“For a change? You go out every Thursday.”
“Can we not do this, Meghan?”
“Do what?”
Rachel slipped the mascara wand back into the tube with more force than needed and was rewarded with a smear of black across her fingers. “This. This bickering. I’m not in the mood.”
“You call this bickering? Clearly you don’t remember our childhood.”
“Actually, I do. I remember you being monumentally lazy, eating crisps and watching telly while I did all the bloody work. Oh, wait. Nothing’s changed.”
Her sister simply raised her eyebrows and gave her a gratingly familiar catlike smile. “Ouch. That’s harsh, even for you.”
“Sorry,” Rachel muttered. “I’m just . . . tense.”
“Why?”
Rachel knew she couldn’t tell Meghan about Claire. She couldn’t even articulate it to herself, and in any case, she andMeghan never talked about that time. They’d both drawn a line across it, kept their heads down and soldiered on. “Where’s Nathan?” she asked as she grabbed a tissue and scrubbed at her fingers.
“I put him to bed early. He was tired from playgroup.”
Meghan and Nathan shared the biggest bedroom in their three-bedroom terraced house. Lily had had the little box room, but a year ago Rachel had taken it and given Lily the other double, so she had room for a desk. Now Rachel squeezed past Meghan and reached for her coat. With her bed and bureau crammed in the six-by-six space, there was barely room to breathe. There certainly wasn’t room for both her and Meghan to be in there comfortably. Sharing the same house was bad enough.
“I need to go,” she said pointedly. “I don’t want to be late.”
“Have fun,” Meghan trilled.
“Make sure Lily does her homework.”
“You doubt me?”
“Don’t forget to check on Mum, either.” When it came to Meghan, Rachel couldn’t help but give instructions. She’d been bossing her sister around since she was twelve and Meghan was nine, when she’d stepped up and taken over from their mother, while Meghan had come home late from school and hid in her room and their father had done his best to find work.
“I will, Rachel,” Meghan answered, and for once she actually sounded impatient rather than breezy.
Rachel hesitated, caught between wanting to escape and needing to stay, to make sure everything was under control. Finally she relented. “Okay, then,” she said. “Thanks.”
She was at the front door when she heard her mother call from her bedroom.
“Rachel? Love?”
Slowly Rachel turned around and cracked open the door to the dining room; her father had turned it into a bedroom for her mother more than ten years ago, when stairs had become too difficult for her to manage on a regular basis.
“Hey, Mum.” Rachel stood in the doorway, trying not to breathe in the stale smell of sickness and cigarette smoke that permeated the air. Her mother had refused to quit her pack-a-day habit despite the doctor’s repeated urgings. She claimed it was one of the few comforts left her, which Rachel could reluctantly understand.
Now Janice Campbell sat propped up in bed, a couple of pillows behind her back, her face puffy from prescription pills and gray with pain. “Sweetheart,” she said, and sank back into the pillows with a wheezy sigh.
They stared at each for a moment, both of them helpless in their silence, because what was there to say? Janice never left the house. Rachel didn’t do anything but work. They’d never had much in common to begin with; Rachel had been a determined Daddy’s girl ever since she was small, wearing dungarees and a flat cap, avidly watching her dad work a lathe.
Joss Campbell had been a carpenter by trade, although he’d never been employed regularly. He’d supplemented his income with stints on the dole and shifts at various restaurants and shops. When he’d been younger he’d wanted to study architecture, but he’d told Rachel university hadn’t been for the likes of him. He’d promised it would be for her. Too bad he’d reneged on that one, along with a dozen others. Like in sickness and in health.
To make up for the silence now, Rachel busied herself as she always did. She plumped her mother’s pillows and then poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the table, which Janice probably wouldn’t drink. She rearranged the bottles of prescription painkillers her mother had been on for fifteen yearsand aligned the box of tissues so the bottles and box made a right angle. Finally, having run out of ways to look and feel useful, she stepped back.
“You’re going out?” Janice asked, wheezing, and Rachel nodded.
“It’s Thursday. Pub quiz.”
“Right.” Rachel shifted where she stood and then glanced down at her top; maybe it really was too clingy. “You look nice, love.”
