My sister’s husband is loved by the entire family and though we get along, I feel that where he is a dog person, I am like a cat being shoved in his lap.
He leads me through to the garden. For a moment I stand motionless, taking it all in. My sister doesn’t do anything by halves. There are two large silk-white tepees, adorned with bunting and fairy lights, and above them, pastel paper decorations hang from tree branches, dancing slightly in the summer breeze; to my left is a bank of wooden tables where cheese boards and colourful bowls of salads and desserts jostle for room; to my right is the sizzling BBQ. As I carry my dessert over to the artfully displayed pavlovas and Victoria sponges, I notice the fences have been repainted in navy, and the summer house in a dusky pink. This party is Pinterest-perfect. Beautiful, expensive people wearing beautiful, expensive things.
I grab a drink and spot my parents sitting together on the swing seat across the lawn. There’s an intimacy in the way they look at each other which is special after thirty-five years. Dad has his arm slung casually around Mum’s shoulders, a bottle of cider dangling between his fingers. She relaxes against him and sips her wine. He whispers something to her, his eyes crinkling at their corners. She blushes and gently slaps his leg in mock reproach. As a teenager, I’d have gagged, but as a twenty-eight-year-old woman, I feel a sliver of envy. I want what they have, that easy, long-lasting love. Maybe I’ve already had it. For the first time in days, I think about Noah. Him sliding between my legs, whispering he loved me beneath the sheets of a hotel bedroom in Copenhagen where he’d whisked me away for a surprise weekend; him lying too still in a hospital bed, tubes and wires snaking in and out of his skin, shallow breathing through broken ribs.
Pushing the memory of him to the bottom of myself, I look over at my parents again; Mum’s eyes light up, so do Dad’s, but they don’t see me – Ada is the focus of their pride. My sister is standing with a group of women who could all be clones of one another: floral maxi dresses, chunky heels, hair sweeping just above their collarbones in ‘effortless’ beachy waves that probably took an hour to perfect. Ada throws her head back and laughs. Forever the Queen Bee.
Everyone says it’s obvious we’re sisters; even Mum gets confused when she looks at old baby photos. We have the same high cheekbones, square chin and long lashes, but my lips are bee-stung, fuller than hers, my eyes green instead of grey, and where my hair is honey, hers is caramel. She’s older than me by four years and taller than me by three inches. And though she didn’t finish her A-levels, much less go to university, she married rich, and her reward is the beautiful house, the shiny car and the picture-perfect husband. My parents laid out two paths for me: one with university, a career and an exciting life in the city; another with marriage, a mortgage and babies. Since straying from the path I’d started on, I’m nothing to them but a situation to be fixed. So while my sister’s ability to bag the right man is celebrated, my achievements are ignored like cracked brooches at the bottom of a bargain bin. But if I could just get my name onto the front cover of a book, maybe Mum and Dad would look at me the way they look at her.
I get myself another drink. Mum appears at my side. ‘Darling, I didn’t know you’d arrived.’
I fix a bright smile before turning to face her. ‘I’ve barely been here two minutes. You look great,’ I say, taking in the navy Marks & Spencer playsuit she bought in the sale last summer. She’s lost weight, only a few pounds, but she was already slim to begin with.
She beams at me. ‘I’ve been going to hot yoga with Ada.’
‘You used the vouchers I got for your birthday?’
She brightens. ‘Oh, it was you who gave them to me! You know, I honestly couldn’t remember.’
‘You should’ve told me you were going, I’d have come too,’ I say, trying to keep the hurt from my voice.
She sips her drink. ‘It gets harder to keep the weight off the older you get. I used to have a figure like yours, once upon a time. I’m telling you, Elodie, men age like fine wine; women rot like meat. Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s go see your father.’
They fill me in on the latest. When we’ve exhausted the gossip, we lapse into comfortable silence. I’m on my second glass of Merlot since I arrived and it’s making my head spin. If Ada knows I’m here, she hasn’t come over to say hello, which must be some sort of violation of whatever Stepford wife etiquette she subscribes to. I catch a glimpse of her pale blue dress as she glides across the lawn, smiling demurely at her other guests, and I can’t help but wonder, for the millionth time, how we’re so different, how things between us became so frosty.
Mum looks adoringly around the garden. ‘It is beautiful, isn’t it, Martin? Ada’s done a wonderful job of it. We should think about repainting our fences.’
Dad nods, and I try not to roll my eyes because Ada did not paint the fences herself. She’s just as likely to be caught with a roller in one hand and a pot of ‘Sapphire Salute’ in the other as she is in Crocs and woolly socks. Dad turns to me. ‘Did you get that outside security light fixed at your place?’
I shake my head. ‘I emailed the landlord, but he takes a week to get back to me about anything.’
‘Useless,’ mutters Dad. ‘I told you I’ll come over and do it.’
‘Thanks, but, like I said, if you mess with it and something goes wrong, I’m liable. I could lose my deposit.’
‘Bloody ridiculous, standing outside in the dark.’
I imagine the man with the serial-killer glasses following me home at night, then creeping up the steps behind, watching me fumble for my key beneath the broken security light, his moist breath on the back of my neck.
‘You okay, love?’ asks Mum. ‘You’re awfully twitchy.’
I nod. I haven’t told my parents about the man I think is following me. I don’t want to worry them, especially not at Ada’s party.
‘You wouldn’t have these issues if you owned instead of rented,’ says Mum with the air of a schoolteacher addressing a wayward child. ‘It’s a waste of money.’
Briefly, I close my eyes, already weary. We have this conversation at least once a month. She and Dad bought their first house in 1984 for ￡34,000 and they don’t seem to grasp the fact that, thanks to an inflated house market and wages failing to keep up, deposits are extortionate. Anyone I know who’s my age and owns a house only managed it because a family member copped it and they got a healthy inheritance to ease their mourning. Or, like Ada, married rich.
Sensing my reluctance to cover old ground, she changes the subject. ‘So, are you seeing anyone?’
Out of the frying pan and into the inferno. I’m going to need another drink to get through this conversation.