sticking her tongue out. She had bowled down from Manchester University with various colours in her hair, piercings and a tiny pair of combat trousers. She ate everything in the house, weighed seven stone and stayed out all night dancing and taking drugs in mysterious nightclubs. Katie felt like her mother.
‘Well, my chakra therapist would say it serves you right for always being the good child,’ Olivia had said harshly. ‘If you’d misbehaved a bit more you’d both have balanced out a bit and she wouldn’t get away with nicking all the hummus.’
‘She’s a free spirit,’ said Katie uncomfortably. They’d been sitting in the kitchen trying to ignore the loud jungly banging music coming from the room next door, that had been playing nonstop for thirty-six hours, shattering the three days’ peace they’d just had while Clara was at Glastonbury. (Her birth name was Clara; she made all her hippy friends call her Honeydew.)
‘She’s going to get you done for intent to supply,’ said Louise, sniffing.
‘What am I going to do, tell Mum on her?’
Their mother was living an extremely quiet life on her own in Blackburn – their dad had never been around very much except for the occasional Christmas pressie – and she was constantly amazed at her daughters’ ability to do anything at all – cross the road, find a job, get a mortgage – never mind be exposed to any actual horrors of the modern world.
‘Hey!’ Clara bounced in. She was sun-kissed from a summer of music festivals and hanging around road protests, tiny in her tie-dyed dungarees, and appeared to be growing dreadlocks.
‘Your hair smells,’ said Katie. She had spent the summer writing long proposals to pitch for edible flowers. Unsuccessfully.
Clara pouted. ‘You need to chill out. Would you like a massage?’
‘No, of course I don’t want a massage. I’m not that desperate for human contact that I’ll let you stick your nails in my spine. I haven’t forgotten the havoc you wreaked with my Barbies, thanks, never mind real humans.’
‘How am I ever going to get my massage business started if you won’t let me practise?’
‘You’re opening a “massage” business?’ asked Olivia. ‘Do you do extras?’
‘She’s got a degree in bioengineering. Of course she’s not going to open a massage business,’ said Katie. The four-year age gap was meant to disappear as you got older, but she’d seen no evidence for it yet.
‘Well, there you go, maybe I haven’t quite got my degree,’ said Clara, poking her tongue out as usual. ‘But that doesn’t matter, because before I start the business, I’m going to India.’
Katie sighed looking back. She had been two years into her job then, working all hours, living on hardly any money. It was fun, of course, living the life of a young professional, meeting friends for drinks after work, feeling terribly grown-up and important, but she’d loved her six months travelling around India at the end of her degree. The sense of escaping; of doing something different…she’d loved living on coconuts and fresh air with young people from around the world. And now, here she was, jealous of her baby sister off to do the same thing. How could she feel nostalgic at twenty-nine? And really, what was she doing here anyway that was so great?
She supposed she could chuck it in any time she wanted to. People were always talking about it down here. They were off to open a vineyard in France, or start an adventure holiday business, or import silk. Nobody ever did. London seemed to exert some kind of mystical centrifugal force on everyone, that sucked all ambitions other than a corner office and a cottage in the country out of you as quickly as it sucked the money from your pockets.
Plus, look what the outcome had been. She’d thrown a party for Clara’s leaving. It had been a really good night, actually, full of people (although some of them had dogs on bits of string). Clara spent the whole night holed up in a corner with Max, with whom she’d always had a cheeky, flirtatious relationship. Louise scarcely noticed. Max was furniture; part of her life, and Clara was the baby sister.
Max left his job and flew to India two days later. The one who got away.
And look at the mess you left behind you, Katie thought. If the whole world just did what they wanted all the time, the whole damn place would fall apart.
After assuring Louise through the tears and tequila haze which followed that he would immediately see sense and come back crawling with his tail between his legs, begging her (and, more pertinently, his employers), he hadn’t. Actually, what made it much, much worse was that he decided he needed to rent the flat out to subsidise his new wacky lifestyle, and gave Louise notice to quit, which is how she’d ended up making loud noises in the tiny room Katie had once earmarked as a study.
Clara didn’t seem to have a big problem with it. They were having fun, chilling, and ‘finding themselves’. In fact, over the last six months, as Louise had careered further and further away from the home and hearth she’d thought she’d shared with Max, Max and Clara got more and more relaxed about how exactly they’d got together in the first place and were practically sharing an email address. No one knew when, or if, they were coming home. Louise was dealing with it through a twin approach of martinis and dating, tiger-pouncing any man that crossed her postcode. Max’s name was best not mentioned, but sometimes – like now, when Katie got an email, it was difficult.
Hey Sis!
Clara still liked to use fonts to make her wacky and different, Katie noticed. It was like being shouted at by a Dickens novel.
HoWZIT? HOT in HERRE! Goa just amazing. Coconuts for twenty pence, xxxxx
Max says Hi to everyone back home – we’re missing you loads in London and the pouring rain! Not!
It wasn’t a nice feeling, being torn between a friend and a relative, particularly when you didn’t even have the distraction of a love life of your own to worry about.
The problem was, it seemed to get harder to raise the subject with Louise, not easier.
At first, of course, when she’d moved in with Katie, she had gone horribly pale and thin, and started her maniacal sleeping around punctuated with 2 a.m. crying jags, side by side with an understanding that one in such a fit of dispossession had to be absolved from housework, keeping regular hours, or in fact much apart from corkscrew wielding and very long scented baths.
But, as time had passed, and everything (apart from the yo-yo knickers) had seemed to ease a little, Katie found it harder and harder to be in the middle. Her sister seemed happy, but Louise still seemed terribly sad, and Katie bringing the subject up just seemed to make things worse. In some way, Katie could see, Louise blamed her for her sister’s behaviour. And whilst comprehensible, it was hardly fair. Being the only conduit between them didn’t help either. Katie thought wistfully for a moment of Clara having fun. Of course she had fun, London fun, in expensive bars, with loud nights. Loud. Having fun in London tended to be loud. Everything in London was loud; the Tube, the traffic, the bars, the shouting of arrogant young careerists showing off. Sometimes Katie really felt like a bit of peace and quiet.
Living with Louise was just about bearable. Katie was trying to be a sympathetic friend. She really was. She didn’t want to be one of those people who had you to stay in their house, then made little remarks about how to clean a grill pan and how different towels had different meanings, thus making Louise feel even worse than she was already. But she’d found it did very little to improve her general disposition towards the world.
Katie turned her attention to the pile of work on her desk. Today she was working on a new diet, which substituted chocolate-covered peanuts and cheese for every meal. Apparently once separately considered high-fat foods, it had been discovered that taken in combination and omitting all other food groups, it had a staggering effect on weight loss and had caught on like wildfire, and was called the CCPC plan, which looked really scientific and everything. Katie’s job was to minimise the coronary or acne scare stories that popped up now and again. She was busy.