‘Did I ever tell you about the time I left my laptopon a train to Edinburgh?’ he asked with encouragement before pulling out onto the roundabout. ‘Someone handed it in at Waverley and they called me before I even realised it was missing. There are good Samaritans still out there.’
‘That or they took a peek at your search history and shit themselves.’
‘Oh look, you’re feeling better already.’ He grinned, shifted gear and put his foot down. ‘One phone call and it will all be sorted. You’re right, the odds of someone finding your bag and putting two and two together are tiny. Most likely they’ll just nick your laptop and leave the rest.’
I sniffed sadly, too far gone to admit it was an uplifting thought.
‘Tell you what,’ William said. ‘I’ll pay for the McDonald’s.’
‘OK but I’m having a milkshake,’ I warned, brushing my lank hair away from my face. I couldn’t show up at Mum and Dad’s looking like this and expect them not to ask questions.
‘Anything you want. With the obvious exclusion of an apple pie. I’m not taking you to A&E when you burn the inside of your mouth. Again.’
‘It’s a deal,’ I said as I stared out the window at the darkening sky, doing my ultra very best not to panic.
High on chicken nuggets, sugar and existential dread, we arrived home forty-five minutes later, a shared smile of solidarity on both our faces as we pulled into the driveway.
Until Mum got pregnant with my little sister, Charlotte, nineteen years ago, (a thrilling, midlife surprise,according to Mum who was forty-two when she had her), we’d lived in a small three bed semi in the suburbs outside London, but with a new addition on the way, they decided to sell up down south and invest further north. Dad was more than happy with the long commute and Mum only went into the office once a week for meetings so it didn’t make any sense to stay in the city when they could move to Harford and live out theirAll Creatures Great and Smallfantasies with five bedrooms, a gorgeous kitchen and a beautiful sunroom on the back of the house that opened onto a garden so huge, my dad had bought one of those ride-on lawn mowers to take care of it. The garden was so big, I sometimes felt as though I needed a staff, half a dozen sheep and a packed lunch if I wanted to go all the way down to the bottom.
After university, I moved back down south, sharing a flat with William and his husband, Sanjit, until I got my job at Abbey Hill School in Tring, and William and Sanjit stayed in London until the year of banana-bread-and-support-bubbles that we’d all agreed never to discuss again. Despite spending every second of his teens desperate to get out from under their roof, William now lived five minutes around the corner from our parents and altogether too far from me for my liking.
‘Go on,’ William instructed, parked up in the driveway and already dialling National Rail. ‘I’m going to find your bag, you save your energy for Mum and Dad.’
‘And if Mum sees you eating McDonald’s, she’ll tell Sanjit and he’ll divorce you.’
‘It’s not my fault he’s got high cholesterol,’ my brothermumbled through a handful of fries. ‘But feel free not to mention this to him ever.’
I kissed him on the cheek, ignoring his theatrical show of revulsion, then climbed out of the car, grabbed my suitcase and rolled it awkwardly down the gravel driveway. It would be all right. Everything would be good. William would talk to the right people, find my bag and get it back. There was nothing to worry about.
‘Hello?’ I called loudly, letting myself in the front door. ‘Anyone home?’
‘Sophie, is that you?’
Mum’s head popped around the kitchen door and right away I felt a million times better than I had in the car, but that could’ve had less to do with Mum’s soothing presence and more to do with the way William had sped down the country lanes at seventy miles an hour, driving one-handed while housing a Big Mac.
‘I think so,’ I replied, flashing back to one particularly hairy head-on challenge from a double-decker bus. ‘Can’t quite say for sure.’
‘Come here and give me a hug, I’ve got my hands full.’ She beckoned me into the kitchen with a head toss. ‘I’m icing the cake for your dad’s party.’
Well, maybe there was still one thing to worry about.
Pandora Taylor was not known for her abilities in the kitchen. She was known for being one of the fiercest and most well-respected literary critics in the business, cutting the greats down to the bone if she saw fit, ending careers and creating stars overnight. When she wasn’t busy intimidating the literary crowd, she took time out to terrify everyone in her children’s lives. My teachers never looked at me the same way after she took my primary school to task for ‘failing to challenge youngminds’ when I came home and performed what I thought was a very impressive rendition of ‘I’m a Little Teapot’.
‘The cake is fine, it’s red velvet,’ she said, piping bag in hand. ‘I’m having some trouble with the buttercream.’
‘Some trouble’ was an understatement. The entire farmhouse kitchen, sage green cabinets, grey slate floor and white quartz countertops, was covered –covered– in brown buttercream icing.
‘I don’t want to alarm you,’ I said from the safety of the doorway. ‘But it does look a little bit like someone’s had an accident in here and not with buttercream icing.’
Mum groaned and pushed her glasses back up her nose with the crook of her elbow, the only part of her not smeared with sugar, butter and brown food colouring. ‘I don’t know what happened. I followed all the instructions. It’s supposed to be the Sorting Hat.’
I stared at the brown mound in front of her and drew my lips together tightly.
‘It doesn’t look like a hat, Mum.’
‘I know what it looks like,’ she said with a dissatisfied grunt. Her signature silk scarf slipped off her head, releasing her silvery grey hair and floating down to her icing-sugar-speckled shoes. ‘Charlotte is going to be so disappointed.’
‘Charlotte?’ I replied. ‘Isn’t it Dad’s birthday?’
