But I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. Instead I stood there, smiling like an idiot, and glancing back and forth between the doorway and Jessica.
Eventually, she glanced up at me. She frowned and then chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I actually can’t tonight, anyway. But if I give you my number, I suppose you could try hassling me repeatedly over the weekend. To see if I give in.’
I pulled a face. ‘You want me to hassle you?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Yeah, I suppose I do, a bit.’
‘Oh, um, OK,’ I said.
‘It’s just that . . .’ she said, chewing a fingernail, ‘we can’t have you thinking I’m too keen, can we?’
‘No,’ I laughed. ‘No, we can’t have that at all.’
We dated on and off. Actually, for Jessica it was mostly on, but I’d get my weird suffocating feeling and suddenly cancel on her, or lie and tell her I was busy. And unlike most of the girls I’d dated, she took this in her stride.
I asked her a few times if she’d reconsider looking in her computer for my sister, but she was quite adamant that it wasn’t going to happen. And then on New Year’s Eve, in a bar in Hoxton, she announced that she had some annual leave to take, and that she might as well take it at the same time as mine, in January.
Because one of her friends had told me that, ‘The person you spend New Year’s Eve with is the person you stay the year with,’ I was already feeling a bit queasy, to be honest. The idea of spending my two-week holiday with her as well pushed me to the edge of a panic attack.
But then, just after midnight, she pulled a folded sheet of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. ‘I thought we could maybe rent a car and go to Cornwall for a few days,’ she shouted over the top of the music. ‘For our holidays, I mean. My uncle’s got a caravan we could use for free. And on the way, I thought we could maybe go here.’
I unfolded the page and looked at it. It had two addresses in Bristol.
‘Bristol?’ I asked.
Jessica shrugged cutely. ‘Bristol!’ she said, emphatically.
‘Why Bristol?’ I asked.
‘Those are your sister’s last known addresses,’ she explained. ‘Before she vanished from the social services radar, she was in Bristol.’
‘Really?’ I said. Unexpected tears were welling up and I was too drunk to even begin to think about why. ‘But you said you couldn’t. You said you’d get into trouble.’
‘I guess I like you enough to take that risk.’
‘God,’ I said, looking at the sheet of paper again. ‘Really?’
Jess grabbed my tie and used it to winch me in. ‘Really!’ she said, between kisses. ‘Happy New Year, you lovely man.’
‘Can we stop at the services?’ Jessica asks, dragging me from my thoughts.
We’ve only been driving for about twenty-five minutes, so I’m reluctant.
‘I need chocolate,’ she says, and when she sees that I’m unconvinced, she runs her fingers through her hair, looks out of the side window and adds, ‘And the loo.’
Once we’ve stocked up on chocolate bars and once Jess has roasted the poor cashier over the fact that there aren’t any vegan chocolate options, we return to the car.
It’s drizzling now, and I almost say something sarcastic about how lucky we are to have a convertible, but I manage to restrain myself.
‘So how was Christmas?’ I ask instead, as I merge back on to the motorway. ‘You still haven’t told me about it.’
‘Uh!’ Jess exclaims, pulling her stripy knees up and folding her arms around them. She starts to unwrap a dark chocolate Bounty. ‘You really don’t want to know.’
I shrug, check the mirrors, then move out to the centre lane.
‘Do you?’ Jess asks.
‘Do I what?’ I ask distractedly, thinking more about the traffic and the weather than the conversation at hand.
‘Do you really want to know about my horrific Christmas?’
I shrug again. ‘I’m just struggling to understand how Christmas can be that bad, I suppose.’
‘I’ll invite you next year,’ Jess says. ‘You can witness it first-hand. You’ll love it.’
‘You’re not really selling it to me.’
‘No,’ Jess says. ‘And at your place everyone is just, what, happy? It’s all just peace and love?’
I laugh. ‘Well, there was only me and Mum this year, but yeah, it was fine. It’s not like it was when I was little, when there were three or four of us. Sometimes we had friends round too, so there were five or six of us. There’s no piles of presents any more either. But it’s fine. We give each other a gift; we eat Christmas dinner; we go for a walk. Some years Dad’s there, too. What’s not to like?’
‘Right,’ Jess says. ‘Well, to start with, we don’t do gifts.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Jess says, offering me a bite of Bounty, and then feeding it into her own mouth when I decline. ‘We used to, till I was about ten. Actually, that’s when Dad left – on Christmas Day when I was ten. So I suppose that’s why Mum just sort of cancelled Christmas after that. I don’t think we were very well off, but I mean, you can always find something to wrap up if you want to. She just got a downer on the whole thing, and from that point on Christmas never really happened again. Or not in any recognisable form, anyway.’
‘That’s harsh,’ I say. I think about Jessica’s dad leaving when she was ten. I knew he’d gone back to Jamaica, but until now I hadn’t known when. It feels like a little something we have in common. ‘Particularly tough when you’re only ten.’
‘I know,’ Jess says. ‘It wasn’t good. Anyway, we just eat a normal meal nowadays, really. I had a fake turkey thing and Mum and Winston had chicken. I usually argue with Mum about something. This year it was the fact that she cooked the potatoes with the meat.’
‘Meaty juices not being veggie.’
‘Exactly. And then Mum argued with Winston.’
‘About?’
‘His job, mainly,’ Jess says. ‘Mum thinks he should aim higher than Pret. But, I mean, at least he has a job now, right? And then I argued with Winston as well. I was actually trying to defend him, but he took it all the wrong way. Which was probably at least partly my fault. I tend to suffer from foot-in-mouth disease where my brother’s concerned.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Do I really have to tell you?’ Jess asks.
‘Not if you don’t want to,’ I say. But I know that of course, she will.
‘I just said that not everyone can be a bloody astronaut,’ Jess says. ‘Like I say, I was trying to defend him. To Mum.’
‘And that didn’t go down well?’
‘No. Winston was all, like, “Oh, and of course you are an astronaut, aren’t you? Because social services is soooo important.” And I said that no, I wasn’t, and nor did I feel I needed to be an astronaut because I have a perfectly good job, and I was actually helping people and I like that and I was just saying that Mum should respect our choices and blah blah, and so Winston got all uppity and said he had a perfectly good job at Pret as well, and that he was helping people too, even if he was only helping them to eat shitty sandwiches, and even if it was just a zero-hours contract, he’s happy, and that the zero-hours thing was hardly his fault, was it? It was Mum’s fault for voting Conservative, and so Mum got all spiky about that and everyone ended up sulking. Honestly, we could argue about the weather in our family. Actually, we quite often do.’