After I’d hung up, I’d accompanied my sister to the self-help section in Piccadilly’s Waterstones and watched her root the book out from the bottom shelf.
How to be the Best Step-parent or some crap – that’s what she chose. ‘Confront the challenges head-on,’ read the tag line.
She’d been worried about Frank too. Worried he’d feel left out and not the ‘only one’ any more. Worried that the twins wouldn’t accept her; worried they would compare her to their mother. Hoping to make a ‘new family’.
What did we know about family though?
I’d told her to stop over-thinking – as usual.
‘Just get on with it,’ I’d instructed again, a fortnight ago, over Jeanie’s hen-night cocktails in the Covent Garden Hotel, when she said it was still ‘a bit sticky’ with the girl. ‘How can anyone not like you, Jean?’
‘Quite easily.’ She ate her olive morosely. ‘I can’t get Scarlett to smile at me at all. I offered to take her clothes shopping last week, and she just left the room without speaking.’
‘Horrible age, babe,’ I reminded her, licking the salt from my hand and downing my tequila. ‘Think what we were like at fourteen.’
Not helpful, actually, that last comment. We were hardly today’s typical teens, my sister and I. Too busy fending for ourselves to have hissy fits about potential step-parents.
Too busy with the business of survival.
* * *
Matthew came to meet Jeanie after our cocktails. They were going to stay the night in the hotel – and when I saw him scoop her off her feet outside the main doors, her cheeks flushing with pleasure and excitement as she disappeared into his embrace, at least I could relax a bit.
This man was besotted by my sister – that much was obvious.
Strange match they might seem, but then stranger things have happened. He treated her like she was made of glass; he seemed to see her as precious.
And she is. Infinitely precious.
* * *
When I couldn’t make the wedding at the weekend, when I texted to say I had to follow up a lead on a story about corruption in the back benches – Cameron’s lot and their sense of entitlement – that if I didn’t, my job would be on the line – Jeanie insisted it was fine. But I knew it wasn’t really. I sent the biggest bouquet of flowers Interflora did, but I still felt shit about it.
Especially when my ‘big story’ turned out to be a complete dud. Maybe I should have examined my own motives for not attending the wedding more closely. Maybe.
Now I closed the wedding photo down to read the directions to the sixth-form college I was visiting this afternoon. I was giving a talk on social media, responsibility and digital journalism. I was trying to do my bit; trying to make amends.
I also had to tell Jeanie I wasn’t going to their New Year’s Eve party. Matthew might be good for my sister, but wild dogs wouldn’t have dragged me to mingle with his money-market mates. I was a little hazy on what exactly his job was, but bankers really didn’t do it for me. Bankers had nearly been my own professional downfall.
Maybe, though, maybe I’d leave telling Jeanie that till tomorrow.
Four
Jeanie
31 December 2014
3 p.m.
* * *
The party is starting in less than four hours. I’m behind already and horribly anxious as I arrive back to find an elderly lady hovering just outside the drive. Our drive, I should say.
Except nothing feels like ‘ours’ to me yet, whatever Matthew says.
The lady ignores my polite beep, refusing to move more than an inch, but eventually I manage to squeeze carefully around her, parking my old car behind the phalanx of shiny, far grander vehicles.
Trying to avoid her eye, I drag Matthew’s dry cleaning out, along with a big box of wine glasses I bought this morning, before my cursed trip to the hairdresser’s.
My hairdo, as my Nan would have called it, is truly awful. I don’t know why I let the girl keep going when I could see the disaster it was becoming – but I just grinned at her manically in the mirror as she turned me into a bouffant Miss Piggy.
Or rather, I do know why I let her carry on. It’s because I didn’t want to upset her. Can’t say boo to a goose me.
And it was because I was distracted.
Whilst the girl cut and curled, I had a cup of tea and scanned a copy of something glossy – maybe it was OK! magazine; I’m not sure. Mid-read about Kylie’s love life, I sensed eyes on me – but it was just a couple glancing at the price list in the window. They walked on.
I finished the magazine and looked for something else to read. I avoided the newspaper rack – I don’t like newspapers any more – but I did catch the Daily Mail’s front-page story – about that girl who’d disappeared from London on Christmas Eve. Apparently they thought she’d quite likely flown to Turkey, planning to travel on to Syria in what they call ‘hijrah’: jihad by emigration.