‘No I think their heightened states keep them pretty slim.’ She paused. ‘Do you know what I thought of the other day?’

‘Isn’t this small talk? Aren’t you doing it right now?’

‘I’m your sister,’ she said. ‘It’s never small talk when we do it.’

*

My first book, the most successful, had been about two children, two sisters, who had an alien encounter. I wrote it when I was twenty-seven. People started to speak to me in completely new ways, as if I was now wired differently. Movie talk. I met movie men and their handshakes seemed to glide right through mine. There were sequels, a series that seemed not to have been written by me, but by a woman who resembled me, a woman with a steady stream of benign answers. It surprised me how little I wanted and, when I actually got something, I never knew what to do with it, except giggle, like a girl winning a school prize.

Time passed. I ate lunch with my agent. She blinked hard at me as if to say, ‘Where is the new book?’ She kept the rest of her body neutral. Blink, blink, blink. No book. Now the anniversary tour, where I sat, styled and tidy, in front of neat rows of children. In the lobbies, I was faceless, like a crude reproduction of myself. My phone was more real to me than the people I encountered. I was just an ear and, because I was lucky, another ear listened back.

My sister thought I was an interesting person because I presented as pleasant – I had a high, persuasive laugh and I wrote books for children – but I was deeply contrary. I was contrary in ways most people don’t know how to be contrary. I was contrary in my bones. In a room with a desk and a bed and a chair, none of which were mine, I showered, watched the steam dissolve off my skin, and called my sister. The dial tone, two transformative beeps, and, on the other side, she was there.

‘Do I have a temper problem?’ I asked.

There had been some regrettable incidents in the past.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s more like you’re just stuck in bad traffic all the time. It’s on the quieter end of the violent scale.’

My sister and I, from a young age, categorised our problems – facial, bodily, personality – marvelling at how easy it was to sort everything into a list. The certainty of a list. My main trouble, my sister declared, was that I always lived my life like I was immediately planning on leaving it.