It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend

by Sophie Ranald

  “I hope you don’t mind me putting the tree up, although it’s only the tenth,” Rose said. She looked flushed and pleased – she really loves doing this kind of thing. “We’re having rib of veal with chanterelles, and smoked, herb-crusted goat’s cheese with chanterelles for you and Simon.”

  “What?” I said. My hopes of sending an SOS text message to Ben and if he wasn’t free ringing my best friend Claire, and legging it down to the Latchmere, were fading fast. “Rose, I’m really sorry, but I’d completely forgotten about this and I… er… I have plans.”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “I reminded you the other night, don’t you remember, and you said you were free.”

  A hazy memory surfaced of her mentioning something, and me muttering a response before going back to gawping at Oliver. Rose is a chatterer – even if she can see I’m watching something on telly or reading my Kindle, she chats. About her day at work, about the new shoes she’s bought, about her plans for the evening – chat, chat, chat. Bless her, it’s quite sweet really, but the ability to tune her out has been a vital life skill I acquired in childhood and have honed to a fine art since we’ve shared the flat.

  Clearly I was trapped – she’d gone and made a special veggie main course for me and this Simon, and I wasn’t going to be able to get out of it without hurting her feelings and making myself feel like a total evil shit.

  “Do you need a hand with anything?” I asked.

  “No, it’s all under control,” said Rose. Then she gave me one of her Looks. “Why don’t you just have a shower and get ready? Use some of my Molton Brown revitalising stuff if you’ve had a tiring day.”

  Which I interpreted as, “Go and wash your hair and change into something decent, or you’ll show me up in front of my friends.”

  “So who’s coming?” I asked, opening the fridge and nicking one of Rose’s homemade chocolate and sloe gin truffles.

  “Just a few people,” Rose said, checking them off on her fingers. “There’s Simon, who works with me, and his partner Khalid.” So at least she wasn’t trying to set me up with Simon, which was a relief. “And Vanessa and Tom.” Vanessa was one of Rose’s more annoying friends from school, whose wedding the previous year to Tom Willoughby-Archer had graced the pages of Tatler and Hello, according to Rose. “And Pip, she was going to bring Sebastian but they’ve had an epic row apparently so she’s coming on her own, and I invited Oliver at the last minute so we’ll be an even number.”

  I felt a little fizz of pleasure. “Right, I’ll go and make myself look presentable then,” I said, and went upstairs to shower.

  To be fair to Rose, I’m never going to win any best-dressed-woman awards in my work attire. I have to wear suits in the office and I absolutely hate it, and resent paying a single penny more than I have to for them, so I tend to descend on Matalan and Next and M&S at sale time and buy a job lot in various colours and throw them in the washing machine once a week, which is why they don’t last nearly as long as they should. That day I was wearing a particularly uninspiring mushroom-coloured ensemble that had seen better days, and quite frankly even its best days hadn’t been that good.

  Steaming gently, a towel wrapped around my hair, I gloomily surveyed the contents of my wardrobe. I don’t much care about fashion – it strikes me as a bit shallow and pointless to spend as much money as Rose does on what you wear – but that night I felt really depressed by my lack of clothes and if I’m being honest by my appearance generally. I was going to be sitting around a table with former model Vanessa, who has the long limbs and perfect bone structure achieved by generations of rich, thick men marrying generations of thick, beautiful women; Pip, who if I remembered correctly was an up-and-coming fashion designer and the daughter of some 1970s rock god and a famous actress; Simon and Khalid who being gay men were bound to be toe-curlingly stylish; and my sister, who always looks gorgeous. And Oliver. Of course. It was Oliver, Rose’s Oliver, who I was really thinking about as I raked through my wardrobe, inspecting and discarding garment after garment. The turquoise silk tunic I bought in China would have been perfect, but had a grease stain in the middle of the front and I kept forgetting to take it to the dry cleaner’s. My black velvet batwing top, which I found in a load of Mum’s old things that Dad was going to take to the Oxfam shop, and rescued for nothing more than sentimental reasons really, except now it’s suddenly madly fashionable, was in a crumpled ball at the bottom of the laundry basket. My only dress, a red beaded sheath from Monsoon, had suffered cruelly when I ignored the ‘dry clean only’ instruction on its label.

  In the end I settled for jeans, of course. That’s what I always do: spend half an hour frantically digging through my wardrobe trying stuff on and dropping it on the floor and end up with my bedroom looking like a branch of JD Sports after the rioters have been round, and wearing jeans. Still, I managed to find a rather nice sparkly scarf in Rose’s accessories drawer (she has an accessories drawer, and a makeup drawer, and a shelf in her wardrobe where all her handbags live in linen drawstring bags. And I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that her shoes are all in plastic boxes with a photo of the shoe stuck to the front), and used her GHDs to straighten my hair and put on some of her Tom Ford scent, and by the time I was ready I looked okay, I thought.

  Now you might be wondering whether in addition to nicking Rose’s scent and her hair straighteners and her scarf (oh, and some lovely shimmery Shu Uemara eyeliner – let me not hold back), I had set my sights on her boyfriend. Honestly, I hadn’t. I was… intrigued, I guess, by Oliver. There was something about him that made me want him to think well of me. I didn’t want him to see me as Rose’s fat, slobby older sister, but I didn’t want him, if you see what I mean. Not then. Rose and I had never, ever gone for the same sort of men – I fancy blokes who see the world in the same way I do, who care about important things like ideas and politics and the environment, and don’t care about things like looks and money. I didn’t know Oliver, but just the fact that he’d appealed to Rose pretty much automatically made him not my type. Still, when I went downstairs to set the table under Rose’s strict guidance, I found myself developing a severe case of Mentionitis.

  “Oooh, you look amazing!” Rose said, when I came into the kitchen. “That scarf is fab on you. You should wear it more often.” That’s another thing about Rose, she’s incredibly generous. She doesn’t mind at all when I borrow her stuff without asking – although the flip side of that is she has no reservations at all about borrowing mine. Not that it matters, because I’ve got nothing she’d want. She does help herself to my fat-free natural yoghurt though, when she’s run out, which is a bit annoying. After all, you can’t just put it back like you can a scarf.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I thought I’d make a bit of an effort so as not to look like the fugly sister. So, tell me more about this Oliver then.” When I said his name, I could feel myself blushing – stupid or what?

  “Isn’t he lovely?” said Rose, with a little sort of happy sigh, arranging a small battalion of gold candles of different heights on the dining room table. “I met him at work. He came in a couple of weeks ago for the contemporary art sale preview, and then I bid on a couple of Marcus Brands for him, and won them, and he took me out for a drink to say thanks.”

  “Wow, Marcus Brand,” I said, putting wine glasses on the table and watching Rose move them to the other side of the plates. Marcus Brand is one of the hottest of Rose’s YBAs. He was long-listed for the Turner Prize a couple of years back and his paintings (to use the term loosely – they’re mostly mixed-media monstrosities made from ‘objets trouvées that epitomise the urban environment’, according to the brochure Rose showed me once, which means empty paper coffee cups, Big Mac boxes, chicken bones and in one instance – and I’m not making this up – a used tampon) are madly sought after and sell for ridiculous amounts. So this told me that Oliver had a) lots of money, and b) not much taste. “He must be loaded.”

  “He certainly likes investing in
art,” said Rose rather primly. “And I suppose he can afford it; he’s a partner at Longfellow Reeves.”

  Business as usual for my sister, I thought. My boyfriends have tended to have interesting but not lucrative careers – Wallace worked in admin for Amnesty International, Sean was a journalist, Chris was training to be a GP, although he changed his mind and decided to go into cosmetic surgery at around the same time as he cheated on me with some blonde nurse. Go figure. And although of course he isn’t my boyfriend, Ben works as a parliamentary adviser for an MP – Lucille Field, who used to be a shadow cabinet minister before she – yeah, that one. But Rose won’t consider going out with anyone who doesn’t have a load of noughts on the end of his net worth. Not that she’s shallow or superficial, she just… Well, I suppose she is, a bit. In some ways.

  “So never mind about his bank balance,” I said, “When he stayed over on Tuesday, was that, you know, your chance to put him through his paces for the first time?”

  “God, Ellie, you’re so nosey!” Rose was leaning over the table lighting the candles, but I suspected the glow on her cheeks wasn’t just from the naked flames. “Since you ask, I stayed over at his place a couple of days before. On our fourth date.”

  “And?” I said. It’s great fun interrogating Rose when she doesn’t want to be interrogated – she gets all flustered.

  She didn’t this time though, she stood back and inspected the table from all angles, then she said quite seriously, “It’s not a buyer’s market out there, Ellie.”

  I was about to ask her what on earth art auctions had to do with what Oliver was like in bed, when she looked at her watch and said, “Christ! I’d better get changed,” and legged it upstairs, and I poured myself a hefty G&T and sat down to wait for Rose’s friends to arrive.

  “And what do you do, Ellie?” asked Simon, or it may have been Khalid, as we all tucked in to our main course – to be honest I can’t remember which of the glossy pair of them it was, as things were a little hazy by this point. I’d had a G&T and then another, and then a couple of glasses of the champagne Rose had splashed about while people ate their canapés (seriously, canapés. God love her), and then obviously loads of wine with dinner.

  I caught Rose’s eye across the table and I could see her thinking, “Don’t mention the minge bus!” That’s the thing about my job – it does tend to take over the conversation rather. It’s not called the minge bus, obviously. The name of the charity is YEESH, which stands for Youth Empowerment and Education for Sexual Health, and in addition to all the media and campaigns stuff that I look after, we’ve got a crack team of doctors, nurses and educators who travel around the place (‘up and down the country’, our press releases say) visiting schools and youth groups and giving talks and then offering counselling and contraceptive advice and smear tests and the morning-after pill and referral for treatment of STIs and counselling for terminations and stuff in their mobile consulting room – hence my name for it, the minge bus. Anyway, if I say so myself, it’s a fantastic organisation and it does brilliant work, but sometimes people – or rather, narrow-minded idiots – view what we do as controversial, mainly because we’re up-front about the fact that teenagers are biologically programmed to have sex, and that’s what they’re going to do whether you like it or not, and the best way to deal with the issue is to provide them with the knowledge and equipment they need to have it safely. As you can imagine, we get a lot of flak from the right-wing press, and Rose knows from bitter experience that once I start talking about it, it can be difficult to shut me up.

  So I said all this in answer to Khalid – or Simon – and they made approving noises, because like most gay men they took a sensible view of these things.

  Then Vanessa said, “But aren’t you just encouraging girls to be promiscuous? Isn’t it better to teach them to say no?”

  I splashed more wine into my glass. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’re a fourteen-year-old girl and your boyfriend says he’s going to finish with you if you won’t have sex with him, and all your friends say they’re sleeping with their boyfriends, and no one is giving any sensible advice about contraception because they still believe the rubbish about not getting pregnant the first time, or if you do it standing up,” I could see Rose wincing, “or if you use an empty crisp packet as a condom, and your boyfriend won’t take no for an answer, and then you don’t have access to emergency contraception or proper advice, and you wonder why we have a teenage pregnancy rate higher than anywhere else in Europe.” By this stage I suppose I was getting a bit loud, but I’m passionate about what I do.

  Before Rose could tactfully steer the conversation on to more innocuous subjects, Vanessa chimed in again, “But how can a fourteen-year-old girl make the decision to terminate a pregnancy?” And then I’m afraid I went off on one a bit, launching into my standard rant about how abortion is safer than childbirth and if you don’t allow women absolute control over decisions about their reproductive health then we become little more than brood mares for society, and by the time I’d finished, the polite hum of conversation around the table had fallen silent, and Vanessa was looking shocked and embarrassed.

  “Well, of course you’re entitled to your opinion, Ellie,” she said, and I said it wasn’t an opinion, it was a fact, and she was entitled to have opinions too but only if she was willing to accept that they were just plain wrong. Which I suppose is why Rose doesn’t like it when I talk about the minge bus at her dinner parties – but then I can’t help it if some of her friends have ridiculous, antediluvian views, can I?

  “Would anyone like some pudding?” asked Rose in a rather tight sort of voice, and stood up and started clearing plates. Vanessa got up to help her and I knew that when they were in the kitchen Rose would be apologising to her for my behaviour and Vanessa would be lying and telling her it was fine, she wasn’t offended, at all. Then they came back with a bowl of what Rose announced was chestnut panacotta with mincemeat sauce, and the conversation around the table more or less resumed. I decided I’d better keep quiet for a bit and try not to cause any more ructions, so I concentrated on eating my pudding – which was gorgeous – and listened to Oliver talking to Tom about his art collection and some guy called Jamie Cunningham who was apparently the next big thing. Rose chimed in and said that he’d asked her to sit for him, and everyone made suitably impressed noises.

  When everyone had finished, I started to clear the table – Rose has me well trained – and Oliver got up to help me. We carried the plates and bowls through to the kitchen and while I was stacking the dishwasher Oliver said, “That was impressive work back there, Ellie. You’re absolutely right, those sort of views need to be challenged.” I looked up at him and he smiled and I felt my stomach turn over in a way that had nothing to do with my having eaten way too much panacotta.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I woke up the next morning feeling as rough as a badger’s arse. My tongue had cleaved itself to the roof of my mouth and tasted as if I’d been licking dried cat sick. My eyelashes were stuck together with lumps of sleep and mascara. I had a pounding headache and a horrible sense of impending doom. I tried to roll over and get back to sleep for a while – always the sensible thing to do in these situations – but it was no good; I needed to wee and The Fear had me well and truly in its grasp, and besides there was a lovely smell of coffee and bacon wafting up the stairs.

  I know I said I’m a vegetarian, and I am, it’s something I really believe is important. It’s not just about the morality of killing animals to eat, there are so many other issues: food miles, the environmental impact of animal husbandry, the economics of it all. Do you know how many acres of pasture it takes to produce a pound of beef, and how much grain could be produced from the same area of land? Well, I can’t exactly remember, but trust me, it’s a lot. Of course vegetarianism isn’t without its ethical compromises. Ben pointed out to me a few years ago that if you’re a vegetarian who eats dairy products you’re inadvertently contributing to th
e murder of thousands of male dairy calves, which are born but have no use in milk production. I have no idea what I thought happened to them – either they lived out their days happily scampering around green pastures, or the bad meat eaters ate them, I suppose. But it’s neither of the above: they basically get slaughtered at birth and used for pet food. And that really shocked me, so much so that I gave up dairy (and eggs, on the basis that if a thing’s worth doing…) and became a vegan for more than a year. But I just couldn’t hack it. My hair started falling out, I was tired and run down and constantly getting colds, I piled on about a stone because I craved sugar all the time and there’s this lovely little vegan cafe down the road that does amazing peanut butter cupcakes, and I was getting through about five of them a week, in addition to mountains of nuts and avocado pears. Then Ben told me about the terrible deforestation that’s going on in the Amazon and how fragile natural habitat is being destroyed to clear land for soya production, and pointed out that by following a vegan diet I was basically complicit in that. So I made myself a cheese omelette and felt much, much better.

  Anyway my point is that if you try to live in a decent and ethical way, you find yourself constantly coming up against dilemmas that seem fundamentally insoluble. Is it worse to eat free range chicken than battery eggs? Is the destruction of the rain forest for soya production a price worth paying to feed people in the developing world who might otherwise starve? Is the carbon footprint of a South African avocado pear more or less than that of a Welsh lamb chop? And so on and on. You can’t get by without making some compromises, and as far as I’m concerned it’s never going to be possible to be morally pure when it comes to food – or indeed anything else – and what’s important is that one is mindful of the choices one makes. Which is why I try not to feel guilty about the fact that I love the smell of bacon and still long for a bacon sandwich, just sometimes, if I have a really stinking hangover.