Who’s That Girl?: A laugh-out-loud sparky romcom!

Trying not to let spirits sag as she entered the poky, ramshackle semi, wreathed in fag smoke, books stacked against the walls and on the stairs, wallpaper peeling. Edie would hug her father, Gerry, hello. He was always in a moth-eaten jumper, his craggy face like an Easter Island statue. You would never guess that Edie, her dad and Meg were related, they looked completely dissimilar. (Edie couldn’t help think that was telling.)

Meg had a very round face to Edie’s pointed chin, small cornflower blue eyes to Edie’s vast and doll-like dark ones, and patchily bleached mousy hair, which she wore in matted dreadlocks, gathered into a pineapple-style ponytail.

Edie would unpack the food into the fridge, while Meg loitered and complained at the Oakham chicken touching her tofu wieners, generally acting as if Saudi royalty had come to stay.

Meg was a militant vegan and if Edie wanted anything resembling a Christmas roast, she had to bring it herself and fight for its right to party. (She’d offered to take them to a pub for lunch in the past, but Meg thought it was outrageous exploitation of the proletariat who had to work on a public holiday.)

With relief, Edie would chuck her flowers in a jug which, in the chaotic tip of a kitchen, was akin to pencilling a beauty spot on a corpse. Then she’d faux-cheerily open a bottle of wine. Glugging it took the edge off, and helped abort the annual argument about whether her father and sister smoking stood in the back doorway, freezing faggy air rushing in to the kitchen, did in fact constitute ‘not smoking in the house’.

They’d long ago cancelled the gift giving on Christmas morning. Edie’s father was on an academic pension and Meg was mostly unemployed, and no one had a clue what to get for each other anyway. So they got half-drunk while Edie tried to make seven dishes in a small kitchen without anything meat or dairy so much as looking the wrong way at Meg’s spartan ingredients.

Meg would slowly build up a head of steam at the fact that Edie dared trample on their ‘cruelty-free lifestyle’ in this insensitive way, and cava-pissed Edie would stop herself from saying it felt pretty cruel to appetites.

With her sister and father parked in front of a rerun of The Snowman, Edie had to clear the piles of mouldering New Scientist magazines from the only-used-once-a-year dining room table and cobble together clean crockery that sort of matched.

They’d eat a botched-together lunch with a Gaza Strip in the middle made of candles, separating Edie’s Henry VIII food from a glowering Meg’s bean banquet. If Edie’s dad recklessly praised anything on Edie’s side of the table, Meg would say: ‘The succulent flavour of murder. The lovely taste of unethical slaughter. I’m having to eat with death filling my nostrils.’

Edie would likely snap: ‘Well we’re having to eat with hippy grief filling our ears,’ and Meg would rejoin: ‘Yes, anything other than your choices is hippy. Why don’t you just join the Bullingdon Club, Bernard Matthews.’ And so on.

And that was it; that was magical Christmas Day. If they could find something on television to agree on, it provided a few hours of respite, but if tempers frayed, or Meg got on to politics, all bets were off.

There’d been a particularly bad row two years ago when Meg had a long soliloquy about scandalous under-funding in the NHS. Edie snapped and said: ‘You know how they pay for the NHS? Taxes, from people who work, and PAY TAXES.’

In the ensuing fight, Meg called her a ‘consumerist chimpanzee’ and a ‘Nazi in a dress’ and Edie said Some Nazis did wear dresses so that doesn’t make sense, which you’d know if you didn’t skive off sixth-form college to smoke weed and call the tutors “head wreck fascists”. An observation that really calmed things down.

Their dad went to the dining room to play his old piano. He treated trying to defuse arguments between his daughters as bomb disposal; he might cut the wrong wire … better to stay back entirely.

Edie got a mid-afternoon text from Jack, last year, that said: ‘Do we need to talk about how this is in fact, the worst day invented?’ and she could’ve kissed her phone; whirled around the room hugging it, while humming. The happy few hours of text tennis with Jack that ensued was the only pleasure to be had that day. He got it, he hated Christmas too! Soulmates! And his jokes about his in-laws – ‘the outlaws’ as he called them – were so funny.

The only other respite in the entire experience was if Edie could get out for a Boxing Day pint with her school friends Hannah and Nick, yet this was increasingly difficult. Hannah had a gorgeous place in Edinburgh and had taken to inviting her parents to come to her, and Nick had a wife – a real Nazi in a dress, from what Edie could tell – and a small child, and recently said he couldn’t get a pass out.

On the 27th, the day she went back to London, Edie felt near-euphoric. She tried to hide it from her dad, but the haste with which she packed and the fizziness of her mood was hard to completely conceal.

The two key emotions of Edie’s visits home were guilt and disappointment, one feeding off the other. The more disappointed she felt, the guiltier she got. Despite best intentions, she could never effectively hide her hating being there, always playing her part in the three-hander Mike Leigh film they were trapped inside.

She got through this nightmare by having her London life to flee back to. It relied on there being a cast of people down south who thought of her as funny, sparky Edie, who coped, who enjoyed life. Who wasn’t a failure of an absent daughter. Who wasn’t a deeply disliked sister.

Now she’d been reinvented again, and not by her own design. She was reviled Edie, the home-wrecking whore. London hated her now. Nottingham didn’t want her or understand her, either.

As the train pulled into the destination, Edie’s eyes brimmed with hot tears. Three months here. The phrase ‘all my Christmases’ usually meant a massive treat, didn’t it?

11 (#ulink_8fef8f9f-4531-5139-bb58-59781c32a975)

Edie’s dad was delighted to see her, making her feel the usual remorse she wasn’t glad to be home. She’d wrestled with whether she could get away with staying in a hotel and concluded: no, not without badly hurting his feelings, and anyway, hotel plus her London rent = exorbitant. Home it was. Sorry, Meg.

‘Three months?’ her dad said. ‘I don’t think you’ve been here this long since before university!’

Edie grit-grinned and said he must be right. They hugged in the narrow hallway, with the dappled Artex walls that had reminded younger Edie of rice pudding. She rolled her trolley case to the foot of the stairs and hung her coat on the banister. They’d lived in this cramped but homely house since her dad retired early, on ill health grounds, when they were still kids. He’d had a nervous breakdown, but they never referred to it as a nervous breakdown.

‘We’ve become a fully vegan household,’ Meg said, by way of greeting, appearing from the kitchen in a T-shirt saying BITCH PLEASE with a picture of Jane Fonda doing the Hanoi Jane fist, and geometric-print leggings that pouched at the crotch. ‘So don’t bring anything of meat or dairy nature onto the premises or it’s going straight in the bin.’

‘Don’t be daft, Megan,’ their father said, all jocular, ‘She can have the odd bacon cob if she wants one.’

‘Bacon cob?’ bellowed Meg. ‘No she CAN’T! Have you ever heard a pig’s death rattle?’

‘No, but you hum it and I’ll try to keep up.’

Once again, she and Meg weren’t really talking about what they were talking about. This wasn’t about bacon cobs, it was about Meg repelling Edie as a rebel force invading her territory.

It hadn’t always been this way. Edie had been a hero to Meg when they were younger, and Meg trotted behind her like a duckling. Edie had been excessively protective of Meg, almost as much proto mother as older sister. Things started to change when Edie went to university and after she moved to London, Edie returned to find she’d become a fully fledged villain. Her popularity, once so simple, so powerful, had completely curdled. Once lost, it wasn’t possible to get it back. Meg was perpetually resentful, as if Edie was a giant fake, and every word out of her mouth only confirmed it. Edie had probably shouted: ‘What IS your problem?’ many times at Meg, yet non-rhetorically, it was a good question. Edie gathered that it was because Meg deemed Edie’s life choices the choices of a sell-out; a false, superficial lightweight.

‘It’s fine, I can eat meat out of the house,’ Edie said, trying to keep to her resolve of no fighting on the first day.

Meg ‘hmphed’ at this, with an air of irritation at a typical Edie ploy.

An assertive rap of knuckles against the flimsy wooden front door made them all jump.

‘Did you bring back-up with you?’ her dad said.

Edie dodged past him and answered, suddenly nervous that it’d be a gift-ribboned turd in a box or something with ‘Love From The Office’ and she’d be forced to explain it.

A motorcycle courier said ‘Thompson?’ – and handed over an A4 envelope, while Edie used the plastic wand to scribble on the electronic receipt-of-delivery device. The adrenaline subsided as she inspected the publishing house watermark and realised it was the Elliot Owen Files.

When Edie closed the door she saw her father and sister watching, once again, as if Joan Collins had wafted in.

‘Cuttings. To help me interview this actor for his autobiography,’ she said.

‘What an interesting project,’ her dad said, kindly. ‘Has he been in anything I’ve seen?’

‘The fantasy show Blood & Gold. If you’ve seen that.’

‘Ah. No. Didn’t look like my bag. Tolkien is enough questing dwarves for one lifetime.’

‘The one with the sexist attitudes to women where it’s all “Oh, look, my bubbies have fallen out of my lizardskin jerkin, again,”’ Meg said, and Edie laughed.

‘Exactly.’

Once again, Meg looked irked that Edie hadn’t disagreed with her.

‘Why are you writing a book about him, then?’ she said.

‘For the money,’ Edie said.

‘You don’t have to say yes to everything that pays money, you know,’ said Meg.

‘No, just some things, so you don’t have to live off gruel. Can I put my things in my room, Dad?’ Edie said hastily, before Meg took off from the runway.

‘Yes, of course. I’ve moved the washing out of it and most of the wardrobes are free.’