I pressed a cold hand against my car, which was as far up the drive of our house as it could get. I’d missed my car.
There were three other cars on our driveway and four more parked on the pavement outside, which told me one thing: all of the Warr family had congregated at our house. This was not an unusual occurrence around Christmas at the Warrs’， but a family party on December twenty-first was a little premature, and it was not exactly the environment I wanted to return to after my university term from hell.
‘Georgia? What are you doing?’
Dad was holding open the front door for me. He’d picked me up from the station.
‘Nothing,’ I said, dropping my hand from my car.
There was a sort of cheer from the twenty-or-so members of my family socialising in the living room as I entered. I guess that was nice. I’d forgotten what it was like to be around that many people who knew who I was.
Mum gave me a big hug. My older brother, Jonathan, and his wife, Rachel, came over for a hug too. Then Mum wasted no time in making me take everyone’s tea and coffee orders and informing me of the hour-by-hour schedule for the next week, including the fact that my aunt, uncle and cousin Ellis would be staying here until Boxing Day. Like a big family sleepover.
‘You don’t mind Ellis sharing your room, do you?’ Mum asked.
I wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events, but I liked Ellis, so it wouldn’t be too bad.
My bedroom was exactly the same as I’d left it – books, TV, stripy bedsheets – apart from the addition of a blow-up mattress for Ellis. I flopped straight on to my bed. It smelt right.
Even by the end of term, university hadn’t felt like home.
‘Come on, then!’ Gran squawked at me as I squeezed on to the sofa next to her. ‘Tell us everything!’
By ‘everything’ she definitely didn’t mean how I’d utterly destroyed the very small number of friendships I’d had, begrudgingly realised that I wasn’t straight and was in fact a sexuality that very few people in real life have heard of, and realised that the world was so obsessed with romantic love that I couldn’t go an hour without hating myself because I didn’t feel it.
So instead I told her, and the other twelve family members listening in, about my lectures （‘interesting’）， my room in college （‘spacious’）， and my roommate （‘very nice’）。
Unfortunately, Gran liked to pry. ‘And what about friends? Have you made any nice friends?’ She leant towards me, patting me slyly on the leg. ‘Or met any nice young men? I bet there are lots of lovely boys in Durham.’
I didn’t hate Gran for being like this. It wasn’t her fault. She had been raised to believe that it was a girl’s primary aim in life to get married and have a family. She had done just that when she was my age, and I think she felt very fulfilled because of it. Fair enough. You do you.
But that didn’t stop me from being deeply, deeply annoyed.
‘Actually,’ I said, trying as hard as I could to keep the irritation out of my voice, ‘I’m not really interested in getting a boyfriend.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said, patting my leg again, ‘plenty of time, my love. Plenty of time.’
But my time is now, I wanted to scream. My life is happening right now.
My family then launched into a conversation about how easy it was to get into a relationship at uni. In the corner, I spotted my cousin Ellis, sitting quietly with a glass of wine and one leg crossed over the other. She caught my stare, smiled a small smile, and rolled her eyes at the group around us. I smiled back. Maybe, at least, I would have an ally.
Ellis was thirty-four and used to be a model. A legit fashion model who did runway shows and magazine adverts. She gave that up in her mid-twenties and used the money she’d saved to spend a couple of years painting, which, as it turned out, she was very good at. She’s been a professional artist ever since.
I only saw her a couple of times a year, but she always caught up with me when we did see each other, asking me how school was, how my friends were, if there’d been any recent developments in my life. I’d always liked her.
I don’t know when I started to notice how Ellis was sort of the butt of the joke in our family. Every time she and Gran were in the same room, Gran would manage to drag the conversation back to the fact that she wasn’t married yet and hadn’t provided the family with any cute babies for them to coo over. Mum always spoke about her like she had some sort of tragic life, just because she lived by herself and had never had a long-term relationship.