‘I think you’d make a divine mother,’ she continued. ‘So responsible and tidy.’
‘That’s - I bought that for my friend.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh really?’
‘Yes. She was too embarrassed to buy it for herself.’ I hoped my flushed cheeks weren’t too obvious.
June shook her head. ‘Why should anybody be embarrassed about having had sex? It’s one of the best things you can do. Releases your natural endorphins.’ She licked chocolate off her finger sensuously. ‘Everyone should have as much sex as possible, that’s what I say.’
‘Hear hear,’ I said, with a lame little laugh.
June was right. Look at her. She’d had sex aplenty, probably more sex than I’d had hot dinners. Was she lurking in chemists buying pregnancy tests before she’d even missed a period? I thought not.
I was silly to be worried. Couples who wanted babies tried for months, sometimes years to conceive, and I’d had nothing but a one-night stand. The chances were minuscule. And here I was, worrying about it like a cardigan-wearing school Health Ed teacher.
I picked up the test and put it in a drawer, intending to stuff it in the bin as soon as I was alone.
‘So, what have you been up to today?’ I asked, putting the mugs on the table and sitting across from her.
‘Oh, this and that, faffing around.’ She took a sip of tea, and stretched like a satisfied cat. ‘Mmm. Tell me, Ellie, you ever get a man coming in your pub who looks like -’ She gestured her hands vaguely. ‘You know, who was that singer in that eighties group who had all those hits?’
I nearly dropped my mug halfway to my mouth. ‘George Michael?’ It burst out of me without my thinking.
She snapped her fingers. ‘That’s it. Sort of good-looking in a weird kind of way. You ever get someone looking like him in your pub?’
I was staring at her; I did my best to look more casual. ‘Why?’
‘Oh it’s a friend of mine who I think said he lived in Reading.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought I’d ask. It’s not like you wouldn’t notice him if he came in, right?’
‘Uh.’ I swallowed. ‘No, he’d be pretty noticeable.’
‘That’s what I figured. Maybe he doesn’t live in Reading any more.’
‘Or maybe he drinks in a different pub,’ I suggested. ‘The Mouse and Duck is pretty much a dump.’
‘Maybe,’ she agreed, though she’d obviously lost interest. She dipped her finger in the dregs of the cheesecake and licked it. ‘Mmm. That Hugh is an absolute angel. I wouldn’t mind licking this cheesecake off his chest.’
I stood up and searched in a drawer for a Gaviscon; my stomach was queasy as anything, probably because of the conversation. I found one and crunched it.
‘I need to get to my desk in your room, so I can do some work,’ I said. ‘You mind?’
‘Of course not, sweetness. You go right ahead and work there all you want. Balancing your chequebook?’
‘Something like that.’ I dumped my tea into the sink and went upstairs. Before I opened the door to my white room, my office, the pristine brain of my house, I drew a deep breath. Then I surveyed the destruction.
Clothes. Little tiny slip dresses, pairs of tights, eensy T-shirts, lacy bras. At least four mugs, from what I could see. Newspapers, an empty bottle of wine. One of my cereal bowls, full of cigarette ends, was balanced on the end of the unmade sofa bed. My desk was covered with bottles of make-up, brushes and used cotton wool.
Get over yourself, Eleanor
, I thought.
You write smutty novels, not works of literary greatness. You don’t need a room of one’s own; you just need a keyboard and a filthy mind.
I picked my way through the mess and turned on my computer. There were sticky rings from cups on the top of my desk. They had started to attract dust.
I was never going to be able to work in here till June was out and I’d reclaimed the room. I shut down the computer, picked up a notebook, and went to my own room and shut the door.
Five minutes of staring at a lined piece of paper and I knew it was no good. I was never going to be able to write a new scene for
Throbbing Member
. I wasn’t anal or anything. I mean, I’d had people staying with me before. Not long ago I’d had a total stranger in my bed, right?
But I could hear her downstairs, scraping her chair back and singing. She’d probably be going through my bathroom cabinets next, and looking through the phone book for the number of her friend who looked like George Michael. Any minute now she’d light up a fag and I would be able to smell it.
I needed space.
‘I’m going out,’ I called to June as I went down the stairs, and didn’t wait for her cheerful reply before I shut the front door behind me and went next door to Hugh’s. I unlocked the door with the spare key I had on my ring and went inside.
It smelled of chocolate in here, and faintly of Hugh’s aftershave. ‘Hugh?’ I called, though June had said he’d gone to college.
I didn’t usually let myself in to his house, though in theory I could whenever I liked, and he let himself into mine pretty often. But there was the matter of his girlfriends, and anyway, whenever I wanted him he seemed to show up near me one way or another.
His house was tidy and clean, and my shoulders immediately relaxed. That was one thing Hugh and I had in common: we weren’t neat freaks, but we both liked things in place. We used to get teased about it at university, but then again people used to queue up to share houses with us because we would do the washing-up pretty often.
Here, I could probably work. I searched through his CD collection till I found one I’d given him and that I also owned, and put it on. I settled myself on his brown leather couch, put a couple of cushions behind my back and another on my lap, and settled my notebook on top of it.
Sitting like this, I was facing the shelves of books and DVDs that Hugh had on his wall, and I idly let my gaze wander over them. He had quite a few expensive cook-books; the rest of the shelves were stuffed with forensic thrillers and funny science fiction/fantasy paperbacks. We didn’t share taste in literature; I didn’t look through his shelves very often.
Which was probably how I’d missed seeing that one of his shelves held a line of sixteen purple-spined books, every one of them with the name Estelle May on it.
I let out a snort of laughter. Hugh had all of my erotic novels in plain sight, in pride of place, in fact, in his living room.
I put aside the notebook and stood up to take the books down, one by one, from his shelf. He even had them arranged in chronological order, according to their release dates.
I knew where he’d got the first one; I’d given him a copy the day it had come out, because Hugh was directly responsible for it getting published due to his incessant nagging for me to submit the silly manuscript I’d written for fun while we were at university. I flipped open the cover of
A Degree in Carnal Knowledge
, and saw my own handwriting on the title page:
For Hugh, with love and thanks . . . I think. Estelle May.
I hadn’t been used to signing the pen name, and the lettering was awkward. I thumbed through the book, reading phrases and pages at random, remembering how I’d written it between lectures and revising. The University of Reading had become a much more interesting place when I looked at it through the eyes of my heroine Maria, an adventurous graduate student in human sexuality who was writing her thesis on her own experiences of being a total slut.
I laughed out loud when I came to the scene involving Maria, the provost of the university, and two raunchy gardeners in an empty examination hall. I had actually written that scene during a sociology lecture instead of taking notes. I’d rushed off after the lecture to meet Hugh for a pint and to tell him all about it.
I replaced the book and took down the next one,
Temporary Secretary
, a romp about libidinous Jeanette, who had a strange fetish involving photocopiers and a wild imagination when it came to uses for paper clips. I’d written that one while bored out of my mind in a temp job during the summer holiday. I hadn’t signed this one; Hugh must have bought it because I didn’t remember giving it to him. I picked up my Biro from his coffee table and wrote in it with a flourish:
To Hugh, you’re a pervert and should stop reading this filth. Love and kisses, Estelle May.
Gradually I worked through all of them, signing the front pages. And as I did, something occurred to me, something I’d never noticed before because I’d never looked at all sixteen of my erotic novels at once.
My heroines were invariably beautiful, desirable, independent women who saw what they wanted and seized it without any thought about the consequences.
Every single one of them was exactly like my sister June.
I put the copy of
Cuffed and Collared
back on the shelf next to its sisters. Great. Just great. She wasn’t only in my house and in my office; she was here, too.
And how was I going to make my current book any better now that the knowledge was in my head that for nearly six years I’d been writing erotic novels based on my sister?
I sat back down on the couch and toyed with the pen and stared at the lined paper.
I couldn’t write about my sister again. Now that I knew, it seemed far too pathetic.
What was I going to do instead - write an erotic novel based on me?
9
‘Another glass of red, doll, and a pint of Stella for Hugh.’ June smiled winningly at me and put a crisp twenty-pound note on the bar.
‘What happened to dinner?’ I asked her.
I wish I could say my voice was calm, and that I was being mature and keeping everything in perspective, but I wasn’t. I’d wrestled two hours with my novel, crossing out every sentence I wrote and several I’d written days ago, for good measure.
Every word seemed wrong. Sometimes there was magic in the air; when I wrote my novels, especially at the beginning, the story would flow out of me and I would laugh at my own audacity. But there was no magic today, not in this book.
Maybe there never was going to be any magic with this book; maybe the whole thing was stupid. Maybe I was a rubbish writer who’d never be good for anything except churning out second-rate smut.
When I’d come back home there was nothing in the kitchen except for two used teabags and a lingering whiff of tobacco. I’d been muttering to myself and fuming ever since, too angry to eat, and my temper and my appetite weren’t improved by seeing my sister cosily curled up with Hugh in the corner of the Mouse and Duck when I came in for my shift.
‘Oh, Hugh came by and said he’d been to the bank,’ June said, ‘so I figured, why eat when you can drink? Better do me a Jack Daniel’s on ice while you’re at it, and do you want anything? Hugh’s paying.’ She showed me the twenty again.
‘June, do you ever keep any of your promises?’
My heart was beating like the bass on the pub’s ancient jukebox; my body felt as if it were on the edge of a precipice, about to fling myself out of the rules of my own life.
Eleanor is not like June. And Eleanor does not fight or argue. She stays detached and sensible
, I thought
.
I put both my hands on the bar and braced myself. I’d heard enough arguments over the years, through the walls and floorboards of our house in Upper Pepperton, and sworn never to act that way myself. That I would never get so angry I lost control, lost myself, dissolved into powerless tears and accusations as my mother always did whenever she was confronted with my sister’s defiance of the way that the rest of the world behaved.
My face felt stiff and red and my stomach rolled. June blinked at me. At first I thought it was in surprise, and then she blinked again and I realised she was actually fluttering her eyelashes at me.
‘Honey, I’m sorry. I’ll do it tomorrow night, yeah? It’s just that Hugh was so charming and he insisted I come out with him.’ She wiggled the twenty again. ‘You sure you won’t have a drink?’
‘No thanks.’ I poured her drinks and slapped them down on the bar.