last thing I need is a floor full of smashed crockery. Not with Jake’s visitors arriving any moment.
I smile brightly at the man, hiding my innermost thoughts, although the very word Jake passing through my brain has made my stomach clench with nerves. It always happens. I think Jake and my stomach clenches. I’m used to it by now, although I don’t know if it’s normal. I don’t know how other people feel about their siblings. My best friend, Hannah, hasn’t got any, and it’s not the kind of question you ask random people, is it? “How do your siblings make you feel? Kind of gnawed-up and anxious and wary?” But that’s definitely how my brother, Jake, makes me feel. Nicole doesn’t make me feel anxious, but she does make me feel gnawed-up and, quite often, like hitting something.
To sum up, neither of them makes me feel good.
Maybe it’s because both of them are older than me and were tough acts to follow. When I started at secondary school, aged eleven, Jake was sixteen and the star of the football team. Nicole was fifteen, stunningly beautiful, and had been scouted as a model. Everyone in the school wanted to be her friend. People would say to me, in awed tones, “Is Jake Farr your brother? Is Nicole Farr your sister?”
Nicole was as drifty and vague then as she is now, but Jake dominated everything. He was focused. Bright-eyed. Quick to anger. I’ll always remember the time he got in a row with Mum and went and kicked a can around the street outside, shouting swear words into the night sky. I watched him from an upstairs window, gripped and a bit terrified. I’m twenty-seven now, but you never really leave your inner eleven-year-old, do you?
And of course there are other reasons for me to feel rubbish around Jake. Tangible reasons. Financial reasons.
Which I will not think about now. Instead, I smile at the old man, trying to make him feel that I have all the time in the world. Like Dad would have done.
Morag rings up the price and the man gets out an old leather coin purse.
“Fifty…” I hear him saying as he peers at a coin. “Is that a fifty-pence piece?”
“Let’s have a look, love,” says Morag in her reassuring way. Morag’s been with us for seven years. She was a customer first and applied when she saw an ad pinned up on a noticeboard. Now she’s assistant manager and does all the buying for greeting cards—she has a brilliant eye. “No, that’s a ten-pence,” she says kindly to the old man. “Have you got another pound coin in there?”
My eyes swivel up to the Coke can and stained chessboard again. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. There isn’t time to sort it now. And the visitors won’t notice it. They’re coming to show us their range of olive oils, not inspect the place. Just ignore it, Fixie.
Ignore it.
Oh God, but I can’t. It’s driving me nuts.
My eye keeps flicking upward to it. My fingers are doing that thing they do whenever I’m desperate to fix something, when some situation or other is driving me mad. They drum each other feverishly. And my feet do a weird stepping motion: forward-across-back, forward-across-back.
I’ve been like this since I was a little kid. It’s bigger than me. I know it would be mad to drag a ladder out, get a bucket and water, and clean the stain up, when the visitors might arrive at any moment. I know this.
“Greg!” As he appears from behind the glassware section, my voice shoots out before I can stop it. “Quick! Get a stepladder. I need to clean up that stain.”
Greg looks up to where I’m pointing and gives a guilty jump as he sees the Coke can.
“That wasn’t me,” he says at once. “It definitely wasn’t me.” Then he pauses before adding, “I mean, if it was, I didn’t notice.”
The thing about Greg is, he’s very loyal to the shop and he works really long hours, so I forgive him quite a lot.
“Doesn’t matter who it was,” I say briskly. “Let’s just get rid of it.”
“OK,” Greg says, as though digesting this. “Yeah. But aren’t those people about to arrive?”
“Yes, which is why we need to be quick. We need to hurry.”
“OK,” says Greg again, not moving a muscle. “Yeah. Got you. Where’s Jake?”
This is a very good question. Jake is the one who met these olive-oil people in the first