rumour (that I was completing a sex change and would be coming back in the New Year as Terence), and after I had received the fifth phone call of the day explaining no one was hiring at the moment, that things were really tough right now and asking if I had considered retraining as a teacher, I gave up. As in, I took off my people clothes and put on my most disgusting threadbare flannel pyjamas, ate everything in the fridge and turned off my stolen phone. And when I turned it back on twenty-four hours later, the only people who had tried to contact me were Amy and Charlie. So I turned it back off again. The only bright spot was that when I left my room at EastEnders o’clock, Vanessa had mysteriously disappeared and taken her suitcase and toxic personality with her.
For the past seventy-two hours I had only got out of bed to pee, take something out of the fridge or fetch another Sex and the City boxset from the living room. No one ever got laid off in Sex and the City. And they all got the men they wanted in the end. Even if one of them was Steve. It did not make me feel better. I did not turn it off.
But three days later, the universe and Amy had decided enough was enough.
‘Get up, get up, get up!’ She started slapping at either side of my head and bouncing up and down on top of my bed. ‘It’s Saturday. You’ve got to get up. We’re staging an intervention.’
‘I don’t want to be intervened,’ I croaked, pushing Amy away and throwing myself face first into my pile of pillows. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, you’re not Anne Frank, you’re not hiding from the Nazis. It’s time for you to get your arse up and out,’ she said, jumping on my back and wrapping her legs around my waist. She was very strong for such a little girl. ‘You need to get in the shower. We’ve got places to go, people to see.’
‘Not possible,’ I remonstrated, pushing up onto all fours and trying to shake her off, but Amy clung to me as though she was riding a scabby horse. ‘Let me go back to sleep.’
‘We haven’t got time – I’m double-parked. Get dressed, you filthy mare.’
Of course the other person in Amy’s intervention was Charlie. I shook Amy loose and tried to push the dead cat on top of my head into something resembling a ponytail. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent more than one night on my bathroom floor holding my hair back while I brought up half of the student union bar, but still, I tried to avoid looking like utter scum in front of him when I could. If I could.
‘How are you double-parked? You haven’t got a car.’ I blinked at the daylight and the very tall, very lovely man silhouetted by my window.
‘It’s mental, Tess. You just go on the Internet and ask a man if you can borrow one, and then you give him your credit card details and, fuck me, you’ve got a car,’ he replied. Sarcasm was not one of Charlie’s strong points. As opposed to his beautiful, floppy hair and wonderful eyes. And his long, long legs. And broad chest. I was going off topic.
‘If you hadn’t gone the complete Howard Hughes, you’d remember that this afternoon is my niece’s christening and we are attending,’ Amy said, releasing her kung fu grip and rolling across the bed as she wrinkled her tiny nose. Her black bob was ruffled from over-exertion and her cheeks were flushed. She looked the very picture of health. She looked like my complete opposite. ‘So get up and get in the shower because we are on our way up north whether you like it or not.’
Those karma gods were not playing fair.
‘Tess! Amy!’
As was tradition, my mum leapt up from the kitchen table as though I was returning from the war and we hadn’t called seventeen minutes ago to say we were getting off the M1 and would be there in seventeen minutes. No hugs, though. We didn’t hug.
‘And Charlie.’
As was tradition, my boy best friend was met with a wildly inappropriate growl of a hello, as he had been ever since the first time I’d brought him home. The only person on earth who loved Charlie more than I did was my mum. I wasn’t sure if she wanted him to marry me or marry her. Of course she was already married and my stepdad was possibly the best man on earth, but that didn’t stop her from giving him a squeeze that was just half a heartbeat too long. They hugged. They always hugged.
‘Nice to see you, Julie,’ he squeaked as she copped a sneaky feel. ‘You look well.’
‘Isn’t it a lovely weekend?’ Once she had put Charlie down, Mum sat back at the table while Amy helped herself to everything in our fridge. ‘It’s going to be a lovely christening. Amy, you must be so proud of your sister.’
‘Yes, getting accidentally knocked up is quite the achievement these days,’ Amy replied, popping the top off a beer. ‘And two kids to two different men. She’s a living miracle.’
‘So proud,’ Mum beamed, stone cold smile on her face. ‘And what are you doing for work now? Are you still seeing that lovely coloured man?’
I shook my head and planted my face on the cool kitchen table. It smelled of disinfectant wipes and shame.
‘No, that was really just a sex thing,’ Amy said. She did love going toe to toe with my mum. And the worst part was that she was really only warming up for her own mother. ‘But you know what they say – once you go black—’
‘I haven’t, but that’s very interesting.’ Mum always got bored before Amy did and so she turned her attention to Charlie. ‘And what about you, love? How’s work? Tess still acting the slave driver?’
Because the atmosphere wasn’t tense enough already.
During the two-hour drive up into the seventh circle of hell, Amy and Charlie had been thoroughly briefed on the situation. They knew that I had not told my mother about my newly unemployed status, and they knew I was not planning to do so. Originally I just hadn’t been able to face it. And then I had convinced myself I’d be able to get a new job so quickly that there wasn’t any point in telling her. And then I’d spent three days under the duvet eating packet after packet of Hobnobs.
Charlie thought I should tell her. Charlie thought my mum was nicer than Mary Poppins on Xanax. Charlie loved my mum because my mum loved Charlie. Amy did not think I should tell her. Amy thought my mum was a word I’d only ever said out loud twice in my entire life. Amy did not love my mum because my mum did not love Amy. And while no one wants to think badly of their parents, Amy’s opinion of my mum was probably closer to the truth than Charlie’s. It was comforting to know there was someone out there who knew everything about me and wasn’t genetically or legally required to love me but did so anyway. Unfortunately, it also meant that Amy had witnessed all the rows, all the shouting and all the tears, and, as was right and proper for a best friend, she held all the grudges I was biologically denied.
I loved my mum and I knew that she loved me. I also knew that she loved me more when I was doing well. If I got ninety-eight percent in a test, she wanted to know what had happened to the other two percent. If I got a pay rise, she wanted to know why it wasn’t a promotion. If I got a promotion, she wanted to see a business card to verify it. She was a pusher. She was a pushy mother. Whenever I got upset about it, I tried to remind myself I should be happy that she focused her efforts on shoving me up the academic and professional ladders, and even happier that reality TV didn’t exist when I was a kid. I would almost certainly have ended up on X Factor, dancing to Kelis’s Milkshake in a diamante bra-and-knicker set at the age of six. It wasn’t her fault, I reminded myself for the thousandth time that year; she just wanted the best for me. She just wanted me to have the things that she didn’t. And she’d watched Working Girl too many times in the eighties. It wasn’t a coincidence that I was called Tess.
‘Oh, you know Tess doesn’t work in my team,’ Charlie replied with careful diplomacy. ‘And thank goodness. She’s so good at her job, she’d just show me up.’
He always knew the right thing to say. Mum and I sat across from each other and smiled in tandem. Her hair was shorter than mine and starting to go grey, but we had the same colour eyes and identical gigantic rack. I’d got my Big Bird