‘It’s … I dunno. It’s just like, a house. You know. A door, some windows, a staircase, some rooms. It’s not like …’ She spreads her arm in an arc across the extraordinary glass structure they’re sitting within.
‘Yeah, well, not much is like this place, I guess.’
‘What was it like, your old house? In Guernsey?’
‘Oh, you know. Pretty spectacular too. Right on a cliff’s edge. Overlooking the sea. We still own it.’
‘Wow,’ says Tallulah, shaking her head slowly at the concept of owning not one, but two properties as incredible as this.
‘Plus there’s my dad’s apartment in Bloomsbury.’
‘He has an apartment in London?’
‘Yeah. A penthouse with views over the British Museum. It’s really cool.’
Tallulah shakes her head again. ‘What’s it like to be so rich?’ she asks.
Scarlett smiles and rises to her feet. ‘It’s nice, I suppose. But, you know, it would also be nice to have a father who wants to live with you and a mother who likes you and a brother who doesn’t always have something better to be doing. It would be nice just to be a normal family. Like the ones onGogglebox. You know.’ She points at the drinks cabinet behind her and says, ‘Rum? Or is it too early?’
Tallulah looks at the time on the oversized clock hanging on the wall beside her. It’s five o’clock. Zach will be leaving work now. In about forty-five minutes or thereabouts he’ll get home and Tallulah’s mum will explain to him where Tallulah is and he will try calling her and she will have to ignore his call and then send him a lie in a text message. She doesn’t want to be drunk then. She needs to keep a clear head.
‘Six o’clock would be better,’ she says.
Scarlett smiles. ‘You’, she says, turning away from the drinks cabinet, ‘are a good influence. I had a feeling you might be. Cup of tea?’
‘Cup of tea would be lovely.’
The sky is starting to darken. Tallulah sees it growing bruises across the top of the trees behind the house, feels the night start to close down her options.
‘Will you stay over?’ asks Scarlett, as if reading her thoughts.
‘I don’t know yet. Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’ she responds, teasingly.
‘Yes, maybe.’ Tallulah smiles and realises she’s doing something she’s never done before in her life. She’s flirting. She wonders at this for a moment, as she stares at the outline of Scarlett’s body, the jutting angles of it, the long stretch of off-white wrist visible below the turned-up cuff of her scruffy sweatshirt, the tight lines of cartilage and bone pressing at the skin. She looks at the bobbles on Scarlett’s sports socks, the patches of dog hair on the knees of her joggers. She looks at the way her hair is hanging halfway out of a towelling scrunchy. She looks at the large spot on her jawline and notes that her lips look dry and she needs to put some balm on them. She looks at a girl who is too thin and too scruffy and might not have had a shower this morning and maybe not even this week. She sees a girl who drinks rum when she’s alone and cuts off friendships when they threaten to overwhelm her and boyfriends when they’re too good for her. She sees a girl who’s on the edge of oblivion, maybe looking for something to hold on to and she knows somehow that that thing is her.
‘Well,’ says Scarlett, topping up the kettle from the tap. ‘I’ll have to see what I can do to persuade you then.’
‘Where’s your mum?’
‘Date night with Dad in London. She drops in on him unannounced whenever she suspects there might be someone hanging around. You know.’
‘You mean, having an affair?’
‘Yes. That sort of thing.’
‘And is he?’
‘Having an affair?’ She shrugs. ‘Fuck knows. Probably. He’s rich and old. Rich old men get mega muff.’ She sniffs and putsthe kettle back on its base. ‘Whatever. I don’t care. It’s just old-people stuff.’
They sit with their mugs of tea and Scarlett puts a playlist through the Sonos speaker system and they chat for a while about their lives, their parents, their plans. At some point it gets entirely dark and Tallulah is quietly surprised when her phone buzzes.
She turns it over, glances at the screen, sees Zach’s name, locks the screen, turns the phone over.
‘Who was that?’
‘No one,’ she replies.