Where Have All the Boys Gone?(12)

Plus, look what the outcome had been. She’d thrown a party for Clara’s leaving. It had been a really good night, actually, full of people (although some of them had dogs on bits of string). Clara spent the whole night holed up in a corner with Max, with whom she’d always had a cheeky, flirtatious relationship. Louise scarcely noticed. Max was furniture; part of her life, and Clara was the baby sister.

Max left his job and flew to India two days later. The one who got away.

AND LOOK AT the mess you left behind you, Katie thought. If the whole world just did what they wanted all the time, the whole damn place would fall apart.

After assuring Louise through the tears and tequila haze which followed that he would immediately see sense and come back crawling with his tail between his legs, begging her (and, more pertinently, his employers), he hadn’t. Actually, what made it much, much worse was that he decided he needed to rent the flat out to subsidise his new wacky lifestyle, and gave Louise notice to quit, which is how she’d ended up making loud noises in the tiny room Katie had once earmarked as a study.

Clara didn’t seem to have a big problem with it. They were having fun, chilling, and “finding themselves.” In fact, over the last six months, as Louise had careered further and further away from the home and hearth she’d thought she’d shared with Max, Max and Clara got more and more relaxed about how exactly they’d got together in the first place and were practically sharing an email address. No one knew when, or if, they were coming home. Louise was dealing with it through a twin approach of martinis and dating, tiger-pouncing any man that crossed her postcode. Max’s name was best not mentioned, but sometimes—like now, when Katie got an email, it was difficult.

Hey Sis!

Clara still liked to use fonts to make her wacky and different, Katie noticed. It was like being shouted at by a Dickens novel.

HoWZIT? HOT in HERRE! Goa just amazing. Coconuts for twenty pence, xxxxx

Max says Hi to everyone back home—we’re missing you loads in London and the pouring rain! Not!

It wasn’t a nice feeling, being torn between a friend and a relative, particularly when you didn’t even have the distraction of a love life of your own to worry about.

The problem was, it seemed to get harder to raise the subject with Louise, not easier.

At first, of course, when she’d moved in with Katie, she had gone horribly pale and thin, and started her maniacal sleeping around punctuated with 2 A.M. crying jags, side by side with an understanding that one in such a fit of dispossession had to be absolved from housework, keeping regular hours, or in fact much apart from corkscrew wielding and very long scented baths.

But, as time had passed, and everything (apart from the yo-yo knickers) had seemed to ease a little, Katie found it harder and harder to be in the middle. Her sister seemed happy, but Louise still seemed terribly sad, and Katie bringing the subject up just seemed to make things worse. In some way, Katie could see, Louise blamed her for her sister’s behaviour. And whilst comprehensible, it was hardly fair. Being the only conduit between them didn’t help either. Katie thought wistfully for a moment of Clara having fun. Of course she had fun, London fun, in expensive bars, with loud nights. Loud. Having fun in London tended to be loud. Everything in London was loud; the Tube, the traffic, the bars, the shouting of arrogant young careerists showing off. Sometimes Katie really felt like a bit of peace and quiet.

Living with Louise was just about bearable. Katie was trying to be a sympathetic friend. She really was. She didn’t want to be one of those people who had you stay in their house, then made little remarks about how to clean a grill pan and how different towels had different meanings, thus making Louise feel even worse than she was already. But she’d found it did very little to improve her general disposition towards the world.

KATIE TURNED HER attention to the pile of work on her desk. Today she was working on a new diet, which substituted chocolate-covered peanuts and cheese for every meal. Apparently once separately considered high-fat foods, it had been discovered that taken in combination and omitting all other food groups, it had a staggering effect on weight loss and had caught on like wildfire, and was called the CCPC plan, which looked really scientific and everything. Katie’s job was to minimise the coronary or acne scare stories that popped up now and again. She was busy.

She wandered into a reverie for a second about what it would be like doing press for a Forestry Commission. Then she realised she didn’t have the faintest idea. Maybe a lot of people stole the trees at Christmas time. No, hang on, that would be a matter for the police. Maybe they were trying to attract campers . . . to a forest in a remote part of Scotland? No, surely not. Only the intrepid would survive, she didn’t want to be responsible for deaths by hypothermia . . . although . . . she looked at the latest CCPC files and sighed.

Miko bundled into the room, her lovely face looking furious. “How much better-looking than you did we say I was again?”

“Fifty to a hundred times?”

“So he hasn’t called, why?”

“Because you have a bad personality?”

“I scarcely think so.”

“Because you’re frightening?”

“It’s 2005. ALL women are frightening.”

She examined her blood-red talon nails carefully. “Do you think these nails are a bit much?”

“Do you gorge nightly on human blood?”