by Bella Mackie
Within a year or two, I fully understood the wealth that the Latimers had. It was not the flashy loot of my father, it was unspoken but obvious in every way. Food came in huge deliveries from upmarket delis. Flowers were found on every table in the house, big bunches of artfully arranged stems you’d never see in the local supermarket. Sophie could spend hundreds of pounds on scatter cushions from the Iranian interiors shop in Crouch End and call them a bargain with absolutely no sarcasm. They talked about how important it was to live in ‘real London’, but they were insulated from anything remotely real. I didn’t even know what they meant by real. I don’t think they knew. The Artemis mansion was protected by enormous gates. The Latimers would have thought this awful, but they were no different really. I recognised how absurd their life was but it was hard not to enjoy it. Aged 15, I found myself using Sophie’s expensive face creams and seriously considering three different shades of green Farrow & Ball paint for my walls. I had never known I might have expensive tastes before. I’d never had the chance to know. But I was fast finding out.
The summer before sixth form started, Jimmy and I were allowed to go on holiday alone for the first time. We went to Greece with his friend Alex and his girlfriend Lucy, who went to private school in West London and delighted in exclaiming in shock whenever I admitted to not having experienced something. It was a CRIME that I had never been to Greece before, how could I not have had a Macchiato in my WHOLE LIFE, oh honestly it was TOO FUNNY that I’d never been swimming in the sea. It was a huge relief when she came down with food poisoning on day two of the trip and didn’t trouble us again until day six, just before we were due to return home. Well, I say food poisoning, but it was decidedly less random than that really. A few doses of Ipecac syrup given with breakfast (which I insisted on making for this very reason) did the trick. I don’t think anyone would blame me, there’s only so much time you can spend with someone who goes shooting on weekends and calls her mother ‘Mummy’ with a straight face. Alex seemed to perk up in her absence too, and the holiday was brilliant. Lucy was subdued on the flight home, and only gave a tiny shudder when I passed my hand over her leg to pick up my bag. Nobody else noticed. They broke up a few weeks later, which just felt best for everyone under the circumstances.
Back in London, I had chosen my A levels, settling on English, French, and Business Studies. Jimmy spent a lot of time going over university prospectuses with his parents, and discussing the merits of different Oxbridge colleges over dinner as Annabelle and I made a great performance of rolling our eyes and sighing loudly. I wasn’t going to uni, much to the dismay of John and Sophie, who seemed not to understand that there was any other option. In their eyes, finishing education at 18 would fast-track you towards a job packing boxes in warehouses, pregnant, on drugs, or possibly worse – it might mean you had to move out of London and live miles away from an artisanal cheese shop. But I wasn’t wasting three more years on rigid learning, getting into debt, and wasting time with other students, who I assumed would spend their free time talking earnestly about safe spaces and organising ineffective marches on rainy days. I had things to do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Unsurprisingly, most prison activities are compulsory. Some of it is set up as though you might have a choice, ‘There’s a quiz night tonight in the TV room, we’ll need you ladies to pair up!’ but when you politely opt out, a guard will drop the forced smile and say, ‘Six p.m., Grace, I expect to see you there with a partner.’ And then Kelly will grab my hand and announce loudly that we’ll be playing together and I will unsuccessfully try to disassociate from my body. Today there is a non-optional lecture on how to be a boss. All morning, Kelly has been singing ‘Who run the world? GIRLS!’ at the top of her lungs as though the seminar will be the first step towards managing a FTSE 500 company and not an exercise in platitudes designed to tick a box on a government target form somewhere. ‘Empower these women,’ some young wonk in a short-sleeved shirt has said, ‘we need to encourage them to channel their specific skills into more mainstream work opportunities!’ As if Kelly and all the other women on my wing will be shown how to make their blackmail, theft, fraud, and other assorted crimes work in a more respectable way. To be fair to some of these girls, in another life they would have made great bankers. But even for bankers, a line in murder might be frowned upon. I have a few hours before the ghastly talk so I shall get back to writing.
When I left school and refused to go to university, so upsetting John and Sophie, I got work in the Sassy Girl shop in Camden. An obvious plotline for our heroine I hear you say, but I was 18, had to start somewhere and I naively imagined that working for one of Simon’s businesses would give me an advantage. I started in the stockroom, unboxing deliveries and affixing price tags, and graduated to the tills shortly after. The days were long and frantic. Stock flew off the shelves. The brand knew exactly how to appeal to teenagers back then, selling whatever had been on the hottest celebrity mere days ago. This process was a mystery to me – I remember imagining that the in-house designers must have had their finger so on the pulse that their clothes matched up with the latest couture completely. I later understood the reality: Artemis Holdings had grim-faced women in head office subtly altering said couture designs and running the amendments past the legal department. Once greenlit, the garments would be made up in any kind of synthetic fabric they had at the ready. The teenagers didn’t give a shit. Glittery jean shorts as seen on their favourite singer for £15, who cares that they smell faintly of rubber?
I surprised myself by enjoying my time on the shop floor. I didn’t have a minute to stop and think, I just worked really hard and did whatever was asked of me. Folding up stained and crumpled polyester after it had been discarded in the changing rooms put me off cheap clothes for life, but my diligence got the attention of my boss, a slightly scrawny woman who I thought was ancient but was probably under 30. She put me forward for the Artemis trainee manager scheme, a grand title which just meant I could be entrusted with handling the day’s profits. Aged 19, I was a titled employee with a badge and a lanyard and the power to discipline new backroom staff.
Jimmy was off to uni, along with most of our year group. There were a few who made it to Oxbridge, but mainly they flocked to Sussex, where it was said that drugs and parties were most plentiful, and Manchester, which gave cosseted North London kids some delusional idea that they were really roughing it. Sophie, bless her, managed to spin Jimmy’s rejection from Oxford as a sort of moral triumph.
‘Well, Oxbridge is just too stuffy really, Sussex is such a vibrant campus and so progressive. The kids really learn so much more about the world than we did at St Hilda’s. Lucky Jim!’
I stayed on at the Latimers’ house for eight months, which was a thoroughly awkward experience for everyone except Annabelle, who I suspect liked having someone in the house who wasn’t a Latimer. With Jimmy gone and Sophie realising that she was one child closer to an empty nest, her need to try to nurture grew more intolerable. Every day she would make Annabelle a flaxseed smoothie for breakfast (‘Dear girl, there’s nothing of her, she still doesn’t need a bra!’) and she became fixated on trying to get her daughter to meditate with her at every opportunity. For a therapist, she was remarkably obtuse about the root of her neurotic daughter’s problems. But perhaps the children of other therapists would say that was pretty standard.
It was clear to all of us that the uneasy bargain we’d made when the family took me in was on its last legs. I’d come to their house too late in life to really be one of them, and Jimmy had been the glue which held us together. Without him, our interactions dwindled rapidly, and I took to spending more time out of the house or in my room. Earning my own money for the first time meant I felt less inclined to follow Sophie’s unspoken rules to the letter. I eschewed home-cooked food for McDonald’s and chopped all my hair off into a severe bob which even I will concede was a mistake. I don’t have the jaw for it. If I didn’t eat dinner with the family at night, Sophie w
ould tell me that she was worried about me. She was never cross, an emotion that she would have found too base. She just expressed concern endlessly. About my hair, about my ambition, about my lack of friends. She was right about the lack of friends. Jimmy was the glue there too. I had never found it easy to forge relationships. Partly it seemed like a skill I didn’t possess but mainly because I had decided early on that teenagers were terrible. I wanted to skip ahead to adulthood where I could be on my own as much as I required. I like to be on my own, and have never understood what weakness exists in people who crave the company of others all the time. Perhaps that was partly why Sophie and I never really connected. John was like me, he could hide away in his study or work late hours every night of the week. But she wanted everyone around her, that would show that she was a successful person with a family who saw her as the vital lynchpin.
So I moved out. They protested, which was understood by both sides to be the standard polite thing to do, and then John paid for me to hire a van and to buy a mattress. They also subsidised some of my rent, which I found uncomfortable at the beginning but grew to accept. After all, people like John and Sophie need to offset their guilt. Sponsoring a child you’ll never meet in another country is base level. Fostering a (semi) orphan is big league. I’d played my part, so why not let them help long term? I found a one-bedroom flat in Hornsey, barely a fifteen-minute walk away from the attic room I’d shared with Marie, and I endured one final meal with the Latimers. Jimmy came back from uni for it, Sophie was insistent, and after a desultory moussaka (the woman could never cook something if she didn’t find its provenance exotic in some way), he came back to my new flat with me and produced a bottle of wine smuggled out of the family home. We slept together that night, which was a strange but inevitable event. Sex was a form of intimacy we’d been growing more and more curious about as we got older, as we got closer. It was a way of binding us together even further – something nobody else could claim. Perhaps there was a control element for me too, opening up another part of me to him and only him in the knowledge that he would prize our relationship even more fiercely. It wasn’t just a calculated act on my part. I have spent years now wavering between loving Jim like a brother and wanting him like a partner. Sometimes he’s just a comfort blanket I take for granted. But he’s also the only person I know who could break my heart. I find it all confusing really, always pushing him away and pulling him towards me. It’s not surprising that I didn’t let him stay over that night. I didn’t want to find him there when I woke up in my new home. I wanted it to be mine and mine alone. But I still opened my eyes that morning expecting to see him lying next to me.
I worked and I ran and sometimes I would meet up with a schoolmate who’d come back home from uni for a few days. I cooked a lot, something I’d never really done before. I studied books about making your way in retail, some of the most boring words a person can ever have the misfortune of having to read. But they were helpful, if only because the bullshit jargon it used gave me a language that has helped me to this day. If you introduce a few choice phrases, you’re understood to be competent. ‘The PC will love this deal’ tells a retail manager you understand what the price-conscious customer is and also makes you want to walk into a door.
I walked up to the Artemis house most weeks, for no other reason than to remind myself of my ultimate aim. That aim felt like it was getting closer when I was asked by head office to apply for a job on the marketing team. I’d been working at Sassy Girl for nearly a year, and I had no real business working in head office, but I had pestered my manager near constantly to let me know if anything came up away from the shop and she must have taken pity on me. She recommended me for my hard work and interest in learning about the brand, and commended me on my window displays, which must’ve swung it. Who knew that pairing a pleather parka with a day-glo bum bag would count as experience? It was a bottom of the ladder job, but it was a rung on the fucking ladder. And it would mean working in the same building as Simon. Five floors and a world of marble away but still, a connection that meant something to me back then.
I lasted precisely thirteen months. The work was simultaneously stultifying and embarrassing. I had no interest in ‘getting the creative juices whizzing’ at roundtable meetings where we discussed shopfront displays and hearing about ‘merch to make the client wet themselves’ made me feel like I was living in a bad simulation. I got three good things out of the experience. The first one was that I earned great money for a 20-year-old and I saved it obsessively. The second was that I got to visit Simon’s house when he threw his annual party for head office staff. I would have given all I had to get a glimpse into that mansion on the hill and here he was, welcoming me in. A proverbial viper, slithering into the bosom of the family.
We got the invites at random. It was said that they invited people by drawing names out of a hat each year so that the system wouldn’t favour anybody over anyone else. So it must have been a coincidence that the party was full of senior management and pretty young girls working at a much more junior level. Gary, the obese website designer who sat three desks down from me had never been one of the lucky ones. Then again, his appearance and his vague ‘given up on life’ aura wasn’t one I’d want at a party either. The man ate instant soup with the same plastic spoon every day for a year. There were many other spoons available in the communal kitchen. Baffling.
The Artemis staff party was a fairly tepid two-hour garden event with canapés and warm sparkling wine passed round by bored-looking students. There was a candyfloss machine set up next to a mini maze, and a few people had made the mistake of accepting the floral hair crowns being woven by an earthy-looking woman who was completely out of place in this palace to greed. Turns out a slightly sweaty man in a grey suit jauntily wearing a flower crown is exactly what a loss of dignity looks like. Even with the dismal activities on offer, you could see that the event was a tick-box exercise – keep staff morale up by pretending to value them enough to allow them into your home. We weren’t valued enough to be allowed access to indoor toilets though, and a stern-looking housekeeper stood on the staircase should anyone think of going upstairs for a nosy. But for me, it was completely fascinating. This house that my mother took me to, that I stood outside of, knowing in my bones that I wasn’t ever going to be invited into. I was here. I was ushered in with a glass and a lukewarm smile. I spent a good twenty minutes just watching a maid discreetly follow people around and then sanitising anything they happened to touch. It was riveting.
Bryony clearly had more sense than to mingle with the employees and was nowhere to be seen. Simon stayed in one corner with the male members of the senior management, cigar smoke forming an orb around their heads. He did not interact with his wife once as far as I could tell. Occasionally a young female member of staff would be beckoned over and a roar of laughter could be heard across the lawn. One could only hazard a guess as to how many HR offences were being committed in the spirit of ‘banter’ by a bunch of men in tan loafers and open-necked shirts. I wandered around, drink in one hand, as though I was vaguely looking for someone, and headed through the French doors of the sitting room. Janine wafted around the doors seconds later, her hair blow-dried into a helmet, her gold jewellery clinking like body armour. I assume she was on high alert, the idea of anyone pilfering her lot-bought high-end knick-knacks too much for her nerves to bear.
I turned my head away and pretended to be looking at a gaudy painting of flamenco dancers and she strode past me, into the kitchen, followed by an anxious-looking woman in an apron and white gloves. Obviously she didn’t see me; people like Janine don’t have normal vision. They are blind to people they deem irrelevant. I don’t begrudge it, it’s a talent I admire. Why waste time on people who offer no value? The corridor was empty, so I continued walking, reaching a wide spiral staircase which would take you upstairs and to their more private space. I hovered, wondering what would happen if I was caught rummaging through the marital bedroom. Would I be
thrown out and fired? Would they do a background check on me? Probably not worth the risk, as much as I was tempted.
Instead, I spontaneously tried the door to the right of the stairs and stepped into what was clearly a study. Bookshelves lined the walls, stuffed with leather-bound volumes bought for show. I doubted anyone in this family had read the complete works of Dickens, let alone a volume by Derrida. Oh God, alphabetised. On the mahogany desk sat a fountain pen, a stack of thick cream paper and a large silver heart ornament I recognised as classic Tiffany. There were two gilt frames, both showing the Artemis trio: one which showed Bryony at her christening; the other was more recent, and peering more closely, showed the family at a Buckingham Palace garden party. Janine’s enormous hat couldn’t completely obscure the building behind them. They must have milked this moment to the max, as though it was a private meet up of mates and not a thousand-person gathering for people the Royal family would find appalling were they able to speak frankly and shrug off their duties. I picked up the photograph, and dropped it on the floor. Thick cream carpet cushioned the fall, of course. So I trod on it with my heel until I heard a quiet crack, and then put it back on the desk. The broken glass had come loose, and I used a shard to lightly scratch across Simon’s face. Then I cautiously crept back into the hallway.