4

In her compact but perfectly formed flat on the top floor of a white stuccoed house, in a once run-down but now regenerated square off the seafront in Brighton, Cass Richards brooded about her own life while she studied herself in the mirror and plucked at her stray eyebrow hairs. She screwed up her eyes, trying to get a good view through the detritus of necklaces and hairbands and scarves that hung over the sides of the glass. She really must declutter one of these days.

Her hair was freshly washed and wrapped in a towel. A choice of two outfits was laid out on her bed next door. It was Saturday night and, as on most Saturday nights, that meant going out. Usually to a party or a dinner. Tonight was a party. A friend of a colleague was celebrating something or other, she forgot what. They all blurred into one endless event after a while. This one was being held in the colleague’s friend’s house in Rottingdean. She knew the one, a characterful flint-walled pile near the pond. She had often driven past it. Admired it from a distance. It promised to be fun. If the friend owned the property, he – or it might have been a she, she couldn’t remember – must be doing OK, so hopefully there would be some interesting people there. By which she meant useful people. Good contacts. She was always on the lookout for good contacts.

She treated these events like work. Dressed smartly. No more than one glass of wine. No shovelling in the canapés like it was your last meal. Network, network, network. You couldn’t overestimate the importance of making new connections.

Her job was her success story. That was the one thing she had got right. So far, anyway. To be fair, it was all she had been concentrating on. She liked to see herself as a work in progress. Everything else – social life, family, relationships – was a bit of a fuck up, admittedly. She had read a book once, one of those self-help manuals that were mostly bought by people who were probably beyond it, and it had suggested making a list of all the things in your life that needed attention. She had been exhausted just by the thought of it, hadn’t been able to put pen to paper. Over the page, it had encouraged a second exercise entitled ‘All the things I like about me’. She had thrown the book in the bin.

The thing was, success at work was there if she wanted it. It was completely within her control. It was up to her to make something of her life. Everything else could wait.

Most of her friends were far less focused than she was. They fell into two camps: the ones who had simply taken jobs that paid the rent, that were a means to an end, and nothing else; and those who, like herself, were working at building a career. She was the only one who rarely took a day off, though. Who had tunnel vision. For Cass it had always been about setting herself up for success. She had no interest in running around like the oldest adolescent in town, drinking and smoking and pretending that going to clubs until four in the morning and waking up next to some bloke whose name you couldn’t remember was what you really wanted to be doing. She wanted to make something of herself. Do well. Make her parents proud.

She wanted to stand out.

Actually, she usually found these events exhausting. Halfway through the evening, she would always think about making her excuses, ringing her friend Kara and heading to a bar for a few glasses of something fizzy. Letting her hair down a bit for once. But she knew she had to seize every opportunity that was presented to her. If work was the only area of her life where she could call the shots, then work was going to come first.

She was a realist above all else. Circumstances had forced her to be. She was in an impossible situation; there could be no happy ending – at least, not as far as she could see. So she had learned just to accept things as they were. Not always graciously, admittedly.

That was too much to ask.