My sister kept walking through our kitchen in a towel and calling it a test of my husband. One Sunday morning he put his coffee down instead of leaving the room.
PART 1 — MY TURN
When Bree rang me crying because Tarek had finished it after six years and told her to find somewhere, I did not think about it for four seconds.
She turned up with two cases and about three hundred pounds.
"Stay until you're sorted," I said, and Gideon said it too, and he meant it.
The first week was fine.
Then she started coming downstairs after her shower in a towel and nothing else, and making coffee, and standing at that counter talking, with my husband sitting eight feet away with the paper.
The first time I let it go.
The second time I took her into the hall.
"Bree. Would you put a dressing gown on before you come down? Gideon's usually in there."
She laughed at me. "Rom. He's your husband. He's not fifteen."
"I know. I'm asking because I don't like it."
She shrugged and said fine.
She did not stop. She got more obvious. One morning, with me four feet away, she asked him to get something down off the top cupboard for her.
Gideon picked his coffee up and left the room.
That night I said it again, properly.
And she rolled her eyes and said, "Why are you being so insecure?"
"I'm not. It's my house and I've asked you once."
And then she leaned back on that counter and said the thing.
"Honestly? Think of it as a test."
"A test."
"If your husband can be got at because a woman walks past him in a towel, wouldn't you rather find out now?" And then: "And if he fails, that's his problem."
I could not make a sentence for about ten seconds.
I had put that woman in my spare room when she had nowhere. I was buying her food. She had my car three days a week for interviews.
And she had arranged it in her own head so that ignoring me was a favour.
I told Gideon what she had said that night and his jaw went, and then he said, "She's your sister. I'll stay out of it."
Three more days. Same thing every morning.
Then Sunday.
She came into that kitchen in the towel like the previous fortnight had not happened, and I opened my mouth.
And Gideon put two fingers on my arm.
"Don't."
I looked at him. He was completely calm.
"My turn."
And for the first time in three weeks he did not pick up his coffee and go.
He set the mug down on the counter and looked straight at her.
"You've been calling this a test all week."
Bree gave him a little pleased smile. "Exactly."
"Good. I've been running one of my own."
Her smile stopped.
"What are you talking about?"
He reached for the thing that had been sitting beside his mug the whole time, which I had assumed was post.
It was an envelope.
Less than a minute later my sister was the colour of the tiles and shouting in my kitchen.
"Gideon, you can't do that!"
PART 2 — WHAT WAS IN IT
Everybody expects it to have been something cruel.
It was a receipt and a set of keys.
Gideon had paid a deposit and three months' rent on a room in a shared house on Kell Street, eleven minutes' walk from our house, in her name, from the Friday.
Fully paid. Not a loan. Nothing to sign and nothing to pay back.
There was a printed confirmation, the landlord's number, and a note in his handwriting that said: Bree — this is yours either way. If you want to stay and be a person in this house instead, that's fine too. Your choice, not Rom's.
Three months. Nineteen hundred pounds. Out of an account he and I have had since 2016, which he had told me about in advance in exactly no detail, which is the only thing I have ever been properly cross with him about.
And my sister stood in my kitchen in a towel and shouted at him that he could not do that.
Which is the part I have thought about most.
She was not angry about being pushed out. He had not pushed her out; the note says so, and he meant it, and she read it.
She was angry because he had taken it off the table.
For three weeks the arrangement had been that she was there on her terms and could not be moved without somebody being the bad one.
He paid nineteen hundred pounds to remove that, in about ninety seconds, in a kitchen, without raising his voice once.
PART 3 — THE BIRTHDAY
Two weeks before that Sunday there was a birthday for our mother. About twenty-five people at our aunt's.
I was in the kitchen with a serving dish and three of my cousins.
And Bree came in and took the dish out of my hands, put it down on the side, and said, loudly, to that whole room:
"Give me that. Rom's gone funny about her house, everyone — don't mention the towel. Sit down, Rom, I'm joking."
There was a laugh. Two cousins and my uncle.
My mother said, "Girls."
Nobody asked me one thing about it.
And I laughed as well. That is the part I have to own.
I stood in my aunt's kitchen and laughed at my own complaint, in front of twenty-five people, because the alternative was explaining it, and explaining it in that room would have made me the difficult one inside about four sentences.
She had already done that. That was the whole point of saying it there.
By the time we got to the Sunday, anything I said in my own kitchen had already been named in front of the family as me being funny about my house.
PART 4 — 2019
This was not the first time.
In 2019 Bree lived with our cousin Nessa for four months and it finished badly and Nessa moved flats afterward.
I was told at the time that Nessa had been difficult about it.
I did not ring Nessa. Not once. I had the number in my phone the whole time.
My mother rang me in the November of that year and said one sentence that I dismissed inside four seconds, which was: Romilly, don't have her, love.
I told her that was a horrible thing to say about her own daughter.
It was not horrible. It was the only piece of accurate information anybody gave me in six years and I threw it away because of how it sounded.
I rang Nessa in the August, after all this. We were on the phone for two hours.
It was the same. Not the towel — a different thing, but the same shape. A rule of Nessa's, broken daily, pleasantly, until Nessa was the unreasonable one.
Bree cannot live somewhere on somebody else's terms. Not will not. Cannot.
Because the moment the rules in a house apply to her, she is a guest, and being a guest means it can end, and she has never once in her life been able to be somewhere that can end.
PART 5 — KELL STREET
She took the room.
Not that Friday. She stayed in our spare room for nine more days doing absolutely nothing wrong, which was its own kind of statement, and then she moved in on the second Sunday.
She was there fourteen months.
She has a flat of her own now in Vantry and a job she has held since the spring, and we speak about once a fortnight, and it is better than it has been since we were about nineteen.
We have never discussed that kitchen. Not once.
She sent Gideon a card in the January with nineteen hundred pounds in a bank transfer the same day, which he tried to send back and which she would not take, and they have never discussed it either.
My mother was right and I have told her so, and she said, "I know, love," and changed the subject, which is the most my mother has ever been able to do.
Rom's gone funny about her house, everyone.
She said that in my aunt's kitchen in front of twenty-five people, holding a serving dish she had just taken out of my hands, and my uncle laughed and my mother said girls and I laughed too.
What Gideon did in our kitchen on the Sunday was not clever and it was not a comeback.
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He just made the one move nobody in my family had made in six years, which is that he gave her something real with no strings on it whatsoever — and by doing it, took away the only thing she actually had.
THE END
