Tina has finished laughing and she’s nodding at what he’s saying. Go on, she whispers directly into my head. Go on and have fun with your family. What’s all this time for if you can’t enjoy it?
‘All right, I’ll call Nicole on the way to pick Bella up, ask her to divert the phones when she leaves the office.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Logan replies. ‘I wonder if a Uviss has that much spirit.’ And he dissolves into laughter again.
‘Next time, you have got to take me with you,’ Bella says. We’re two bottles of white and six bottles of beer down and the story has grown and expanded with every retelling, even I’ve joined in because it feels so ridiculous I can’t quite believe I reacted like that.
‘Oh, right, so you can sit there with us, a line of Carlisles terrifying the teaching staff? Pretty sure they’re the ones who’re meant to scare us.’ I shake my head and then down a mouthful of too-tart, too-chilled wine. ‘Bet she wished she’d waited for Alain now and hadn’t insisted I come in without him,’ I smirked loudly as Mrs Long’s face wafts across my mind again. ‘That will teach her! Literally teach-er!’
Bella sprays wine all over table. ‘You are out of order,’ she admonishes and wipes a sleeve over her mouth. ‘So, you and Alain . . .’ My sister always pronounces his name phonetically – A-Lane, ‘You do school and stuff together?’
‘Yeah, course.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got the most civilised break-up on Earth.’
I snarl at Logan from the corner of my mouth. ‘Who said we’d broken up? Logan?’
‘You think that pitiful show you put on every Sunday works on anyone except Mum and Dad? And not even on them; they just pretend it works on them because if they pretend hard enough they think it’ll be true.’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say. More wine. I need more wine. I down what’s in my glass and then pour myself another from the dregs left in the bottle.
‘For the record, I think he’s a really nice guy. Decent, good-looking, clever, good dresser, adores the bones of you and Betina. I just wish you’d allow yourself to be loved. And loved by a man as decent as A-Lane.’
Away from our parents, Bella is a different person. Almost literally. Away from our parents she lives in a nice yellow-bricked house two streets over from Mum and Dad. She runs a publicity business from the office she’s created in her converted attic. She has client meetings, she runs campaigns and she gives definitive advice you’d be downright silly to ignore. Around our folks, Bella barely speaks and when she does, she stutters with nerves, and she keeps dropping things. If Logan has a position of strength with the Carlisles, then she has one of no agency.
‘You really need to listen to her,’ Logan says. ‘I was saying the same to her the other day. She really needs to listen to you.’
Bella turns a look on him that is worthy of one of Betina’s disdainful expressions. ‘Like you’re one to talk. You’ve been going out with someone for nearly a year and you’re still too chicken to tell us her name, let alone let us meet her.’
It’s Logan’s turn to turn on me. ‘Poppy,’ he hisses.
‘Like I need Poppy to tell me you’re completely in love with someone but won’t allow yourself to admit it because it’d be too weak? You’d be too happy?’
Logan meekly takes a long pull on his beer and shuts up. It’s almost worth being told off to see that look on his face.
‘What a mess we Carlisles are when it comes to love,’ I say with a smile.
‘What? No. Don’t put me in with you two freak-show screw-ups. My love life is perfectly fine, thank you. I have a man who loves me and who I love and our life is on our planned trajectory.’
‘Those men who live on the telly aren’t really your boyfriends, Bels,’ Logan patronises. ‘They’re make-believe.’
‘Erm, I know?’ she replies with such sarcastic scorn, we both stare at her. ‘Myron is very real.’
‘But you broke up with Myron when you moved down here,’ Logan says.
‘Says who?’
‘Erm, you just never talk about him. Never bring him up. Never see him. Nothing.’
My sister wrinkles her nose. ‘I see him every Thursday to Sunday. Where do you think I go? Why do you think I’m there a bit later for Sunday lunch every other week? I’m on my way back from London. And on the alternate week he comes here.’
‘But you don’t bring him to Sunday lunch,’ I say.
‘You think I’m inflicting that on him? Unlike you two messed-up dudes, I know how to love and to be loved. I like my partner and I won’t put him in rubbish situations.’
‘Wow,’ Logan says.
‘Yeah, wow. In eight months we’ll have saved enough money to pay off the mortgage on the house and we can afford for him to move here permanently.’
‘What? Just how?’ I ask.
‘ “How” is that when I see a decent person and he offers me love, I go with it. I accept his love and I give love back and I enjoy myself around him. Love is not complicated for me. It doesn’t have to be for you two, either. Just get over yourselves.’
With our sister’s words ringing in our ears, we spend the rest of the afternoon getting very, very drunk.
verity
July, 2019
‘It’s been three weeks and neither of us has mentioned the elephant in the room,’ Logan stated.
I was reading one of the science magazines he’d bought me that morning on the breakfast run, and he was interspersing his reading with long pauses to kiss lines of desire up and down my skin.
‘I don’t see an elephant,’ I replied.
He moved to snuggling into the crook of my neck. ‘Be serious. This is serious. What are we doing here, babe?’
‘We’re doing something that allows you to call me “babe” without a hint of irony.’
‘Are you going to tell your parents?’
‘Are you going to tell your sister?’
‘I was meant to be getting your mother to confess. I got waylaid.’
‘Waylaid, huh?’
‘In the best way possible, but still waylaid. I don’t know what to do now. Because I do not want this to end. But I suspect it will if I march in and tell your mother I think she got away with murder.’
I placed my hand on his forehead and moved him smartly away from my body. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ he said, trying to come back to where he was.
‘But you still think she did it.’
‘And you still think Poppy did it.’
Deadlock, I thought. ‘Deadlock,’ I said.
Logan sat back. Slowly he ran his hand through his hair as he let out a long sigh. ‘Deadlock.’
‘Can we just not tell anyone? No one really needs to know, do they?’
‘No, I suppose they don’t if we’re going to just let my sister continue with this half-life she’s living. You know, seeing as I started all this for her.’
‘I don’t know the answer, Logan,’ I snapped. He had raised every single hackle, had destroyed our Sunday-morning buzz. ‘If I ever meet anyone who tells me how to deal with this sort of thing, I’ll pass on those life lessons to you quick smart.’