her to take on board, I’m sure she’ll be shored up by Shirley, Maxine and the other literary ladies. Or perhaps she can do a Waitrose run and stock up on her favourite Belgian Double Chocolate Cookies.
