We were just a few feet from each other, but it felt like every one of those sixteen years was laid out end to end between us. I looked at my sister, who wasn’t nearly as much of a stranger as I’d expected her to be, and couldn’t help thinking about the deep vertical crevice that had appeared between my eyes some time over the past year. A bloke at the pub had recently bet me a pint I couldn’t balance a pound coin in it – more fool him. I won the pint and stopped off at Boots on the way home to buy some heavy-duty Olay moisturiser, which I’d only used twice before the commitment got too much. I was suddenly uncomfortably conscious of how I looked, and how I looked to her.

I felt slightly dizzy and I might have swayed if Dom hadn’t been beside me. OK, Mulberry, steady as she goes. I could almost hear him. And so, incredibly, I was the one to step forward over the gulf of all those years, and just for a second I thought, Well, look at that. Maybe I’ve got this after all. But when I got my first proper look at Lou, her face smudged with green and yellow bruises, one leg encased in a plaster cast from foot to thigh and the other wrapped in gauze bandages, I realised it was always going to have to have been me.

My sister’s eyes didn’t move from my face, and when she spoke, very softly, I felt the pull of gravity as the gulf swallowed me whole.

‘All right, Danny?’

13

Danny

Pot, kettle and pushing forty myself aside, Lou definitely didn’t look great. It wasn’t just the bruises on her face or the obvious injuries to her legs, though. She had an air about her that made me think she’d be more at home sitting in a rocking chair waiting for Bargain Hunt than going out to trendy wine bars like most thirty-whatever-year-old women. And who was I kidding, I’d done those sums, too. Her features were the same as the girl I remembered, but Lou the woman looked like a reduced, 50 per cent off for damages sale version. A decent wind could probably have knocked her over, never mind a delivery van full of perishable groceries.

All that time in the car spent worrying about how I should greet her had been wasted, because there was no handshake, no kiss, no embrace. I’d considered them all, played them out in my head, but in the end there was nothing, and it was Dom who spoke. He introduced himself and George, because he always does the right thing and he’d probably clocked I wasn’t capable of talking at that point. I was aware of some other conversation and movement happening around me, but I should have paid more attention, because before I knew anything about it, I was sitting on the sofa with Lou and everyone else had left the room.