The Ugly Sister

by Jane Fallon

  This evening he is meeting Stella – Abi has finally discovered this is Mrs BBJ’s name – and she’s both honoured that he’s decided to introduce her and curious to meet the woman who Richard thinks is so special.

  She knows Stella the minute she walks in. She looks exactly right to be a match for Richard. Slim, pretty, long straight blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, casual clothes that scream of money but not in an ostentatious way: 7 For All Mankind jeans and a tight but not too tight cashmere cardigan. She’s smiley. She looks nice.

  ‘Hi! You must be Abi.’ Stella greets her warmly and sticks out a hand for her to shake. Other women never think Abi is a threat, something she has decided is a response to the way she looks, but which, in actual fact, owes more to her approachable, welcoming demeanour. And, of course, in this case she’s most definitely not. In fact, she never is. She would never knowingly steal another woman’s man – most importantly her sister’s, she reminds herself, as she does now several times a day. Don’t flirt with him; don’t let him guess how you feel – but just once in a while she wishes everyone wouldn’t write her off so quickly. Stella has all the confidence of knowing that she has won the looks lottery, but she’s so open and friendly that it’s impossible not to like her. While Richard gets the drinks, the women chat away happily. Abi asks Stella about her kids (yet again the trusty old default conversation with women she knows are mothers) and Stella tells her about her two little boys who are three and eighteen months.

  ‘You’re a single mum too, aren’t you?’ she says, so Abi is able to bang on about Phoebe, her favourite topic, but she tries not to bore Stella to death. Stella asks about Phoebe’s dad, so Abi gives her the short version and Stella tells her that her boys’ dad buggered off with the au pair a year ago.

  ‘How can you … I mean isn’t it hard …’ Luckily Stella realizes where Abi is going and puts her out of her misery.

  ‘Trusting another man?’

  Abi nods.

  ‘Definitely, but the way I figure it is that if I don’t give someone else a chance, then I’ll end up on my own forever.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Abi says, and she tells Stella how she has been single pretty much for the past eighteen years. Stella is gobsmacked as everyone always is when Abi admits to that. ‘I’ve been out with people,’ Abi tells her. ‘I’m not that sad. I just haven’t had what you’d call a real relationship.’

  ‘Oh god,’ Richard says when he appears with the drinks and catches the tail end of their conversation. ‘Slagging off men already – that’s not a good sign.’

  Abi has hardly been able to look at Jon since she found out that Cleo was going away. She’s sure he must think he’s done something terribly wrong. He probably assumes that she resents him for pushing her to admit that she and Cleo aren’t getting on. She hopes that’s what it is anyway, and not that he thinks she has taken a dislike to him for some random reason. Since Phoebe’s dad Abi has only reached stage four once before – at least she thought she had for a while although it didn’t turn out to be the case – and that was with someone she knew through the library.

  He worked in social services and he used to bring a party of OAPs from a local home for the elderly down to browse around every few weeks. Abi used to make him coffee and chat to him while he waited. Of course she blushed and stuttered for a few weeks and then, just as with Jon, one day that all miraculously went away and in its place was something far more real and scary. He was divorced, he seemed to like her, there was nothing stopping her making a move, really, except fear of rejection and the fact that Phoebe was about eleven at the time and she couldn’t imagine taking someone home and introducing him as her boyfriend. And what if she did and Phoebe got to like him and then it all went wrong? So she did nothing about it except palpitate a bit dramatically every time he came in.

  Eventually her infatuation disappeared as quickly as it had arrived – Abi thinks around the day when he happened to mention that he was a member of the local church choir at the exact same moment she noticed he was wearing novelty socks with Bart Simpson’s face on them. She was horrified that she might have made a huge mistake, might have somehow given away her feelings and that he might actually have realized she fancied him. So she dealt with it in the most mature way that she knew how. She started avoiding him and more or less blanking him if they did come face to face. She can still remember the confused look he gave her the first time she told him she was really busy and didn’t have time to chat. She’s the first to admit she has all the emotional maturity of a fifteen-year-old when it comes to relationships.

  Luckily the focus is all on Cleo’s trip for the moment. The girls want to hear the details of where she is going and what she’s going to be doing over and over again and that suits Abi just fine. Let her have her moment. Abi is assuming that while Cleo is away Jon will take the days off work to do his fatherly duty when she is otherwise engaged at the bookshop, but she doesn’t like to ask. She can’t even begin to think about what they’ll do in the evenings and at the weekends.

  The house seems to breathe a bit of a sigh of relief when Cleo leaves to catch her plane late on the following Tuesday morning, and although the kids get caught up in a teary goodbye they’re fine five minutes after she’s gone. Abi has swapped her days, working yesterday in lieu of today to allow her to do childcare once Cleo has left and she ferries them to their self-improving classes (Megan: French conversation; Tara: drama and improvisation) and then she has a delicious afternoon all to herself pottering around doing not much and hoping that the evening won’t come round too soon. If at all.

  If she had any friends up here, she could arrange a night out and then just tell Jon he is on his own. But there’s only Richard and he would interpret an invitation to anything more formal than two drinks in the pub as Abi asking him out on a date. Maybe she could go out with him and Stella. She’s decided she really likes her. For all her intimidating good looks she seems down to earth and funny. Easy to talk to. When Abi left them to it in the pub the other night, they made all the right ‘we must do this again’ noises, but she knows that with her two children Stella doesn’t get to go out that much so it would feel like an imposition to muscle in on one of her and Richard’s evenings together.

  She could take herself off to the cinema, but she’d feel like a bit of a saddo on her own and, even if she did, that would still only be one night out of twelve. She just needs to get a grip, keep her head down and her emotions in check, and try to get through the next two weeks unscathed.

  13

  So here they all are. Abi, Jon, Tara and Megan, sitting round the kitchen table, all chatting away as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, which Abi imagines it is to the other three. Actually it’s really just the kids who are chatting. Jon and Abi are interjecting occasionally, but there’s not much that would pass as conversation flowing between the two of them. Abi doesn’t mind. As well as feeling relieved that they are filling the silence, she has come to love her nieces’ ceaseless banter. Tonight Tara is trying to fill them in on an incident that happened at her drama class involving the teacher and the mother of one of the other girls who had insisted on staying to watch the lesson.

  ‘So she just sat down on one of the chairs in the corner even though Mrs McClusky never lets anyone stay and watch.’

  ‘Which one is she again?’ Megan chips in.

  ‘I told you. She’s Tamara’s mum.’

  ‘Which one’s Tamara?’

  Tara rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t know her. Anyway, she’s sitting there then –’

  ‘Is she the one who broke her wrist?’ Megan always likes to know the details.

  ‘No. Shut up, I’m trying to tell a story.’

  ‘Sorry. But is she? Or was that Ruby?’

  Tara ignores her. ‘And then her mobile rings right in the middle of Amy reciting her monologue that she’s got to do for her Guildhall exam. Can you imagine? Mrs McClusky nearly exploded.’ Tara pauses, waiting for a re
action. Abi sees a smile creep across Jon’s face.

  ‘Which one is Amy?’

  ‘Dad!’ Tara says, but she smiles as Jon had clearly known she would.

  He tries to keep a straight face. ‘Is she the one with the cross eyes or the one with thirteen fingers?’

  Tara can’t help herself, she bursts out laughing. ‘Stupid,’ she says.

  Abi watches them happily, loving the easy atmosphere despite her own anxieties. She is dreading the moment when the girls go to bed, and she’s tempted to tell them they can stay up all evening and watch DVDs. They’d love her for it, there’s no doubt, but she has a feeling Jon might overrule her.

  Before she knows what she’s doing, she finds herself wondering what her and Jon’s children would look like and she realizes that actually Tara and Megan could be them. She must have the genes buried inside her somewhere that would pass on long legs and skinniness to Tara just as they somehow have circumvented Cleo and Jon and passed her own looks straight down to Megan. Just as Phoebe has inherited her physicality from her aunt. Actually it makes Abi wonder what Phoebe’s dad brought to the table. He was tall, but she had tall in her family anyway. He was dark, but so is Cleo; funny, but Abi firmly believes Phoebe gets her sense of humour from her. She doesn’t remember him having much to contribute in the brain department despite the fact that he went to university.

  And then it hits her: the kink in her nose. Phoebe has this tiny bump on the bridge of her nose that lifts her face from picture-perfect pretty to – in Abi’s humble opinion – strikingly beautiful. She scans through her family in her head – Mum, Dad, Cleo, random aunts and uncles she might have met once. Not a nose bump between them. Her own nose is straight and blunt. Not bad, not a horror, just ordinary once she grew into it. Jon’s is similar, although longer and more masculine, of course. There, she tells herself, if you had children with Jon, they wouldn’t be as adorable as Phoebe. There’s no way they would have the nose bump. She tries to hang on to this inane piece of rationale, as if remembering that might save her from making a fool of herself by taking off all her clothes and throwing herself at him.

  When they finish eating, she asks the girls to help her fill the dishwasher and to her surprise they don’t complain – they just do it – and then they demand that they all play on the Wii Fit, which seems like a fairly harmless way to pass the time, so she agrees readily. Actually, boxing the life out of the object of your unrequited crush is quite a fun way to spend an evening. They box, they bowl, they play tennis and then Abi insists they box some more. In the end Tara and Megan actually volunteer to go to bed they’re so exhausted, so Jon goes and tucks them in, and Abi decides, what the hell, and breaks out the Pouilly-Fumé.

  She’s still out of breath when he comes back in and sweating a little, not her best ever look. She hands him a glass of wine.

  ‘One more match?’ he says. ‘I was holding back before. Now I’m really going to thrash you.’

  They are ridiculously competitive. After each bout, the victor parades around the room, hands aloft, rubbing their triumph in the face of the loser. It’s the most tiring thing Abi has ever done. If ever there was a perfect displacement activity, this is it, because she has no energy left to think about how much she thinks she is in love with Jon; she just wants to win.

  Five matches later (Abi having lost three to two) she is lying on the floor in need of oxygen and laughing so much she’s making herself cough. Jon flops on the sofa, panting.

  ‘Bowling,’ Abi says. ‘Best of five.’

  He groans and drags himself back up. ‘You’re worse than the girls.’

  They play till at least eleven o’clock. Abi barely even notices the time go by. Just as they’re packing up, Jon’s mobile rings and she gathers it’s Cleo letting him know that she’s there safely and, by the sounds of it, not very happy with her hotel which is clearly not The Mercer. She half listens in for a few moments, but then it seems like a good time to make her escape, so she waves goodnight at Jon and practically runs up the stairs and shuts herself in away from temptation.

  OK. One evening down. Eleven to go. She gets into bed and turns out the light, but she can’t get to sleep for ages because her head is filled with all sorts of thoughts that it ought to be illegal to have about your brother-in-law. She tries to replace him with her default fantasy objects: George Clooney, Johnny Depp, that bloke off Top Gear who’s not even the one everyone else thinks is good-looking, but it’s hopeless. Every time the fantasy Abi in her head (the one with no stretch marks, much longer legs and unerring self-confidence) turns round there’s Jon beating a path to her door. In the end she just succumbs. Sod it. Why fight what you can’t change?

  Wednesday starts off quite well. Abi keeps out of the way till Jon has left for work and then she ferries the girls around in the car. She’s getting quite good at driving in London now. She can be as aggressive as the rest of them, although when Megan shouts ‘bastard’ at an old man who nips into a parking space just before them Abi realizes that she should probably try to rein herself in a bit. And, of course, she laughs when she asks Megan not to use language like that again, which completely cancels out any authority she might have earned.

  ‘Bastard,’ Megan shouts happily to someone who cuts them up on Regent’s Park Road.

  ‘Megan,’ Abi says, ‘it’s not funny, really. Don’t.’

  ‘You do,’ Megan says, and of course she has a point.

  ‘Yes, but I’m a grown-up. I’m allowed. Please don’t use language like that or your mum and dad will be really cross with me.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t ever say it in front of them?’ Tara pipes up.

  Is this acceptable? Negotiating about how and when to swear with a seven- and a ten-year-old? It must be better than nothing. ‘Or anyone else. No teachers, no parents of your friends.’

  Megan contemplates this. ‘OK. I’ll only ever say it in front of you and Tara.’

  ‘What about me?’ Tara whines. ‘I want my own word.’

  Great. ‘Fine. Which word do you want?’

  She thinks. ‘Shit-head. That’s what dad always calls people when they annoy him.’

  Abi can’t help it; she laughs.

  ‘That’s two words,’ Megan is saying. ‘That’s not fair, is it, Auntie Abi?’

  ‘It’s one phrase – it counts. OK, here’s the rules. Megan may call people bastards, Tara may call people shit-heads, but only in this car and only in front of me and each other. And not so loud that the people in the other cars hear and I get beaten up. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ they both say, and then they all spend the rest of the day arguing about whether everyone they come across is a bastard or a shit-head. Abi is glad she’s teaching them valuable life skills. She has found herself warming more and more to Tara. Of course she loves her, Tara is her niece, her flesh and blood, but she hasn’t always found spending time with her that easy. She’s usually so busy worrying about what she looks like or what the socially acceptable thing to say is that she’s not actually much … fun. It might just be that she’s relaxing with Abi because they’re together all day, but she seems to be loosening up a bit, becoming more like a normal child all the time. Maybe this time away from watching her mother pretending to eat and discussing everyone’s weight and dress sense as if that was the only thing about them that mattered might do her the world of good. And if allowing her to call all their near neighbours shit-heads can help her down that path then maybe Abi is a marvellous auntie after all.

  There’s no avoiding it. There’s another evening coming up. With her newfound feeling of solidarity with the girls giving her courage, Abi dares to suggest that they might actually help with the preparations for dinner and, miracle of miracles, they agree. Tara MacMahon Attwood doing manual labour. Where will it end? So they all spend an hour in the kitchen together chopping and stirring and generally, honestly, having a good time.

  At one point Abi looks at Jon showing Megan how to make the dressing for the salad
and she feels a lump the size of an orange well up in her throat. He’s so patient with her – because, truthfully, she’s not that interested – and he somehow manages to make mixing oil, soy sauce, mustard, honey and sesame seeds fun. Megan is obviously the daddy’s girl of the two, but even Tara insists on having a go at making her own version and, in the end, they have a salad-dressing-off in which Abi is the judge. They’re actually both pretty rank because the girls insist on adding their own special ingredients, which, Abi suspects, are Marmite in Megan’s case and half a bottle of vinegar in Tara’s (Abi has been banished from the room for five minutes while they finesse their offerings), but she exclaims over their deliciousness and then suggests they mix the two together because there’s no way to choose between them.

  Jon looks at her, eyebrows raised. ‘Really?’

  ‘Why not?’ she says, smiling. ‘But, I know, let’s have it on the side like they do in America.’ She’s basing her knowledge of the way they eat in America on When Harry Met Sally, by the way. Everything on the side. ‘That’s how your mum’ll be having it, if she’s having a salad.’

  Jon grabs that idea quickly before it can be vetoed. ‘Great idea. I’ll get a jug.’

  Just as they’re about to sit down his mobile rings.

  ‘It’s Mum,’ he says, and Tara grabs it and answers.

  While she and Megan take turns to burble away, Abi says to Jon, ‘Have you spoken to her today?’

  He nods. ‘Only for a couple of minutes. She was in the middle of a make-up test. It seemed to be going OK.’

  She makes the appropriate face. Neither Jon nor Abi have mentioned the anonymous-moisturizer issue since it first raised its ugly head, but she’s pretty sure they both know there’s a strong possibility this is not the dream job Cleo was trying to make out it is. Abi has decided it must be a downmarket brand. A cheap, supermarket-available face cream that only Cleo would care didn’t have a designer label or cost £200 a jar. Made from actual chemically proven ingredients rather than enhanced with acai berries or sea water or puppy’s tears. It’ll be an overblown sense of her own importance that’s preventing her from owning up to the brand. Abi wonders how honest Cleo is being with Jon, whether she can really admit even to him what the real story is. She doubts it somehow. Or, even if she is, Abi isn’t sure she and Jon will make it real by acknowledging it to each other. She waits to see what he’ll say next.