‘She might be helpful,’ echoed Ruby, looking at me sympathetically. It was the way you’d look at someone who’d just been told they had a terminal disease and three days to live.
Hugo was still mopping steak juice with his finger.
God, my family.
‘Fine,’ I repeated, picking up another chip and jabbing it in the air at them like a knife. ‘But if I go, you all have to remember what I said tonight – we’re never ever discussing my love life as a group activity again.’
‘All right, all right, Germaine Greer,’ said Mia, ‘keep your hair on. Now, can we chat dates for wedding dress shopping? Since you two are bridesmaids, I want you in the same thing. I was thinking coral?’
So I was right about the bridesmaid dress being sick-coloured.
It was bright the next morning, the sun already warming the attic, so I got out of bed and stood in front of my full-length mirror, naked apart from my pants, to gauge how fat I was feeling. I knew I wasn’t really fat. Not fat fat. But I examined my stomach in the mirror every morning anyway. Bloated? Not bloated? I poked my belly with a finger and slumped so it bulged out beneath my tummy button, then straightened again. I cast my eyes down over my thighs (I wished they were smaller), upwards towards my chest (I wished it was bigger) and then ran a hand through my hair which hung in no discernible style to just below my shoulders. I had to straighten it every time I washed it, otherwise it frizzed out, making me look like a spaniel.
I showered and returned to my bedroom. From the hanging cupboard, I retrieved one of four pairs of identical navy trousers from Uniqlo. From my tops drawer, I took out and unfolded a navy T-shirt. I laid them on my bed and returned to my chest of drawers for a pair of ironed and folded black knickers, peeled from a neat row, plus a bra. I dressed, tied my hair up in its usual ponytail and made my bed.
‘Let’s go, pal,’ I said to Marmalade, scooping him up and counting the stairs in my head as we went down – two, four, six, eight, ten, two, four, six, eight, nine, ten, two, four, six, eight, ten.
I put two slices of bread in the toaster for breakfast: toast with honey, one cup of coffee. After that, I’d make lunch. This, too, was always the same: a cheese and tomato sandwich with butter and pickle, which had always gone pleasantly soggy by 1 p.m., and a piece of flapjack from a batch I made every Sunday afternoon.
I was bad with change. Didn’t like it. So I wore the same outfit and ate the same lunch every day because it made me feel safe. It was a form of control; if my daily life remained unvarying, constant, then nothing calamitous could go wrong. I liked uniform days which ended with me lying on the sofa, reading, while a cookery show played on TV. Ideally one with Mary Berry in it. I liked Mary because she was neat and orderly.
Occasionally I worried such a quiet, unambitious life meant I’d be alone for ever, never brave enough to fall in love or go abroad. The furthest I’d ever travelled was to my grandmother’s in France, which was ironic considering my parents were keen explorers who met in India. Mum had been an idealistic 23-year-old who taught English at a school in a Mumbai suburb, and lived in a small apartment nearby where she was woken in the morning by monkeys shrieking on her balcony. I’d always held on to the idea of those noisy monkeys, one of the only stories I could remember her telling me.
Dad was living in the city at the same time, a student writing his dissertation on dynastic Indian politics. This topic had apparently acted as an aphrodisiac on Mum, who’d met him one evening when he was invited over to dinner by her flatmate. That was that. They became inseparable, until the car crash in London eight years later. The crash that rocketed into our lives like a comet and changed everything. That was when I realized change was bad. So, the same clothes; the same lunch; every Monday, by and large, the same as the previous Monday, and the Monday before that. If life stayed the same, life was safe.