It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (12 page)

“Mmmm,” I said non-committally.

“So I checked the messages on his phone, and I didn’t find anything, but he went completely mental at me for snooping, and after that things weren’t right any more, and we drifted apart.”

“Okay, I’ll put ‘drifted apart after snooping caused by fear of affair and worry about commitment’,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to discern a pattern here. Now, Mark.”

“Okay, okay,” Rose said. “That only lasted five weeks. He dumped me after I said I thought we were seeing each other exclusively, and he thought we were dating other people too.”

“Commitment-phobe frightened off by demands for exclusivity,” I said. “I think we have the answer, Rose. You need to forget commitment, and work on being less clingy. Think cool, elusive, remote. Think Scarlett O’Hara meets Buffy.”

“Ellie, you’re a genius. You and your Venn diagrams! From now on Oliver bloody Farquahar can do the running. I’m not calling him, I’m not texting him, and if he comes round here I shall be out. And we’ll see if a couple of weeks of that treatment doesn’t change his mind.”

And she hefted her bag of skiing stuff on to her shoulder and stalked off upstairs.

My advice had been good, I knew that, but I wondered whether I’d also invoked the law of unintended consequences. After all, if Rose was going to be giving Oliver the cold shoulder, then Oliver might find himself at a loose end, and in need of company occasionally. I logged on to Facebook.

CHAPTER NINE

Rose was true to her word. A couple of weeks passed and Oliver’s number remained untexted, his Facebook wall unwritten on. Every now and then I heard Rose talking to him on the phone, sounding breezy and cheerful, saying things like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Ollie, but I’ve got a… something on on Thursday,” and, “I’m working late that evening otherwise I’d love to have seen you,” and so on. She has nerves of steel, she really does. Unfortunately this meant that I didn’t get to see Oliver either, and what with the launch of YEESH’s digital poster campaign on the Tube and my continuing regimen of early morning runs, vegetable soup and no booze, I felt that my social life was going from below average to non-existent.

After a week of heinously late nights – I think I’d left work after eleven o’clock on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – the artwork was finally signed off on Friday afternoon. It had really gone to the wire – the boards were due to go up on Monday morning so London commuters would be faced after a weekend of debauchery with hard-hitting messages about STIs that were sure to get their week off to a truly horrible start. The initial creative from the design agency had been all wrong – totally off-brand, Duncan complained – and it had had to go back again and again, while Ruth and I sweated blood over the copy. Eventually we’d settled on two images: one of a girl’s face and chest on a pillow, dimly lit but clearly in the throes of sexual ecstasy, and one of a bloke’s face, similarly contorted but seen from below. The copy read, “She [or he]’s not the only thing you picked up tonight,” and then there were a few scary bullet points about the increasing rates of various infections, and our freephone number and web address. I’d questioned whether showing sex taking place in the missionary position in both images was reinforcing gender stereotypes, but as Duncan pointed out, you can never overestimate the ability of the general public to fail to get the message, so we’d kept it simple.

Anyway, at last Ruth clicked ‘send’ on the final email to the production guy, and we all sat back in our chairs and looked shell-shocked with relief.

“Drink?” Duncan suggested, but to be honest by this stage we were sick of the sight of one another, and Ruth said she’d arranged to take Diana out for dinner and Duncan said he was desperate to get to the gym and I suggested we have a night out the following week, and we switched everything off and locked the office and drifted away, zombie-like with post-deadline fatigue.

I’d ring Claire, I decided, and see if she could leave Pers with Portia, her neighbour, and pop out for a beer or two, or otherwise I could just go round to hers and we
could order a curry and watch a cheesy film, or something.

She took ages to answer her phone but eventually I heard her say, “Hey, Ellie, how’s it going?” She sounded flustered and out of breath.

I told her about the work stuff, and asked how she and Pers were doing.

“We’re fine, just great! Just a bit mad at the moment, I’m getting ready to drop Pers off at Portia’s while I’m out.”

“Fab!” I said. “Where are you going? Mind if I come along?”

There was a sort of awkward, pregnant pause, then Claire said, “Oh, it’s not really that kind of out, Ellie. You see, I’m meeting…” then there was a crash and a wail, and as so often happens during conversations with Claire, she said, “Shit! Got to go. I’ll call tomorrow, petal, okay?”

Feeling a bit deflated, I texted Ben to see what he was up to, then got off the train a stop early and walked along the river and through the park. It was a gorgeous, sunny February day – one of those days when you start to feel like you have broken the back of winter and spring genuinely can’t be far away. The river sparkled in the setting sun and there were drifts of snowdrops and crocuses scattered through the grass. It all perked me up a great deal, and by the time I got home I was thinking that actually a night out to celebrate was just what I needed, so I got in the shower and shaved my legs and scrubbed my tired, greasy hair and used some of Rose’s Dermalogica exfoliating stuff on my face. By the time I’d finished straightening my hair – which was really looking horrible, I noticed, straggly-ended and split to fuck – Ben had replied.

“Sorry, Ellie, busy tonight. Maybe catch up next week? Bx.”

Oh, I thought. That was a bit shit.

By this time my feeling of wellbeing had totally evaporated, and when Rose came
home she found me sitting at the kitchen table, still in my towelling dressing gown, morosely drinking vodka and slimline tonic.

“Hey, Ellie,” she said, sort of skipping into the room and dumping a load of Selfridges and House of Fraser carrier bags on a chair. “What’s up? I’ve barely seen you all week.”

I told her we’d cracked the deadline and I’d really been looking forward to a night out to celebrate, but Ben and Claire were both busy.

“But you must come out with us!” Rose said. “Come on! It’ll be brilliant.”

“Who’s ‘us’?” I asked suspiciously, imagining myself playing gooseberry to Rose and Oliver.

“Pip, Ness, Chloë, me,” she said. “Just a low-key girls’ night out, I promise. We’re going to a new bar that’s opened down the road. It’s meant to be really nice.”

I hesitated. I knew Rose’s idea of a low-key night out – the last one I’d been to had ended after four o’clock in a club in Chelsea, with us having to scrape Chloë off some rugby player she’d picked up. Music too loud to talk over, nowhere to sit, skinny girls shrieking at each other – not my idea of fun. But, I realised, it must be Oliver’s, if it were Rose’s.

“It won’t be like last time, I promise,” Rose said, seeming to read my thoughts as she so often does. “This place is really new, no one’s discovered it yet, and Pip knows the owner so we’ll get a table.”

“Okay,” I said. “But if it’s horrible, I’ll…” I cast around for a dire threat, “I’ll tell Vanessa about the time you shagged Mick.”

“Waaah!” Rose said, “No! Anything but that!”

I hadn’t mentioned Mick in a while, but clearly the memory had lost none of its
power. Rose had been in sixth form and I was in my first year at uni, and we were both back at Dad’s for the summer holidays. We’d been out to the local nightclub – a total dive called Mask-u-raids – with some of my old schoolfriends, and Rose, presumably feeling there was no need to act cool as none of her crowd were there, had really let her hair down and got totally plastered on alcopops.

By around midnight she was superglued to a brawny, tattooed, shaven-headed twenty-something man. I considered trying to break it up, but figured he was probably harmless and Rose was quite capable of looking after herself, and sure enough she staggered home the next day, brutally hungover but in one piece.

“Oooh, my head,” she moaned. “And oooh, my knees and elbows. I feel like I did ten rounds with Mike Tyson.” I laughed, and Rose went on, “The weird thing is, he looked sort of familiar. Do you think he’s on telly or something?” I gazed at her in horror and pissed myself laughing. “You mean you didn’t realise?” I said. “That was Mick, who’s been our bin-man for, like, eight years.” And ever since then, when I’ve wanted to coerce Rose into loading the dishwasher when it’s my turn, or doing the Ocado order or whatever, I’ve wheeled out the prospect of revealing all to Vanessa, who, being an appalling snob, would mock Rose mercilessly and quite possibly defriend her.

Rose and I had a giggle about Mick the binman, and as usual I realised that she had made me feel much more cheerful, so I headed upstairs to get dressed. Sadly my good mood didn’t last long, as I realised that my recent weight loss had left me with absolutely no clothes that fitted – even my bras were too big. I ended up wearing a denim mini skirt that sat so low on my hips that it was barely a mini any more, a slouchy black jumper that wasn’t really meant to be slouchy, leopard-print tights and black boots. Rose said I looked amazing and she couldn’t believe how thin I’d got, but I suspect she was just being kind – half a stone
isn’t much really and there was no way I could compete with her in her designer skinny jeans, flat over-the-knee boots and backless gold top.

Her friends were being kind too, though, because when we walked into the bar – it was called Eve’s and it was decorated in a style that I suppose was meant to echo the garden of Eden, with loads of lush plants, murals of tropical jungle scenes on the walls, snakeskin print fabric sofas and bowls of fake apples everywhere – they all broke into a chorus of, “Wow, Ellie, you look amazing! How fabulous to see you!” It was quite sweet really.

We sat down at our table and all ordered fancy cocktails and started chatting away. Pip told us about the filthy text messages she’d been getting from Hans the ski instructor, and had us all in stitches with his ‘damn you, autocorrect’ moments. Apparently the latest message had said he wanted to kick her aunt. Chloë was checking out a group of men in suits at the next-door table, but when they came over and said hello and she found out that they were estate agents, she lost interest. Rose produced some juicy gossip about her friend Gervase, who was apparently having a passionate affair with a married man he’d met at work. After the second round I found myself telling Vanessa all about Ben’s running-and-porridge boot camp, and how none of my clothes fitted any more.

“But you must come and see me at work,” she said. “I’d love to sort you out with a new wardrobe, I adore doing that sort of thing, and I’ll get you a discount too. Go on, you can’t deprive me of a chance to play personal shopper,” and the next thing she’d whipped out her Blackberry and we were comparing diaries and discovering that we were both free the next afternoon at two (actually I hadn’t needed to consult my diary to know that, but it’s just as well to play along in these situations).

Vanessa’s a fashion buyer for Black & White, the uber-smart department store on Bond Street. I’d only been in there once before, with Rose when she’d been on a desperate quest for a hat to match her taupe shoes, and the place had frankly terrified me with its fragrant, deep-carpeted swankiness, sneery assistants and eye-watering prices. However I was feeling quite flush that month and I hadn’t spent any money on clothes for ages, and it felt quite glamorous and exciting to be pushing open the heavy glass doors and heading to the first floor to find the personal shopping department, where I’d arranged to meet Vanessa.

“So, Ellie,” she said. “I’ve picked out a few pieces that I think will work for you.” She was all bouncy and excited, and I could tell that, like me, she really loved her job, and I felt myself warming to her quite a bit. “I’m thinking some classic, timeless pieces for work, with some more directional bits and accessories to make them a bit younger and more fun, and then some great casual stuff that will make your weekend-wear look just a bit more pulled together.” She smiled a bit pityingly at my black trousers and stripy top. I’d thought I was doing rather well by pinning a corsagey thing to my denim jacket and nicking another of Rose’s scarves, but clearly she’d seen through me. “And one or two totally fabulous things for evening. And then when we’re done, I’m going to send you downstairs to Martina who will sort you out with some decent bras – trust me, they’ll make you look taller, curvier, the works.”

I thanked her yet again for giving up her Saturday afternoon and going to such a huge amount of trouble, and said, “Right, let’s get on with it then.”

Vanessa ushered me through to a sort of super-cubicle – a room almost the size of my bedroom at home, with mirrors all along two walls, a squashy gold-coloured chaiselongue, a little table with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a tray with coffee things
and a plate of fancy chocolate biscuits. Knowing Black & White’s clientele, I doubt many of those ever got eaten. Along the other wall stood a garment rail absolutely groaning with clothes.

“My god!” I said. “I’ll never try all those on, I’ll be dead of exhaustion.”

“No you won’t,” Vanessa said in a steely tone that reminded me a bit of Rose. “Besides, once we get an idea of what suits you we’ll be able to tell which of the things I’ve pulled out for you are worth you trying on and which aren’t, and we’ll discard the ones that aren’t and I’ll pop out and get some more styles I think will work on you. So – what’s first?”

“Casual stuff, I suppose,” I said, clinging limpet-like to my comfort zone.

“Casual? No, I don’t think so,” Vanessa said. “Come on, put this on.” And she took a dress off the rail and held it out to me in the manner of a conjuror pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

I flinched away from it. “I can’t wear that,” I said. “It’s pink.” And so it was – a deep, almost lilacy pink like a peony. Looking at it, I realised that almost every single garment I own is either black, white, grey, beige or denim. “And what’s more it’s got a hole in it.” It did too – a massive great cut-out bit across the shoulders at the back.