Me, You and Tiramisu

**

On the night she first met Billy, Jayne and Rachel were sitting in their kitchen, still in their school uniforms with the remnants of their microwave meals congealing on the plates in front of them. Rachel was engrossed in carving the words INXS into the back of her calculator with a compass while Jayne was studiously rewriting her essay using her sister’s slightly more sloped handwriting, remembering not to dot her ‘i’s’ like she would have done, but to draw a small bubble over each one instead.

Their mother, Crystal, was precariously balanced on the edge of the worktop hanging up a Native American dreamcatcher in the window that she’d just bought in a gemstone shop in Totnes. ‘I’ve got a new client coming round later for a reading, girls, so make yourself scarce.’

Of all of Crystal’s money-making schemes over the years this was the one that Jayne hated the most, and yet sadly was the most lucrative, so Crystal had no intention of cancelling it. Simply by closing her eyes, leaning forward in her chair and saying the words, ‘they are safe on the other side, and they love you,’ she made forty quid a session.

‘And?’ Rachel had yawned, leaning back in her chair.

‘And, this one might be my ticket out of this place, so don’t be like you usually are.’ Neither daughter had even flinched at their mother’s choice of words, they’d heard much worse. ‘It was bloody bad luck,’ was how Crystal had always described her unplanned pregnancy. ‘It was a night of passion under the stars, but I’ve been paying ever since!’ was the title tune on the backing track of their childhood and it was usually accompanied by a Chardonnay-scented hiccup and a sharp inhale of a Lambert & Butler.

Apparently their father’s name was Neil, aka Jupiter. That’s as much as they’d ever managed to get out of their mother regarding the identity of their dad. To be fair to Crystal, it wasn’t that she was deliberately withholding specifics from them, it was the only information she’d gleaned from him before she’d shed her sarong on Thailand’s Koh Pha Ngan beach and celebrated the full moon with some intoxicated love-making. Neil left Paradise Bungalows the next day for a school-building project in India and Crystal moved on soon after to a rice farm in Bali.

She’d initially put her tiredness and weight gain down to the carb-heavy diet and intense manual labour, but five months into her pregnancy there was no mistaking what was happening inside her body. She flew home to have the girls and her free spirit evaporated a little more each day, leaving behind a bitterness that was impossible to shift.

Despite only knowing Neil for a matter of hours, and ignoring the fact that little of that was spent talking, Crystal still blamed Jayne’s shortsightedness on this teenage lothario, along with her ability to put on a few waist inches by passing a wrapped chocolate bar. But over the years Jayne had learnt to channel her grandmother’s mantra of ‘deal best you can with the lot you’ve been dealt’. She reasoned that she should know, having had to help raise her eighteen-year-old daughter’s dark-haired twins in a seaside town where being from Exeter was considered exotic.

By the time the doorbell went that evening, both girls would have forgotten about Crystal’s grieving client had it not been for the overwhelming smell of sandalwood incense that engulfed the house, which apparently energised the spirits. ‘It’s what the clients expect,’ Crystal had said the first time the girls coughed their way through the fug.

This client seemed to fill the doorway; his broad shoulders were slightly stooped, yet still blocked out whatever remnants of daylight were left in the reddening sky behind him. Crystal had been characteristically effusive in her welcome. The social niceties and wide smile that only made their appearance when in the company of vulnerable people with cash were flaunted with abandon.

This time was different, though. The girls had almost walked straight past the man’s smart navy Volvo that was incongruent with the potholed driveway and forlorn wasteland of a front garden. As Jayne drew level with the driver’s window she had glanced in and seen a teenage boy sitting low in the seat, shoulders hunched, his dark lanky hair obscuring his eyes. She’d tapped on the window, but he didn’t respond. She’d knocked harder, hurting her knuckles, until he’d slowly raised his head, his eyes tired and lifeless.

He’d reluctantly leant across and wound down the window an inch. Rachel had nudged Jayne to move on, to see the inch as a deterrent, not an invitation; his whole demeanour had suggested that he just wanted to be left alone with his dark thoughts, a concept alien to Jayne, yet one that Rachel recognised and understood.

He’d answered her questions with expressionless shrugs and turned down the invite to join them on their walk into town with an almost imperceptible shake of the head. So Jayne had no choice but to open the back door of the car and climb in. Which is where she spent the next half an hour. Talking to the back of his head.

She’d once tamed a baby badger by leaving milk and bread out every night, crouching still in the shadow of their dustbin until it gradually relented, delaying its retreat back behind the shed by a few more seconds every day. Cracking Billy was slightly harder, but even he had a breaking point. A few days later when his dad had booked a repeat reading, Billy eventually surrendered and agreed to join them on their early-evening walk into town.

‘You go, Jayne,’ Rachel had nudged her in the back towards the off-licence door.

‘No! Why? You go!’

‘I can’t, that’s the bloke that knew my ID was fake last time.’ The sisters had then both turned and looked at Billy, their looks of expectation fading as they realised that he barely looked all of his fifteen years, let alone three years older. ‘Billy, tell Jayne to get the cider,’ Rachel had ordered.

‘Um, Jayne, I think you should get the booze, you look really old.’

‘Gee, thanks Bill, way to win new friends.’

‘Um, I, er, just meant that with your, you know, natural assets …’ He’d broken off to mime two mountains jutting out from his chest, ‘and your height, you’re the best choice.’

‘Well, thank you for the impromptu game of charades just there, but I’m actually the same height as Rachel.’

‘Yeah,’ Rachel had interrupted, ‘but your hair adds about five inches. For the love of all that’s holy Jayne, get the frickin’ booze, and remember, 11

October 1982, 1982, 1982.’

Having confidently secured the contraband the three teens had headed to the park to drink their stash, lament their luck in being allocated such crap parental role models and to lie back on the grass and gaze up at the light pollution. As the days had turned into weeks, and aided by cheap strong cider, they had graduated from grunts to words, from vague teasing chat to whispered, confiding thoughts – the type that only teenagers have the right to voice out loud.

They were an unlikely threesome back then. Jayne with her jolly optimism and round John Lennon-in-the-Yoko phase glasses; Rachel with her morose moodiness, clad in the current season’s must-haves – a walking oxymoron if ever there was one. And Billy. He had been one of those boys whose width hadn’t yet expanded in line with his height. He was already over six feet tall, but his body had looked as if it had been stretched. His jeans were perpetually falling down, not through any desire to be a frontrunner in the fashion stakes, purely through the lack of any discernible body shape. He wore glasses too, but his were thick-rimmed like Buddy Holly, and his hair flicked over his collar, due entirely to the fact that the person who used to drag him to the barbers was no longer around.

He’d been a helpless bystander to his mother’s swift decline. In the space of three months his home had gone to one filled with tantalising odours of dinner and the sound of Italian folk songs from his mother’s native Sicily, to one where only whispering was permitted and the only fragrance was disinfectant and disease. The doctor had said that cancer doesn’t have a smell, but Billy said it did. Before she’d passed away his mum had written him lots of little notes, each one clearly labelled in her neat handwriting, which had started to show signs of shakiness.

For every milestone in his life there was a corresponding envelope and in a fit of grief after returning from the crematorium he’d ripped open all the ones right up until his fortieth. He’d barricaded himself in his bedroom, away from the black-clad relations eating heat-direct-from-the-freezer sausage rolls and the unrelenting sound of their disrespectful chatter. He’d kept hearing little flashes of laughter rise up the stairs, which had made him so angry he’d punched a hole in the partition wall, so he’d moved his poster of Faye from Steps over it so his dad wouldn’t see and try to talk to him about his feelings.

He’d been lying on his back when he’d told Jayne and Rachel this, deliberately looking up at the cloudless sky and not at them so they wouldn’t see a small tear slowly run down his cheek and pool in his ear. But Jayne did.

It was edging towards the end of the summer and the three of them had shunned their usual spot in the park for a little cove between Torquay and Paignton that only the Devonshire locals knew about. They’d bought some crisps and sweet dessert wine that they were drinking from the only plastic cups that the Co-op had in stock,ironically, considering the turn the conversation had taken, with colourful party balloons on them.

Billy had flipped over then so he could see them better. In doing so he had given Jayne a tantalising glimpse of his taut stomach, tanned from a summer mainly wearing just board shorts. Her pulse had quickened, although she hadn’t at the time realised why.

‘Now here’s a question,’ he’d said, ‘Why do you both call your mum Crystal and not Mum?’

Jayne quickly glanced at Rachel to see which one of them was going to respond first. The answer would be the same regardless of which sister spoke, but Jayne knew her version would be less peppered with expletives. Rachel’s eyes were cast down, concentrating on her finger tracing patterns in the sand. ‘Ironically, her name is actually Catherine,’ Jayne said. ‘But she changed it to Crystal when she was a teenager. Catherine the Clairvoyant doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?’ Jayne paused. ‘But when we were really young, we were on this beach actually–’

‘On the rare occasion she took us anywhere,’ Rachel had interjected.

‘Yes, on the handful of times we were allowed out of the cellar – Jesus, Rach, it wasn’t that bad! Anyway, we were here, about six or seven years old and there was this bloke she fancied–’

‘Sensing a pattern yet, Billy?’ added Rachel, picking up clumps of sand and letting the small grains cascade gently between her fingers.

Jayne carried on, ‘and one of us shouted ‘Mum’, and she went ape and said that from then on we had to call her Crystal and to say that she was our sister, and our real parents had died in a fire.’

‘Jesus.’ Jayne still remembered how Billy’s eyes had grown wide with disbelief and how the cloak of pity that he’d worn around him ever since they’d known him then extended to include his two new friends too.

That summer was one of Jayne’s favourite memories of adolescence. Actually, if she was completely honest, it was her favourite hands-down. She didn’t have many happy recollections to choose from, so you could argue that it was all relative, but even taking that into the equation, the summer they had met Billy was a game-changer. She and Rachel had always avoided any outside interference from anyone else; they’d never explicitly talked about why they didn’t try to integrate themselves with anyone else at school, or on their road, but they both knew why. Crystal’s inability to relate to children was even more pronounced, if that was possible, if she didn’t share some DNA with them.

Billy’s detour into their lives was a timely reminder that there was life outside of their twindom. But as the cooler evenings started to seep in, Billy’s dad was offered a job with his brother’s brick-laying business in Slough.

Billy had ridden around on his bike the morning of the big move, despite them having said goodbye the evening before. ‘I got this for you,’ he’d mumbled, blushing. He’d held out a red and green friendship bracelet. ‘I thought you might like it. Or not. You don’t have to wear it. Bye.’ He’d turned to go, swinging one leg over his battered BMX.

‘Wait!’ She’d shouted, ‘Um, thanks Bill, it’s really nice. I um, actually got you a book – it’s only second-hand, but you once said that you liked Terry Pratchett and this is his new one. Wait here.’ Jayne had run upstairs to get it from underneath her bed. It had been there for nearly three weeks, still wrapped in the rough, recycled paper bag it came in. She hadn’t known how to cross over into the realm of present-giving-for-no-reason without it seeming odd, so she had carefully stowed it until she had figured out a way to give it to him without simultaneously combusting in mortified embarrassment. She’d bounded back down the stairs, flushed. ‘Here,’ she’d said, thrusting it into his hands.

‘Thanks, Jayne, this is great. I’ll start it in the car now. Um, say bye to Rachel too, and, um, well. Bye.’

He’d looked as though he was going to start peddling and then thought better of it; then he’d quickly leaned over and crushed his mouth onto hers. His tongue had darted frantically into her mouth, then out again, and then he was off, wobbling furiously down the cul-de-sac.

**

They’d suddenly stopped walking and were standing outside a restaurant. Jayne didn’t need to look at its name or see the menu to know that it was Italian. Rows of Chianti bottles with wicker bases and eruptions of hard candle wax lined the windows, and you could glimpse the ubiquitous red-and-white-checked tablecloths beyond. Jayne tuned back into what Billy, Will, and Rachel were discussing. It seemed as though they’d decided that a celebratory drink deserved an upgrade to dinner.

‘This suit?’ asked Will, gesturing to the restaurant. In that moment he could have bought a can of dog food and three plastic spoons and she’d have nodded just as eagerly as she found herself doing now.

Chapter 3 (#uc5f6e201-e9fe-5802-96b4-0a8e48becffd)

It may have been the warmth of the room or more likely the potency of the house wine, but Jayne found herself starting to relax. Having been initially shocked into silence, she was making up for it now, gabbling and prompting, asking and touching. She couldn’t stop touching him, actually couldn’t stop herself. She was peppering every question by gratuitously resting her hand on his forearm, which he, in turn, instinctively flexed a little each time it happened.

Rachel was sitting back in her chair smiling. It had taken her four years to persuade Jayne to cut his friendship bracelet off her wrist, by which time it was all matted and the once-vibrant red and green had faded to a grimy sort of grey. ‘Darling girl, it’s time,’ she’d said, approaching her sister with her nail clippers as they’d sat in Jayne’s room in her hall of residence.