She looked at me suspiciously but then left the room. ‘Be quick,’ she called through the door. ‘I’m busy.’
I climbed out of my clothes as fast as I could and folded them roughly into a pile.
‘Am I allowed to keep my underwear?’ I called through the door.
‘Yes, of course you can,’ she replied impatiently.
I stepped into the stupid black robe and leggings and observed myself in the mirror. I looked like a very small, very thin monk. I stifled the desire to laugh out loud. Then very quickly I ran my hand around the backs of my drawers, searching for something. My fingers found it and I stared at it for a moment. The bootlace tie I’d bought in Kensington Market two years ago. I’d never worn it. But I could not bear the thought that I never would. I slipped it under my mattress with Justin’s witchcraft books and his rabbit’s foot and then I opened the door. I passed my folded clothes to Birdie.
‘Good boy,’ she said. She looked, for a moment, as though she might touch my hair. But then she smiled instead and repeated, ‘Good boy.’
I paused for a moment, wondering, as she seemed momentarily soft, if I could possibly ask the question I desperately wanted to ask. I drew in my breath and then blurted it out. ‘Aren’t you jealous?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you jealous about the baby?’
She looked broken then, for just a split second. I felt as if I suddenly saw right inside her, right into the runny yellow yolk of her. She flinched and then she rallied. She said, ‘Of course I’m not. David wants a baby. I’m grateful to your mother for letting him have one.’
‘But didn’t he have to have … sex with her?’
I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever said the word sex out loud before and I felt my face begin to flush red.
‘Yes,’ she said primly. ‘Of course.’
‘But he’s your boyfriend?’
‘Partner,’ she said, ‘he’s my partner. I don’t own him. He doesn’t own me. All that matters is his happiness.’
‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But what about yours?’
She didn’t reply.
My sister had turned thirteen a few days after my mother’s pregnancy announcement. I would say, although it is not particularly my area of expertise, that she was blossoming into a very pretty girl. She was tall, like my mother, and now, a year since the ‘no haircut’ rule had been implemented, her dark hair hung to her waist and unlike Clemency’s hair and Birdie’s hair, which grew thin and scraggy at the ends, hers was thick and shiny. She was thin, as we all were, but she had a certain shape to her. I could imagine （not that I spent very long at all doing such a thing, I can assure you） that with another stone on her, she would have had a knock-out figure. And there was an interesting face with a certain impish charm to it starting to emerge from beneath the baby face I’d been used to seeing all her life. Almost beautiful.
I mention all of this, not because I think you need to know what I thought about my sister’s looks, but because you may still be envisaging a little girl. But she was no longer a little girl.
She was, when the next thing happened, much closer to being a woman.
44
Libby arrives at work, breathless, two minutes late for her meeting with Cerian Tahany. Cerian is a local DJ and minor celebrity who is spending fifty thousand pounds on a new kitchen and every time she walks into the showroom a kind of low-level electric buzz starts up. Usually Libby would have been ultra-prepared for seeing her, would have had the paperwork ready, coffee cup set up, she would have checked her reflection and eaten a mint and tidied her skirt. Today Cerian is already seated and staring tensely at her phone when Libby arrives.
‘I am so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘So sorry.’