Читать книгу Who’s That Girl?: A laugh-out-loud sparky romcom! - Mhairi McFarlane, Mhairi McFarlane - Страница 16

Edie’s dad was delighted to see her, making her feel the usual remorse she wasn’t glad to be home. She’d wrestled with whether she could get away with staying in a hotel and concluded: no, not without badly hurting his feelings, and anyway, hotel plus her London rent = exorbitant. Home it was. Sorry, Meg.

‘Three months?’ her dad said. ‘I don’t think you’ve been here this long since before university!’

Edie grit-grinned and said he must be right. They hugged in the narrow hallway, with the dappled Artex walls that had reminded younger Edie of rice pudding. She rolled her trolley case to the foot of the stairs and hung her coat on the banister. They’d lived in this cramped but homely house since her dad retired early, on ill health grounds, when they were still kids. He’d had a nervous breakdown, but they never referred to it as a nervous breakdown.

‘We’ve become a fully vegan household,’ Meg said, by way of greeting, appearing from the kitchen in a T-shirt saying BITCH PLEASE with a picture of Jane Fonda doing the Hanoi Jane fist, and geometric-print leggings that pouched at the crotch. ‘So don’t bring anything of meat or dairy nature onto the premises or it’s going straight in the bin.’

‘Don’t be daft, Megan,’ their father said, all jocular, ‘She can have the odd bacon cob if she wants one.’

‘Bacon cob?’ bellowed Meg. ‘No she CAN’T! Have you ever heard a pig’s death rattle?’

‘No, but you hum it and I’ll try to keep up.’

Once again, she and Meg weren’t really talking about what they were talking about. This wasn’t about bacon cobs, it was about Meg repelling Edie as a rebel force invading her territory.

It hadn’t always been this way. Edie had been a hero to Meg when they were younger, and Meg trotted behind her like a duckling. Edie had been excessively protective of Meg, almost as much proto mother as older sister. Things started to change when Edie went to university and after she moved to London, Edie returned to find she’d become a fully fledged villain. Her popularity, once so simple, so powerful, had completely curdled. Once lost, it wasn’t possible to get it back. Meg was perpetually resentful, as if Edie was a giant fake, and every word out of her mouth only confirmed it. Edie had probably shouted: ‘What IS your problem?’ many times at Meg, yet non-rhetorically, it was a good question. Edie gathered that it was because Meg deemed Edie’s life choices the choices of a sell-out; a false, superficial lightweight.

‘It’s fine, I can eat meat out of the house,’ Edie said, trying to keep to her resolve of no fighting on the first day.

Meg ‘hmphed’ at this, with an air of irritation at a typical Edie ploy.

An assertive rap of knuckles against the flimsy wooden front door made them all jump.

‘Did you bring back-up with you?’ her dad said.

Edie dodged past him and answered, suddenly nervous that it’d be a gift-ribboned turd in a box or something with ‘Love From The Office’ and she’d be forced to explain it.

A motorcycle courier said ‘Thompson?’ – and handed over an A4 envelope, while Edie used the plastic wand to scribble on the electronic receipt-of-delivery device. The adrenaline subsided as she inspected the publishing house watermark and realised it was the Elliot Owen Files.

When Edie closed the door she saw her father and sister watching, once again, as if Joan Collins had wafted in.

‘Cuttings. To help me interview this actor for his autobiography,’ she said.

‘What an interesting project,’ her dad said, kindly. ‘Has he been in anything I’ve seen?’

‘The fantasy show Blood & Gold. If you’ve seen that.’

‘Ah. No. Didn’t look like my bag. Tolkien is enough questing dwarves for one lifetime.’

‘The one with the sexist attitudes to women where it’s all “Oh, look, my bubbies have fallen out of my lizardskin jerkin, again,”’ Meg said, and Edie laughed.

‘Exactly.’

Once again, Meg looked irked that Edie hadn’t disagreed with her.

‘Why are you writing a book about him, then?’ she said.

‘For the money,’ Edie said.

‘You don’t have to say yes to everything that pays money, you know,’ said Meg.

‘No, just some things, so you don’t have to live off gruel. Can I put my things in my room, Dad?’ Edie said hastily, before Meg took off from the runway.

‘Yes, of course. I’ve moved the washing out of it and most of the wardrobes are free.’

Edie made noises of thanks and, envelope clamped under one arm, began huffing her giant case up the stairway, made narrower by the books lining each step. The books were on their way to or from a bookcase, stuck in mid-flight.

She felt Meg watch her progress, suspiciously and sullenly. Edie could explain she wasn’t back at home to mess up her life, or to show off, and that her own life had gone spectacularly to shit.

But what would be the point? Even if Meg believed her, she’d no doubt think Edie brought it all on herself by being a sex puppet of the patriarchy, or whatever.

It wasn’t that Edie violently disagreed with most of Meg’s principles, even if she didn’t want to be vegan herself. The fact was there was no point agreeing with Meg about anything – because Meg’s views existed to establish the difference between herself and most of the rest of the world, specifically her older sister. When Edie concurred, it was viewed by her sister as some sort of spoiling and tarnishing gambit.

Edie flubbed down on the bed – she was touched to notice her dad had put clean sheets on it, and old blue faded ones from her childhood, too – and considered unpacking. But it was too much like accepting the length of her visit.

She had hoped that, if nothing else, Nottingham would make her feel better about what had happened to her life in London. Sat staring at the old built-in wardrobes, from the days her dad still did carpentry, and the bare emptiness of this box room without her things in it – bar a few old musty dresses on plastic hangers inside the wardrobes – she felt worse.

In a vacuum, there was nothing to stop her howling, no routine to cling to. She put her toilet bags in front of the mirror, the one she’d gazed into a thousand times while applying copious amounts of kohl before a teenage night out drinking an illicit concoction she and Hannah had devised, ‘Poke’, a blend of port and Coke.

She dug her phone out of her coat pocket and saw she had a text from Louis.

Hey babe, how you doing? Xx

Not great, but thanks for asking. You spoke to Richard? X

Yeah, I wanted to save you the hassle. He was cool about everything, as always. How long are you off for? Everyone misses you, you know <3

Hah! Yeah, Edie betted that was what everyone was saying. Louis was such a snake on wheels. This was his dream: a catastrophe that overlapped on the personal and professional Venn diagram. He could be excited onlooker and major political fixer, whispering in everyone’s ears, with the sole hotline to the villain of the piece. This was Edie’s Vietnam and his House of Cards. He’d deleted the Instagram picture to distance himself from Edie, and called Richard purely to stir and get a measure of her fate. Now he wanted Edie to tell him whether she’d been sacked, so he could be bearer of that news, too.

That’s nice. Three months.

OMFG, three months! Paid leave?

Did Louis think she was stupid? Did he not realise she knew he’d look up from his phone and say ‘My God, listen to this, she only got a three-month holiday out of ruining Jack and Charlotte’s wedding’? Louis knew what Edie knew, that a false friend was the only kind of friend she had left in that office.

Not leave, on a project in Nottingham. How’s Charlotte?

No reply. Of course not. Edie asking after Charlotte didn’t fit the story and there was nothing in answering it for Louis.

Edie got up off the bed, and thundered down the stairs. Her dad was fishing a tea bag out of a mug in the kitchen.

‘I meant to say, dinner’s on me tonight, as thanks for having me! We could go out. Or get fish and chips. Or, chips for Meg. Whatever you like.’

‘I’m cooking,’ Meg called, from the front room. ‘The kidney beans are already soaking. Also that chip shop doesn’t use separate preparation areas. I asked them and everything’s contaminated. And I don’t want to give them more profit anyway.’

You wouldn’t be, would you, Edie thought.

‘Uh, OK. Maybe tomorrow?’ Edie said, heart plummeting, as her dad nodded. Meg was an awful cook. That wasn’t anti-veganism, just a fact. Meg had never met a seasoning she liked to use. The one consistency all her curries, stews, hotpots and casseroles achieved was ‘non-toothsome sludge’. She eschewed recipes as creative constraint, and generally just mashed some stuff into other stuff.

Most terrible cooks were aware they were terrible, and limited people’s exposure to it, thus they weren’t a danger to the public. Meg was either blissfully unaware or strangely sadistic – the more Edie pushed it round her plate or her dad declared himself ‘pleasantly full’, the more she’d heap spoonfuls of it out and say, ‘This is full of iron,’ or similar.

There was an aggressive piety to forcing it on them: it wasn’t for the food to get nicer, it was for their minds to get wider.

She trudged back up the stairs thinking she’d eat Meg’s Sewage Slurry tonight to make nice, then tomorrow, go to Sainsbury’s and try to fill a cupboard with edible items. She might even hide a packet of Polish sausages inside a large bag of rice.

Back in her room, she was at a loss about what to do in the middle of a Monday afternoon, when not at work. She physically ached for the life she couldn’t go back to. She wasn’t only separated by geography from it now. She couldn’t even indulge herself with a crying jag, and come down for dinner pink-eyed and puffy, and have to explain what was up. The envelope with her name scrawled on it sat in the middle of the bed.

Sod it. There was no avoiding Elliot Owen. She was probably one of the few women in the country that this opportunity was wasted on.