It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (8 page)

I got up and tipped the bucketful of water down the kitchen sink, dried my hands and went into the front room, where everyone was sitting around rather awkwardly with cups of coffee and plates of pudding and glasses of port. I poured myself a brandy and sat down and tried to chat to Gill, who asked me about my plans for New Year’s Eve, presumably thinking it was a safe subject.

“Rose and I are having a party at our flat,” I said, and I saw Gill’s lips tighten at the mention of her name.

“I’m really sorry about what she said back there,” I said. “She’s had a lot to drink and I suppose with it being Christmas it brings back memories of Mum and the feelings are a bit raw. I’m sure she’ll be down soon and feeling absolutely mortified.”

Gill sort of sniffed, and I realised that Serena would have confided in her over the years about all the little examples of Rose being ‘difficult’ – the loads of clothes put in the
washing machine with all Serena’s left behind in the laundry basket; the lovingly cooked meals loaded with chilli, which Serena can’t eat; the china figurine of a cat that had been a wedding present to Dad and Serena, which Rose accidentally smashed. Admittedly it was a bit hideous, but still.

Then Dad came downstairs looking no happier, and took me aside and said, “I’m afraid Rose has decided to go back to London, Ellie.”

“But how can she?” I asked stupidly. “There aren’t any trains until tomorrow.”

“She’s rung a boyfriend. Some bloke called Oliver. He’s on his way to fetch her now.”

I couldn’t help feeling a lurch of excitement at the prospect of seeing him.

CHAPTER SIX

When I arrived home three days later, Rose was out. The flat had that slightly stuffy, dusty smell places get when they’ve been empty for a few days, and the beautifully-decorated Christmas tree was shedding its needles on to the parquet floor. I dumped the huge carrier bag of Christmas presents for Rose, which she hadn’t bothered to take with her, in the hall and headed up to my room, put my bag on the floor and then sat down on the bed, looking down at my hands and feeling sad, anticlimactic and generally at a loose end.

We’d tried to maintain the pretence of a normal Christmas after Rose left with Oliver, who had introduced himself politely to all the family but refused anything to eat or
drink, clearly finding the situation as cringily awkward as the rest of us. He barely spoke to me, simply perched on the edge of a chair and made desultory conversation while we all waited for Rose to reappear, and when she did she said, “Shall we go, Ollie? Goodbye everyone, enjoy the rest of the day. Ellie, I’ll text you.” Then she and Oliver had walked out to his car (a low-slung sporty thing I think may have been a Jaguar) and they drove away, leaving silence and a feeling of emptiness behind them. Frankly it was all just shit and although I tried not to show it I felt so angry with Rose and embarrassed for her and myself, as if I were somehow to blame. And Oliver, of course, remained as remote and untouchable as ever.

Part of me had really wanted to leave myself, head back home and go out with my friends or to work or somewhere – anywhere – to escape the bad atmosphere. But the office was closed until the second of January, I didn’t want to go back to the flat in case Rose was there with Oliver, there was no room for me in Claire and Pers’s little matchbox and besides I didn’t want Dad and Serena to feel like they’d been deserted by another daughter. So I stuck it out for three more nights, chatting to them about the babies and making pots of tea and being dutiful, and instead of enjoying having them to myself, by the end of it I was really relieved to go. But now that I was home, I couldn’t seem to decide what to do with myself. If we were going to go ahead with Rose’s ambitious New Year’s Eve party plans, we’d have to have a conversation at some stage, but she hadn’t been in touch with me and I was buggered if I was going to be the one to give in and call her first.

After a while I got up, unpacked, found homes for all my Christmas presents, swept up the pine needles and whisked a duster around in a half-hearted way, then went out to the corner shop and stocked up on bread, milk and – randomly – a cabbage, because I vaguely felt we should have something healthy in the fridge to make up for all the chocolate
I’d eaten over the past couple of days. When I got back I flipped through the channels on the telly, called Ben and left a message for him, called Claire and left a message for her, and then of course I caved in and called Rose. I should have known I would – I have no willpower in these things and absolutely no ability to sustain any kind of cold war. Whenever I’ve had rows with boyfriends and stormed out into the night in a huff, I’m always back knocking on their door apologising within a few minutes. If I have a disagreement with someone at work, I literally have to sit on my hands to stop myself sending conciliatory emails and end up sending them anyway. I’m a complete sucker that way. Peace-loving, I suppose you could say if you were being kind.

Anyway Rose answered her phone before I even heard it ring, so I suspected she’d been waiting for my call as anxiously as I’d been waiting for the moment when I’d give in and call her.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Are you home?” she asked, and I said yes, I’d got back a couple of hours before.

Then I said, “Rose, listen…”

“No, Ellie,” she said. “I’m not going to listen and I’m not going to talk about it. I’m just not, okay?”

I think I’ve mentioned that Rose is ridiculously stubborn. I didn’t say anything, and thought for a bit. I could try and talk sense into her and convince her that she was being childish, bratty and cruel, but then we’d end up rowing about it and there’d be a fug of tension in the flat that could last for weeks. Or she might decide to stay where she was and not come home and that would be just as bad.

So I said, “Where are you?”

“I’m at Vanessa’s,” she said surprisingly. “I’ve been staying here for the last few days – Ollie had stuff on. We’re planning our outfits for New Year’s. Did you see the update on the Facebook page?”

“No,” I said, rather sullenly if I’m being honest.

“We’ve decided to make it an eighties theme,” she said. “You’ll need to find a costume – I’m going as Madonna, with a pointy bra and everything, and Ness is going as Tina Turner.”

“What?” I said, well and truly distracted from my original point. “But I hate fancy dress. You know I do.”

“Oh come on, Ellie, don’t be a spoil-sport,” Rose said. “It’s going to be brilliant. We’re going to have disco music and lights and retro food and everything. Ness wanted a prawn ring but I said no because we have our standards, but I’m thinking miniature chicken kievs and devilled eggs and stuff.”

“Cheese and pineapple hedgehog?” In spite of myself, I was entering into the spirit of the thing.

“Exactly!” said Rose. “See, there’s no need to be so prickly.”

“As long as you promise the prawn ring idea’s going to be spiked,” I said, starting to giggle. Rose and I love playing this game.

“Don’t worry, I talked Ness out if it,” Rose said. “She’s quite spineless really.” I could hear the smile in her voice too.

“Did you have sharp words?” I asked.

“Nah,” Rose said, “Ness lacks the quillpower.” I could hear Vanessa groan loudly in the background. She just doesn’t get it.

“Know what I don’t understand about them?” I asked.

“What?” said Rose.

“Why they can’t just share the hedge.” I heard Rose dissolve into laughter, and ended the call, feeling much better. I didn’t know what was going to happen with Oliver, or with Dad and Serena, but for now I had my sister back. I sat down at my laptop and started Googling 1980s fashion, and when Rose walked in a couple of hours later I was feeling quite enthusiastic about the idea and had decided to go as Siouxie Sioux.

“Now if we hang the mirror ball here, in the middle of the room from the light fitting,” Rose said, “And the coloured fairy lights round the edges, it will look totally tremaze.” It was five o’clock on New Year’s Eve and she had been in full-on preparation mode all day, the two of us working like slaves piping filling into scooped-out boiled eggs, sticking spikes on not one but three cheese hedgehogs, one with pineapple, one with green and red glacé cherries, and one with blue cocktail onions – god knows where Rose managed to track those down, I thought they would have been banned years ago owing to their frightening E-number content. After all, even Smarties have been made all healthy and naturally coloured now, and look like they’ve been pre-sucked, which is wrong if you ask me. Anyway Rose had managed to locate her lurid pickled onions from somewhere, and made a huge black forest gateau and loads of vol-au-vents and sausage rolls and sticks of celery stuffed with blue cheese and walnuts, and it may all have been kitscher than a kitsch thing, but it looked delicious.

Finally, Rose climbed the step ladder and carefully hung up the mirror ball.

“There.” She stood back and surveyed our handiwork. “Now we’d better go and get ready, Ellie – it’s going to take me ages to get my hair right with those stupid heated rollers.”

We went into Rose’s bedroom together and it was just like getting ready for parties used to be when we were teenagers. Rose teased my hair and sprayed it purple and I helped her arrange the rollers in hers. She lent me a black vinyl mini-skirt she’d found in one of her drawers and which I just managed to squeeze my arse into and we put careful rips and ladders in a pair of my M&S opaque tights and I finished off the ensemble with Mum’s velvet batwing top that I’d remembered to iron, and put loads of black eyeliner on my eyes and some on my lips too. Rose hadn’t managed to find a pointy bra but she put on a white basque thing and a full, short skirt and white lace gloves and white fishnet stockings that she said had cost a fortune at a bridal boutique, and masses of red lipstick and once she’d spayed half a can of Elnett on her curled hair she looked beyond hot.

Then the doorbell rang and it was Rose’s friend Simon wearing a suit and tie, and apart from the fact that the suit was a bit padded-shouldery and the knot of the tie a bit on the huge side, he looked pretty normal, and we all went, “Booo, party pooper!” but then he handed over a carrier bag that contained a magnum of Krug, pulled a mask out from behind his back and put it on, and he was Nigel Lawson. We all fell about laughing and Rose opened a bottle and found an Abba album on her iPod and put it on and we turned out the lights and started dancing even though it was only seven thirty and none of our other friends had arrived yet.

Soon Ben arrived, dressed as Robert Smith with madly back-combed hair, a baggy white shirt, red lipstick and masses of black eyeliner. He looked the very spit of the Cure frontman circa 1984, only less podgy and rather sexy, and we laughed about our totally accidental outfit co-ordination, and we seemed to have returned to normal after the so-brief-I-might-have-imagined-it weirdness before Christmas. But there was still a bit of a shadow between us after our last evening together, and for the first time ever, I actually felt shy
around him. Claire turned up, looking absolutely stunning in fluorescent yellow legwarmers and an outsize black and white stripy jumper, with Pers strapped in her sling. Pers is such a chillaxed baby, she’s been with Claire to Occupy London demos and any number of parties and even a couple of pro-choice marches, and she’s really good at meeting people and in no time at all Ben and Simon and even Rose were cooing over her and making her do jazz hands with her pudgy little arms, and she was giggling like a loon and loving it.

To be honest I envied little Pers her effortlessly sociable nature. As more people began to arrive – Vanessa and Tom, Pip and Sebastian, a gaggle of Rose’s old friends from uni who I didn’t know; my mate Ash and her boyfriend Dave, Ruth from work and her girlfriend Diana, Ben’s brother Alex and various other mutual friends of ours – I got the urge to retreat to a quiet corner and spectate for a bit, and I noticed a strange thing. Even though almost everyone was in fancy dress (except Alex, who’d forgotten, and turned up in jeans and a jumper, the noodle), if you had to play a game of spotting who was my friend and who was Rose’s, I reckon you’d be able to do it with about ninety-five percent accuracy. My lot all looked just a little bit scruffy. Their fancy-dress outfits had obviously been thrown together at the last minute, based around stuff they’d found lying around in their wardrobes, as mine was. I think the only one who’d spent any money was Diana, who’d decided to come as Princess Diana and invested in a sparkly plastic tiara from Claire’s Accessories. They mostly had beers in their hands, or glasses of wine, and they were standing around in small groups, engaged in quite interesting and serious-seeming conversations. Ben and Claire, for instance, were sitting on the sofa with Pers on Ben’s lap. They’d only met once or twice before, I realised, which was weird given that I’d known Ben for years, and Claire – well, her Mum was best friends with my Mum, so I suppose you could say I’ve known her for ever. But she and Ben were obviously getting on, and when I walked past them on my way to the kitchen I
could hear them earnestly discussing the future of education in inner London and how much more important a stable home life is to a child than private schooling, which is just as well because Claire wouldn’t be able to educate Pers privately in a million years, unless she won the lottery or something.

Rose’s friends, on the other hand, were standing around in big groups all talking very loudly at once, with occasional outbursts of loud laughter, braying from the men and shrieky from the women. Rose was flitting from group to group, and I wondered if she was stressing because Oliver still hadn’t turned up – every now and then, in between her flitting, she stopped and checked her mobile phone, then bit her lip and looked cross, except as the evening wore on and there was still no sign of him, she began to look more anxious than cross.

It was when Rose went off to boarding school that this great divide between our friends opened up, I suppose. When I look at other sisters I know, their social circles are pretty homogeneous. There might be this one’s friends from her book group or that one’s friends from her running club, but by and large they’re much the same kind of people and they all sort of fit together. But when Rose first brought Vanessa to stay with us for a week over the summer holidays almost fifteen years ago, it was like an alien had landed in our house. Although she was only twelve, Vanessa had her hair highlighted, her toenails painted lime green and her legs waxed. She wore matching bras and pants from Sloggi. She had a mobile phone of her own, which was virtually unheard of for anyone under the age of eighteen in those days. She had not one but two ponies, and every night of that week she rang her mother, who she called Mummy, and had a long conversation about how Dapples and Buzz’s schooling was progressing ahead of the pony club championships later in the summer. She really did. The following holiday Rose went off to stay with Vanessa’s family in
Gloucestershire, and came home with highlights, painted toenails and waxed legs of her own. Granny went completely mental and told her that painted toenails are vulgar at any age and totally unacceptable for a child of thirteen, and made her clean it off. I paint mine now, of course, every couple of weeks in the summer, although it has to be the most boring activity in the world, ever, but every time I do I can still hear the note of horror in Granny’s voice as she told Rose off.