Page 15 of Pride and Privilege

“Did you know a new phone charger is fifteen quid?” she asked Harvey.

He grunted.

Fifteen quid. Which meant that now she’d bought those groceries, she couldn’t get one until she got paid. She’d even asked Dave if he could get her one cheap from work, but ofcourse he’d said no. Actually, what he’d said was: “You know what you need to do, Poptart. You scratch my back…” She had declined the offer.

“Do youhavefifteen quid?” Harvey said, not looking around from his game.

She felt a little surge of fondness that he was taking an interest in her plight as she looked at the back of his head, his short, fuzzy, dark brown hair. He had thick dark eyebrows, too, and other than sharing pale, freckled skin, looked nothing at all like her, taking mostly after his dad.Shelooked a bit like her mum, who was strawberry blonde, but she had no idea what her dad looked like, except one old, blurry school class photo taken when he was fourteen or so. He basically looked like all the other boys. A bit of puppy fat. Navy blue school uniform jumper. Crooked tie. Round white face and short brown hair. Indistinguishable, really, from a million others. Her other brother Liam’s dad was Ghanaian and the only one vaguely still in their lives, turning up once or twice a year. Liam’s birthday. Sometimes Christmas.

When they went out together—Poppy, her mum, her two brothers—nobody ever thought they were a family. Leaving aside their varying appearances, her mum looked almost young enough to be her sister, and Poppy looked almost old enough to be Harvey’s mother—if she’d got pregnant at fifteen, like her mum had.

“No, I’ve got nothing until I get paid,” she told Harvey. “I’ll have to buy the charger then.”

“Do you have ten? Only I need it for a school trip.”

Oh.That’swhy he was asking. “A school trip? Have you asked Mum?”

“Yeah, but she said she can’t ‘til next week. But school are saying they need it Monday or I can’t go.”

“Where’s it to?”

“I dunno. Some museum or something.”

“Is it important?”

She winced at her question. Ofcourseit was important. School was important. Her grandparents had drilled that into her daily. They’d basically raised her for thirteen years, while her mum finished her own schooling then started work. To them, education was the route to a better life. No one in her family had ever gone to university. But her grandparents didn’t want Poppy to get trapped the way her mum had. They had aspirations. Desperately wanted Poppy to be smart, do well at school. And they had fairly old-fashioned notions of how to go about it. They didn’t let her watch much TV—except Countdown and other quiz shows and the news—and they insisted on having Classical FM on the radio. They did puzzles with her: crosswords and word searches and sudoku. They read books. They went to the library. A lot. (It was free.) And they always, always made her do her homework. No excuses. Ever.

“Any homework this weekend?” she asked Harvey.

“Nah.”

Ought she press him? Because she didn’t believe him. But she wasn’t his mum. And it was hard sometimes to have the energy to do all the right things—to be the awkward one, always pushing.Did you check out the food bank this morning? Did you fill in that form? Where did the money go that I gave you to top up the electricity meter? Where did Harvey get that video game?

Her grandparents hadn’t nagged. Or she didn’t remember it. They seemed to lead by example. They’d been working class themselves, lived in a council house—but how big that house had seemed: semi-detached, three bedrooms, a garden at the frontandthe back. And her grandad had worked most of his life, until he did his back in. And her grandmother had worked in a shop, until Poppy was born. And somehow there had always been sweets and ice creams and trips to the seaside—on thetrain down to Kent, to Whitstable. Things had been pretty OK. A normal sort of life.

That’s all she wanted to give her family, really. A normal sort of life. But even handing over half her paycheck barely kept them fed. Her mother’s wages covered the rent. Just. Liam’s went on utilities. Her contribution paid for everything else.

She sometimes wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed in school, gone to university like her grandparents hoped. Would that have been the better option? Or just landed her with debt? It was irrelevant anyway. Eight years ago, she’d found her mother crying in the kitchen, and there had been no food, and her brothers were hungry…

But she didn’t want Harvey to have to make that choice in a few years’ time. Little as he cared about school now, she wanted him to be able to stick at it. Go to college. Or get an apprenticeship. An internship. Something, anything, that gave him options.

“I can give you a tenner,” she said. “For your trip. I’ll walk down to the cash machine.”

And then she’d be left with thirty-seven pence to feed herself until she got paid. But her grandparents would have done the same for her.

SEVEN

On Monday morning, Roscoestopped the lift at the sixth floor and walked to Aubrey’s office.

“Like a carrier pigeon returning home. Get lost, Goldy?”

“Only existentially.”

Aubrey had just arrived himself. He eyed Roscoe as he unbuttoned his coat and lay it carefully over the back of his chair, then sat back against the edge of his desk, arms folded. “Everything alright?”

Roscoe glanced around. Not many others were in yet. He sank down into his old chair, fiddling with the coffee cup in his hands. “Intuition’s part of this game, isn’t it? Being able to read a situation. Understand what’s happening. Predict what’s going to happen next.”

Aubrey gave him an assessing look, then sat down, too. “Sure. That and reams of data analysis.”

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