Sisters ... No Way!

by Siobhán Parkinson

  I was flabbergasted. I had this vision of them all, but it seems it was all wrong. I must have made up the bit about the charades. Has your dad got a drink problem, Lisa? I asked, tentatively. A drink problem, she snorted. That’s putting it mildly. He’s just a raving alcoholic, a compulsive gambler and occasionally violent. Violent! I never knew. Oh Lisa! I said. And there I was complaining because my stepmother plays Neil Diamond at eight o’clock in the morning. Neil Diamond at eight o’clock in the morning, Lisa screeched, full of indignation. Funny how even someone going through the sort of stuff she has to put up with can still sympathise about something pretty minor like that. Amazing sense of solidarity, really. (Of course, it’s only minor by comparison. It doesn’t feel a bit minor at the time. Not to mention Ashling and her wretched double-bass. It sounds like a very sick elephant.) And to think I was beginning to think Lisa wasn’t being a good best friend. She’s a star, really.

  Lisa suspects the baby came early because of something her dad did, either that he’d actually knocked her mum about, or just that the strain of it all had got to her. I was sitting opposite her, and at this point I wriggled out of my seat and slipped around to the other side of the table and sat next to her. I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her a half-hug. She hugged me back, and we finished our doughnuts in silence. After that we went for a walk down Grafton Street, but we didn’t do any window-shopping, like we usually do, we just walked along very close together, our shoulders almost touching and keeping in step with each other, just being friends. After that, Lisa had to go and do her babysitting bit.

  Sunday 9th November

  I’m not used to this sort of thing. I suppose with the Junior Cert and all, and Mum being ill, it’s not been a madly sociable year for me. Nothing more thrilling than a school disco, held jointly with the only local boys’ school the nuns approve of. (I don’t know what criteria they use, but I suspect it may be the fact that it’s a fee-paying school that swings it, even though ours isn’t.) The problem with those things – apart from the absurd level of supervision – is that they make you dance with boys of your own age, and we all know what fifteen-year-old boys are like – spotty, gauche, exceptionally immature, and obsessed with dirty jokes. And their feet smell. I think maybe all male feet smell, but it’s worse at fifteen.

  They seem to think that if you agree to dance with them, that’s a licence to grope. You never get groped by anyone you wouldn’t mind being groped by. That seems to be an immutable fact of life. And there is nothing worse than being groped by someone you don’t want to be groped by. But you can’t very well make a scene, or they’ll call the whole thing off, and then nobody will get a chance to grope anyone, and I suppose on the law of averages, somebody somewhere must be getting some sort of a kick out of all this.

  Anyway, that’s all beside the point. I’m staying at Imelda’s this weekend. Saturday was Ashling’s seventeenth birthday, and they were having a party. I really didn’t want to be there. For a start, I don’t know any of her friends, and anyway I just couldn’t bear the sort of party she wanted to have. They were all getting dressed up. Not fancy dress, I mean dressed up in ballgowns, all tulle and corsages. I mean, ballgowns are all very well if you’re going to the Shelbourne in a taxi with a box of Leonidas chocolates and an orchid – and even then it’s all a bit much – but at home (in this case, my home). I just couldn’t face it, all those girls from their prissy school, with their partners in monkey suits. Ugh! And anyway, I haven’t got anyone to be my partner. So I said I’d much rather spend the night with Imelda, and to tell the truth I think everyone was relieved. I think Ashling was afraid I’d stomp around in my Docs, stepping on people’s toes and spitting into the fruit punch (mostly Aqua Libra and orange juice, with just enough cider to give it a whiff of alcohol, so they can pretend they’re being dead grownup). I wouldn’t of course, but it’s just as well that they should think I would.

  Imelda and I went to hear some traditional music in the evening. I’ve never been into that stuff before, but this was good. It’s different live, I suppose. I really enjoyed it, even though I was only drinking rock shandy. I wouldn’t ask for a drink in a pub, it’s not fair on the barman, and it would be mortifying to be refused, and anyway, I don’t like beer.

  We met these fellas with crash helmets. They were sitting across from us in the pub, and I think they were fascinated watching Imelda sipping her Guinness, which I held for her. Anyway, we all got chatting, and they were dead nice. I fancied one of them like mad, but I didn’t think he was all that interested in me, just making conversation. But then at closing time we sort of strolled out of the pub together, the four of us, and they walked a little way with us, talking about this and that, joking together. They were really tickled that we were aunt and niece, and one of them – not the one I fancied, his mate – was being awfully gallant to Imelda, telling her we looked like sisters. I know he was just messing, but it was the first time I ever thought about us being similar, and when he came to mention it, I realised it was true. She is twice – no, nearly three times – my age, and she wears her hair really dead short so she doesn’t have to worry about combing it, not even after she washes it, and mine is all long and tatty, but it’s the same sort of murky brown and we have the same pale skin and dark eyes. Of course, I wear glasses most of the time and Imelda doesn’t and she is small. I’m tall and still growing. Being around short people usually makes me uncomfortable, I feel as if I will break them if I touch them, but I don’t feel like that with Imelda.

  We came to our bus-stop and joined the queue. We had a long wait, as we had missed the last ordinary bus and we had to wait for the midnight night-link. I had had a stone in my boot, so, since we had a long wait, I sat down on the pavement and undid my shoelaces. I eased the boot off, shook out the stone, and put the boot back on.

  The two lads stood around, keeping us company till the bus came, joking me about the stone in my boot. One of them, the one who was playing up to Imelda, asked us to come on to a club with them. I was terrified Imelda was going to say yes, but she just threw her head back and laughed and laughed and asked them had they any idea what age she was. They said they were both twenty-two (which was probably an exaggeration), and that she was probably a year or two older. She shook her head and said that if they were twenty-two they were old enough to know better. She could easily have told them I was only fifteen, and far too young to be let into a nightclub (though I will be sixteen in three months), and even though I didn’t want to go, I desperately didn’t want her to say that either. But she didn’t. Imelda never says anything embarrassing like that.

  Then the bus came. We saw it at the end of the street, and I jumped up without lacing up my boot and started to get the fare out of my shoulder bag. I got the change ready, and was concentrating on making sure it was the right number bus – I always have to screw my eyes up – and flagging it down, and so I was completely thrown when Robbie, the younger of the two blokes, the better-looking one, the one I fancied, not the one who’d been making up to Imelda, put his hands heavily on my shoulders. I’ve never been mugged, but I thought they usually just grabbed your bag. I didn’t think they would do a whole pick-up routine first.

  My first instinct was to hug my bag really close to my body, pinioning it with my elbow and then I opened my mouth to scream, but before I got properly started, Robbie was kissing me, hotly and hurriedly, a bus-stop sort of kiss. Because my mouth was already open, I could feel his breath right down into my throat, and his tongue briefly brushed my upper teeth. Then he pulled away and pushed me gently towards the bus, which Imelda had already boarded.

  She was struggling with her purse, blocking the doorway. I stumbled up the steps, anxious to help her, but by this time she had got herself sorted out and paid my fare. As soon as he’d got the money, the driver simultaneously started the bus and closed the doors, though I was still hanging onto the central bar and standing in the well of the doorway. I must have still had one foot on the pave
ment, because I can remember that I jerked it up really quickly when I realised that the doors were about to close, but I wasn’t quick enough, because my foot got stuck between the doors, the foot with the unlaced boot.

  I yelled at the driver to open the doors, that my foot was caught, but I was giggling and struggling, and I think he thought I was messing. Maybe he thought I’d been drinking. Anyway, he ignored me at first and hung out of his side window, watching for his chance to pull into the flow of traffic. I kicked and struggled a bit more, still yelling at him to open the doors. I yanked really hard and my foot shot out of my boot, but just at that moment the driver must have realised I was serious, because just as I shot forward, released from my boot, the doors opened and the boot fell out and clunked onto the road. At that very moment, the driver saw an opportunity and he pulled out from the bus stop and sped off into the night, leaving me giggling and heaving in a clump on the floor, and my lovely new (well, newish) Doc Marten lying in the roadway.

  I didn’t dare yell at him to stop the bus, and anyway, I was giggling so much I couldn’t have got it out even if I’d tried. Get up, you eejit you, said Imelda, toeing me in the ribs, and I struggled to my feet, and limped down the bus behind her, one shoe off and the other shoe on, like Diddle-Diddle-Dumpling, my-son-John. The pair of us collapsed into a seat, and it was only then that Imelda realised I’d lost my footwear.

  She wanted to go and tell the driver to stop, but by this stage we were a good quarter of a mile from the bus-stop, and it was too late. The driver might stop, but he wasn’t going to wait for me to hop back a quarter of a mile, pick up my boot and put it on, and then run to catch up, and the next bus wouldn’t be until one o’clock. So we sat tight, swaying with the onward rush of the bus, which was travelling far too fast, and lurching against each other, occasionally getting another gale of giggles at the memory of what had happened.

  At one point, after we had sobered up a bit, I lifted up my stockinged foot and wiggled my toes, and that started the pair of us off again. I’m sure the driver thought we were paralytic.

  Just as the bus careered around a corner we heard a horn being tooted in a doodle-de-doo-doo rhythm and I pressed my face up against the window of the bus, making a peephole around it with my hands, just in time to see a motorcycle with two people on it zooming along the road we were turning off, almost grazing the side of the bus with the speed of it. I couldn’t be sure, I could only see two helmets and two figures, but I think it was Robbie and Ger, and I fancy I saw the one on the pillion trailing something in the wind behind him, something clumpy and dangling on what might have been a bootlace. They whizzed by with a roar, and anyway the bus was just leaning off into a side road as the bike whipped along, but I could have sworn I heard a laugh riding on the afterbreeze of the motorbike.

  We went straight to bed when we got back to Imelda’s. At least, Imelda went to bed, and I pulled out the ‘put-you-up’, as Imelda jokingly calls it – she always says this with a middle-England rural sort of accent, I don’t know why – which is cleverly tucked away in the sofa, and made up my makeshift bed. The duvet and things are kept in a plain wooden chest under the window. It doubles as a sort of primitive window seat.

  I was glad we didn’t stay up to chat and make hot chocolate. I was happy to slip under the duvet and lie in the dark, savouring the memory of my first kiss – hardly a memory, it still seemed almost to be present in my body fibres, in spite of all the jostling and giggling since it had happened. I lay there in the dark and replayed the scene in my head, like a video, and I smiled at myself for thinking he was trying to mug me.

  Monday 10th November

  I woke up with a smile on my face still, though I couldn’t remember why. And then I remembered the kiss. Fifteen is probably a bit old for a first kiss nowadays, I realise that, but it wasn’t technically a first kiss. There was that awful time when I was thirteen and my cousin organised something for me. She was going out with her boyfriend – she was fourteen – but of course she couldn’t tell them at home that she was, as they wouldn’t let her out with a boy. (They still won’t, even though she’s sixteen now.) So she had to pretend she was going to the cinema with me. I was delighted. We were staying with her family at the time, on holiday, and it was pretty boring, so a night out at the cinema seemed like a great treat to me. But as soon as we were out the gate she announced she was really going to meet Ed and they were going to go into the woods. I shrugged and said I would go to the cinema anyway. That wouldn’t be necessary, she said. She had me fixed up with Alan. I was shocked and excited at the same time. Alan was very goodlooking and desirable and I had been admiring him from a distance for some time, but I’d had no idea Marianne knew this. I said OK and tagged along, brimming with anticipation, to the meeting place, which was near the entrance to the woods. (It wasn’t really a wood, it was just a little plantation of trees, maybe ten yards by four.) Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turned out not to be Alan at all. It was somebody else, his name was Alan, but he wasn’t the Alan I’d had in mind, he was much older, seventeen, which to a thirteen-year-old is like a grown-up, and he wore these grey trousers, real trousers, not jeans, and a tie, and I was terrified of him. When he tried to kiss me, I felt my whole body stiffen and go rigid in his arms, and I remember that I kept my own arms dead straight against my sides and I curled my lips in between my teeth, so that you couldn’t see any mouth, just a gash across my lower face. Still, he tried to kiss me, a horrible sloppy, wet, warm kiss, like a dog’s lick.

  The worst part of the whole experience was the embarrassment. I couldn’t explain to him why I was so shocked to see him, I couldn’t tell him I had been expecting a younger and more handsome Alan. It was awful, really, really awful, and I was sure he would think I was frigid. I didn’t really know what that meant (I still don’t), but I knew from reading magazines that it was not the thing to be.

  That was technically my first kiss, but I don’t count it. I don’t count the snatched slobberings at school discos either. I count Robbie, though, because, even though it was a snatched kiss too, and completely unexpected, it was totally and utterly delicious.

  Wednesday 12th November

  I wonder if I will ever see Robbie again. I think it’s probably more romantic if I don’t. The whole thing has a sort of perfection about it as it is, ships that pass in the night, a fleeting kiss, a moment of intimacy, and then no more. Mad!

  But maybe romance isn’t what I want. I think maybe that’s true. It’s not romance I want, it’s a romance, which is quite different. A real flesh-and-blood boyfriend is probably worth quite a lot of fleeting kisses at bus-stops. And he is lovely. Oh well. I suppose a fleeting kiss at a bus-stop is better than nothing. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s worse than nothing. It has had a very unsettling effect. I keep thinking I see him in the street, and then the person turns around and it’s somebody else entirely. I can’t really keep his face in my mind, if I’m honest, but I think I would know it if I saw it all the same. His eyes turn up at the corners.

  Monday 17th November

  Lisa’s little sister was christened yesterday. At least, she was baptised ages ago, when she was born, so they just had a little ceremony for family and friends at the house yesterday, to make up for not having a proper christening, and we were all invited, me and Dad and Margaret and Ashling and Alva.

  We never went anywhere before all together like that, like a real family. It felt kind of weird, all piling into the car. Margaret got to sit in the front passenger seat, beside Dad, who drove, of course, because that is the sort of family this is, and anyway Margaret is a very nervous driver, and Ashling and Alva and I sat in the back, in a row. Ashling and I made Alva sit in the middle, on the hump, because she is the youngest and also the smallest, but mainly because she is the youngest, and we had the two door places. It was very cramped, but only Alva moaned about it. Ashling and I were very mature and we made long-suffering faces at each other over the top of Alva’s head. I had never exchang
ed a meaningful look with Ashling before. Ashling isn’t too bad really, it’s Alva that is the real pain.

  She saved me some birthday cake from her party last week, icecream cake it was, and gave it to me on Sunday evening when I came home. It was quite funny really, I arrived in a pair of Imelda’s slippers, which were the only things of hers I could get my feet into (she’s smaller than me). Luckily it was a dry day, because I think the soles of those things are only made of cardboard and they would probably have disintegrated in the rain. I couldn’t find my key, so there I was standing in the porch, slapping my pockets, when Ashling saw my shadow through the glass and let me in. She stepped backwards into the hall when she saw these two daft things on my feet – they are sort of novelty slippers that somebody with very poor taste gave Imelda for Christmas one year, and they are in the shape of dalmatians’ heads. I had brought my other Doc home with me, because I couldn’t bear to throw it in the bin, but I didn’t have room for it in the little bag I had, so I was carrying it under my arm. I must have looked very peculiar, because Ashling started to smile, but she is too polite to guffaw out loud (which is what I would have done). Seeing the little smile on her face, I began to see the funny side, and I found myself telling her the whole story, down to the two fellas at the bus-stop, though I didn’t mention the kiss, I thought that was private. I am not sure if even Imelda knows about that. Either she was too busy fumbling for change for the bus, or she is very tactful, because she didn’t say a word. I think she genuinely didn’t see it. I hope so, because even though I am very fond of Imelda, I love the idea of me and Robbie being the only two people in the whole world who know about that kiss. We are the only two who know what it felt like anyway.