‘Never.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Well, maybe a little knifehand strike to the ribs.’
Sadie is passionately kissing Brian. She is pressing her breasts against his chest. I am standing in front of the two of them in Brian’s crowded kitchen, trying not to appear disconcerted – only a few seconds ago the three of us were politely talking.
‘Autumn in New York’ is playing, telling me about how new love mixes with pain, making me think of you as Sadie cups Brian’s cheek with one hand and traces his lips with the index finger of the other. She stares into his handsome-in-a-geeky-way face and strokes his dark hair. ‘You obsess me.’ Her whisper is deadly serious.
‘And you obsess me.’ His whisper is a tease. She frowns, wondering where his eyes are darting to. The frown gets bigger when she sees they are darting to me.
I’ve never met anyone as sickly sweet on the outside and full of poison on the inside.
Your pronouncements on Sadie were endless.
Sadie is six feet tall, so perhaps one of the things she likes about Brian is his great height. I am only five feet five. You always said that the thing Sadie likes best about me is that she can literally look down, though you pretended not to hear when I said she could do that with most people.
Sadie adjusts the rectangular frames of Brian’s nerdy-cool spectacles, which have slipped down his nose. Brian is a dermatologist and I cannot help but imagine those spectacles falling off as he bends over a patient’s head, smacking them on the forehead and leaving a bad blemish or maybe even interfering with the performance of some vital instrument.
She turns from Brian to examine me, though she curves his arm around her waist and holds it there in a way that makes my heart twinge for her. ‘You’re actually wearing a dress!’ she says. ‘I didn’t think you owned any.’
‘It was Miranda’s.’
She motions me to turn around. I catch Brian watching me and I hope – though I am not quite sure – that he manages to tear his eyes away by the time Sadie glances at him to check.
Sadie has spent the last five years trying and failing to be in a serious relationship. She desperately wants Brian to be The One. She is sneakily buying wedding magazines already.
‘Is that DVF?’ She peeks at the label of your dress, scratching the back of my neck with a nail. ‘Christ, Ella,’ she says. ‘These are £500 a pop in silk.’
How could you have afforded this kind of thing on your nurse’s salary? This is a recurring question for me. The police wondered about it too. Like so much else, it remains unanswered.
‘Miranda had one in red as well,’ I say. ‘But red isn’t really my colour.’
I imagine how furious you would be at my letting out one of your shopping secrets to Sadie. It was bad enough that I told the police. But you signed the confidentiality clause, Melanie. The confidentiality clause never expires.
Only you were allowed to call me Melanie, as if you wanted to make me yours alone. To name somebody is a powerful act, and you like powerful acts. You extracted Ella from the middle of my name, adding an extra L. You commanded everyone else to use it. Even Mum and Dad obeyed you. They still obey you. Was it out of guilt that they’d been careless and spoiled your decade as an only child by saddling you with an accidental baby sister?
‘I’m not sure you’re right about red,’ Brian says.
My stomach tightens, but Sadie lets the comment pass. ‘Those wrap dresses don’t date,’ she says. ‘They’re classic.’
‘This one is a consolation prize, awarded by my mother.’
‘For what?’ Sadie asks.
For the box, I silently think.
Our mother actually grabbed me when I started towards the attic this afternoon to retrieve it. I was drawing strange men after me and Luke, she said. I was stirring up danger in my refusal to leave things alone, she said, especially after the newspaper article.
‘Ignoring things, hiding them from each other, that’s the real danger,’ I said.
She didn’t answer.
‘The difficult things aren’t going to go away because you pretend not to see them,’ I said.
Stalemate is the rose-tinted view of where the two of us were when we parted, the box still up in the roof space beneath the eaves. But our mother took this midnight-blue dress from her shrine of your things and pressed it into my hands, along with a pair of strappy sandals you never even wore. She was horrified by the prospect of my going to a party in the jeans and sweatshirt I’d been wearing all day.
Your dress flowed and swirled as I walked out their door in it. I even swished my hips like you used to, to try to jolt our mother into reacting, to try to shock her into giving me my way and handing over the box when she saw how like you I look.
Yeah, right. I imagine you rolling your eyes at the impossibility. Like that’s really going to work.
I shrug away Sadie’s question as if I am bewildered by it. I put a hand up to my neck, an unconscious reflex, near the place she scratched when she searched for the label. I’m startled when my finger pad comes away with blood. There is no doubt that she is being even spikier than usual, and that this heightening of her default state of resentment has something to do with Brian.
‘Don’t be such a baby, Ella – I was fixing your neckline.’
You follow me through this party like a sardonic ghost, whispering in my ear. Sadie’s perfect at the can’t-do-enough-for-you act. Every good deed is a little stab.
‘I have some extremely expensive overnight cream from a new line Brian recommends.’ Sadie runs a beauty clinic. She first met Brian a few months ago, to discuss the possibility of his doing some treatments on her clients, the kinds of procedures she needs a proper dermatologist for. ‘Would your mother like to try it?’
‘That’s nice of you. I’m sure she would,’ I say.
‘Evening, everyone.’ The voice is talk-show host smooth and charming, and vaguely familiar. When I turn to its owner and realise who he is I want to sink into the floor because I had the misfortune of being assigned to Dr Blossom when our mother dragged me for tests to investigate why my periods vanished at the same time as you.
Sadie does not know this, so she feels the need to introduce me and Dr Blossom feels the need to pretend he has never seen me before in his life and certainly has never peered at my reproductive organs and pored over countless tests of my hormone levels only to diagnose the fact that my ovaries are in a decade-long and extremely mysterious coma. Something I could have told him myself.
Sadie is more agitated than usual, at this party full of doctors she barely knows. She is making lots of self-mocking jokes, which is what she always does when she is ill at ease. She glances under each of her arms and says, ‘God, this room is hot. Good thing this dress is sleeveless.’
Dr Blossom says, ‘Get Brian to inject you with some Botox.’ He points under Sadie’s arms, in case there is any confusion about where the injections need to go. ‘That’ll stop the perspiration.’ He touches the top of his absurdly flaxen head, as if to check that his hair has not flattened. ‘Not sure it’s available on the NHS, though. You’ll probably need to do it privately.’ He thinks he is being very funny.
But Sadie is funnier. ‘Brian already injects me privately. Twice a day, morning and night.’
A