Chapter 2
It was raining when I emerged from the Tube after work – a persistent downpour that felt more like December than April and made me offer up a silent prayer to the weather gods to get their shit together before my sister’s wedding in six weeks’ time. Then, without waiting to see if they’d answer (possibly in the form of a lightning bolt striking me down for being so presumptuous as to tell them how to do their jobs), I pulled the hood of my coat up and ran for it.
The truth was, I’d wanted to run since the moment I left the boardroom, where Marion remained seated at the table, her folder in front of her, waiting for her next victim. All I could think was, I need to see my sister. I need Amelie. And so I’d texted her, my thumbs fumbling on the keyboard of my phone, and asked if she was home, and if I could come round.
The flat Amelie shared with Zack was in one of those elegant white stucco-fronted Georgian houses, overlooking a garden square in which cherry trees were valiantly flowering in spite of the chilly weather and persistent wind. But I barely noticed the attractiveness of the surroundings as I hurried up the slippery stone steps and leaned on the buzzer of flat 29A. My sister was expecting me, and normally I heard the click of the lock within seconds, because she generally had something she couldn’t wait to tell me. But this time, I waited, shivering, for a full two minutes – which doesn’t sound like long but does feel like it when you’re loitering on a doorstep wondering if the neighbours think you’re a burglar or a Jehovah’s Witness.
Six months earlier, I’d received a text from my sister at work asking me to come round, ‘Soon as poss, need to talk.’ I don’t believe in telepathy or mysterious sibling bonds or any of that twaddle, but as soon as I saw that message, I thought, ‘Oh. Zack’s asked her to marry him.’ The realisation had come with a surge of happiness for my sister – but only after a fleeting but horrible sinking sensation somewhere underneath my heart.
She’s leaving me behind. There’ll be no coming back from this.
But that unhappy – and frankly selfish – thought had vanished as soon as I saw my sister’s face, positively shining with joy, as radiant as the solitaire diamond on her ring finger. She’d squealed and I’d squealed and we’d done a little hopping dance around her kitchen – or rather, Zack’s kitchen, because where they lived was Zack’s flat and the Smeg fridge and the wine chiller and the two-thousand-pound coffee machine were, of course, all Zack’s.
‘I can’t believe he how lucky I am!’ Amelie had gushed.
Of course, I’d shut that line of thinking down sharpish. It was just a step away from, I can’t believe I’m good enough for him, and if Amelie privately thought that, she needed to stop thinking it, stat. My sister was one hundred per cent amazing, and as far as I was concerned it was Zack who’d got lucky. Not that there was anything wrong with him – on paper, he was the catch to end all catches, with his lean six-foot-something frame, his way of holding the attention in a room that I guess some people would call charismatic, his high-powered something-in-finance career that was the perfect foil for Amelie’s job in PR for companies that did things in finance. Still, I felt that I’d never quite got him – and he certainly didn’t get me. He definitely didn’t get my jokes, laughing a beat too late before he turned back to Amelie and she abruptly stopped laughing herself then turned to him like a flower to the sun. But in the intervening months, her happiness hadn’t dimmed and Zack, too, seemed unable to believe his luck, and my own doubts had more or less melted away.
And as for her leaving me behind – well. She’d done that years ago. Done it, by almost imperceptible increments, since the day she was born, when I was eighteen months old. She’d smiled, crawled, walked, talked, slept through the night and grown teeth and hair earlier than I had. She’d been cast as Mary in the school nativity play when my highest achievement was being a camel. She’d been to a school prom a year before I had, with her then-boyfriend (with whom, obviously, she’d had sex for the first time, when I’d remained a virgin for another four years).
And now, with a kind of inevitability that I accepted without really questioning it, because after all I’d had twenty-seven and a half years to get used to the situation, Amelie was getting married, and I was just as single as I’d ever been.
I’d always known that my sister was quite the catch. If my granny’s insistence on repeating every time she saw the two of us, undeterred by Mum’s glares and shushes, that, ‘Lucy got the brains, but Amelie got the looks,’ hadn’t been enough to bring the reality of our difference home to me, one glance in the mirror – or at the wall where photographs of the two of us at all ages from newborn upwards were displayed – would have been.
As I said, I scrub up okay. I’ve got great hair – long, thick, dark brown and shiny, and it puts up with the benign neglect I lavish on it without complaint – but the rest of me is only really average. Okay skin, an okay figure, a too-big nose and eyes that would be quite nice if they weren’t obscured by my glasses and too sensitive for contact lenses.
Amelie, though – Amelie looks like I was nature’s first attempt, and it had stood back, looked me up and down and thought, ‘Not too bad, but next time I’ll really nail it.’ It was like I was a basic stoneware coffee mug – one of those ones you get free from Sports Direct, maybe – and my sister was the fine bone china version of the same product. All her proportions were subtly different – her eyes bigger and wider set, her cheekbones higher, her jaw more delicately defined, her nose a perfect ski-jump. Her legs were longer, her waist smaller, her teeth whiter.
In the face of all that, I don’t think anyone would blame me for not bothering too much with my appearance, especially as I could never bother as much as Amelie did. Fortnightly manicures and pedicures, subtle eyelash extensions, expensive cuts and blowdries in a salon every six weeks – how she found time for all of it I never knew.
And even now, when at last the door I’d been waiting outside clicked open and I hurried out of the rain and downstairs to the basement flat, I found her swathed like a ghost in a white waffle dressing gown and a sheet mask, the backs of her hands slippery with some sort of oil, her lips sticking out over a pair of plastic mouth-guard things.
She flapped her hands at me then leaned in for a forearm hug, leaving a smear of fragrant goo on my cheek, and gestured to the fridge. Obediently, I found a bottle of white wine and two glasses and carried them through to the living room, where I settled down on the squashy cream sofa to wait. Amelie was hovering in the kitchen doorway, eyes fixed on her phone, thumbs busily tapping away at the screen.
‘What’re you doing?’
She made a ‘hold on’ gesture and said something inaudible around her mouthful of plastic. Then she disappeared into the bathroom. I waited, my eyes falling on the engagement photo of Amelie and Zack that had pride of place on the mantelpiece. It wasn’t a selfie taken in the first giddy moments after he’d said, ‘Will you…?’ and she’d said, ‘Yes!’, but a professional shot taken a couple of weeks after. Zack was in a suit and Amelie was in a pink dress, her perfectly lit face angled to gaze up at him, the smile on her face radiant but not quite natural, as if she was saying, ‘Cheese!’ or possibly, ‘Success!’ I heard splashing water and the hum of an electric toothbrush, then drawers slamming in the bedroom, and a few minutes later she re-emerged, looking more or less normal again.
‘Sorry.’ She flopped down next to me on the sofa, glancing at her phone again. ‘Just logging my macros. I’ve got enough carbs left for a glass of wine – hurrah. Not that I’d let some stupid app tell me I couldn’t, even if I didn’t.’
‘Amelie, you don’t need to bloody diet.’
‘It’s not a diet. Diets are so over. It’s body recomposition through optimum nutrition. Duh.’
I glanced sideways at her. ‘Sounds like a diet to me.’
‘It’s n— okay, it is. But I feel a bit better if I call it something else. I tell you what, though, this wedding can’t come soon enough. If I ever see a tuna and egg-white omelette again after the tenth of June I’ll legit cry.’
‘But you don’t need?—‘
‘It’s not about needing. Come on, Luce. It’s just one day, and I’m chucking everything I’ve got at it because… well, because if I didn’t I’d look at the photos after and think, maybe if I’d put a bit more effort in, I could’ve looked better. And when something’s going to be up on your living room wall for the rest of your life you want to make damn sure it’s as right as it can be.’
‘I still think?—’
‘I tell you what though, it’s a bastarding faff,’ she carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘The skincare, the Callanetics – apparently that used to be thing ages ago, did you know? And it’s back. It’s meant to make you all lean and toned like a dancer. The damn Invisalign retainers. I haven’t told Zack about them – once my teeth were straight I thought that would be it, but no, I have to wear those vile plastic trays every night forever. Except I can’t wear them at night – I mean, I’m getting married. Who goes on honeymoon with those? So I try and wear them for eight hours during the day, except I’m constantly spitting them out when I have meetings.’
‘Or need to eat.’
‘Or to eat. So I’ve been having protein shakes, mostly. They make me feel like I’m receiving palliative care and they taste like chocolate-flavoured chalk.’
She heaved a weary sigh and I poured wine into our glasses and handed her one, watching as she took a deep gulp and then another.
‘Did you sort out the thing with the flowers?’ I asked, remembering some crisis a week or so back, but unable to recall the details.
‘Mum did. We can’t have the original ones I wanted – the giant orange daisy things – because they’d have to be imported from China or something. But the florist showed Mum some alternative ones that we think will do. Honestly, I’m so done with it all now. I just want to be married to Zack. No one tells you when you get engaged that planning a wedding takes over your entire life and before it even happens you’re sick to death of it all and can’t wait for it to be over.’
‘Don’t be daft.’ Since Amelie’s engagement, I’d seen her giddy with joy when she finally found The One (dress, that is), in floods of tears when her dream venue got snapped up before she could book it, and on the verge of a toddler-worthy strop when the invitations got printed in a shade she declared was peach rather than apricot. But this weary resignation was a new one on me, and it worried me. ‘Look, you’ll have heard this before but I’m saying it anyway. It’s just one day. Of course you want everything to be perfect, but in the grand scheme of things?—‘
‘But that’s what I’m saying. It’s just one day. God! All this stress for one stupid day.’
‘So stop. Step away from the tuna omelettes. Ditch the skincare. Chill out a bit and just’ – I produced a pretty poor attempt at chanelling Elsa from Frozen – ‘Let it go.’
‘Yeah, right. If I did, you’d have to listen to me whinge on for years and years about how it could have all been perfect but it wasn’t. This way, at least you only have to put up with my drama for forty-four more days.’
‘Forty-five days. Trust me, I know. I’ve got one of those countdown things on my phone.’ I swiped the screen to life. ‘Actually, forty-five days, fourteen hours and eleven minutes until I get my sister back.’
Except I’d never get my sister back. Not really. In forty-five days and whatever else it was, she’d become Zack’s wife first and Lucy’s sister second, and that would never change back again. And immediately after the wedding, she and Zack were decamping to New York for six months for him to work on some lucrative secondment and her to be his trailing spouse.
‘Have I really been that bad? I’m so sorry, Luce.’
‘Utterly vile,’ I confirmed, smiling.
Amelie grinned back. ‘Well, if I can’t be utterly vile when I’m getting married, when can I? Honestly, I’m sorry. It’s just all so… It’s a lot. Sometimes I wish we’d just decided, “Fuck it,” and eloped to John O’Groats.’
‘You mean Gretna Green.’
‘Whatever.’ Amelie splashed Picpoul into our glasses and scooted round on the sofa so she was facing me, cross-legged. ‘Anyway. How are things with you?’
I took a breath, ready to tell her the whole story of the barely-read warning letter, my meeting with Marion, and the prospect of being able to keep my job – well, a job, at any rate – if I could only think of something valuable I could bring to the Radiant Media party. But before I could get a single word out, I heard myself give a massive gulp that turned into a sob, and suddenly I was crying as if I’d never stop.
‘Oh my God. Luce, what’s wrong? Has something bad happened? Is it Astro?’ My sister hauled me across the sofa and enfolded me in her white towelling arms, and held me tight while I sobbed, patting my back soothingly then passing me tissues when the flood of tears eventually slowed down.
Once I was able to speak again, I poured out the whole story.
‘So I won’t have a job, after next week. I’ll have some redundancy money but it won’t last long and I don’t know what to do,’ I finished self-pityingly. ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me again.’
‘It”s nothing like last time,’ Amelie said firmly. ‘What bastards, though. And this Ross? Who is he, anyway? The fucker.’
‘It’s not really his fault,’ I said. ‘He’s been there longer than me. Last in, first out, they said. If only I could think of another job for me to do, but I can’t.’
‘You can.’ My sister looked at me with the same steely determination I’d seen in her face since she was a baby, determined to reach the vase of roses Mum had put out of her reach on the coffee table and bring the whole lot crashing to the floor. ‘We can. Together. We’ll think of something.’
‘I mean, I could offer to make coffee for everyone and reboot the server when it goes wrong. But it’s not like they’ll pay me a full-time wage for that.’
Amelie tutted. ‘Not that. Come on. You need to come up with something wow. You need to make them an offer they can’t refuse.’
‘Clean the bogs when the Beast of Cubicle Two’s done a massive shit in there and there’s a client due in five minutes?’
’No! I mean, I can see how they might go for that, but it’s not exactly sustainable, is it?’
‘Not really. But what can I do? I know about technology, and I can write about it in a way people understand. That’s it. That’s my skill set.’
Amelie put down her wine glass and reached over to the table, picking up a notebook covered in champagne-coloured satin with beads and sequins embroidered on it. The words My Wedding were stamped on it in gold, and a slim gold pen slotted into its spine. She flipped the pages until she found a blank one, about two-thirds of the way through.
‘Okay.’ She poised her pen over the page. ‘You can write. We know that.’
‘But so can everyone else that works in the editorial department,’ I pointed out, ‘otherwise they wouldn’t have jobs there.’
‘Fair enough. So then the question is, what don’t they write about now that people would want to read?’
‘Everything I can do is covered,’ I said glumly. ‘Movie reviews, computing, gaming. And then there’s a whole load of stuff I don’t have a clue about, like fashion and recipes and things like that.’
‘Does the men’s magazine have a recipe page?’ Amelie brightened. ‘I bet it doesn’t. You could do that. How to impress your date with your jerk monkfish in blue corn tortillas. The first time Zack?—’
‘Yes, except unlike Zack, I can’t cook. So that’s a non-starter.’
‘Shhh. I said something a second ago that gave me an idea, and now I’ve lost it.’
‘Something about Zack?’
‘No, before that.’
‘About impressing your date?’
‘Yes! That’s the budgie. Dating advice for men. Like, Fab! has an agony aunt, am I right?’
‘Sure. We – they get loads of letters.’
‘And do the men get one? Hmmm? Do they?’
‘Umm, no. There isn’t an equivalent in Max! I don’t know why. Maybe they tried it and it didn’t work.’
Amelie shook her head. ‘Poor men. Honestly, you’ve got to pity the buggers. No wonder so many of them end up being incels or following Andrew Tate on Tiktok or whatever. All they need is some good, straight-talking advice from someone who understands what women want.’
‘Like a woman?’
‘Yes, but no. I know men, Luce, and I know they don’t listen to a bloody word women say. It would need to be a man – or at least, pretend to be a man, all brotherly, explaining to them what they’re doing wrong in their dating lives.’
‘You’re saying I should pretend to be a man and write a dating advice column for Max!?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Brilliant.’ I loved my sister and I knew her intentions were good, but I couldn’t help sarcasm oozing from my words. ‘Only one, I don’t understand dating; two, I don’t understand men; and three, I don’t know what men do wrong when they’re dating because I never date them.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I do. Go on – ask me anything.’
‘Uh…’ I racked my brains and came up with very little. ‘Okay. I’m a guy and I can’t get a girlfriend. Why not?’
Amelie frowned. ‘I’d expect them to give me a bit more to go on than that. But okay. When guys can’t get women to go out with them, it’s generally because their expectations of the kind of woman who might want to are completely unrealistic, or because they aren’t even trying to make the most of themselves, or because they’re just dicks, and women can tell. One of the three. Try another.’
A memory rushed into my mind and I tried to block it, but it was too late. ‘I’ve been hooking up with a girl and I think she wants more. What should I do?’
‘Hmmm. If you don’t want a relationship with her, that’s fine. But be clear about it, be kind, and above all don’t be a dick.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘That’s because it is. Men are simple.’
‘Not to me, they aren’t.’
‘But you want to find out about them, don’t you? What makes them tick? They’re just another puzzle, like those lateral thinking things you were obsessed with when you were little.’
I smiled. ‘I remember those! Like, why did the man take the lift up to the eleventh floor when it was raining, but get off at the third and walk when it was sunny?’
‘Exactly! So come on, let’s write a proposal. Seriously, this is genius. There’s no way they won’t go for it.’
Amelie had already put down her notebook and whipped open her laptop, and I could see words appearing at the top of a blank document on her screen.
PITCH: ‘ASK ADAM’ WEEKLY COLUMN FOR MAX! ONLINE.