by Jenny Colgan
‘And I ruined a new pair of boots.’
‘Invoice him.’
‘That’s not a bad idea. Although I’d rather invoice for the ten hours of my life it took me to get back. Mind you…’
‘Mind you what?’
‘Nothing,’ said Katie. ‘It was pretty, that’s all. You could breathe. And do you know how many people in vests stopped me on the street to annoy me for charity while I was there?’
‘How many?’
‘None at all.’
Katie clicked her email thoughtfully. Oh God. Another one from Clara. As usual she would have to fight with herself over whether or not to let Louise see it.
Katie thought back to the days when Louise hadn’t had her knickers permanently on a Venetian blind. Max had been so affable. He and Lou had been joined at the hip for years, it seemed. He was beefy, amiable, liked FHM magazine and, secretly, Jordan, but was never much of a one for doing anything more than having a few beers with his mates, mostly surveyors like him and Louise, or old friends from college when they were all a lot more sporty and trim than they were now; sitting on the sofa and letting Louise make him pasta for supper.
Louise thought he was great and Katie and Olivia found him inoffensive, which, in the current climate, was saying quite a lot. Louise had moved in with him, and it had started to look like they would roll gently on this way for ever. Louise had begun happily to think of engagement rings, honeymoons, joint dinner services…
Then Katie’s sister had come to stay at Katie’s, back in the days when she had a spare room. Twenty-two and just out of college, Clara was an imp and always had been. There were very few photographs of her as a child that didn’t show her either screaming or sticking her tongue out. She had bowled down from Manchester University with various colours in her hair, piercings and a tiny pair of combat trousers. She ate everything in the house, weighed seven stone and stayed out all night dancing and taking drugs in mysterious nightclubs. Katie felt like her mother.
‘Well, my chakra therapist would say it serves you right for always being the good child,’ Olivia had said harshly. ‘If you’d misbehaved a bit more you’d both have balanced out a bit and she wouldn’t get away with nicking all the hummus.’
‘She’s a free spirit,’ said Katie uncomfortably. They’d been sitting in the kitchen trying to ignore the loud jungly banging music coming from the room next door, that had been playing nonstop for thirty-six hours, shattering the three days’ peace they’d just had while Clara was at Glastonbury. (Her birth name was Clara; she made all her hippy friends call her Honeydew.)
‘She’s going to get you done for intent to supply,’ said Louise, sniffing.
‘What am I going to do, tell Mum on her?’
Their mother was living an extremely quiet life on her own in Blackburn – their dad had never been around very much except for the occasional Christmas pressie – and she was constantly amazed at her daughters’ ability to do anything at all – cross the road, find a job, get a mortgage – never mind be exposed to any actual horrors of the modern world.
‘Hey!’ Clara bounced in. She was sun-kissed from a summer of music festivals and hanging around road protests, tiny in her tie-dyed dungarees, and appeared to be growing dreadlocks.
‘Your hair smells,’ said Katie. She had spent the summer writing long proposals to pitch for edible flowers. Unsuccessfully.
Clara pouted. ‘You need to chill out. Would you like a massage?’
‘No, of course I don’t want a massage. I’m not that desperate for human contact that I’ll let you stick your nails in my spine. I haven’t forgotten the havoc you wreaked with my Barbies, thanks, never mind real humans.’
‘How am I ever going to get my massage business started if you won’t let me practise?’
‘You’re opening a “massage” business?’ asked Olivia. ‘Do you do extras?’
‘She’s got a degree in bioengineering. Of course she’s not going to open a massage business,’ said Katie. The four-year age gap was meant to disappear as you got older, but she’d seen no evidence for it yet.
‘Well, there you go, maybe I haven’t quite got my degree,’ said Clara, poking her tongue out as usual. ‘But that doesn’t matter, because before I start the business, I’m going to India.’
Katie sighed looking back. She had been two years into her job then, working all hours, living on hardly any money. It was fun, of course, living the life of a young professional, meeting friends for drinks after work, feeling terribly grown-up and important, but she’d loved her six months travelling around India at the end of her degree. The sense of escaping; of doing something different…she’d loved living on coconuts and fresh air with young people from around the world. And now, here she was, jealous of her baby sister off to do the same thing. How could she feel nostalgic at twenty-nine? And really, what was she doing here anyway that was so great?
She supposed she could chuck it in any time she wanted to. People were always talking about it down here. They were off to open a vineyard in France, or start an adventure holiday business, or import silk. Nobody ever did. London seemed to exert some kind of mystical centrifugal force on everyone, that sucked all ambitions other than a corner office and a cottage in the country out of you as quickly as it sucked the money from your pockets.
Plus, look what the outcome had been. She’d thrown a party for Clara’s leaving. It had been a really good night, actually, full of people (although some of them had dogs on bits of string). Clara spent the whole night holed up in a corner with Max, with whom she’d always had a cheeky, flirtatious relationship. Louise scarcely noticed. Max was furniture; part of her life, and Clara was the baby sister.
Max left his job and flew to India two days later. The one who got away.
And look at the mess you left behind you, Katie thought. If the whole world just did what they wanted all the time, the whole damn place would fall apart.
After assuring Louise through the tears and tequila haze which followed that he would immediately see sense and come back crawling with his tail between his legs, begging her (and, more pertinently, his employers), he hadn’t. Actually, what made it much, much worse was that he decided he needed to rent the flat out to subsidise his new wacky lifestyle, and gave Louise notice to quit, which is how she’d ended up making loud noises in the tiny room Katie had once earmarked as a study.
Clara didn’t seem to have a big problem with it. They were having fun, chilling, and ‘finding themselves’. In fact, over the last six months, as Louise had careered further and further away from the home and hearth she’d thought she’d shared with Max, Max and Clara got more and more relaxed about how exactly they’d got together in the first place and were practically sharing an email address. No one knew when, or if, they were coming home. Louise was dealing with it through a twin approach of martinis and dating, tiger-pouncing any man that crossed her postcode. Max’s name was best not mentioned, but sometimes – like now, when Katie got an email, it was difficult.
Hey Sis!
Clara still liked to use fonts to make her wacky and different, Katie noticed. It was like being shouted at by a Dickens novel.
HoWZIT? HOT in HERRE! Goa just amazing. Coconuts for twenty pence, xxxxx
Max says Hi to everyone back home – we’re missing you loads in London and the pouring rain! Not!
It wasn’t a nice feeling, being torn between a friend and a relative, particularly when you didn’t even have the distraction of a love life of your own to worry about.
The problem was, it seemed to get harder to raise the subject with Louise, not easier.
At first, of course, when she’d moved in with Katie, she had gone horribly pale and thin, and started her maniacal sleeping around punctuated with 2 a.m. crying jags, side by side with an understanding that one in such a fit of dispossession had to be absolved from housework, keeping regular hours, or in fact much apart from corkscrew wielding and very long scented baths.
But,
as time had passed, and everything (apart from the yo-yo knickers) had seemed to ease a little, Katie found it harder and harder to be in the middle. Her sister seemed happy, but Louise still seemed terribly sad, and Katie bringing the subject up just seemed to make things worse. In some way, Katie could see, Louise blamed her for her sister’s behaviour. And whilst comprehensible, it was hardly fair. Being the only conduit between them didn’t help either. Katie thought wistfully for a moment of Clara having fun. Of course she had fun, London fun, in expensive bars, with loud nights. Loud. Having fun in London tended to be loud. Everything in London was loud; the Tube, the traffic, the bars, the shouting of arrogant young careerists showing off. Sometimes Katie really felt like a bit of peace and quiet.
Living with Louise was just about bearable. Katie was trying to be a sympathetic friend. She really was. She didn’t want to be one of those people who had you to stay in their house, then made little remarks about how to clean a grill pan and how different towels had different meanings, thus making Louise feel even worse than she was already. But she’d found it did very little to improve her general disposition towards the world.
Katie turned her attention to the pile of work on her desk. Today she was working on a new diet, which substituted chocolate-covered peanuts and cheese for every meal. Apparently once separately considered high-fat foods, it had been discovered that taken in combination and omitting all other food groups, it had a staggering effect on weight loss and had caught on like wildfire, and was called the CCPC plan, which looked really scientific and everything. Katie’s job was to minimise the coronary or acne scare stories that popped up now and again. She was busy.
She wandered into a reverie for a second about what it would be like doing press for a Forestry Commission. Then she realised she didn’t have the faintest idea. Maybe a lot of people stole the trees at Christmas time. No, hang on, that would be a matter for the police. Maybe they were trying to attract campers…to a forest in a remote part of Scotland? No, surely not. Only the intrepid would survive, she didn’t want to be responsible for deaths by hypothermia…although…she looked at the latest CCPC files and sighed.
Miko bundled into the room, her lovely face looking furious. ‘How much better-looking than you did we say I was again?’
‘Fifty to a hundred times?’
‘So he hasn’t called, why?’
‘Because you have a bad personality?’
‘I scarcely think so.’
‘Because you’re frightening?’
‘It’s 2005. ALL women are frightening.’
She examined her blood-red talon nails carefully. ‘Do you think these nails are a bit much?’
‘Do you gorge nightly on human blood?’
‘Look at me. I’m a size six. I gorge on NOTHING.’
‘Well, we’re back to the whole personality thing…’
‘Olivia wants you,’ said Miko, curtly.
‘How are you? Keeping well I hope? What did you have for breakfast this morning?’
Oh no, Olivia was in ‘I’m your boss now’ mode.
Katie had eaten the last four chocolate digestives in the flat. ‘Two bananas and a fruit smoothie,’ she said.
Olivia’s brow furrowed, but not very much. It looked suspiciously taut. ‘Smoothie? You know there’s dairy in smoothies.’
‘A whole dairy?’ asked Katie.
‘Well, we can’t be too careful. NOW.’ She placed her arms on her desk in what was meant to be body-language-speak for ‘Look at my wide stance! How approachable I am!’ This wasn’t good at all. ‘Now, you won’t believe this…it’s just the funniest thing.’
Katie’s ears pricked up. Was this going to be one of those kind of nettle-drinking sample things she got in her office that she was always stuffing down unsuspecting juniors, to check their vomiting reflexes?
‘Yes?’
Olivia’s office was full of crystals that made annoying tinkly noises whenever anyone moved even a finger, and scattered various colours in different parts of the room. Years after everyone else had moved on from Feng Shui, Olivia was still clinging on to it with the tips of her fingers.
‘We have,’ she said, opening her eyes very wide in the manner of a nursery teacher, ‘a new client!’
‘Great,’ said Katie. ‘Well done.’ She hoped it was shampoo. Her hair had been all tired and gritty recently – not entirely unlike her mood. Plus, she’d plucked a grey one out in the mirror.
‘And it’s in a completely different field to our usual one!’
Now she had her attention. Ooh, maybe it was celebrities? She saw herself suddenly being one of those barky dog PRs who sit in rooms with celebrities and growl when cheeky journalists bring up their drugs hell/adultery.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes. this is really going to put the LiWebber name on the map. It ticks all our boxes, does our bit for the environment, fills our charity requirements…oh, it’s perfect really. Of course, you know I’ve always been very in tune with the environment…I’m not surprised they came to us really…’
‘What is it, Olivia?’
Olivia spread out her hands in excitement. ‘The Fairlish Forestry Commission! The one you saw in the paper!’
Katie took a step back, felt a chair behind her legs and collapsed onto it.
‘…and, well, apparently, would you believe this, they couldn’t find anyone to take on the job. So they called us.’
Katie looked up. Hang on. She would have taken the job. Well, possibly. That wasn’t the point. The point was, that bloody Harry whatever his name was hadn’t ‘offered’ her the job. That was the point. But she’d given him her card…and now presumably he was calling to see who else was available. But if she told Olivia she’d already been up for the job without telling her, Olivia would mince her innards. Crap!
‘And, well, I spoke to Miko and she agreed with me that, well, you do seem to have been a little under the weather recently, with Louise and the mugging and everything.’
Under the weather? The weather has been FARTING on me, thought Katie savagely to herself.
‘So we thought, maybe a bit of fresh air…change of scenery for a few months…go up there and sort them out…gorgeous scenery I’ve heard…take a few photos…get our charity bit in the annual report by next year and Bob’s your uncle. What do you say? Fantastic, eh?’
‘Well, I’m not sure the outdoors is quite…I mean, my hayfever gets quite bad.’
Olivia looked up, her face instantly less beatific. ‘When I said “fantastic”, Katherine, you understand I meant “pack”.’
God, Katie hated ‘boss mode’.
Chapter Four
‘You can’t leave me too,’ said Louise, clinging to the toaster as if it were a life preserver (which, given her lack of cooking skills these days – all built up to cater for Max, all immediately abandoned – it was).
‘Yes, that’s what I’m doing,’ said Katie. ‘I’ve been planning this all along. Put the toaster down, I’m running a bath and no longer trust you.’
‘Oh God,’ said Louise, in a tone of voice that Katie recognised was gearing up to start on about the future course of her life, involving loneliness, misery, telly and gradually slipping into obesity brought on by sadness inspired TUC-biscuit blowouts. Louise put on a good face in public, but once they were back in the flat it was a different story.
‘I’m having a bath,’ said Katie heavily. ‘I have a premonition it’s going to be my last one for six months that isn’t shared with goats or something.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Durr! No. It was just a stupid whim at the time. Which has come right around to bite me in the arse, because now, do I have a choice? No. Is everything going great guns for me here? Not, as it happens, necessarily.’
‘Things aren’t going that well for me either,’ said Louise, sticking her finger in the Philadelphia.
‘Really? I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Where is this place?’
‘It
’s on a higher latitude than Moscow.’
‘Is it pretty?’
‘If you like that kind of thing.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Lambs. Fresh air. Stink. That kind of thing.’
‘What kind of stink?’
‘It might have been the fresh air. Or some cow thing.’
‘Does it smell worse than the litter bins on Oxford Street on a hot day?’
‘No. It’s in Scotland, not the devil’s anus.’
‘It might be fun.’
‘I’ve been there. It is not fun. It has no cable, no Joseph, no proper coffee, and everyone up there is horrible. I know I moan about the shallowness of London life, but I’ve kind of got used to these staples.’
‘How many people did you meet?’
‘Only one. But there’s only about twelve people there anyway, so it’s a reasonable statistical sample.’
Louise stirred her coffee thoughtfully. ‘When do you have to leave?’
‘Two weeks on Monday. I don’t know if I’ll have time to knit all the waterproofs I’ll have to take.’
‘What’s the job involve?’
‘Trees. Looking after trees. Apparently trees need a PR.’
‘I thought they had Sting.’
‘He’s on tour. Anyway, he only cares about foreign trees.’
‘That’s bigo-tree.’
Katie looked at Louise. ‘That’s the first joke you’ve made in about three months.’
‘That waiter was a joke.’
‘You know, I wonder if you might just be recovering.’
‘Huh. You know, I think it might be really interesting. It’d be great to get out of this cesspit for a while,’ Louise said wistfully.
Katie suddenly had a great idea. ‘Do you know how long it takes to drive up there?’
Louise shook her head.
‘Me neither. Wanna come?’
Packing for three months in March was absolutely not easy. In London, the daffs were out in the public squares, and you could make it on a sunny afternoon with just a cardie. But according to www.middleofnowhere-weather.com, Fairlish still had six inches of snow and a wind-chill factor of minus ten.