Claudia Carroll 3 Book Bundle. Claudia Carroll

earlier than you thought. Like – how about right now? And what’s more, you can take your manky laundry strewn across my hallway and your abandoned, half eaten pizza with you. Oh and by the way? I’d strongly suggest you don’t come looking to me for a reference. Trust me, it would be a really, really bad idea.’

      In the end, of all people, my sister Helen ends up being my saviour, my messiah in this hour of need. In total and utter desperation, I put out not so much a distress flare as an SOS to her, and to my astonishment and eternal gratitude, she tells me not to panic, that she’ll be on the next train up to Dublin from Cork.

      Miracle. It’s a bloody miracle. I feel huge gratitude, mixed with a pang of sharp guilt when I think of how dismissively I’ve treated her over the years. And now, here she is, in my hour of need, dropping everything and running just to give me a dig out.

      Hours later, while I’m still at home dealing with the massive backlog of phone calls and replying to all my emails from the office, while simultaneously seeing off Madam Elka, my nagging conscience won’t let up on me.

      Would I have done the same for Helen?

      The answer’s obvious. Not a bleeding snowball’s chance.

      Bad mother, bad sister … Soul searching is something I rarely have the luxury of spare time to indulge in, but somehow there’s just no avoiding it today.

      And then there’s little Lily, snoozing peacefully on the sofa, clinging to her battered and almost threadbare comfort blankie, worn out after all the high-octane drama of her day.

      She’ll forget all about that other matter, I think smugly to myself, feeling a cool, tigerish joy flood over me at the happy sight of Elka finally getting her arse out of here in a taxi. She’ll wake up shortly, all refreshed and happy after her nap and the whole notion of her father will all have been banished right out of her little head, as though it never was.

      I continue to think that as I tidy the spare room to get it ready for Helen. I still think it when Lily wakes up, beams to see me still in the house, then immediately waddles upstairs to her bedroom.

      She’s ages in there, and in between firing off an email to Seth Coleman and putting a clean duvet cover on the spare bed, I suddenly realise the child is gone suspiciously quiet, so I stick my head round her bedroom door to do a lightning quick check on her.

      ‘Look at me Mama!’ she squeals excitedly as soon as she sees me, twirling round in the outfit she’s just changed into. A pink leotard and a matching fluffy tutu with bits of diamanté all over it, along with sparkly little pumps in … what else? Bubblegum pink.

      ‘You look lovely sweetheart,’ I tell her distractedly. ‘Now come on downstairs, I want you to have some dinner.’

      ‘NO! I HATE dinner! And I’m playing dwess up!’

      ‘Later, you can play dress up later. Is this so you can wear something pretty for Auntie Helen?’

      ‘NO Mama!’ she yells at me, stomping her foot in a gesture that a silent movie actress would shudder to use. ‘This is what I’m going to wear when we go to meet my daddy. Like you pwomised. Wemember? You pwomised!’

      With that, the mobile tucked into my suit pocket rang out loud and clear. And this time, I never even bothered checking to see who it was.

       Chapter Three

      Pay absolutely no attention to this, I tell Helen as soon as she’s settled in and used to us all. Lily’s just developed a bee in her bonnet about the whole idea of having a dad and maybe even getting to meet him, nothing more. But she’ll pretty soon forget all about it; wait and see. All we need to do is starve the whole thing of oxygen. Simple as that. Not unlike my strategy with her whenever she’s stomping her feet and demanding whole dessert spoonfuls of Nutella on top of her toast for her breakfast on our Sundays together; I just blatantly ignore it, distract her by dangling some kind of toy in her face and in no time, all her little demands disappear as though they never were.

      Such are the vagaries of being almost three years old it seems; you’re cursed with the short-term memory of a fruit fly. What was bringing on hysterics two seconds ago is banished instantly at the sight of anything pink and glittery dangled in front of your face. Complete doddle.

      I continue to believe that the whole ‘when am I meeting my daddy?’ issue has finally been put to bed right up to the following weekend which, in spite of my best efforts, is the next window of peace I get from work, so I can spend a bit of time at home.

      I race home on Friday night so I can give Lily her bath and put her to bed, aching to do some mother/daughter bonding with her, but to my dismay I find out I’m already too late.

      Helen’s waiting up for me, watching TV while texting away on her phone downstairs in the family room, wearing an oversized dressing gown and a mansize pair of fleecy socks, sofa-lising. (New buzzword dreamt up by Marc, from Arts and Culture. A bastardisation of words to describe the act of socialising whilst your bum is glued to the sofa. Marc, as you see, is very fond of his word mash-ups.)

      She doesn’t hear me slip into the kitchen at the far end of the room and looking at her from this distance all I can think is … so much about Helen has changed over the years and yet so much has stayed exactly the same. She’s gained weight, but she’s lucky, it happens to suit her. Fills her face out and makes her look even younger. She still has the same even temperament and insuppressibly sunny good humour, the exact same general Pollyanna, glass-half-full outlook on life, at all times, always. Just like an air hostess, smiling through her pretty, even white teeth and unfailingly polite, even when living under the same roof as a termagant like me.

      She and I don’t look even remotely alike. Helen is bright-eyed and fair-haired, with a sunny, sparkly, outgoing personality to match; not so much a glass-half-full person, as a Waterford crystal, limited edition glass, half full of rare, vintage champagne. Then there’s me; small, dark, unsmiling, with deathly, Morticia Addams-pale skin that’s the bane of my life and a permanently hollow, sunken-eyed look about me, which, in spite of the most expensive face creams money will buy, still seems to be permanently etched in.

      Helen’s adopted you see, something which always left me with the lifelong sensation that I somehow wasn’t good enough for my parents, which was why they felt the need to go out shopping for another daughter, as I’d seen it at the time. It had hurt me as a little girl, hurt me far more deeply then I ever let on, and to this day remains a searingly vivid memory, one that still has the power to sting even now, from a safe distance of decades. Coming home from primary school to be told by Dad that there was a ‘surprise’ waiting for me in the good front room. Course I was all excited at first, then bitterly disappointed to discover nothing other than my battered old cot with a new baby sleeping in it. I’d thought at the very least that I was getting a new home computer or a maths set. Something useful.

      As time went on though, I realised the truth; that Mum and Dad had just brought home what appeared to the five-year-old me to be an improved version of what a little daughter should be. One who grew up to be pretty and blonde who lisped and giggled and wore pink and got invited everywhere. And although they’d die rather than admit it, one who they both clearly preferred; to this day, I can still hear the three of them happily laughing and messing about while watching some TV programme together night after night, like a proper family. All while I sat all alone upstairs in my room, getting ahead on the next day’s homework and trying to choke back hot, furious tears at being so blatantly excluded. Five years old was a young age to learn all about rejection, and yet that’s exactly what I had to do.

      Course years later, after several gin and tonics, my mother has told me that this actually wasn’t the case at all; that she and Dad were if anything just utterly exhausted and worn out by all the various demands involved in rearing a child genius – the special tutorial classes, the constant IQ tests, the violin/cello/clarinet lessons, the way I never seemed to need sleep for more than a few hours, instead reading book after book throughout the long, lonely nights.

      According