Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (17 page)

I arrived dressed in some baggy jeans, a slightly grubby and oversized jumper and trainers. I had not bothered to wash my hair the day before, nor had I applied any make-up. I was, after all, supposed to be the thirty-something mother of two small children. A young woman holding a clipboard greeted me at the door. She was dressed in a blue skirt and pillarbox red jacket, and she looked like a British Airways stewardess.

‘Hello,’ she said, warmly shaking me by the hand, ‘and you are?’

‘Celia Wicks,’ I replied.

‘You’ve come all the way from Kettering, I see. We can give you travel expenses as well as the fifty pounds for attendance.’

Score.

‘Your children not with you then?’ she said, looking around anxiously, imagining perhaps that I’d left them on the pavement outside, tied to a lamppost.

‘No, I’m afraid that Rosie, my youngest, had a bit of a cold, so I had to leave them at home with their dad. I hope that’s OK?’

‘Of course it is,’ stewardess woman said, but I could tell she was disappointed.

She gave me a form to fill in, on which I entered my (i.e. Celia’s) name, address and other details.

‘You’re thirty-four?’ the stewardess asked, scrutinising me intently.

‘That’s right,’ I lied.

‘You have such lovely skin,’ she said.

‘That’ll be all the mayonnaise,’ I replied.

The testing itself was simple enough, though fairly revolting and no doubt hugely fattening. We had to eat various types of mayo and salad cream, occasionally neat but mostly smeared on either crudités or cheese biscuits, and say which ones we preferred and why. We had to express preferences for jars or bottles (squeezy or non-squeezy), whether or not we cared if our choice of mayonnaise was ‘ethical’; and give our opinions on whether we thought mayonnaise was a healthy thing to be serving our children. I said I
thought that it probably wasn’t very healthy, but I gave it to them because they liked it. Stewardess woman looked very disappointed indeed.

With seventy quid in my pocket (they gave me twenty pounds for the train fare!) I was off to my next appointment: a group examining the World Outlook for Roll-On, Solid and Other Types of Underarm Deodorants Excluding Aerosol and Spray Types. Christ. And I thought my job was dull. Given a choice I think I’d rather walk dogs than ask people about how much Lynx they use in the morning. After answering questions about whether my brand kept me dry all day, how many reapplications I needed to make during the day and whether I felt my brand a) was reliable and b) reflected my busy and hectic lifestyle, I was sent on my way with another fifty quid in my pocket. Money for old rope, this.

Perhaps thrift wasn’t so bad after all. I was really looking forward to the clothes swap party which I’d organised for Saturday night. In addition to Ali, I’d invited Kate and Sophie from Hamilton (they might be a pair of supercilious bitches but they’re my size and have killer wardrobes), as well as a couple of girls from Fleet & Partners, the law firm I worked at before I went to Hamilton. Jude also invited five of her friends: we figured twelve was probably the maximum manageable number given the size of our flat.

I had done a thorough wardrobe cleanout. First to go was everything Dan ever gave me or which
reminded me of him: this included the Marc Jacobs dress that I wore to the Hamilton Churchill party and which he thought looked so good on me, the Missoni scarf he bought me for Christmas and all the assorted tops and shoes and bags he’d lavished on me over the past year or so. I sighed. He really had been a very generous boyfriend. I did not include all the underwear he’d given me (his favoured gift but not really appropriate clothes swap attire), nor did I include the Louboutins, which remained hidden in their box at the back of my wardrobe. I just couldn’t bring myself to part with them.

What my wardrobe needed, I had decided, was an edgier twist. All the stuff I used to wear to Hamilton was a bit corporate, so I ditched most of that, too. There were about four pairs of jeans which I never wore any more, half a dozen jumpers, the odd jacket … By the time I had finished deciding what I was going to be offering up for swaps, a mountain of clothes, shoes and bags had accumulated on my bed. My wardrobe was looking streamlined. Some might say sparse.

But this was a good thing, surely? My new life was all about change, and that included clothes and accessories. Plus, style gurus are always banging on about ‘capsule wardrobes’, and whenever you see one of those life coach programmes, they’re endlessly berating their TV guinea pigs, demanding they chuck out their worldly possessions.

In true
Less is More!
spirit, Jude and I decided we
would ask everyone to bring a bottle to the party. I’d volunteered to organise the food, having nothing better to do all day. Not wanting the whole thing to seem too downmarket, I had decided that I would make sushi. At some point in my distant past someone had given me a home sushi-making kit, so on Saturday afternoon I rifled through our kitchen cupboards before eventually I found it. I was pleased to discover that inside the kit was a small, unopened bottle of sake. Just the thing to get me in the mood.

I thought I’d start out simple, with a little salmon nigiri. As per the instructions I had found on the Internet, I boiled up the shari rice, drained it and let it cool before grabbing a handful to shape into ‘a long oval form’. The bottom was supposed to be flat, the top and sides more rounded in order to get the salmon to stay on top. Never mind flat on the bottom and rounded on the top, I couldn’t get the rice to stick together at all. Bugger it. I ditched the first batch, had some more sake and started over.

The second batch worked a little better, and I did manage to form some respectable-looking rice bases. I had planned on doing fourteen, but it was laborious (and frankly, very boring) work, so I gave up after seven. Not everyone likes salmon anyway, do they? Next, I had to slice the fish into neat little rectangles. Or jagged, misshapen lumps, take your pick. These were to be glued to the rice with the help of a pea-sized serving of wasabi. I don’t know if my wasabi was too watery or my pieces of fish too ungainly, but
the salmon refused point blank to stay on top of the rice.

Damn. Nigiri is a deceptively simple-looking dish. I decided to move onto dragon rolls. I finished off the remains of the sake and got to work. It all started out rather well. I fried up my shrimp in the tempura mixture and they came out golden brown and delicious, exactly as they were supposed to be. I sliced the cucumber and peeled the avocado and got ready to do the assembly.

‘
Spread the rice on the nori sheet and flip it over the mat so that the rice is now facing upwards
,’ the instructions said. Huh?

‘
Lay the avocado and cucumber sticks you have precutted [sic] and line up some tempura shrimps and on top of that slice of eel
.’ Eel? Since when was there eel? Nobody had even mentioned eel until now. I laid out the avocado, cucumber and shrimp in a line.

‘
Roll it inside-out style
,’ the instructions said. Um, OK. I rolled up the nori sheet as best I could. Bits fell out from either end.

‘
Elegantly, cover the top of the roll with the layers of avocado
.’ What sodding layers of avocado? I’d used up the avocado. And there was nothing elegant going on here. The roll wouldn’t stay rolled up, the stuffing (I’m sure that’s not what you’re supposed to call it) kept falling out … it was a total bloody disaster.

This just couldn’t happen. Here I was, trying to show how together I was, trying to prove to Jude that I could cope, trying to prove to Kate and Sophie that
my life was going swimmingly, trying to prove to Ali that I wasn’t a total basket case, and now look at me. It was quarter to six, the guests were due here in just over two hours, the kitchen was a mess of soggy rice and greyish green wasabi paste, topped off with random bits of fish, and I hadn’t even started tidying up the living room. There was nothing for it. I dialled Tsunami, the very expensive sushi restaurant around the corner.

‘You have to help me!’ I wailed at the man who answered the phone. ‘I need twelve California rolls, twelve vegetarian California rolls, twelve salmon nigiri, twelve prawn nigiri, six salmon and six tuna sashimi and I need them now. I mean, within two hours. I could come and collect?’

‘We don’t usually do takeaways, miss,’ the man said. ‘We do cater parties, but we would need some notice for that.’

‘What if I paid extra?’ I asked, scarcely believing the words were coming out of my mouth even as I said them.

There was a long pause.

‘There are twelve people at your party, I take it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘We can put together a mixed platter for twelve. It will cost one hundred and sixty pounds.’

‘Done.’ I gave him my credit card details, trying as hard as I could not to think about how self-defeating all this was. I wished I had some sake left.

I tore through the flat, scooping the assorted sushi
mess into a bin bag and taking it to the bins outside (you never know, someone might notice it in the bin in the kitchen). I speed-tidied the living room, grabbing armfuls of trainers, laptops, iPods, magazines and other assorted junk and dumping them on Jude’s bed. Realising that I smelt strongly of fish and ginger, I hopped into the shower and was just in the middle of washing my hair when the doorbell rang. Crap.

Wrapped in a tiny towel (where have all my enormous White Company bath sheets gone?), I buzzed up the delivery men from Tsunami. There were three of them, all bearing platters covered in the most exquisite-looking Japanese delicacies. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. I laid them out on the kitchen counter. Way too perfect. Even if I decanted everything from the Tsunami-branded platters, it was going to be completely obvious to everyone that I hadn’t made these. Shit.

I grabbed a bunch of plates from the kitchen cupboard and began the process of laboriously transferring the rice-and-fish constructions from the platters to our plates, while at the same time squidging them in an effort to make them look less perfect. I took a fork and mashed a few of them a bit, and with a sharp knife I managed to unpick some of the nori roll in order to make everything look less professional. I heard keys rattle in the door. Jude was home. Bugger.

I grabbed the platters from the kitchen counter and sprinted to my bedroom, losing my towel on the way. I slammed the door and flung the platters under the bed.

‘Cassie?’ I heard her call out. ‘Is everything all right?’ She was coming down the hallway. I grabbed a robe and flung it around me. She knocked softly on the door.

‘Come in,’ I trilled, as casually as I could.

‘It’s weird, I could have sworn I just saw you run through the living room naked,’ she said. ‘You weren’t preparing the food with no clothes on, were you? Because that would be unhygienic. And quite disturbing.’

I laughed heartily.

‘You need your eyes tested, Jude. I was in my robe. And I wasn’t making anything. Everything was ready ages ago. I was just … checking.’

‘Well, it looks very good. I am impressed. I was expecting the kitchen to look like a bomb had hit it.’

Phew.

By eight thirty, half the guests had arrived. Well, Jude’s guests had arrived, anyway. They were all gathered around the kitchen counter, trying to find the bits of vegetarian sushi.

‘What’s this one got in it, Cassie?’ people kept asking.
I don’t know, I didn’t bloody make it
.

‘Oh, that’s avocado and cucumber,’ I said, sounding less than confident.

‘What’s the pink stuff?’

‘That’s … the sauce.’

I’d ordered one hundred and sixty pounds’ worth of sushi and most of it wasn’t getting eaten because all of
Jude’s friends are bloody vegetarians and none of my friends had turned up. Or should I say my ‘friends’. I’d emailed Ali about this thing when we thought about it on Wednesday and she’d sent back a message saying:

Bit late notice but sounds like fun. Will rope in Kate and Soph. See you then x
.

The ‘rope in’ part of the message annoyed me. It was as if I’d asked them to do something arduous or inconvenient. I’d invited them round for drinks, for God’s sake.

In any case, the non-appearance of Ali, Kate and Sophie as well as my other former work colleagues was inconvenient not just for sushi reasons. I had been expecting a bottle or three of Laurent Perrier Rosé to get the party started. Jude’s friends had all brought variations on a Jacob’s Creek Rioja. Rioja? Really? With sushi? I had mentioned to Jude that I was planning a Japanese menu. Perhaps she hadn’t told them.

But worse than that, far, far worse, were the clothes. When Jude announced that we were going to get started (it was after nine and despite my increasingly frantic texts there had been no news from Ali or anyone else), I began to get a glimpse of my prospective new wardrobe. Much of it – the best of it – came from Topshop. Some of it was handmade. There was tie-dye, there was crochet, there were old pairs of leggings, there were endless nasty, stretched, holey T-shirts which I would feel embarrassed donating to a charity shop, let alone offering as realistic swap material to my friends.

Oh. God. I
had
to get out of here, and I had to get out of here with
my
clothes. I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with my back to the hallway (the escape route to my bedroom), sipping a glass of warm red wine. My clothes, the clothes which I had intended to offer up for swaps, were in a pile next to me. Slowly, surreptitiously, I tried to push my pile behind my back while at the same time inching backwards on my arse towards the door. I was just about starting to think that I might be able to shove my clothes into the hallway, taking them out of eyesight and out of reach, then spill some red wine to create a diversion and leg it into the room with my stuff, when Tilly, one of Jude’s trustafarian mates, said, ‘Oh, gosh, look at these,’ pulling a pair of True Religion jeans from the pile behind me. ‘God, there’s a load more stuff here!’