‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, having children kills your brain cells, doesn’t it? So I’ve heard. Kills them dead.’ She stubbed a short baby-pink nail on Sarah’s desk. ‘I’m not having babies until I’m at least thirty-five, or more – I’ll get fully established on the career ladder first.’ She tucked a curtain of her hair behind one ear. ‘And if I do have them, I’d go straight back to work after two months. I wouldn’t want to lose my momentum, come back like a dinosaur. I really admire you, being brave enough to try and get back out there. It must be so hard for a woman of your age.’
Sarah didn’t know whether to thank her or slap her. ‘Well, I’ll see how I go,’ the dinosaur said lightly. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, my mummy brain has to crank up to some kind of functioning level, before more of the old brain cells jump ship, one by pathetic one.’
‘Oh, you’re hilarious,’ said Felicity. ‘We’re going to work so well together,’ she giggled. ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you by my side.’
Hmm, thought Sarah. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way round? Felicity was still perched on the corner of Sarah’s desk; that skirt almost pelvis high.
At last, Felicity hopped down and clattered back to her desk. Sarah decided to check Verity’s emails. Most of them were thanking Verity for what she’d done and wishing her well for her maternity leave. There were also a couple of leads she could follow up, and a couple of new requests for events. Sarah listed them in order of priority and flagged the most important messages. Her stomach rumbled. She really was starving now. As soon as she’d finished this she’d go and look for a shop that sold paninis and huge slices of cake.
An email popped into the inbox, causing Sarah’s stomach to stop rumbling and her heart to pause beating, just for a second. The subject line was ‘Hello Verity’s Replacement!’ and it was from Dylan Silva. Dylan Silva. Oh my god, was he still working for House? He was a photographer; he was funny, sarcastic, and occasionally belligerent. Sarah had also had a crush on him when she’d worked here before. She quickly opened the email.
Hello, whoever you are! Just wanted to say hi, break a leg, whatever. See you on the next job. PS I like strong coffee and Black Forest gateau. Just saying.
Dylan
She remembered he did. He’d often turn up with a flask and one of those brown paper bags with the handles, with cake inside. He’d share, sometimes. He had dark-blue eyes, jet-black wavy hair that fell in his eyes and a smile that started slowly and a little sardonically then spread into the widest, cheekiest grin which could make her heart flip upside down. Oh, she’d had a major crush on him. He’d started working for House a month before she left. The night she’d won her National Award, red wine and success – both of which went straight to her head – found her brave enough to start tentatively flirting with him, at the team celebratory dinner in that cosy Italian restaurant across from the Royal Albert Hall. But then that terrible phone call had come, over coffee, and, like a needle scraping over a vinyl record, everything came to an abrupt end. The flirting, her career; her happy and going-places life as she knew it. After that night she’d never seen him again.
Sarah didn’t reply to Dylan’s mock-jaunty email. She didn’t know what to say. She clicked on the new email above, some junk mail from a caterer, and allowed her stomach to rumble again. Lunch. She really needed lunch.
*
The Tube was busy; packed in fact. Sarah had forgotten how totally manic rush hour could be. She had someone’s armpit in her face; someone’s book shoved under her nose. And it was stiflingly hot – still no air con on the Tube then. Sarah just wanted to get back to Meg’s flat, have a large mug of tea and spend the evening watching Billions on Netflix.
Her afternoon had been as full-on as the morning. She’d had the mood board to do and bike out, more emails to respond to and to send. Calls to answer. She’d really enjoyed herself though. It had been exhausting, but like coming home.
Sarah stood on the right of the escalator. Her feet were killing her, but there was no way she was power-walking up the left-hand lane with the super commuters. They stomped past her, scowling and determined, whilst Sarah tried to imagine they were perfectly nice people once they got home. She turned and stared at the framed posters flashing slowly by. Mama Mia!, some diet pills for getting your beach body (wasn’t a beach body just a body that happened to be on a beach?), the latest Coldplay album. Hang on, what was that? There was something tucked behind the side railing, as she passed it, the spine of a book? She let her fingers trail across it as she sailed on by. Had someone left it there because they were too lazy to take it home with them once they’d finished it, or had they left it for someone else to pick up? Sarah had read in the paper once there was a society that left books on the Tube and didn’t Harry Potter actress Emma Watson once go incognito on the Underground leaving books about?
Sarah looked behind her at the book, then realized there were three more above her, wedged in the same way. Love in the Time of Cholera. A Room with a View. Little Women; oh, she used to love that. Her old childhood copy was still doing the rounds of Tipperton Mallet. Sarah un-wedged it and picked it up: Little Women could maybe calm her brain between Billions and bed.
She tucked the paperback in her bag and reached the top of the escalator. Meg’s flat was a five-minute walk from the station and there was a Tesco Metro on the corner, just by her building. Sarah popped in and bought herself some tortilla chips and salsa plus a pre-prepared tub of salad. She might do this every night, she thought. Call in and get herself whatever she needed for that evening; there was no need for all that cooking now, no need for the Big Shop. She let herself into the flat and set up her dinner on Meg’s little desk. She would check her emails whilst she ate, as she had linked the account at work to her Hotmail one. The first email she saw was from Meg.
Hi Sarah, I found your email address. I can’t believe you still use Hotmail! A few things to let you know. Bin day is Tuesday, just put any sacks outside the front door – they will collect. When is your bin day? Do I have to move the bin to the front gate? The kids don’t seem to know. Can I light a fire? In the sitting room? I know it’s summer, but I really want to do it. How often do I feed the cat, when he comes home – Connor says he’s lost? Not seen for four days?? Meg
Sarah yawned and wrote a reply to Meg’s questions.
1.Bin day is Wednesday. Yes, please, drag bin out to front gate. They’ve recently changed to fortnightly collections so please can you stamp the bags down on the week they don’t come? Schedule in kitchen drawer.
2.Yes. Wood is in the shed.
3. Monty still not back yet? Can you please check shed and ask Connor to call him?
Sarah closed down the laptop and came away from the desk. It was noisy on the street tonight: a man was yelling, a pile driver was going, several cars were beeping, concertinaed in a jam, and a seagull was cawing – a long way from home, just like her. She sat in Meg’s pink suede chair and texted Olivia.
All OK?
All OK, Mum.
Then she texted Connor.
All right, Connor?
All good here, Mum.
What did you eat tonight?
Auntie Meg made us beans on toast.
Oh, that sounded about right. All that meat and fish in the freezer and the veggie box groaning with veggies and they’d had beans on toast.
What time are you at work tomorrow?
Half seven.
OK.
Sarah had a quick shower, a floss and an experiment with one of Meg’s expensive-looking facial scrubs; it seemed to rip half her skin off, but perhaps she’d look like Jennifer Lawrence in the morning. Then she flicked on her iPad and settled down to watch Billions, but she found it difficult to concentrate. Her mind was full of mood boards and baby showers and Meg and Dylan and, now, worrying thoughts of scurvy and malnutrition, and its consequences in teenagers.
She persevered; Damian Lewis could distract you from anything, eventually.
Meg
When Meg woke at eight o’clock on Thursday morning, she thought it must still be the middle of the night it was so dark. It was also noisy; the two fanlights of her bedroom window were open, and it was thundering with rain out there. Her walk across the field would be interesting this morning, she thought; she hoped she didn’t arrive at the village hall looking like a drowned squirrel.
She took her blood pressure tablet, got out of bed and searched Sarah’s wardrobe for something suitable to wear for running the life drawing class. She wanted to look arty but not an idiot. Boot cut jeans? Some kind of smocky top? She found some white linen culottes which would be full-length on her and a white printed long tunic of Sarah’s with tiny butterflies on – it was quite cute, she supposed, if you wanted to resemble an MP on her day off. She could put her hair up in an unruly bun and a pencil behind her ear, or was that builders?
Shoes? Well, it would have to be wellies again, by the look of it out there – she could take a pair of ballet pumps in her bag to change into – and Sarah would definitely have a raincoat hanging up in the boot room. With a hood. There was no call here for the overlapping umbrella canopy of the streets of London, having people’s eyes out all over the shop.
Once showered and dressed in the arty outfit, Meg looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t sure she liked looking like Sarah. No, she definitely didn’t. She wished she’d never emailed Sarah the other night, either, for the clipped, frosty reply she’d got. Let’s hope she had no more questions about the house, eh? Meg stripped off her sister’s clothes and changed into a pair of tight jeans and an even tighter, long-sleeved Guess T-shirt. That was better; she felt more comfortable in her weekend-type garb, although she was also finding it weird, frankly, not to be wearing a smart and sassy work outfit every day – the sexy dresses, the beautifully cut trouser suits. Country-mode, that’s what she was now in, and she better get used to it. Meg smiled to herself: back in the day her country-mode used to consist of sometimes intricate and often jaw-dropping Goth outfits she would source from local vintage shops. There was a time she used to thoroughly enjoy freaking out the locals.
She headed down onto the landing.
‘Olivia? Are you ready?’
Olivia had been reluctant, at first, to sign up to the class. ‘As I say to Mum, every single week, “drawing a nude person with all their bits hanging out? No thanks”,’ she’d said, when Meg had asked her about it on Monday evening. She’d been reluctant to talk to Meg at all, it seemed. Olivia hadn’t come home from wherever she’d been until half ten, then when her aunt had tried to corner her in the kitchen, Olivia had been monosyllabic, off-hand and really quite rude. It had taken the bribe of some Charlotte Tilbury beauty freebies and Meg’s small Mulberry sample handbag to get her to agree to come, but Meg was satisfied; she wanted some moral support and perhaps – secretly – the hope of some belated aunt/niece bonding.
Olivia looked great this morning. Wearing jeans, a white baggy T-shirt and no make-up, she looked fabulous. She shrugged on a giant khaki parka in the boot room; Meg found a big raincoat with a roomy hood and drawstring waist. They both put wellies on, Meg again employing the double layer of socks inside.
‘Help me climb into the bin,’ she said to her niece as they pulled up their hoods and stepped outside the back door into the rain.
‘What?’
‘Your mother says she does this every two weeks. Come on, we’ve got time and I might not remember again. You can help me.’
The bin was in the front garden, by the right of the drive, and was almost overflowing. Meg flung back the lid. ‘Right, give me a leg up.’
‘How do I do that?’ asked Olivia sullenly. Honestly, the youth of today! thought Meg. Had Olivia never climbed trees or broken into off-licences?
‘Clasp your hands together and hold them out for me to put my foot on. Like this.’ She showed her, lacing her fingers together. Olivia did the same. ‘That’s it.’ But as soon as Meg tried to put her foot on Olivia’s hand platform, slippery with rain, it collapsed and Olivia started shaking her hands violently. ‘Ow!’ she shrieked.
‘OK, that’s not going to work,’ said Meg. ‘Let’s grab those recycling boxes.’ There were two heavy green recycling boxes, upturned, by the front door. Meg piled one on top of the other and made a precarious-looking tower out of them. ‘OK, hold my arm. I’m going in.’
She leant on Olivia, climbed up on the boxes and stuck one foot then the other into the mouth of the bin. Immediately the bulging bags sunk under her weight and once she felt them settle she started to stamp. Oh, this was fun. She felt like a grape treader, in an extremely rainy and stinky vineyard. She stamped until the bags were really quite flattened and she was half-immersed in the bin.
‘You’ll disappear in a minute.’ Olivia grimaced, rain dripping off her hood and onto her nose.
‘I know. Now you’ve got to help get me out.’ Meg looked up at the high sides of the bin. She didn’t think she’d get her leg over them. ‘You’re going to have to tip me out!’
‘Pardon?’
‘Tip me out.’
‘OK.’ Olivia grinned sadistically. She grabbed one side of the bin and pushed it, hard.
‘Careful!’ yelled Meg, but it was too late. The bin toppled, and wobbled, and hesitated, then decided to fall right over and Meg and all the squashed black bin liners came tumbling out and into a giant laughing puddle on the drive … just as a red Fiat Uno came slowly motoring past the cottage.
‘Morning!’ shouted Meg cheerfully at the driver, from her lumpy black crash mat of slippery rubbish bags, then realized to her horror that the car had one careful, male and moody veterinary driver. Jamie. He gave a kind of half-hearted, grimacy wave, and drove past.
Bloody typical, thought Meg, as she stood up and brushed a gravy-dipped yoghurt carton off her leg. Of all the early-morning wheelie bin disasters in the world, he had to drive into mine.
*
‘Does he have to wear a hairnet?’
‘Who?’
‘Connor? Does he have to wear a hairnet?’ Connor had left at seven this morning to go to the sandwich factory. Meg had heard the door slam, and the up-and-over garage door squeak open for him to get his bike out.
‘Erm. I think so.’ She and Olivia were trudging across the fields now, Bin Gate behind them and the bin safely installed at the gate ready to have its grape-trodden contents collected next week. Meg decided to forget about Olivia’s overzealous push. She would let it go.
‘Is that what he wants to do with his life?’ It was muddy as hell and Meg’s feet were sloshing about in the oversized wellies.
‘What do you care?’
Oh! Meg was taken aback. First the push and now this rudeness again. Should she tackle Olivia? Ask what her problem was, or ignore and deflect?
‘Well, I suppose I was just making conversation,’ said Meg. ‘Trying to find things out about you. I’ll shut up.’ She could understand if Olivia was resentful, and Connor disinterested, actually. They didn’t know her from Adam and here she was suddenly living with them, when they probably wanted to be on their own while the cat was away, so to speak.
She glanced at Olivia who had stopped to pull her left welly free from a giant, sucky crater of mud. ‘Mum says he needs a rocket up his arse,’ Olivia said.
Meg laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can see your mum would say that.’
They carried on walking in silence.
‘What’s it like living in London?’ Olivia asked.
‘Pretty cool,’ replied Meg.
‘So cool you need to come and live here?’
‘I had to come for a break.’ Meg shrugged. ‘Medicinal purposes.’
‘Mum says you work in a model agency.’
‘I own one,’ said Meg, desperately trying to not sound too pleased with herself.
‘Do you think I could be a model?’
Meg looked at her. ‘Yes, yes, you probably could. But
you’re going to Durham in September, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah. Jude says uni’s a mug’s game these days though.’
‘Jude? Who’s that?’
‘My boyfriend. He’s a playwright.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Yeah. Well, he hasn’t had anything performed or anything yet. Or bought. But, yeah he writes plays.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘Kitchen sink dramas.’
Meg tried not to chuckle. ‘What, domestic dramas set in the East End or something?’
‘Yeah. Well, no, up North-ish. They’re really good. Heaps of potential.’
Meg nodded. They’d reached the stile. Once over it, without flying into any cowpats or being knocked over by marauding dogs, they walked to the village green, then to the hall, where Violet was waiting outside, the front doors already open.
‘Morning, ladies! Olivia! How lovely to see you!’
‘Hello, Mrs Chase.’
They walked in, shaking off their sodden rainwear, and there was Garfield, slumped to the floor in the lobby, sleeping and snoring; his tail slowly thumping.
‘Dreaming,’ explained Violet. ‘I had to bring him. He gets lonely if I leave him alone the house – he’s a people person. Don’t worry, he’s tied up. We don’t want him gobbling up any watercolours, do we?’
The main hall was bare apart from chairs; the village artists were bringing their own easels. Meg started unstacking the chairs and placed them in a semicircle facing the far end of the room. The rain had stopped and light was now flooding in from the high windows, creating squares of sunlight on the parquet flooring.
‘All set?’ asked Violet, lending a final hand.
‘All set,’ said Meg. ‘Are you joining us?’
‘Yes, I thought I would. I’ve brought my gouaches.’
People started trickling in, giant easels under their arms, and chatting to each other. They busied about taking off raincoats, freeing stacks of brushes from elastic bands to set them in the horizontal groove at the front of their easel, opening giant sketch pads, and popping into the kitchen to fill up plastic cups of water to clean their brushes in. Then they all sat down, looking expectant and slightly confused that she wasn’t Sarah.
The Sister Swap Page 9