‘Well, it’s your last night here with us, hopefully,’ the nurse said on Sunday evening, as she checked Rachel’s stitches and blood pressure with approving noises. ‘Your sister should be here about midday tomorrow, I think, so that’ll be nice, won’t it?
‘Mmm,’ Rachel said noncommittally. That was one way of putting it.
In truth, she had never particularly hit it off with her stepsister, right from when Dad married Wendy and she’d suddenly had to share him with a one-year-old. She’d hated it, actually. ‘Carry me!’ Rachel would cry to him when it was time for her to go up to bed, lifting her arms in the air. ‘Carry me up to bed!’
She just wanted to be babied too, but her dad had laughed. ‘Don’t be silly! Carry a great big girl like you? Give over, Rach.’ And so she had trudged up the stairs to bed every night, feeling dejected and praying that Dad would come to his senses and take the two of them away. Please, God, I just want it to be me and Dad again, like it used to be.
As Becca grew older, the resentment began to thicken and expand, like mutating cancer cells taking over a body. It wasn’t just hearing her stepsister calling him ‘Daddy’ that bugged her (‘He’s not your daddy,’ Rachel wanted to shout every time), it was the way she hogged his attention each evening when he came home from work – for bathtime, stories, the endless night-night cuddles, her chubby pale arms curled tight about his neck. He’s mine now, her smiles and giggles seemed to say. See how I have wound him round my little finger! Rachel, trying to get on with her homework, would scowl and stomp off upstairs to play music in her bedroom more often than not.
Then came the wild teenage years where Becca broke every rule in the house, got cautioned by the police for shoplifting, threatened with expulsion from school for trying to set fire to the science lab, and seemed to be leaning out of her bedroom window smoking or in a clinch with some awful boyfriend or other whenever Rachel came back to visit. She had turned Terry’s hair white with stress, basically. And what about the day Rachel gave birth to Mabel – one of the most important events of her life! – and she couldn’t get through to her dad on the phone because he was down at the police station bailing out Becca, who’d been arrested for hunt sabbing? You just could not make it up.
She had never quite forgiven her stepsister for that alone; for the weariness in her dad’s voice when she finally got through to him. Oh, a little girl, how lovely. Well done, love! It should have been her moment of glory, her hour in the spotlight – and yet all she could hear in the background was Becca shrieking at Wendy, and of course she felt obliged to ask what was going on. Mabel had been tucked in the crook of one arm, pink and perfect, her eyelids flickering with her first baby dream, and Rachel just felt like hanging up in defeat as her dad started detailing the latest teenage antics back home. Actually, do you know what? I don’t care, she wanted to say. Can we go back to talking about me now, and my baby?
If Rachel had found it hard to forgive, her dad and step-mum were a different case altogether. Oh, they let Becca off every single time, however awfully she behaved: babying her, rescuing her from this plight and that, letting her get away with murder, basically, while Rachel was slogging away, the diligent first-born, quietly acing a degree in Newcastle, getting married, becoming a mother. She had done all the right things and yet it was her unruly stepsister that commanded the limelight. There was justice for you – not.
As for what Becca had done more recently, what she’d been up to with Lawrence, their double betrayal . . . Well. Rachel should not have been surprised, frankly. She might even have predicted it, if she’d had her wits about her. It wasn’t the first time her stepsister had behaved inappropriately around men, after all – there was that cringeworthy scene at Mabel’s christening, where Becca had been drunk and flirted atrociously with Lawrence’s friend Sam, and that Christmas Eve at Dad’s a few years ago when she’d snogged the barman in their local pub. ‘There was mistletoe! And it’s Christmas!’ she’d said when she saw Rachel’s disapproving expression, like that made it any better. Grow up, Becca, she’d thought, pursing her lips.
Obviously being a bit wild was one thing. But to go after your own brother-in-law like that . . . To be so shameless, so don’t-give-a-shit . . . It took your breath away, it really did. Especially as she’d now shown up in Rachel’s house, apparently, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Talk about a cheek.
Rachel realized she was gripping the bed covers, knuckles white and pointy as the nurse went away, checks completed. This time tomorrow, she’d be home and in her own bed, she reminded herself, letting go. And even if she had to put up with her stepsister for a few hours, it would all be worth it eventually. Wouldn’t it?
Becca drove back to Hereford that evening, her mind churning. There was a lot to digest and not just the enormous roast she’d put away, courtesy of the local pub. The way her mum had spoken to her . . . it had never happened before. Not since she was nagging on about GCSE revision and life choices and the fuss she’d made discovering a packet of fags in Becca’s jacket pocket once, anyway. But as an adult, Mum had always seemed proud of her. She and Dad had helped Becca move into the flat, they’d bought a bottle of fizzy wine and a pot plant, saying how pleased they were that she was standing on her own two feet and making a go of things. (The subtext being, of course, thank God you’re not sponging off us any more and have finally given us an extra spare bedroom, but you know, the main thing was they supported her.) She’d gone along when Becca and Debbie did their first trade fair at the NEC, even though it was a bridal fair and she was not exactly the ideal customer. Becca had always felt so loved by her parents, so adored, that to have Wendy now telling her she had to buck up her ideas – it was like being slapped round the face. In the kindest possible way.
Her mum thought she was a loser. You’ve lost your way. (What even was her way, anyway? How was she supposed to know how to find it?) Her flatmate clearly agreed with her mum. Oh, are you still doing that? Her brother-in-law viewed her as a slut. Well, hello there. Her nieces and nephew now knew better than to trust her with their lives after Snickers-gate. And her sister – sorry, stepsister – had been all too quick to cut any slim ties and walk away. It felt, in short, as if she had nobody left who thought she was any good. Maybe just a sweet, elderly Welshman in his lonely bungalow, although even he might have forgotten by now that she had ever been there.
The worst thing was, she knew her mum was right. She had stopped in her tracks since losing her dad. Her heart had calcified, the laughter had died away, the light had vanished from her life. She’d had a boyfriend at the time, Ben; they’d been living together for six months when the accident had happened, but he’d dumped her pretty quickly and moved out, unable to cope with the emotional deluge that poured from her incessantly, embarrassed and awkward when she kept bursting into tears on his shoulder. Her world had shrunk down to a pub job and the safety of her flat. Meredith had answered her Room to Let advert and moved in, head-in-the-clouds Meredith, who was kind, and thankfully didn’t seem to mind if her flatmate started crying for no apparent reason. Becca had become like a bad queen in a fairy story, banishing joy and letting brambles grow up around her in a thorny tangle, too dense for anyone to break through.
We’ve got to move on, Mum had urged, earnestness shining from her eyes. Becca found herself sighing as she drove.
Why, though? Why did they have to? The thought of throwing herself back into the world, of dancing at parties, putting on lipstick, flirting – it all seemed disrespectful to her dad’s memory. Inappropriate for a bereaved daughter. But then Wendy had come out with that killer line – he wouldn’t want us to go moping around forever, or however she’d phrased it – and the words had sunk right into Becca’s skin, sharp with pertinence. It was true. Dad would have hated them to stay sunk in gloom for ever. He had been a cheerful, busy man, never happier than when solving a problem or fixing something mechanical. Maybe he’d been gazing down at them all this time, aghast at their mournful ‘Dad dinners’. Come on, girls! Turn those frowns upside down, for goodness’ sake. Hopers, not mopers!
She smiled to herself ruefully. Hopers, not mopers, indeed. It had been his catchphrase when she did her exams and she could hear him saying it now, his voice ringing with optimism. ‘All right, all right,’ she muttered under her breath as she approached the turn-off for Rachel’s street. ‘I’ll give it a whirl.’ Tomorrow her sister would be home again, and Becca could return soon after to Birmingham and get stuck into Life, Part Two. She would do some serious thinking, draw up a plan, decide where she went from here, rather than rushing straight into the first menial job that came her way. Maybe she could go back to college, retrain, feel excited about work again. She would make an effort to reconnect with the friends she’d neglected, perhaps organize some kind of night out for her birthday at the end of the month. And just to get her mum off her back, she might even ask Meredith if Baldrick, or whatever his name was, had any sexy mates. Positive thinking from here on in, she told herself. No looking back.