The Things We Do to Our Friends by Heather Darwent

Author:Heather Darwent [Darwent, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

37

A new academic year began in September.

New notepads bought, new courses chosen: modern portraiture for Tabitha and me; more weepy landscapes for Imogen. When it came to non-work-related endeavors, it was important to Tabitha that we tried new things to broaden our horizons. To stretch ourselves, she said, and I thought of a body pulled at either end and stretched taut, until it reached the breaking point and snapped and splintered into two parts above the hips in a bloody mess.

Tabitha’s focus was on things that would help the business long-term.

“Clubs?” Samuel had thrown into the ring. No one asked him what kind of “clubs” he meant. He had started to mention girls who weren’t part of The Shiver much more by that point.

“Cookery classes?” Imogen had suggested hopefully.

Tabitha didn’t dignify the suggestions with a response, and it was an illusion that we had a say in the whole thing anyway. All other ideas were met with light derision.

She was prone to distraction, always drawn to any shiny scheme, and she did seem to recognize this in herself. She said she needed to stay focused on cash flow, which is why she decided that we should have a go at gambling. In a casino. With the money that we’d made over the summer. We’d made a lot, but we wanted more.

What to play? Poker was too fiddly. Roulette was just chance, really, and Tabitha didn’t like to bet on chance. We settled on blackjack. It was easy enough to get the hang of and, when we started, she had grand plans involving card counting. She thought we’d be excellent card counters. This was entirely misjudged. We were all predictably hopeless, while staying enthusiastic about playing in general as we sat around at night in the flat, going through round after round. Hitting and standing, and laughing the whole time. The end goal was a casino trip. None of us had been to a casino before.

We only went once, and I think that was always the plan. Sometimes they preferred the elegance of doing things once. Steal a cat from the street for the night, feed it milk, pretend it was ours, just once. Stay up all night on the roof, just once. And then talk about everything endlessly: the time we skinny-dipped in the North Sea; the time we counted cards at the casino. The memories of events became bigger and brasher, easy group folklore to dip into on demand and slide into conversation.

“It will be like Monaco,” Tabitha said when she told us what she wanted us to do.

“Monaco!” Imogen squealed, her hand to her chest, typically prudish.

“Monaco,” Ava repeated flatly.

And that’s how we treated it. Dressed up far too fancily in frocks that fell off our shoulders, floor-length like we were going to a ball, makeup done by Imogen, troweled on in greasy slicks. Tabitha wore something that was sequined all over, pale blue and unsuitable. Dastardly ice queen meets cruise ship glitterball. And then she kept banging on about Monaco.

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