I turned around. It was the woman I’d seen sitting with Chris last Sunday. His mother, I assumed. She was handling things with much more aplomb than Mum was.

‘Mary,’ she boomed, ‘I’d never have taken you for an alcoholic.’

Mum forced herself to laugh.

‘What are you in for, Philomena? The horses?’

More forced hernia-inducing cackles, as if they were at a cocktail party. Davy, the gambler, was at the other end of the table. I saw the bleak expression on his face and felt a rush of protectiveness.

‘Our son is in here,’ said Philomena. ‘Where’s he gone? Christopher?’

Definitely Chris’s mother. Good. It was no harm at all if his parents knew my parents. It might come in handy just in case he didn’t ring me when we got out. I could use the excuse of dropping a tupperware container up to Mrs Hutchinson, to see him. Mum was bound to need a tupperware container dropped up to Mrs Hutchinson within a day of me getting out. Mum and her friends constantly dropped tupperware containers up to each other. Gateau Diane, coleslaw, that kind of thing. They seemed to do little else.

Mum attempted to do some introductions.

‘Our daughters, Claire…’ She gestured at me.

‘Rachel,’ I corrected.

‘… and Anna, no, the other one… Helen.’

Helen politely excused herself by saying conspiratorially to Mr and Mrs Hutchinson ‘Janey, I’m bursting to make my wees,’ and sidled off. A while later I went after her. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, it was just that I didn’t… trust her.

She was sitting on the stairs literally surrounded by men. The dining-room must have been full of abandoned wives and children. One of the men was Chris. It didn’t surprise me, and it certainly didn’t make me happy.

She was regaling her captive audience with stories of her heavy drinking. ‘Very often I’d wake up and not remember how I got home,’ she boasted.

No one topped her boast by saying ‘That’s nothing. Very often I’d wake up and not remember whether I was dead or alive,’ which they would have been perfectly entitled to do.

Instead, they were tripping over themselves with enthusiastic suggestions. That she check into the Cloisters, there was room for a woman at the moment, there was an empty bed in Nancy and Misty’s room…

‘You can always share my bed if you’re stuck,’ Mike suggested. And I felt a surge of fury. His poor, down trodden, biscuit-bearing wife was only a few feet away.

Clarence tried to stroke Helen’s hair.

‘Stop that now,’ she said sharply. ‘Not unless you pay me a tenner.’

Clarence made a move to rummage round in his pocket, but Mike restrained him by putting his hand on his arm and saying ‘She’s joking.’

‘No, I’m not,’ Helen replied.

While all this furore was taking place, I jealously watched Chris’s face. I wanted to see how he reacted to Helen. Well, what I really wanted to see was that he didn’t react to Helen.

But a couple of glances passed between the two of them that I didn’t like the look of. They seemed loaded and meaningful.

I felt sick and I hated myself for always fading into insignificance around any of my sisters. Even my mother sometimes outshone me.

Like a fool, I’d thought I might have made enough of an impact on Chris not to disappear under the onslaught of Helen’s charms. But once again, I’d been wrong. I got that terrible, but oh-so-familiar feeling of ‘Who are you trying to kid?’

I stood among the men, forcing myself to join in the laughter, feeling non-existent and elephantine, simultaneously.

I was so upset that, when she was leaving, I forgot to give Helen the letter for Anna, telling Anna to come and visit me with lots of drugs. And later, when I asked Celine for a stamp she said ‘Certainly. Bring me the letter and, when I’ve read it, I’ll let you know if you’re allowed to post it.’

I was so pissed-off that I marched straight over to the confectionery cupboard, flung wide the door and waited to be concussed by the Sunday evening avalanche of chocolate. I wavered momentarily, trying to lay my hands on some will-power. But then Chris said ‘God, that sister of yours is a gas woman,’ and I was awash with the same old agony that I was me. And not Helen. Or somebody else. Anyone else, anyone other than me.

Chocolate, I thought, sick and miserable. That’ll make me feel better, seeing as there’s no drugs available.

‘She’s great, isn’t she,’ I managed to say.

I caught Celine smirking to herself, as she pretended to busy herself with the tapestry thing she always had in her hand when she was spying on us.

Unable to help myself, I picked up a bar of fruit-and-nut so massive you could sail to America on it. ‘Who owns this?’ I called.

‘I do,’ said Mike. ‘But work away.’

I finished it in about twenty seconds.

‘Crisps,’ I shouted out to the room. ‘I need something salty.’

I could have eaten the Tayto that Mum had brought me, but I wanted attention and looking after as much as a savoury snack.

Don rushed to my side with a six-pack of Monster Munch, Peter called ‘I can do you some Ritz biccies’, Barry the child said ‘If it’s a real emergency I can spare a bag of Kettle Crisps’and Mike muttered in an undertone that I was supposed to hear and that Celine wasn’t, ‘I’ve got something nice and salty in my pants you can suck on.’

I waited for Chris to offer me something, to let me know that he knew I still existed, but he said nothing at all.

33

They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Well, Luke and my true love’s path didn’t run at all, it limped along in new boots that were chafing its heels. Blistered and cut, red and raw, every hopping, lopsided step, a little slice of agony.

In the week after the party I thought of him a lot. I was so ashamed every time I remembered how badly I’d behaved. At the time I’d thought I was a femme fatale, but afterwards I felt more like a prostitute. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, the way you can’t help probing a sore tooth with your tongue.

Even though I hoped I would never clap eyes on him again, he intrigued me. His rejection had sparked an interest that I hadn’t previously felt.

Fair play to him, a part of me thought. A man with principles.