KATY REGAN

The One Before the One

September 2008

I knew this would be the day the minute I opened my eyes that morning, the sun pouring through our slatted blinds throwing stripes onto Martin’s face. I turned over and examined him, his face slack with sleep, head half turned into the pillow, mouth ajar.

That was it, I decided, tears already threatening. I’d come to the end of the road.

I just couldn’t do this any more. It was killing me. Not softly, like the song, but slowly and painfully, sucking the life force out of me like hands around my neck.

I reached over and gently (guilty, probably, at what was about to come) pushed his dark hair, clammy after another Indian summer’s night, from his face so that it stuck up, revealing his widow’s peak. I’d watched that peak develop. That deepening V was like a measure of the fourteen years we’d spent together. Sometimes I felt like my feelings were receding at the same rate as his hair. Fourteen years. More than a third of my life. Did I even know who I was without him? My heart thudded with nerves.

‘Happy Birthday, gorgeous,’ he mumbled, still half-conscious, before flinging a heavy arm across my chest.

I swallowed hard. It felt like trying to swallow a mouthful of dried leaves.

‘Thanks,’ I managed eventually. But it was already anything but happy.

The next time I would be in this bed, I would be here alone. What I hadn’t predicted at that point, however, was that technically I was about to finish with my fiancé, the man I was due to marry in a month’s time, the only man I had ever loved or who had loved me, over a present. A present he’d bought for me.

‘Here we are birthday girl, one blueberry smoothie and Eggs Benedict with – I dare say so myself – a Michelin star standard Hollandaise sauce.’

It’s two hours later (one of those spent perfecting the Hollandaise sauce) so that I’m that unfortunate mix of so ravenous I am annoyed, and guilty that I’m annoyed, Martin places the tray on the duvet in front of me, then sits down on the bed. He tightens the belt of his white ‘waffle’ dressing gown, a free gift from Boots with a Magimix coffee machine last Christmas.

I look at the tall glass with the sprig of mint placed lovingly on top and then at his face – such a pleasant, friendly face that I knew so well: the neat, narrow mouth, pressed deep into a generous chin that told of a man who was full of joie de vivre and liked the good things in life; the slightly upturned nose that he liked to root around constantly when he thought I wasn’t looking; round cheeks that made you want to reach out and squeeze them and those small, yet ever-twinkling dark eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, slightly too far apart like a sheep, and yet filled with so much unwavering love it made me want to cry.

I forced a smile. ‘Thank you, honey.’

‘My pleasure. Now, does birthday girl want her present now, whilst she’s eating her breakfast, or later?’ Martin liked to refer to me in the third person.

‘Ooh, I think now.’

‘Good choice.’ Martin reached deep into his dressing gown pocket and produced an envelope wrapped up in red ribbon. Martin was always an excellent present-wrapper, unusual for a man I’d always thought. A momentary flurry of hope: tickets to the theatre perhaps? Beauty Salon facials? A voucher for John Lewis? It didn’t really matter since I’d already decided I won’t be able to keep it.

‘Come on then, Caro, the suspense is killing me. Aren’t you going to open it?’ he said, eyes glistening.

I opened the envelope, my hands shaking. A leaflet with a picture of a tree in full autumnal blaze on the front.

‘Your Guide to the National Trust', it read in an uninspiring font.

Membership to the National Trust? I momentarily had to catch my breath. If it was membership of the National Trust at thirty-two, what would it be at forty? His-and-her flasks? The Vicar of Dibley box set? Jesus Christ, I was about to marry my dad. (If my dad were a normal sort of dad, which he isn’t).

‘So do you like it? he said, nudging closer whilst I held the membership card in my shaking hand. ‘I thought after the honeymoon, when weekends are more free, we could start with the Stately—’

‘Course I like it!’ I cut in, and then an awful, awful thing happened. I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.

Martin peered at me, alarmed.

‘Caro, what on earth is the matter?’ The membership leaflet was damp with tears now. ‘Please. Tell me. What on earth is wrong?’

And that’s where it ended, in what should have been our marital bed. Martin, the only man I had ever known, really, the man who had loved me for more than a decade, who had talked about having children with me, who had held me whilst I sobbed through no end of twenty-something self-esteem crises, who had listened to me moan about my parents and my mental family, who knew the best of me, the worst of me, the ugly truth of me and yet accepted me more than anyone else in he world, was lying next to me, shushing me, stroking my hair.

And I was about to break his big heart into a million different pieces.

Early June 2009

I suppose you could say that things had barely moved on in my life, nine months later, when my seventeen-year-old sister turns up on my doorstep and I am drunk, alone, on a Sunday afternoon.

When I say drunk, I don’t mean staggering-all-over-the-place drunk. God no! That would have been humiliating. It was more like two-large-glasses-of-wine drunk. Okay, possibly half a bottle, exacerbated by two fags and the dregs of a bottle of Prosecco. I’d say, on alcohol consumption alone, I would have just about got away with convincing someone I wasn’t drunk. If I hadn’t been crying. Or if I hadn’t answered the door with said bottle of Prosecco. Or if I wasn’t standing barefoot on my doorstep at 4 p.m. on a Sunday wearing a wedding dress and a tiara.

It had been raining, sheeting it down for hours, but was on the verge of brightening up so that the sky glowed, making the row of white terraces behind where Lexi stood and the trees of Battersea Park – full as broccoli florets in the height of summer – look unreal, like a stage set.

She was carrying a trolley case with fuscia-pink lips all over it and was wearing gold leggings, and a silver headband, Grecian-style, around her forehead. In the luminescent light, I thought how lovely she’d become, a modern take on Wonder Woman, with her gamine crop and kittenish eyeliner. I, on the other hand, must have looked like a contestant for Trailer-Trash Bride of the Year.

‘Hi! It’s me, Lexi.’

Did she think I had dementia? That I needed to be reminded of who she was before being escorted back to the church where I would get on with the wedding I had clearly wandered off from?

‘Sorry, is this a crap time?’

I leant one hand on the top of the doorframe, but missed, so that I stumbled forward and ended up doing a strange unintentional dance on the front step.

‘Er … no.’

‘Right, it’s just you –’ I was aware I was swaying, that the trees were moving although there was no breeze – ‘look like you’ve been crying. And you’re wearing a wedding dress.’ I looked down. This was no word of a lie. ‘And a tiara. And you’re holding an empty bottle of wine.’

‘It’s Prosecco, actually.’

Overlooking the empty bottle of Prosecco and the fact my house stank of booze and fags and the fact I had Pat Benatar’s ‘Love is a Battlefield', blasting from the stereo, I think I styled it out well. It was regrettable that my wedding dress had a four foot train and so could not be passed off as evening wear, but like I say, all this was exacerbated by the fact I was drunk and it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘So how long are you planning on staying?’ We’re standing in my kitchen now and I’m trying to sound as breezy as possible.

Lexi leans against the doorframe and looks around her.

‘Um, well, I thought maybe the summer holidays …?’ she says, hopefully.

The summer holidays? I almost heave.

‘What? Like, the whole summer?’

‘Er, yeah.’ She smiles. She still has the same rosebud mouth she had as a baby. Pouty and cherubic. A real Drew Barrymore mouth. ‘Why, are you going somewhere?’

‘No.’

‘Cool,’ she says brightly, like, that’s that sorted then.

She sits down at the kitchen table, helps herself from the bowl of pistachios. Inside, I’m beginning to panic – this is all a bit sudden, isn’t it? A bit unexpected. She’s been here half an hour now and I don’t feel we’ve quite got to the bottom of why she is.

‘Look, Lex …’ I say, gently. She looks at me with her big, brown eyes – there’s something hopeful about them, so innocent and trusting and I already feel awful. ‘I’m more than happy to have you for a while but you have to understand, I have a job, a really demanding job. I’m out all day …’

‘I’m very resourceful.’ She shrugs. ‘I’m used to amusing myself.’

That’s what’s worrying me.

‘I often have client events at night.’

‘Seriously? Cool. Maybe I could come to a few?’

I sigh. My stomach shrivels like a mollusc into its shell.

‘Or help you out at work? I’ve decided I want to go into business, actually – sixth form’s not for me. I was thinking, because I really love shoes, like seriously have a passion for them, that I could be a shoe designer. I could design the shoes here, I mean dead funky ones, much better than the pap that’s in the shops now,’ she says, in her flat Yorkshire accent. I’ve pretty much lost mine, after someone once told me I sounded like Geoff Boycott. ‘I could draw them – Art’s my best subject – send the designs to China where a team of people would make them, then get them sent back here!’

She looks at me as if to say, ‘Genius, or what?’ and a strange nausea passes over me, like this is already becoming more surreal than I can handle. Thankfully, then, there’s a noise like a lion roaring. Her mobile. Again.

She picks up. ‘Yo.’

She said that last time they called, so I assume it’s the same person.

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m here now.’ Pause. ‘Yeah, she’s cool, yeah, I think so …’ She looks at me and grimaces, apologetically – so she clearly told whoever’s on the other line of her plans to come and ‘surprise me’. Just not me.

Her voice grows quieter.

‘Yeah, I know Carls, I know. I’ll talk to him at some point.’ So, boyfriend trouble?

She rolls her eyes and makes a blah-blah-blah sign with her hand. There’s a long pause, then a gasp and a ‘No way!’ then an even bigger gasp and a ‘What, like permanent-permanent?!’

After about five seconds and no ‘goodbye’ that I can decipher, she hangs up.

‘What’s happened? Is everything Okay?’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, cracking a pistachio between her teeth, ‘it’s just my mate Carly’s had her hair dyed, and it’s gone totally tits up.’

We sit at the kitchen table, me still in the wedding dress and the start of a hangover.

‘So listen, honey, about the sixth form thing. Does Dad know you aren’t planning on going back?’

‘Yes. Dunno. Don’t care. I’m not really talking to him at the moment, or Mum for that matter.’

‘What? What do you mean you’re not talking to them? You mean to say you came on the train all the way to London and you didn’t tell them? Lexi! Right, I’m calling Dad now.’

I pick up my bag and rummage in it, trying to find my mobile, but Lexi stretches across the table and slaps her hand on top of it.

‘Caroline, don’t. Please.’

She lowers her eyes at me, looks at me from under silky black lashes that I was always so envious of as a teenager.

‘Back away from the bag, Caroline. Away from the bag, come on …’

She slowly takes the bag from my grasp, like I’m a self-harmer and it’s full of razors.

‘Please don’t call Dad. They know I’m here – Dad drove me to the station.’ She looks a bit sheepish. ‘And gave me the money to get the train. He gave me a bit of cash too, you know, for the holidays?’

‘Oh, did he now? And did he think to, you know, call me about this?’

She wrinkles her nose.

‘Mmm, yeah. But I think you had your phone off.’

I am about to protest about the ludicrousness of this comment when I remember, yes, I did. I always switch off all methods of communication when I’m indulging in a maudlin-fest. One gets so much more out of it that way.

We sit in silence for a minute. I look around at the kitchen, at the disarray – the Flora margarine carton with fag butts in it, the empty bottle of Prosecco (with a fag butt in it), the little sister, helping herself to pistachios, announcing she’s staying for the summer. The whole summer. God, I hate summer, and I am suddenly taken hold with a sickening grip of panic, a sort of vertigo like I’m in freefall.

Then Lexi’s phone goes again. This time she looks at the screen and runs upstairs to take it.

Brilliant. A lovesick teen on my hands.

I get straight on the landline to Dad. It rings three times before the answerphone kicks in. If they’ve sodded off on one of their yoga holidays to an obscure Greek island, I’ll kill him, I really will.

‘Hi, this is the happy home of Cassandra and Trevor Steele. I’m afraid we’ve been currently called upon elsewhere, but if you’d be so kind as to leave us a message …’

Then: ‘Helllooo!’

These days, Dad sounds like he just leapt off a yacht in the Carribean to answer the phone, he’s so ecstatic. ‘Dad, it’s Caroline.’

‘Ah, lovely Caro! I was just about to call you.’

‘Were you? Good.’

Resist temptation to rant. It never works with Dad.

‘Do you think you might be able to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Ah. Lexi?’

‘Yes, Dad, Lexi.’

‘The thing is, honey, I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon but you’re always so unavailable.’

(Note: emotional blackmail three seconds into the conversation.)

‘I see, so you thought you’d just send her over?’

‘No! It wasn’t like that. Look, I can tell you’re excited …’

‘Am I? I don’t feel that excited.’

‘So just take a moment to relax. A few deep breaths. Would you like me to call you back?’

‘No, I’m fine. I want to talk about this now.’

‘Okay, all right.’ (Dramatic sigh.) ‘The thing is, honey, Lex is … how can I put it … “at sea” at the moment. She’s in a transitional phase, there’s a lot of inner conflict. She’s been off the rails recently, raging against the world. All the normal teenage stuff, but also some sadness, some searching; her mum and I feel, some un-met needs.’

I hold the receiver away from my mouth for a second and swear, silently and enthusiastically to the heavens.

‘Dad, do you think I could have this in plain English please?’

‘Basically, she’s decided …’ (sigh) ‘Lex has decided she doesn’t want to go back to sixth form next year and finish her A levels.’

Well, that’s a relief. By the way he was carrying on, you’d think she’d signed up for a sex change.

‘Basically, she dropped out of school last month, been moping around the house ever since, lots of tears, very hostile. As you can imagine, her mother and I are very concerned and we thought – well, actually it was Lexi’s idea – that she’d really benefit from spending some time with you. You lead such a stimulating life down there in London.’

‘Do I?’

‘And you’ve always been so driven, such an achiever, Caro, done your A Levels, gone to university. Always done everything so right. You’d be a great role model for Lex, who needs some direction right now, so I invite you to take this opportunity, Caro. Cass and I invite you—’

‘Stop inviting me, Dad,’ I interrupted, ‘it’s not a bloody party.’

He makes this noise, and I know he’s tapping manically at his forehead, which he does when he’s stressed.

‘I guess what I’m trying to say is, can you talk to her? Please, darling? She’s mighty upset about something, and something’s happened for her to just drop out of school, of life, like this …’

‘Probably just boyfriend trouble, Dad. She’s seventeen, these things often seem like the end of the world …’ (Like I knew anything.)

‘Ah, but it’s not. You’re wrong there, because …’

There’s an enormous racket as Lexi thumps down the stairs.

‘Look, she’s here now.’

‘I know, and I’ll talk to her in a minute, but just … Will you do this one thing for me, Caro? Will you talk to your sister? Her mother and I just don’t want to see her throwing her life away like this. It would give you a chance to get to know her better, besides anything else, and she’s a good kid, a great kid.’

Why was he talking like he was in an episode of The Waltons all of a sudden?

‘I will, Dad, okay? Course I will. Anyway, here she is …’

I hold out the receiver.

‘It’s Dad,’ I say. ‘I think you should talk to him.’

Lexi’s on the phone for ages. She sits, curled up like a cat, in a puddle of evening sun by the window, fiddling with the phone cord. I watch her as she talks, and I have to admit she’s very pretty. She has thick, dark hair, painstakingly styled ‘bedhead', a neat, snub nose – her mum’s nose, not the sizeable Steele honk I inherited, and then those eyes, wide-spaced, chocolate-dark, a flick of black eyeliner accentuating their feline quality, and framed by slightly too bushy eyebrows, which give her a naturally exotic look, like she might look ridiculous in too much make-up.

She talks to Dad for ages. At first there are the usual sullen grunts and rolls of the eyes and a ‘Yeah, all right, Dad, don’t give yourself a nosebleed about it.’

But then her voice becomes much quieter and softer and when I next look, a big fat tear is rolling down her face.

‘I know that, Dad,’ she’s saying. ‘I know it’s coz you care … Course I’d tell you if there was something. You know I tell you everything …’

Liar, I think. Girls don’t tell their dads anything. At least, I didn’t, but then, that’s probably because Dad was always doing the talking.

‘But there isn’t, I promise,’ she carries on, wiping her nose on the palm of her hand, and something, despite myself, squeezes my heart. Even if this was just boyfriend trouble she was gutted, really upset – and she’d dropped out of sixth form. It must be serious.

Eventually, she says, ‘I will. I miss you, too. Yep, love you too.’ Then she hangs up and looks at me, mascara running down her cheeks. ‘God, look at the state of me,’ she says, laughing through the tears. ‘What sort of total minger must I look now?’

‘Wanna talk about it?’

I’m sitting down beside her now.

‘No. Honest. I’m all right.’

‘Sure?’ I nudge her with my elbow. ‘I might be able to help, you know. Especially since I am such an exceedingly sensible, level-headed and mature person.’

Lexi looks at me in my wedding dress.

‘Yeah, right!’ She laughs. ‘I used to think you were – now I’m not so sure.’ There’s a pause.

‘Anyway,’ I say, eventually, putting my hand on her knee. ‘We’ll sort this out, yeah? Me and you, whatever it is, we’ll get you back on track.’

‘Okay.’ She sniffs. ‘Thanks. You’re very nice to me.’

‘Oh, I know – my benevolence knows no bounds.’

‘I’ll be okay,’ she says. ‘I just need some time out of Doncaster, to be honest, some time away.’

Then she leans her head back on the radiator and studies me, her dark eyes still glassy from crying.

‘And d’you know what?’ she says, absentmindedly stroking the fabric of my wedding dress. ‘It’s all right to get dumped. We all get dumped. Carly’s just been dumped, so it doesn’t make you a freak.’

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

* * *

It’s only when Lexi’s in bed that I do what I’ve been dying to do all day. I sit back on my pillows, take my notebook – all perfect in its lovely, stripy hardness – out of my bedside-table drawer and I begin, asterisking new items.

To Do:

MINOR

*Make something with Quinoa

Pluck eyebrows

Get spare room painted

Sort out photo albums (buy photo corners)

*Get drippy tap fixed

Get involved in local culture: this coming weekend: installation by interesting sounding German artist at The Pump House Gallery. (Toby to come? Impossible. Shona and Paul? Possible. Martin? Pretty much a cert. Call him tomorrow.)

Learn how to use i-pod that have now had since Christmas. Just do it!!

*Do 3 x 12 squats and 3 x 12 sit ups before bed (start tomorrow)

MAJOR

Incorporate two hours of admin into every weekend. No excuse!

Every day, do something for self and de-stressing, even if just breathing (alone, concentrating on, rather than just breathing breathing.) for ten minutes. Work: Step things up a gear. Seal deal on two new clients per week.

*FIND OUT WHAT’S WRONG WITH LEXI ASAP!!! Fix it. Then send her back to Doncaster asap.

Was only joking about that last bit … Kind of.

I should say that when I say my ‘sister’ I actually mean half-sister. Lexi was born when I was fifteen – which makes her seventeen now – about seven months after Dad moved in with Cassandra, which means he must have got her up the duff whilst he was living with Mum. My mother never lets me forget that.

I remember the day she was born – 12 September 1991. It was a Thursday morning, a school morning, and Mum was putting a load of washing on. Mum was forever putting a load of washing on, back then, especially after Dad left. It was ridiculous; she was either stuffing it into the machine or hanging it out, like some manic, nervous tick, which I now realize it was.

She had her bottom in the air, and was wearing the aqua elasticated trousers that couldn’t have helped in Dad’s final decision to walk, that’s for sure!

‘Well, your father’s had his second daughter,’ she announced. ‘God help her, Caroline, with two lunatics for parents! Alexis Simone, they’ve called her, poor little sod. Surely the work of the She Devil.’

The ‘She Devil’ was what Cassandra was known as in our house, which, even at fifteen and abandoned by my dad, I felt was a little harsh, but what did I know? Mum’s a black and white kind of a woman. It’s love or hate with her.

I remember an immediate pang of envy that she’d got Alexis Simone, where as I got Caroline Marie, something you’d surely call a canal barge. But then there was another emotion that took me by surprise: excitement. Surging, dizzying excitement that made me unable to swallow my Weetabix. I had a sister! I’d always wanted a sister. Especially since I’d always felt short-changed by my brother, Chris, whom I strongly suspected was off the autism scale and whose one great love in life was his biscuit-infested Nintendo.

‘And is she okay? I mean, is she healthy?’ I asked. I liked to think I was a caring sort who rose above personal politics even then, mainly out of necessity, since if anyone had two lunatics as parents, it was me.

‘Oh yes, she’s fine … physically,’ Mum said, ramming the soap-powder dispenser shut. ‘Only time will tell what they do to her head.’

I don’t know what I expected having a half-sister would be like. I guess I was thinking along the lines of swapping clothes, discussing boys, although since Alexis – Lexi, as she quickly came to be called – was a day old, I’d have to wait years to do all that.

I was travelling from Mum’s in Harrogate to Dad’s (well, Cassandra’s house) in Doncaster every other weekend back then. Cassandra was a flamboyant American who could talk a glass eye to sleep and had a good line in enormous dresses that looked like she’d had a run in with a box of water-colours. Dad had met her on a residential course called Heal Your Life at the height of his midlife crisis.

Anyway, I was desperate to get to Dad’s that weekend so I could meet this new, coolly named sister of mine. My little sister. My very own confidante! Someone to save me from my mental family and, above all, myself and this altogether below-par existence I was leading.

As soon as I walked in, however, I realized the other thing I hadn’t thought through – as well as the fact that it would be approximately sixteen years before I could discuss my concerns about still being a virgin with my sister – (and at the rate things were going, I’d still be a virgin then) – was the fact that my father would be madly in love with this new bundle and that this would bring my already crumbling world crashing down.

Cassandra was breast-feeding when I arrived and Dad was sitting next to her on the sofa, stroking Lexi’s head. I stood in the doorway, my throat constricted with an all-consuming jealousy.

You’d have thought, what with Cassandra being a life coach and Dad now transformed into a yoga-loving, therapy addict who used terms like ‘closure’ in normal conversation, that they might have been more sensitive and given me time to adapt. But no. Cassandra simply lifted Lexi straight from her gigantic breast, which dangled out of a bra the size of a pillowcase.

‘Caroline, meet Alexis Simone, your new baby sister. Isn’t she adorable?’

She was so light, she almost fell through my fingers.

‘Yeah, she’s, um … nice,’ I said, holding her like you might hold a bundle of firewood, trying to keep all the tiny bones, the bits, together. I was appalled, shocked by how tiny she was. What use was this to me? How could this downy, squawking thing that bore more than a passing resemblance to a newborn ape save me from anything?

Cassandra was smiling at me, head cocked to the side. Then Dad started with the camera. This was so embarrassing.

‘Put her next to your breast, sweetie,’ urged Cassandra, massive knockers still dangling like water bombs. ‘Babies love skin-to-skin contact, it makes them feel safe.’

Yeah, well, it didn’t make me feel safe, it made me feel like a total moron. I touched the top of her head – just because I felt I ought to really – but it felt like an over-ripe peach and made my legs turn to jelly. Then the baby started head-butting me. This wasn’t panning out well at all.

‘Aaah, look, she’s rooting,’ gushed Cassandra.

‘What do you mean?’ This sounded like something a badger did.

‘She thinks you have milk, sweetie, she’s hungry. She thinks you’re her mommy, too.’

Dad was still snapping away: ‘My two little girls,’ he kept saying. ‘My two, gorgeous girls,’ which for reasons I am yet to fully understand made me suddenly so mad, and so sad, it was all I could do not to punch him.

We had tea, eventually, around 9 p.m., with Lexi being passed between Dad and Cassandra and the Moses basket. Nobody asked me a thing, except for Dad, who asked when I’d started to get psoriasis on my scalp. Then I went to bed, an hour earlier than normal, and balled my eyes out, all the time listening to Lexi do the same.

So Dad, as much as I loved him, was never a father to me or Chris, and yet, here he was being one to somebody else. And that hurt. That hurt like nothing else had ever hurt in my life, and if I’m honest, my realisation that day that Alexis Simone was not, as I’d hoped, my very own baby-sister-shaped saviour but a usurper, stayed with me. If I’m really honest, it’s probably still there.

The morning after Lexi arrives in London, I wake up to the sound of something throbbing. At first I assume it’s a hangover, but then decide I feel nowhere near rancid enough, since mine are largely of the vomit-on-waking variety. I remove my earplugs and fumble around on the floor for my glasses, morning being a gradual reintroduction of the sensory world to me, my myopia at a level where I have been known to say hello to my own reflection.

It doesn’t take me long to realize the thumping is music and it’s coming from downstairs.

It’s only then that I remember I have a guest.

‘Lexi?’ I’m banging on the bathroom door in my pyjamas now. ‘Lexi, are you in there?’

‘Yeah,’ comes a muffled voice from inside. ‘Come in if you want. I’m fully dressed.’

I push open the door. It’s steamy and warm. I just can make out Lexi hovering over the sink but not much else.

‘Er, music?’ I shout with what I hope is a vaguely humorous I-am-so-cool-with-your-rock-music-at-seven-in-the-morning but there’s an accusatory rise at the end of the sentence.

‘Gossip!’ she shouts back

‘I’m sorry?’

‘GOSSIP!’ She stands up from the sink. ‘The MUSIC. It’s GOSSIP. Why, do you like them?’

‘CAN’T SAY I’VE EVER HEARD OF THEM!’

‘WHAT?! BETH DITTO IS A FEMINIST ICON OF OUR TIMES!’

‘I THOUGHT YOU SAID IT WAS GOSSIP?’

‘IT IS. BETH DITTO IS THE LEAD SINGER OF THE GROUP, GOSSIP.’

‘OH …’

‘WHY ARE WE SHOUTING?’

‘I DON’T KNOW. I CAN’T HEAR BECAUSE I CAN’T SEE AND I CAN’T SEE BECAUSE I HAVEN’T GOT MY GLASSES ON. I THINK I LEFT THEM IN HERE!’

‘Oh my Lord,’ giggles Lexi as I edge right up to her face. ‘You really are blind, aren’t you?’

She fumbles around near the sink, hands me my glasses, and I put them on. Only then does everything become clear. Well, almost clear, there’s still something obstructing my vision. Lexi has her hair wrapped in a Tesco bag, dribbles of purple dye running down her forehead, around her ears. My sparkling white, Italian designer bathroom basin – obscene amounts of money from a place on Lavender Hill – is splattered with purple dye. As is the wall. As is the towel around Lexi’s neck. As are, I discover, my glasses. Hence the dark spots in front of my eyes.

‘Um, the sink,’ I squeak, thinking, keep a lid on it, Caroline. Keep things in perspective.

‘The sink?’ says Lexi.

‘It’s covered in dye.’ I put a specific emphasis on the word ‘dye’.

‘Oh!’ She bites her nail. ‘Shit. But it’ll come off, right?’ She goes to rub at it with dye-covered fingers. ‘Er, Lex, don’t do that?’ I’m trying to sound calm, whilst suppressing the hysteria that’s bubbling within me.

‘If I just …’ She licks her fingers and goes at it again.

‘Stop!’ I mean it to come out normally but it shoots out of my mouth like a small, hard pellet. ‘NOW. Please. Lexi.’

‘All right, missus.’ She’s brightly rubbing at it with my flannel now. ‘Calm your boots. I’m just going to give it ever such a little …’

She wipes away a drip of dye that’s rolling down her forehead and then goes to pick up the flannel again, at which point I crack. I literally slide, cartoon style, across the bathroom floor in my towelling bedsocks, grabbing the side of the sink. ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE JUST LEAVE IT OKAY? JUST …’ I gather myself. ‘Leave it.’

She stops rubbing.

‘Oh, okay. Sorry,’ she says. Does she actually flinch? Something tells me this little arrangement may not pan out that well. Something tells me I have lived alone for far too long.

My sister turning up for the summer aside, I do occasionally worry what it says about my life that I look forward to coming to work on a Monday. The hating weekends thing crept up on me, really. For the fourteen years that Martin and I were together, weekends were okay. Well, they were much the same as anyone else’s – any other couple’s, that is.

Endless rounds of barbecues and visits to the almost in-laws; Sunday afternoons spent at the Tate Modern, even though neither of us really liked anything in there so we’d end up in the shop where I’d buy another Dali postcard and Martin would buy his mum her birthday present in advance – usually another Liberty-print oven glove.

Post break up, there were about three months where I revelled in my new-found freedom. When the novelty was over, however, and my concerned friends, who had rallied round went back to their neglected boyfriends, I began to dread weekends. Especially summer weekends. Bank holiday weekends are the work of the devil. The two in May, a torture device. Because what I envisaged about summer in London: Tooting Lido, picnics on Hampstead Heath, Shakespeare in Regent’s Park, didn’t hold that much appeal on my own and sometimes, although I hated to admit it, I would feel lonely. Panicky, even. And at times like that I’d start to think that maybe I’d made a huge mistake with Martin – well, actually, I still sometimes wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake with Martin. I kind of missed the ‘schedule’ after all. At least he was enthusiastic about doing stuff, even if it was Duxford Aerodrome. Also, Martin Squire is, quite simply, the nicest bloke in the world. Which is probably why he wasn’t the bloke for me.

I get out my mobile to call him. I miss ‘us’ most in the mornings, sitting here at Battersea Park station, the heady, oily smell of a London summer in the air, the sky already a brilliant blue. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of the summers we sat here together, Martin giving me one of his early morning pep talks: ‘Caro, nobody’s dying, you’ve still got me. What’s the worst than can happen?’ he’d say. ‘You lose a client. You fail.’

I’d go into voluntary spasm at the thought.

The phone rings and rings, which is strange, because Martin always picks up. I leave a message.

‘Hello you, it’s me. Why aren’t you answering your phone? Wanted to know if you fancied coming to see an exhibition with me on Saturday? Thought I’d get you early. It’s by a German artist, some sort of conceptual thing – I saw it in Time Out. Might be crap but it would just be nice to see you. As ever. Also, you’ll never believe this, but guess who just rocked up on my doorstop last night, announcing she’s staying for the whole summer? My bloody sister! As you can imagine, I’m freaking out. I need a Martin pep talk. Oh yeah, and the exhibition. You’ll probably want to know—’

‘Where it is,’ I’m about to say, but then a cargo train approaches and by the time it’s passed, the space on the answer machine has been used up and there’s just a flat tone ringing.

Shona’s the only person in the office when I arrive. She’s on the phone and I know exactly, by her straight, tense back and clipped voice, who to. She presses ‘hold', gives a little shudder and puts her fingers to her head, mimicking a trigger. Shona’s not one for hiding how she feels about people, especially how she feels about Darryl Schumacher.

‘It’s Darryl Bum Smacker,’ she hisses. ‘Wants to discuss a date for the pitch for Minty Me – and to take me to dinner, obviously.’

‘Tell him I’m not here yet. Tell him I’ll call him back, okay?’

‘She’ll call you back,’ says Shona.

Then, more irate: ‘I said she’ll call you back!’

Even more irate: ‘I don’t think what I’m doing at the weekend is really that relevant to the oral hygiene market, do you, Darryl?’

She slams the phone down.

‘Cock,’ I hear her mutter under her breath before taking another call. God, I love Shona. I wish I could be more like Shona. Doesn’t suffer fools. Never gets stressed. Never puts her job before her principles – which is maybe why she’s still the sales’ team’s admin exec after seven years at the company. If we let her loose on selling anything we’d be in liquidation by now.

Darryl Schumacher is head buyer for Langley’s supermarkets, notorious for making women physically sick but also for driving the hardest bargain in the oral hygiene market. For weeks now, I’ve been chipping away at him, toeing that fine balance between what our boss calls skilful sales and ‘the sledgehammer effect’ (i.e., all punch and no result). I sell oral hygiene products to supermarkets for a living. I know it’s not saving the world, but I love my job and seem to be quite good at it. But then I guess, without blowing my own trumpet, that I’m pretty good at most things if I put my mind to it. ‘Caroline is a very capable young lady,’ teachers would write on my report. You know the sort: three As at A Level, First Class degree, head-hunted on the university Milk Round to join Skidmore Colt Davis’s graduate scheme – a geek, basically.

This is a crucial time with Schumacher. If he catches me off guard, I could lose the sale, but if I play my cards right, we’ll have Mini Minty Me breath freshener on the shelves of all branches of Langley’s by next week, meaning profit for the company and a stab at being nominated as Sales Person of the Year in August’s Institute of Sales Annual Awards – not that that’s a highlight or anything.

So now, when I’ve just walked into the office and I’m not on my guard, is not the time to deal with Schumacher. I’m distracted by Lexi’s arrival and I want to mail Toby.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Teenage Mutant Sister invasion at 64 Coombe Gardens. Argh!

So, on Sunday I am knee-deep in admin [small, white lie but he doesn’t need to know this] when the doorbell goes. You will never guess who was there, announcing she’s staying for the summer?!

There’s a sudden pressure on my shoulders and then a familiar schoolboy giggle.

‘Writing love letters to me again? Give it a rest, will you? They’re clogging up my inbox.’

‘Jesus, Toby. You nearly gave me a heart attack.’

He laughs, chomping on a pastie. I’ve never known anyone eat as much as Toby Delaney, and still have a concave stomach.

‘I tend to have that effect on women,’ he says, sitting down at his desk.

There are bits of pastie all down his tie but even that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to take away from his breathtaking attractiveness. In fact, it seems to add to it, which I find exhilarating and demoralising all at the same time. The less he tries, and he never does, the more delectable he seems to become.

I lean back on my chair, assuming an air of nonchalance. It’s something I’ve perfected after nearly a year of sitting opposite someone who it’s all I can do not to strip naked and eat.

‘So how was your weekend?’ I say.

‘Oh, you know … missed you,’ he mouths, chucking a pen in front of me.

‘Shut up, Delaney!’

‘I did!’ he says, clutching at his chest with mock hurt. ‘Anyway, pick up that pen, will you? I want to see your pants.’

I chuck the pen back at him

‘What about you?’ he says. ‘Good weekend Steeley? Or are you keeping it a secret?’

But then there’s the familiar ‘dong’ as his computer sparks into action. I wait for him to carry on the conversation but he’s too busy squinting at his screen.

‘Caroline still topping the sales targets,’ he reads, in a South African accent, mocking our boss’s email. ‘You bitch.’ He shakes his head. ‘You total spawny cow.’

I’m about to respond with some devastatingly witty comeback when a familiar figure looms over our desks.

‘What’s that I hear, Mr Delaney? Spawny cow?’

Janine Cross. Our boss. At least five foot ten of South African sinewy muscle and balls. I speak metaphorically, of course, although it wouldn’t surprise me if, tucked into those skintight Joseph trousers, she does, actually, have a pair of iron balls.

‘Do I detect a smidgen of jealousy?’

‘Um …’ Toby can’t speak. More due to food bulging from his mouth than anything else.

‘Or just a healthy competitive streak?’

‘Oh, just the, er, streak,’ says Toby.

Janine shakes her head at him then smiles at me. ‘So, you got Morrisons? Well done. Very well done, in fact. Just Schumacher to get in the bag now, Caroline, but I have no doubt you’ll crack it. If you carry on like this you’ll definitely be in the running for Sales Person of the Year.’ She taps Toby on the shoulder. ‘Look and learn, Toby, and don’t think I’ve not noticed that you were late twice last week and haven’t reached your target for three weeks running.’ Then she strides off on her racehorse limbs towards a slightly scared-looking marketing team.

Toby’s shaking his head at me.

‘You’re such a lick-arse, Steele.’

I am about to reply when a high-pitched ‘Eeek! Eeek!', unmistakable as the sound from the shower scene in Psycho, interrupts us.

‘What the hell’s that?’ exclaims Toby.

‘What?’

‘That noise like the shower scene from Psycho.’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Toby looks around him. ‘Well, it’s not coming from me.’ The noise continues, grows louder, more urgent.

‘I didn’t say it was coming from you.’

‘So where is it coming from, then?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘It’s coming from you, Steele!’ Toby slides back on his chair, pointing at my bag.

I pick up my bag and open it, look inside.

‘Have you got a rape alarm in there? That’d be typical of you.’

‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

‘A bomb, then?’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘I don’t know!’ I hold up the bag a metre away from me. ‘But I’m not looking – you can.’ And I walk over and thrust it onto his desk.

‘Oh, nice. So I get the bomb-in-a-bag,’ says Toby, shaking it up to his ear. He opens it. ‘Jesus, there’s like a whole ecosystem in here.’

He rummages a little and then, a smirk spreading across his handsome face, lifts out my mobile phone, the ‘Eek! Eek!’ becoming ear-splitting as he does. He stands up and hands it to me. LEXI is flashing in silver.

‘Hello?’

‘Hiya!’ says the Yorkshire voice on the end of the line. ‘What d’ya reck to what I’ve done with your ringtone? It’s awesome, isn’t it?’

‘So how long is she staying?’

Toby is highly amused but trying not to show it. Shona is sitting on her desk, biting hard on her pencil, trying to come up with a solution, because this is what Shona does in every problematic situation.

For some reason, Toby seems to have orchestrated a ‘crisis’ meeting and skidded over next to me on his office chair, which is causing all manner of problems, mainly in the pelvic region, since I can smell him: a clean, just-had-a-shower smell, but made purely of pheromones and mixed with something reminiscent of fresh, sugary bakery goods. Something delectable. Something flutters between my legs.

‘The whole summer,’ I say, pretending to look conscientiously at my emails, when really I’m picturing Toby, in bed, naked, and me, burrowing my head in his chest hair.

‘What, like July and August?’

‘That’s the whole summer, isn’t it?’

Toby sucks air between his teeth. ‘Oh, Steeley,’ he says, squeezing my shoulders. The something fluttering between my legs is positively flapping now. ‘Sharing your space with a whole other person? How are you coping?’

‘Not very well, actually. There’s stuff all over my flat.’

‘Oh no. Not stuff. In flat?’

‘Piss off!’ I nudge him in the side.

Shona groans. Poor Shona. She’s worked with Toby and I nearly a year now and the constant sexual tension by proxy must be beginning to wear thin.

‘And what about her not leaving the cushions lined up symmetrically? Leaving the tap dripping? Spoiling your one-woman efforts to save the Great Barrier Reef?’

I slap him over the head as he twinkles his swimming-pool-blue eyes at me.

‘You’re so rude! And this morning she dyed her hair in my bathroom – purple dye all over my brand new Italian bathroom.’

Toby bursts out laughing. ‘Fuck, I’m surprised you made it into work.’

‘How old is she?’ asks Shona

‘Seventeen.’

Toby almost falls off his chair.

‘Seventeen?’ Health and Safety Heather swings around and sighs dramatically, but we all ignore her since she does this several times a day. ‘You didn’t tell me you had a seventeen-year-old sister!’

‘Half-sister,’ I correct.

‘That is so cool,’ says Shona. ‘I would have killed my three brothers for a sister when I was a kid.’

Toby and I frown. Shona often saying things that make people frown.

Toby put his feet up on my desk. ‘So what’s she like? Is she a—’

‘Delaney!’

‘God, Delaney,’ agrees Shona.

‘What?’ he says, wide-eyed at the injustice of it all. ‘A student, was all I was going to say. Thanks a lot, you two.’ He stabs at a ball of Blu-Tack with his pen ‘What do you two take me for? I’m a responsible, married man.’

‘Well, since you’re such a fan of responsibility, maybe you’d like to volunteer as a fire marshal? Eh? Clever clogs. Whaddya think about that?’

Our ‘crisis meeting’ – obviously just an opportunity for Toby to laugh at me – is suddenly cut short by Heather, playfully hitting Toby across the head with her Fire Safety manual.

‘Fifty quid for the first three takers and an hour with me, to show you the ropes.’

‘That, H, is a very hard offer to refuse,’ says Toby, as Heather swings back and forth on her court shoes, clearly delighted by her opening gambit. ‘But I think I’m going to decline, on this occasion. It’s more Caroline’s sort of thing, isn’t it, Caroline?’ And then he smiles in a way that makes me want to punch and snog him all at the same time.

So that’s how I get roped into being one of the office’s three fire marshals – me, Heather and Toupee Dom from payroll. I spend the next hour learning how to use the fire extinguisher and sitting in a special chair used to evacuate disabled people from the office, whilst Toupee Dom almost knocks me out with his body odour. I try Lexi several times but, worryingly, get no answer until, finally, around lunchtime – just as I get stuck into my PowerPoint presentation, in particular a very well-executed pie-chart, detailing what’s currently driving the growth of oral hygiene goods in Asda – comes the shower scene noise from Psycho. I immediately grab my phone from the table, but it flips about in my hand like a live trout. There’s a text.

Am up town. This oldie just tried to flog uz xtc! I

WMPL!

C u l8r

DWBH. [smiley face] Ha ha. lol. Lex xxxxxx

What?

‘Am up town’ is all I can make out. So she’s in town, but where in town? Soho? Shoreditch? The arse-end of Hackney?

I immediately email Toby. He’s got a nineteen-year-old brother. He’ll know what she’s on about.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

This text from Lexi, do I need to worry?

Am up town. This oldie just tried to flog uz xtc! I WMPL!

C u l8r

DWBH. [smiley face]

Ha Ha. lol. Lex xxxxxx

Five seconds later, an email pings into my inbox.

Subject: translation services from down-wiv-the-kidz From: [email protected]

She’s been offered class A drugs by a geriatric. This made her wet herself laughing. She says, don’t worry, be happy!

To: [email protected]

Don’t worry? I am SO worrying. I don’t think I can hack this responsibility for another human being/space-sharing thing, you were right.

He emails back.

From: [email protected]

Relax woman. It could be fun. I sure wish I had a seventeen-year-old lolling about my gaff all summer. Although, it has occurred to me, I don’t know whether it has you. Does the fact you’ve got your sister staying change the book club? Like, do we need to re-locate??!

I email back.

That, Mr Delaney, is the last thing on my mind.

When I get home from work, Lexi’s in the back garden, sunbathing. It’s only when she removes the copy of Time Out she is reading to talk to me in comedic deep voice (I am finding she rarely uses her normal one) that I realize she is topless.

‘Afternooooon. You’re early; good day at the office?’

‘Yeah, good, thanks.’ I don’t know where to look, so I take a sudden interest in the doorframe. ‘Very productive.’

‘Great.’ She smiles brightly. Her long legs are stretched out on the sun lounger. She’s wearing bright red lipstick and enormous square shades. ‘So, what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘My tattoo, you chump!’ She sticks her right arm out in front of her.

I look in horror at the anchor (an anchor?) splat in the middle of her upper right arm. I can’t believe this. Dad will kill me. I have an overwhelming desire to head-butt the wall.

‘You got that done today?’

‘Yes, don’t you like it? It’s like the one Amy Winehouse has, kind of ironic, you know, sailor iconography?’

‘Who did it to you?’

‘A tattoo artist did it to me.’ She laughs. ‘A very sexy, Paolo Nutini lookalike tattoo artist, if you must know.’

Who the hell was Paulo Nutini?

‘Where?’

‘Camden Market. That place is awesome. I could have spent a fortune. And guess what? I got a job!’ She sits up on her elbows and I have to look away so it doesn’t look as if I’m leering at her bosom. ‘I met this guy called Wayne.’

‘Wayne?’ I grimace. ‘Unfortunate name.’

‘I know, but he had the most wickedest shop – well, it’s not his, it’s his mate’s, but he’s working on it part-time. We got chatting, coz he’s originally from Sheffield and his accent stood out. I said I’d just landed for the summer and he said he needed some help at weekends and occasionally during the week, so …’

‘Hang on. Who is this Wayne?’

‘He runs a shop in Camden Market, like I said. And he lives in Battersea!’

‘Where?’

‘On a boat, how special is that? Anyway, do you wanna see the stuff I bought?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ I decide to come back to the Wayne thing later; this was all going way too fast. So then she’s up, padding across the garden, legs as skinny as a stork. She gets hold of my hand.

‘Come to my boudoir,’ she says, which sounds ridiculous in her thick Yorkshire accent, and I follow her, helpless. We go through the lounge.

‘Soz about the mess,’ she says, trampling all over the cushions she’s tossed on the floor earlier. ‘I was trying my new stuff on and was just about to start tidying up when you came home.

‘That’s okay!’ I lie, quickly replacing all the cushions on the sofa.

We get to the guest bedroom.

‘Okay, you stay there,’ she says, hands on my shoulders, pushing me against the wall. And then she goes inside and closes the door so I am left staring at it, suddenly feeling like a stranger in my own home. Five seconds later, music is on.

‘Ta-dar!’ She flings open the door.

‘Nice,’ I say. ‘What is it, exactly?’

‘It’s a playsuit, divvy. A vintage one.’

‘So when would you wear it?’

‘Anywhere, shopping?’

Not shopping with me you won’t!

‘Hanging out in cafés, in Battersea Park, maybe with some high-heeled sandals,’ she says, doing a funny pose like one of those vintage postcards of ladies in 1920's bathing suits.

‘And I got these …’ She shoves a pair of shoes in my face. ‘And this …’ she puts on a purple trilby. ‘Cool, or what? And there were loads of stalls and some right nutters selling stuff. There was this bloke, right, he came up to me and he was going, “marijuana”, but pronouncing it with a “J” which cracked me up. So he was like, “Do you wan-na, some maru-ju-ana?”’ She puts her hand on her hip and says it with a convincing Jamaican accent, which, despite myself, makes me laugh. A little. ‘Then he was like, “Do you wan-na some Es?” That’s when I texted you.’

Es? At Camden Market? Why was I never offered Es at Camden Market? Well, could be I’ve never been to Camden Market …

‘And, guess what? Jerome was there!’

‘Who on earth’s Jerome?’

‘A guy I met on the way here on the train – you know, the one who rang me yesterday?’

So that’s who she was going all coy with.

‘Anyway, he’s somethin’ spesh, he is. Such an inspiring person. He says he wants to photograph me. He says I have a very interesting look.’

‘Lexi,’ I groan. I get that feeling, like stop the train, I want to get off. ‘You can’t just meet up with randoms off the train and let them take your picture. This is London. A big, scary, dangerous city.’

I’ve been thinking all day about what Dad said on the phone, but it’s only later, when I’ve drunk the best part of half a bottle of wine, that I pluck up the courage to talk to her.

‘So, Lexi …’ She’s slumped on the sofa in the playsuit; laptop open, one eye on Facebook. ‘I think we need to chat.’

‘Wow, sounds serious. Are you about to dump me?’

‘No!’ Sometimes, Lexi strikes me as very sophisticated. Then she says things like that and she sounds about twelve.

I reach over and slowly close her laptop.

‘Look, you know you’re very welcome to stay …’ I start.

‘But,’ she says.

‘But?’

‘There’s a “but” in there, isn’t there?’

‘No, not exactly.’ God, I’m crap at this. ‘It’s just, Dad’s worried about you. I’m worried about you. I think we need a plan for this summer, that’s all.’

‘What sort of plan?’

‘A plan, you know? A goal. An aim.’

‘God, now you sound like Mum and Dad. They can’t go to the toilet without a personal goal.’

I resent this comparison. I hardly think me suggesting a few things for Lexi to concentrate on constitutes a ‘motivational talk’ on a level with the talks (that’ll be evangelical lectures) Dad and Cassandra give as key speakers with the Healing Horizons Forum (that’d be cult) that they run. And anyway, it was Dad who insisted I talked to her. I would quite happily have avoided anything of the sort.

‘I made a list,’ I say, finally.

‘Not another one! You’re obsessed with lists.’

‘Oh, that’s unfair.’

‘I don’t think it is. I’ve seen them all over the place. You make so many lists, I’m surprised you have time to do anything on them.’

‘Lists help you to focus,’ I say, grabbing my notebook and opening it at the page that says LEXI’S FIVE POINT PLAN. ‘Number one, your room.’

‘Oh, you’ve seen it?’

‘Yes, and I nearly had a seizure, so please sort it out. Moving swiftly on. Number two, you need to get a job. If you’re not going back to sixth form – which, incidentally is number three, we need to discuss sixth form properly – then you need to know what else you’re going to do. I thought we could draw up your options.’

‘Make a list you mean?’

‘Number four,’ I sigh. ‘You need to call Dad.’

‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’ She shrugs

‘Good, well that’s all of them.’

‘That’s it? That’s the list?’

‘Yup. Told you it wasn’t serious.’

‘But you said there were five points,’ she says, edging closer.

‘Did I?’ I move my hand so that it covers up the fifth point. The bit Dad told me to do. The bit about finding out what’s actually wrong with Lexi.

She uncurls my fingers from the notepad.

‘Find out what’s wrong with Lexi,’ she reads out. ‘God!’ She flops dramatically onto the sofa. ‘Did Dad put you up to this? He did, didn’t he? There’s nothing wrong with me, except that everyone keeps asking what’s wrong with me, and my parents treat me like I’m depressed, or a total mentalist or like it’s not totally normal for a seventeen-year-old to not know exactly where she’s going or what to do with her life.’

‘Of course it’s normal,’ I say. ‘I’m thirty-two and I still haven’t really got a clue what’s going on with my life.’

‘Liar!’

‘It’s true! It’s just, Dad said—’

‘I don’t care what Dad said. He’s such a moron sometimes. I mean, I love him, but he doesn’t understand me. He and Mum, they’re always like: “You could do anything you want to do, Alexis. The world is your oyster!” But what if you don’t know what you want to do? What then?’

‘I thought you said you wanted to be a shoe designer?’

‘Oh, I don’t mean that really. I’m crap at Art A level.’

‘I’m sure you’re not.’

‘I am. I’m crap at all my A levels.’

Her face goes bright red and she looks like she might cry.

‘Look,’ I say, realizing this isn’t going anywhere. ‘We don’t have to talk about it now.’

‘Good,’ she says, ‘because there’s no big secret. I just came here to have fun, that’s all. I just want to have a good time.’

So why are you crying? I want to say. But of course, I don’t.

Caroline. Sorry, can’t do exhibition tomorrow. Got an unavoidable appointment. Enjoy though.

I stare at the text again. The umpteenth time in two days. Why didn’t he just call me? Caroline, too. Martin never calls me Caroline. And no kiss. Not even a friendly exclamation mark.

I call him one more time but it goes straight to answerphone and this time I don’t leave a message. Still, Martin doesn’t know how to be enigmatic so maybe he does, actually, have an unavoidable appointment; probably something to do with his wisdom teeth.

It’s been almost a week since Lexi arrived, and, since the hair-dyeing fiasco and the tattoo, she’s been on best behaviour. She seems to love this job with Wayne, who has already achieved guru status in my house.

‘Wayne reckons people who write obsessive To Do lists are masking unhappiness,’ said Lexi the other day, as I added ‘dry-clean rugs’ to the list pinned to the fridge.

‘Does he now?’ I said, thinking does anyone actually talk like that? And anyway, since when was a complete stranger qualified to comment on my state of mind?

‘Yeah. He reckons they’re just avoiding the big stuff.’

‘Oh, right. I see. And what is this big stuff, according to Wayne?’

‘Dunno, life I s’pose. He didn’t really go into that bit.’ I rolled my eyes.

‘That’ll be because Wayne – who I am sure is lovely but who basically runs a jumble sale for a living, let’s not forget – doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.’

In truth, I don’t really care what Wayne says, as long as Lexi enjoys working for him and he gives her some focus. I’m still pretty worried about her. She won’t talk to me, not really. We’ve chatted a bit about how she hated sixth form, a lot about her friend Carly and her disastrous love life, but nothing about hers. Once or twice, late at night, I’ve heard her having hushed, stressed conversations on the phone but I think I’ve finally worked out what that’s about.

The other evening, quite out of the blue when we were watching How to Look Good Naked, she announced, ‘Carly thinks she’s pregnant.’

‘You’re joking,’ I said, one eye on the telly. ‘What’s she going to do?’

‘Dunno,’ said Lexi. ‘She hasn’t done a test yet.’

‘No way! If I was worried I was with child there’s no way I could sit around wondering. I’d have to know.’

‘Really?’

‘Definitely. Anyway, I thought her boyfriend had dumped her?’

‘He has, which is why it’s a complete nightmare.’

There was a long pause. I was too busy watching the bit where they make her walk down an aisle, naked in a shopping centre, to really be listening, then she said,

‘Anyway, Carly reckons she’s decided she doesn’t want to keep the baby if she is.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘What’s the furthest gone you can be before you have an abortion?’ she added, after a long pause.

‘Dunno. Twenty weeks? But then the problem is that some women give birth not even knowing they’re pregnant, especially teenagers whose bodies don’t even change that much.’

‘What, so you could just think you’re a bloater when really, you’re like, eight months up the duff?’

‘I s’pose so, yes.’

Then we watched Celebrity Big Brother and that was the end of that.

And so, what with Martin and his enigmatic ‘unavoidable appointment’ and Shona having to stay in and wait for a washing machine to be delivered, it’s just Lexi and I who find ourselves standing in the starkness of the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, staring at a square of turf.

‘So, by actually filming the grass growing …’

The curator, Barnaby Speck (I always read the accompanying leaflet from start to finish) is a bald, fleshy-lipped man who gives a little jump on words he finds exciting, like ‘growing’.

‘… Rindblatten is saying something about the mysterious, unseen nature of time. Time not experienced by us, time of the –’ He jumps so much on this word, I see his red socks leave his shoes – ‘Other of Otherness.’

‘Eh?’ Next to me, Lexi screws her little nose up. ‘How do you go from a piece of grass, right?’ I nudge her in the ribs, which she reacts to with a comedy death rattle under her breath. A woman in a green beret turns round and tuts.

‘In short …’ Barnaby Speck clears his throat in our direction. ‘By actually witnessing the growing of the grass, Rindblatten forces us to acknowledge the events taking place in places we cannot or see, and thus expresses beautifully …’

I am suddenly aware of Lexi’s warm, minty breath in my ear. ‘What about that one there?’

I shoot her a sideways glance.

‘What one?’

‘The tall one with the dark hair and glasses.’ She gestures in the direction of a man near the front of the crowd, peering intently at the installation – essentially, a napkin-sized square of turf surrounded by four camera lights, entitled: Otherness. The Other. An Objective Study of Displacement by Jergen Rindblatten. Lexi grimaced when I read from the leaflet: ‘I smell a bollock,’ she sniffed in that left-field way she has with words. ‘But we can go if you want.’

I crane my neck to get a proper look at the man who is lanky, wearing a cardigan and looks about twelve.

‘Nose too small.’

‘What?’ Lexi frowns. ‘What do you mean, nose too small?’

The woman in the green beret turns round again and purses her thin, crimson lips at us. Then, thankfully, Barnaby Speck moves on from talking about the grass and we are encouraged to disperse and look at Jergen Rindblatten’s accompanying sketches on the subject of ‘Otherness', which line the wall of the sun-flooded gallery.

‘Can’t do a small nose; it looks like it belongs on a doll and makes mine look even bigger.’ We stand, admiring a sketch entitled, Untitled. ‘Also, he looks about your age.’

Lexi sighs and looks around. I study the drawing, which looks like a square to me but I’m sure it’s layered with meaning if you know how to interpret these things.

Suddenly, Lexi gasps.

‘Ohmigod!’ She nudges me in the elbow. ‘I might actually have found my future husband.’

I look to where she’s indicating, to see a lean, black guy, record bag draped across his broad chest, looking intently at the drawing next to us.

‘Good God, no, he’s wearing a gold chain.’

‘Yeah? And? He’s gorgeous! I’d ’ave him. He looks like Dizzee Rascal.’

‘Who the hell’s Dizzy Rasta?’

‘You know,’ says Lexi. ‘"Bonkers"!’

‘Bonkers?’

‘The song, “Bonkers”.’

I roll my eyes at her. Who in their right mind would bring out a record called Bonkers for crying out loud. Then she starts singing:

‘Some people think I’m bonkers, some people think I’m mad. Some people think I’m crazy but there’s nothin’ crazy ’bout—’

‘Lexi!’ I grab her by her rapping arm. The tattooed arm. ‘Just concentrate on the art, will you?’

We make our way around the gallery, which sits at the top of a spiral staircase in a tall, old pump house in the middle of Battersea Park. Outside, down below from where we’re standing, I can see two swans gliding on a lake, which glitters with hot, afternoon sun, and a young couple standing arm in arm on a wooden bridge.

I turn my attention to another drawing, which depicts what looks like a mound of cow dung.

Lexi moves in next to me, head cocked to the side, pretending to read the accompanying commentary.

‘Another hottie,’ she suddenly hisses into my ear. ‘Ten past two. Your ideal man.’

‘Soz,’ mumbles Lexi. We’re walking across the park towards the river now. ‘It just wasn’t my thing. When you said “art", I thought you meant proper art, like paintings, sculpture, something where they’d splattered paint on canvas and it meant “happiness” or “death” or something.’

Half of me wants to protest. Half of me thinks: this was art, proper conceptual art, if you must know – not bloody Monet’s water lily paintings. You wouldn’t get this in Doncaster! Honestly, you try your best to show someone some real London culture and this is the thanks you get. I wasn’t sure Lex and I were really going to agree on much. However, I must admit that the other half of me did kind of agree – Otherness. The Other. An Objective Study of Displacement didn’t quite live up to my expectations, either, and, in fact, I’m wondering, if I took, say, a fork, bashed it about a bit and then wrote something about how this represented the domestic unrest I experienced as a child, I, too, could be an acclaimed artist with a ‘ground-breaking’ exhibition at the Pump House Gallery.

Also, I think to myself as we walk across the park, dodging rounders’ teams and men in rugby shirts and cropped trousers attempting to light barbecues, we had to leave. I couldn’t have tolerated one minute more of Lexi’s ‘talent-spotting’.

It’s all my fault. I should never have humoured her ‘Find Caroline a Boyfriend’ project, which was born last night, probably as a distraction from the Lexi Five Point Plan Project. (I wonder what Guru Wayne would make of that little manoeuvre.)

I didn’t have the heart, when she was looking at sad dating sites where sad people gather to meet other sad people, to say, ‘Look, Lex, I don’t want a boyfriend, I really don’t. All that having to get your bikini line waxed and worrying if they’ll call. I just can’t be bothered.’

We’re still walking across the park. Lexi won’t let the matchmaking thing lie. ‘He was your ideal type, though, wasn’t he?’ she says referring to the blond man in the gallery. ‘Tall, blond, handsome. He was well sexy, you should have given him your number.’

‘He was nice,’ I say, dodging a couple, their legs entwined on a picnic rug, ‘but like I say, I’m happy being single.’

‘If you say so. Although nobody’s really happy being single, let’s face it, not for long anyway. Wayne says single people suffer more depression than those who are attached, that it’s part of being human to want somebody.’

Praise be to the God of Wayne! Maybe Wayne should write his own self-help book.

‘The most Carly’s gone without a boyfriend is twenty-five days and that was only—’

‘You’re single, aren’t you?’ I say, turning to her. It’s more of a question than a statement. Something boy-related is going on, I’m sure of that, but then something’s always going on in a teenager’s love life.

We’ve stopped walking now, Lexi is looking at me.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I s’pose I am. Well it’s a bit …’ She looks the other way, like she might be about to cry, and I have a sudden desire to hug her. Not that I did the whole messy teenage business of falling in and out of love, not even having a boyfriend until Martin at eighteen. But I recognize that if-you-prod-me-I-will-break look, so I smile.

‘It’s all right, Lex,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me.’

I’m about to carry on walking when my eyes are drawn towards the men in the rugby shirts trying to light barbecues. One man in particular looks familiar. It’s the legs that do it. Stocky, with no ankles. Those are Martin’s legs.

Just as this thought sinks in, he looks up from the BBQ he’s poking, gives an awkward smile, and starts to walk over.

‘Bloody bugger!’ I say, squinting at him.

‘Caroline,’ says Lexi. ‘Language, please!’

Martin grins sheepishly and waves as he walks over, that same slightly lolloping walk of his. ‘Unavoidable appointment’? Likely story!

‘Hello, you.’ He’s standing right in front of us now, holding out his barbecue prongs like we should shake them or something. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Caro.’

He’s had his hair cut since I last saw him three weeks ago, into a bizarre little quiff that doesn’t really suit him. However, he’s tended to it like he does to everything, with meticulous precision so that it is a perfectly symmetrical, topiary-like construction on the top of his head.

‘Clearly, Martin Squire. So what’s the unavoidable appointment, then?’ I prod him jokily in the stomach. ‘A barbecue with your mates? You could have just said.’

‘I know I could, it’s just …’

‘Sorry, you know Lexi, my sister, don’t you?’ I say, when I can see he’s struggling. ‘Lexi, you remember Martin?’

‘Oh yeah, I remember Martin.’ I shoot her a look – why the rude tone? Oh. I know why the rude tone. ‘We met a few times,’ she carries on. I feel the blood rise in my cheeks. ‘The last time when you were actually engaged to my sister.’

Martin’s eyes dart to mine. Mine dart to the floor. Why didn’t I just tell her it was me who broke off our engagement?

‘So, er, how’s tricks, Caro?’ says Martin, after a very awkward pause. ‘Just having a walk?’

‘We’ve been to see an art exhibition, actually.’ Lexi folds her arms, indignantly. ‘It was at the Pulp House—’

‘The Pump House, Lexi.’

‘It was brilliant, really inspiring.’

God, Lexi, just shut the fuck up.

‘You should go if you get the chance, although probably best to go with someone, you know, if you can.’

‘Right,’ says Martin, staring at me with something combining boy-caught-out and confusion. This is dreadful.

We stand in awkward silence until I see a blonde, plumpish girl in flip-flops and a cotton shirt dress walking towards us, smiling.

‘Hello …’ She puts her arm around Martin’s back. A girlfriend?! Martin has a girlfriend?

‘Oh, hello P.’ P? Pee?! Bloody hell, were they already on pet names and he hasn’t even told me he’s seeing someone? ‘You made me jump. Caroline, Lexi this is Polly. Polly, this is Caroline and her sister, Lexi.’

‘Hi!’ She smiles. She has a ruddy complexion, well-bred teeth and earnest, uncomplicated eyes.

‘Hi,’ I say, my face fixed into something I hope resembles friendliness. I look over at Lexi, urging her to say the same, but she’s chewing the inside of her cheek and looking Polly up and down.

‘Anyway …’ I say

‘Anyway,’ agrees Martin.

‘We’d better get going.’

‘Yes, we’ve got so much to fit in today,’ says Lexi. ‘Shopping, having dinner …’

‘Nice to meet you, anyway, Polly,’ I say, squeezing Lexi’s hand tighter. ‘Have a lovely barbecue.’

‘We will,’ says Martin, somewhat feebly.

And then we carry on across the park, and the soundtrack of a summer’s day in London – planes flying into Heathrow, roller-bladers’ shrieks of delight, the laughter of friends on picnic rugs – is drowned out by the sound of my brain trying to fathom how I feel about what just happened.

After a bus ride, where Lexi goes on about how I am so much prettier than Polly and how Martin wanted me back, she could see it in his eyes, we end up in a Mexican on the King’s Road.

Lexi studies me over her menu, twiddling her fringe. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

‘Me? Fine.’

‘Are you upset about Polly?’

‘No. No,’ I say, totally unconvincingly. ‘It was going to happen sooner or later.’ Although I didn’t expect it quite so soon. We only split up last September. That’s nine months ago. Nine months to get over a fourteen-year relationship? I thought I might have made a little more impact than that.

‘Can I ask you a question, then?’

‘Fire away,’ I say, forcing a smile.

‘Was I right?’

I scour the menu, pretending to be making vital decisions between a burrito and a taco.

‘Right about what?’

‘The dress.’ She puts the menu down now and folds her slim, tanned arms. ‘The wedding dress? Look, I know it’s none of my business but I think the reason you were wearing your wedding dress when I turned up and that you were drunk …’

I wince at the drunk bit.

‘… and sh-mok-ing …’

‘Now you’re just rubbing it in.’

‘… was because you were upset about Martin, you know, and the fact –’ she cocks her head to the side sympathetically, which makes me feel even more terrible – ‘the wedding didn’t happen?’

‘If only it were that simple,’ I say, in a you-wouldn’t-understand-you’re-only-seventeen kind of a way.

But clearly she does understand, because then she says, ‘Caroline. How many times have you had that dress on?’

‘Why? What’s it to you?’

‘Come on, I just wanna know. How many times have you had it on in, say, the past six months?

I don’t know how the wedding dress thing happened, it just did, a self-indulgent little ritual that got out of control. It was a bit like how some people feel the need to get all their hair hacked off when a relationship ends, or go out and get drunk.

That dress was gorgeous, too, a vintage-style gown with silk sleeves sliced to the waist and a four foot train. I pictured myself walking down the aisle, smiling and radiant on my wedding day, arm in arm with Dad, who, for just that one day, would be there for me. Just me. I would be a success story. Because someone wanted me and loved me enough to marry me.

But, in the end, that dress, which was supposed to represent My Future, just smells faintly of cigarette smoke and regret and sits at the top of my wardrobe only to be brought out after another romance bites the dust, so I can wallow in could-have-beens.

Of course, Lexi’s right; the first time it came out was two months after Martin and I finished, which was one month after the wedding that never happened, which, like I say, was almost a year now and I’m still wracked with guilt …

‘Hello?’ Lexi says. She’s got her ‘computer generated’ voice on. ‘Calling Caroline Steele to planet Earth. Calling Caroline Marie Steele—’

‘Three times, okay? I’ve had the dress on three times.’

She raises an eyebrow.

‘Okay, possibly five. And, yes, if you must know, I did once put it on and get drunk and listen to Pat Benitar because I was upset about Martin – but that wasn’t really why I had it on when you arrived.’

‘Right, got yer,’ says Lexi. ‘So who were you crying about, then?’

Who was I crying about? It’s hard to tell. Since Martin and the first outing of the dress, there’s been a wake of casualties: Nathan – a Kiwi I met on a client do who I fancied like mad but who then asked me if I wanted to come and visit his mum in New Zealand three weeks after I started seeing him. I made a sharp exit in the opposite direction. There was Mark – I had hopes for him, could have really fallen for his green eyes and penchant for obscure French films, but then I realized he was just pretentious. In the end, I could no longer tolerate him calling me Carol-eeen (if he had actually been French that would have been fine, but he wasn’t, he was from Walsall). And of course there was Garf, lovely Garf, who I dumped at his sister’s wedding, which was held at Walthamstow Dogs Track (not that his family’s love of dog racing was a deal-breaker or anything). He was the sweetest of the lot and he could have really loved me, but I couldn’t love him, probably because I was already falling for someone else by then, I just didn’t know it yet.

So, a pattern emerged. Every time a relationship ended, I would find myself getting sentimental and morose and drinking alone in my wedding dress. But really, I wasn’t upset about Nathan or Mark or Garf, I was just upset that, at thirty-two, I was no closer to finding The One, and asking myself whether I’d made a huge mistake letting Martin go. After all, I still loved him, even if he was a bit middle-aged, had over-bearing parents and could spend three hours making the perfect pesto. I just don’t know whether I was ever in love with him, that’s all, not after the first few years anyway. But the older I get and the more complicated life becomes, I am beginning to wonder whether I could settle for ‘love’ rather than ‘in love’, which everybody knows is the solid, reliable concrete that remains beneath your feet, when the sparkling snow has melted away.

Still, I reasoned, it could be worse. At least I had the book club …

Toby leans coolly against my bedroom window frame, takes a slow, deep drag on his cigarette, his eyebrows smouldering as he does. I swear he’s putting that on now.

‘God, you really look like James Dean doing that.’

‘Do I?’ he says.

‘Yes, except for maybe the socks.’ I squint at his feet. ‘Are they actually South Park socks?’

It’s a rare man that can pull off nudity avec South Park socks with all the style and nonchalance of a Hollywood sex god, but Toby Delaney manages to.

I sit up in bed and pull the sheet up so my nipples don’t escape. It’s 8.08 p.m., still broad daylight outside, the hum of traffic from Battersea Park Road just audible, and Toby is smoking a post-coital cigarette out of my bedroom window. It’s something he’s done every other Wednesday for the past five months, a ritual of the ‘book club’. Except, it isn’t a book club at all. It’s more, well, it’s more of a fuck club. With just the two members: Toby and me.

Rachel, Toby’s wife thinks it’s a book club. She thinks that every second Wednesday, Toby comes to my house in Battersea to discuss the naked prose of M. J. Hyland, when really, he’s just there to get naked with me.

I sink further down into the duvet and take a moment to savour his physical form. I never know when it might be my last chance, after all. When all this might implode. When he, or I, decide we can’t do this any more. His long, slim legs, which drive me crazy, his bum, possibly less firm than it could be but that’s because he spends so much time sitting on it. Lazy bugger. His … Yep, he’s got a very nice one. Surely it spells trouble if you’re starting to find their flaccid penis attractive?

My eyes move up his body to that flat, boyish belly of his, which he’s always stuffing but which never increases. It incites a sort of erotic envy in me. His chest, lean yet broad, that perfect smattering of darkish hair and then that bizarre, mutant third nipple, tiny like a baby’s, which apparently is very common and which I find thrilling because when he’s at work I know it’s there, under his shirt. Our little secret. And, finally, his face. The bit I crave the most when he’s not here: that gorgeous line from his Adam’s apple to his chin to his jaw, emphasized by a two-day shadow, which I know he’s kept for me because I’ve got a thing for facial hair. (A throwback from a crippling crush on Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby). The fine, distinguished nose and the sexy quiff of a fringe. Then the famous Delaney eyebrows, which I love and despise all at the same time because they give away all of his feelings. They frequently disappoint me.

Toby sucks hard on his Lucky Strike.

‘So what did you tell your sister again?’ he asks.

‘That I was hosting a book club. That it would be full of geeks reading War and Peace and that she’d hate it.’

Toby laughs.

‘Steele, you’re a genius. And did she buy it?’ He exhales the last of his cigarette and gets back into bed, slipping his cool, hard body next to mine.

‘Oh yeah, totally. She was like, “yawn” and other teenage expressions denoting boredom.’

Toby smiles, amused, snuggles under the duvet and grabs my bum.

‘Anyway, she said she was going swimming followed by some body combat class at the gym, thank God. Otherwise, I don’t know what I would have said to get her out of the house.’

‘Like I said, Steeley, perhaps we’ll have to de-camp.’ Toby puts one arm across my chest then pulls me on top of him.

‘Decamp what?’

‘The book club, of course.’ He cups my boobs in his hands and gives them a squeeze. ‘I can’t do without my book club, no way. I’d go crazy with lust.’

‘Really?’ I say, with more hope in my voice than I’d intended.

‘Er, yeah. Let’s see.’ He frowns up at the ceiling in mock concentration. ‘Firstly, with whom else would I get to discuss whether Pride and Prejudice is, in fact, the perfect novel?’

He gives one of his infectious schoolboy giggles and I kiss him on the lips.

‘How would I get through the week without hearing what a genius – who’s that Japanese bloke you love?’

‘Murakami.’

‘Yeah, him. What a genius he is. Where would we be without having to make it through another fucking Joanna Trollope novel?’ We both burst out laughing. ‘Shit, I mean, seriously!’ We’re both snorting now. ‘Enough to make you want to open a vein. And then there’s that Houellebecq dude. What a barrel of laughs he was.’

He assumes a deep, pompous voice. ‘“I found Atomised very nihilistic text.”’

I bury my head in his chest and shake with laughter.

‘Don’t be mean! At least Charles was actually taking it seriously, unlike someone I know.’

‘Who was just there because he fancied the arse off a certain book club member? A member who, as well as exquisite taste in literature, also happens to have the best norks in London.’ He squeezes them again and we end up snogging.

I guess this is how I manage to square all this in my head (which most of the time I don’t, meaning I spend my waking hours swinging between ridiculous excitement at the prospect of the ‘book club’ and feeling like a wanton whore who is destined for hell). There once was an actual book club. Once upon a time, that wasn’t a lie. It was Marta’s idea, Marta being the office martyr, arranging countless, thankless, work-bonding events. We needed a venue, so I volunteered. It had been two months since Martin moved out and I liked the idea of the house being full once a fortnight. I imagined we’d sit around a roaring fire, sipping vintage Merlot and discussing so-and-so’s use of personification and whether we identified with such-and-such protagonist. What actually happened was that we’d discuss the book for ten minutes, get slaughtered on Blossom Hill. Then have a row.

What was supposed to be a bonding exercise ended up dividing the office. It was ‘us’: Me, Toby, Shona and Charles from marketing (‘The ones with degrees,’ Toby would comment with typical scathing humour) and ‘them’: Marta, Health and Safety Heather and Toupee Dom (‘the plebs’ – Toby, again). The plebs thought our book choices were pretentious. We thought theirs were lame. Everything came to a head when Toby said that Heather’s choice – admittedly it was Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews – had less literary merit than a McDonald’s menu, and she fled from the club in tears.

And so, one by one, people fell away until it was just Toby and I who found ourselves in my lounge, books in hands. I knew immediately this was a bad idea. We were reading Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi (my choice). An account of the night before a man leaves his wife, charting the unravelling of a relationship; how you can look at someone you’ve known for ten years and feel nothing.

‘How can you be married to someone for ten years and feel nothing?’ I said. We were sitting at my dining table. I’d lit candles – something I’d never done when everybody else was here.

‘Oh, it’s possible, believe me,’ said Toby, those eyebrows smouldering, fixing me with his hypnotic blue eyes ‘And it doesn’t have to take ten years.’

I read a passage aloud. The drunker we got, the more seriously we were taking it. Or perhaps it was because discussing the book meant we didn’t have to acknowledge the strangling sexual tension in the room. I could feel Toby’s eyes burn my eyelids as I read. I looked up from the book and he was still holding my gaze. I read on, my heart thumping. Then there was a line where the narrator says how he never found a way to be ‘pleasurably idle’ with his wife; how she was always so busy, wanted too much out of life.

‘I know that feeling,’ said Toby. His gaze was intense, penetrating. Gone was the usual, puppy-dog Toby; he was serious. ‘Feeling neglected, unimportant.’

The room had gone deathly quiet and I pulled a face. No doubt wholly unattractive, but nerves do that to me.

Then Toby said: ‘You know what, Caroline (he never called me Caroline, only Steeley)? I think you may be one of the few women who does understand me.’

I downed a glass of red in one. Then Toby sat down next to me, moved his face millimetres from mine and kissed me, but I’d not had time to swallow the wine so a dribble ended up in his mouth.

‘Sorry!’ Another bit escaped down my chin, so I now resembled an incompetent vampire.

‘Don’t apologize,’ he said. ‘Red wine and Caroline Steele. Two of my favourite things.’

Things went from nought to sixty in about ten minutes. We abandoned the books and my top and started on the vodka (the beginning of the end). The next thing I know, I’m lying on the lounge floor smoking Lucky Strikes whilst Toby showers my belly with kisses (the end of the end) and he’s telling me he thinks I’m ‘enigmatic’ and I’m telling him I find it hard not to touch him at work, that I think he looks like James Dean. At which point, I imagine, I ceased to be enigmatic.

And then he says, giving me the most gorgeous, stubbly kiss, ‘Well, if I’m going to live fast and die young I’d better get the snogs in now …’ And a small explosion took place in my groin.

Then we ended up in my bed.

‘We need condoms!’ I said as he pulled my tights off. ‘We need condoms and we need fags!’ That’s the last thing I remember. I woke up, with just my bra on, a Lucky Strike – you live, or you die, the in-joke of the evening – lodged between my cleavage.

In this case, I died. Of utter embarrassment. Talk about out of character. Toby, on the other hand, thought it was hysterical.

‘And I thought you were stuck up,’ he said, laughing and laughing in the office kitchen the next day, as I stood, face in hands.

‘This can never, ever happen again,’ I hissed. ‘You are bloody well married and I … I want to be single.’

He raised his James Dean eyebrows at me. My cheeks burned furiously.

‘Not that I was suggesting …’

‘Oh, Steeley,’ he said, with his sexy little lisp, taking my hand. ‘Take a chill pill. It’ll be our little secret.’ Then he sighed. ‘But yes, you’re right, we can’t do this again’. He grimaced in a way that told me he didn’t mean this at all. ‘You are, however, sexy as hell. Remember that.’

I did. Oh, I did.

I shuffled into work later after a horrifying, near-vomit experience on the tube where I heaved, but nothing came out, so that people on my carriage just parted, like a wave as I made a sound like a dying walrus. I was green and the heel of one shoe was missing. Last seen, rolling down the escalator of Marble Arch station.

As the day wore on and the alcohol wore off, the reality of what I’d done hit me. I’d slept with a married man. In the space of five months, I had dumped my fiancé, dumped a string of men and slept with someone else’s husband.

And it had all started off so well, too! For the first four years of working together, I was the only person out of twenty-two graduates on the Skidmore-Colt-Davis graduate trainee scheme who hadn’t had so much as a party kiss with Mr Delaney. This was my first grown-up, ‘proper’ job, after all, and I was in the thick of a ten year, very grown-up relationship with Martin Squire. So whilst all my new colleagues were out drinking till 3 a.m. and jumping into one another’s beds, I was batch-cooking risotto.

‘Two birds with one stone, Caro!’ Martin would proudly announce, like batch-cooking actually elevated him to a higher spiritual plain. ‘This will do us for tea and five days of lunches!’

It has come to light since – I know because he’s told me – that Toby was somewhat fascinated by me. He was the unmistakable heartthrob of the grad scheme. His unique blend of raw sexiness and little-boy-lost look had all the girls wanting to soothe his hangovers, then roger him senseless and bear his children, me included.

And yet I never stayed behind to get drunk, always went home to the boyfriend. That wasn’t to say I didn’t have the same filthy thoughts as everyone else, I was just a pro at self-control. On the few occasions that Martin and Toby met at work drinks, I would squirm, then feel terrible for squirming. They would talk about music – nobody is less sporty than Martin and it seems to be sport or music with men. I would be trying to concentrate on whatever conversation I was having whilst overhearing Martin going, ‘David Gray, Toby, he’s your man!’ whilst Toby raised his eyebrow at me over Martin’s shoulder and tried not to laugh.

Then, in 2004, four years after Toby and I met on the first day of the grad scheme, he was head-hunted and we didn’t see each other for another four years. But then, one day in the October of 2008, I heard a familiar voice in the office: loud, slightly husky, with an adorable lisp. My stomach turned upside down.

So now we’re here, with me snogging a married man in the living room of the house I used to share with my fiancé. Like I said, it was all going so well …

Perhaps, I reasoned, that now I was going to hell anyway, I may as well get the best seat there, because despite my resolve, come a fortnight later, when Toby kissed me outside the tube station, cocked his eyebrow and said, ‘Back to yours?’ I dissolved.

Well, that was it. I had lost face, dignity, any enigmatic qualities I might have ever possessed. I was damned if he thought he was just going to continue to get me drunk, then have his wicked way with me any time he wanted. I was damned if I was going to get involved. If we were going to play this game, then there were going to be some rules. The book club rules. My house, every other Wednesday. Out by 9.30 p.m.

So, in an effort to show Toby Delaney that I am not the sort of girl he can just get slaughtered then shag, I have become the sort of girl who makes a fortnightly appointment to sleep with someone’s husband. Which suits me fine, of course. Sex with someone who is already taken. I couldn’t get involved if I wanted to.

We’re dozing in bed now. Beside me I can see the red digits of my clock winking, menacingly: 8.16 p.m. Forty-four minutes until he has to go.

‘Would sex vixen of SW11 care for a glass of wine?’ asks Toby.

I roll on top of him and sigh. ‘Is it that time already?’

‘’Fraid so, treacle.’ He smacks my bottom. ‘Wine time, home time … Worst luck.’

I kiss his nose and get out of bed. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I say, turning towards the window so he can’t see my smile.

We get dressed and go down to the kitchen. Post-coital, ice-cold Sauvignon Blanc being one of the book club rituals.

‘Do you know what I love about you most, Steeley?’ says Toby, pouring me a glass.

‘No, go on, what do you love most about me?’

‘You’re like a bloke.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh, baby!’ he says, seeing my face fall. This time his schoolboy snort is a little irritating. ‘I don’t mean in the way you look – you’re foxy as all hell, you know I think that – I just mean in the way you are.’ He pushes me gently against the worktop and kisses me. ‘You have a rare gift for a woman.’

Our noses are touching now; I’m staring right into his blue, blue eyes.

‘Really? And what’s that?’

‘You’re able to compartmentalize things. Get what you want, when you want. You’re in control of things. It’s ridiculously sexy …’ He puts his hand between my legs. I remove it.

‘Stop that! You’ll set me off.’

‘Like, take a look at this. This book club. This little fuck club of ours, young lady.’ He’s putting his hands through my hair piling it on top of my head.

I open my mouth to laugh but nothing comes out.

‘Don’t pretend you didn’t orchestrate all this. This suits you down to the ground, doesn’t it? You schedule me in on a fortnightly basis. Three hours. Your house. Nice and tidy.’

I prod his stomach, look at him saucily.

‘Now you’re making me out to be some sort of cold fish.’

‘I’m trying to give you a compliment, actually. All I’m saying is that you’re not governed by constant, irrational emotion like most women, are you, Caroline?’

‘Oh God no. No, no! Never been like that.’

‘Not like Rachel. Jesus! She’s such a woman, is Rachel.’

I lean against his chest. The mention of Rachel – which doesn’t happen often – incites a sort of fascinated fear in me. Like I want him to shut up and carry on all at the same time.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I just mean it’s constant, you know?’

‘Constant what?’

Don’t dig too much. Remain nonchalant. Nonchalant and not governed by constant, irrational emotion.

‘Constant woman-ness with her. It’s all about her, Steeley. If she’s not spending the whole bloody weekend counselling some boring friend about her drama, she’s having a drama herself. Or we’re going to yet another do with the boring Uni Girls, or yet another boring awards ceremony for her. Or she’s working, always working.’

I feel a stab of insecurity. Rachel is well-known in the industry for winning awards. When she first met Toby she was selling soft drinks and used to sweep the board at the Trade’s Awards, twice being named Sales Person of the Year.

‘Sex has gone completely off the radar, she’s not interested.’

‘How …’ I kiss him ‘… can that be possible when you’re such an irresistible sex god?’

He laughs.

‘She’s uptight. Doesn’t let herself go, like you. If we do have sex, it’s like something that’s got to be factored in to her tight schedule, something on her fucking endless To Do list, do you know what I mean?’

I shake my head. To Do list. Who would reduce their entire life to a To Do list?

‘To be honest, sometimes,’ he says, ‘I feel like an extra in the show that is Rachel’s life.’

‘Well,’ I say, slipping a hand under his shirt. (Must balance fine line between wanton sex goddess and only-woman-who-understands-him.) ‘We can’t have that.’

Toby cups my face in his hand.

‘Fuck me, I fancy you,’ he says. ‘What is it about you, Caroline Steele, that means that when I am around you, I just want to have sex with you?’

Our top halves are off in seconds, the bottom two of Toby’s shirt buttons sent skidding across the floor. Toby pushes me backwards against the fridge, sending magnets and papers flying. I cover his chest with kisses, his hair smells incredible, that shower-fresh, sugary, bakery smell, times about five hundred. I inhale as he pushes my hair back and kisses me, hard; on my face, my neck, my breasts. There’s the feverish undoing of belts, which is awkward since I am wearing one of those fabric ones and for some reason he keeps squeezing it the wrong way so that my insides are getting squashed. Finally, after much giggling, I’m up against my fridge, naked, jeans around my ankles. A woman possessed. Possessed by a harlot in my own kitchen.

I want him so badly now. I drop down and take him in my mouth. His pubes smell delicious, clean, with a faint muskiness that sparks another explosion that spreads from my groin, right down my thighs.

‘Jesus, you’re good at that,’ he says, leaning back onto the fridge, and laughing, a sort of half-laugh, half-groan. His eyes are closed, his whole body rigid, except his hands, which are gently pushing my head, and his knees that are bending, along to the same rhythm as me.

‘Stop,’ he says, softly. ‘Stop. I won’t last two minutes if you carry on like that.’

Then we’re on the floor, he wants me on top of him and I happily oblige. I am possessed, again, by someone who writhes and swishes her hair and her hips, like a belly-dancer, there, next to the whirring fridge, as, outside, the birds break out into evensong and, inside, I think I might explode with desire.

We’re lying on the kitchen floor now – me on top of Toby in a breathless, sweaty, elated heap.

Then I hear the door go.

‘Fuck!’

‘What?’ says Toby alarmed.

‘It’s Lexi, she’s back!’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ I’m scrambling off him now. Toby’s spread-eagled, naked except for a large erection and the South Park socks.

‘Get up!’ I hiss, flapping my arms about.

‘All right keep yer knickers on.’

‘I would if I could find them!’

I’m flitting about the kitchen now. Toby’s standing, scratching his head and smirking at me. He thinks this is funny.

‘Right, you through the utility room and into the bathroom,’ I say, spotting my knickers scrunched up like a sleeping rodent next to the fridge.

‘What?’

‘Just do it!’ I push him, still sniggering through the door and kick his clothes in after him.

I hear Lexi slam the front door shut and call down the hallway,

‘Hel-lo-oh! I’m back!’

‘Just using the loo!’ I shout back. It’s lame but, frankly, I need anything that’s going to stall her.

I manage to get one leg in one hole of my knickers, as I hear her drop her bag on the hallway floor, then follow Toby, limping, into the bathroom.

‘I can’t find my pants,’ he whispers, rummaging through the pile of clothes.

‘Well, just wear your trousers then. You’ll have to go commando.’

I hear Lexi cough, dramatically, and drag her heels towards the kitchen. Just those two sounds tell me she’s drunk. Body combat class, my arse.

Then she’s hammering on the bathroom door.

‘Hurry up, Missus. I’m gonna piss my pants! Can’t make it upstairs!’

Toby’s buttoning his shirt, his face red with the effort of not laughing.

‘Won’t be long!’ I shout. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck it! How was I going to get out of this one now?

‘In the bath,’ I mouth to Toby ‘The what?’

‘It’s leaking out!’ moans Lexi.

‘All right, can you just hang on a second?’

‘Not su-re!’ She’s singing the words now, intermittently leaning against the door and making it bang. ‘There might be a little puddle in your kitchen if I don’t get in there soo-oon!’

Eventually, I get Toby crouched safely down behind the shower curtain, flush the toilet and open the door.

‘Ohmigodimgonnapissmyself,’ Lexi barges right past me clutching her crotch.

I hear the toilet cover go up, then Lexi sigh, heavily, as she announces. ‘Oh Lordy,’ over the longest, loudest wee ever known to man. ‘I fucking needed that.’

To be honest, at first I’m so relieved that Lexi didn’t catch me riding Toby on the kitchen floor that I forget to be annoyed that she’s drunk. But she is. Leathered, in fact. My little sister is totally pissed.

I managed to persuade her upstairs for a few minutes by presenting her with a pile of laundry, thus freeing Toby up. As far as she’s concerned when she comes down, he just emerged from the lounge.

Lexi stands, arms folded, giving Toby the once over.

‘So. Who’s this then?’

‘This is Toby Delaney.’ I’ve no idea why I give him his full title. Like we’re in a Jane Austen period drama or something.

‘Hello, Toby Delaney,’ she says.

She’s wearing a black, stretchy minidress, pointy shoes with bows on them and a leather biker jacket. In my mother’s book this would definitely qualify as a look that says, ‘On the game.’

Toby’s sitting up on the worktop, hands clasped neatly in his lap in a gesture that says, ‘Do I look like a man who was just having sex on the kitchen floor?’

‘Hi …?’

‘Alexis,’ she says.

Alexis? Since when did she ever want to be called Alexis?

She pulls out a kitchen chair and sits down, stretching out her long, bare legs. If I didn’t know any better I’d say she was flirting.

‘Cool name,’ says Toby. ‘So how was the body combat class? Back when us two old timers were young …’ Ha! He’s got a cheek. Less of the ‘old timers’ and the ‘us two’ thanks very much. ‘It was aerobics or step class. Everyone was lugging these step things about.’

Lexi giggles. A mixture of nerves and a certain thrill, perhaps, that a handsome, older man is talking to her.

She leans forward and rests her dainty chin on her hand so that you can see her perfect B-cups resting in a floral lace bra.

I check Toby. His eyes dart upwards. Caught!

‘Eh, so you’re that Toby off the photo aren’t you?’ she says, her accent even stronger now she’s obviously had a drink.

Oh, that’s great, that is. Now he’s going to think I’m obsessed with that photo.

‘What photo’s that?’

‘Brighton,’ I say curtly. ‘Anyway, hadn’t you better be getting a shower or something, Lexi?’ I glare at her but she ignores me or she’s just too pissed to take a hint.

‘It doesn’t do you justice,’ she says. She’s looking up at Toby from under mascara-smudged eyes. She is flirting. God, I could kill her! ‘You know how some people look better in a photo and some people take a rubbish photo but look much better in the flesh?’ she slurs on. ‘Well, you’re definitely the latter type.’

Toby laughs, flattered. I shoot him a look.

She takes off her leather jacket and puts it on the back of her chair, sliding it back from the table slightly. That’s when I see them. Toby’s Tommy Hilfiger boxer shorts, caught under the front right chair leg! I look over at Toby. Had he spotted them too?

‘Thanks very much,’ says Toby. ‘If that is a compliment, which I think it is. It’s all your sister’s fault, anyway …’ He winks at me, which I respond to with a tight smile and cock of the head in the direction of the floor. ‘Shoddy photography.’

Lexi mumbles something but she’s already thinking of the next question. She has her audience and she’s determined to keep them.

‘How was the book club, anyway?’ she pipes up. (How much longer was this going to go on?)

‘Great,’ we say in unison.

‘So where is everyone?’

‘They left,’ we say, again in unison.

‘But they were here,’ I add, totally unnecessarily.

Lexi nods, uninterested, and looks around the room, her eyes finally landing, unfocused on Toby.

‘Sowhatsyerjob?’ she slurs

God, when was she going to shut up? I look again at the pants, the chair’s moved slightly now, so that more material is on show. My heart’s beating ten to the dozen.

‘I’m an account manager. I sell stuff to supermarkets the same as your sister, but I’m much better at it than she is,’ he says, to which I roll my eyes.

‘Wow!’ says Lexi.

Wow? She’s never said my job is wow.

‘So that must mean you have to do a lot of like, speeches?’

‘Present—’

‘—ations,’ he was going to say, but then Lexi kicks off her shoes, which land with a slap on the wooden floor, inches from the pants.

I see Toby do a double take as he spots them; his eyes linger there for a second before he looks up at me, mouth open.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lexi giggles. Her eyes flit about the room and rest on the floor for a second. I clench my stomach muscles, hold my breath.

‘Nothing. Er, just saw the time, actually,’ says Toby, brightly. ‘I’d better get going.’

‘Really?’ Lexi’s face falls, her eyes drunkenly following him as he gets his jacket.

I’d normally see Toby to the door, catch one more lingering kiss before he has to go but I can’t risk it this time. Besides anything else, leaving Lexi alone with the pants could be potential suicide.

‘Good book club this week, Delaney,’ I opt for, lamely, as he puts on his jacket.

‘Best book I’ve had … sorry, read, for ages,’ he says, which is a joke he wheels out every book club. ‘Hope your head’s not sore tomorrow, Alexis,’ he adds as he’s walking out. I watch as he opens the door, closes it behind him and goes home to his wife.

Lexi goes to the tap to get some water and I immediately see my opportunity, grab the pants and put them in the kitchen drawer. She sits back down, nearly missing the chair. God, I think, I really don’t need this.

‘Lexi, are you drunk?’

‘No.’

‘Well, yes, you are, actually. It’s totally obvious.’

She rolls her eyes and gives a little teenage wobble of the head and I suddenly feel very tired. I’ve come over all black of mood and pretty miffed that she thinks she can just turn up here with her minxy little ways and flirt with my, my – what was he? – my lover? My partner in crime? My … well, mine anyway, that’s what he was. And I resent her making me feel like this, actually: a horrid mix of jealous big sister – a very unattractive emotion – and a nagging, joyless mother when she’s my sister and I just want to go to bed, go to work and get on with my life like I was doing before.

‘What happened to the body combat class?’

‘I bumped into a friend.’

‘Lex, come on. This is London. I’ve been here for a decade and never just bumped into friends.’

‘Well, I did, okay?’

‘And who is this friend? Is it a male friend?’

‘Might be.’

‘Is it that Jerome bloke you met on the train?’

‘Might be.’

‘Is it Wayne?’

‘Nope.’

‘Lexi, don’t be like that.’

‘I’m not being like anything,’ she sighs, rolling her eyes dramatically.

‘And what was that flirting in aid of anyway?’ It comes from nowhere but it’s out now and I can’t take it back.

‘What flirting?’

‘Oh come on, Lexi, you were flirting like mad with Toby! Batting your eyelashes, kicking your shoes off.’

‘I was not! I was just chatting to him.’

‘Chatting? You were thrusting your cleavage in his face!’

She looks visibly wounded. I feel a stab of guilt, but not much.

‘That’s bollocks. And anyway, he was flirting with me.’

‘That is bollocks. You’re just pissed and imagining things.’

‘What do you care anyway?’

She had a point; why did I suddenly care?

‘He’s my colleague! I have to work with him.’

‘Whoopdee-do, he’s not your boyfriend is he? And so what if I have a little flirt with a nice bloke who’s who’s …’ she starts crying now, which seems a little OTT. I know I should probably hug her but I don’t feel like it, I just don’t. ‘Nice to me and asking me questions?’

I roll my eyes. ‘For God’s sake, Lexi. It’s not really that, it’s the fact you’re drunk out of your head and I’m supposed to be bloody well looking after you! You’re supposed to have come here to sort your head out and I don’t even know where you’ve been.’

Just then the phone goes. We both stare at it, then stare at each other.

‘If it’s Dad, I’m not in,’ says Lexi

‘You bloody well are.’

I pick up the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, hi there.’ It’s a man’s voice – a man’s, not a boy’s. ‘Is Lexi there?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Tell her it’s Clark,’ he says. His voice is northern, rich, and really quite attractive.

‘It’s Clark,’ I say, flatly, holding out the receiver, but Lexi’s face darkens immediately.

‘No. No way,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Tell him I’m not here.’

‘She’s not here.’

Lexi has shrivelled into the wall, gone a dealthly pale all of a sudden.

‘Are you sure? Because I really need to talk to her.’

I hold out the phone to Lexi again.

‘He really needs to talk to you.’

Lexi shakes her head.

‘Tough shit.’ She’s really crying now, tears are streaming down her face. ‘Tell him I don’t want to talk to him. And while you’re at it …’ she stabs a finger in the direction of the phone. ‘Tell him to go fuck himself. I wish he, and you, for that matter, would just leave me alone!’

Then she runs upstairs, leaving me holding the phone, wondering what the hell all that was about.

I gingerly take my hand off the receiver.

‘Clark? She’s drunk and really upset about something. I’d call back another time, if I were you.’

‘I will,’ he says.

* * *

The next day, I wake up feeling irritated. Like if my life were laid before me it would all be in tiny little fragments, like nothing’s in control. Call me selfish, but it’s one thing agreeing to take my half-sister in for the summer but not if she’s going to come home off her face, taking out her boyfriend troubles on me. And clearly we can’t have the book club at mine if Lexi’s going to walk in any minute, so perhaps we shouldn’t be having it at all. Why did that thought suddenly fill me with panic? Anyway, I’ve got a big presentation to give to Schumacher today – if I play my cards right, I could seal the deal between us and Langley’s, meaning I’m in with a chance of Sales Person of the Year, and frankly, although I can already feel sisterly guilt breaking down my resolve like a hairline fracture, I can do without Lexi’s boyfriend dramas, too.

I take my To Do list from my bedside table. This is what I need. Nice orderly lines of writing, clear tasks and a chance to prioritize. I feel better already.

This is my Master list, I also have a Shopping list, a Must-see Cultural Events list, an Admin list, Presents to Buy list and a Long-Term Goals list.

I take my notebook out of my bedside table and set about updating.

To Do:

MINOR

Make something with Quinoa – still to do.

Pluck eyebrows – done. (Do again when start to join up.)

Get spare room painted – Never going to do it, give it up!

Sort out photo albums (buy photo corners) – Still to do, but seriously, when?

*Call council about recycling – Done! (Although I still maintain there’s some smug little arse down at Wandsworth Council with ‘Head Foxer’ as his job-title since it seems one needs a degree to recycle correctly.)

Get involved in local culture: this coming weekend: installation by interesting sounding German artist at the Pump House Gallery. Done! What next? (See Must-see Cultural Events list and pick something else. Aboriginal Ceramics?)

Learn how to use i-Pod that have now had since Christmas. Just do it!! (Have developed a dislike of people who buy me things that I then have to find the time to learn how to use, which is just wrong on so many levels.)

Do 3x12 squats and 3x12 sit ups before bed (start tomorrow) – start tomorrow.

*Join actual book club

MAJOR

Incorporate two hours of admin into every weekend. No excuse! (This is looking pretty unlikely now I have a teen on my hands.)

Every day, do something for self and de-stressing, even if just breathing (alone, concentrating on, rather than just breathing breathing) for ten minutes. Chance would be a fine thing.

Work: Step things up a gear! Seal deal on two new clients per week: work in progress. If I nail this meeting with Schumacher today, I could be half way there.

FIND OUT WHAT’S WRONG WITH LEXI ASAP!!

At present, I don’t really care what’s wrong with Lexi, to tell you the truth, which I’m worried makes me the worst sister in the world.

I give her a knock before I leave for work anyway, just to check she’s still alive.

‘Lex?’

No answer

‘Lexi, are you awake?’

Nothing.

‘We’ll speak later in the day,’ I say, presuming she’s sulking. ‘I’ve left a cup of tea by your door so don’t, you know, step straight into it and get the mug stuck on your foot.’

I wait a few more seconds and when I get no answer to my moronic ramblings, I leave for work.

Victoria tube station is rammed with tourists carrying cameras and backpacks. It used to make me feel nostalgic when I saw tourists en masse like this; reminded me of a time when London was new and exciting for me, too, when Martin and I were fresh-faced from the cosy confines of the rolling hills of Yorkshire and everything and everyone seemed exotic.

Now I’m just one of a million other jaded Londoners who wishes they’d all bugger off, stop treating my city like a holiday destination and taking up space on my journey to work.

A train approaches and I curse the 20-strong team of rowdy school children blocking my way to the door. ‘HOLD YOUR BUDDY’S HAND!’ a blonde woman with no chin is shouting as the children shuffle, dazed, onto the tube. ‘And remember we’re getting off at Vauxhall.’

Vauxhall? Christ. Did I have to put up with this until Vauxhall?

The tube creaks into action and I look down from my spot jammed up against the armpit of a man who smells of fried chicken to see a pale, ginger-haired girl staring up at me, tasting the snot that streams from her nose with the tip of her tongue. This is what I resent most about the tube: the fact you pay a fortune to be subjected – totally out of your own control – to the most vile of human habits at 8 a.m. in the morning.

I eventually get a seat and ask myself when I turned into such a wizened, grouchy old woman. I’m sure I used to be a sunny sort of a girl who took delight in the minutiae of life and gave selflessly to others. Or something.

Perhaps it was just that I was happier back then. Or younger. In fact, perhaps happiness is actually just youth. It’s funny, isn’t it, how your experience of happiness changes as you get older? When I was young, happiness came in bursts of unadulterated joy, moments that stuck in my memory like diamonds in a rock-face: a walk onto the university campus on a sunny October Friday, knowing Martin was coming to visit in a matter of hours; running into the sea, drunk on Bacardi in just my knickers on a girl’s holiday to the Costa Brava. (Now I wouldn’t be seen dead in a bikini even if I drank my own weight in Bacardi.) Driving through the Yorkshire Dales in my clapped-out Polo with Pippa, my oldest friend from school, chain-smoking out of the window. Where was Pippa now? Last I heard, she was shacked up with some builder in Otley, a baby on the way, and what was I doing? Living in London, the great flat, the big job and shagging somebody else’s husband. Oh GOD. It made me feel sick just thinking about it.

Yeah, these days, happiness to me is more like an unreliable weekend dad. You never know when it’s going to turn up, and even when it does, you never know how long till the next time.

Mum used to say: ‘You wait till your thirties, Caroline! Your thirties are the happiest time in your life because you’ll know who you are and what you want.’

Sometimes, I feel like that is the biggest piece of misinformation I’ve ever been fed. In fact sometimes, I get this feeling like is this it? Is my only stab at happiness over already?

Perhaps that’s what Toby feels like when he talks about his marriage. And I can relate to that; this is why I understand him. Because if grown-up happiness means knowing anything for certain, I’m about as far from it as humanly possible.

We grind to a halt at Green Park. I think about Lexi, tucked up in bed, no doubt brooding about life, about Clark, about our row last night. She’s probably sticking needles into a voodoo doll of me as we speak. Maybe this boyfriend trouble was why she dropped out of sixth form – I suspected as much the day she arrived. She probably thinks it’s the end of the world, too. It’s only when you get to thirty-two and look back that you realize it had only just begun.

‘Meet Aaron. Aaron is twenty-eight and at the top of his game.’

Rule number 1 of the perfect sales pitch: HUMANIZE. Especially when pitching to Darryl Schumacher. Darryl can’t resist the human touch. It makes him believe (wrongly, so wrongly), that he possesses it too.

‘Aaron is a successful insurance broker. He works in a swanky high-rise in the heart of Manchester.’

(Cue picture of a swanky office block in Melbourne. Shona couldn’t find one in Manchester.)

‘He owns a wharf apartment in the city’s hip Canalside district, drives an Audi convertible, drinks Staropramen, Budvar, shops in Ted Baker, Diesel, Reiss.’

Darryl fingers the length of his tie. Must get myself down to that Reiss, you can see him thinking, see what all the fuss is about.

‘Image to Aaron is everything and that’s because IMPRESS …’

The word flashes fuscia pink on my laptop. Darryl’s piggy eyes widen.

‘… is Aaron’s middle name. By day, he needs to impress clients. By night …’

Darryl taps his chewed biro on his notepad. ‘The laydeez …’

‘Quite,’ I say, suppressing the desire to be sick.

I take a deep breath, turn my eyes to the screen.

‘Aaron is talking to people twenty-four-seven. The last thing he needs is to feel unconfident. But he is also a fast-living guy in his twenties. He works hard, plays hard, does everything to the max.’

Darryl loosens his shirt. ‘To the max …’ According to what scale, exactly, I can hear him thinking.

‘He likes a double espresso to kick-start his morning, more than a few Marlboro Lights to relax him post-work. His post-lunch café crème cigar is as much a part of his image as his Armani cufflinks. In short …’

Rule number 2 of the perfect sales pitch: Introduce humour. Especially when pitching to Darryl. Darryl likes to think he’s a very humorous man.

‘… without help, Aaron’s breath’s going to smell like a camel’s bottom.’

The picture of the camel’s gigantic arse flashes up. For some reason, Shona had no problem sourcing that one.

‘Hahahahahah!’ Darryl throws his head back and guffaws. ‘Love it!’ A roll of neck fat spills over his shirt like a piecrust. ‘I can always trust you to provide the laughs, Miss Steele. A girl with a sense of humour. Rare in this game, very, rare indeed.’

I shudder inside. Darryl carries on laughing. Then coughing, like he might cough up a blackened lung right there on the beige, static carpet.

‘So,’ I almost have to shout over the hacking, ‘this is where Mini Minty Me comes in.’ I pick up the tiny silver bottle from the table and hand it to Darryl.

‘It’s got all the benefits of the Minty Me mouthwash: kills 99.9 per cent of oral bacteria, prevents tartar, reduces plaque, but it comes in a slick little atomizer that Aaron can slip into his pocket along with his wallet. A mouthwash-cum-breath freshener, all in the size of a lighter. Revolutionary, Darryl, I’m sure you’ll agree.’ I flash my best QVC channel smile.

Darryl is nodding, rubbing the stubble on his top lip, which is pale ginger and for some reason reminds me of my old guinea pig, Graham. Me having been the sort of child to call a guinea pig Graham.

He holds the bottle up to the light. Paws it with his sausage fingers.

‘Is he single?’ he says.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You don’t say if Aaron is single.’

‘No, he is not single!’ I am not sure I like where this is going.

Darryl cocks his head to one side. ‘Oh?’

‘I mean, yes! Yes, of course he’s single. Single, but looking for The One.’

‘Ah, likely story. Good looking mover and shaker like Aaron? Come on …’ Darryl’s red-rimmed piggy eyes are looking straight at my chest. ‘Okay, how many women has he slept with this year?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Fifteen? Twenty?’

‘No! No way.’

‘Ten, twelve?’ urges Darryl.

‘Definitely not that many.’

‘How many then?’

‘Three.’

‘What? An Alpha Romeo like Aaron?

‘Okay, six maybe. Oh God, I don’t bloody well know. He’s not real, I made him up!’

Darryl laughs again. I feel my cheeks burn.

‘Anyway, Darryl, Mr Schumacher,’ I say, closing my eyes.

Don’t blow it now. You’re almost there, this sale is so in the bag …

‘Back to the product, a great product, which all your competitors without exception will be stocking come mid-August. I’d say there’s an opportunity of 1.2 million pounds here for Langley’s with a margin of 35 per cent, which is higher than your average category margin.’

‘I’m sold.’ Schumacher slams shut his notepad and folds his porky little arms.

‘Oh!’ That was easy. ‘That’s great. Really great.’

‘I’ll order 600 units to be in all of the 57 stores by August.’

And there it is. The kick. The high. The fizzy little bubbles of achievement that start in my belly and rise to my face, which is beaming now. It’s the reason I do this job. The reason I get up at 6 a.m. some days, work weekends, work all hours God sends. Because this feeling, it’s gold. Sales is the crack cocaine of the corporate life if you ask me. Although, on reflection, even I am concerned that getting this euphoric about mouthwash may not be altogether healthy.

I shake Schumacher’s hand. He has a handshake like salami: damp, limp and fatty.

‘Thank you, Darryl.’ He carries on shaking. ‘I’ll get the paperwork to you for tomorrow. Of course, it won’t all be done and dusted before the contract’s signed and it’s all, you know …’

‘Bona fide,’ says Darryl, flashing a set of tartar-covered teeth.

‘Exactly,’ I say, hoping he doesn’t see me wipe my hand on my skirt. ‘Well, I’m looking forward to working together,’ I lie.

‘Yep, we’re onto a winner, Caroline. Awesome,’ he says, eyes boring holes in my shirt. ‘Now, I’ve got some mail to fire off, so I’ll see myself out.’

‘Great, speak soon,’ I say, making towards the door.

As I close it, I see him breathing into his hand, covering his nose and sniffing it.

‘Yes! Get in. Schumacher in the bag!’

It’s only when I stop punching the air that I see that Shona and Toby are looking at me.

Toby bursts out laughing.

‘Fuck me, you really do get excited about selling mouth-wash, don’t you?’

I feel suddenly ridiculous.

‘Shut up you, you’re just jealous.’

‘I can’t believe you can even be in the same room as that man,’ says Shona. ‘Look at him …’ She watches him through the glass. ‘Letching at us all with his little piggy eyes.’

‘He’s all right,’ I say. ‘Schumacher and I, we have, a personal understanding.’

‘Uh. Grim!’ Shona shakes her head, grimly.

‘Man, your face though,’ laughs Toby.

‘Yeah. Ab-sol-utely-fucking-hilarious,’ agrees Shona.

‘Were you spying on us?’

‘Course we were!’

‘Well don’t! Especially when I’m in with Schumacher. He kept making irrelevant sexual references and then there was the picture of the camel’s arse. GOD knows why I thought that was a good idea. The last person I want to be sharing a joke with – especially a joke about an arse – is Schumacher. He kept laughing, like a braying donkey. And then, you know how I get the dark, twisted thoughts that just pop into my head and then I can’t get rid of them?’

‘Sure do,’ says Toby, raising an eyebrow.

‘Well, I kept thinking of Darryl and a camel.’

‘Oh Jesus.’

‘Yes. I know, I am sick, sick in the head. Then I kept thinking he was going to make a move on me.’

Toby’s snorting with laughter now, Shona’s got her head on the desk and one eye open.

‘Your face was like this …’ Toby says, assuming a grimace, somewhere between shocked and offended: flared nostrils, wide eyes.

‘You looked like a cross between someone who had poo smeared on their top lip,’ adds Shona, thinking hard, ‘and a hamster in rigor mortis.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Hey, but I got the sale though and that is all that matters.’ I raise my hand for a high five. Toby slaps it, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Six hundred units to be in every store by next month!’

‘What?’ He wasn’t expecting that. ‘You spawny cow. If you win that award, I’ll kill you.’

I feel a guilty little thrill of competition. So it’s not just Rachel who wins awards, actually, thank you very much.

I look at Shona.

‘It will be an award tainted with dubious morality, which is unfortunate,’ she says.

‘God, people! It’s breath freshener I’m selling, not children!’

‘But well done,’ Shona adds. ‘Because I know how much it means to you. It’s just, don’t think that just because Schumacher is now officially on board, that I will ever engage in any conversation with that prick that isn’t ab-sol-utely fucking necessary, okay?’

‘Loud and clear, Shona. Loud and clear.’

‘Well done, Caroline.’ Janine has a new super-short fringe that makes her look even more like a German lesbian than she did before. ‘You officially kicked ass.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, dumbly. I always feel like a disappointment whenever I’m in Cross’s office.

But it feels great all the same. Sealing the deal. Who would think selling breath freshener could make your heart race? But I think that’s it. The simplicity of it, the lack of anything major at stake. I doubt, for example, if I’d feel this way if I worked for a charity, or as a teacher where real hearts and minds were on the table. The fact we could all quite happily survive well into our nineties without breath freshener allows me to put a hundred per cent of me in without feeling there’s going to be any emotional fall out. And that’s great, because sometimes it feels like work is the only place in my life where I feel safe to operate; like it’s the only room in the Titanic,

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