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Whenever it happened, and whatever the circumstances, I have been rendered spineless. Devoid of vertebrae. I can’t stand up for myself. I am incapable of resistance. It is literally impossible for me to say ‘no’.
At least it is to my sister, Laura.
Laura is physically older than me by only two years, but by about three decades in terms of maturity. When we were growing up, she was always the good girl. The pretty girl. The one who everyone liked. The one my mum’s friends would look at, and go ‘aaah, isn’t she gorgeous?’
I was the one they looked at and simply went ‘aaaaagh!’ – which is a fair reaction as I spent much of my childhood having screaming tantrums, stabbing people with forks, swearing and growling at the world like a mad dog who’d swallowed a whole nest of wasps.
I was not, to put it diplomatically, a ‘pleaser’.
To be fair and accurate, my mum and dad never loved me any less. They never locked me in a cupboard, or beat me, or threatened to send me away to Miss Hellish’s Academy for Troubled Youngsters.
They displayed far more patience than I probably would if I had kids. Nothing they did ever made me feel like an outsider or like the odd one out – I was quite capable of doing all of that by myself.
So, Laura was the good one. I was the bad one. These were the roles we played, quite happily I might add, for most of our childhood.
We’ve joked about it since – about how occasionally, every now and then, one of us would slip up and act out of character. I would accidentally do something kind, or actually agree with my mum, or join in when the rest of them did the rap from the beginning of Fresh Prince of Bel Air instead of pulling a face and slamming the door as I exited the living room.
And even less occasionally, Laura would take on my role as the rebel. There was a time, for instance, that she forged my mum’s signature on an absence note so she could bunk off school for the day with her boyfriend, David.
They went to see Twister at the Odeon; I remember this quite clearly because for days afterwards, they used to run around, ducking under tables and shouting ‘Debris!’ as though it was the funniest thing in the world.
And once she climbed out of my bedroom window, onto the garage roof and down the drainpipe, so she could sneak to a party with him.
And another time, she… well, no. She didn’t. I’ve actually run out of bad things she did now, which I think means it comes to a grand total of two. She wasn’t perfect – she could roll her eyes with the best of them – but neither was she difficult. She was one of those girls people liked; one of those girls whose mums could safely say ‘she gives me no trouble’ about, even when she was a teenager.
I, however, wasn’t one of those girls. At heart, I was all right. I think my family always knew that, which possibly explains their superhuman patience levels.
I might have been vile on the surface, but underneath I always had a code. I never bullied anyone. I never hurt animals. I never stole. I did, however, turn the air blue with my language; drink to excess; buy and use recreational drugs; slack off at school; tell teachers and other authority figures to go f**k themselves on a regular basis; get piercings before everyone else did; dress like something from a horror film and hang around with a gang of other ne’er-do-wells who looked like the ensemble cast from a Goth version of Prisoner Cell Block H.
And while I was never the world’s easiest to deal with – I’m even scowling in the baby photos – things got even worse after my seventeenth birthday. I hit a bit of a speed bump that year, which I don’t like to dwell on, and took a sharp turn from surly-but-acceptable to call-in-the-exorcist-her-head-is-spinning.
As I delved even deeper into the abyss, finding brighter and shinier ways to hurt myself, Laura was busy planning her wedding. To David, the boy she’d loved since I was five years old and she was seven.
I know, it sounds crazy. It was crazy. It was as though everything between us was divvied out wrong. She got too much domesticity and no sense of adventure, and I got all the rebellion and fight. Between us, we’d have probably made one normal human being.
So, I was the bad one – and I slowly got worse, after that little speed bump I mentioned. The speed bump I didn’t just hit, but that made me crash, somersault and burst into flames. Seriously, I was so messed up that if I was a car and not a human, they’d have taken me to the scrap yard and got me crushed up into one of those little rusty metal cubes.
My chosen methods of self-destruction tended to be booze and drugs and men, which resulted in more than a couple of trips to A&E, dropping out of college, developing a very on-off relationship with personal hygiene and several other behavioural traits that caused a lot of sleepless nights for the poor, driven-mad parentals.
While all of this was going on, Laura continued to be the good girl. Even though they were initially concerned about her settling down too young, one look at the shambles of my life was enough to make Mum and Dad happy that Laura was doing what she was doing. Heck, the shambles of my life made it look like head-shaving-era Britney Spears made good choices.
I chose chaos – she chose marriage and kids and being a suburban goddess. Or maybe those roles chose us. I don’t really know.
As it turned out, though, the parentals have probably had just as many sleepless nights about Laura as they have about me now. Because her entire life fell to pieces a few years ago, when her husband, David – the beloved David of Myth and Legend, the boy who won her heart in primary school – died.
He died in a bloody stupid way that still makes me angry. He died falling off a ladder, while he was clearing leaves out of their guttering. It’s not glamorous, is it? Nothing involving guttering ever could be. Or death, now I come to think of it. But at least members of the 27 Club exited this world in a cloud of mystique and self-indulgence. They weren’t clearing leaves out of their damn gutters.
David was only thirty-three, the same age as Laura was at the time. He was too young to die, and she was way too young to be a widow. He left her on her own with their kids, Nate and Lizzie, and their dog Jimbo. He left her on her own, when she’d never been on her own before. While I’d lived my life on the margins of my own family, she’d gone off and created her own – one that revolved around the love story that she shared with David.
I can’t begin to describe the hell on earth that followed his death. Mainly for Laura and the kids, obviously, but also for the rest of us. You can’t see someone you love suffer like that and not go through it with them.
I watched her fade and struggle and fight and fade again, over and over, like some twisted Groundhog Day. I saw her try to be brave and I saw her collapse, and I saw her paralysed with pain so strong I honestly thought she’d never move again.
I saw her weep and I saw her tremble and, worst of all, I saw her silent – silent and withdrawn and empty, her face a blank mask, going through the motions of life and motherhood, living on automatic pilot, functioning without feeling.
I saw all of this, and I saw Lizzie and Nate go through their own agonies, and I saw my mum and dad snarled up with their inability to do anything, and I saw myself, quietly screaming inside.
It was the very worst of times – and it seemed to go on forever.
Until, that is, she got her second chance. Until she applied for a job at a café in Dorset and took the kids down to the coast for a long, hot, working summer.
Until she made a world of new and wonderful friends and got a new dog, and found her new home, and found a man who is helping her heal. Until she found the will to live again.
Until she found the Comfort Food Café.
Which is exactly where I am heading this month – December. Against my will, I am being dragged away from the comfortable urban buzz of my flat in Manchester, and my shallow-but-safe existence and, more importantly, my entirely Christmas-free lifestyle.
I don’t want to go, but Laura asked me to. And when it comes to her, I have no backbone. No spine. I simply can’t say no.
I really, really hate Christmas.
But I love my sister more.
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