The Ugly Sister (13 page)

The new chilly atmosphere persists right into the weekend. Cleo huffily cries off going out for a family trip on Saturday – a day which everyone had agreed to spend together pottering around the South Bank, primarily so Abi could go to the Tate Modern and then down to the Tower, which, she has discovered, the girls have also never been to. Not that they have shown the slightest interest in going there, but anyway. Despite Abi’s protestations that she could still go alone or with Tara and Megan, whichever suited everyone best, Jon insists that he come too, so that she can slope off to the upstairs galleries in the Tate while he amuses the girls on the interactive giant wooden sculptures, made for climbing on, which are currently in the Turbine Hall.

‘Otherwise you won’t get to do anything you want to do,’ he says.

On the one hand he’s right. Abi really doesn’t want to spend yet another day amusing two small girls on her own. It’s exhausting. Especially when all they really want to do is go clothes shopping. But the idea of spending a whole day playing happy families with Jon makes her feel anxious. Will he pick up on her ridiculous crush? Which is what she’s decided it is,
the reason for her blushes and palpitations whenever Jon is around. Will she forget herself and flirt with her sister’s husband? No, she thinks, definitely not the latter. She is loyal to her sister no matter what, never mind that she has always run from married or even just attached men like they had the Plague. She would never go there. But what she might well do is colour up like a complete idiot every time Jon speaks to her.

She can’t decide what to do, but, while she dithers around arguing with herself in her own head, Jon makes the decision for her and before she knows it they’re out the door and in a taxi.

Abi is ridiculously self-conscious of where and how she sits in the cab, making a big deal to Megan of how much fun it would be to sit on the pull-down seats and go backwards, and then keeping her legs tucked under her just in case there’s a jolt and her foot brushes Jon’s.

She is all too aware that she has had crushes like this before. That’s how she knows it will pass. In fact, she seems to have them all the time, blushing inappropriately when the postman rings the doorbell, or, for a while, stumbling over her words whenever she was in the local seafront café and the ancient owner’s son served her. After a few days she usually snaps out of it and then spends weeks thanking every deity she can conjure up that she didn’t do anything about it. Not only does her infatuation disappear as quickly
as it arrived, but generally she can see nothing – nothing – attractive about the person she has spent hours fantasizing about once it has gone. In fact, having twinkled and batted her eyelashes in their presence for weeks, she can barely even look at them until she knows that if they ever did receive the message that she was flirting with them they have now definitely
received the follow-up that it’s all over and they’re never to mention it again. There must be some seriously confused men in Deal.

She attributes her adolescent behaviour to the fact that she has been on her own for way too long. Since she had Phoebe – eighteen years ago now – she has barely had what could be described as a relationship, because whenever it came down to it and she had to ask herself the question ‘Could I ever see this man being a father for my child?’ the answer has always been no. So there was never any point in carrying on.

After a couple of years she decided there wasn’t really much point even starting a relationship because she was only going to end it fairly rapidly once she had to decide whether to introduce them to her daughter or not. Consequently Phoebe has never met any man Abi has been involved with. Abi has never even told her daughter about them. None of them ever felt ‘Phoebe worthy’. At least, this is the spin she has always put on the situation when she is torturing herself with her aloneness. Deep down she suspects that she actually rejects all men before they
have a chance to reject her so that she doesn’t have to relive the whole Phoebe’s-father humiliation, but she has no intention of acknowledging that fact, even to herself.

Anyway, whatever the psychology behind it, the bottom line is that lack of real male companionship equals indiscriminate schoolgirl crushes, which she now knows count for nothing but which pass the time. So far none has been as screamingly inappropriate as the current one on her brother-in-law, but she puts that down to the fact that they’re living in very close proximity and he’s being nice to her in a time of emotional stress (i.e. her need for a proper sisterly relationship with Cleo and Cleo’s apparent indifference). She’s fully aware of how pitiful that sounds. It’s that easy – be in her immediate surroundings and be kind to her and you will be rewarded by being her crush object of the day. It’s funny but, however much she can rationalize about the whole situation, she still can’t control her blushes and stutters and stupid girly nervous laughter. Her head knows that this is
meaningless and pointless, but her body is still bent on shaming her. Maybe she’ll tell him that she’s having an early menopause. That would explain the redness at least.

Luckily Jon seems entirely oblivious to her state of mind. He hardly knows her, after all. He probably thinks she’s always this socially inept. He’s a little preoccupied at the moment anyway with Tara’s moaning
that she doesn’t want to waste a day going to an art gallery and the stupid Tower that’s for tourists and the under-fives.

‘You never know, you might enjoy yourself,’ Abi says, and Tara rolls her eyes. ‘At least do me a favour and give it a chance,’ Abi tries as Jon and Megan walk on ahead, ‘for your dad’s sake. He’s giving up his day off, so, you know, it’d be nice if he thought you’d had a good time.’ Tara acts like a teenager so Abi figures that trying to talk to her in a mature way might just work.

‘It’s for little kids,’ she whines, and Abi has to stop herself from saying, ‘You’re ten! What is that if it’s not a little kid?’

‘Listen,’ she says, trying to adopt a calm and conspiratorial tone. ‘You know that modelling is all about pretending, right? Pretending you’re really enjoying standing knee-deep in freezing water in a bikini in February, pretending you’re in love with the male model you’re shooting with when his breath smells like onions and old socks, pretending you don’t think you look stupid in some ridiculous haute couture concoction with a hat that looks like a lobster on your head. It’s acting. It’s just acting without the words.’ This has definitely got Tara’s attention now; she’s looking at her aunt with interest. ‘So look on this as your first modelling job. I’m the client and I want you to pretend you’re having a great time climbing up those wooden sculptures. How about it?’

‘OK,’ she shrugs. ‘But I’m still not going to enjoy it.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Abi says. ‘In fact, even better. Gives you a chance to show how good you really are.’

When they get to the Tate, she makes for the stairs, arranging to meet the others for lunch at twelve o’clock – in an hour’s time. Not long enough really to explore all the delights the Tate has to offer, but Jon, quite rightly, is worried that he won’t be able to keep the girls entertained for any longer than that. So she heads straight for Level Three and the room where they keep the Francis Bacons along with a few other favourites of hers, knowing that an hour is perfect to do justice to that one section of the gallery only. She’s finding it hard to lose herself in the paintings, though, so she wanders around aimlessly, stopping here and there. After fifteen minutes she’s waltzed round three sides and not really experienced anything, so she decides to take herself in hand and go back and start again from the beginning and do it properly. She hasn’t been here for what seems like years – who
knows when she might be here again – she owes it to herself to make the most of it. She forces herself to concentrate and after a few more minutes she’s so absorbed in what she’s seeing that she doesn’t even notice the time go by.

When she gets back down to the ground floor, expecting to see Jon and the two girls already waiting impatiently for her beside the fire exit they agreed on
as their meeting point, she’s surprised to see there’s no sign of them. She checks her watch. She’s a couple of minutes late. She wonders if they got impatient and headed outside already, and she’s about to go and check when she hears a voice shouting, ‘Auntie Abigail, look!’

Abi tries to see where the voice is coming from. The ground-floor exhibit is of oversize wooden sculptures, smooth as hazelnuts, with a complex arrangement of stairs carved up the sides of them and through the middle of each one. There are branch-like structures joining them high up with tunnelling through the centre and along the top, and these serve as walkways, probably forty feet up. A hole at the bottom of one nut seems to be spilling people out of it, so she guesses there’s some kind of slide inside. As an art exhibit it leaves her cold, but as a climbing frame it’s fantastic. People are lining up to climb them, many of them with kids. Abi hears her name being called again and she looks up at the highest branch and there are Tara and Megan waving down at her.

‘Come up!’ Tara shouts. She looks like she’s got her brief nailed down to a T. Something about her strikes Abi as a bit strange, though, a bit unusual, and then she realizes what it is: Tara really is behaving like a child. She’s not putting it on to make Abi or her father happy. She actually looks as if she’s enjoying herself. Her hair is all messed up and one leg of her (designer) skinny jeans has come untucked from
her Uggs. She’s not worrying about what she looks like or whether she’s being sophisticated enough – she’s just having fun.

‘OK,’ Abi shouts back. She looks at the queue. There’s probably a ten- or fifteen-minute wait – they are clearly rationing the amount of people allowed to scale the heights at any one time both, she imagines, to enhance your experience once you do get there and for health-and-safety reasons. Abi can’t imagine how much the insurance must cost on something like this – but she doesn’t want to lose the moment. So, head down, she works her way along to the front of the queue muttering to people that she’s really sorry, but her children have gone up without her and she needs to get up there quick to make sure they don’t do anything stupid.

She waves to the girls as she goes as if to prove that there really are children up there who might belong to her. She keeps her fingers crossed that Jon doesn’t appear behind them because she wants to keep up the myth that they are alone and in danger of falling off, at least until she’s on her way up herself. People roll their eyes, some empathetic, some irritated, but no one tells her to stop, so she pushes her way on through and waits to be given the go-ahead to climb on up. Actually, it’s fun negotiating the stairs and tunnels – although she still feels none the wiser about what it’s saying. She rushes through, not really able to take the time to appreciate it, because
something inside her says that this is an important moment. Even with their evening on the Wii, she hasn’t seen Tara properly let her guard down and behave like the ten-year-old she is since she arrived, and she
wants to encourage her as much as she can.

It takes her a few minutes to find them – there are false starts and wrong turns to go down, all part of the fun – but when she does it’s just the two girls who start jumping up and down enthusiastically when they see her.

‘Where’s your dad?’ Abi asks. She’s slightly out of breath. She tells herself she really must do some exercise one of these days. She tries not to look over the edge, vertigo rushing up to meet her.

‘He went down to take a picture,’ Megan says. ‘Come on.’

They take a hand each before Abi can object, and pull her towards a large hole that she assumes – at least she’s hoping – contains the slide.

‘Jump,’ Tara commands, so Abi does what she’s told and the next thing she knows the three of them are hurtling down the curved wooden surface, round and round the inside of the giant hazelnut, like an inside-out helter-skelter. Both girls are screaming and it’s impossible for Abi not to join in. After what seems like an age, they spill out onto the floor laughing, terrified and exhilarated. Jon appears, waving his camera.

‘I got it,’ he says excitedly, and he shows them on
the screen a picture of the three of them at the moment of exit, mouths open, hair on end. Abi looks like … well, she couldn’t even begin to explain what she looks like it’s so bad. But she doesn’t really care – it was fun. Tara and Megan are in fits over the photo and they make Jon scroll back to show Abi the earlier ones they have taken; Jon with Megan, Jon with Tara, the two girls together. They’ve definitely been having fun while she was gone.

‘They’ve been up there five times,’ Jon says as they walk towards the exit on their way to lunch, the girls running on ahead. ‘They didn’t even complain about having to wait. This was a great idea.’

Lunch is pizza on the river. Abi watches how Jon manages to coax Tara into eating more by ordering side dishes he knows she won’t be able to resist and she can’t help but think how good a father he is and how it must be alarming to be bringing up two little girls whose mother is trying to teach them by example that all that matters is being skinny and beautiful. Already Tara pays far too much attention to the way she looks. At least Abi, queen of the five-minute-hair-comb, dab-of-concealer-on-the-worst-offenders and mascara routine, thinks so. But today she seems to be staying in her new ten-year-old mode, and she happily wolfs down everything that’s put in front of her. Megan, who definitely gets her genes more from her aunt than from her mother, orders way too much and sets about eating it all.

Abi wonders briefly how different life would have been for Phoebe if she had had a father around. Any father, not even one as attentive and caring as Jon. Even Dave’s initial rejection of his daughter didn’t have to be final. It didn’t have to mean the door was shut on him ever having a relationship with her. Deep down Abi had understood. They were young. It was never meant to happen. He’d panicked. So she had always kept tabs on where he was, just in case, and, sure enough, one day when Phoebe was fifteen she had announced that she wanted to know more about her father. It was important to find out everything you could about your ancestry, after all. What if she had a congenital disease that she didn’t even know she’d been born with?