Page 3 of It's All Sun and Games

Liz smiles at me sweetly for a second, waiting for me to smile back, before she dashes off.

Priya, who has been eavesdropping from a safe distance, catches up with me and links her arm with mine.

‘So, we’re all going out for a drink tomorrow?’ she says with a knowing grin.

‘Yep,’ I reply, mustering up an unmissable level of sarcasm. ‘Can’t wait.’

2

‘I can do you all some spaghetti hoops?’ Mum calls out from the kitchen.

‘Go on then,’ Dad calls back.

‘I thought you said you wanted Italian food?’ I remind him.

‘Well, it sounds like it’s spaghetti hoops or nothing,’ Dad replies. ‘I’ll take what I can get.’

‘We could order a Domino’s,’ Tom chimes in.

‘That’s not very Italian either, is it?’ I point out.

‘It’s close enough,’ Tom says with a shrug.

‘And I’m too hungry to care,’ Dad adds.

I smile as I glance over at the two of them. Despite their obvious differences – and they would both probably hate this, if I said it out loud – my dad and my younger brother are like two peas from the same pod sometimes. Usually when they’re hungry.

Mum pops her head around the door and raises her eyebrows at me optimistically.

‘Pizza is pizza,’ she says. ‘And it means I don’t have to cook.’

Those are not words you would usually hear leave my mum’s lips. Mum absolutely loves cooking, and cleaning, and organising – no, really – and just generally being loving and caring towards her family. She lives for it. However, the thought of sitting down on the living room floor with me and going through my old things is appealing to her way more this evening.

She smiles widely as she practically rips off her apron.

‘I’ll make the call,’ she announces.

‘It’s an app,’ Tom calls after her with a chuckle. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Even better,’ Mum says, hurrying back, sitting on her legs on the floor next to me.

Sue Cole – my mum – is new to her sixties but, in a way, she’s been rehearsing for them for some time now. Even when she was much younger, she loved an apron, knitting, baking – all of the things that are allegedly the hobbies of women approaching retirement age, but rarely are. She doesn’t look her age at all, with her chestnut lob hairstyle, with one natural flash of grey at the front that looks too perfect to have come from anything but a salon.

‘Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,’ she says as she begins sorting through a pile of folders.

‘Come on,’ Dad says with a scoff. ‘None of this shit is going to help her, is it?’

‘Colin,’ Mum ticks him off.

‘He’s not wrong,’ Tom joins in as he pulls a face at a poorly drawn sketch of the Colosseum. He holds it up for our dad to see and he laughs.

‘You were never going to be an artist, love, were you?’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ I say with a sarcastic smile.

Colin Cole is almost ten years older than my mum – which, I swear, he thinks is some kind of flex. Dad is definitely a throwback to a bygone era (sometimes I really do wish we could throw him back) with his neatly trimmed moustache and his ideas about men and women. He’s mellowing as he’s ageing, and as Tom and I are forcing him to redefine things, and his expectations of us.

I’m thirty-one and Tom isn’t far behind me at twenty-eight. Honestly, I think Dad thought we both would have been married off and having kids with our partners by now, and sometimes we still find him scratching his head over why I don’t seem to have found anyone, or why Tom is the way he is.

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