The One Before The One. Katy Regan

my notebook and opening it at the page that says LEXI’S FIVE POINT PLAN. ‘Number one, your room.’

      ‘Oh, you’ve seen it?’

      ‘Yes, and I nearly had a seizure, so please sort it out. Moving swiftly on. Number two, you need to get a job. If you’re not going back to sixth form – which, incidentally is number three, we need to discuss sixth form properly – then you need to know what else you’re going to do. I thought we could draw up your options.’

      ‘Make a list you mean?’

      ‘Number four,’ I sigh. ‘You need to call Dad.’

      ‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’ She shrugs

      ‘Good, well that’s all of them.’

      ‘That’s it? That’s the list?’

      ‘Yup. Told you it wasn’t serious.’

      ‘But you said there were five points,’ she says, edging closer.

      ‘Did I?’ I move my hand so that it covers up the fifth point. The bit Dad told me to do. The bit about finding out what’s actually wrong with Lexi.

      She uncurls my fingers from the notepad.

      ‘Find out what’s wrong with Lexi,’ she reads out. ‘God!’ She flops dramatically onto the sofa. ‘Did Dad put you up to this? He did, didn’t he? There’s nothing wrong with me, except that everyone keeps asking what’s wrong with me, and my parents treat me like I’m depressed, or a total mentalist or like it’s not totally normal for a seventeen-year-old to not know exactly where she’s going or what to do with her life.’

      ‘Of course it’s normal,’ I say. ‘I’m thirty-two and I still haven’t really got a clue what’s going on with my life.’

      ‘Liar!’

      ‘It’s true! It’s just, Dad said—’

      ‘I don’t care what Dad said. He’s such a moron sometimes. I mean, I love him, but he doesn’t understand me. He and Mum, they’re always like: “You could do anything you want to do, Alexis. The world is your oyster!” But what if you don’t know what you want to do? What then?’

      ‘I thought you said you wanted to be a shoe designer?’

      ‘Oh, I don’t mean that really. I’m crap at Art A level.’

      ‘I’m sure you’re not.’

      ‘I am. I’m crap at all my A levels.’

      Her face goes bright red and she looks like she might cry.

      ‘Look,’ I say, realizing this isn’t going anywhere. ‘We don’t have to talk about it now.’

      ‘Good,’ she says, ‘because there’s no big secret. I just came here to have fun, that’s all. I just want to have a good time.’

      So why are you crying? I want to say. But of course, I don’t.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      Caroline. Sorry, can’t do exhibition tomorrow. Got an unavoidable appointment. Enjoy though.

      I stare at the text again. The umpteenth time in two days. Why didn’t he just call me? Caroline, too. Martin never calls me Caroline. And no kiss. Not even a friendly exclamation mark.

      I call him one more time but it goes straight to answerphone and this time I don’t leave a message. Still, Martin doesn’t know how to be enigmatic so maybe he does, actually, have an unavoidable appointment; probably something to do with his wisdom teeth.

      It’s been almost a week since Lexi arrived, and, since the hair-dyeing fiasco and the tattoo, she’s been on best behaviour. She seems to love this job with Wayne, who has already achieved guru status in my house.

      ‘Wayne reckons people who write obsessive To Do lists are masking unhappiness,’ said Lexi the other day, as I added ‘dry-clean rugs’ to the list pinned to the fridge.

      ‘Does he now?’ I said, thinking does anyone actually talk like that? And anyway, since when was a complete stranger qualified to comment on my state of mind?

      ‘Yeah. He reckons they’re just avoiding the big stuff.’

      ‘Oh, right. I see. And what is this big stuff, according to Wayne?’

      ‘Dunno, life I s’pose. He didn’t really go into that bit.’ I rolled my eyes.

      ‘That’ll be because Wayne – who I am sure is lovely but who basically runs a jumble sale for a living, let’s not forget – doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.’

      In truth, I don’t really care what Wayne says, as long as Lexi enjoys working for him and he gives her some focus. I’m still pretty worried about her. She won’t talk to me, not really. We’ve chatted a bit about how she hated sixth form, a lot about her friend Carly and her disastrous love life, but nothing about hers. Once or twice, late at night, I’ve heard her having hushed, stressed conversations on the phone but I think I’ve finally worked out what that’s about.

      The other evening, quite out of the blue when we were watching How to Look Good Naked, she announced, ‘Carly thinks she’s pregnant.’

      ‘You’re joking,’ I said, one eye on the telly. ‘What’s she going to do?’

      ‘Dunno,’ said Lexi. ‘She hasn’t done a test yet.’

      ‘No way! If I was worried I was with child there’s no way I could sit around wondering. I’d have to know.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Definitely. Anyway, I thought her boyfriend had dumped her?’

      ‘He has, which is why it’s a complete nightmare.’

      There was a long pause. I was too busy watching the bit where they make her walk down an aisle, naked in a shopping centre, to really be listening, then she said,

      ‘Anyway, Carly reckons she’s decided she doesn’t want to keep the baby if she is.’

      ‘Oh. Right.’

      ‘What’s the furthest gone you can be before you have an abortion?’ she added, after a long pause.

      ‘Dunno. Twenty weeks? But then the problem is that some women give birth not even knowing they’re pregnant, especially teenagers whose bodies don’t even change that much.’

      ‘What, so you could just think you’re a bloater when really, you’re like, eight months up the duff?’

      ‘I s’pose so, yes.’

      Then we watched Celebrity Big Brother and that was the end of that.

      And so, what with Martin and his enigmatic ‘unavoidable appointment’ and Shona having to stay in and wait for a washing machine to be delivered, it’s just Lexi and I who find ourselves standing in the starkness of the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, staring at a square of turf.

      ‘So, by actually filming the grass growing …’

      The curator, Barnaby Speck (I always read the accompanying leaflet from start to finish) is a bald, fleshy-lipped man who gives a little jump on words he finds exciting, like ‘growing’.

      ‘… Rindblatten is saying something about the mysterious, unseen nature of time. Time not experienced by us, time of the –’ He jumps so much on this word, I see his red socks leave his shoes – ‘Other of Otherness.’

      ‘Eh?’ Next to me, Lexi screws her little nose up. ‘How do you go from a piece of grass, right?’ I nudge her in the ribs, which she reacts to with a comedy death