Page 2 of The Love Hack

‘Do you have an idea what that might be?’ Marion asked.

I cast around desperately in my mind, but came up with a total blank. ‘Not right now, but I…’

‘This is only our initial meeting,’Marion said. ‘As I think our letter made clear, you’re legally entitled to a follow-up in three days’ time. You’re welcome to have a colleague or union rep present to support you. If you wish to bring alternative proposals to that meeting, they will of course be carefully considered.’

Translation: We’re doing this by the book, because we don’t want you suing our arses.

And I didn’t want to sue their arses. I didn’t have the nerve or the desire, and I knew that, more importantly, I didn’t have a chance of winning. Still, Marion’s words felt like a lifeline, albeit a slender one that would most likely break and send me tumbling back into the abyss I could feel opening up under my feet, beneath the heather-grey carpet tiles.

‘I’ll think,’ I said. ‘Give me three days, and I’ll think of something. I promise.’

TWO

It was raining when I emerged from the Tube after work – a persistent downpour that felt more like December than April and made me offer up a silent prayer to the weather gods to get their shit together before my sister’s wedding in six weeks’ time. Then, without waiting to see if they’d answer (possibly in the form of a lightning bolt striking me down for being so presumptuous as to tell them how to do their jobs), I pulled the hood of my coat up and ran for it.

The truth was, I’d wanted to run since the moment I left the boardroom, where Marion remained seated at the table, her folder in front of her, waiting for her next victim. All I could think was, I need to see my sister. I need Amelie. And so I’d texted her, my thumbs fumbling on the keyboard of my phone, and asked if she was home, and if I could come round.

The flat Amelie shared with Zack was in one of those elegant white stucco-fronted Georgian houses, overlooking a garden square in which cherry trees were valiantly flowering in spite of the chilly weather and persistent wind. But I barely noticed the attractiveness of the surroundings as I hurried up the slippery stone steps and leaned on the buzzer of flat 29A. My sister was expecting me, and normally I heard the click of the lock within seconds, because she generally had something she couldn’t wait to tell me. But this time, I waited, shivering, for a full two minutes – which doesn’t sound like long but does feel like it when you’re loitering on a doorstep wondering if the neighbours think you’re a burglar or a Jehovah’s Witness.

Six months earlier, I’d received a text from my sister at work asking me to come round, ‘Soon as poss, need to talk.’ I don’t believe in telepathy or mysterious sibling bonds or any of that twaddle, but as soon as I saw that message, I thought, ‘Oh. Zack’s asked her to marry him.’ The realisation had come with a surge of happiness for my sister – but only after a fleeting but horrible sinking sensation somewhere underneath my heart.

She’s leaving me behind. There’ll be no coming back from this.

But that unhappy – and frankly selfish – thought had vanished as soon as I saw my sister’s face, positively shining with joy, as radiant as the solitaire diamond on her ring finger. She’d squealed and I’d squealed and we’d done a little hopping dance around her kitchen – or rather, Zack’s kitchen, because where they lived was Zack’s flat and the Smeg fridge and the wine chiller and the two-thousand-pound coffee machine were, of course, all Zack’s.

‘I can’t believe he how lucky I am!’ Amelie had gushed.

Of course, I’d shut that line of thinking down sharpish. It was just a step away from, I can’t believe I’m good enough for him, and if Amelie privately thought that, she needed to stop thinking it, stat. My sister was one hundred per cent amazing, and as far as I was concerned it was Zack who’d got lucky. Not that there was anything wrong with him – on paper, he was the catch to end all catches, with his lean six-foot-something frame, his way of holding the attention in a room that I guess some people would call charismatic, his high-powered something-in-finance career that was the perfect foil for Amelie’s job in PR for companies that did things in finance. Still, I felt that I’d never quite got him – and he certainly didn’t get me. He definitely didn’t get my jokes, laughing a beat too late before he turned back to Amelie and she abruptly stopped laughing herself then turned to him like a flower to the sun. But in the intervening months, her happiness hadn’t dimmed and Zack, too, seemed unable to believe his luck, and my own doubts had more or less melted away.

And as for her leaving me behind – well. She’d done that years ago. Done it, by almost imperceptible increments, since the day she was born, when I was eighteen months old. She’d smiled, crawled, walked, talked, slept through the night and grown teeth and hair earlier than I had. She’d been cast as Mary in the school nativity play when my highest achievement was being a camel. She’d been to a school prom a year before I had, with her then-boyfriend (with whom, obviously, she’d had sex for the first time, when I’d remained a virgin for another four years).

And now, with a kind of inevitability that I accepted without really questioning it, because after all I’d had twenty-seven and a half years to get used to the situation, Amelie was getting married, and I was just as single as I’d ever been.

I’d always known that my sister was quite the catch. If my granny’s insistence on repeating every time she saw the two of us, undeterred by Mum’s glares and shushes, that, ‘Lucy got the brains, but Amelie got the looks,’ hadn’t been enough to bring the reality of our difference home to me, one glance in the mirror – or at the wall where photographs of the two of us at all ages from newborn upwards were displayed – would have been.

As I said, I scrub up okay. I’ve got great hair – long, thick, dark brown and shiny, and it puts up with the benign neglect I lavish on it without complaint – but the rest of me is only really average. Okay skin, an okay figure, a too-big nose and eyes that would be quite nice if they weren’t obscured by my glasses and too sensitive for contact lenses.

Amelie, though – Amelie looks like I was nature’s first attempt, and it had stood back, looked me up and down and thought, ‘Not too bad, but next time I’ll really nail it.’ It was like I was a basic stoneware coffee mug – one of those ones you get free from Sports Direct, maybe – and my sister was the fine bone china version of the same product. All her proportions were subtly different – her eyes bigger and wider set, her cheekbones higher, her jaw more delicately defined, her nose a perfect ski-jump. Her legs were longer, her waist smaller, her teeth whiter.

In the face of all that, I don’t think anyone would blame me for not bothering too much with my appearance, especially as I could never bother as much as Amelie did. Fortnightly manicures and pedicures, subtle eyelash extensions, expensive cuts and blowdries in a salon every six weeks – how she found time for all of it I never knew.

And even now, when at last the door I’d been waiting outside clicked open and I hurried out of the rain and downstairs to the basement flat, I found her swathed like a ghost in a white waffle dressing gown and a sheet mask, the backs of her hands slippery with some sort of oil, her lips sticking out over a pair of plastic mouth-guard things.

She flapped her hands at me then leaned in for a forearm hug, leaving a smear of fragrant goo on my cheek, and gestured to the fridge. Obediently, I found a bottle of white wine and two glasses and carried them through to the living room, where I settled down on the squashy cream sofa to wait. Amelie was hovering in the kitchen doorway, eyes fixed on her phone, thumbs busily tapping away at the screen.

‘What’re you doing?’

She made a ‘hold on’ gesture and said something inaudible around her mouthful of plastic. Then she disappeared into the bathroom. I waited, my eyes falling on the engagement photo of Amelie and Zack that had pride of place on the mantelpiece. It wasn’t a selfie taken in the first giddy moments after he’d said, ‘Will you…?’ and she’d said, ‘Yes!’, but a professional shot taken a couple of weeks after. Zack was in a suit and Amelie was in a pink dress, her perfectly lit face angled to gaze up at him, the smile on her face radiant but not quite natural, as if she was saying, ‘Cheese!’ or possibly, ‘Success!’ I heard splashing water and the hum of an electric toothbrush, then drawers slamming in the bedroom, and a few minutes later she re-emerged, looking more or less normal again.

‘Sorry.’ She flopped down next to me on the sofa, glancing at her phone again. ‘Just logging my macros. I’ve got enough carbs left for a glass of wine – hurrah. Not that I’d let some stupid app tell me I couldn’t, even if I didn’t.’

‘Amelie, you don’t need to bloody diet.’

‘It’s not a diet. Diets are so over. It’s body recomposition through optimum nutrition. Duh.’

I glanced sideways at her. ‘Sounds like a diet to me.’

‘It’s n— okay, it is. But I feel a bit better if I call it something else. I tell you what, though, this wedding can’t come soon enough. If I ever see a tuna and egg-white omelette again after the tenth of June I’ll legit cry.’