It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (3 page)

“So never mind about his bank balance,” I said, “When he stayed over on Tuesday, was that, you know, your chance to put him through his paces for the first time?”

“God, Ellie, you’re so nosey!” Rose was leaning over the table lighting the candles, but I suspected the glow on her cheeks wasn’t just from the naked flames. “Since you ask, I stayed over at his place a couple of days before. On our fourth date.”

“And?” I said. It’s great fun interrogating Rose when she doesn’t want to be interrogated – she gets all flustered.

She didn’t this time though, she stood back and inspected the table from all angles, then she said quite seriously, “It’s not a buyer’s market out there, Ellie.”

I was about to ask her what on earth art auctions had to do with what Oliver was like in bed, when she looked at her watch and said, “Christ! I’d better get changed,” and legged it upstairs, and I poured myself a hefty G&T and sat down to wait for Rose’s friends to arrive.

“And what do you do, Ellie?” asked Simon, or it may have been Khalid, as we all tucked in to our main course – to be honest I can’t remember which of the glossy pair of them it was, as things were a little hazy by this point. I’d had a G&T and then another, and then a couple of glasses of the champagne Rose had splashed about while people ate their canapés (seriously, canapés. God love her), and then obviously loads of wine with dinner.

I caught Rose’s eye across the table and I could see her thinking, “Don’t mention the minge bus!” That’s the thing about my job – it does tend to take over the conversation rather. It’s not called the minge bus, obviously. The name of the charity is YEESH, which stands for Youth Empowerment and Education for Sexual Health, and in addition to all the media and campaigns stuff that I look after, we’ve got a crack team of doctors, nurses and educators who travel around the place (‘up and down the country’, our press releases say) visiting schools and youth groups and giving talks and then offering counselling and contraceptive advice and smear tests and the morning-after pill and referral for treatment of STIs and counselling for terminations and stuff in their mobile consulting room – hence my name for it, the minge bus. Anyway, if I say so myself, it’s a fantastic organisation and it does brilliant work, but sometimes people – or rather, narrow-minded idiots – view what we do as controversial, mainly because we’re up-front about the fact that teenagers are biologically programmed to have sex, and that’s what they’re going to do whether you like it or not, and the best way to deal with the issue is to provide them with the knowledge and equipment they need to have it safely. As you can imagine, we get a lot of flak from the right-wing press, and Rose knows from bitter experience that once I start talking about it, it can be difficult to shut me up.

So I said all this in answer to Khalid – or Simon – and they made approving
noises, because like most gay men they took a sensible view of these things.

Then Vanessa said, “But aren’t you just encouraging girls to be promiscuous? Isn’t it better to teach them to say no?”

I splashed more wine into my glass. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’re a fourteen-year-old girl and your boyfriend says he’s going to finish with you if you won’t have sex with him, and all your friends say they’re sleeping with their boyfriends, and no one is giving any sensible advice about contraception because they still believe the rubbish about not getting pregnant the first time, or if you do it standing up,” I could see Rose wincing, “or if you use an empty crisp packet as a condom, and your boyfriend won’t take no for an answer, and then you don’t have access to emergency contraception or proper advice, and you wonder why we have a teenage pregnancy rate higher than anywhere else in Europe.” By this stage I suppose I was getting a bit loud, but I’m passionate about what I do.

Before Rose could tactfully steer the conversation on to more innocuous subjects, Vanessa chimed in again, “But how can a fourteen-year-old girl make the decision to terminate a pregnancy?” And then I’m afraid I went off on one a bit, launching into my standard rant about how abortion is safer than childbirth and if you don’t allow women absolute control over decisions about their reproductive health then we become little more than brood mares for society, and by the time I’d finished, the polite hum of conversation around the table had fallen silent, and Vanessa was looking shocked and embarrassed.

“Well, of course you’re entitled to your opinion, Ellie,” she said, and I said it wasn’t an opinion, it was a fact, and she was entitled to have opinions too but only if she was willing to accept that they were just plain wrong. Which I suppose is why Rose doesn’t like it when I talk about the minge bus at her dinner parties – but then I can’t help it if some of her friends have ridiculous, antediluvian views, can I?

“Would anyone like some pudding?” asked Rose in a rather tight sort of voice, and stood up and started clearing plates. Vanessa got up to help her and I knew that when they were in the kitchen Rose would be apologising to her for my behaviour and Vanessa would be lying and telling her it was fine, she wasn’t offended, at all. Then they came back with a bowl of what Rose announced was chestnut panacotta with mincemeat sauce, and the conversation around the table more or less resumed. I decided I’d better keep quiet for a bit and try not to cause any more ructions, so I concentrated on eating my pudding – which was gorgeous – and listened to Oliver talking to Tom about his art collection and some guy called Jamie Cunningham who was apparently the next big thing. Rose chimed in and said that he’d asked her to sit for him, and everyone made suitably impressed noises.

When everyone had finished, I started to clear the table – Rose has me well trained – and Oliver got up to help me. We carried the plates and bowls through to the kitchen and while I was stacking the dishwasher Oliver said, “That was impressive work back there, Ellie. You’re absolutely right, those sort of views need to be challenged.” I looked up at him and he smiled and I felt my stomach turn over in a way that had nothing to do with my having eaten way too much panacotta.

CHAPTER THREE

I woke up the next morning feeling as rough as a badger’s arse. My tongue had cleaved itself to the roof of my mouth and tasted as if I’d been licking dried cat sick. My eyelashes were stuck together with lumps of sleep and mascara. I had a pounding headache and a horrible sense of impending doom. I tried to roll over and get back to sleep for a while – always the sensible thing to do in these situations – but it was no good; I needed to wee and The Fear had me well and truly in its grasp, and besides there was a lovely smell of coffee and bacon wafting up the stairs.

I know I said I’m a vegetarian, and I am, it’s something I really believe is
important. It’s not just about the morality of killing animals to eat, there are so many other issues: food miles, the environmental impact of animal husbandry, the economics of it all. Do you know how many acres of pasture it takes to produce a pound of beef, and how much grain could be produced from the same area of land? Well, I can’t exactly remember, but trust me, it’s a lot. Of course vegetarianism isn’t without its ethical compromises. Ben pointed out to me a few years ago that if you’re a vegetarian who eats dairy products you’re inadvertently contributing to the murder of thousands of male dairy calves, which are born but have no use in milk production. I have no idea what I thought happened to them – either they lived out their days happily scampering around green pastures, or the bad meat eaters ate them, I suppose. But it’s neither of the above: they basically get slaughtered at birth and used for pet food. And that really shocked me, so much so that I gave up dairy (and eggs, on the basis that if a thing’s worth doing…) and became a vegan for more than a year. But I just couldn’t hack it. My hair started falling out, I was tired and run down and constantly getting colds, I piled on about a stone because I craved sugar all the time and there’s this lovely little vegan cafe down the road that does amazing peanut butter cupcakes, and I was getting through about five of them a week, in addition to mountains of nuts and avocado pears. Then Ben told me about the terrible deforestation that’s going on in the Amazon and how fragile natural habitat is being destroyed to clear land for soya production, and pointed out that by following a vegan diet I was basically complicit in that. So I made myself a cheese omelette and felt much, much better.

Anyway my point is that if you try to live in a decent and ethical way, you find yourself constantly coming up against dilemmas that seem fundamentally insoluble. Is it worse to eat free range chicken than battery eggs? Is the destruction of the rain forest for soya production a price worth paying to feed people in the developing world who might otherwise
starve? Is the carbon footprint of a South African avocado pear more or less than that of a Welsh lamb chop? And so on and on. You can’t get by without making some compromises, and as far as I’m concerned it’s never going to be possible to be morally pure when it comes to food – or indeed anything else – and what’s important is that one is mindful of the choices one makes. Which is why I try not to feel guilty about the fact that I love the smell of bacon and still long for a bacon sandwich, just sometimes, if I have a really stinking hangover.

I showered and cleaned my teeth and swallowed two paracetamol with water from the bathroom tap, and got dressed in skinny jeans and ballet pumps and a rather pretty camisole top and waterfall cardigan (from Primark – don’t get me started on the ethics of
that
) and poured loads of eyedrops into my eyes before I went downstairs. Not that I was expecting Oliver to be there, or anything. But he was. He was alone in the kitchen, standing at the stove poking with a spatula at a pan full of bacon.

“Morning,” I said, feeling desperately shy all of a sudden.

“Morning,” Oliver said. He was wearing the smart white shirt he’d had on the previous night, with the cufflinks and everything, and I presume boxer shorts, although I couldn’t see because the shirt tail hung down to the tops of his thighs, which I couldn’t help staring at. His legs and his feet were bare and he’d obviously just had a shower (Rose has her own en-suite shower room; in the course of negotiations about that, I got sole use of the main bathroom and the bigger bedroom that faces the garden, so I’m not complaining), because his hair was damp, although it had been carefully combed. His top half looked like a banker and his bottom half like a teenage boy – it was odd and quite touching. I noticed that he had lovely legs, lean and muscular with a dusting of dark hair, which was worn away at the tops of his legs where his jeans would rub. I realised he’d noticed me staring, and also that a rather awkward sort of silence had fallen.

“Did you sleep…” I said, at the same moment as Oliver said, “I hope you don’t mind…”

“After you,” he said.

“No, no,” I said. “Guests speak first in this house. Anyway I was only going to ask you if you’d slept okay, which is pretty dull as conversation-starters go.”

Oliver laughed. “And I was going to apologise for taking over your kitchen. I promised Madam breakfast in bed – it seems she’s feeling a little fragile this morning. So am I, in fact. I think bringing out the Calvados was probably a strategic error. You’d very sensibly called it a night by then.”

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but finding out that someone else has a hangover worse than your own has almost supernatural restorative powers. Perhaps it’s realising that they will be too occupied dealing with their own crawling sense of shame to worry about anything stupid you might have said or done the night before, or it’s a simple question of realising there are others worse off than yourself, but trust me, it works every time. I certainly felt heaps better knowing Rose and Oliver were suffering too, anyway.

“Coffee?” Oliver asked, pushing the cafetière across the table.

“Lovely.” I located my favourite Marmite mug in the cupboard, sloshed in coffee and milk, and sat down at the kitchen table, sipping gratefully. “Do you have anything exciting planned for the day?” I asked, realising as soon as I said it that it sounded like a none-too-subtle way of asking when I could expect him to clear off out of our kitchen.

Oliver lifted the slices of bacon out of the pan and arranged them on a plate lined with kitchen paper to drain. Impressive – I’m more of a slap straight on to bread and eat leaning over the sink girl myself. “Work, unfortunately,” he said. “We have our year-end in December and it means that the run-up to Christmas is ridiculously busy and January doubly
depressing because there are no looming deadlines to distract one.”

I suppose that may have been my cue to ask Oliver what he did for a living, but I had a hazy recollection of it having been discussed at some length the night before, so I just made sympathetic noises. Oliver opened the breadbin and took out a loaf of wholemeal sourdough – Rose refuses to have white bread in the house, she says she can’t resist eating it and it plays havoc with her weight and her IBS – and started to slice it.

“I always feel plastic white is the best medium for a bacon sarnie,” Oliver said, “but I’m sure there are benefits to this, too.”

I said I totally agreed with him, and placed the blame for the organic stone-ground stuff on Rose. I didn’t mention her IBS though – that would just have been low.

“But where do you stand on the red sauce versus brown sauce debate?” I asked.

“Sauce? What kind of philistine would adulterate a bacon sandwich with sauce?” Oliver said. “Lots of butter,” he spread a thick layer on the bread, “Bacon, a generous dusting of white pepper, and there you have it – perfection. Would you like one the same? Oh, no, sorry, of course – you don’t…”

I looked at Oliver and I looked the slices of bacon, the fat golden and crisp at the edges, and thought about my principles and the poor pigs, and how shallow and wrong it would be to do something I disapproved of in order to please him, and I said, “Oh, go on then.”

And he was right – it was delicious. We ate and he asked me about my plans for the weekend and I said I was going to visit my best mate Claire, who lives a couple of miles away in Brixton, in a very tiny, very dodgy studio flat with her gorgeous baby girl Persephone, who’s my god-daughter. I told him all about how Claire’s boyfriend Ty had succumbed to a fit of commitment-phobia towards the end of Claire’s pregnancy and ditched
her, leaving her and Persephone to make do on almost no money whilst Claire’s on maternity leave from her job as a drama teacher in a youth outreach programme, which pays next to nothing at the best of times. I told him how Claire had asked me to be her birth partner after Ty buggered off – although I suspect he would have been about as much use as a chocolate teapot anyway; I saw him almost faint once watching Claire trimming chicken livers for a paté.