do?’
‘Kept his head down, talked to everyone else other than me and acted like I was invisible. He’s not answered any of my texts since the initial few early on before the funeral. Now I may as well not exist.’
‘Maybe he’s unsure how your friendship is going to carry on now.’ I chose my words carefully.
‘Because I’m a widow?’
I nodded.
‘He hasn’t even had the decency to explain, just dropped me.’
‘But if he’s married and you’re now effectively single, the boundaries might have blurred in his head. Maybe he can’t cope.’
‘But the boundaries were all over the place anyway.’
‘Had you even kissed?’
Louise dragged some frozen pizza bites out from the cold, shut the freezer door and turned to face me. Louise and I didn’t normally talk like this. She kept her shit filed under a stone and I did the same. Deeply personal conversations were uncommon, and filled me with an uneasy dread if they ever sidled into the vicinity. Skeletons were best kept where they were… Even when I asked if I could stay with her and Nigel for a few weeks while I sorted myself out after Tom, she didn’t probe acutely and I didn’t offer up anything for discussion. She very kindly made me tea before I left for work and sent me off with some homemade flapjacks most mornings. They weren’t really my thing, too chewy, but Margaret liked them.
‘Yes. It was amazing, by the toilets in the Rye Park café while the kids were washing their hands. I kind of forgot I was married for a minute…’ She slumped on the counter. ‘Now I feel sooooo awful. I wish I’d never kissed him. I should have known it would only cause trouble…’
Mum loved to tell the tale of how I had initially been excited when Louise was born, then once it dawned on me that she was a permanent addition, the novelty had waned. Apparently, my favourite trick had been to flick her head while she was having her bottle and nonchalantly walk off, leaving her screaming and Mum seething. Things did improve and I remember punching Barry Jenkins in the playground at primary school because he’d made her cry one break time, only to find out that he fancied her and that was why he’d been picking on her. And so it began…
Lou and I definitely stood under the familial umbrella of blood is thicker than water, but I couldn’t tell you what was her favourite chocolate bar (I’d only just found out she hated lasagne) or if she and Nigel had ever been truly happy. Nigel had been dipped in professional veneer that made it hard to determine what was going on underneath. He’d been handsome and definitely a catch at the time (we’d joked he was a silver fox, but he was only ten years older than Lou), but I never really knew him. In the latter years, he’d just felt like a distant figurehead while Louise was the beating heart of the family that the children flocked to with cuts and grazes and bum wiping. I’d hardly seen him when I was staying there because I was always out with friends, grizzling into a wine glass or trawling through rental properties on my work laptop while trying to catch up on practice paperwork.
There had been a time when Louise and I had been a lot closer, ironically once I’d left to go to Sheffield to start my medical journey. She visited a few times in her last year at school leaving behind whatever boyfriend she was dating. During one half-term she announced that she had applied to Leeds to do midwifery. ‘It’s not too far from you, maybe we can see each other?’ We’d managed it a few times in between unforgiving schedules, then came The Unfortunate Silence of 1994–95. After that, I only saw Louise sporadically. She continually had a man in her life and they seemed to take preference over everything else. Typical Louise.
When people who didn’t know I had a sister met her, they would be genuinely surprised, remarking on a lack of family resemblance, practically hinting at a cuckoo in the nest. Growing up, I was very conscious that Louise was prettier than me, but I knew I was smarter than her, or rather, I worked at being smart. Louise’s burnished straight chestnut hair swung perfectly like a starry-eyed shampoo advert while mine was wiry and brown forcing me to wear it long or it sprung up round