Emily Barr - The Sleeper

I love this street because it is almost entirely lined with restaurants. If it were up to me, we would be at the Indian vegetarian place up the road, but it is not, and that is fine. I check my phone. Sam has texted me good luck for this evening. I reply quickly, and then, as I press send, see my parents walking past the window and coming into the restaurant.

I stand up and plaster on a big smile. I wish I could kick back with my family, stop putting on a front, be myself. But I am far more myself when I am at work. I am most of all myself, I think suddenly, when I am drinking on the night train home. Guy is in my head again, and I push him away.

‘There she is!’ says Dad. As I look at him, I notice, as I always do, how old he is. In my head he remains about forty, and whenever I see him I have to fast-forward through time, twenty-five years, to the present day. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and slightly stooped now. His hair is grey and slightly longer than it should be in (I think) an attempt to preserve the fine head of hair of which he was always so proud. He is also morbidly obese, but we never mention that.

His eyes, though, are as piercing as ever. They strike fear into me still. I look at him and I crave approval.

‘Hello, Dad,’ I say, and kiss him on the cheek.

‘Lara.’ He smiles. ‘You are looking extremely well. Your sister’s not arrived yet, then?’

‘Not yet. Hi, Mum.’

My mother is blonde and beautiful, but she is also opaque, unknowable, and the least maternal woman imaginable. I rarely give her a moment’s thought. For my whole life she has done as she has been told by Dad. I have no idea what goes on in her head, or, behind closed doors, in their relationship. She is a woman who toes the line. I slightly despise her, while Olivia openly and rudely scorns her.

‘Hello, dear,’ she says, and we all sit down. Entirely predictably, Dad orders a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, his standard Pizza Express tipple.

‘You looked tall just then.’ He leans around the table to look at my feet. ‘I thought so! How on earth do you walk in those things?’

‘I’m used to it. I like them.’

He shakes his head. ‘Women! Your mother’s never gone in for that sort of thing. The whole “ladies love shoes” gene passed her by entirely. You carry them off, though, darling, you really do.’

‘Lara carries everything off,’ Mum agrees, her tone as mild as it always is and always was.

‘She does.’ He smiles at me. ‘So? Ready to chuck it in and run back to Cornwall? Or ready to drag Sam to the city?’

I pout as I ponder this. ‘I’m enjoying work,’ I tell him. ‘Sam hates me being away. He wouldn’t move up here, though. I’m happy as I am for now, but I know that’s selfish because Sam’s not happy at all. I’ll do this and then settle back in Cornwall. Probably.’

‘Hmm.’ He is looking at me with his piercing eyes, but he does not pursue this any further. ‘Leon’s coming along later, by the way,’ he adds, and this cheers me up.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ Olivia takes the empty seat at our round table. It is directly opposite me, between our parents. I look at her, then quickly away. She has done something to her hair, so it is spiked up a little bit on top. In her red and white striped Breton top and tight black jeans, she looks (as ever) like someone from a magazine. Her eyes are rimmed with kohl, her lips bright red.

‘Olivia,’ says Dad. He doesn’t stand up, because she forestalled that by sitting down so quickly, but he leans across and plants an awkward kiss on her cheek. ‘Good to see you. Have some wine.’

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I’ll get a Peroni. If that’s allowed.’

‘Of course it’s allowed.’

They say nothing, but their eye contact is challenging and exclusive. It never takes long.

Now that Olivia is here, conversation becomes stilted. Dad makes a point of looking at her shoes, and wordlessly comparing her tatty-yet-cool Converse with my shiny red heels. Olivia bristles. Mum drinks quickly and fiddles with the stem of the glass so much, in her anxiety, that she knocks it over and smashes it. Dad smoulders with fury and raises his voice at the waiter who comes to clear it away. I try to smooth things over, with him, with Mum, with the waiter. It is a perfect microcosm of the way our family life has always worked.

As a child, I lived in a constant state of heightened anxiety. I knew that, in Olivia’s eyes, I was the chosen one, and she, by implication, had been discarded. I courted paternal approval, terrified that one day I might accidentally do something horribly wrong and that Olivia and I might change roles in his eyes.

Dad, though, has never wavered. He has always liked me, always approved of what I have done, appreciated my work, liked the way I have lived my life.

No one knows, not even Mum, that I single-handedly bailed out his business, years ago. We never talk about it. He never paid me back. And no one, not even my father, knows that if I had not bailed him out, I would not be uneasy and scared now, every time I imagine someone spying on me. He never asked where the money came from; I have always assumed his instincts informed him that he was better off not knowing.

It was always going to catch up with me, one day.

I look at Olivia across the table, at her petulant mouth and her sulky face, and I am fourteen again.

I got home from school that day as usual. I never dawdled, but walked sensibly with my sensible friends because, even though Dad was at work, that was the behaviour he expected. When I got home, I went around to the back of the house and let myself in at the back door as usual.

‘I’m home,’ I called, and put the kettle on; I was self-consciously making an effort to start to drink tea. I took out a mug and the tin of tea bags. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I called.

‘Yes please,’ said Mum’s voice from somewhere in the house. We lived in Bromley, in the house that is still the parents’ home, an ugly Edwardian place. It looked like nothing from the outside, but inside it was strangely huge. I made us both tea, and took mine to the kitchen table, where I started my homework.

‘Tea’s in the kitchen!’ I called. ‘Shall I bring it to you?’

‘No, darling. I’ll be right down.’

Olivia is right. I must have been insufferable: I was so desperate for ongoing approval that I never, ever risked transgressing in any form at all.

Mum came down, smiled vaguely at me, and took her cup of tea.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘Fine,’ I assured her.

‘Any sign of your sister?’

Both parents call Olivia my sister when they speak to me about her. They always have done. She said once that it is because they cannot bear the intimacy of speaking the very name they gave her. She might be right.

‘No. I haven’t seen her.’

I was two years above her at school. Our paths rarely crossed, and when they did, we carefully ignored one another. She was generally around the fringes of the school grounds, smoking with the cool crowd. I was more likely to be found in the library.

‘As long as she’s back by five. Your father’s coming home early today. He called to say so.’

We both looked at the large clock that hung in the middle of the wall. It was quarter past four. Neither of us said anything.

Dad’s key sounded in the front door at three minutes to five. I kept on with my homework, sitting up straight at the dining-room table like a good girl, but my heart was not in it. I was starting to worry, not only about his fury and its consequences, but about Olivia’s safety.

He came in beaming. At this point he really was in his forties, and he was tall and strong, in his prime. He was only slightly fat.