“It’s so passive-aggressive!” She opens her eyes wide. “It’s so controlling! He knows I’m stressed out, but he just does that! It’s like…” She trails off in her usual way, and I feel a shaft of impatience.
“I thought you were stressed out because you were missing your husband,” I point out. “He’s bought you a plane ticket to see him, so surely now you should be less stressed out?”
“You don’t understand.” Nicole shoots me a glare. “God, I’m dying for a coffee. Make me a coffee, Fixie.”
I count to three, then say clearly, “Make it yourself.”
“What?” Nicole blinks at me.
“We’ve got a coffee machine.” I gesture at it. “Make it yourself.”
“Oh, but you know I can’t do it,” says Nicole at once, as though proclaiming a law of nature.
“So learn,” I say. “I’ll teach you.”
“My head can’t learn that kind of stuff.” Nicole wrinkles her nose. “It’s, like, I get a mental block? Go on, you do it, Fixie. You’re so brilliant at the coffee machine.”
And there’s something about her lazy, drifty, entitled voice that suddenly makes me flip out.
“Stop telling me I’m brilliant at things you don’t want to do!” I yell, and her head jerks up in surprise. “Stop pretending to be incompetent to get out of things!”
“What?” Nicole’s staring at me as though she’s never heard me speak before and didn’t even realize I had a voice. Which maybe she didn’t.
“You can learn the coffee machine! Of course you can. You just don’t want to! You avoid everything, Nicole! Everything! Including your own husband!”
Shit. That popped out before I could stop it.
“What are you talking about?” Nicole’s hand flutters defensively to her mouth, and I feel my face flame. That was going too far. Or was it?
I swallow a few times, my mind working furiously. I could backtrack. Apologize. Close the conversation down. But I’m not in the mood for backtracking, or apologizing, or closing the conversation down. Maybe it’s time for us to be the kind of sisters Mum always wanted us to be. The kind who actually know something meaningful about each other’s lives.
“I know it’s none of my business,” I say, more calmly. “But you never talk to him on the phone. You don’t seem to care when he’s ill. And now you don’t want to go to Abu Dhabi to see him. Nicole…do you actually love Drew?”
There’s a massive silence. Nicole’s beautiful face is swiveled away from me, but I can see a tightness at the corner of her mouth. Her fingers are fiddling with her tassely belt and I notice her chewed-up nails. Then at last she turns her head, and to my shock, her eyes are full of tears.
“I don’t know,” she says in a whisper. “I don’t know. I don’t bloody know.”
“Right,” I say, trying to hide my shock. “Well…did you love him when you married him?”
“I don’t know.” Nicole looks desperate. “I thought I did. But I might have made a massive mistake. Don’t tell Mum,” she adds quickly, and she sounds so like she did when she was fifteen years old and I found her swigging from a bottle of vodka that I can’t help a snort of laughter.
“I thought you were dying from separation anxiety,” I say, and Nicole’s nostrils flare.
“I have been really stressed out, actually,” she says, returning to her haughty self. “My yoga teacher says she’s concerned about me.”
I roll my eyes. Nicole will never not take herself seriously. But at least she’s sounding a bit more real.
“So, what went wrong?” I can’t help asking. “You seemed so happy at the wedding.”
“The wedding was great.” Nicole’s eyes soften with the memory. “And the honeymoon was great. But then I was a bit, ‘Is this it?’ There wasn’t anything to plan for anymore, you know? All the excitement was gone. It was so, I dunno, flat.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to Abu Dhabi with Drew?” I suggest. “Couldn’t you have planned for that? Why didn’t you go, anyway? Don’t tell me there aren’t yoga courses out there.”
“I panicked,” admits Nicole after a pause. “We’d had a couple of rows, and I thought, Drew and me on our own in Abu Dhabi in some expat flat? What if it all goes pear-shaped? What if we have more rows? I thought it would be easier this way. You know. It’d be…” She trails off in her usual unfinished way.
“You thought it would be easier to completely avoid your husband than to have a