“The Caribbean, maybe, or somewhere in South America. I don’t know about hurricanes, but Nathan talked about this little place—”
“Nathan?” Alice snapped back to the conversation. “What did he say? I mean”—she forced herself to sound more casual—“we chatted for a while, I think. He’s the American, isn’t he?”
Flora wasn’t fooled. She let out a squeal of excitement. “Ooh! Do you like him? Do you want me to fix you up? I could put a dinner party together, or talk to him for you, or—”
“No!” Alice yelped. She had a sudden flash of Flora running around, gossiping to Stefan, or worse still, to Nathan. Her stomach lurched. “I mean it, Flora,” she said quickly. “We only talked for a minute; you’re getting carried away.”
Flora sighed. “But—”
“No,” Alice said sternly. “Promise me?”
“Promise,” Flora muttered. “But we should still have dinner, the two of us. Or lunch sometime. Or drinks!”
“That sounds, nice,” Alice replied slowly. “Why don’t you email me over the date? I’m on my way out for lunch now, but I’ll let you know.”
“OK!” Flora sounded far too excited. “Will do!”
Hanging up, Alice pulled on her jacket and hurried down the stairs, as if leaving right away would make her excuse to Flora less of a lie. Their office was tucked away just off Carnaby Street, and as Alice fell into step with the rest of the tourists and midday shoppers, she tried to shake off a slight sense of unease at Flora’s sudden avalanche of invitations.
The two of them had never been close. The year her father met Jasmine, Alice left for university, and having spent her adolescence making sure he surfaced from his current historical obsession long enough to eat and occasionally sleep, it was a relief to hand responsibility to someone else. That is, until it became clear that the wafting, temperamental artiste and her wide-eyed thirteen-year-old had as tenuous a grasp on domesticity as he did. But by then Alice was a safe hundred miles away from their ramshackle cottage and returned only occasionally after that, to check Jasmine hadn’t burned the house down with her incense or that her father wasn’t wasting away on a diet of wild nettle soup and organic oatcakes.
No, Alice thought, as she reached the deli and swiftly browsed the chilled cases. Flora had always remained something of a stranger to her, a needy, emotional girl who would burst into tears during soap operas, and sit watching birds in the garden with curious concentration. Now, as adults, the space between them was something more than their age difference, but Alice was content with their usual rhythm of warm detachment. After all, they had never conspired together against their parents, whispered secrets, or fought angrily the way other siblings did; there was no shared childhood or fierce intimacy to bind them together now they were grown.
Except now Flora was reaching out, clearly hopeful, and Alice didn’t know why.
It wasn’t until she reached the head of the lunchtime queue to pay for her salad that Alice remembered the problem with her debit card.
“Sorry, sorry.” Fumbling hopelessly for change, she resorted to grabbing at crisps and useless snack bars to meet the credit card minimum. The crowd behind her shifted impatiently while she went through the routine of swipe and scribble, already resigning herself to another afternoon on hold. But to her surprise, back at the office, her call was answered almost immediately, by a bored-sounding Scottish woman named Laura.
“If you could give me the sixteen-digit number, and expiration, please.” Laura rattled off the demand in a blank monotone. Alice recited the details obediently, cocking her head to trap the phone against her shoulder as she peeled off the lid of her salad and carefully drizzled a tiny amount of dressing over the leaves.
“If you’ll just bear with me…”
There was a light tap at the door, and Saskia poked her head around. “I’ve got some papers,” she whispered loudly. Alice waved her in.
“Miss Love?”
“Yes, sorry.” Alice turned back to the phone.
“Can you confirm your mother’s maiden name?”
“Scott.” She scribbled her signature on three pages in quick succession. “Her maiden name was Scott, and my postcode is N1 OHD.” Putting her hand over the phone, she told Saskia, “Take those too, by the door, I need another five copies of each.”
Saskia nodded, retreating just as Laura seemed to make some kind of breakthrough. “Ah, I see,” she said, the monotone rising ever so slightly. “For your convenience, it’s now our policy to cancel cards after dispatching a replacement. You need to switch to the new one.”
Alice sighed. “But I haven’t got the new one yet.” She stabbed at a slice of carrot in frustration.
“But it says here it was dispatched last month, on the twenty-fifth.”
“Well, I never got it.” Sinking lower in her seat, Alice wondered why so many hugely inconvenient things were done in the name of her convenience. Tube maintenance on the weekends, self-service checkout aisles; calling something by a word long enough did not make it so.
“That’s funny, it says here the new card has been active for two weeks.”
Alice sat up with a jolt. “What?”
“I’m going to have to transfer you to an agent in our fraud unit,” Laura trilled.
“No, wait,” Alice tried to stop her. “What do you mean, ‘active’?”
“Please hold.”
While an instrumental version of an old boyband hit played, Alice flipped to the back page of her organizer and used the details there to log on to her bank website, anxiety building with every passing second. She didn’t normally access it at work, suspicious that the network wasn’t as secure as the tech people liked to believe, but this was an emergency. As her account slowly loaded, she tried to remember the last time she’d seen a statement. Not for at least a week, and she hardly ever checked the balance at the ATM.
Her balance flashed up on the screen. Two thousand six hundred seventy pounds overdrawn.
Overdrawn!
“This is Ahmed in fraud prevention. Can I help you? Hello?”
Alice struggled to find words. On the screen in front of her was a litany of spending that had drained her current account beyond empty before the month was even halfway through. A hundred and twenty-two pounds in Liberty’s? Over two hundred pounds in the Apple Store! The last time Alice had visited Selfridges, it was to spend twelve pounds on a hypoallergenic Clinique mascara, but according to her statement, somebody had charged sixty-odd pounds for lingerie there only two days ago. Suddenly, that luxurious vibrator began to make a lot more sense.