I blustered and blushed and stuttered, and he said, ‘Send me your address. I’ll pick you up at seven on Saturday. I’d tell you to dress up because I’m taking you somewhere special, but you always look great.’
So, after a statement like that – a statement that in a parallel universe could have been the beginning of the rest of my life – I was completely beside myself about what to wear. I had to look better than great; I had to take it to a whole new level.
I told Claire my dilemma and she said she had some outfits that would fit me – ‘From back when I had a social life,’ she said, pulling a bitter face. Which was patently ridiculous because Claire always had far more of a social life than me, despite all her hot air about never going anywhere and always being in bed by nine. But her social life didn’t include hot dates, I reckoned, so maybe that’s what she meant. I even felt slightly smug.
‘Come over tomorrow after work,’ she said. ‘We can have a dig around and see what I’ve got. You can stay for supper, but it’ll be with Mackenzie, so very low key.’
I left work a bit early the next day to get to Claire’s house. It was magnificent – in a suburb of Johannesburg I’d only ever dreamt of living in, with tree-lined streets and deep pavements, everything was quiet and green and even the gardens on the verges looked like something out of a magazine. Security guards lounged in small wooden huts, calling out greetings to the domestic staff taking dogs for their evening walks.
Claire’s house is set back on the property, with a long driveway that actually circles at the top, like some sort of English manor house. I hadn’t realised it before, but Claire and her husband must have money. Proper money. Family money. This house is beyond anything I could have imagined. The garden is beautiful – I arrived early enough to see it full of flowers I don’t know the names of, tall Jacaranda trees, what seemed like a field of agapanthus, and a play area with a jungle gym for Mackenzie. The lawn was green and perfectly mown like a hotel’s. It was a world that belonged to adults – not someone I thought of as a friend of mine. When you walked inside, the house could have been on Instagram – the perfect home. I looked around and thought, This is what I want one day.
‘This is beautiful,’ I said to Claire, after she’d led me through the entrance hall, which was a room that basically just contained a table holding a huge vase of flowers, and into one of what turned out to be several lounges. ‘Did you do it yourself?’
Claire looked around. ‘Thanks. Yes, I dabble with interior decorating but I’m sure a professional could’ve done a better job.’ She tweaked a perfectly positioned scatter cushion as if to illustrate the complete hopelessness of the place.
‘When I grow up, I want to be you,’ I said smiling.
She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. ‘I think you should stay you. You’re pretty fab.’
We walked through that lounge into a room where Mackenzie was enveloped in a deep sofa, watching TV. Claire introduced us and then told Mackenzie we were going upstairs for a bit to look at clothes.
‘Please can I come?’ said Mackenzie, already clambering up and wrapping her arms around her mum.
Claire rolled her eyes at me, but said, ‘Sure, sweetie – that’ll be fun.’
The three of us traipsed up the (gorgeous) stairs, and about halfway up, Mackenzie took my hand and said, ‘Who are you?’
She was so pretty and so smart, with her blonde hair in an elaborate bun and her blue eyes like curious beacons. You could see how perfectly she fit here, a little Claire growing into this world. She chatted and told me about her day at school as we walked through Claire’s (perfect) bedroom into a dressing room that was basically the size of half my flat.
‘Wow,’ I said, standing still.
Mackenzie tugged at my hand. ‘My mummy has wa-a-ay too many clothes,’ she confided. ‘One day Daddy’s going to take them all and give them to the homeless, and Mummy will have to live in a mangy old tracksuit and only one pair of shoes.’
Mackenzie was clearly echoing something her father had said, and I added a detail to the mental image I had of Claire’s Nordic-looking tyrant of a husband. But before I could say anything, Claire laughed.
‘And tell Julia what Daddy thinks about your toys.’
‘Daddy says my toys are appalling and disgraceful,’ Mackenzie said cheerfully. ‘He says he’s going to give them to the poor and I’ll have to play with a cardboard box like he did when he was a child.’ She paused. ‘They didn’t have toys back then. Or cars. Or phones. And everybody was poor. Daddy had to walk to school in the snow, you know.’
Claire laughed again as she began pulling out clothes from the cupboard,
