This time, I drove myself to darkest Essex. Clearly my car was low status; the duty paps didn’t even stir as I pulled up to the gate. Scarlett buzzed me in and I parked in the same garage slot we’d used on my first visit. The red Mazda convertible I’d noticed before was still sitting in the far bay. It didn’t look as though it had moved. Scarlett was riding high; she only had to drive herself if she wanted to.
I found Scarlett in the kitchen, leaning on the range with a mug cradled against the top of her belly. This time, the joggers were black, the muscle T-shirt white. When I walked in, she was yawning luxuriously, unselfconsciously revealing the glitter of gold-crowned molars. Clearly she’d always lived in a world where nobody ever covered their mouth. ‘Hiya,’ she said through the end of her yawn. ‘Fuck, I stayed up so late last night.’
‘Were you partying with Joshu?’ I said. Not that I was interested. But part of my job is making conversation, bridging the gaps between me and the clients.
She snorted scornfully. ‘He’s up in Birmingham. Some new club opening. Needed the king of cool to scratch and scribble and stutter for them.’ She giggled. ‘It sounds like somebody’s granddad, doesn’t it? Like some old fart that’s lost his marbles. Scratching and stuttering. No, there was a Wife Swap marathon on and I got sucked in, watching all them hopeless pillocks trying to fit into somebody else’s life.’
‘It’s the bitching and the niggling we watch for.’ I have to admit, I’ve got a soft spot for Wife Swap too. ‘It’s car-crash telly. I’m holding out for the night somebody’s kid slaps the invader.’
Scarlett giggled again. I could imagine how much that was going to irritate me over nine days of interviews. Sometimes the clients have incredibly irritating verbal tics or physical twitches that drive me crazy. The only way I can deal with it is to keep an hourly tally and set little mental bets with myself.
‘If it was me, I’d totally turn them on their heads,’ she said, pushing off from the cooker and heading for the kettle. ‘Brew?’
‘I’d love a coffee. What do you mean, you’d turn them on their heads?’
‘I’d wait till they were all out at work or at school. Then I’d hire in a cleaning service and caterers. They’d come back home and think I was amazing. And they’d be totally pissed off with their real wife.’
‘I take it you’re not much of a housewife, then?’
She pulled a face. ‘I can clean if I have to, but these days I don’t have to. As for cooking – beans on toast, scrambled eggs on toast. Toast on toast. And that’s your lot. That’s what takeaways are for, right? So we don’t have to waste our time in the kitchen. You’re not one of them Nigellas are you? Domestic fucking goddesses?’ She couldn’t have got much more scathing contempt into three words.
‘I don’t do any of that fancy shit, but I like to make a proper roast dinner at the weekend.’ More Nigel Slater than Nigella Lawson in the kitchen, that’s me.
‘That’s cool, a proper roast,’ she conceded. ‘But I bet you’re one of them that likes proper coffee.’
I grinned. ‘You got me bang to rights. Have you got some?’
‘Yeah, that Carla turned up with a box of them metal pods for the coffee machine when she drove Georgie up the other day.’ The cupboard she opened contained a giant box of teabags and a plastic bag filled with a mixture of coloured metal capsules. ‘We only drink tea,’ she said. ‘We’re total plebs, me and Joshu. Well, he pretends to be. He’s not really. His dad teaches at a university and his mum’s a doctor. He’s a big disappointment to them, is Joshu.’ She dumped the bag by a coffee machine that looked like it’d had more design input than the space shuttle. ‘I hope you know how to work it.’ She turned and gave me that hundred-watt smile again, the one that made her whole face come to life. ‘Or I’ll have to give Carla a bell and tell her to get her arse out here to show us what to do.’
‘How hard can it be? George Clooney seems to manage it, and he’s a bloke.’ It didn’t take much figuring out, but Scarlett was impressed when I managed to fix myself a decent coffee in a matter of minutes.
‘You want to work in here?’ Scarlett asked, eyeing my shoulder bag. ‘ ’Cos there’s a table so you can take notes easily.’
‘I don’t need a table. I’ll be taping our conversation. I make the occasional note, but I just lean my notebook on my knee. We’re going to be sitting around for hours. It’s better if we’re somewhere comfortable. What about the living room, with the sofas?’
‘You don’t think that’s too much like, just hanging out?’
‘Trust me, just hanging out is good. The more you relax, the more natural you’re going to sound.’ She still looked dubious, but she led the way through. ‘Did you get a chance to sort out those photos?’ I asked before she settled in.
‘I had a look,’ she said. ‘There’s not much. Hang on a minute.’ Scarlett disappeared down the hall, and I heard the soft shuffle of her feet on the stairs. I’d asked her to show me her life in photographs, going all the way back to childhood. I’d found that photos often jogged memories. But they also made the clients drop their barriers as they were drawn back by the image into a sense of place and time, a vivid recapturing of smells and sights and sounds that could often unlock a whole stream of recollection.
As Scarlett handed over the meagre bundle, I knew this wasn’t exactly going to be a fertile field for us. Like most people, I spent my teens thinking my parents were pretty useless – out of touch, out of time, out of ideas. But at least they understood that when you have a kid, you’re supposed to pay attention to them. My life in pictures would have been a thick bundle of holiday snaps, school photos, moments of pride captured by the camera and a record of family celebrations. My cousin’s wedding, my grandparents’ golden wedding, my nephew’s christening. All faithfully preserved for posterity.
It hadn’t been like that for Scarlett. Whatever her parents had been doing, it hadn’t included demonstrating their pride in their offspring by capturing her every endearing moment. ‘Like I said, there’s not much.’ She shrugged and fell backwards into the sofa, her lips turned down in a pout.
Top of the pile was, predictably, the hospital shot. The new mum propped on pillows, holding the new baby close to her chest and giving the camera an exhausted smile. Chrissie Higgins looked more raddled than radiant. She must have been about the same age her daughter was now, but you wouldn’t have guessed it. Her face was puffy, her skin looked rough and there were dark smudges under her eyes. It could have been the toll of a hard labour, but more likely it had been a hard life. Nevertheless, I could see the resemblance to her daughter.
‘I wasn’t much to look at,’ Scarlett said without glancing at the photo. ‘I look like a hundred-year-old monkey.’
She wasn’t far wrong. ‘All babies look like that,’ I said. ‘But we’re programmed to love our own so we don’t notice.’
Scarlett snorted. ‘Programmed to love our own? I don’t fucking think so! My mum couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital and have a drink. She was down the pub before I was a week old.’
‘Did she take you with her?’
‘Sometimes. Mostly she left me with her mum. She was already an alcoholic. And my dad was in between stretches and she didn’t want to lose him, which meant she had to go out on the town with him. She didn’t want some other slapper catching his eye and snagging him.’ That blistering contempt again. ‘Like anyone would think he was a catch, for fuck’s sake.’ She folded her arms tight against her chest and sighed. ‘Is this what we’re going to do, then? Look at old photos so I can have a good bitch about how crap my life’s been?’