Letters From My Sister Page 6

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’ She ruffles my hair and smiles. ‘He’s yours now.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  I wake up feeling disorientated. My sleep was disturbed. I feel sure I was back at home, in Mum’s studio. I can even smell the white spirit. Since the news that Bells was coming to stay I’ve been thinking a lot about home, particularly about Mum. Yesterday, when I was working in the shop, I found myself drifting back to the time when we all went to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by Mrs Kissinger. I must have been about twelve. Dad called her Lady Kiss Kiss because she thought she was very grand and did those awful air kisses with sound effects. I remember she had a face like a pug. In between bowls of quail’s eggs and blinis with smoked salmon being handed around the chandeliered room, Bells lifted her velvet skirt and proceeded to pee on the carpet. You see, unless we reminded her to go to the loo she’d forget that it wasn’t the done thing to do it on the floor. Lady Kiss Kiss raced over to us saying it was her favourite carpet with hunting scenes on it. Now there was this wet patch over one of the angry warriors on horseback clutching a spear. The other guests didn’t look our way. Instead they pretended to be engrossed in conversation. I had never before seen so many backs turned towards us. Dad was grateful Lady Kiss Kiss never invited us back.

  Sam is still fast asleep. He must have crawled into bed at about four this morning. I slip my feet into stripy zebra slippers and put on my silk dressing gown which is hanging on the back of our door. I walk into Bells’s bedroom but she is not there. She must be downstairs. I find her at the kitchen table poking the milk-bottle sculpture. She’s wearing grey baggy tracksuit bottoms and a red Oxford University T-shirt.

  ‘Careful, Bells.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘No.’

  I half smile. ‘Don’t say that to Sam. It’s his favourite piece of art.’

  ‘Don’t like Sam.’ She withdraws her hand from the sculpture immediately, as if she is touching something dirty. ‘He says “F” word a lot. We not allowed to say that word.’

  ‘You don’t know Sam,’ I point out firmly. ‘You mustn’t judge so quickly. Be nice to him, OK?’

  ‘Don’t like him,’ she states.

  ‘Bells, this is Sam’s house. He has been kind enough to have you to stay. You need to get to know him. Do you want some breakfast?’

  ‘In Wales have muesli for breakfast. Make it ourselves.’

  ‘We need to go to Sainsbury’s. Do you want to come with me?’

  *

  As we walk into Sainsbury’s I watch us on the CCTV screen. Bells is now wearing her pink frilly blouse underneath a pair of denim dungarees, plus her purple pixie boots and embroidered hat. I’m wearing an orange skirt that clings to my hips, with a pale yellow top and orange beaded sandals. Bells tells me I look like a satsuma.

  There’s a delicious smell of fresh bread that makes me feel hungry. ‘Hello, how’re you?’ Bells asks an old lady on a light blue scooter which has a black shopping basket at the front. ‘How old are you?’ She stares at the scooter, which has ‘Bluebird 2’ painted on the back like a number plate.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the lady says, reaching across to grab an avocado and avoiding eye contact.

  Bells comes back to me with two lemons. ‘I wouldn’t say hello to everyone,’ I tell her quietly as we move on. ‘And, funnily enough, people aren’t that happy to declare their age.’

  Bells is picking out packets of dried prunes, apricots, sultanas, figs and rolled oats for her muesli. ‘You have to have Diet Coke,’ I tell her when we reach the drinks section.

  ‘Best of luck,’ I hear a man saying. I turn sideways to see an old bearded man pushing a trolley filled with oranges. He taps another man on the shoulder who is pretending to be absorbed in deciding what brand of tomato ketchup to buy. ‘Best of luck,’ he says again, winking. He’s wearing a knitted jumper with ducks on it and a pair of black fingerless gloves. His eyes twitch when he talks and for a moment he looks at Bells and me, aware he’s being watched. I look down at my feet, hoping the man won’t point his fingerless gloves our way.

  ‘A mad man,’ Bells says. ‘Poor man.’

  ‘Shh, don’t stare.’ Swiftly I push our trolley on. Bells fills it with everything organic. The only vegetable that isn’t organic is the tin of mushy peas. That’s the only thing she likes in a tin, she tells me. She puts ingredients I have never even used into our trolley. She wants dried porcini, coconut milk, chillies, coriander, bay leaves, stuffed olives, sesame seed oil, fresh ginger. ‘What are we going to do with all these herbs and stuff?’ I ask her, slowly panicking that the bill is going to be enormous. ‘You cook a lot at home, don’t you?’ I ask her. ‘I bet they love you cooking for them.’

  ‘Yes, they call me Queen of Kitchen.’

  I feel relieved when we finally make it to the checkout desk. The queue is long and we stand behind a tall man with light brown tousled hair. Amongst the shopping in his trolley are a packet of crumpets, runny honey, a ready-made lasagne for two, mini Magnums and a bottle of red wine. The kind of food I normally have in mine. Bells taps him hard on the arm. ‘Hello.’

  I look down at my feet.

  He turns around. ‘Hi,’ I hear him say, and briefly look up. He’s wearing glasses, a white T-shirt and dark jeans.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, drawing in breath.

  ‘Hello.’ Bells whacks him hard on the arm now and then holds out her hand.

  ‘Bells! I’m sorry,’ I say, wincing in sympathy. He manages a pained smile as he rubs his arm and stretches out his own hand to Bells.

  ‘You like Beckham?’

  I’m sure he’s wondering if he heard right, and I nod. If you can imagine talking without being able to touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue, that’s what Bells sounds like. It’s easier for me because I have learned her language since I was a little girl.

  ‘Yes, I think Beckham’s great, and Posh Spice too. I can see you love him,’ he intimates, looking at the football badges on her dungarees.

  ‘You have children?’ she goes on. Oh, please, stop talking.

  ‘Really?’ He smiles.

  ‘You have children?’ she asks, urgently now.

  He watches her intently, trying to work out what she just said. ‘No, I don’t have children,’ he replies, and I nod, as if to say, Well done, you got it right. ‘Well, I hope not.’ He pulls a crooked smile.

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Bells!’ I say, exasperated. I want to blindfold her and put a scarf around her mouth too.

  ‘It’s OK,’ the man says, beginning to pack his food into bags. ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘My sister, Katie,’ she announces, thumping my arm. ‘I staying in London.’

  He tells her that that sounds like fun. As he speaks I can’t help thinking that if he brushed his hair, took off his glasses, fattened up a little … he could really be quite attractive.

  ‘You want cashback?’ the assistant asks him.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Nectar card?’

  He digs into his pocket and produces a few cards. As he hands the right one to the girl he turns to look at me again. It’s strange but I feel like we have met already.

  ‘’Bye,’ he says, finally.

  ‘Yeah, ’bye,’ I say, still trying to put a name to his face.

  ‘’Bye-bye,’ Bells adds.

  The man turns around once more. ‘By the way, I’m really thirty-four! I find it hard facing up to my age first time round.’ I laugh as I watch him walk away.

  Bells asks the woman serving us how old she is. I suppose it’s better than asking her how much she weighs, I think desperately.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she says.

  Before she has time to ask again, I tell her once more not to ask strangers personal questions, especially their age. ‘Let’s get our food and go. I’m sorry,’ I apologize to the checkout girl.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says.

  I push the trolley
brusquely towards the exit door. ‘No, don’t say anything,’ I say sharply each time I think Bells is about to approach someone else.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Don’t even think about it!’

  ‘In the car!’

  I put the keys in the ignition and breathe a sigh of relief that we made it out of Sainsbury’s in one piece, that no one chased us out, threatening to beat us up with a long hard baguette. ‘This is only day one, I can cope with this, I can cope,’ I mutter to myself.

  God help me, I have two weeks of this. I can forget being anonymous for the next fourteen days, can’t I?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1988

  I’m thirteen years old. ‘How did you meet Dad?’ I ask Mum in the car. She is taking Bells and me to watch Dad conduct an auction. It’s strange seeing her out of her work overalls. Today she’s wearing a green dress and her hair is pinned up with her special tortoiseshell comb. It’s one of the first times we have all gone out together. A trip to London! Normally we don’t do anything. My best friend Emma occasionally comes round but we stay at home.

  ‘Well, my mother had given me an Impressionist painting, so I went to Sotheby’s to see if it was worth anything. It was a bit of a mystery as it wasn’t signed but it looked like a Pissarro. I was rather desperate to sell it. I’m afraid I was too poor for sentimentality,’ says Mum, twitching her nose.

  ‘What was it worth?’

  ‘A free dinner,’ she laughs. ‘I met your father and he asked me out. I knew he was going to be a part of my life the moment I met him. Sometimes you can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling.’

  ‘Like love at first sight?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was. He was an assistant back then. He was very naughty, you know. This very lugubrious specialist was explaining that my painting sadly wasn’t an original, and as he was talking your father was imitating him behind his back. He was unbelievably attractive, the sort of man who could get away with anything. I remember thinking what a big nose he had. I mean, you can hardly miss it, can you, girls? But it didn’t matter, it went with his long thin face. And his eyes were so flirtatious …’ She was getting carried away now. ‘He only had to smile and his eyes were chatting you up. You’ll know what I mean when you’re older. I remember him giving me his business card. Christopher Fletcher. Marianne Fletcher, I said to myself.’

  ‘Mum, that’s sad,’ I sigh heavily. I can’t imagine wanting to marry any of the boys in my school.

  ‘You’ll be doing the same one day. You don’t want to marry anyone with a surname like Pratt, or Burk, or Fogsbottom.’

  She’s right. There is a girl at school whose surname is Smellie and she dreads the school register each morning. Bells is laughing, and this conversation is annoying me now. I turn to look out of the window.

  The auction room is dark, with lots of people coming in and out. The carpet is red. I’m sitting next to a man with such a large moustache he looks like a walrus. Mum was too mean to buy us a catalogue each, so I try to lean over and look at Walrus’s. I can see lots of stars scribbled on each page next to the prices.

  Over breakfast Dad explained how an auction worked. ‘There’s an estimate for each painting and then a reserve price, which means I can’t sell below that figure. I’m proud my girls are going to be watching me today,’ he added as he ate his last mouthful of toast.

  The Walrus peers over at me and I sit straight in my chair. He twirls a pen in his fingers and eyes me curiously. ‘You want to have a look?’ he says in a heavy accent. He is a French walrus.

  This feels exciting. Like when you go to the cinema and everyone is waiting for the main film to start. Everyone is waiting for my dad.

  Finally he enters the auction room in his polished shoes, smart suit and tie. I chose his tie this morning. He lets me do that sometimes. He’s wearing the black-rimmed glasses that make him look clever. ‘That’s my dad,’ I whisper loudly to my French neighbour. I do think my dad is good-looking.

  ‘Good afternoon, we have a feast of paintings here today so let’s get started.’ He coughs to clear his throat and I watch him intently. ‘Lot number one. Sketch by Matisse of a lady’s face. Who’s going to start the bidding at twenty-five thousand pounds …?’

  The Walrus holds up what looks like a ping-pong bat.

  Suddenly the bidding is fast and furious. I turn to the Walrus in amazement as he continues to put up his ping-pong bat. As the auction heats up, Mum is growing redder in the face from trying to stop Bells putting up her hand to confuse the bidding. ‘Hello, Dad!’ she calls out. I can hear people tut-tutting behind us and whispering, ‘Why bring a child to a place like this? It’s quite ridiculous.’ I turn around and give the two old ladies one of my dirtiest looks.

  ‘That’s my dad!’ Bells shouts now, waving at him.

  I feel Mum’s hand tug at mine. ‘We’re going,’ she mutters. ‘Excuse me,’ she asks the person next to her. Chairs are shifted, legs are tucked in to allow us to pass. I don’t want to go. I can feel everyone’s eyes on us and the two old ladies nudge each other triumphantly. ‘Whatever happened to being seen but not heard?’ I turn around and stick two fingers up at them. The two ladies gasp and my father looks at me, disappointment in his eyes. ‘’Bye, Dad,’ Bells is now calling out, people still staring.

  In the car on the way home I scream, ‘Why can’t you be normal? We can’t go anywhere with you!’

  Mum brakes suddenly and swerves into the side of the road.

  ‘Danger, danger,’ Bells says in the back seat, laughing.

  ‘Shut up, Bells!’ I screech at her.

  Mum swerves again to avoid a cyclist and goes into the pavement instead, the tyres burning against the kerb in protest. The driver behind us beeps his horn furiously as he overtakes us. ‘Wanker!’ he shouts out of the window. The cyclist turns around briefly and shakes a fist at us.

  ‘Now you listen to me, Katie …’

  ‘But, Mum …’

  ‘No. You shut up,’ she says. ‘If you ever say that about your sister again, I mean EVER, you forfeit your pocket money for weeks.’ She grips the steering wheel. ‘It’s not Bells’s fault …’

  ‘You always take her side, Mum.’

  ‘You are very lucky you …’

  ‘I am very lucky I don’t have a cleft lip,’ I finish for her like a robot. Whenever I’m difficult, Mum and Dad’s invariable answer is to tell me how lucky I am not to have been born with something wrong and that I should count my lucky stars.

  ‘Well, you are,’ Mum says.

  ‘You love her more than me,’ I tell Mum.

  ‘I do not,’ she says wearily. ‘That’s not true.’

  I look out of the window, trying hard not to cry.

  ‘All I wanted to do was watch your father today with no dramas, but I see that’s clearly impossible. No more outings, that’s it,’ she tells us with finality.

  Back to doing nothing.

  ‘On Monday we do nothing, on Tuesday we do nothing,’ Bells chants to the theme of Happy Days. She doesn’t appear at all upset that she ruined our afternoon.

  Mum lights a cigarette with the car lighter and opens the window. ‘It’s OK,’ she mutters. ‘I can cope. You can cope.’

  If Bells hadn’t been naughty none of this would have happened. I can feel my chin wobbling but I’m still determined not to cry. Yet tears stream down my face now. I don’t understand it. Why do I always get the blame? I might as well be the naughty one, because at least that way I get to have more fun.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘What am I doing now?’ Mr Vickers rubs his hands together, thinking up his next trick. We’re in my shop and Mr Vickers and Bells have been playing this charade game for about five minutes. Already I’m finding it a challenge having Bells around. She likes to pretend she’s a customer and unfolds Eve’s neatly piled clothes. She also likes to ask customers how rich they are. ‘How much money you have?’ she says, almost the moment they step inside. And now … who is this man
with giant hands the colour of a purple cabbage? His circulation is so poor that his feet, squashed into old beige shoes looking more like Cornish pasties, are also a mottled purple.

  I sent Bells off to buy a baguette for lunch, and somehow she managed to pick up this man along the way and bring him back here. ‘Sorry, who are you?’ I asked him as he walked into the shop.

  ‘I, er, don’t want to intrude.’

  ‘I’m sorry, who are you?’ I asked again.

  Finally I discovered that he is called Mr Vickers and he works at one of the local libraries. He has grey hair and wears mustard-coloured trousers with a smart white-collared shirt. What’s even more peculiar about him is that he has a bump about the size of a golf ball in the middle of his forehead.

  ‘Why funny lump on head?’ Bells asked immediately.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Eve said, putting a hand over her mouth. ‘Bells, it might be personal.’

  Our visitor looked at me for a translation. ‘She asked you what the, um, lump was on your forehead?’ My voice rose at the end. I was oddly curious too.

  ‘I was, er, born with it,’ he replied. ‘I’m not quite sure, er, what it is … soft tissue or something like that.’ He didn’t seem too embarrassed about being asked such a personal question.

  ‘What am I, er, doing now?’ he asks her, and even Eve is joining in. He holds his hand in mid-air, fingers clenched as if he is holding on to something tightly, and starts rocking backwards and forwards, making strange noises.

  ‘You are riding a horse?’ Eve guesses, her finger resting on her lip as if she is trying to solve an important crime. She looks confused, her eyes narrowed. ‘Non, that does not explain the hand.’

  I glance at the door, praying no one is going to come in.

  ‘Shall I, er, do it again?’ he asks with enthusiasm. ‘I’ll give you, um, another clue,’ he adds generously. ‘OK. OK.’ He positions himself.

  Bells starts rocking forwards and backwards like Mr Vickers. It’s the first time I have seen her enjoying herself since she arrived. He still makes those odd noises as he rocks back and forth. ‘Mind the gap,’ he announces sporadically. ‘That is,’ he pauses, ‘er, the clue,’ and he smiles at Bells and Eve.