The Sister Swap

by Fiona Collins

  ‘You’re going back to work for your old company?’ asked Connor. The chocolate bar demolished, he shoved the screwed-up wrapper into his back pocket, currently somewhere halfway down his left thigh. ‘What happened to “never go back”?’

  ‘When I say that, I mean boyfriends and love affairs, not jobs.’ Sarah sighed heavily, that kind of world-weary sigh mums are so practised at. Picking up a pair of slippers, she pulled a face then flung them to the bottom of the wardrobe: no one in London wore slippers. ‘How about a “congratulations, Mum”? It might be nice to hear one.’

  ‘Congratulations, Mum,’ the twins offered in unison, like Kevin and Perry.

  ‘Thank you.’ Sarah rejected a peach floaty scarf. She would have to examine Google on the train up, see what fashionable people were supposed to be wearing these days. She didn’t want the first London siren she heard to be the sound of the fashion police coming for her …

  ‘How long are you going to be away for again?’ asked Connor.

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘Two months! That’s ages!’ Oh, finally! ‘Who’s going to cook our dinners?’

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t even know if Auntie Meg can cook.’

  ‘And who’s going to clean the house? Hoover our bedrooms?’

  ‘You are – you two. If you can find a square foot of carpet to do so.’

  ‘Can’t’ – Connor did the inverted commas thing with his fingers –‘“Auntie Meg” do it?’

  ‘I’m not expecting her to,’ replied Sarah, sitting back down on the bed. ‘I’m expecting you two to step up. Perhaps you could use my going as an opportunity.’ She waited for the eye-rolling. ‘Connor, I know you fell into the sandwich job – which was only supposed to be for last summer, by the way – but sticking labels onto packs of sandwiches is hardly a career, and you’ve been sitting on that electrician’s apprenticeship form so long it’s grown stuffing and a side zip.’ Connor rolled his eyes and gave another fringe flick, with the toss of his head, making his cargo shorts drop another two inches lower down his hips. ‘And, Olivia, your gap year has never been more aptly named as there’s simply nothing in it! I know you’re going to Durham in October, but all you’ve done since A levels last year is drift around. You could spend the rest of the summer more usefully than listening to depressing music with your mates or getting yourself a pointless new boyfriend.’

  ‘She likes The Smiths,’ said Connor, from the doorway. ‘And I promise I’ll take a look at that form thing again.’ He yawned.

  ‘I’ll think about doing something this summer,’ said Olivia unconvincingly. She was leaving it awfully late, thought Sarah. There’d been an opportunity to go to Kenya, to help teach English at a school, many months ago, but Olivia hadn’t taken it. Sarah really hoped her sudden flight to London would shake them up. Or at least make either of the lazy so-and-sos pick up the Hoover.

  ‘Can you give me a lift to the station tomorrow please, Connor?’ The station was walking distance, but Sarah didn’t want to walk to it with the family suitcase. It wasn’t one of those nice ones on wheels; it was a hefty, rock-hard red thing, a throwback from when she and her ex-husband Harry used to take the kids to Cornwall, before he decided to have multiple affairs and left them to move down there permanently. It looked at her accusingly from the bed.

  ‘Yeah, what time?’

  ‘Three o’clock?’

  Sarah had already checked the current shambles of a train service: there was no miracle currently settling over Tipperton Mallet; the train staff were on strike again and she would be travelling on a bus replacement service from Tipperton Mallet to Ipswich, taking a whole hour and a half and going round all the houses, no doubt, then an actual train, from Ipswich to London. Then the Tube to Meg’s flat, which Meg had given her the address for at the end of yesterday’s phone call. The whole journey would take ages, almost four hours.

  ‘All right.’ He shuffled away from the doorframe, in the direction of his bedroom, and Olivia got up and left too. Hardly devastated, were they? They weren’t exactly weeping in the aisles. But she still worried how they would get on without her.

  Sarah carried on with her packing and it didn’t take long; not many things made the London cut, just underwear and nightwear, her trusty black skirt, one or two old blouses she hadn’t worn for ages and one pair of boring, safe, black court shoes. Minimal make-up was packed; she didn’t have a lot. Meg was the one who had make-up and hair down to a fine art, thought Sarah, as she stared at a never-used Pound Shop eyeshadow palette. Meg used to have an eyeshadow called Black Jade, which she wore down to the tin doing big dramatic panda eyes for her various adventures.

  ‘Are you going out like that?’ Sarah had always asked, as the panda had slunk to the front door in a hitched-up mini and a scowl.

  ‘Can’t stop me,’ Meg had always retorted.

  Meg had always looked gorgeous, Sarah reflected again as she zipped up her meagre make-up bag and put it in the top of the case. Ten-year-old Sarah had been in awe of the loud little sister with the big blue eyes when she was born, and loved running round helping with the new baby. She helped change her nappies and wind her. She helped with her bath and rubbing baby oil on her cradle cap.

  ‘You’ll be so good when you have your own,’ Mum had remarked more than once, after Sarah had brought the Gripe Water for her. ‘You’re a natural,’ Dad had added. And she had been, hadn’t she? thought Sarah, as she rolled another pair of sensible knickers and wedged them in the corner of her case. A natural for years and years and years. She had given her all to her sister, and then to her children. Now she was going to give something back to herself.

  *

  It was two forty-five, on Sunday afternoon, and Sarah was sobbing at the top of the landing.

  ‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she wailed. ‘I just love you both so much.’ She had one arm round Connor’s shoulders, despite his attempts to lean himself out from under it, the other circled tightly round her daughter’s neck whilst she wriggled like a beleaguered worm and muttered, ‘Get off, Mum!’

  ‘Pull yourself together, Mother!’ chided Connor sternly, finally managing to prise Sarah off him. ‘It’s only two months.’

  ‘It’s really not a big deal, Mum,’ said Olivia, rolling her eyes and pulling a sheaf of golden hair out of Sarah’s grasp. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘If you don’t stop this, you’re going to miss your bus,’ added Connor. ‘You’ve been hanging off us for twenty minutes. Please don’t do this when we get to the station.’

  ‘No. I won’t, I promise,’ said Sarah, attempting to pull herself together. ‘I’m OK now.’ She sniffed and snuffled her nose into a screwed-up tissue. ‘Let’s go. Be good for Auntie Meg,’ she said, giving Olivia a final hug and briefly wondering if Meg would be remotely good for them. ‘And come up and visit me. We can go to Madame Tussauds.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Olivia shrugged. ‘Bye, Mum,’ and the two of them practically herded their mother down the stairs and out of the door.

  Connor threw her suitcase in the boot and Sarah climbed into her battered old blue Fiesta. It had certainly seen better days. It had scratches, a dented back bumper and one of the doors didn’t quite shut properly – capable of short journeys only, if that. Sarah never spent any money on it; everything she earned went on Connor and Olivia, mostly to keep them supplied with junk food and chocolate. Before she’d shut the front door, she’d left some money for them on top of the fridge along with strict instructions to ration it and to maybe actually buy some vegetables once in a while. She wouldn’t be sending any extra home unless it was an emergency.

  The village flashed slowly by as the Fiesta couldn’t manage much more than 40 mph. Connor put the CD player on and sang tunelessly along to Foreigner. She looked across at him, her boy at the wheel. He had the hint of a whiskery moustache and a five o’clock shadow; his once cute features somehow metamorphosed into those of this incredible Boy-Man. She wanted to well up, but she had promised h
im she wouldn’t, so she forced the tears back down.

  ‘This is you,’ said Connor, as they pulled up outside the station. A coach was waiting, its engine running. This was it, she thought: she was really going. She was abandoning her children and going up to London to re-seek her fortune after all these years. She should really be taking a Dick Whittington-style knapsack.

  ‘If Dad makes one of his rare phone calls, tell him where I am,’ said Sarah, as she got out of the car. Connor got her case out of the boot for her and one of the coach drivers lifted it with a gruff ‘Ipswich bound?’ and threw it in the baggage compartment at the bottom of the coach.

  ‘Doubtful,’ said Connor. ‘And isn’t he in France or somewhere at the moment, sketching muddy bits of water and getting pissed?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Sarah, trying to give her son another quick hug and kiss without crying. ‘Just tell him if he gets in touch.’ It was a few steps on from ‘Tell your father to pass the salt,’ this message relay between her, the twins and their father, but it worked for her. Only speaking to Harry through the children these days was a great relief.

  ‘Will do, bye, Mum,’ Connor said, and she was waving at him as she walked away, and she was blowing him kisses he pretended weren’t for him, and she was getting on the coach.

  Sarah sat at the front, behind the driver – she felt like she wanted to fully see the road ahead – and watched from the window as Connor folded his long, lanky legs into the Fiesta and drove off. More people slowly trickled onto the coach. Chatting, laughing, and squashing bags between their knees; juggling packets of sweets and drinks bottles; adjusting the air conditioning above their heads. A mother and daughter were bickering about a flask of orange squash and who would sit in the aisle. A burly man with a Stephen King novel wedged himself next to Sarah with a grunted ‘Afternoon.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said, praying that Pet Sematary was suitably horrifying he wouldn’t talk to her on the journey.

  Finally, the rumbling standby engine roared into action, the driver released the handbrake and he turned the enormous steering wheel away from the kerb.

  ‘OK, madam?’ he asked, over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, I’m OK, thank you,’ she replied. She was better than OK.

  She was ready.

  Chapter Five

  Meg

  When Meg finally arrived at Tipperton Mallet station, on that bloody coach, she realized everything looked exactly the same as it had twenty years ago when she’d got on the 9.42 and had escaped up to London. If she was expecting things to have moved on in any way, she was mistaken. There was the same little café, the one that served the dodgy doughnuts and the revolting coffee; there was the vending machine, which never worked unless you gave it a swift kick to the bottom right-hand corner; there was the heavy, dispiriting feeling that a big fat nothing was going on.

  ‘Tipperton Mallet!’ said the driver all proudly, as he parked the coach, as though he were responsible for the village’s existence. He’d been eyeing Meg up in his rear-view mirror since Ipswich station, the pervy old git. She’d had to sit right at the front as she was late getting on, and she’d clocked him looking at her bum as she’d squeezed her messenger bag onto the overhead rack. She wasn’t really dressed for the country, she knew, in her high-necked black minidress and gladiator sandals, but she didn’t own any jodhpurs or fleeces. She hoped Sarah had some she could borrow; if she had to do the whole country thing, she may as well look the part.

  Meg got off the coach. She stood outside the station entrance, watching as her fellow passengers walked off with holdalls and rucksacks or were picked up in filthy cars or, in one unfathomable instance, a horse and cart. She was here now, and she’d better try to rustle up some of the right feeling for the place. She tried to put positive images in her mind: gambolling ponies, the smell of freshly mown grass, country pubs, open fires, a kind of Jilly Cooper-esque existence – romping with polo players on haystacks and sleeping off sloe gin in cart lodges … But no, she couldn’t do it. Tipperton Mallet meant boredom and sadness and oppression. She didn’t want to be here, and she missed London already.

  It was a gorgeously warm afternoon. She perched on the edge of a bottle-green station windowsill, stretched out her legs and closed her eyes. She’d walk to Orchard Cottage in a bit. She was in no great hurry to get there, although she’d certainly been in a massive hurry to leave the place, all those years ago.

  Meg opened her eyes again, on hearing a faint shout and a clicking noise. There was a field, opposite the train station, and a man was walking a horse across it. Well-honed calves, silky brown hair and an attractive gait, and that was just the horse. Well, she thought, there was her first hunky farmer. She had to fill her two months down here doing something, so it might as well be desirable men. She was wondering if there were any more and looking about her a bit, when a battered blue Fiesta pulled up and a lanky, sloping figure in a Van Halen T-shirt unfolded himself from it and flopped out onto the pavement. He approached, flicking a long fringe out of his face.

  ‘Excuse me, but are you Auntie Meg?’

  ‘Er, yeah?’

  ‘I’m Connor. Mum said I had to hang around here this afternoon, see if you needed a lift home.’

  ‘Well, yes please,’ said Auntie Meg. ‘I’d love a lift. Thank you, Connor.’ He was so tall, this lad, she thought. Well, Sarah was, and she wondered if Olivia was, too. Was it just Meg who had inherited the short-arse genes from their mother’s side?

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ added Connor and he stuck out his hand, giving Meg the impression he was doing what his mother had always taught him to do: be polite.

  ‘You too,’ said Meg. She felt a little guilty this was the very first time she’d ever clapped eyes on her sister’s son. That it was a shame. There was no aunt–nephew hugging, no laughingly telling him how much he’d grown. It was sad, really. Regrettable. That she and Sarah had made each other so bloody miserable they never wanted to set eyes on each other again once Meg left Tipperton Mallet.

  ‘Let me take your bag,’ said Connor. He had a very deep voice; he sounded like a Suffolk Morgan Freeman.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Connor took Meg’s bag for her and put it in the boot of the car. When they got in the car, Connor’s legs were so long and his seat so far back it looked like he was sitting on the back seat; Meg had to turn her head a forty-five-degree angle in order to talk to him.

  ‘Has your mum left yet?’ she asked innocently as Connor motored up the road. She prayed Sarah had; being this close to her made her feel suddenly uneasy.

  ‘Yes, ages ago,’ replied Connor. He did another hair flick and his fringe landed back where it had started.

  ‘Great,’ said Meg. ‘I hope she likes my flat. It’s really tiny. Fancy her getting her old job back like that!’

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Connor.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Mind what?’

  ‘Your mum going up to work in London and me coming here for a while?’

  Connor just shrugged, then indicated left, navigating a woman on a bike with an enormous shopping basket. Two chickens appeared to be flapping in it.

  ‘I’ve left my job for two months,’ Meg added.

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘I own a model agency in London. Tempest Models? Perhaps your mum’s told you?’

  ‘Nope.’ Connor shook his head and didn’t look remotely impressed.

  ‘I look after models.’ Still nothing. God, she was at an awkward angle trying to talk to him, with him almost sitting in the back and everything. ‘One of my girls – my friend, actually – is Clarissa Fenton-Blue. Have you heard of her?’

  ‘Everyone’s heard of Clarissa Fenton-Blue,’ said Connor, finally showing a flicker of animation. ‘She’s hot!’

  Meg felt gratified Connor was showing a bit of an interest at last. In London she was used to people being excited to meet her. She wondered exactly what Sarah had said about her successful sister. ‘Do
es your mum talk about me much?’ she ventured. ‘Mention me at all?’

  ‘No, never,’ replied Connor, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘I’d forgotten you existed until yesterday, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Meg. Still, she shouldn’t be surprised, should she? She never mentioned Sarah to anyone, either. ‘What do you do?’ she asked.

  ‘I work in a sandwich factory.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ Meg nodded. ‘Management?’

  ‘No, production.’

  ‘Oh, right. Well, cool. Good money?’

  ‘No’ – Connor smiled – ‘but it suits me. We’re here.’

  That was quick. She’d forgotten how near the cottage was to the station. Connor pulled up onto the short gravel drive and Meg stared at the front of the house. It was how she remembered it, but different. Before, years ago, the mottled brick stonework had always looked grey and chilly, now it had more of a soft honey glow. Had something been done to it? Repointing or whatever it was called? The cottage looked homely and pretty in the afternoon sun, especially as it had pink roses winding round its chocolate-box leaded windows and window boxes bursting with all kinds of flowers she would never be able to identify. Meg was surprised by a wash of feeling. A feeling that she had missed this place, very much, which was ridiculous as she obviously hadn’t. She didn’t dare think of Mum and Dad. Mum, at the window, waving like a lunatic as she walked to school every morning. Dad, in the front garden with his top off and his chest all tanned, mowing the lawn to a backdrop of Radio 2 from a tinny transistor radio on a stretched-to-capacity extension lead. No, no, she would not think of them. She couldn’t. Oh god, it had been a big mistake coming here; what on earth had she been thinking? She should have just maxed out her credit card and gone to Antigua.

  ‘Well, are you going to come in?’ asked Connor. He was standing outside the passenger window, her suitcase in his hand.