The Half Sister(3)

‘Come on, seriously, I wanna know,’ says Simon. ‘Do you and Matt share stories or are you bitter rivals? Fighting each other to the death for the best ones.’

Kate wonders whether he’d prefer to hear about the imminent cabinet reshuffle or the prostitute who’s claiming to have kept a Premiership footballer up the night before a cup final, both of which she knows Matt is working on. She decides not to give Simon the satisfaction of either.

‘I couldn’t possibly divulge our pillow talk,’ she says. ‘Lauren, pass me the carrots, will you?’

‘I can’t remember the last time we were all together,’ says Lauren.

Kate can. It was three weeks ago, and on the way home, her and Matt had discussed how they might be able to stretch the weekly lunches to maybe every other week.

‘I only do it for Mum,’ Kate had said. ‘You know how she loves having us all over.’

‘I know,’ Matt had replied. ‘But it’s dictating our weekends. I don’t get much time off as it is, and when I do, no disrespect, I’d rather us two do something together.’

But in the last three weeks, that hadn’t happened either, as Matt had worked, then Kate had been at a film festival, and now, this weekend, he’s had to go into the office again.

‘It’s just that everyone’s busy,’ says Kate.

‘Everyone but me,’ laughs Lauren. ‘I’ll be sitting at this table waiting for the roasties until my dying day.’

‘Well, maybe you need to get a life!’ Simon laughs.

It’s funny how words are dependent on who says them. If Matt had said that, Kate would have taken it in the spirit it was meant; banter between two people who gave each other as good as they got. But from Simon’s lips, the joke is lost, turning a flippant comment into something that sounds far more disrespectful.

The flash of disdain that crosses Lauren’s eyes tells Kate she’s not the only one who feels it.

‘I’d imagine being a mother keeps you very busy,’ Kate interjects.

Lauren rolls her eyes. ‘You have no idea.’

You’re right, I don’t, thinks Kate.

‘In all honesty, now that I’m back on maternity leave, I don’t know how I had time to go to work,’ Lauren says, laughing.

‘It’s all about time management,’ says Simon. ‘Imagine Kate when she has children; it’ll be like a military operation.’ He laughs again.

‘Not everyone wants children,’ says Lauren, and Kate can’t help but feel dismayed at how misplaced and ill thought out her words are.

She fixes an insincere grin on her face, wondering how much longer she has to keep up with this charade of happy families. If Matt were here, he’d at least take some of the flak for her, stepping in to bat away the barbs.

‘Some women want careers instead,’ Lauren goes on.

Kate struggles to keep her expression neutral, but it feels like her cheek’s been slapped. ‘I don’t think you have to make a choice between having a career and having children,’ she says.

Simon looks at her with an amused expression. ‘You can’t have both.’

‘Why not?’ asks Kate brusquely. ‘We’re perfectly capable. Just because we’re the ones who have babies shouldn’t mean our careers have to suffer whilst we have them.’

Simon rolls his eyes.

Kate looks to Lauren, shaking her head in the hope that she’ll get some sisterly support, but Lauren has turned away. Kate wonders when her sister became so spineless when faced with her husband’s old-fashioned views.

Up until their first child, Noah, was born five years ago, Lauren had dedicated her life to bringing other people’s babies into the world. In fact, Kate couldn’t remember a time when her sister wasn’t surrounded by children. She’d babysat for family friends as a teenager and had studied midwifery as soon as she’d finished secondary school, which was why she was well placed to make comments about forgetting your dignity when you give birth. Logically, Kate knew she should take her sister’s words as they were probably intended, yet she couldn’t help but feel they were aimed at her personally.

Simon sighs theatrically. ‘The proof’s in the pudding. Someone like Lauren, who has worked for the good old NHS for fifteen years, isn’t as high up as her peers who have chosen not to have children. Fact.’

‘When do you think you’ll go back to work?’ asks Rose in an attempt to change the subject, although Kate is quite sure that she already knows the precise date. Lauren and their mum are close like that.

Lauren throws a glance at her husband. ‘I’m not due back until the end of the summer, but if we need the money, I might go back sooner.’

‘Let’s hope that she still has a job by then,’ says Simon. ‘If the current government have their way, the NHS won’t last for much longer.’

Now, you just wait a minute. This government have gone all-out to secure the future of our healthcare system.

Those are the words she knows her conservative father would normally have said, but there’s a deafening silence. Kate looks at the chair he’d once occupied, now sitting woefully empty in the corner of the room, and feels a very real physical tug on her heart.

It’s coming up to a year since he died, yet Kate can still hear him, still see him, sitting at his place around the table. They’d left his chair empty for the first six months, none of them able to remove it from where they gathered every Sunday, but gradually they’d moved a little this way and that, shuffling ever closer, until suddenly it had been banished to where only cobwebs grew. Kate had been a reluctant visitor ever since, finding the slow removal of the man she adored too painful to accept. Where she’d once looked forward to the family getting together, excited to hear about her father’s week at work and revelling in the heated debates between him and Matt, it had now become an effort. Without her ally, the dynamics seem to have shifted, and the once light-hearted, evenly matched pairings of her and her father versus Lauren and their mother now feel heavily weighted in her sister’s favour.