We Are Family

by Nicola Gill

  Laura stared at the massive photograph in the middle of the page. Oli could quite easily make it a tiny bit smaller and have room for all the copy. But Laura couldn’t face arguing with him and was keen to get back on the phone to Jan Towler as soon as possible. She also had to make a decision about her sister. Even if you set aside their current row, she wouldn’t be mad keen on commissioning Jess to write a piece for Natter – that wasn’t so much inviting Jess to tread on her toes as getting her to stamp heavily all over them. She looked at Oli. ‘I can cut the copy. But could you do one thing for me? Could you stop avoiding me?’

  The strings broke and Oli looked up, his face puce. ‘I haven’t … I’m not …’

  Laura wished she hadn’t said anything. ‘I just wanted to say that I’m fine.’ (Highly questionable use of the word ‘fine’.) ‘You can treat me normally.’

  Oli looked as if he might cry and Laura felt awful. She got up to leave the room.

  ‘Laura,’ Oli called after her. She turned around. ‘I’m sorry about your mum.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Why oh why had she said something? Her interactions with Oli were bound to be way more excruciating than their non-interactions.

  Back at her desk, Laura dialled Jan’s number, wishing as she did that the sales team weren’t always so noisy. This was a hard enough call as it was.

  Jan picked up on the third ring.

  ‘Jan,’ Laura said, hating herself for the exaggerated friendliness in her voice. Would she have had to manipulate her interviewees if she’d got the job at Inlustris? Not that it mattered because she’d blown her chance of even being in the running for a job there. ‘So, I’ve just been looking at the article again and I think it paints a really sympathetic picture of you—’

  ‘I don’t wanna do it,’ Jan said.

  Two of the guys in sales had started playing desk table tennis. Laura covered the phone so that Jan wouldn’t hear the jeering. ‘Look, I can absolutely see why you’d get nervous but I really think people will understand why you were driven to do what you did.’ She really hated herself right now. The truth was Laura was the last person who was understanding about such matters. Having been cheated on herself, she knew exactly how much damage it could do, and she took a very firm line on people who had affairs. Of course they would always make excuses, but that’s exactly what they were: excuses.

  ‘I don’t wanna do it,’ Jan repeated.

  The table-tennis ball landed with a smack right in the middle of Laura’s desk. It was like working in a bloody creche. ‘The thing is, Jan, we did pay you for the article.’ Another piece of integrity out of the window, but if Laura didn’t say it now, Dani would just make her call back.

  Silence came down the line.

  Please, Laura thought, please.

  ‘I’ll give the money back.’

  Laura stared at the phone. ‘Is there anything I can say to persuade you to change your mind?’

  ‘Nah.’

  Laura said goodbye and let her head fall into her hands.

  ‘Having a good day so far?’ Amy said, appearing at Laura’s desk.

  ‘The best.’ She got up. ‘I’ve got to talk to Dani.’

  Dani looked displeased before Laura even started speaking.

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t change Jan Towler’s mind,’ Laura said.

  Dani did a whole body sigh. ‘Let’s run the story anyway.’

  ‘Really?’ Laura said.

  ‘Yup. She agreed to it, let us do an interview and a photo shoot, accepted a fee—’

  ‘She says she’ll give that back.’

  Dani swatted the air. ‘We’re running the story.’

  Laura walked back to her desk wondering how on earth it could possibly still only be 9.40 a.m.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Laura was standing at Jess’ front door, unable to believe there was no answer to her insistent ringing of the bell. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, of course, no one knew she was coming, but somehow it just hadn’t crossed her mind that there wouldn’t be someone at home.

  She should have messaged Jess to say she was coming. It was fair to say her sister wasn’t exactly Mrs Spontaneous – she and Ben probably diarized sex sessions – but Laura had been worried that if she’d messaged, Jess might have said no, made some excuse about being very busy.

  She rang the doorbell again. Maybe they were all at the bottom of the garden?

  Laura hadn’t planned to come here today. Well, not consciously at least. But in the back of her mind there had been a guilt about their row gnawing away at her, especially when Dani had mentioned StyleMaven and Laura hadn’t even said it was her sister. That had felt like a new low, especially when, later that day, Laura had compounded matters by commissioning ChiaraPicks to write the yes part of the ‘Is it okay to be a social media addict’ story.

  But it wasn’t just guilt that drove Laura. There was also this pervading feeling that she had already lost Dad, Mum and Jon (a different kind of loss, but a loss nonetheless) and she couldn’t lose Jess too. Her sister might be annoying, but she was the only person left who shared the tapestry of their childhood. Laura might feel ridiculous classifying herself as an orphan but she was fully aware that becoming one placed additional weight on the relationship with her sister.

  Jon had Billy for the day and Laura had lots of ideas about how she was going to spend her Saturday being busy and productive. She was going to spring clean the flat. Was the 30th of March a bit late to start on such a thing? Probably. If you were a Jess-type person you would be done and (literally) dusted weeks ago. But Laura wasn’t a Jess-type person. After sorting the flat, Laura was planning to go to the supermarket and buy lots of healthy food so she could meal prep for the week ahead – she was determined she was going to change into a meal-prepping sort of mother. She also had the very weird sensation of noting that she’d better pick up a Mother’s Day card for tomorrow before realizing that she didn’t actually need one.

  However, as she shut the door to Jon and Billy, Laura hadn’t been thinking about cards or plans because she had an overwhelming urge to see her sister. It was a weird feeling, and she had rarely been troubled by such a thing in the past.

  And now she was standing in Jess’ front garden trying to decide if it was a good idea to wait for a bit. She wondered where they might all be. Perhaps they were out to lunch? A perfect Clapham family sitting in a sunny café on Northcote Road. Laura could picture them; it wouldn’t be like when she and Jon took Billy out to eat, instead they would all be chatting and laughing while they ate food off their own plates, no one frightening the other diners. Or perhaps Jess and Ben were ferrying the girls to one of their many improving activities like karate, or Kumon maths or Tiger Sharks? She and Jon had made a conscious decision to avoid all that kind of stuff with Billy. The things he described as ‘bourgeois crap’.

  Laura glanced at her watch and saw it was just after one. She’d wait for a bit. It was a nice day and, if she left now, she might lose her nerve about apologizing. She might remember that, actually, although she shouldn’t have said what she said, it was Jess who started it all with that bullshit about Billy being tired, not to mention Lola basically calling Billy a thief.

  But she didn’t want to think about that now, just like she didn’t want to think about the fact that after the story about Jan Towler had run, Jan had been absolutely ripped to shreds on social media. Laura had been tempted not to take her call when her phone number had flashed up, but then decided that was the least she could do. Her reward was a sobbing Jan calling her ‘the scum of the earth’ and saying she didn’t know how Laura could sleep at night.

  Laura’s stomach rumbled loudly and she realized she’d been so busy trying to coax Billy to eat his cereal this morning that she hadn’t actually eaten any breakfast herself. She scrabbled in her bag and found a half-eaten packet of biscuits nestling at the bottom next to a lone sticky cough sweet and a tampon that had broken free of its wrapper. The top biscuit was caked i
n tampon fluff so she threw that in the wheelie bin and ate the next two.

  A sleek blonde in head-to-toe lycra looked quizzically at Laura as she passed, and Laura wasn’t sure if it was because the woman thought she didn’t look smart enough for the house and so could be a burglar, or simply because she was appalled by the sight of someone munching a chocolate HobNob in plain sight.

  Laura heard her mother’s voice in her head: You’d look nice if you lost a bit of weight. She stuffed another biscuit in her mouth and chewed it in big, joyless, sandy mouthfuls.

  Laura stared at Jess’ glossy front door (painted in the must-have dark grey of the moment from Farrow & Ball) which was flanked by two immaculate bay trees. It all looked so perfect, like it had just been styled for a shoot. She wished Jess was a little less perfect. But that was never going to happen.

  This was crazy. They could be out for the whole day. She’d give it another twenty minutes or so and then go. Maybe she’d leave Jess a note. But, of course, she didn’t have a pen and paper on her, and anyway, they needed to have this conversation in person.

  If I’m going to wait, I may as well do something useful, Laura thought, but then she found herself opening Facebook and twenty minutes later she’d done nothing more productive than wish someone she’d worked with over ten years ago and hadn’t seen since a happy birthday, seen that Sarah Goth had updated her profile picture and watched a GIF of kittens in hats (quite life-enhancing, to be fair).

  It was nearly two o’clock. Time to go.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Then

  Laura and Jon were late to his grandmother’s funeral. They shouldn’t have stayed out so long last night. One more beer, one more dance … until they were among the last to leave the club and it was starting to get light. The bagel place down the road had already opened its doors, unleashing a waft of warmth and yeasty deliciousness.

  Jon’s mother was tight-lipped when they arrived at the house. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’ She looked at Laura as if she had no doubt where the blame lay, and Laura was suddenly acutely aware of the shortness of her skirt and the skimpiness of the spaghetti straps (it was the only black dress she owned, one of just a few dresses, for that matter). Great. As if it wasn’t enough to have her own mother disapprove of her every waking move. Perhaps she could work towards a situation where she had a whole raft of mothers who found her to be a total disappointment.

  A big black car was parked outside and Laura suddenly remembered getting into a similar one the day of her dad’s funeral. She felt a wave of sudden and powerful nausea.

  ‘There’s only room for family,’ Jon’s mother snapped as Laura went to step in.

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum,’ Jon said. ‘We can squeeze up.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve already made us late. And there are plenty of people that can give her a lift.’

  As it was, there weren’t plenty of people who could give Laura a lift and she found herself half walking and half running the two miles to the church, her new shoes rubbing big, puffy blisters on her heels.

  She arrived at the church sweaty and agitated and conferred with one of the men directing people to their seats. Was she family? She was Jon’s girlfriend. The man nodded and gave her the chilliest of smiles before directing her to a seat right at the back. Several people had to move to let her in and she started to clamber over bags and feet. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry …’

  She had only met Jon’s parents once before today when she had been to their house for Sunday lunch. Even though she and Jon weren’t into bourgeois things like marriage, she liked him more than she’d care to admit and she wanted the meeting to go well. Sadly, his parents didn’t seem to warm to her. When they asked her what she did for a living and she said she was a journalist, they reacted very much as if she’d said ‘street walker’. And when she responded to their enquiries about her parents with the information that her father was dead, they looked at her as if this was the result of some carelessness on her part. Lunch was a stilted affair and, even though Laura’s own family drove her mad, she noted that at least they had the good manners to always talk over each other.

  Jon gave her an encouraging smile from the front row and she smiled back. Her temples throbbed. She would win his parents over and, in the meantime, she certainly didn’t want him to know it worried her. He always called her his ‘little hippy chick’ and little hippy chicks didn’t stress.

  The hymn started: ‘Morning Has Broken’. The same one as they’d had at her dad’s funeral. Suddenly Laura was twelve years old again, standing between her mum and Jess, biting the inside of her cheek and trying so hard to be brave that it made her whole body scream in protest.

  Tears started to roll down her cheeks now. She wiped them away self-consciously.

  Jon’s brother got up to do a reading, but Laura wasn’t listening. All she could hear was Jess reading from the Corinthians, her voice calm and clear. Incredible to think her sister had only been fourteen at the time. Jess may get on her nerves but Laura had to admit she was one tough cookie.

  Laura had started to cry properly. She scrabbled in her bag for a bit of loo roll but couldn’t find anything. And she didn’t even have a sleeve. The woman next to her handed her a peach tissue and patted her roughly on the arm.

  The small kindness unhinged Laura even more and she started to sob messily and noisily. People glanced in her direction and she steeled herself, trying to get a grip, especially as the front row of close family were all resolutely dry-eyed. Laura couldn’t imagine Jon’s mother crying. Well, unless her beloved black lab died. Then she would no doubt weep copiously.

  Jon’s uncle was delivering the eulogy. Talking about Peggy’s ninety-two years on this earth, her service during the war, her devotion to her family, thirty years of doing the flowers for the church.

  Thinking about her own dad’s eulogy, Laura sobbed even harder. She’d been too upset to take much of it in at the time, but she did remember Uncle James saying that he had asked Laura what she’d like said about her dad and she’d told him that he was someone who made the good things even better and the bad things bearable.

  Jon glanced over at her. No doubt he was wondering why she was so upset. She tried to give him a wobbly smile.

  She hoped he felt the same way about her as she did about him. They didn’t talk about the future any more than they talked about mortgages or pensions. They were ‘live in the moment, dance all night’ people. C-A-S-U-A-L. But she hoped he was into her. She loved it when he said she was his muse for the novel he wanted to write. And when he said he hoped they were still going to raves when they were seventy, she’d savoured the ‘they’ like the last morsels of a delicious cake.

  Perhaps she should just get out of here, stop making such a show of herself? The trouble was she would have to clamber over six people to get out.

  She balled her fists and dug them into her eyes willing the tears to stop.

  The peach-tissue lady patted her arm again. Please, Laura wanted to shout, don’t be kind! I may be able to stop as long as no one is kind.

  The vicar was doing the final address.

  And suddenly they were all outside in the searing sunlight, Laura acutely conscious of her red, swollen eyes. Jon was trying to get to her but people kept stopping him to offer their condolences. His mother shot her a look of pure contempt.

  ‘Are you okay now?’ peach-tissue lady said.

  Laura nodded because she still couldn’t quite trust herself to speak.

  ‘Were you and Peggy very close?’

  Peggy? Jon’s grandmother. The one she’d met all of once. The one whose funeral she’d just been to.

  How did Laura tell the kind woman that it wasn’t really Peggy she was upset about?

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Laura didn’t know how she was supposed to feel today or even how she did actually feel. It was Mother’s Day, the first one she had ever had where she no longer had a mother. Last Mother’s Day, Evie hadn’t
even been ill.

  Laura was curled up in bed with Billy looking at the card he’d made for her at school. On the front was a painting of a hyacinth, which Billy had remembered was Laura’s favourite flower. Each little splodge of purple paint had been lovingly pressed onto the card by a chubby finger and it was just about the most beautiful thing Laura had ever seen.

  ‘Do you like it, Mummy?’ Billy said.

  ‘I love it,’ she said, kissing the top of his head which, just when he couldn’t get any cuter, was sporting an impressive amount of bedhead.

  As Laura had seen the shops start to fill up with cards, flowers and gifts in the run-up to today, she’d felt nervous. She’d also guiltily remembered her words to Jon last year. She had complained that she hardly ever got to appreciate Mother’s Day as a mother because the day was always ‘totally hijacked’ by Evie.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  ‘Should I bring you breakfast in bed?’ Billy said.

  He really did look like Laura’s dad – even if her mum hadn’t been able to see it. ‘No thank you, my sweetheart. We’ll get up and have it together.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Billy said. ‘Because I don’t know how to make tea.’

  Laura smiled. She wasn’t surprised Billy’s template for Mother’s Day was bringing her breakfast in bed because that was what he had always done with Jon (another thing that was different today). Last year Billy had dropped the toast just as the two of them had come into the bedroom and Laura had still eaten it even though there were bits of fluff, and possibly much worse, flecked through the butter.

  ‘Shall we have treat cereal?’ Billy said.

  Laura laughed. ‘Treat cereal’ was the tooth-achingly sweet multi-coloured shapes that Billy had talked her into at the supermarket and if there was a food that was less of a treat for her, she couldn’t think of it. ‘Absolutely.’