Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (4 page)

BOOK: Lessons in Laughing Out Loud
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Even breathing wouldn’t be possible once India Torrance was settled in. She’d have to be on high alert all the time, keeping India hidden and sane, the latter a task for which Willow was most definitely underqualified. And if something terrible did happen, if the press discovered India or the girl did harm herself in any way, the person who would get the blame would be Willow.
From what little Willow knew about her personally, India seemed to be a nice enough person: well brought up, well-spoken. She was certainly very beautiful in a fresh-faced way, and while she never seemed to need even a speck of makeup to gild those sparkling eyes and the long, light brown hair that framed her delicate features, when the stylists glammed her up for the red carpet, she took it well, an actress playing the vamp. India was still in the bloom of youth, that reign of beauty when you are in your twenties that seems like your right, one that you never expect to lose.
Pausing in front of a mirrored wall punctuated with handbags of all shapes and colors, floating on glass shelves, Willow observed her own face.
For the last twenty years, perhaps more, Willow had been allowing herself to grow steadily fatter, adding a few pounds more every year and never quite finding the time or the will to make the necessary changes that could either halt or reverse the gradual increase in her waistline, hips and bottom. Willow met her own eyes and regarded them for a moment,
deep blue, almost violet, with a fleck of black in one iris. They could be quite arresting, intense, intoxicating someone had once whispered in her ear.
Everyone always said she had lovely eyes.
And Willow had great hair, she was a genuine blond, no need for highlights or glosses or squeezed lemon for Willow. Her thick, golden, waist-length hair fell in soft curls, always silky and soft to the touch. It was her crowning glory. Willow had it styled every six weeks by a celebrity hairdresser who owned a high-end salon in Covent Garden and gave her a massive discount for sending stars his way. He’d blend away the grays while telling her that she had hair any star would envy.
Her skin was radiant, soft and smooth without a single blemish. Even at the age of thirty-nine, even after a horrible divorce, even after everything, she still looked a good ten years younger than she was. Willow would routinely get asked how she did it and she would reply that it was in the genes, although once at some torturous family occasion one of her mother’s friends had told her that big girls always have great skin.
“It’s the fat, you see. Stops your face falling in,” she’d told her as if she were delivering excellent news.
“Fuck it, I’m having another piece of cake then,” Willow replied, enjoying the shock her casually dropped profanity had on one of mother’s book club set.
“The fat,” as if it wasn’t part of her, as if it were a separate entity all of its own that she could somehow absentmindedly lose or shed like a butterfly shrugging off a cocoon. But that wasn’t going to happen. The fat was more than part of her; sometimes Willow felt like it
was
her, all of her, marbling throughout her whole being, not just her body but her mind, her heart and perhaps even her soul. Perhaps she had a fat soul.
Even so, Willow could never blame her weight on her genes or her metabolism or big bones or any other excuse. Her weight was all her own doing. She could be certain of it, because she had another reflection, one much crueler than any mirror she stood in front of could ever return: her own identical twin to look at, her very own genetic clone, to show in glorious Technicolor exactly what could have been if only she had been better at saying no.
Holly was almost her exact double, with the very same violet eyes, including the fleck, the honey-gold hair and wonderful skin. They were the same in every respect except one. Holly was a healthy size four and Willow was size fourteen. Whenever Willow looked at her beautiful sister, she had to confront on each and every occasion what she might have looked like, what she might live like, if only she could find whatever magic ingredient it was that would make her stop eating much more than she needed to every single day.
Willow stared at the woman who was staring back at her from behind a tangerine Mulberry bag, her rounded face, the gentle pouch of a double chin that billowed softly beneath her jaw, the buttons of her shirt that strained against the pressure of flesh building behind them, and the surge of fat that blossomed over the waistband of her wide-legged trousers. She could remember exactly the last day that she and Holly had looked identical.
It had been the day of her stepfather’s funeral in Christchurch. He’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer ten months before and had succumbed to his short illness, as the notice in the paper said, at home and at peace with his loving wife and doting stepdaughters. The twins had never known their real father, and Willow’s recollection of life before Ian shone in her memory like polished silver despite the hardships they’d faced. Back then it always seemed to be summer,
and she remembered being taken out for picnics on a school night, because the cupboard was bare and the bakers on the corner sold sandwiches half price at the end of the day. They’d climb the side of a steep hill on a windy day, paper napkins sailing away on the breeze, and Willow and Holly, hands linked, would roll down the slope, laughing and laughing as the world spun out of control all around them, secure in the knowledge they would always have each other.
Then her mother met Ian, Mr. Sinclair, the local bank manger. Imogene Briars made her girls wait for her while she went in for her interview, careful to point out her needy seven-year-old charges, drumming their worn-down heels on the metal chair legs in unison, as she disappeared into his office. She’d gone in to extend her overdraft and came out with an invitation to dinner. They were married after a whirlwind romance of less than a year, during which Willow remembers her mother constantly smiling.
Ian brought everything into their lives that had been missing before; stability, order, security. There weren’t picnics on school nights anymore, or evenings spent rolling down hills until after it got dark. But neither were there winters when the tips of their fingers went blue because the gas bill hadn’t been paid, or beans on toast for tea the third night in a row. He’d been the closest thing Willow and Holly ever had to a father, but it never occurred to Willow, until they buried him, how much she’d loved him. And when she realized it, the only thing she could think of to do was eat.
On the day of Ian’s funeral, Willow’s mother had been inconsolable, retiring to bed with a large gin and Valium before the guests had left the wake. Holly, turned out so neatly in a black dress with a white collar, had done her best to step into their mother’s shoes, and Willow, bereft and feeling a sudden empty crater inside, had sat quite alone at the kitchen table
and eaten sixty ready-cooked cocktail sausages straight out of the packet, one after the other, without stopping. Later, after everyone had gone and Holly had been upstairs to check their mum was still breathing, she had come and found Willow still sitting in the kitchen.
“She’s never going to get over this,” Holly had said, taking a chocolate cake out of the fridge and putting it on the table. “We’re going to have to look after her now.”
“I know,” Willow replied. “Well, we’re almost fifteen now anyway.”
“Just the three of us again,” Holly had said, her eyes meeting Willow’s, full of apprehension.
“Just the three of us, yes.” Willow remembered feeling as if the gulf inside her was reaching through her toes and into the guts of the earth.
From that day on she had drifted ever further from the life her identical twin lived. When Holly, size four, went to university, Willow, size six, moved into a bed-sit over the chip shop and started at a temping agency, moving from job to job, quite happy never to settle anywhere. When Holly, size four, started as a graduate trainee for a fashion house in the West End, Willow, size eight, automatically went along as requisite flatmate and started working as a dentist’s receptionist. For four years the two of them lived together, a perfect, happy period in Willow’s life that always seemed to be full of fun. Holly and her boyfriend, Graham, affectionately called Gray, were the sensible ones, and Willow, curvier than her sister, flirty and sexy, was in much demand, dating an endless stream of men but never really able to settle on one. That all ended when Holly, twenty-five and size four, married Gray. Willow, size ten, stood at the altar in a bridesmaid’s dress dyed to match her eyes.
The following years were almost featureless in Willow’s
memory. Holly, size four, had worked her way up in the fashion industry, traveled with Gray whenever she could, gradually spent more and more time visiting their mother and less time with Willow, who seemed to be trapped in a time warp while everyone else’s life moved on. She ricocheted from one ill-fated liaison to another, some of them lasting for months, others only hours; she drifted from job to job that did nothing more for her than make ends meet, and in all that time found no one and nothing to give sustenance to that constant gnawing hunger.
At the age of thirty-two, Willow, size twelve, found a new job working for a wine merchant underneath the arches in London Bridge. It took her entirely by surprise to discover how drawn she was to Sam Wainwright, her new boss, a man a little older than she, who lost his wife a few years earlier and was now bringing up his eight-year-old daughter alone. Willow was not certain whether she’d loved him, or his story, or Chloe at first, but love him she did, and it had seemed like her life was finally resolving itself when a year after she started working for him he proposed. Holly, size four, and Chloe, age nine, had been her bridesmaids.
Which was why everyone was so upset when—at exactly the same time that Holly (size six for two months, then size four again) gave birth to her twins—Willow, size twelve, left her husband and Chloe, never to return.
Holly moved back to Christchurch to be near their mother, and Willow, verging on a size fourteen, was offered a job by Victoria Kincade, who’d interviewed her along with ten other applicants, telling Willow she’d gotten the job on the spot because she was the only one who looked like she wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown after five minutes in Victoria’s presence. Her weight gain slowed down but continued to creep up, and Willow knew that if not this year then the next she’d be looking at the next dress size up.
Brushing the thought aside, she had just stopped to buy several packets of her favorite handmade Lick the Spoon chocolates when her phone vibrated. That would be Victoria, probably asking her to stock up on wigs and disguises for India.
“You were thinking about me,” Holly said into her ear. “Nice thoughts. It made me wonder how it went with Dave?”
Willow smiled. Although they were twins, Holly was the psychic one, able to pinpoint exactly what Willow was thinking or feeling with eerie accuracy. Willow didn’t seem to have quite the same prowess for sisterly intuition, although she could always feel Holly there, almost like hearing her heart beating in the back of her mind, and sometimes she would get a muffled sense of how Holly was feeling, as if another, mirrored presence was passing through a dream that wasn’t precisely her own. It wasn’t an exact science, though; it could never be predicted and it didn’t always come at the right time. “Ah, Dave,” she said, rather apologetically.
“What do you mean ‘Ah, Dave’? He’s gorgeous!”
Willow thought of Dave’s halfhearted kisses and her mechanical response to them.
“No, sorry. Not for me. And I am not the one for him, either.”
“Oh, Willow.” Holly sounded quite cross. “I had high hopes for Dave too.”
“Sorry, sis.” Willow paused by a display of Liberty-print-covered notebooks, picking one up to flick through the blank pages. Since she was a very young girl, there had always been something about the neatly bound, gilt-edged potential that comforted her. Other little girls had teddy bears or age-old scraps of material to cuddle up to. It was a blank notebook that Willow always kept under her pillow. The world’s most boring secret diary, Holly always said. But Willow knew—she knew what she would write in it if she could—she didn’t have to spoil the beautiful pure white pages with the stream of words
that so frequently threatened to break the dam of her firmly closed mind. Picking up a particularly lavish pink, purple and gold affair, she decided to add it to her purchases. She would put it carefully in her drawer full of empty notebooks.
“Well, anyway, I’ve got to go, you ungrateful wretch,” Holly said, her affectionate tone belying her words. “Jem seems to have taped Jo-Jo’s hair to the back of the table—but call me later to tell me about your big secret.”
“Okay, that had to be a guess, how did you know? I barely even know!” Willow said, as her sister hung up without a good-bye.
Willow caught her breath in surprise as the phone rang again and she saw Daniel Fayre’s name on her screen. Daniel, the one person, among the four she loved, whom she would not openly admit to loving.
“What now?” she asked as she took the call, studiously careful to be flippant and brusque, as always.
“Nice.” Daniel laughed. “Where’s the hello, where’s the how are you, Dan, what’s up, it’s been a few days. Did you get that assignment in Panama? None of that then?”
“Dan, you and I both know you only phone me when you want something, so what is it?”
BOOK: Lessons in Laughing Out Loud
9.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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