Page 14 of Pride and Privilege

“Unfortunately, not your liver.”

“Oh, I pickled that long ago.”

His big blond smug self stepped further into the kitchen and promptly occupied eighty percent of it. In fairness, it was a very small kitchen, but mostly he was very large. Not in the healthy, vital way of certain furiously indignant caramel-haired gentlemen, but in a big beefy steroidal sort of way. Like those cows fed on growth hormones and late-stage capitalism.

He leant against the counter, right next to the hob where she was batch-cooking her week’s dinners—more money-efficient, both in terms of energy usage and ingredient cost. He picked up the wooden spoon—but not because he wanted to taste her food.He had already declared it bland stodge on numerous occasions but given her key ingredients were lentils and hope, she didn’t take that too personally. No, he picked up the spoon merely because he knew she needed it and tossed it in his hand. Like a tosser.

“Can I have the spoon, please?”

“Mm… What you gonna give me for it, Poptart?”

“How about leprosy?”

Maybe it was living with Lecherous Dave that had skewed her view of men to something so transactional. It had become apparent soon after she moved in six months ago—mainly because he openly propositioned her—that the amazingly low rent he was charging was because he was expecting her to sleep with him. She hadn’t, of course. And he was too lazy/unfoundedly optimistic to bother kicking her out and getting a new flatmate. Instead, he made her do all the housework, doubled her contributions to the utilities and…leched. She would have moved out long ago, but she simply couldn’t afford to.

With an angry huff at his refusal to hand over the spoon, she reached for a different one and stirred her stew. Soup? Dhaal? Generic food substance.

“Always so touchy,” Dave chided. “But never touchy-feely.”

“It’s Saturday. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

One of the very few benefits to Lecherous Dave was that he worked in a mobile phone shop and often worked weekends. He had once, in the distant past, before the financial crash, been an account executive or something with Goldman Sachs. They were the guys who schmoozed the big clients whose money people like Roscoe Blackton would manage. But his so-called glory days were long gone. Poppy suspected they were “glory days” in the same way that bigots mourned the days before political correctness.

“Nope,” he said with another toss of the spoon. “No work today. How about we entertain each other?”

“Sure. You talk. I’ll laugh at you.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to be nice, would it? Smile those pretty smiles at me? That face is wasted on you.”

Lecherous Dave was also, she realised, the type of man she had assumed Roscoe Blackton to be. She had assumed they were cut from the same greedy, arrogant, grasping, immoral, entitled City Boy cloth. And it had been a fair assumption, hadn’t it? So many menwerelike that, especially where she worked. And there were all those rumours. It had been easy to believe.

Or had it just been easy to believe she was worth so little?

“Dave,” she said, snatching the spoon back. “My face is wasted onyou.”

She slammed the lid on the bubbling pan and left it to simmer.

Once her dinners for the week were cooling in their reusable plastic freezer trays—more energy efficient to keep a freezer full—she made the long journey from the outskirts of north-east London to Lewisham in south London where her mum and brothers lived. Luckily, she could use the monthly travel card she used for her work commute so it didn’t cost her anything. But she stopped at the budget supermarket on the way and spent some money stocking up on a few essentials for her family. Which brought her remaining bank balance down to ten pounds and thirty-seven pence.

Her mum and brothers lived in a one-bedroom flat. The street itself wasn’t too bad. The flat was privately rented—they had been on a Council housing waiting list for years, but the only place they’d been offered was right smack in the middle of the area they’d been desperate to leave. They’d been here for yearsnow, and Poppy barely even noticed the way it fell to pieces day-by-day, the landlord doing nothing but inexorably increasing the rent.

She let herself in and found her youngest brother Harvey sitting on the living room floor playing a video game.

“Where’s Mum?” she asked.

“Work.”

“Oh. Maybe she texted. My phone died. Charger’s broken. Is Mum’s charger in the kitchen?”

Harvey just shrugged. He was thirteen years old and his conversational skills had been lacking even before puberty hit.

Poppy went into the kitchen and unloaded the little bit of shopping she’d bought, frowning at the half-empty cupboards as she folded the carrier bag, stowing it back in her handbag to reuse.

She found her mum’s charger in the kitchen drawer, glad they still had the same make of phone, and plugged hers in.

Was a mobile phone a luxury? Could she do without it? Work contacted her on it. And her laptop was so old and slow—and virus-prone—that it was much easier to access the internet through her phone. She used it to study—reading whatever she could ofThe Economistand theFinancial TimesandMorningstarandBloombergandInvestment Weekly. Some of it was behind paywalls, but there was a lot of information available for free. Dizzying amounts of it, really.

Back in the living room, she sat on the sofa bed and watched Harvey race a gaudy rally car on the screen.

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