Emily Barr - The Sleeper

Birds fly overhead with a sudden cry. A man is walking towards me, and I look at him desperately, as if he might save me from having to press the buzzer. He walks past slowly on the other side of the road, talking into a phone.

‘Yeah, sure we could,’ he says, ‘but you’ll have to manage Goddard’s reaction, mate. I’m taking no responsibility.’

I want to ask who Goddard is and what his reaction will be like, but I press the buzzer instead, and the door clicks open without a word from the intercom.

She waits for me on the landing. The carpet has been replaced since I was last here, but the walls are still grubby.

I take a deep breath.

‘Olivia!’ I gush, taking care not to notice the disdain in her flinty eyes. ‘It’s lovely to see you!’ I walk towards her for a hug, then retract it when I feel the force of her frost. ‘Thank you so much for having me. How are you? You look great. Here, I bought you some stuff. Flowers, and some contributions to the house.’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Of course you did. Thanks.’

She runs her fingers through her hair, which is bottle-black and shorter than I have seen it for a long time. It suits her short: she has had it cut in a gamine style that makes her look young and French, an unforgiving style that few could carry off.

Inside, this is a small dwelling but a beautiful one, with windows at the front that flood every part of the sitting room and main bedroom with light for much of the day. The kitchen, bathroom and small bedroom are gloomy in comparison, but I notice that she has now strung fairy lights everywhere to counter the darkness in characteristic aggressively kooky fashion.

She dumps the shopping bag in the murky kitchen without looking at it, and I follow her into the sitting room and watch her throw herself down into the battered leather armchair that has been a part of this room for as long as she has lived here, though now it is covered in purple and silver cushions. I take my place on the cream sofa, and aim a fake and desperate smile in her direction.

‘You’re here,’ she says, fiddling with one of her nails. ‘So how was the first day back in the grand career?’

‘It was fine,’ I tell her, and inevitably, I start babbling. ‘Actually it was great. Straight back into it. I spent the day checking the planning permission, which I always used to do. It was exactly like old times. But how about you, Olivia? How’s work with you? And how’s everything else?’

‘Oh, you know. Not dramatic. Humdrum.’

I laugh. ‘You have the least humdrum life. You know that.’

‘That’s not the way it feels from inside it. But anyway. The parents want to see you. They’re coming up for dinner on Wednesday. Dad’s booked Pizza Express. Obviously. As there is no other restaurant in London.’

‘Oh. OK.’

I sit and smile a frantic smile. She pulls her feet up so she is curled in the chair like a cat. She is very skinny, I notice. I try to calculate how offended she will be if I go and fetch the wine I just bought, open it and pour both of us a large glass. She is ignoring it on purpose. She flashes a sarcastic smile back at me.

I am the older sibling. I am, as she has insisted for as long as I can remember, ‘the golden child’. Golden children can take charge.

‘Are you hungry?’ I offer. ‘I’ve got some bits of food. I can cook something, if you like.’

She will say no, but at least this gives me an opening to go into the kitchen and do it myself.

‘I’m out tonight, actually.’

‘Oh. Cool.’

‘Cool? Yes, it is “cool”, isn’t it? Nice flat to yourself.’

‘That isn’t what I meant! I meant “cool” as in “totally fine”. Where are you going?’

‘Oh, just out.’ She tries to twiddle a piece of hair around her finger, though her hair is not long enough for that, and chuckles privately.

I stand up.

‘OK,’ I say. It never takes long for this to happen, though I think this encounter marks a record. A big wooden carriage clock, the sort of thing I would pass over at a car boot sale because it looks naff, but which is somehow stylish in this setting, tells me that it is ten to eight. It is still light outside. ‘I’ll get myself some food then, if you don’t mind. And some wine.’ With a deep breath I force myself to be friendly again. ‘Can I pour you a glass before you go out?’

‘Sure.’ She looks terminally bored.

My bedroom is the box room, which is also known as ‘the study’. Over the years it has hosted various of Olivia’s arch and unknowable friends, and in between tenants it becomes a dumping ground for anything she doesn’t want to look at.

I push the door open and, because I want so much to be friends with Olivia, I am genuinely touched by the fact that she has cleared it, and cleaned it, for me. I three-quarters expected to find the floor covered with paperwork and boxes and things she was thinking about throwing out. Instead, the floorboards are perfectly clear, the single bed (this is a room that definitely could not host any other sort) is made with a duvet in an embroidered white cover, and two pillows. There is even a folded pale pink towel on the end of the bed. A clothes rail has hangers on it for my stuff, and there is a built-in cupboard for the rest of my things.

‘Thanks for the room, Olivia,’ I call. I wish I could call her Liv or Oli as her friends do. Some of them call her Libby or Libster or Ols, and the further the variation gets from her actual name, the more intimacy there is in it. I have never been able to attempt anything other than the full ‘Olivia’.

It is not a dilemma that works in reverse. There is no obvious shortening for Lara. Only one person, in my whole life, has attempted one. Rachel used to call me Laz. I swallow, and push the memory away.

Even my mother has never gone off piste with so much as a ‘La’ (which would, admittedly, sound stupid). Nor has Sam. I am Lara, and people call me Lara, and that is that. I am not my sister, and unlike her, I cannot use my name as a weapon.

‘You’re welcome,’ she calls back from somewhere, just as I open the cupboard to be hit by an avalanche of paperwork, discarded clothes, random items and what can only be described as ‘assorted crap’.

I wonder whether to retract the thanks, but in the name of peacekeeping I just get down on my knees and shove the whole lot under the bed.

A rangy man with a beard and a tweed jacket appears at the door. He looks a bit like Jarvis Cocker, and I am pathetically grateful when he greets me warmly.

‘Aha!’ he says, pointing at me from the doorway. ‘You are the famed sister! Loitering with wine! Cornish-woman come to work in the city, no?’

‘That’s right.’ I don’t want to know what she has been saying about me.

‘Enchanted to meet you,’ he says with a little bow. ‘I’m Allan.’

‘Hi, Allan.’ He is looking expectantly at me. She clearly has never mentioned my name. ‘Lara.’

He stretches out a long arm, and we shake hands with a strange formality.

‘Lara.’ He rolls the word around his mouth. ‘Lara. Sorry to whisk your sister away on your first night, Lara. Would you care to join us, Lara?’

I am tempted to accept, just to see her face.

‘No. Thank you, though. I’ve got lots to sort out. Have a good evening.’

‘We most certainly plan to.’

Allan bids me a polite good night as they leave. Olivia pretends I am not there as she sweeps past me and out on to the new-yet-dirty landing carpet.

I speak to Sam for half an hour, amazed that I have not yet been away from home for twenty-four hours. As we talk, I pace around the flat, into and out of the sitting room that is bright even when dark closes in, illuminated by the street lights outside, into the tiny kitchen where I help myself to an olive, a piece of pitta bread dipped in hummus and then, on my third circuit of the flat, a refill of wine.