‘Really.’
‘What did she say?’
‘It’s not what she said – it’s that she thinks I’m the motherly type,’ I mutter, sorry I started this.
‘You’re the “take down the patriarchy” and the true sisterhood type,’ says Vilma. ‘You look out for the women you work with. You dumbass.’ She uses the term with affection. ‘You like them to be prepared, same way you prepared me for life after school, andinschool for that matter. That’s why my friends love you. You tell us to take no shit and we don’t. You’re our special ops trainer, Sid: leave no woman behind. Sort of like the Army Rangers – be ready for anything.’
I say nothing for a moment: I always wanted Vilma and her friends to be prepared for life because women are notorious for playing by the rules when the other half of the human race long since ripped up the rule book. I adore Vilma – nobody is going to hurt her on my watch.
‘That’s probably it,’ I say, aiming for cheerful.
‘Besides, you’ve got Mum’s skin: olive andanti-ageing, horrible sister. I’ve got Dad’s: pale and liable to burn after five minutes in the sun. You look way too young to be my mum... You’d have to have had me when you were fifteen, and in all the pictures I’ve seen of you at fifteen you look like you’re considering entering a convent.’
‘I was a nerd,’ I protest. ‘Nerds wore undistressed jeans and fluffy sweaters with cats on them.’
Vilma laughs.
She and I are technicallyhalf-sisters and she takes after my beloved stepfather, Stefan, who required nomake-up when he’d adoringly dress up as a vampire to accompany her and other small children on the endless Hallowe’en rounds. He is actually Lithuanian but has the bone structure and height of someone who just drove down from the Carpathians in a black coach. Vilma, whose name means ‘truth’ in Lithuanian, is the same as Stefan – pale skin, pale eyes, hair like the woods at midnight. I’m like my mother: my hair’s chocolate with what Vilma fancifully likes to call bronze highlights, and my eyes are like Mum’s, hazel. But Mum’s a perfect hippie with her hair long and trailing, which goes with her Stevie Nicks’ vibe, while mine’s short. And if anyone ever catches me in a hippie outfit, kill me immediately.
‘What’re you up to tonight?’ I ask Vilma, imagining her in the bedroom she shares in a college house, deciding whether it’s a jeans night or time to break out the big guns and wear one of the floaty skirts she borrowed from Mum – to be worn ironically, of course.
‘Going to Jojo’s for a Netflix binge. Drag Race old seasons.’
I can hear the rattle of clothes hangers as she speaks.
‘What—’
I know what’s coming next.
What are you up to tonight?
‘Just here,’ I say, as if here is somewhere exciting instead of outside my building. I can’t face Vilma’s sadness at the fact that my life revolves around almost nothing social. ‘Talk tomorrow and be—’
‘—safe, yes,’ she replies. ‘Love you.’
‘Love you more.’
It takes another few minutes to get me home.
‘Thanks, Gareth,’ I say, climbing out right in front of the steps to myapartment-block door. That’s the great thing about my taxi guys. There’s none of that, ‘We’ll just drop you on the corner here and sure, you can walk the rest of the way’ with them. I tip well and I always ask to be brought as close to the door as possible.
I’m on the tenth floor, which is utterly wonderful from the point of view of getting burgled, because there’s a great shortage often-storey ladders. Anywould-be intruders would have to come from inside the building and, given the concierge system and security cameras all over the place, which I do not regret paying for in my management fees, it’s very unlikely that anyone in our apartments would ever get burgled. Plus, I have three locks on the door. And a baseball bat inside it.
Marc, who’d been my significant other for twelve years, hadn’t said a word when I insisted on getting three locks. It was one of the many things I loved about him.
Loved:is there a sadder word?
I open my three locks, step inside, relock them quickly and walk through the hall, which, finally, is no longerbare-looking, because Vilma had persuaded me to give her money for frames for some art prints, which we then hung with sticky wall hangers because we are both lethal with hammers.
Marc had taken all his pictures when he’d left.
‘Sid, you really don’t care about interiors, do you? It looks like you just rent the place and expect to be evicted at any moment,’ said Vilma one day when she was visiting. ‘Give me a few quid and I’ll find pictures to give some vague sense that you’re staying longer than a week.’
And she had.
Vilma is a wonderful sister, a conduit to another world. I’m not sure how I would have got by this past year without her because Marc and I were like an old married couple with our own happy routines. Without him, I was rudderless.
There was no one to make me morning coffee, no one to cook up scrambled eggs when we’d run out of groceries, no one to sit with in companionable peace while we surfed the TV stations and our various cable subscriptions.
