The Family Way

‘That’s nice.’

‘I’ve got a puppy.’

‘Lovely!’

‘I’ve got a dinosaur.’

‘I just want you to take it easy for a couple of days. Will you do that for me, Daisy?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Are her bowel movements normal, Mrs Marley?’

‘Shits like a carthorse, that one,’ said the mother, running her fat pink tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper. Megan stood up and faced the woman. When she spoke she was surprised to find her voice shaking with emotion.

‘You’re not smoking drugs in the presence of this child, are you?’

Mrs Marley shrugged. ‘Free country, innit?’

‘That’s a common misconception. If I discover you are taking drugs in front of this child, you will find out exactly how free it is.’

‘You threatening me with the socially serviced?’

‘I’m telling you not to do it.’

The woman’s natural belligerence was suddenly cowed. She put down the cigarette papers and began fussing over Daisy as though she was up for mother of the year.

‘You hungry, gorgeous? Want Mummy to defrost you summink?’

Megan let herself out. That woman, she thought. If Daisy were mine I would feed her good nutritious food and read her Harry Potter and never pierce her little ears and never let her wear cheap jewellery and –

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Daisy was not her child. She was just her patient, and she had three more to see on the Sunny View Estate before the start of afternoon surgery.

Megan pushed through the hooded youths at the foot of the stairwell. They didn’t laugh at her this time, even though their ranks had been swollen by a number of smaller hooded creatures, who looked like elves on mountain bikes.

These people, thought Megan. The way they breed. Like rabbits.

It was lucky she was here to save them.

Cat’s boss was the woman with everything.

Brigitte Wolfe had a business she had built from nothing, a boyfriend she had met in one of the more exclusive resorts in Kenya and, above all, independence.

If Cat’s dream on leaving home was pure, unencumbered liberation, then surely Brigitte was closer to achieving that dream than anyone she had ever known. There was no husband to answer to, no children to prevent her jumping on a plane to anywhere she felt like going. Nobody owned Brigitte. Unlike most people on the planet, Brigitte wasn’t trapped by her past.

So Cat was surprised to walk into Brigitte’s office at Mamma-san on Saturday night and find her boss feeding a shoebox full of photographs to a shredding machine.

Brigitte held up her hand, requesting silence. Cat stood there and watched her deleting a box full of memories.

Brigitte would select a photograph from the shoebox, give it a cold smile, and then feed it to the growling shredder. A wastepaper basket overflowing with coloured streamers indicated Brigitte had been at her work for some time. Cat noticed that the photographs were all of Brigitte and her boyfriend. If a forty-five-year-old property developer called Digby could reasonably be called a boyfriend.

There had been a string of men in the past, all that bit older and bit richer than Brigitte, and she tended to stick with them for two or three years, and then trade them in. ‘Like cars,’ she told Cat. ‘You get a new one before the old one fails its MOT.’

Digby had been around for longer than most. Brigitte always said that he could stay until she found a vibrator that liked going to galleries. Now Digby was clearly out, but it didn’t look as though it had ended the way these things had for Brigitte in the past.

Brigitte had taught Cat everything she knew about the restaurant business, and a lot of what she knew about life.

So while Brigitte fed her relationship to the shredding machine, Cat stood there in patient silence, as if she might learn something.

Cat owed her career to this woman.

When she had first met Brigitte Wolfe, Cat was a twenty-five-year-old freelance journalist eking out a minimum wage by knocking out restaurant reviews for a trendy little listings magazine. Write about what you know, they all told her, and after feeding her younger sisters thousands of meals when they were growing up, what Cat knew about was food.

And by now she also knew about restaurants, because the well-brought-up public school boys she met at university had all wined and dined her before attempting to take her to bed. It was a different world from the one she knew – the restaurants she had occasionally glimpsed with her father and his actor friends had seemed more concerned with drinking than eating – but she took to it immediately. Usually the food was better than the sex. What she liked most of all was that you didn’t have to cook it yourself.

When she met Cat, Brigitte Wolfe was nearly thirty, and was the owner, accountant and head cook of Mamma-san, a tiny noodle joint on Brewer Street where young people queued out on the narrow pavement for a bowl of Brigitte’s soba and udon noodles.

Over the next ten years London would become full of Asian restaurants that were neither owned nor run by Asians – bright, funky places with menus that served Thai curry and Vietnamese noodles and Chinese dim sum and Japanese sashimi, as if that continent was really just one country, with a cuisine that was perfect for beautiful young people who cared about their diet and their looks. Mamma-san was among the first.

Cat joined the noodle queue on Brewer Street, and wrote a rave review for her little listings magazine. When she came in again, not working this time, Brigitte offered Cat a job as manager.

As the listings magazine took a very casual approach to paying its contributors, Cat took the job. The magazine went out of business soon after. Mamma-san moved up-market and out of Soho, although Cat believed that the clientele were still the same ragged-trousered kids who had queued up on Brewer Street all those years ago before going dancing at the Wag, just ten years older and, a decade into their careers, a lot more affluent. Brigitte seemed to enjoy her restaurant as much as they did.

‘A great man once said, Arrange your life so that you can’t tell the difference between work and pleasure.’

‘Shakespeare?’ said Cat.

‘Warren Beatty,’ said Brigitte.

It was love at first sight. Cat had never met anyone who could quote Warren Beatty, although her mother claimed that he had once touched her arse backstage at the London Palladium. Brigitte had more fun than anyone Cat had ever known. After the domestic drudgery of her childhood, here was life as it ought to be lived.

When most of the city was still sleeping, the two women toured the markets – Smithfield for the restaurant’s meat, Billingsgate for their fish, New Spitalfields for vegetables. Red-faced men in stained white coats shouted at each other in the pre-dawn gloom. Cat learned how to hire good kitchen staff, and how to fire the bad ones when they turned up drunk or stoned, or couldn’t keep their hands off the waitresses.

Cat learned how to talk to the wine merchant, the VAT man, the health inspector, and to be scared of none of them. Although she was only four years older, Brigitte felt like the closest thing to a mother that Cat had ever had.

Brigitte was one of those European women who seem to discover a lifestyle they like in their middle twenties, and then stick with it for ever. She had never married. She worked harder than anyone Cat knew, and played hard too – twice a year she flew off to walk in the foothills of the Himalayas or dive in the Maldives or drive across Australia.

Sometimes she took Digby with her, and sometimes she left him at home – more like a favourite piece of luggage than a man. Brigitte enjoyed her life, and for years she had been Cat’s North Star, guiding her way, showing her how it was done. This unencumbered life.

But now Brigitte selected a photograph of Digby and herself on a blinding white beach. The Maldives? Seychelles? One last look, and she fed the photo to the shredding machine.

‘What’s he done?’ Cat said.

‘He wants to be with someone who can bring something new to a relationship.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, for example, a pair of twenty-four-year-old tits.’