‘Russell’s such an idiot,’ Angelica said. ‘Can’t you just ignore him? I would.’
Lucy can’t, though – they share a house, they work together, and she doesn’t even have relatives she could go to. Her father’s family are in New Zealand, and her mother’s parents aren’taround much. They’re good to Lucy when she sees them but that’s only a few times a year. She doesn’t feel close to them, not close enough to ask if they could help her.
So she has to find her own ways to manage Russell. Or, rather, to not antagonise him. Except that seems to be failing, because he really doesn’t like her sewing at home. He’s been grumbling about the noise of the machine ‘wrecking things’, even though she’s upstairs in a tiny space that her mum calls the attic but which is really a weird kind of half room that has no purpose. Now it’s Lucy’s sewing room, and she doesn’t make that much noise in it, not even now she’s trying to make a dress according to the pattern.
Today, though, in the interests of trying to keep everyone happy, she’s closed the door to the stairway that leads up to the attic and put a draught stopper against it – one she made herself – to cut out as much noise as possible.
There’s enough room in the attic for her to spread out a little and lay the calico pieces she’s sewed on the floor. Her mother gave her that tip – to make a pattern in calico first if you’re not sure what you’re doing. And Lucy really isn’t sure.
She bends over the machine to start on the next piece, frowning as she looks closely at her stitches. Are they straight? They need to be. The fabric for the dress was expensive and she can’t afford to make a mistake, so she needs to get this calico version right.
She bought the material from a big fabric shop in the city – white cotton with holly leaves and berries printed on it – and another fabric that’s the same red as the berries, which she plans to use for the sash. The cotton is rolled up and sitting on a chair Lucy brought up from her bedroom, and the red is folded over the back of the chair.
As she presses the pedal on the machine to make it move, she hears a loud bang and starts, which makes the stitch go awry. Great – now she’ll have to unpick it.
Another bang.
She goes to the stairs and opens the door.
‘Tell her to shut up!’ It’s Russell, yelling.
‘I will not.’ That’s their father, and Lucy feels surprised – usually he lets Russell have his rants, regardless of what they’re about.
‘She’s ruining my bloody weekend!’
So Russell is back on this again. She can’t imagine what she’s ruining for him – all he does is sit around and watch television.
‘Let your sister have her hobby,’ her father replies.
‘Half-sister.’ Even all the way upstairs, Lucy can hear Russell’s contempt.
That’s what he’s always called her: his half-sister. Back when he was still at school and had friends, he’d bring them over to the house and introduce Lucy as his half-sister. He wouldn’t even use her name. So his friends all called her the half-sister. ‘Hi, half-sister’; ‘Hey, Russ, does your half-sister want a drink?’; ‘Don’t let the half-sister in.’
It’s designed to hurt her, she knows. Her mum once told her thatshewas the real target, because Russell has never forgiven her for being with his dad. Or something. But it’s not her mum whose name has been erased. Russell always introduced her to his friends as Connie.
Lucy understood what her mother was telling her, though: Russell needs their understanding. Lucy’s to do her best to accommodate Russell and accept that he isn’t going to accommodate her. That’s what she gets for being second born. And it’s still going on, even though he doesn’t have friends coming around any more.
‘Russell, Lucy’s allowed to have her interests,’ her father says.
‘What – even if they’re stupid?’
She can’t hear what her father replies as they seem to be moving into a different room.
Lucy returns to the machine, but doesn’t feel she can go on. If she starts up again, will Russell get worse? She decides to leave it for today and try again next weekend.
On Monday, though, she thinks she’ll try to sew the pieces by hand – it’ll be good practice and at least she can make some progress that way.
She tells Poppy and Angelica about what happened on the weekend and they both tell her to not let Russell win.
‘Who does he think he is?’ Poppy says. ‘Imagine carrying on like that about asewing machine?’
It does seem ridiculous when she puts it that way. But Lucy doesn’t want to make things worse, so after she arrives home from the shop, she eats her dinner quickly and goes upstairs.
When she turns on the dim overhead light she sees that the Christmas fabric has unspooled and is now covering part of the attic floor. Which is odd – she propped it on the chair in such a way that it couldn’t have unrolled by itself.
Then she peers closer and sees there are shoe prints on it. Dirty, big shoe prints.
She can’t quite figure out what’s happened. A biology teacher once told them how the human eye doesn’t actually see things – it gathers information for the brain to then work out what it’s looking at. So that must be why she can almost feel her brain trying to make sense of this.