The Sister Swap: the laugh-out-loud romantic comedy of the year!. Fiona Collins

hands, which were at her sides. Some kind of cotton, with a scratchy, crackly something underneath. She wriggled her toes. They were under constraint, held by a starchy, apple pie tucking in. Holy hell – was she in hospital?

      A face – soft cloudy hair, rectangular glasses with navy frames – loomed into shot.

      ‘Hello … ?’ muttered Meg hoarsely. She tried to sit up but realized she didn’t have the energy. The pillow hurt under her head – everything hurt.

      ‘Good morning, Miss Oxbury,’ said a cool voice, above a white coat and a stethoscope. ‘I’m Doctor Field. You’re in University College Hospital. You collapsed at work. Fainted. Do you want some water?’

      Meg nodded and the doctor handed her a blue plastic lidded cup with a straw sticking out of the top from which Meg took a couple of grateful sips.

      ‘I’m so sorry. I had too much to drink last night,’ whispered Meg, her throat sore and her mind racing. She’d collapsed? ‘And I haven’t really been eating that well recently—’

      ‘Neither would have helped,’ interrupted Dr Field, ‘but they’re not the reason you fainted. You’re suffering from hypertension.’

      ‘What’s that?’ asked Meg. She’d heard of it, vaguely. Probably via Holby City. She felt sleepy and wanted to close her eyes.

      ‘High blood pressure.’

      ‘Oh.’ Hell! High blood pressure! That wasn’t good.

      ‘Dangerously high. So much so, I’m afraid I’m signing you off.’

      What? Meg’s weary and befuddled brain tried to compute the doctor’s words. Signing her off? Was that the same as writing her off? Was she going to die?

      ‘What do you mean?’ a stricken Meg asked.

      ‘I’m signing you off work. For eight weeks.’

      Meg would have burst out laughing, if she’d been physically capable of it. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she croaked. ‘That’s two months! I can’t be signed off work for two months! – I’ve got far too much to do!’

      ‘Which is precisely why I’m signing you off,’ said the doctor, in clipped tones. ‘You’re highly stressed and you have hypertension. You’re not going to be working for the next eight weeks and, ideally, I want you out of London.’

      Meg started to panic. She wished she could heave herself up to a sitting position; she needed to prove she was perfectly OK. ‘But it’s my company!’ she protested. ‘I can’t just bugger off and leave everyone to get on with it! And what do you mean, out of London? Where on earth would I go?’

      London was her life. She loved London. She loved Tempest Models. She didn’t want to leave either. This was ludicrous!

      ‘To the country, to the coast, to a nice quiet field somewhere … take up knitting, fall in love, whatever. I’m insisting on it, for the good of your health. You need to get away and it has to be right now. This weekend.’

      ‘I don’t believe in love,’ muttered Meg. ‘And I don’t want to get away.’ This was a disaster. An absolute disaster.

      ‘You have to,’ said the doctor firmly. ‘Don’t you have anyone you can call? Parents, siblings, friends in the country, or somewhere, who can put you up?’

      ‘No, there’s no one,’ replied Meg, shaking her head. ‘Everyone I have is in London.’

      ‘Go and stay in a hotel then, or a B&B,’ said Dr Field distractedly. Something was buzzing in her pocket. ‘Right! I’m putting you on a course of tablets and by Monday I expect you to be on a beach in the Bahamas, or, at the very least, in the New Forest.’ The doctor was halfway out the door.

      ‘I can’t afford either,’ muttered Meg. Despite business being good, all money being ploughed back into the company meant she could barely manage the rent on her ridiculously expensive, just-off-Tottenham-Court-Road flat, let alone pay out for an additional place to live for the next two months.

      ‘Goodbye, Miss Oxbury.’

      ‘Goodbye,’ Meg mumbled weakly, but the doctor was already gone. She slumped back on the pillow. Eight weeks off work and enforced exile from London. This was a complete nightmare and actually completely impossible.

      How could she get out of London when she didn’t have anywhere to go? There were no lovely parents in the country. No friends with coastal retreats. As she’d said, anyone who meant anything to her lived in London.

      The only person she knew who lived in exactly the kind of place Dr Field was talking about, Meg really didn’t want to see.

Chapter Two

       Sarah

      Sarah idly scratched her left bum cheek under the flimsy material of her cotton shorts and stretched her right arm out into the warm, unmown grass. A plump bumble bee was nuzzling in some clover just beyond her fingertips; she admired his wriggling, furry form, his rotund work ethic, his purpose. The faint pong of distant manure nudged at Sarah’s nostrils. An ancient transistor radio stuck wonkily on the ground competed for her attention with an overhead wood pigeon. Smooth FM, the oft-repeated jingle kept proclaiming; music to fall asleep to. She thought so, anyway. The Carpenters were singing about rainy days and Mondays when today was hot, sticky, with no breeze, and Friday. Not that it mattered much to Sarah what day it was, when they had all pretty much merged into one this summer.

      She had been drifting on and off all afternoon, in a languorous haze – very easy to do in her little orchard to the rear of her cottage, especially when it was this sunny and warm. In between snoozes she’d consumed three Magnums – dark chocolate, she might hasten to mention; they were clearly much better for you – and half a packet of custard creams. She really must stop adding those to the online shop, she thought; the twins didn’t even like them any more.

      She considered letting her eyes lazily close once more, but her phone, a little away from her outstretched hand and half concealed by fat blades of grass, lit up suddenly and started angrily buzzing. Who could that be? Connor, needing to be picked up from his job at the factory because he’d got another puncture on his bike? Olivia, saying she was at a friend’s and wasn’t coming home for dinner again? Or her boss, Mandy, recruiting her for another hateful stint in her local job as second-in-command children’s party host? Sarah had better answer it. She reached for the phone with the tips of her fingers and slid it towards her.

      The name flashing on the screen was Ginny Mulholland. At first Sarah didn’t recognize it, then, with a start, she twigged.

      Sarah sat up, knocking her tall, half-drunk glass of cloudy lemonade all over her battered, thrown-off flip-flops and part of her left foot. A wasp immediately began to swarm close to it and Sarah swatted it frantically away.

      ‘Hello?’ She stood up and turned in the direction of the manure pong and Westins Farm, somewhere behind the orchard, where a tailwind from the pine trees sometimes made the mobile signal better than hopeless.

      ‘It’s Ginny! Ginny Mulholland. From House Events.’ The woman’s chirpy voice sounded like it was being buffeted through a wind tunnel, and Sarah was extremely surprised to hear it at all. She hadn’t expected to hear from Ginny again; she’d expected a polite rejection letter in the post and a good chuckle to herself at her own ridiculousness for applying for her old job. ‘How are you?’

      ‘Fine, thanks, Ginny,’ she replied, her voice shaking a little. ‘You?’

      Sarah’s ridiculousness had happened during a very similar lazy afternoon in the orchard, in May, when she was reading the paper and eating more biscuits. She was crazy to even have it catch her eye, really – that ad in the Temporary Job section of The Guardian