Page 74 of How We Began

I can’t go back to that.

He’s right.

I just can’t.

25th January

(2.37 p.m.)

This lecture can’t go fast enough. I have a date with my brother, and for the first time in what seems like forever, I am actually looking forward to seeing him. Yesterday evening I lay in bed listening to Ben play guitar through the wall and realised that the one person in my entire life that I should be closest to—my twin—is actually the furthest away. So I texted him and asked him to meet me. We’re meeting at Costa and I can’t wait. First thing I’m going to do is make him buy me the biggest coffee they have in order to make up for all the money he ponced off me at Christmas.

Bloody cheek.

26th January

(9.00 p.m.).

If there is one day that I’ll never want to re-live it’ll be this one.

Scrap that. I don’t even want to be able to remember today. I’d like someone to take it away. Now.

It is nine o'clock and I’m in Ben’s bed. His arms are around me tight and his fingers are tracing patters along my sides. I’m emotionally dead. I’ve been chewed up by some emotion-sucking monster and spat back out again.

Yesterday, Tristan and I had our first ever grown-up sibling conversation, which was great. Then it all went horribly wrong. So wrong that I wish I could go to sleep now and wake up unable to remember anything that happened.

Of all the occasions I’ve suffered memory misplacement, this is the one time I could truly do with it.

(Costa and the Coffee of Truth)

I ran out of class as soon as the bell rang and dashed to Deathtrap Cooper, which I drove at high speed into Putney.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, stirring my humongous mocha/choca/every ingredient possible including whipped cream drink.

“Now, let me think, Delilah. Are you aware that you’re a little stuck-up?”

I flicked a sugar packet missile at him.

“You know, for seven years I watched you shrivel away. The longer you were there at the bank, and then when you met that idiot John, and let Mum and Dad morph you into a mini version of them, the less of my sister I actually recognised.”

I stared at him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I couldn’t work out what you wanted. You just seemed to be sleepwalking around, completely unaware that life was going on. I couldn't tell what was real and what was an act.”

Horrified, I realised that’s the same thought I’d had when Ben told me about us meeting before.

“So I ask again, why did you not say anything?”

“Because we were estranged enough anyway. I thought that if I called you on your little miserable existence that you’d cut me out completely.”

“Okay,” I said. There was no point in arguing over the milk the McCannon family had spilt.

“You were acting, though, weren’t you, Lilah? You weren’t really going to end up like them.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“When you decided to go to University, I knew that you had finally woken up. I was really proud of you that day. You finally stood up to Dad.”

“How do you bloody know? You legged it before the row got going.” I grinned thinking back to that awful roast in August when I’d dropped my nuclear bomb. Tristan had hightailed it as soon as we’d stopped chewing on the dry meat.