The Personal Shopper (6 page)

Green necklace, green sparkly hairclips (Claire’s Accessories)

Pea green leather knee-length coat (Oxfam)

Total est. cost: £185

‘
So, ask me where I got my coat?
’

‘It could be worse,’ Annie’s younger sister Dinah told her as they surveyed a slimy, slightly mildewed shower curtain dangling by two hooks from a flimsy rail above a bath, possibly last cleaned in the 1990s.

‘It could,’ Annie agreed loudly. ‘If there was a large black, plague-carrying rat sitting on the kitchen floor, for instance, that would be worse.’

‘Shhh!’ Dinah urged. It was just like her to worry about what the estate agent and inhabitants of this sink might overhear. Annie couldn’t care less. This was the ‘exclusive investment opportunity’ she’d got out of bed early on a Sunday to view? What a joke.

She was exploring the possibility of swapping her beautiful, fully renovated home for both a doer-upper and a little buy-to-let, but if this was the quality of the doer-upper she could afford: forget it.

This was a gloomy basement prison, inhabited by three, probably more New Zealand travellers who clearly had better things to do than keep house. Every available surface was covered with their clobber: wet towels, unemptied ashtrays, clothes and empty beer cans. In the sitting room, five curry takeaway boxes were sitting like pre-schoolers in an expectant semicircle round the TV.

‘I don’t think they’ve been watching
House Doctor
,’ Dinah whispered to her.

‘Their landlord must be insane trying to sell it while they’re still all here.’

‘As you can see,’ the estate agent continued, ‘the lounge could benefit from a little freshening up, but there’s a lot of potential.’

Ha! Yes, with some effort, the room could be transformed from a filthy, north-facing gloomy dungeon with a view of a wall, to a clean, nicely painted north-facing gloomy dungeon with a view of a wall. On the plus side, the little kitchen faced south, was almost sunny on a good day and even had a minuscule strip of lawn outside it. But the deciding factor was the bedrooms: two little cubicles carved from one room with the ruthless use of plasterboard.

Each had a small double bed buried beneath a tumble of more clothes, towels and stuff.
The rooms smelled of damp, sweaty clothes
and cheesy trainers.

‘It could look just so completely different all white, Annie,’ said Dinah in her usual, touchingly positive way.

The estate agent was nodding agreement.

Were they joking?

In the kitchen, one of the tenants was making a fried egg sandwich, standing bravely beneath a flapping polystyrene tile that was threatening to throw itself off the ceiling at any moment.

‘What do you think of the flat?’ Dinah asked him.

‘Great!’ came his brief reply. ‘Obviously we don’t want anyone to buy it right now!’

Annie caught herself staring at his bare bronzed pecs a moment too long. She couldn’t think when she’d last been so close to tanned nipples. This really was a small kitchen.

‘Shall we go and take a look outside then?’ Dinah asked.

‘Oh . . . yeah.’ Annie tore her eyes from the pecs.

Out in the tiny garden, surrounded by tall walls on
 
every side, Dinah’s three-year-old daughter Billie skipped in a circle, oblivious to the disappointingly poor quality of the real estate around her. Her straight shoulder-length hair, the same light brown as Mummy’s, bounced on her shoulders and she sang something under her breath.

She came to a stop before her beloved Aunty Annie (the adoration was mutual), made an attempt at crossing her chubby arms and asked, ‘You can still be a fisher lady if you’re a princess, can’t you?’

‘Yes, definitely.’ Annie didn’t know what a fisher lady was, but she wasn’t capable of denying this soft round face, bright eyes and perfect pink mouth anything at all. No-one else was either, which was probably something of a problem for Billie’s long-term development, but no need to worry about that yet.

‘Well, I’m going to be a princess fisher lady when I grow up, then.’

‘What does a princess fisher lady do, babes?’ Annie bent down to make sure she didn’t miss a thing.

‘Well . . .’ Billie began, putting her hands on her hips and leaning forward in a theatrically conspiratorial kind of way, probably copied directly from her nursery school teacher, ‘it’s a princess, so she wears a pink dress and eats pink cakes all the time, but she also fishes, you know, with a fishing rod.’

‘And that’s what you’re going to be when you grow up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perfect. Now, I think we should go to my house and eat croissants. How does that sound?’

‘Yesssss!’ Billie began to skip in her circle again.

‘So, ask me where I got my coat?’ Dinah challenged Annie on the walk back to her flat.

‘That’s no use!’ Annie laughed. ‘Now I know you got it in Cancer Research or the PDSA. What did you pay?’ she followed up immediately.

‘Oxfam, thirty pounds,’ came Dinah’s completely honest reply.

‘Could have got it for you for less,’ Annie told her, but this wasn’t true today, it was just a knee-jerk reaction, something she always liked to say to Dinah when they were talking about shopping.

‘Could not!’ Dinah retorted huffily.

Annie and her sister Dinah – three years younger – had always understood each other almost perfectly. They weren’t alike. They appreciated each other’s differences and clicked. Always had done, ever since Annie had worked out how to scramble – carefully, without stamping on the baby’s head – into Dinah’s cot in the morning to make her giggle.

Although Dinah spent far less on clothes than Annie, she still maintained a lively, edgy style all her own and never shied away from a fashion challenge: tank top and Bermudas? Mini kilt and woolly tights? Sweater dress and kinky boots? Bubble coat? Dinah was game.

There was still an element of competitive dressing between them, left over from the days when they stole tops from each other’s wardrobes, fought to wear the same skirt to the same party, and cried when new dresses got ruined.

‘How’s Bryan?’ Annie asked next, aware that she’d been with Dinah for almost an hour and not enquired once after her brother-in-law. But then it was a badly kept secret between the sisters that although Annie was crazy about Billie and couldn’t imagine life without weekly get-togethers with Dinah, she wasn’t quite so smitten with Bryan.

‘He’s fine.’ Dinah sprang open one of her glittery green clips, readjusted it in her perky bob and smiled. ‘Still waiting to hear about that project, over in Hammersmith.’

‘Nothing else in the pipeline?’

‘Oh loads, he’s pitching for work all the time, but you know how competitive it is.’

One of life’s true romantics, Dinah, in Annie’s opinion. She was dreamy and sweet and softly pretty: pale skin, rosy cheeks, dark brown hair. After an unexpectedly druggie youth and many disastrous relationships, she’d finally found Bryan. A ‘soul mate’ (supposedly) just as kind and gentle as she was. Bryan was an architect, who only ever seemed to secure work on the smallest of projects like rearranging kitchen units, and as Dinah was
 
an
occasional
children’s book illustrator, they lived in a tiny flat, not far from Annie’s, but still a million miles
 
from
 
Highgate, in a state they liked to describe as ‘impoverished bliss’. It drove Annie slightly wild. She was
 
always nagging them to be more proactive and ambitious . . . not that it made the slightest difference.

Annie would ask things like: ‘But don’t you want to do up the kitchen at some point?’

Dinah, oiling some ancient French casserole dish she’d bought at Brick Lane market for 20p, would answer, ‘Oh, but at least this is a real wooden cupboard’ (squeeeeeeak, cue cupboard door falling off hinge). ‘Those MDF things get worn out so quickly. And this has character, I love to
 
cook in here.’ The fact that her kitchen was no bigger than most people’s fridges didn’t put her off either.

Or, ‘Have you thought about where you’re going to
 
send Billie to school?’ Annie, ever practical, would ask.

‘Oh, her nursery’s so
lovely
and most of her friends there are going to the local primary, so we’ll probably send her there and . . . you know . . . see how it goes . . .’ came Dinah’s rose-tinted-spectacle reply.

‘But you can’t! That primary school
came bottom of the entire league table!’

‘Did it?’ Genuine surprise, followed by, ‘But apparently they’ve got a
lovely
new head.’

Annie, preoccupied with earning enough money for
 
her family, couldn’t help suggesting moneymaking schemes for Dinah and Bryan: ‘If Dinah had a job just three days a week even . . .’ ‘If you put together a website, Bryan, showcased your best ideas . . .’ ‘Dinah, have you tried contacting other publishers?’ ‘Have you tried advertising in property magazines, Bryan?’

But she suspected Dinah and Bryan quite liked things the way they were: they liked not having to work too hard, they liked being at home with each other and their precious little girl.

For Billie, however, Annie had great hopes. Billie was aiming high with her plans to become a princess, and she was already displaying the ferocious negotiating skills of a Washington lawyer.

‘Just four more mouthfuls, darling,’ Dinah would beg.

Billie would shake her head.

‘Well, let’s say three then, so long as they’re big ones?’

Vigorous shake of head, lips glued together.

‘Two?’

‘NO!!’ would come the roar.

‘Just one tiny-winy little bit more then? Just for Mummy?’

‘N-O spells NO!’

Billie had a shiny pink moneybox in which Annie encouraged her to store all the pound coins she slipped her. It wasn’t going to be enough to pay for St Vincent’s, though.

‘Aunty Annie,’ Billie piped up now, ‘is it true that Lana and Owen’s daddy lives on a hill with other ladies?’

Startled by this question, Annie turned to look at Dinah for some guidance on how to reply.

Dinah just shrugged her shoulders and looked as if she was trying not to laugh.

‘Well, er . . .’ Annie began, but to her relief, Billie had already moved on.

‘Mummy?’ she asked next. ‘You know the pink fish we eat . . . is that a real fish? The same as the ones you catch? Do we eat
real
fish?’

‘I’m leaving that answer to you,’ Annie smiled, suddenly recalling Owen’s devoutly vegetarian phase, aged four.

Back at Annie’s flat, there was an overwhelming smell of nail polish. Lana and her friends Greta and Suzie were giving each other lavish, diamanté-studded manicures and trying to eat toast at the same time with the wet talons.

Annie made the girls and Billie sit down at the kitchen table where she spread butter and jam and cut toast into
 
manageable pieces for the manicurists, while Dinah went in search of Owen, who was in his room reading and hiding from the teen excitement in the kitchen.

Annie’s children had managed to jumble up their parents’ looks and features so thoroughly that they looked very like both their mother and father, but completely unlike each other.

Lana had Roddy’s thick, straight black hair, blue eyes and pale skin, as well as Annie’s fine mouth, nose and long limbs. Owen had Roddy’s face but coloured with Annie’s brown eyes, rumpled mousy hair and a tawnier skin. Although he might one day fill out to be muscular and sturdy like his dad, at the moment Owen was a lanky, slouchy, skinny boy.