‘You don’t give a toss about me,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to lie, I know it.’
‘That’s not true, we give many tosses,’ I replied, turning my phone over before it could come back to life. ‘But we’re both rubbish and, if I’m being completely honest, sometimes you make me feel old.’
‘That’s because you are old.’
William’s eyes met mine and I silently begged him not to drive us off the road.
‘Saying things like that don’t help your case,’ I cautioned her. ‘I’m sorry we’ve made you feel that way. I definitely didn’t mean to. William probably didn’t.’
‘On my eighteenth, he gave me fifty pounds and a card that said “In my day this was a lot of money, you ungrateful little monster”,’ she replied. ‘And that was before I’d even had a chance to tell him this is my day and fifty pounds isn’t a lot of money any more.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a smile stretch across my brother’s face.
‘Insults are William’s love language,’ I explained. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
She ran her thumb over the tip of the fingernail of her forefinger, half her nails were covered by glittery almond-shaped press-ons while the others were short and bare, and her braided hair had faded down to a silvery-grey, a few little strands framing her pretty face.
‘I can’t believe you’re Este Cox,’ she said, gazing at me with a mixture of awe and disbelief. ‘You wroteButterflies.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Sorry if that ruins it.’
‘Why did you keep it a secret for so long?’
‘Because.’
It was a complete sentence. There was somethingabout being in a car with only siblings that made it so much easier to regress to a teenage state.
‘Because theGuardiancalled you the author of Britain’s filthiest novel?’ Charlotte guessed with a wrinkled nose, trying to remember. ‘Or was thatThe Times?’
‘It wasThis Morningand it’s not even true, there’s much filthier stuff out there.’
‘Oh, much filthier,’ she agreed readily. ‘Have you read the one about the minotaurs that have to get milked? Or theShrekreimagining where he’s a CEO and—’
‘I’m going to stop you right there,’ I said as our brother began to turn as green as the swamp monster himself. ‘Ogre smut is not my thing. And no, that’s not why. I just didn’t want to have to deal with it all.’
‘All what?’
‘Everyone’s opinions,’ I confessed. ‘Mum and Dad, people at school. It’s a lot.’
‘You care too much about what other people think.’ She yawned without covering her mouth and grabbed hold of her feet, performing a perfect happy baby pose on the backseat of a moving vehicle. ‘Must be exhausting, seems like a waste of energy to me.’
‘It must be amazing to be you,’ William said, looking at her in the mirror. ‘Promise me you’ll never change.’
‘Why would I?’
I looked over at William and he shrugged. Neither of us had an answer.
‘If I’d written a book likeButterflies, I’d want everyone to know,’ Charlotte announced. ‘Imagine knowing there are millions of people out in the world, reading a story you wrote and it’s making them happy. I don’t understand how there’s any more to it than that. Who cares what critics say, or pretentious twats like CJ? His bookisn’t inherently better than yours just because it’s depressing. The whole thing where people shit on something because it’s not what they’re into is so messed up. When did we decide that was allowed?’
‘Probably when Eve tried to get Adam to wear a different brand of fig leaf,’ William said, swerving to miss an empty KFC bucket that made my empty stomach rumble.
‘Well it’s stupid. I love Mum and Dad but they don’t know everything. Soph, Dad is in hissixties.’ She hissed out the last word as though our father had been raised with dinosaurs. ‘He’ssoold.’
‘Sixty isn’t old,’ William clucked with dismay. ‘George Clooney is in his sixties.’
Charlotte looked to me, blank-faced. ‘Who’s George Clooney?’
Before our brother could let out a wail of existential despair, she sat up and reached around the seat to grab my wrist, repeatedly whacking me in the side of the head with my own hand.
