‘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.

CHAPTER TWO

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.’