The Sister Swap: the laugh-out-loud romantic comedy of the year!

‘Not more sandwiches!’ exclaimed Sarah as she opened the back door. ‘I’m doing a chicken casserole again.’

‘Sorry,’ said Connor, coming in and dumping the bags on the table. ‘They couldn’t shift these.’ ‘They’ was the factory where Connor worked – Larkins – where he cycled each day for a random shift in a dead-end job he’d done since completing his A levels last summer. A job he bizarrely loved, despite the hairnet and the white Crocs.

‘I’m not sure I can, either,’ replied Sarah, as she rifled through the bags. Egg mayonnaise with cucumber, on thick white sliced. About twenty packs of them. Yuk. ‘We can freeze them, or something,’ she said. ‘Eat them next week for your lunches.’

She wouldn’t be here next week, thought Sarah. And she was almost knocked for six by a massive wave of guilt. She was leaving her children, leaving them for two whole months. She felt terrible and wondered how to tell them without just blurting it out and risking their dumbstruck and stricken faces – perhaps a little grubby, too, like Victorian street urchins. Where was Olivia, anyway?

‘Do you know what time Olivia’s coming home?’ she asked. Connor had slouched over to the fridge and was helping himself to a carton of orange juice. He had honed his foraging skills by watching American teen movies – taking great bites out of things, swigging juice straight from the carton and never putting the lids back on anything so when Sarah picked up jars the bottom fell away and the contents went all over the kitchen floor.

‘No idea,’ he said, between slugs. ‘I think she’s got a new boyfriend.’

‘Has she?’

Sarah wouldn’t know; Olivia was always out. She would be glad when autumn rolled around and Olivia headed off to Durham University. Her daughter was coming to the end of a gap year she’d done nothing with except mooch around the village.

‘Yeah. Apparently he’s a playwright.’

‘A playwright? Really?’ Sarah hoped he wasn’t a very good one. She didn’t see the point in Olivia getting a boyfriend when she’d be off to Durham in three months and leaving Tipperton Mallet far behind. Thank goodness her daughter was going places. She wished Connor was. Perhaps Sarah going up to London to do a proper, exciting job now would stir him up a bit, and encourage Olivia to do something vaguely useful for the remainder of the summer? She hadn’t been a great role model for them, Sarah realized; she had done nothing for years except play Pocahontas at those parties and run the art class and the library. Perhaps now she was a go-getter, working in London, it would inspire her offspring. If it wasn’t for the overwhelming guilt about abandoning the twins, she might almost be excited to tell them. As soon as Olivia got home she’d do it …

‘I don’t suppose you saw Monty on your travels, did you?’ she asked.

Their cat hadn’t been seen by anyone for four or five days. Clearly, he was surviving on birds and the occasional wild rabbit, but Sarah was getting a little concerned. She adored that cat; her children teased her relentlessly about how soppy she was over him. Would she have to leave with him still missing? That would be awful.

As she flung the sandwiches in the freezer, guilt gripped her again.

Oh god, how could she leave any of them?

*

‘I’m going to London,’ Sarah said brightly. To avoid seeing her children’s reaction she reached for the suitcase which was sleeping under a layer of dust on top of her bedroom wardrobe. Olivia had just sat down on the bed – her honey-coloured hair in beachy loose waves over a floaty dress and DMs she was supposed to have taken off when she came in the house. Connor was leaning against the doorframe. The unusual scenario of their mother noisily dragging items of clothing out of the wardrobe and onto her bed had brought them into her room, as planned. She’d chickened out of telling them when Olivia first got home, about nine o’clock. She thought if she got on with her packing she could tell them in context.

‘What? When?’ asked Olivia.

Sarah turned back to the bed to dump the suitcase on it, catching sight of herself in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door as she did so. She looked awful. Shapeless shorts, an equally uninspiring pale-pink T-shirt and a cheap bra she knew had been a mistake. It made her boobs look like a uni-sausage. Perhaps she’d take a trip to Agent Provocateur in Soho, when she got to London … if they let frumpy people who hadn’t had sex for eleven years in there …

‘What do you mean you’re going up to London?’ asked Connor, his long fringe now released from the bandana and halfway through an exaggerated flick.

‘I’ve got a job there,’ said Sarah, almost gulping as the words came out. She ran suddenly sticky hands down her thighs. ‘An eight-week contract. I’m going up there tomorrow – Auntie Meg’s coming down to stay with you, and I’m going to stay in her flat.’ There, she’d said it. It was out there. A hideous twangy pang of motherly guilt flicked viciously at her stomach. She was abandoning her children to selfishly take a job she was far too greedy to have applied for, and to visit sexy lingerie shops. What a terrible mother.

She sat down on the bed between Olivia and the dusty suitcase.

‘What sort of a job?’ asked Olivia, incredulous. She tossed her wavy hair over one shoulder and gave a little pout. She looked gorgeous; Sarah felt like a galumphing troll next to her.

‘Who’s Auntie Meg?’ asked Connor. He’d suddenly got a chocolate bar from somewhere and was languidly chewing at the end of it, like a cowboy.

‘My sister,’ said Sarah. ‘You remember I’ve got one, don’t you?’

‘Barely.’ Connor sniffed. He was always sniffing. ‘And does she have to come, whoever she is? We can look after ourselves. We’re nineteen!’

‘I know, but I’ll be staying in her flat and she’s been ordered to come to the country by her doctor. It makes sense for us to do a swap. And she can keep an eye on you.’

Connor rolled his eyes. ‘We don’t need it,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous. Anyway, what sort of job could you do up in London? You’ve spent the last few years dressing up as Jess from Postman Pat!’

‘Among others,’ muttered Sarah. ‘And plenty of jobs!’ She got up from the bed and started further appraising the contents of her wardrobe for anything not too hideous. ‘I’m not so old I couldn’t try something new.’ She caught the scathing look between them but chose to ignore it. ‘But actually, I’m going back to my old industry.’

‘And what was that again?’ said Connor, chewing like John Wayne. ‘I can’t remember. Chimney sweep, down the coal mines—?’

‘—Dinner lady in a Victorian workhouse?’ joined in Sarah with a wry smile. She pulled out a ratty navy T-shirt with ‘Bonjour’ on it then quickly shoved it to the back of the wardrobe in disgust. ‘Ha ha, very funny. None of the above – events organizing.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Olivia, examining her nails. ‘That.’ She sounded bored. Unimpressed. And Connor’s expression didn’t change either. They had never been interested when Sarah had told them semi-glamorous tales of working in London before they were born; in fact, brilliant anecdotes from one’s past never impressed one’s offspring, Sarah noted. She bet even Madonna’s kids rolled their eyes and huffed, ‘Yes, you’ve already told me,’ when she started waffling on about going to the Oscars with Michael Jackson or whatever. ‘Events organizing sounds a bit too swanky for you, these days,’ Olivia added.

Sarah looked past the green fleece she was holding up against her and down to her comedy socks – rainbow stripes with a grinning sheep on each foot. ‘I can be swanky, you know,’ she protested, vowing to dump anything frumpy in the Thames once she got to London, which might not leave her a lot. ‘And I was damn good at that job. They obviously think I’ve got it in me. My old company.’

‘You’re going back to work for your old company?’ asked Connor. The chocolate bar demolished, he shoved the screwed-up wrapper into his back pocket, currently somewhere halfway down his left thigh. ‘What happened to “never go back”?’

‘When I say that, I mean boyfriends and love affairs, not jobs.’ Sarah sighed heavily, that kind of world-weary sigh mums are so practised at. Picking up a pair of slippers, she pulled a face then flung them to the bottom of the wardrobe: no one in London wore slippers. ‘How about a “congratulations, Mum”? It might be nice to hear one.’

‘Congratulations, Mum,’ the twins offered in unison, like Kevin and Perry.

‘Thank you.’ Sarah rejected a peach floaty scarf. She would have to examine Google on the train up, see what fashionable people were supposed to be wearing these days. She didn’t want the first London siren she heard to be the sound of the fashion police coming for her …

‘How long are you going to be away for again?’ asked Connor.

‘Two months.’

‘Two months! That’s ages!’ Oh, finally! ‘Who’s going to cook our dinners?’

‘I have no idea. I don’t even know if Auntie Meg can cook.’

‘And who’s going to clean the house? Hoover our bedrooms?’

‘You are – you two. If you can find a square foot of carpet to do so.’

‘Can’t’ – Connor did the inverted commas thing with his fingers –‘“Auntie Meg” do it?’

‘I’m not expecting her to,’ replied Sarah, sitting back down on the bed. ‘I’m expecting you two to step up. Perhaps you could use my going as an opportunity.’ She waited for the eye-rolling. ‘Connor, I know you fell into the sandwich job – which was only supposed to be for last summer, by the way – but sticking labels onto packs of sandwiches is hardly a career, and you’ve been sitting on that electrician’s apprenticeship form so long it’s grown stuffing and a side zip.’ Connor rolled his eyes and gave another fringe flick, with the toss of his head, making his cargo shorts drop another two inches lower down his hips. ‘And, Olivia, your gap year has never been more aptly named as there’s simply nothing in it! I know you’re going to Durham in October, but all you’ve done since A levels last year is drift around. You could spend the rest of the summer more usefully than listening to depressing music with your mates or getting yourself a pointless new boyfriend.’

‘She likes The Smiths,’ said Connor, from the doorway. ‘And I promise I’ll take a look at that form thing again.’ He yawned.

‘I’ll think about doing something this summer,’ said Olivia unconvincingly. She was leaving it awfully late, thought Sarah. There’d been an opportunity to go to Kenya, to help teach English at a school, many months ago, but Olivia hadn’t taken it. Sarah really hoped her sudden flight to London would shake them up. Or at least make either of the lazy so-and-sos pick up the Hoover.

‘Can you give me a lift to the station tomorrow please, Connor?’ The station was walking distance, but Sarah didn’t want to walk to it with the family suitcase. It wasn’t one of those nice ones on wheels; it was a hefty, rock-hard red thing, a throwback from when she and her ex-husband Harry used to take the kids to Cornwall, before he decided to have multiple affairs and left them to move down there permanently. It looked at her accusingly from the bed.

‘Yeah, what time?’

‘Three o’clock?’

Sarah had already checked the current shambles of a train service: there was no miracle currently settling over Tipperton Mallet; the train staff were on strike again and she would be travelling on a bus replacement service from Tipperton Mallet to Ipswich, taking a whole hour and a half and going round all the houses, no doubt, then an actual train, from Ipswich to London. Then the Tube to Meg’s flat, which Meg had given her the address for at the end of yesterday’s phone call. The whole journey would take ages, almost four hours.

‘All right.’ He shuffled away from the doorframe, in the direction of his bedroom, and Olivia got up and left too. Hardly devastated, were they? They weren’t exactly weeping in the aisles. But she still worried how they would get on without her.

Sarah carried on with her packing and it didn’t take long; not many things made the London cut, just underwear and nightwear, her trusty black skirt, one or two old blouses she hadn’t worn for ages and one pair of boring, safe, black court shoes. Minimal make-up was packed; she didn’t have a lot. Meg was the one who had make-up and hair down to a fine art, thought Sarah, as she stared at a never-used Pound Shop eyeshadow palette. Meg used to have an eyeshadow called Black Jade, which she wore down to the tin doing big dramatic panda eyes for her various adventures.

‘Are you going out like that?’ Sarah had always asked, as the panda had slunk to the front door in a hitched-up mini and a scowl.

‘Can’t stop me,’ Meg had always retorted.

Meg had always looked gorgeous, Sarah reflected again as she zipped up her meagre make-up bag and put it in the top of the case. Ten-year-old Sarah had been in awe of the loud little sister with the big blue eyes when she was born, and loved running round helping with the new baby. She helped change her nappies and wind her. She helped with her bath and rubbing baby oil on her cradle cap.

‘You’ll be so good when you have your own,’ Mum had remarked more than once, after Sarah had brought the Gripe Water for her. ‘You’re a natural,’ Dad had added. And she had been, hadn’t she? thought Sarah, as she rolled another pair of sensible knickers and wedged them in the corner of her case. A natural for years and years and years. She had given her all to her sister, and then to her children. Now she was going to give something back to herself.

*

It was two forty-five, on Sunday afternoon, and Sarah was sobbing at the top of the landing.

‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she wailed. ‘I just love you both so much.’ She had one arm round Connor’s shoulders, despite his attempts to lean himself out from under it, the other circled tightly round her daughter’s neck whilst she wriggled like a beleaguered worm and muttered, ‘Get off, Mum!’

‘Pull yourself together, Mother!’ chided Connor sternly, finally managing to prise Sarah off him. ‘It’s only two months.’

‘It’s really not a big deal, Mum,’ said Olivia, rolling her eyes and pulling a sheaf of golden hair out of Sarah’s grasp. ‘We’ll be fine.’

‘If you don’t stop this, you’re going to miss your bus,’ added Connor. ‘You’ve been hanging off us for twenty minutes. Please don’t do this when we get to the station.’

‘No. I won’t, I promise,’ said Sarah, attempting to pull herself together. ‘I’m OK now.’ She sniffed and snuffled her nose into a screwed-up tissue. ‘Let’s go. Be good for Auntie Meg,’ she said, giving Olivia a final hug and briefly wondering if Meg would be remotely good for them. ‘And come up and visit me. We can go to Madame Tussauds.’

‘Maybe.’ Olivia shrugged. ‘Bye, Mum,’ and the two of them practically herded their mother down the stairs and out of the door.

Connor threw her suitcase in the boot and Sarah climbed into her battered old blue Fiesta. It had certainly seen better days. It had scratches, a dented back bumper and one of the doors didn’t quite shut properly – capable of short journeys only, if that. Sarah never spent any money on it; everything she earned went on Connor and Olivia, mostly to keep them supplied with junk food and chocolate. Before she’d shut the front door, she’d left some money for them on top of the fridge along with strict instructions to ration it and to maybe actually buy some vegetables once in a while. She wouldn’t be sending any extra home unless it was an emergency.

The village flashed slowly by as the Fiesta couldn’t manage much more than 40 mph. Connor put the CD player on and sang tunelessly along to Foreigner. She looked across at him, her boy at the wheel. He had the hint of a whiskery moustache and a five o’clock shadow; his once cute features somehow metamorphosed into those of this incredible Boy-Man. She wanted to well up, but she had promised him she wouldn’t, so she forced the tears back down.

‘This is you,’ said Connor, as they pulled up outside the station. A coach was waiting, its engine running. This was it, she thought: she was really going. She was abandoning her children and going up to London to re-seek her fortune after all these years. She should really be taking a Dick Whittington-style knapsack.

‘If Dad makes one of his rare phone calls, tell him where I am,’ said Sarah, as she got out of the car. Connor got her case out of the boot for her and one of the coach drivers lifted it with a gruff ‘Ipswich bound?’ and threw it in the baggage compartment at the bottom of the coach.

‘Doubtful,’ said Connor. ‘And isn’t he in France or somewhere at the moment, sketching muddy bits of water and getting pissed?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Sarah, trying to give her son another quick hug and kiss without crying. ‘Just tell him if he gets in touch.’ It was a few steps on from ‘Tell your father to pass the salt,’ this message relay between her, the twins and their father, but it worked for her. Only speaking to Harry through the children these days was a great relief.

‘Will do, bye, Mum,’ Connor said, and she was waving at him as she walked away, and she was blowing him kisses he pretended weren’t for him, and she was getting on the coach.

Sarah sat at the front, behind the driver – she felt like she wanted to fully see the road ahead – and watched from the window as Connor folded his long, lanky legs into the Fiesta and drove off. More people slowly trickled onto the coach. Chatting, laughing, and squashing bags between their knees; juggling packets of sweets and drinks bottles; adjusting the air conditioning above their heads. A mother and daughter were bickering about a flask of orange squash and who would sit in the aisle. A burly man with a Stephen King novel wedged himself next to Sarah with a grunted ‘Afternoon.’

‘Hello,’ she said, praying that Pet Sematary was suitably horrifying he wouldn’t talk to her on the journey.

Finally, the rumbling standby engine roared into action, the driver released the handbrake and he turned the enormous steering wheel away from the kerb.

‘OK, madam?’ he asked, over his shoulder.

‘Yes, I’m OK, thank you,’ she replied. She was better than OK.

She was ready.

Chapter Five

Meg

When Meg finally arrived at Tipperton Mallet station, on that bloody coach, she realized everything looked exactly the same as it had twenty years ago when she’d got on the 9.42 and had escaped up to London. If she was expecting things to have moved on in any way, she was mistaken. There was the same little café, the one that served the dodgy doughnuts and the revolting coffee; there was the vending machine, which never worked unless you gave it a swift kick to the bottom right-hand corner; there was the heavy, dispiriting feeling that a big fat nothing was going on.

‘Tipperton Mallet!’ said the driver all proudly, as he parked the coach, as though he were responsible for the village’s existence. He’d been eyeing Meg up in his rear-view mirror since Ipswich station, the pervy old git. She’d had to sit right at the front as she was late getting on, and she’d clocked him looking at her bum as she’d squeezed her messenger bag onto the overhead rack. She wasn’t really dressed for the country, she knew, in her high-necked black minidress and gladiator sandals, but she didn’t own any jodhpurs or fleeces. She hoped Sarah had some she could borrow; if she had to do the whole country thing, she may as well look the part.

Meg got off the coach. She stood outside the station entrance, watching as her fellow passengers walked off with holdalls and rucksacks or were picked up in filthy cars or, in one unfathomable instance, a horse and cart. She was here now, and she’d better try to rustle up some of the right feeling for the place. She tried to put positive images in her mind: gambolling ponies, the smell of freshly mown grass, country pubs, open fires, a kind of Jilly Cooper-esque existence – romping with polo players on haystacks and sleeping off sloe gin in cart lodges … But no, she couldn’t do it. Tipperton Mallet meant boredom and sadness and oppression. She didn’t want to be here, and she missed London already.

It was a gorgeously warm afternoon. She perched on the edge of a bottle-green station windowsill, stretched out her legs and closed her eyes. She’d walk to Orchard Cottage in a bit. She was in no great hurry to get there, although she’d certainly been in a massive hurry to leave the place, all those years ago.

Meg opened her eyes again, on hearing a faint shout and a clicking noise. There was a field, opposite the train station, and a man was walking a horse across it. Well-honed calves, silky brown hair and an attractive gait, and that was just the horse. Well, she thought, there was her first hunky farmer. She had to fill her two months down here doing something, so it might as well be desirable men. She was wondering if there were any more and looking about her a bit, when a battered blue Fiesta pulled up and a lanky, sloping figure in a Van Halen T-shirt unfolded himself from it and flopped out onto the pavement. He approached, flicking a long fringe out of his face.

‘Excuse me, but are you Auntie Meg?’

‘Er, yeah?’

‘I’m Connor. Mum said I had to hang around here this afternoon, see if you needed a lift home.’

‘Well, yes please,’ said Auntie Meg. ‘I’d love a lift. Thank you, Connor.’ He was so tall, this lad, she thought. Well, Sarah was, and she wondered if Olivia was, too. Was it just Meg who had inherited the short-arse genes from their mother’s side?

‘It’s nice to meet you,’ added Connor and he stuck out his hand, giving Meg the impression he was doing what his mother had always taught him to do: be polite.

‘You too,’ said Meg. She felt a little guilty this was the very first time she’d ever clapped eyes on her sister’s son. That it was a shame. There was no aunt–nephew hugging, no laughingly telling him how much he’d grown. It was sad, really. Regrettable. That she and Sarah had made each other so bloody miserable they never wanted to set eyes on each other again once Meg left Tipperton Mallet.

‘Let me take your bag,’ said Connor. He had a very deep voice; he sounded like a Suffolk Morgan Freeman.

‘Thank you.’

Connor took Meg’s bag for her and put it in the boot of the car. When they got in the car, Connor’s legs were so long and his seat so far back it looked like he was sitting on the back seat; Meg had to turn her head a forty-five-degree angle in order to talk to him.

‘Has your mum left yet?’ she asked innocently as Connor motored up the road. She prayed Sarah had; being this close to her made her feel suddenly uneasy.

‘Yes, ages ago,’ replied Connor. He did another hair flick and his fringe landed back where it had started.

‘Great,’ said Meg. ‘I hope she likes my flat. It’s really tiny. Fancy her getting her old job back like that!’

‘Yeah,’ muttered Connor.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Mind what?’

‘Your mum going up to work in London and me coming here for a while?’

Connor just shrugged, then indicated left, navigating a woman on a bike with an enormous shopping basket. Two chickens appeared to be flapping in it.

‘I’ve left my job for two months,’ Meg added.

‘Oh, right.’

‘I own a model agency in London. Tempest Models? Perhaps your mum’s told you?’

‘Nope.’ Connor shook his head and didn’t look remotely impressed.

‘I look after models.’ Still nothing. God, she was at an awkward angle trying to talk to him, with him almost sitting in the back and everything. ‘One of my girls – my friend, actually – is Clarissa Fenton-Blue. Have you heard of her?’

‘Everyone’s heard of Clarissa Fenton-Blue,’ said Connor, finally showing a flicker of animation. ‘She’s hot!’

Meg felt gratified Connor was showing a bit of an interest at last. In London she was used to people being excited to meet her. She wondered exactly what Sarah had said about her successful sister. ‘Does your mum talk about me much?’ she ventured. ‘Mention me at all?’