‘She couldn’t give a stuff about Patrick,’ Dad said. ‘I told her he rang to tell us he came 157th in the Viking thing, and she couldn’t have looked less interested.’ He sipped his tea. ‘Mind you, to be fair on her, even I found it pretty hard to get excited about 157th.’
‘Do you think she’s ill? She’s awful pale under that tan. And all that sleeping. It’s just not like her. She might have some terrible tropical disease.’
‘She’s just jet-lagged,’ I said. I said it with some authority, knowing that Mum and Dad tended to treat me as an expert on all sorts of matters that none of us really knew anything about.
‘Jet lag! Well, if that’s what long-haul travel does to you, I think I’ll stick with Tenby. What do you think, Josie, love?’
‘I don’t know … who would have thought a holiday could make you look so ill?’ Mum shook her head.
I went upstairs after supper. I didn’t knock. (It was still, strictly speaking, my room, after all.) The air was thick and stale, and I pulled the blind up and opened a window, so that Lou turned groggily from under the duvet, shielding her eyes from the light, dust motes swirling around her.
‘You going to tell me what happened?’ I put a mug of tea on the bedside table.
She blinked at me.
‘Mum thinks you’ve got Ebola virus. She’s busy warning all the neighbours who have booked on to the Bingo Club trip to PortAventura.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Lou?’
‘I quit,’ she said, quietly.
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think?’ She pushed herself upright, and reached clumsily for the mug, taking a long sip of tea.
For someone who had just spent almost two weeks in Mauritius, she looked bloody awful. Her eyes were tiny and red-rimmed, and her skin, without the tan, would have been even blotchier. Her hair stuck up on one side. She looked like she’d been awake for several years. But most of all she looked sad. I had never seen my sister look so sad.
‘You think he’s really going to go through with it?’
She nodded. Then she swallowed, hard.
‘Shit. Oh, Lou. I’m really sorry.’
I motioned to her to shove over, and I climbed into bed beside her. She took another sip of her tea, and then leant her head on my shoulder. She was wearing my T-shirt. I didn’t say anything about it. That was how bad I felt for her.
‘What do I do, Treen?’
Her voice was small, like Thomas’s, when he hurts himself and is trying to be really brave. Outside we could hear next door’s dog running up and down alongside the garden fence, chasing the neighbourhood cats. Every now and then we could hear a burst of manic barking; its head would be popping up over the top right now, its eyes bulging with frustration.
‘I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. God. All that stuff you fixed up for him. All that effort … ’
‘I told him I loved him,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘And he just said it wasn’t enough.’ Her eyes were wide and bleak. ‘How am I supposed to live with that?’
I am the one in the family who knows everything. I read more than anyone else. I go to university. I am the one who is supposed to have all the answers.
But I looked at my big sister, and I shook my head. ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I said.
She finally emerged the following day, showered and wearing clean clothes, and I told Mum and Dad not to say a word. I implied it was boyfriend trouble, and Dad raised his eyebrows and made a face as if that explained everything and God only knew what we had been working ourselves into such a fuss over. Mum ran off to ring the Bingo Club and tell them she’d had second thoughts about the risks of air travel.
Lou ate a piece of toast (she didn’t want lunch) and she put on a big floppy sunhat and we walked up to the castle with Thomas to feed the ducks. I don’t think she really wanted to go out, but Mum insisted that we all needed some fresh air. This, in my mother’s vocabulary, meant she was itching to get into the bedroom and air it and change the bedding. Thomas skipped and hopped ahead of us, clutching a plastic bag full of crusts, and we negotiated the meandering tourists with an ease born of years of practice, ducking out of the way of swinging backpacks, separating around posing couples and rejoining on the other side. The castle baked in the high heat of summer, the ground cracked and the grass wispy, like the last hairs on the head of a balding man. The flowers in the tubs looked defeated, as if they were already half preparing for autumn.
Lou and I didn’t say much. What was there to say?
As we walked past the tourist car park I saw her glance under her brim at the Traynors’ house. It stood, elegant and red-brick, its tall blank windows disguising whatever life-changing drama was being played out in there, perhaps even at this moment.
‘You could go and talk to him, you know,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait here for you.’
She looked at the ground, folded her arms across her chest, and we kept walking. ‘There’s no point,’ she said. I knew the other bit, the bit she didn’t say aloud. He’s probably not even there.
We did a slow circuit of the castle, watching Thomas roll down the steep parts of the hill, feeding the ducks that by this stage in the season were so well stuffed they could barely be bothered to come over for mere bread. I watched my sister as we walked, seeing her brown back exposed by her halter-neck top, her stooped shoulders, and I realized that even if she didn’t know it yet, everything had changed for her. She wouldn’t stay here now, no matter what happened with Will Traynor. She had an air about her, a new air of knowledge, of things seen, places she had been. My sister finally had new horizons.
‘Oh,’ I said, as we headed back towards the gates, ‘you got a letter. From the college, while you were away. Sorry – I opened it. I thought it must be for me.’
‘You opened it?’
I had been hoping it was extra grant money.
‘You got an interview.’
She blinked, as if receiving news from some long-distant past.
‘Yeah. And the big news is, it’s tomorrow,’ I said. ‘So I thought maybe we should go over some possible questions tonight.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t go to an interview tomorrow.’
‘What else are you going to do?’
‘I can’t, Treen,’ she said, sorrowfully. ‘How am I supposed to think about anything at a time like this?’
‘Listen, Lou. They don’t give interviews out like bread for ducks, you eejit. This is a big deal. They know you’re a mature student, you’re applying at the wrong time of year, and they’re still going to see you. You can’t muck them around.’
‘I don’t care. I can’t think about it.’
‘But you –’
‘Just leave me alone, Treen. Okay? I can’t do it.’
‘Hey,’ I said. I stepped in front of her so that she couldn’t keep walking. Thomas was talking to a pigeon, a few paces up ahead. ‘This is exactly the time you have to think about it. This is the time when, like it or not, you finally have to work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life.’
We were blocking the path. Now the tourists had to separate to walk around us – they did so, heads down or eyeing with mild curiosity the arguing sisters.
‘I can’t.’
‘Well, tough. Because, in case you forgot, you have no job any more. No Patrick to pick up the pieces. And if you miss this interview, then in two days’ time you are headed back down the Job Centre to decide whether you want to be a chicken processor or a lap dancer or wipe some other person’s bum for a living. And believe it or not, because you are now headed for thirty, that’s your life pretty well mapped out. And all of this – everything you’ve learnt over the past six months – will have been a waste of time. All of it.’
She stared at me, wearing that look of mute fury she wears when she knows I am right and she can’t say anything back. Thomas appeared beside us now and pulled at my hand.
‘Mum … you said bum.’
My sister was still glaring at me. But I could see her thinking.
I turned to my son. ‘No, sweetheart, I said bun. We’re going to go home for tea now – aren’t we, Lou? – and see if we can have some buns. And then, while Granny gives you a bath, I’m going to help Auntie Lou do her homework.’
I went to the library the next day, and Mum looked after Thomas, so I saw Lou off on the bus and knew I wouldn’t see her again till teatime. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for the interview, but from the moment I left her I didn’t actually give her another thought.
It might sound a bit selfish, but I don’t like getting behind with my coursework, and it was a bit of a relief to have a break from Lou’s misery. Being around someone that depressed is a bit of a drain. You might feel sorry for them, but you can’t help wanting to tell them to pull themselves together too. I shoved my family, my sister, the epic mess she had got herself into, into a mental file, shut the drawer, and focused my attention on VAT exemptions. I got the second-highest marks in my year for Accountancy 1 and there was no way on earth I was dropping back just because of the vagaries of HMRC’s flat rate system.
I got home around a quarter to six, put my files on the hall chair, and they were all lurking around the kitchen table already, while Mum began to serve up. Thomas jumped on me, winding his legs around my waist, and I kissed him, breathing in his lovely yeasty little-boy smell.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ Mum said. ‘Dad’s only just in.’
‘How’d you get on with your books?’ Dad said, hanging his jacket on the back of the chair. He always referred to them as ‘my books’. Like they had a life of their own and had to be wrangled into order.
‘Good, thanks. I’m three-quarters of the way through my Accountancy 2 module. And then tomorrow I’m on corporate law.’ I peeled Thomas from me and put him down on the chair next to me, one hand resting in his soft hair.
‘Hear that, Josie? Corporate law.’ Dad stole a potato from the dish and stuffed it into his mouth before Mum could see. He said it like he relished the sound of it. I suppose he probably did. We chatted for a bit about the kinds of things my module involved. Then we talked about Dad’s job – mostly about how the tourists broke everything. You wouldn’t believe the maintenance, apparently. Even the wooden posts at the car park gateway needed replacing every few weeks because the eejits couldn’t drive a car through a twelve-foot gap. Personally, I would have put a surcharge on the ticket price to cover it – but that’s just me.
Mum finished serving up, and finally sat down. Thomas ate with his fingers while he thought nobody noticed and said bum under his breath with a secret smile, and Granddad ate with his gaze tilted upwards, as if he were actually thinking about something else entirely. I glanced over at Lou. She was gazing at her plate, pushing the roast chicken around as if trying to disguise it. Uh-oh, I thought.
‘You not hungry, love?’ said Mum, following the line of my gaze.
‘Not very,’ she said.
‘It is very warm for chicken,’ Mum conceded. ‘I just thought you needed perking up a bit.’
‘So … you going to tell us how you got on at this interview?’ Dad’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth.
‘Oh, that.’ She looked distracted, as if he had just dredged up something she did five years ago.
‘Yes, that.’
She speared a tiny piece of chicken. ‘It was okay.’
Dad glanced at me.
I gave a tiny shrug. ‘Just okay? They must have given you some idea how you did.’
‘I got it.’
‘What?’