“Six hundred pounds,” said Lizzie. How on earth could people do something like that? Lizzie lived as she ate: hand to mouth.
“Should have read the menu, the dick, instead of yelping ‘Two glasses of your finest brandy’ over and over again. No wonder the waiter was smiling.”
“Did he tip?”
“Did he fuck. They were still screaming at each other when I ran out of the door.”
“Finish the water,” said Lizzie. It might not get Penny to work on time, but it might get her to work.
Penny took a long slug. “Ah,” she said. “Like finest brandy on my lips.”
“You’re a bad, bad girl,” said Lizzie. “Go to bed or I’m telling Mum.”
Six hundred pounds kept running through Lizzie’s head the next morning as she made her way to the bus stop. Six hundred pounds. That was unbelievable. Who could, did, spend money like that? Even by accident. Penny was still in bed; she didn’t start her job, as Brandford’s most glamorous and also grumpiest waitress, until later.
Nonidentical twins can have a head start on the knowledge, usually learned by children through a procession of tedious and time-consuming upsets, that life isn’t always fair.
“Twins? Really?”
That was one of Lizzie’s earliest memories; people disbelieving their mother as to their provenance. Along with, “Look at the size of you!” and, Lizzie’s personal favorite, “So, is Lizzie terribly clever, then?”
Being dressed alike only made matters worse, so they both started having tantrums about it from as early an age as possible. After all, it wasn’t Lizzie’s fault that she stayed short and plump while Penny shot up. It might have been her fault that while Penny made sure her dolls were immaculately dressed for their tea party, Lizzie scoffed all the scones. And while Penny smiled politely and learned to simper at adults from an early age, in case they had a spare pound coin in their pockets, Lizzie preferred to stay in the background before anyone had the chance to say, “Good eater, are we?”
“They’re so different, aren’t they?” their mother’s friends would say, smiling meanly in a very unconvincing fashion.
“Out! Out! Out!” Lizzie would say to herself quietly in the kitchen. “Goodbye, visitors, time to go!” And once they’d gone, her mum would come in and give her a special hug and a biscuit, just for her plain little daughter.
And here the twins still were, twenty-seven years old and in the same tiny council house in Parkend Close, Brandford. Lizzie sometimes felt as if there should be a bus to take them off to real life, but if there ever was she knew she’d miss it, staying indoors and reading TV Quick.
Maybe the bus had come, she thought occasionally, as she spent yet another Friday night sharing a big box of Celebrations with her work friend Grainne and her mother in front of Easties, while Penny was off, weighed down by lip gloss, in borderline dangerous nightclubs, chatting up prosperous idiots who left their expensive shirts untucked and reeked of Hugo Boss. Maybe their dad had caught it instead.
Penny woke at eleven, screwed up her eyes, and groaned. OK. Another day, another minimum wage. That stupid bloody man from last night. She thought for a second and realized she could only just remember his name, and that it would probably be gone in a couple of days. Excellent.
She blinked in the cheap bathroom mirror. The whole place needed grouting, it was incredibly dingy. But their mother worked far too hard, Lizzie inexplicably was refusing to do it by herself, and Penny had paid a lot of money for these nails so she couldn’t be expected to under the circumstances. They seemed to have reached something of an impasse.
She threw on her Tesco ultra-skinny jeans and diamanté top, and got to work on her makeup. OK, she was only going to work, but you didn’t know who you were going to meet on the way, and by the time she’d changed into her uniform she’d look so awful anyway she’d be lucky to get a second glance from anyone half decent.
Penny rarely dwelled on her genetic luck, seeing it mostly as a means to an end, and preferring instead to wonder if she should get her boobs done and whether it really was worth applying for one of those loans she saw on television. So far, Lizzie’s shocked expression had just about held her off, but if she had bigger knockers she’d definitely pull a better class of bloke, and would be able to pay it back anyway. But even in her work uniform she stood out. Pale hair—when she didn’t go overboard with the highlighter, which she usually did—glowed over a small, heart-shaped face with a high forehead and full lips. Her eyes were long, like a cat’s, which she made even longer with liberal amounts of eyeliner in daily changing shades, and she had the figure that only comes to someone who has spent too much time watching what really goes on at a deep-fat fryer.
Lizzie accused her occasionally of anorexia, but it was pretty much sour grapes. Penny knew she had to be thin—preferably with big knockers—and didn’t think about food terribly often, unlike Lizzie, who turned to the biscuit barrel in times of joy, sadness, stress, tiredness, boredom, and random television.
Penny hated Brandford. She hated its estates, its graffiti. The underpass, the horrid cheap corner shops with plastic mop buckets, and cheap sweets being guzzled by fat grubby babies. She hated the stoved-in cars, the fact that practically her entire class had gotten pregnant at sixteen. She didn’t feel like she was made for this. Was it so wrong to want more? Really? Just a nice car? Clothes that didn’t come from a supermarket? So, school hadn’t worked out so well. It was a shit school. There was nothing wrong with liking nice things, was there? Even—Penny bit her lip as she applied the white layer of her mascara—someone to fall in love with one day, though she’d never have admitted that to Lizzie in a million years. Lizzie was such a drip when it came to romance, and everything else. She’d seen Dirty Dancing nine million times, snottering into her extra-large popcorn all the while. Penny and her friends had scoffed. Penny’s favorite film was Pretty Woman, closely followed by The Thomas Crown Affair.
Penny took the bus—God, she hated the bus—out to the junction of the motorway where the big shops were, at the entrance to London and the M11. In the vast fields of hypermarkets and massive, elongated versions of ordinary high street shops, there were mega-restaurants, huge places seating hundreds for birthday parties, hen nights, reunions, and kiddies’ parties. Penny’s was called the All-American New York Diner. There was a bucking bronco at the back, where girls would get on and shimmy their bosoms, and men would pretend they were having a laugh while taking it all incredibly seriously; the food was entirely brown and came in huge portions, and the cocktails were gigantic and sticky.
Penny hated it, but it had one major advantage: everyone went there eventually. Whether a works’ night out, or a divorcing couple meeting for a child handover, all sorts of people ended up prodding uselessly at the Death by Chocolate with triple-brownie fudge ice cream and chocolate sauce supreme. And she could spot them a mile away; they’d look slightly perturbed about walking in, wouldn’t know what to do with the sparklers in their drink, ask if she had fizzy water or salad (“There’s our bacon-bit surprise, sir,” she would say insouciantly), and she’d check out their shoes, or their watch, then play the comely wench a bit more. There weren’t many well-off single men in Brandford—one or two footballers in nearby Saffron Walden, but the competition for them tended to be intense and exhausting—but serving four hundred covers a night very often yielded results, as well as occasionally spectacular tips, which made Lizzie green, particularly as she had an indoor job, in an office and everything.