Page 1 of Best Mistake Ever
1
BEATRICE
My father has always made the job of being CEO of his own company look so simple, but then he’s the tenacious type.
He’s a brilliant man.Brilliant. But it’s a lot to live up to.
When my sister, Delilah, and I were ten years old, he and my mother went through a really nasty divorce and it caused such a cataclysmic rift in our family, Dee and I are still living through the shockwaves of it. It tore our childhood apart, with each of us preferring a different parent to live with when my mother moved out of the family home and into an arty commune across town: me with Dad, Dee with Mum.
You see, despite being identical twins, Dee and I are polar opposites in personality. Our mother maintains that when the egg split, I got all of our father’s ‘shrewd genes’ and Dee got her ‘fun genes’, which, despite our best efforts, seem to have informed the way we’ve lived our lives up till now.
Dee, for her part, seems to think I’m naturally good at everything I do, which is patently nonsense. I just work really hard and I don’t give up easily.
Being good at things takes practice and discipline, but Dee doesn’t seem to be naturally predisposed to either of these things.
It’s good to have her living nearby again though. Despite our differences, I’ve missed her while I’ve been away at university in London and she at art college in Exeter, and we’ve grown a lot closer since we’ve been living in the same city again.
It was great when, last year, she moved into a very tiny, but super cute, attic flat that I found for her a few streets away from me. She’d hoped Bath, where I settled after graduating, would be a better place to forge ahead with her dream of being an artist, after struggling to make it happen in Devon.
But it’s not worked out so far.
Trouble is, she’s not been able to stick at any of the jobs she’s done to pay the bills since graduating either.
To be fair to her though, she’s been trying hard to readjust her life’s trajectory since our father laid into her about it at an excruciating family meal a few months ago.
Over the years, she’s learnt to let his criticism of her go right over her head, but unfortunately, this time he caught her on a bad day.
She totally lost it with him, telling him he needed to ‘butt the hell out’ of her life now that she’s an adult and that she didn’t ‘need his bloody advice’.
To which he replied, ‘Okay then, I guess that means you don’t need my money either. I’m stopping your allowance.’
Even though all the blood seemed to drain from her face, she said, ‘Fine. I don’t want anything from you any more anyway,’ before she stormed off.
But despite the torrent of tears I found her in later, this change in circumstances seems to have lit something inside her.
So, I was delighted for her when she managed to land a well-paid job as an Events and Marketing Manager at a new boutiquehotel near Frome, which is about half an hour’s drive south of Bath.
I’ve never seen her so relieved about something, especially when our hard-as-nails father made a point of calling to tell her how proud he was of her for securing it. As I well know, getting any kind of recognition out of him is a tough task.
When Dee told me he’d contacted her, I could tell by the emotion in her voice it meant the world to finally get some credit from him. You see, deep down – once you get past the blustery bravado – she’s actually quite an insecure person with a gentle soul. She’s had the rough end of the stick from our father since she was little and she’s been desperate to prove him wrong about her lack of decisiveness and control over the direction of her life.
Which is funny because I want to prove him right about the things he says about me: that I’m built to run my own company and to be as successful as he is.
Like I say, it’s a lot to live up to, but I’m down for it.
Just as I’m thinking this, my business partner, Jem, appears in our office.
Well, when I say ‘office’, I actually mean a basement room in a town house that my father bought recently and is allowing me to live in rent-free while it’s being turned into individual flats. The deal is that I take in any out-of-hours deliveries, liaise with the project manager when he can’t get hold of my dad and make sure the place looks lived-in to deter potential squatters and thieves. They’re patently trumped-up excuses so my dad can feel he’s supporting me in some way, since I’ve out and out refused to take a loan from him for my fledgling business. But this way, we can both pretend we’re helping each other out without it feeling loaded.
I’m staying in the already converted garden flat, which consists of a kitchen-diner, a bathroom, a bedroom and theaforementioned living room that’s doubling as the office, which we’ve been able to squeeze two desks into.
You see, Jem and I aren’t quite at the stage where we can afford to pay rent for proper office space yet – or to pay ourselves wages – but we’re working on it.
Getting a start-up business off the ground is really hard – harder than I’d ever imagined – and less fun than I’d thought it would be too, but both Jem and I are fully committed to making it work.
We’ve actually been good friends since the day we met during the first lecture of our degree course. I chose to sit next to him, thinking he looked like my kind of person with all his notes, books and stationery laid out neatly on the desk in front of him, and with an expression of focused attention on his face that reflected my own need to make the most of the three years ahead of me.
So, when he asked me to form this company with him, I jumped at the chance, even though business software wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined choosing to develop for my first company. It could turn out to be a real money-maker though – and money is something Jem is going to need a lot of.
