Chapter 2: The Girlfriend Clause

The trouble with a secret, Talia reflected — folding her phone face-down on the counter as the key rattled in the lock — was not the keeping of it. She had been keeping things since she was seventeen and the keeping was easy, a filed thing, a closed tab. The trouble was the weight of the ordinary: you had to carry the secret through the ordinary, at its exact speed, in step, or it showed.

“Penguin,” said Jennifer, by way of hello, because that was the game — two years of it, one animal each, no repeats within a month, and a whole appendix of case law they had built by attrition (marine mammals counted as a family, a ruling handed down after the Great Otter Incident of their first winter, and appealed, and upheld) — and put the paper bag on the counter, and her mobile, and her badge, and her keys, in that order, the order of a girl decommissioning herself from the café one object at a time. She smelled of espresso and cinnamon and the rain on her shoulders, and she was, as on every Thursday of the known world, gorgeous in the specific unglamorous way that Talia had long ago stopped trying to explain to anyone, because it didn’t translate. Café-qualified gorgeous. Damp-fringe gorgeous. Mine, gorgeous.

“Otter,” said Talia. “And you’re dripping on the audit.”

“The audit can absorb a little rain. The audit is resilient.” Jennifer kissed her — the fast sideways one, delivered in passing, a fiscal transaction — and went to the shower, and the flat did what the flat did at seven on a Thursday: filled up with the small music of them. The boiler sang its two thin notes. Wet feet padded. The paper bag, examined, held two almond croissants bought at close for twenty pence each, and, wrapped separately in a napkin like a contraband item, the danish Talia liked, which had travelled home separated from its fold every Thursday since October, and which had never once been mentioned, because mentioning it would have spoiled the napkin, and some arrangements were too well structured to touch.

Nine days, Talia’s other ledger said, from the counter, in the voice it used for totals. Nine days live. Forty-one messages in the inbox, unread in bulk, triaged nightly into the categories that had quickly stopped shocking her: the photographers — can I shoot you, strictly artistic, you’d sign a release; the marrieds — discretion assured, my wife doesn’t understand me, the oldest ad copy in England, and the ones, she noticed, who always wrote longest; the tourists, the fantasists, the boy aged twenty-two who had written hey and nothing else and presumably wondered why the market ignored him. And underneath the categories, the arithmetic she was actually running: response rates, the badge effect, the tone of the photographs against the tone of the replies. The badge had been the first real finding — a verified-student halo, granted for nothing but an email to her university address, and the replies had doubled within four days of it clearing, which told you something cheerless about the market’s idea of student, and had told her something useful about her own pricing, and she had entered both in her notes without sentiment. It was a market. She was reading the tape. Nineteen of the forty-one were actionable by her own strictness; four were interesting; one was funny. There was no hurry — that was the whole point of a runway, and this was one, a long one, lit and quiet, and at the end of it the £52,000 would be standing there wearing a bow.

“Tal,” said Jennifer, through the bathroom door, over the water. “Question. Hypothetical.”

“Go.”

“If a girl’s shift pattern changed — purely hypothetically — to include Fridays, would a girl’s flatmate be devastated, annoyed, or fine about it?”

“Devastated,” said Talia, to the almond croissant. “Obviously. I’d have to eat both croissants out of grief.”

“Both croissants. God, the cruelty of this household.” Jennifer’s head came round the door with a towel on it like a particularly smug turban. “Because Marisol wants Saturdays covered and I said I’d think about it. Money’s money.”

“Take it.” She meant it; the audit meant it; the audit had a whole line for Jennifer’s earnings and treated it, correctly, as infrastructure. But something in her — something she checked and found annoying and checked again — had heard Fridays and seen the shape of the week rearrange itself around the gap, the way the flat’s light rearranged when a cloud went over the well of the yard. One evening less. One— she stopped the inventory there, because it was a Thursday and Jennifer was wearing a towel and the croissant was excellent, and there are thoughts you do not feed on Thursdays.

It’s for her too, she told the croissant, later, when Jennifer was dressed and arguing with the frying pan and the rain had started again in earnest. Every pound of it is for her too. That’s the entire architecture. And the croissant, wisely, said nothing, and the voice that kept the other ledger ticked a small item into a column with no name.

They ate at the little table with the wobble that had never once been fixed, because Jennifer maintained — reasonably, often, at length — that the wobble was character. Talia cooked the way she did most things, from technique: onions, paprika, the cheap cut made to behave through patience, a recipe that had come out of her mother’s kitchen in the town she never named and had been re-engineered, over two years of Sundays, into something that was entirely theirs. Jennifer cooked the way she did everything else — by enthusiasm, at speed, with casualties — so the division of labour had settled itself years ago and never been discussed, the way of all their oldest arrangements.

“Marisol’s cousin,” Jennifer reported, mouth full, “got dumped by text. At his own birthday. In front of the bouncy castle.”

“At his own birthday,” Talia said, with the gravity the material deserved.

“There was a bouncy castle, Tal. You can’t be dumped in front of a bouncy castle, there are rules, there’s a site—” and she was off, delighted, doing the cousin’s probable face, doing the girlfriend’s probable text, fork conducting, and Talia watched her over the top of her glass and did the thing she did perhaps four times a year and never said aloud, which was to run the counterfactual. If she took the profile down. If she deleted the forty-one messages and the bow-wearing £52,000 and kept this — the wobble, the bouncy-castle jurisdiction, the Thursday lights, the specific flavour of being loved by someone whose love had no floors in it. If the answer to money was simply less life: fewer books, a cheaper room, the degree stretched over more years like good butter.