Chapter Text
Taggie settled back against the tufted velvet of her sofa, letting her spine relax against the plush backing of the upholstery, her limbs going limp. She groaned as she attempted to reach her Cab Sav, fingers just barely brushing the handle of the Granny Knows Best mug she’d nicked from Fara years ago.
She’d been going through the first of her many “rebellious phases”, as Maud preferred to call them. Probably because it sounded better to her friends than calling Taggie an “attention-hungry little bitch”.
It was all very “stick it to the man” in the way all posh-kids-who-don’t-think-they’re-posh are. Pretty shit in retrospect- filling her shelves at Cheltenham with stolen, charity shop glassware.
What man had she been sticking it to? Oxfam?
It was still her favorite mug though- pink and floral and dreadfully tacky.
She carefully unpacked their takeaway, trying not to drip curry sauce on the rug while her younger sister rummaged through the cutlery drawer in her kitchen. Caitlin was on exeat from Wycombe and had begged to spend her few days of freedom at Tag’s flat.
“I’m working all of Friday. I won’t be any fun,” Taggie had warned on the phone last week.
Caitlin had let out a dramatic sob. “If I go home Mummy is going to spend all of exeat dragging me to Botox appointments and lunches with casting agents she’s shagged,” she cried. “Last time I was in London she tried to talk me into salmon sperm injections. You can’t do that to me, Tag.”
She’d arrived earlier that afternoon, trying her best to assist Tag in the kitchen while they discussed the latest gossip surrounding the London set.
“The Makepiece’s daughter is dating a footballer,” Taggie told her as she rolled out another slab of chilled dough. “West Ham.”
“I thought she was dating that comedian? The one who’s always on Countdown?”
“Broke up,” she mumbled, nibbling on a piece of raw dough. “Took the mick out of her in his Netflix special.”
They chatted for hours, Caitlin catching her up on all the drama plaguing her year at school.
Last week one of the groundskeepers had found a discarded johnny in the bushes behind Clarence House. Worrying, considering Cait attended an all girls’ school- a fact Taggie had been quick to point out. Apparently, the working theory was a lurid affair between a mystery student and the fit, new maths teacher.
“Is he the only male teacher?” Taggie had asked.
“The only shaggable one,” Cait joked in response.
It had been taxing for a Friday. Taggie had spent nearly ten-hours decorating royal icing biscuits for one of Lizzie’s “mumfluencer” friends. Sadly, the job did not pay enough to warrant the carpal tunnel she’d surely given herself, and the client had been nothing short of a complete bitch via WhatsApp.
She also exclusively referred to her son as “twenty-four months”.
Two.
He was two.
Still, she had four hundred thousand followers on Instagram, and had promised to mention her food account on her socials. So, Taggie quietly accepted her defeat (and two broken nails)- piping cartoon cattle dogs until the sun dipped past her window.
They’d taken a walk to her favorite wine shop after cleaning up, stopping to grab a Chinese on the way back. Taggie had barely crossed the threshold of her flat before stripping down to her bra and pulling on a pair of worn, cashmere lounge pants. Caitlin went about fighting the wine corks while Tag attempted to free her hair from the ballerina-esque bun she’d fashioned it into while she worked.
Now, hair down and phone in hand, she’d begun to wind down for the evening...If doomscrolling could be considered winding down.
Taggie opened Instagram, making a good show of scrolling her feed before hovering her finger precariously over the magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen. She knew exactly which names she’d see in her recent searches.
This was so stupid.
She told herself as much, dealing a barrage of insults from inside the peace and quiet of her own mind.
Don’t be bloody mental.
Just don’t click it.
You’ve already looked twice today.
You looked ten minutes ago.
They were on the beach.
They will still be on the beach.
Georgia will still be posting inane shit to her story about “finding her true self in Bali” the way all white women do on holiday.
Which is still less pathetic than an hour of screen time a day attributed to stalking your ex’s instagram.
Don’t look.
Just don’t look you absolute. fucking. nutter.
Taggie swiped up to close the app before she could spare it another thought, racing a moment later to delete it all together. At least the mental load of trying to remember her password would strengthen her resolve for the evening.
She didn’t care. Really, she didn’t. Okay, so maybe she’d spent most of her morning wishing they’d both develop a gut-eating Indonesian parasite but that didn’t mean she cared.
She was just lonely, and knackered, and so very sick of trying to date in London. It was a circle of hell Dante had apparently forgotten to include! Presumably somewhere between the swimming through boiling blood and immersed in human shit ones if she had to guess. And it wasn’t as though she wasn’t trying.
Taggie was trying, really.
She would ask for first cut at the restaurant, or rush home from catering gigs with dirty dishes in the back of her car- all to spend thirty minutes with the same TikTok on a loop, trying desperately to copy another blow dry tutorial she’d saved months ago. She shaved. She plucked. She went to gym even when she’d had four pints of Guinness the night before and was very close to being sick on an incredibly expensive piece of pilates equipment.
Dressed-up or down. Smokey eye or no makeup. Chanel bag or Zara dress.
It didn’t matter.
The dates were bad. They were always bad. And the message was resoundingly clear- it wasn’t them, it was her.
She was too posh for the tattooed, mullet-wearing boys of Shoreditch, but too working-class for the types of men she’d gown up alongside. Too dumb for guys in uni. Too busy for lads on gap year. Too well-connected. Too much of a black sheep. Too independent. Too needy for one-night stands.
She was too…Taggie. And yet, every night she found herself back on that stupid fucking app, swiping through men like she were sorting through courgettes at Waitrose.
Taggie barely bothered with the bios anymore. She didn’t care whether they supported Tottenham or Arsenal- or whatever stupid quip they had about the best first date being a Tesco Meal Deal. Most of it was lies anyways- the photos, the heights, even the politics…Tories in Labour’s clothing, half of them.
Thomas, 20
Student
Right.
Martin, 21
Estate Agent
Left.
Alex, 21
Tattoo Artist
Right.
End of the line.
You’ve reached the end of profiles in your area, try expanding your filters to see more people.
What. The. Fuck.
Taggie let out a shriek, causing Gertrude to jump anxiously from her spot beneath the mantle. “Thats it! I’m going to be single forever,” she announced, smacking her head violently against the back of the sofa. “I’ve officially swiped through every man in London.”
Caitlin gasped, remote falling from her hand. She swiveled her head away from the telly and crawled towards Taggie's end of the settee, abandoning the episode of Gogglebox she'd landed on. "You did not! I didn't even know that was possible," she cried, sounded utterly fascinated. "Let me see.”
"Nooooo," Taggie whined, attempting to hold her mobile outside of her sister's reach. "It's embarrassing!"
“Give me your phone!” Caitlin demanded, easily snatching the phone from Taggie’s hands. “Too easy- how you’ve not been robbed on the tube yet, I don’t know." Caitlin clicked the little gear icon in the corner of the app, assessing the state of Taggie’s settings. She rolled her eyes, biting the head off the Freddo she’d pulled from her bag. “There. You see? You haven’t swiped through every man in London. You’ve swiped through every twenty to twenty-one-year-old within three miles of Shoreditch.”
“May I remind you that I am a twenty-year-old who lives in Shoreditch?” Taggie rebuked.
Caitlin ignored her, sliding her fingers across the scale on the screen. “We need to expand your age settings, and location- let me look at your photos too.”
Taggie scowled. She was rather content with her settings- thank you very much.
She had once wasted forty-six pounds on an Uber to Hammersmith just to meet a man whose greatest accomplishment had been making it to the third round of casting for that year’s series of Love Island. Since then she’d sworn off any dates further than Islington. “I wouldn’t want to date anyone younger than me. And Ralphie was only a year older!”
Caitlin rolled her eyes and took a swig from her mug-full of Pinot Grigio. “You’ve got to stop using Ralphie as your sexual barometer,” she chided, holding the phone in front of Taggie’s face. “Here- that’s better.”
Taggie looked at the little dot, now positioned much closer to the center of her screen. She nearly choked on her own drink when she saw the number beneath it. “Forty?! But Daddy’s only thirty-eight!”
“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t use our father either,” Cait retorted, saving the settings and clicking onto her profile. “Tag, what the fuck are these pictures?" Caitlin asked her voice sounding utterly befuddled.
Taggie peeked over her shoulder to see what she was looking at. The first picture on her profile was an adorable shot she’d taken of Gertrude on the one-year anniversary of her adoption. She’d thrown her a picnic in Haggerston Park complete with Gerty-shaped peanut butter biscuits and party hats. “What? What’s wrong with them?” she asked sincerely.
Her younger sister looked over at her as though she’d grown a second head. “For starters? You’re not a dog,” Caitlin answered, holding up the photo of Gertrude. “Or a cake, for that matter. For fuck’s sake Tag, your face isn’t even in this one!” she cried as she scrolled past a landscape shot of the Bluebell wood behind their parent’s country home.
Taggie huffed and picked a piece of tofu out of the Chinese she’d ordered earlier. Was it really so wrong that her photos show any semblance of her personality? “I wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice, Cait,” she insisted. “You know I hate taking photos of myself.”
Caitlin waved a hand in the air as though such facts were completely irrelevant. “You might, but I don’t,” she countered, scrolling through her own camera roll. “Turn your airdrop on.”
Taggie rolled her eyes but followed her instructions, returning her attention to the old repeat of Made in Chelsea she’d flipped to.
“I swear to god if James mentions that private jet one more time I’m filing a complaint against Channel Four for emotional distress,” Cait groaned without lifting her eyes to the screen. She continued clicking through photos, selecting a small album’s worth and grabbing Taggie’s phone from her lap in order to accept them.
Taggie watched as she sorted through the collection of snapshots, most of which she’d never seen. That wasn’t particularly surprising, though- Caitlin was a typical sixteen-year-old, and thus found everything worthy of documentation. They’d once missed the last train home because she’d thought a discarded vape on the floor of Charing Cross was just too ‘aesthetic’ not to photograph. Her younger sister began to strategically replace the images on her profile one by one.
“Caitlin Aisling O’Hara,” she gasped, trying to pry her mobile from her younger sister’s grasp. “You cannot use that photo!”
In the first slot, she’d selected a shot from last year’s IFTAs in Dublin.
Maud had been cast in a West End revival of 'night, Mother at the time, so the girls had been allowed to attend in support of their father as he took home an award for his Documentary Series on Yeats. Taggie, made anxious by the prospect of seeing Declan for the first time in months, had indulged in a few too many glasses of champagne in the hotel room.
Caitlin had been happy to use Tag's drunkenness to her advantage, coaxing her into a long, black silk dress that stuck to her hips like cling film. The top had been particularly scandalous- two narrow panels of fabric that crossed over her chest and fastened at the nape of her neck. She'd managed to snap a shot of Taggie leaning against the door of the hired Bentley, waiting for their father.
“Why? You look hot!”
“I look smashed!” she protested. “Which I was- that was the only way you got me into that dress.” This was an exercise in futility. Apparently her sister’s gauge for what made a good photo directly correlated to how few articles of clothing she was wearing. “Photos like that give guys the wrong idea,” she tried explaining.
“The wrong idea?” Cait replied sardonically, brow furrowed in disbelief.
Jesus, leave it to her younger sister to make this a statement about the present circumstances of gender inequality in the UK. She just didn’t want a man to assume she was going to wank him off on their first date because she had her tits out in her Tinder profile, sue her!
“You know what I mean,” she sighed. “I don’t want them thinking I’m the type of girl who does bits on the first date.”
Caitlin snorted a laugh at that, using her free hand to stab a fork through her pile of chips and curry sauce. “Respectfully, Tag- you’re not cool enough to look like a slag.”
How Cait managed to make not calling her a slut sound like the most scathing insult in the world, she wasn’t sure. “What does that mean?” she demanded. “What do I look like?”
“Like the type of girl who says ‘doing bits’ instead of getting fingered,” Caitlin shot back.
"You do realize you're literally speaking to the family rebel," she replied, still somewhat offended.
Her younger sister rolled her eyes and sighed exasperatedly. "Alright Anna Nicole Smith, tone it down a notch. You had half a pill problem at boarding school and still manage to make it sound boring," she scoffed, brown sauce dribbling down her chin. "Besides, that doesn't change the fact that you’re only one willy away from being a virgin, so this is the perfect time to kill the little misogynist that apparently lives inside your brain."
Taggie batted her hand away as Caitlin attempted to pat her on the head like she might Gertrude.
"You keep that one, and I’ll let you pick the next one,” she offered.
“Letting me pick my own profile photos? How generous,” Taggie droned sarcastically. She scrolled through the album, stopping on an older shot from one of her parent’s garden parties. She had been trying a new recipe for Black Forest Gateau and Caitlin had managed to snap a picture of her in the Priory kitchen. A glass bowl and whisk sat tucked at the hip of her dress- a puffed-sleeve, fitted-bodice of a thing she’d picked up from Harrods on her way out of the city.
“You can’t use that one,” Caitlin lambasted.
“Why not? It shows I have hobbies!” she protested.
Caitlin slammed her takeaway container back onto the table and turned to face her older sister, tossing her a look of total incredulity. “You’re dressed like an eighteenth-century milkmaid,” she stated, like the issue should be wholly obvious. “You’re going to attract a load of red-pilled incels who want their own little tradwife to chain to their ovens.”
Taggie stared at Cait as though she’d begun to speak ancient Aramaic. “I do not know what any of those words mean,” Taggie said honestly.
Shit, now her email inbox was going to be flooded with articles from The Cut and links to YouTube video essays she didn’t have time to listen to.
Caitlin just sighed and made a small rubbing motion against the side of her temples. She scrolled past a few more photos, landing on another one from that same day. Taggie wore the same dress, but in this one she was sat on chair in the back garden, cake and fork in hand. “Do this one,” Caitlin relented. “You don’t look so Stepford Wife-y in it.”
“Fine,” Taggie replied, accepting the small victory. “Your turn.”
They swapped back and forth for several minutes, alternating between Taggie’s more modest tastes and Caitlin’s desire to get her sister laid. Eventually, they found a happy medium.
“Oh this one is good! This is from that charity polo match Mummy dragged us to!” Caitlin said, showing her sister the photo she’d selected.
Taggie had worn a fitted white dress, one that left her shoulders bare and sloped in a chic but respectable v at her neck. It came to a stop just below her knees, where she’d paired it with a pair of comfortable gold heels and a tan, calfskin tote. Even she had to admit she’d looked good- sunglasses resting against the bridge of her nose, summer sun giving her just enough of a tan to show off her muscle tone without turning her pink.
“You don’t think it makes me look horribly posh?” she asked, taping a finger against her lip in indecision.
“Firstly, not everyone who watches polo is posh- that’s discrimination,” Caitlin teased. “Secondly, from an objective standpoint- we are posh.”
Taggie rolled her eyes. “We are not that posh. Daddy is literally a socialist,” she rejected.
“Well Daddy also has a television contract worth four-million pounds a year so, you know, Bob’s your uncle.”
Taggie took another glance at the photo, tilting her head slightly to the side. “I do like that dress,” she said.
"Me too,” Caitlin nodded, taking another bite of the Freddo. She seemed to be alternating between the disgusting combination of curry and chocolate. “Where is it? I haven’t seen you wear that in months.”
The girls made eye contact, Tag’s brow quirking as though the answer were obvious. “Mummy’s closet,” they answered simultaneously.
After thirty or so minutes they’d made it to the end of the album Caitlin had prepared. Taggie had demanded she be allowed to keep the photo of Gertrude, and in exchange, her sister had traded the opportunity to add a bikini pic from their weekend in Cornwall last year.
They saved the profile, and against her better judgement Taggie felt a small swell of excitement stirring within her. She rubbed her hands together between her lap. “Okay, now what?”
Caitlin paddled her hands against her thigh like a little drum roll. “Nowww,” she began, drawing out the word and feeling of anticipation, “we wait at least an hour for a fresh crop of likes.”
“Oh,” Tag answered, trying to keep the disappointment from her tone. “Well that was antilimclatic.”
“Anticlimactic,” Caitlin corrected. “But I will take another Pinot while we wait.”
An hour later, Taggie had all but forgotten her phone, completely engrossed by the drama unfolding on her screen as Liv and Digby shouted at each other from across the bed in an emotional break-up scene.
“Holy shit,” Caitlin said, letting out a low whistle. “Who are you?”
Concentration broken, Taggie glanced down to where her sister was swiping at the screen of the phone. The photo was of a man atop the deck of a small sailing yacht, surrounded by turquoise waters- white, tanned, dark hair, possibly tall, definitely shirtless. He was smiling, though windswept curls and a pair of sunglasses concealed the top half of his face.
Rupert, 38
Media
Cute. Too old.
“Swipe left,” she instructed. “I’m not going to date someone who’s nearly forty.”
“Because your relationships with men in their twenties have been going so well?” Caitlin jabbed, barely missing a beat.
She bit back a remark about taking romantic advice from someone in sixth form. After all, at least Caitlin could say she had a boyfriend. Taggie swallowed her words and allowed herself to engage in a brief retrospective of her last few romantic endeavors.
Taggie had fallen for Ralphie Henriques at the ripe age of fifteen, from the moment Patrick had brought him back from his football club to their family’s flat in Mayfair. He was only a year older than her, with perfectly coiffed blonde hair and a laugh that lived somewhere in the space between obnoxious and contagious.
They’d finally gotten together the night of her eighteenth birthday, tucked into a dark corner at the back of Maddox in Soho. He’d bought her a shot- joked about how he could do it legally now instead of slipping her his flask in the crowd at Glasto. Taggie had just giggled in response, finding it easier to laugh than explain that she'd already been to youth court less than a year before.
As far as vices went, Ralphie became a good one. And Taggie relished in the fact that, of all the parts she’d given up of herself in pursuit of her family’s attention, he had been her first real everything.
- First awkward hand at her tit
- First lay
- First love
He hadn’t been particularly good at any of the above, but Taggie was nothing if not lenient.
His kisses were like a contact high. He tasted of vodka and chewing gum and for six months, they had been great...until he’d decided he was fucking off to join Patrick in Dublin after his gap year.
At the time, Taggie had thought it felt like dying. She was forever seesawing between tenuous stability and the edge of a mental breakdown, and the reality of being abandoned by yet another person she loved had managed to catapult her head first into the deep end.
They'd given it two months after that night.
Well, Taggie had given it two months.
Ralphie had given it a given less than a week before he started shagging Georgina Harrison. She’d had the privilege of learning that bit through her brother, which as you might imagine, was excellent for her dignity. He was still happy to send her an unsolicited dick pic on a night out though.
Good to know their relationship had left some lasting imprint on his mind.
She eventually began the grueling process of piecing herself back together, rebounding a year later with Sebastian Burrows. An up and coming journalist from City St. George’s, Seb was perfect on paper- sweet, intelligent, handsome. Tall, with high cheekbones and a narrow eyes. He wore his hair shaggy in the back like Brad Pitt in the nineties.
He’d also been a fan of her father’s.
A really, really big fan of her father’s.
Which was nice, at first- what girl didn’t want the guy she was seeing to like her parents? But after the sixth date in a row to include a thinly-veiled ask about internship opportunities at Corinium, she’d cut him loose. Her father didn't speak to her, let alone her undefined situationships.
They’d never even made it to bed.
So, Caitlin wasn’t entirely wrong. She’d gone zero for two thus far- but that didn’t mean she needed to go full sugar baby mode.
Taggie turned her attention back to the app. “He’s the same age as Daddy!”
“He’s gorgeous, is what he is,” Caitlin insisted.
“Please,” Taggie replied, gesturing to the photo. “You can’t even tell what his face looks like.”
Caitlin gave her an incredulous look. “Tag, he’s 38 with a full head of hair and abs- he’s fit,” she said firmly. “I would bet my signed One Direction album on it.”
Tag rolled her eyes- a relic from earlier in their father’s chat show days. For her most prized possession from childhood, Cait seemed to bet on it an awful lot. She zoomed in on one of the photos. Most of his features were obscured by distance and the pair of dark wayfarers, but she couldn’t help but think she’d seen him before. “He looks kind of familiar, no?” Taggie asked quietly, though she couldn’t quite place him.
Caitlin scoffed, reaching for another chip. “Oh so now the dark and handsome stranger looks familiar? What dens of iniquity have you been hanging around in?”
“Shut up,” Tag snorted. “Not like that- he just has one of those faces you feel like you’ve seen before.”
“Doubt it,” she replied. “You’re the one who refuses to leave her three-mile radius, remember? What’s his bio?”
Taggie scrolled further down the page, placing the phone back between them.
Likes: Dogs. Horses. Getting the fuck out of London.
Dislikes: The M25. Poorly made Martinis. The red tops’ yearly subscriber base.
“Well, that’s great for you since you can’t read,” Cait quipped.
Taggie rolled her eyes. She didn’t exactly take her morning coffee with a copy of The Sun, but Tag hated when people thought they were too high brow for celebrity gossip or reality tv. It went along with her general dislike for haughtiness and self-conceit. Even her father could get a bit annoying with the whole ‘serious journalist’ schtick. But perhaps being the only thick one in a family full of geniuses had bred a bit of anti-intellectualism in her.
“Don’t be a bitch,” she snapped. “Swipe left, he sounds pretentious.”
Caitlin ignored her, per usual, scrolling further down the profile to another photo. This one was framed from the neck down. Taggie recognized the background, across the stretch of water was Royal Festival Hall. The man was leaning against the door of a blue Aston Martin- dressed neatly in a tuxedo and bow tie, cigar dangling from his hand.
“Do you think that’s actually his car?” she asked.
“No way,” Cait fired back. “No one is parking a car like that in Zone 1 unless they want to be robbed.” She scrolled to the next photo, faceless again. “What the fuck is this background? It looks like Buckingham palace.”
“That can’t be his house,” Tag answered with a quiet gasp. She would be quick to discard such a thought, but the chaotic pack of dogs swirling at the feet of the photo had her thinking otherwise.
“You have to swipe right,” Caitlin demanded, holding the phone out of reach.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffed. “I want a boyfriend, not the English version of Leonardo DiCaprio.”
Her sister stuck out her bottom lip, furrowing her brow and pouting. She clasped her hands together in prayer. “Please, Tag. Please, please, please,” she begged. “Archie made me delete all the apps when we went official- let me live vicariously through you!”
Why a sixteen-year-old was “on the apps” rather than studying for her GCSEs, she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter, men like this did not date girls like her. Maybe they would if she’d gotten a degree or went to work for her father or hadn’t gotten herself cut off at eighteen.
“We’re not going to match! He’s like…a ten and I’m….you know, me.”
Caitlin cocked her head to the side, eyes running over her as though Taggie were a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out. “Don't you have a therapist? You two really need to work out the number Mummy did on your psyche,” she said simply, finger poised over the screen.
Taggie attempted to snatch the phone from her sister’s grip, but her reflexes were no match for the ones honed by Caitlin’s years of boarding school tennis lessons. You would think that since Taggie didn’t inherit her family’s brains, she’d at least be good at sport. But no, the universe had fucked her over in that regard as well.
“Just let me swipe!” Cait screeched. “It’s not like you’ll have to talk to the man.”
“Caitlin!” Taggie yelped as she watched her sister spring from the couch and rush to the other side of the room. “I swear to god, I will drive you back to Buckinghamshire tonight! Give me my phone!”
Her sister didn’t answer, slapping a hand over her mouth with a gasp.
“What?” she demanded, repeating herself when Caitlin didn’t respond. “What?”
She held her phone up, dangling the mobile between two fingers and swinging it back and forth like pendulum. “You matched.”