Me and You. Claudia Carroll

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      Dinner served. Determined somehow to survive and live to tell the tale. Mum and I jointly cooked, but then we’re the only ones round here who eat normally and still gain weight. The other three are like bleeding rakes.

      3.55 p.m.

      Conversation turns to a personal injury case Dad presided over in the District Court few months back, where Toby was a junior counsel for plaintiff. Toby won, record settlement. Got in the papers and everything, one or two scuzzy tabloids even lapping up the whole father/son thing. Dad was utterly mortified by all the fuss, but I’m prepared to bet good money Toby still has all press cuttings framed and mounted in his downstairs loo. Strongly suspect he thinks it’ll boost his chances of landing a quick shag.

      But if you weren’t involved in said case, and if you don’t happen to get the legal terminology, it’s all deeply, deeply boring, so while Toby’s telling yet another ‘hilarious’ lawyerly anecdote, I surreptitiously whip out my mobile from my jeans pocket and check it. Just on the off chance Simon has news. Or better still, in case Kitty herself has miraculously resurfaced. Who knows? Maybe having crashed out on someone’s sofa for past twenty-four hours? And now with nothing more than a minging hangover and a hilarious tale to tell?

      Course I’ve tried to check if Kitty is by any chance visiting her foster mum, but can’t. Already made two sneaky phone calls to Foxborough, Mrs K.’s nursing home, when I was holed up in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. No answer, though. ’Course not, it’s Christmas Day. Who in their right mind would be working on reception Christmas Day?

      Mum’s straight on to me. Asks me why I keep glancing down at my phone every few seconds. Then tells me to put the phone away, that it’s rude.

      3.56 p.m.

      Golden chance for Madeline to get yet another jibe in.

      ‘You know, Angie, you can just say if all this legal chat is a little bit above your head. We can always change the subject and talk about, ooh, let’s see now … what’s happening in the lives of the Kardashian sisters? Would that be a little more up your street? Or maybe the latest news from the catering industry?’

      ‘I was actually checking to see if there was any word from Kitty,’ I fire back, throwing her what I only hope is a scalding look.

      The whole table give long sighs and eye rolls. Yet again. All in lawyerly agreement I’m totally overreacting to whatever’s going on. The gist of what they think is that Kitty’s spending the day doing whatever suits her and clearly has better things to do than making phone calls. Yes, even to the best friend she stood up on her birthday.

      Relations between la famille Blennerhasset and Kitty are as follows: both Mum and Madeline are the only people I’ve ever met totally and utterly resistant to her laid-back, chaotic charm. Instead, the pair of them have her down as a notoriously unreliable, uneducated, lunatic flake-head from the wrong side of the tracks, whose worst crime in their eyes is that she’s a bad influence on me and has been ever since the day we first met. They hold her wholly responsible for my not obediently trailing after every other Blennerhasset since the Civil War and subsequently spending my days mouldering away in the law library. (Where I’d doubtless have ended up either an alcoholic by now, or else on hard drugs. Fact.) Mainly because it was Kitty who first encouraged me to stop always doing what was expected of me, but instead to follow my own dreams, and to live my best life.

      Which is why, not long after graduating, I took myself off to post-grad film school, to study as a freelance director. Which is kind of why, after years of great gigs coming in, I’m now suddenly unemployed. (Film production is what you might call a soufflé business, and this is not a good economy to be in the soufflé business, trust me.)

      Dad and Toby tend to be slightly more under Kitty’s spell, though every now and then Dad will remind me he still hasn’t forgotten about the time she filched a bottle of his Château Margaux for a piss-up we were both going to. Happened when I invited her to stay here one Christmas all of four years ago and he still hasn’t let it go. And I know right well Toby has a crush on Kitty, I can tell by way he blushes like a wino whenever she’s here and he keeps asking her if she’d like to swing by his flat sometime, to check out his fifty-two-inch Blu-ray plasma screen.

      ‘She’s clearly gone to visit that foster mother of hers down in Limerick,’ Mum is telling me, ‘so just relax and don’t let that girl ruin your Christmas, like she ruined your birthday.’

      ‘She didn’t ruin my birthday,’ I say loyally, to an exasperated eye-roll back at me.

      ‘I’m sorry, love, but it’s no secret that Kitty Hope is not exactly my favourite of your friends.’

      ‘Mum’s quite right, you know,’ Madeline pontificates, ‘so just stop harping on about what did or didn’t happen to Kitty and wait till she gets back to you. Knowing her, she probably forgot all about you and spent the day at some more interesting Christmas Eve do. Be perfectly typical of that nutcase you insist on hanging around with. Oh God, will you ever forget the time that she—’

      But Dad interrupts. ‘Scan not your friend with microscopic glass; you know his faults, so let his foibles pass.’

      Dad’s a great man for quotes, but I rarely have the first clue where they come from. Nice, though, to think he’s temporarily forgiven Kitty over the nicked Château Margaux incident.

      ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I smile gratefully back at him.

      ‘You know, I’m certain there’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about, pet,’ he says, leaning forward and gently patting my hand. ‘One of a thousand things could have happened to Kitty yesterday, you know. She’ll be in touch, you just wait and see. Never assume something is wrong until you have concrete evidence in front of you.’

      Subject dismissed as far as everyone concerned.

      Long pause, the table filled with sounds of nomnomnom noises, then Mum suddenly pipes up, sounding worried now.

      ‘Are you absolutely certain that you and she didn’t have some kind of falling out?’

      I nearly splutter on a Brussels sprout.

      ‘Mum! There was absolutely nothing like that, I promise! Come on, you know how close Kitty and I are. We’ve never had a single cross word in all the years I’ve known her!’

      Almost the truth. Only ever had one tiny blip with Kitty, in seven otherwise row-free years. In my defence, it wasn’t entirely my fault either. It was Kitty’s idea to shoplift two lip glosses from the Top Shop cosmetic counter just for the laugh, when she thought the place was so packed, no one would notice.

      Bloody CCTV cameras.

      It was v. scary, we were taken into a security office and threatened not only with the police being told, but even more intimidatingly, with being barred from every Top Shop branch on the planet for life. I was all of twenty-one years old at the time and while Kitty brazened it out with all the swaggering confidence of someone who’s had to fight all her own battles from a young age, I collapsed under questioning and just sat there, bawling hysterically. End result? We were let go with a caution, but to this day I still can’t cross threshold of any Top Shop without breaking into a cold, clammy sweat.

      Mum’s implication is v. clear though. That somehow, even without realising it, I did something to piss Kitty off, and now she hasn’t disappeared at all. She’s just not speaking to me.

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