The Ugly Sister

by Jane Fallon

  ‘Abi!’ Stella says, and Abi says, ‘He’s talking rubbish. Just for a change.’

  ‘And, actually, I do remember his name. It’s Jon. And do you know why I do? Because you never stop talking about him.’ He smiles at her. Got you.

  ‘Honestly, Stella,’ Abi says, ignoring Richard, ‘he’s exaggerating. I’m just surprised to find I like Jon, that’s all. I thought I didn’t.’

  ‘But you’re not about to jump him while your sister is out of the picture?’

  ‘No! Of course not!’

  ‘Good,’ Stella says. ‘I didn’t have you down as a husband stealer.’

  ‘Absolutely, a hundred per cent not,’ Abi says, and she means it.

  Richard smirks. ‘But you wish you could, don’t you?’

  ‘OK, you. Enough,’ Stella says. ‘Go and get us another drink.’

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ she says once he’s out of earshot and on his way to the bar. ‘You know what he’s like. He’s only teasing.’

  Abi forces a laugh. ‘Oh, I know. It takes more than that to wind me up.’ In fact, she feels a real need to confide in someone, to talk over how she’s feeling and what she’s going to do about it, but, much as she likes Stella, this is only the second time she’s met her, so she thinks that would count as too much too soon. There’s no one she can talk to who would understand. She doesn’t understand herself. So she tells Stella how she gets her own back on Richard by giving the hormonal ladies hope, and Stella’s laughing so much that when he comes back from the bar he asks what’s so funny.

  ‘Nothing,’ Stella says innocently.

  ‘You,’ Abi says to him, and gives him a big cheesy grin.

  In the Ladies she rattles off a quick text to Jon – ‘Out for the evening so eat without me’ – and then agonizes about whether or not to put a kiss on the end. She puts a kiss on the end of pretty much every communication she sends. It’s just a habit and she never even thinks about whether the person on the receiving end even registers it or not. It comes from having a teenage daughter who covers everything, including her homework and probably her A-level exam papers, with hearts and kisses. This time, though, the innocent little x seems to be laden with subtext. Abi puts one on, takes it off again, puts it on, takes it off. Eventually she decides it’s better without. She can’t imagine Jon sprinkles kisses liberally on his texts and she doesn’t want him trying to analyse her meaning.

  In the end the three of them have such a good time that she forgets about Jon. The five glasses of wine help. Both Richard and Stella are such good company that Abi’s cheeks ache from laughing by the time they get up to go. She doesn’t realize how drunk she is feeling until she gets out into the fresh air and starts to totter round the corner to the house. She offers up a quick thank you that they went to the closest pub to the house and not the one they usually frequent all the way up Haverstock Hill. It’s a nice drunk, though. A happy, how-bad-can-it-be drunk.

  Luckily she finally got around to getting herself a key cut, so she doesn’t have to ring the bell and disturb everyone, but she can see the light in the living room is on, which means that Jon must still be up. She fannies around trying to get the key in the lock quietly, which takes her about four attempts, and then she tiptoes heavily through the hall and bumps straight into a table, knocking a lamp – a very expensive lamp, she has no doubt – onto the floor. She scrabbles around trying to pick it up, cursing her lack of coordination. She’s not so drunk that she’s unaware of her state, unfortunately, so she is completely conscious of how ridiculous she looks, flailing around on the floor, when she looks up and sees Jon standing in the living-room doorway, watching her with an amused look on his face.

  ‘Good night?’ he says, and he picks up the lamp, which has, thankfully, not broken. Abi scrambles to her feet.

  ‘Lovely,’ she says. ‘We went to the pub.’

  He laughs. ‘Now, how did I guess that?’ He takes her arm and steers her into the living room. This isn’t right. She’s not meant to be sitting in here with him late at night, five glasses of wine down. That seems like asking for trouble.

  ‘Nightcap or coffee?’

  ‘Oh no. Neither.’ She needs to get up to bed, fast. Alone. ‘Thank you,’ she adds as an afterthought.

  ‘Jon,’ she hears herself saying as she turns to go. She has no idea why. She should just get the hell out of there, but the words tumble out before she can stop them. There’s something she needs to know. Suddenly it’s vital. It’s a defining moment; if he gives her the answer she’s most hoping for, it might kill her infatuation stone dead. ‘Why did you have a handbag – I mean a man bag – the first day I was here?’

  Jon laughs. ‘A man bag?’

  ‘Yes. A brown leather thing. Like a handbag only a little bit … manlier.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘That’d be my camera bag. Not quite a handbag, but I can see where the confusion might lie. I’d taken my camera in to be repaired.’

  Shit. ‘Good. I’m glad. I didn’t want to think you were the sort to carry a handbag. Goodnight.’ Actually, she realizes as she’s saying this that she wouldn’t care any more. Man bag, church choir, Simpsons’ socks, he could have the lot, all at once, and it wouldn’t sway her feelings. She tries to conjure up a picture. Jon, singing his heart out in church, man bag dangling saucily off one shoulder, trousers rolled up to show his comedy socks off to best advantage. Nope. She still wants to jump him.

  She heaves.

  ‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asks as she stumbles towards the stairs.

  ‘Yes. Fine.’ She is suddenly hit by a wave of nausea. Oh god. Not now. Not on the cream stair carpet. She veers round and tries to head towards the downstairs toilet.

  ‘Abi?’

  ‘I feel a little bit sick,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’ All this would sound a little more convincing if it wasn’t for the fact that she doesn’t even have time to shut the door before she’s doubled over the toilet throwing her insides up. This is so shaming. So undignified. She hates being sick. Not that she assumes anyone actually enjoys it. Well, maybe bulimics get a certain satisfaction, but anyway. It frightens her. She feels out of control. There is nothing she can do to stop it so she doesn’t even try; she just collapses onto her knees and hopes that it’s over soon. She can’t remember the last time she was properly drunk. Tipsy quite often, probably, but so drunk that she was sick? Probably fifteen, no, twenty years ago. Not since Phoebe’s been around, anyway, and she’s eighteen. She’s not used to drinking all evening and those glasses of wine they give you in pubs are so huge these days. Plus she hasn’t had anything to eat since lunch. Anyway, even as she is throwing said lunch up into the toilet she is telling herself never again. She’ll take a vow of abstinence. Just make it stop.

  As she’s thinking this, promising herself that this is a one-off and it will all be all right in a minute, she becomes aware of a strange sensation. She can’t feel her hair on her neck. In fact, there’s definitely a breeze there where her hair should be. Resting her head on the bowl she looks down, suddenly conscious that there is a foot next to her and it definitely isn’t hers. Not unless she’s taken to wearing Converse All Stars and she’s become a contortionist. She makes a silent plea. Please tell me Jon isn’t in here with me. She hears a voice, very close, saying, ‘You’ll be OK now,’ and she realizes that not only is he in the tiny cloakroom with her, but he’s holding her hair. Jon is holding her hair. Not only has he been witness to a scene from The Exorcist playing out in front of him, he’s been holding her hair out of the way while it happened. That is hands down the nicest thing anyone has ever done for her. Ever.

  She nearly flattens him trying to get away and upstairs.

  ‘Thanks,’ she calls back down as she goes. ‘Sorry.’

  As she lies in bed, she tries to think who she would do that for. Who she cares about enough that she would stand in a tiny enclosed space with them while they heaved their guts up and hold their hair out of the way. Phoebe obvio
usly, but she doesn’t count. She’s Abi’s child; Abi would do anything for her. Carol, her best friend from school who she still emails and meets up with a couple of times a year? No way. Juliet from the library who she sometimes goes for a drink with after work? Out of the question. Cleo? Forget it.

  There’s no one to whom Abi feels close enough that she would even think of doing that for, but Jon was prepared to risk life and limb and permanent damage to his olfactory system doing it for her.

  Would I do the same for him? she wonders, and then she gets a bit distracted by thinking that if she needed to that would be because he had long girly hair and then she has to factor that in with the bag, socks and choir just to make sure her devotion is as rock steady as she’s afraid it is. But would she do something fairly gross because she thought it might make him feel better? Absolutely she would. Bring it on.

  Everything hurts. Her head. Her eyes. Her ears. She knows that strictly speaking her eyes and ears are part of her head, but they’re hurting so much in their own right at the moment that they deserve their own mention. Her tongue is surely too big for her mouth, and furry, as if someone’s replaced it with a guinea pig in the night. Her stomach aches. She opens her eyes and then closes them again. It’s too much effort. Snapshots keep popping up in her head. She’s in the pub, she’s fine, she’s funny and fabulous and on form. She’s knocking over a lamp. She’s crouching on the floor of the downstairs toilet. Jon is holding her hair back. Oh god. She forces her eyes open. She is most definitely in her own bed and most definitely alone. She can’t really remember getting here, though. It’s all a bit of a blur. She couldn’t have … she wouldn’t …

  A half-formed picture takes shape – her stumbling around her bedroom getting changed. She is definitely taking her own clothes off. No one else is helping. She peers under the covers. She has her pyjamas on: pink bottoms dotted with little white flowers, a white vest top. There’s no way she could have had a drunken night of passion and ended up in her PJs.

  Of course I didn’t have a drunken night of passion, she tells herself. This is Jon we’re talking about.

  Even if she lost all sense of reason and threw herself naked at him – which, thankfully, she’s now pretty certain she didn’t – there’s no way in a million years he would have gone along with it. OK, keep calm. She may have made a drunken fool of herself, but, compared to what might have happened, that now seems like model behaviour. It’s just a bit embarrassing; it’s not the end of life as we know it. By the time Jon gets back from work this evening she might even be able to laugh at herself with him. OK, maybe not.

  She turns her aching head round to look at the clock. If Jon has gone to work by now, she needs to get up and see what the girls are up to. Elena will have made them breakfast, but Abi thinks Tara has gymnastics at half past ten and she needs a lift. There’s something in the way of the clock. A glass of water. Abi doesn’t remember bringing that up with her. Leaning in front of it is a sachet of Resolve and stuck on the side of that a Post-it note, which reads, ‘Drink me!’

  It can only be Jon. He’s the only one who knew the state she was in and how bad she’d be feeling this morning. He must have crept up here before he went out this morning, while she was doing what? Sleeping like a baby? Lying on her back with her mouth open, snoring? Breathing out fumes that could kill a small child? It doesn’t bear thinking about. If ever there had been a chance that he might be feeling the same about her as she does about him, then that will have cooled his ardour. Which she knows would be a good thing. Obviously.

  She mixes up the Resolve and drinks it gratefully, then has to resist the urge to lie straight back down and pull the covers up over her head. She has the world’s quickest shower, which basically involves her turning on the water and walking in and straight out again. Actual washing feels like too much effort. She ties her wet hair back off her face, shoves herself into comfort clothing – sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt – and makes her way downstairs reluctantly. She can hear the girls chatting away in the kitchen and smell the coffee and toast and suddenly breakfast seems like a great idea. So long as no one expects her to speak. She practises looking awake as she walks towards the kitchen, but then she catches sight of herself in the hall mirror, hair on end, eyes wide, face white. She looks like a blonde Morticia Adams. On a bad day. One glimpse of her will probably screw up Tara and Megan for life. Oh well, it’ll be good for them. A lesson on the perils of drink. If Tara thought it made you look like this, Abi doesn’t think she’d ever touch a drop.

  She can hear Elena gabbling away in what she’s decided is Hungarian as she shuffles in. You’ve got to admire Elena; she’s persistent even though no one ever understands a word she says. And then, just as it’s too late, just as Megan has caught sight of Abi and said, ‘Hi, Auntie Abi,’ loudly, she hears a man’s voice, Jon’s voice, saying something to Tara, but she’s missed her moment to turn back. Great.

  ‘She’s alive!’ he says in a hammy tone as he catches sight of her. The girls fall about laughing and even Abi reluctantly cracks a smile.

  ‘Barely.’

  Elena places a coffee in front of her and then briefly strokes her head as she walks off. It’s such a comforting motherly gesture that, emotional wreck that she is, Abi almost cries. ‘Thank you,’ she says and gives her best attempt at a smile.

  ‘What time is it?’ Why hasn’t Jon gone to work yet?

  Jon points at the huge clock on the wall. ‘Twenty past nine.’

  ‘You got drunk,’ Megan says helpfully, and Abi says, ‘Yes, I’m afraid I did a bit.’

  ‘Dad says you were funny.’

  Abi raises one eyebrow at Jon. ‘I’m not sure about that.’ What has he told them? Surely not about her throwing-up-all-over-the-place routine? She briefly wonders if anyone has cleaned it up and then thinking about it makes her feel sick again, so she pushes the thought out of her mind.

  ‘I told them you knocked the lamp over,’ he says, clearly aware of what she’s thinking.

  ‘And he did an impression of your walk,’ Megan adds helpfully. ‘Like this.’ She gets up and does a comedy drunken stagger. Tara and Jon nearly wet themselves. Abi momentarily feels a bit picked on; it’s hard to laugh at yourself when you are in the throes of a rampaging hangover.

  But then Tara says, ‘Dad got drunk on sangria on holiday once. He fell over and then tried to go to sleep on the beach, because he thought he was in bed. He was like this …’ she says, and then does an impression, a noisy stumble that Abi sincerely hopes is exaggerated.

  She can’t help it – she laughs. No one’s picking on her; this is what families do – normal families – they tease each other and no one takes offence.

  ‘Well, if that’s how it is, then I’m going to show Auntie Abi what you looked like when you tripped over that bit of pavement in the middle of Oxford Street,’ Jon retaliates. He performs an elaborate pratfall, which has Megan banging on the table she’s laughing so much and even Elena’s joining in.

  Abi is relieved and heartened to see that Tara is laughing along with the rest of them. Teasing wasn’t encouraged when she was young. If you had told Caroline she looked ridiculous doing something, then she would have stormed off in a huff, Philippa following closely behind, and there would have been a black cloud over the house all day. Funny that. Abi can remember laughing and laughing with Caroline until they were breathless about pretty much nothing. In jokes and bad puns. But, now she comes to think about it, none of the jokes were ever at Caroline’s expense. She had a sense of humour, she definitely did. Just maybe not about herself. Abi wonders if she’s changed or if Jon, Tara and Megan save these moments for when she’s not around.

  When they’ve laughed themselves out, she realizes she’s starting to feel more human. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she asks Jon accusingly. She’s hoping he didn’t feel he had to stay home and take care of the girls because she was incapable and not to be trusted.

  ‘Well,’ he says slowly. ‘I thought it mig
ht be nice for us to all do something together.’

  Really? ‘Tara has gymnastics,’ Abi hears herself saying.

  ‘I’m not going,’ Tara says. ‘Dad said I didn’t have to.’

  ‘I thought you loved gymnastics,’ Abi says, clutching at straws, and Tara shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘We don’t have to,’ Jon says hastily. ‘I mean, if you don’t feel up to it …’

  ‘Because you got drunk,’ Megan chimes in.

  Jon laughs. ‘… because you got drunk – that’s exactly what I was going to say – then we can do something on our own. I just wanted to say thank you for all the time you’ve spent with the girls …’

  Actually, the thought of being able to crawl back up to bed and sleep it off is almost irresistible. She should protest. She should come up with an excuse why she can’t go with them – an appointment with the doctor or a promise to Richard to go in and cover for him for a couple of hours over lunchtime – but her brain is too fuzzy to be able to offer up anything coherent. Why is she going to the doctor? For that matter, what doctor? Why would she have a doctor in London? And where is Richard’s regular Friday assistant? If they’re away, how come he only needs Abi to be there for a couple of hours conveniently timed so that she could run the girls to their classes and pick them up again? It’s too complicated. She’s too hung over. She knows that spending the day playing mummy and daddy with Jon, especially when she’s feeling so off her guard, is a terrible idea, but he and the girls are looking at her so hopefully and it’s so thoughtful of him to have planned something that before she knows it she is going along with it.

  ‘Excellent. So, what’s the plan?’

  ‘We thought we could get the train down to Richmond, have a walk along the river, lunch at the Gaucho there, maybe a boat trip …’

  ‘Lovely.’ She does think it sounds lovely, as it goes. It’s a beautiful day and, being away from home, she misses the water. In the summer she usually goes down to the beach every morning, even on days when she’s working because she doesn’t start till ten. Admittedly the Thames isn’t quite the same, but it’s the closest thing she’s got at the moment. And she’d be lying if she said the idea of a day with Jon didn’t appeal.