Hugh put his arm around me. This in itself was not unusual. It was warm for March, but it was still March and he was welcome warmth. I took another drink of wine, closed my eyes, and thought about funny sex. The film had been ridiculous, but imagine something that would turn you on and make you laugh at the same time . . .
From funny sex my thoughts inevitably wandered to Rupert, my latest crush. For a moment I allowed myself to fantasise that the arm around me belonged to him.
I knew Rupert through my former room-mate Leena, who moved in remote circles but who still spoke to me occasionally. Rupert was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, floppy-haired, and played cricket. Normally I didn’t go for sporty types, but Rupert had something, some sort of confidence and style I’d never seen before. Maybe it was the way he wore those white, white cricket jumpers with no hint of irony. I pictured myself cuddling into Rupert’s blinding jumper and looking up to see him gazing down at me in the moonlight. He’d put a finger underneath my chin, lift my face up to his, and kiss me with the same sort of talent he brought to bowling.
The thought made me sigh in romantic lust. I felt Hugh’s arm tighten around me, I heard him mutter something I didn’t quite listen to about taking charge of his life, and then he took the bottle of wine from my hand. I still had my eyes closed but it seemed as if he drank for a very long time.
When he put the bottle down on the path it made a hollow, empty sound. I opened my eyes and frowned. There had been about a third of the bottle left when I’d last taken a drink.
I leaned forward to pick up the wine to see if Hugh had hogged it all, and at that moment Hugh lunged towards me. I felt the warmth of his breath, the heat of his lips, on the side of my face near my ear. And something wet that I realised, with shock, was his tongue.
I jumped off the bench, knocking the wine bottle over on to the path. ‘Hugh,’ I gasped, ‘did you just
try to kiss me?’
I stood in the moonlight and stared at Hugh. He appeared to be as surprised as I was.
A quick calculation told me that if I hadn’t moved at exactly the same time that Hugh had lunged, he would have planted his mouth right on to mine.
‘You tried to stick your tongue down my throat,’ I said, and, as I didn’t know how to deal with the idea of my best friend kissing me, I started to laugh.
A duck, roused from sleep in the nearby weeds, splashed in alarm and launched itself into the air, flapping and quacking.
Hugh put his hand to his face and rubbed it. ‘I guess I did. Funny, huh?’
It had been a joke. ‘What were you thinking?’ I asked, relieved.
He stood up and brushed himself off. ‘Just practising my aim. I think we can conclude that it isn’t very good.’
He went to pick up the bottle, kicked it off the path instead, and went into the bushes to fetch it. I heard him cracking branches and swearing and I started laughing all over again, and Hugh laughed too, and everything was normal, our friendship was the same.
Anyway, obviously the whole episode was caused by Hugh suddenly discovering his sex drive. He began practising his aim on a regular basis, with a succession of female students, and apparently he was getting better and better, because none of the girls went around wiping their ears.
He still had plenty of time to spend with me, so I didn’t mind. It gave me something to tease him about. Besides, it left me a little bit of breathing room to look for that extraordinary boyfriend of my own, the one who never quite seemed to turn up - or if he did, he never stuck around.
7
Five and a half years and two STD examinations later, Hugh was waiting for me outside the clinic. He only wore glasses when he was driving these days, and he no longer bought the majority of his clothes from charity shops. I linked my arm through his and we started walking together.
‘You don’t look too traumatised,’ I said.
‘You should have seen me when they got that long-handled swab out. I nearly knocked the door down and came to kill you.’
‘You would’ve had an easy target. A person can’t move that quickly when she’s on her back with her feet in stirrups.’
‘I think the nurse who took my sexual history was intrigued,’ he said. ‘Do you think it would be tacky to go back and ask her out?’
I kept walking, pulling him along. After a moment of pretending to resist he carried on with me.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘It can’t hurt to get a clean bill of health.’
‘No.’
‘You shouldn’t have made me the appointment.’
‘Probably not.’
‘I do have things that are my own business.’
‘I know,’ I said, though I hadn’t known it before. Hugh had always seemed to conduct his love life (or the non-naked parts of it, anyway) largely in the public eye. He’d never seemed in the least bit private or embarrassed about it. Or about anything, come to that.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I wasn’t used to treading carefully with Hugh.
He nodded. From the side his profile looked vaguely hawklike: strong chin, prominent brows, high cheekbones, and straight nose with a hint of a hooky bend at the end. His lips pressed together and reinforced the resemblance.
Funny how in many ways I still thought of him as that gawky first-year uni boy, when for a long time he’d been a man. Habit, I guessed.
Over the years he’d developed some sort of sex appeal for women without seeming to invest much of an effort. I’d watched him on the pull many a time and he was never particularly flirtatious - he was friendly, cheerful, attentive, but he was that way with everyone. He was that way with me. Somehow it made women fall into bed with him.
We didn’t have far to walk; our houses were only a few streets over from the hospital, in one of the many nineteenth-century rows of terraces built for workers in Reading’s biscuit or brick factories. I kept hold of his arm, but we didn’t talk.
The nurse had said I could ring for my results in a week, and I imagined she’d told Hugh the same thing. I had a week to try not to think about what I was going to find out. Hopefully now that I’d made a positive step I would be able to write without my worries intruding. Hopefully.
Hugh finally spoke as he and I rounded the corner to our terrace. ‘It could have been a good thing, anyway, getting checked out,’ he said. ‘Like making a fresh start.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Look, El, I need to ask you something I should have asked you a long time ago.’
I opened my mouth to say sure, and then I spotted the figure in front of my house and I gasped.
She sat on my doorstep, too thin, too pale, gorgeous in a tiny slip dress, black tights and tall, tall boots. Her dark, straight hair fell around her face in attractive disarray.
My wild, unpredictable, glamorous older sister June.
She jumped to her feet at the sight of us and ran to us, fast-moving in high heels.
‘Ellie, doll!’ she cried and threw her arms around me. Her hug was remarkably energetic for someone so skinny, and she never seemed to age, though she was nearly forty by now. I hugged her back.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, delighted. ‘I haven’t seen you since Christmas.’
Christmas, when she’d shown up unexpectedly in Upper Pepperton with her boyfriend Jojo, who was large and mysterious-looking with designer white-man dreadlocks and a sharply tailored suit. She’d showered expensive gifts on us and my mother had hastily set two extra places at the table. Jojo had sat in the chair I still thought of as my dad’s, helping himself to implausibly large amounts of brussels sprouts, and I’d listened to June talking. I drank in her careless words and wondered about her life.
She hadn’t stayed long enough; she never stayed long enough. She wound up my mother, probably because they were so different.
‘And who is this breathtaking thing?’ she asked me, turning to Hugh.
‘Hugh Gibson.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
‘Well, haven’t you done well, little sis?’ She took Hugh’s hand and instead of shaking it, she leaned forward and up and planted a big kiss on his mouth.
Hugh looked surprised, but not wholly unpleased. June had one of those wide, sexy mouths meant to be slathered in red lipstick and wrapped around parts of male anatomy.
‘Hugh’s my best friend,’ I told her. ‘He lives next door.’
I’d told her about him before, on the rare occasions I’d seen her, but she obviously didn’t remember. Unlike Hugh, who’d heard me talk about the mystery that was my older sister over and over again, and who seemed very interested indeed.
Of course he would be. She was beautiful and charming and lawless. Aside from our hair and eye colour you wouldn’t know we were related.
‘It’s wonderful to meet you, Hugh,’ June said, giving him one of her wide, wide smiles. She was fourteen years older than I was, but she had that type of bone structure that made it difficult to tell her real age.
Then she turned to me. ‘Ellie, doll, I’m coming to stay with you for a little while! Isn’t that wonderful?’
For the first time, I noticed two large canvas duffel bags on my doorstep. I unlocked the door and June wafted inside. I reached for one of her bags but Hugh beat me to it and picked up both of them.
‘Your sister is really something,’ he said to me in a low voice.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘She’s never been to Reading before. I’ve never even had a card from her. And now she turns up out of the blue.’
‘What do you think she wants?’
‘I don’t know if she wants anything. June just turns up. That’s how she works.’
And whenever she did turn up, she brought intrigue, like a scented whirlwind scattering fairy dust.
‘It’s nice to see her,’ I added, though June was never quite ‘nice’.
She wasn’t like normal people. She didn’t have a steady job and she’d lived all over the globe with all kinds of different men. She didn’t own a house and she hadn’t finished school. Sometimes she had a lot of money and sometimes she was stone broke and showed up asking my mother for a loan she’d never repay. Today, the dress and boots she was wearing looked expensive-chic, but her duffel bags were Army surplus.
June had already gone into the kitchen. Hugh put down her bags and the two of us followed her. I put on the kettle while Hugh sat next to June at the table squeezed into the corner of the tiny terraced-housed kitchen. She looked incongruous in the familiar surroundings; a bit of wildness in my tidy home.
‘So June, what have you been up to?’ I asked her, putting on the kettle.
‘Oh, babe, what haven’t I been up to.’ She laughed her throaty laugh and took a packet of tobacco and rolling papers out from somewhere. Her dress didn’t seem big enough for pockets, so maybe she’d had them hidden in her knickers.
‘Like what?’ I asked, taking down some mugs.
‘Oh, ups, downs, everything.’ She began the delicate task of rolling a cigarette. She’d always liked to roll her own. When I’d been younger, she’d used liquorice paper and strange-scented tobaccos that filled the house with exotic scents. My mother had hated it.
‘How about you,’ she said, ‘what have you been up to, Ellie? You look so grown-up in your own house. Where are you working?’
‘The same place,’ I said, and then, when I saw her blank look, added, ‘the pub.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, although it was clear she hadn’t remembered such a boring snippet of information.
‘What brings you to Reading?’ I asked.
‘Well, I would have come a lot sooner if I’d known you had such an adorable house and a good-looking neighbour.’ She turned to Hugh, who was sitting perforce very close to her. ‘What’s going on between you and my little sister?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘We’re just friends.’
‘Mmm. Got a girlfriend, then?’