Me, You and Tiramisu. Charlotte Butterfield

her reliance on rules and propriety were a regular topic of ridicule from her sister. Jayne took three steps towards the nurse before she stopped abruptly in the middle of the room. What was she doing? She’d dreamed of this moment, well, not this moment exactly, she’d never considered that this was how it would happen. Semantics aside, it suddenly seemed ludicrous to her that she was prepared to pause it while she had her incisors whitened.

      ‘Um. You know what? I think I’ll reschedule. Er, if that’s okay? If it’s not, I’ll come now, but I’d really rather not,’ she heard herself say. Turning around to seek approval from Will and Rachel at her impulsiveness, she saw that they’d both stood up already and Will was holding her coat open for her to step into.

      Will and Rachel had excitedly chosen the pub that the three of them were now walking briskly towards. Their speed had little to do with the unforgiving climate; they were propelled instead by their eagerness to allow almost two decades to melt into insignificance. Jayne kept pace with them, hearing their animated chatter, yet unable to add to it herself.

      There wasn’t a day in eighteen years that she hadn’t fantasised about this moment; most mundane tasks had been tinged with a fleeting thought of where or what he was doing, she’d concocted the most creative and implausible scenarios where serendipity would thrust them together again, and now it was actually happening. On an icy pavement in a London suburb, against the tide of collar-up commuters, she was walking with Billy.

      **

      On the night she first met Billy, Jayne and Rachel were sitting in their kitchen, still in their school uniforms with the remnants of their microwave meals congealing on the plates in front of them. Rachel was engrossed in carving the words INXS into the back of her calculator with a compass while Jayne was studiously rewriting her essay using her sister’s slightly more sloped handwriting, remembering not to dot her ‘i’s’ like she would have done, but to draw a small bubble over each one instead.

      Their mother, Crystal, was precariously balanced on the edge of the worktop hanging up a Native American dreamcatcher in the window that she’d just bought in a gemstone shop in Totnes. ‘I’ve got a new client coming round later for a reading, girls, so make yourself scarce.’

      Of all of Crystal’s money-making schemes over the years this was the one that Jayne hated the most, and yet sadly was the most lucrative, so Crystal had no intention of cancelling it. Simply by closing her eyes, leaning forward in her chair and saying the words, ‘they are safe on the other side, and they love you,’ she made forty quid a session.

      ‘And?’ Rachel had yawned, leaning back in her chair.

      ‘And, this one might be my ticket out of this place, so don’t be like you usually are.’ Neither daughter had even flinched at their mother’s choice of words, they’d heard much worse. ‘It was bloody bad luck,’ was how Crystal had always described her unplanned pregnancy. ‘It was a night of passion under the stars, but I’ve been paying ever since!’ was the title tune on the backing track of their childhood and it was usually accompanied by a Chardonnay-scented hiccup and a sharp inhale of a Lambert & Butler.

      Apparently their father’s name was Neil, aka Jupiter. That’s as much as they’d ever managed to get out of their mother regarding the identity of their dad. To be fair to Crystal, it wasn’t that she was deliberately withholding specifics from them, it was the only information she’d gleaned from him before she’d shed her sarong on Thailand’s Koh Pha Ngan beach and celebrated the full moon with some intoxicated love-making. Neil left Paradise Bungalows the next day for a school-building project in India and Crystal moved on soon after to a rice farm in Bali.

      She’d initially put her tiredness and weight gain down to the carb-heavy diet and intense manual labour, but five months into her pregnancy there was no mistaking what was happening inside her body. She flew home to have the girls and her free spirit evaporated a little more each day, leaving behind a bitterness that was impossible to shift.

      Despite only knowing Neil for a matter of hours, and ignoring the fact that little of that was spent talking, Crystal still blamed Jayne’s shortsightedness on this teenage lothario, along with her ability to put on a few waist inches by passing a wrapped chocolate bar. But over the years Jayne had learnt to channel her grandmother’s mantra of ‘deal best you can with the lot you’ve been dealt’. She reasoned that she should know, having had to help raise her eighteen-year-old daughter’s dark-haired twins in a seaside town where being from Exeter was considered exotic.

      By the time the doorbell went that evening, both girls would have forgotten about Crystal’s grieving client had it not been for the overwhelming smell of sandalwood incense that engulfed the house, which apparently energised the spirits. ‘It’s what the clients expect,’ Crystal had said the first time the girls coughed their way through the fug.

      This client seemed to fill the doorway; his broad shoulders were slightly stooped, yet still blocked out whatever remnants of daylight were left in the reddening sky behind him. Crystal had been characteristically effusive in her welcome. The social niceties and wide smile that only made their appearance when in the company of vulnerable people with cash were flaunted with abandon.

      This time was different, though. The girls had almost walked straight past the man’s smart navy Volvo that was incongruent with the potholed driveway and forlorn wasteland of a front garden. As Jayne drew level with the driver’s window she had glanced in and seen a teenage boy sitting low in the seat, shoulders hunched, his dark lanky hair obscuring his eyes. She’d tapped on the window, but he didn’t respond. She’d knocked harder, hurting her knuckles, until he’d slowly raised his head, his eyes tired and lifeless.

      He’d reluctantly leant across and wound down the window an inch. Rachel had nudged Jayne to move on, to see the inch as a deterrent, not an invitation; his whole demeanour had suggested that he just wanted to be left alone with his dark thoughts, a concept alien to Jayne, yet one that Rachel recognised and understood.

      He’d answered her questions with expressionless shrugs and turned down the invite to join them on their walk into town with an almost imperceptible shake of the head. So Jayne had no choice but to open the back door of the car and climb in. Which is where she spent the next half an hour. Talking to the back of his head.

      She’d once tamed a baby badger by leaving milk and bread out every night, crouching still in the shadow of their dustbin until it gradually relented, delaying its retreat back behind the shed by a few more seconds every day. Cracking Billy was slightly harder, but even he had a breaking point. A few days later when his dad had booked a repeat reading, Billy eventually surrendered and agreed to join them on their early-evening walk into town.

      ‘You go, Jayne,’ Rachel had nudged her in the back towards the off-licence door.

      ‘No! Why? You go!’

      ‘I can’t, that’s the bloke that knew my ID was fake last time.’ The sisters had then both turned and looked at Billy, their looks of expectation fading as they realised that he barely looked all of his fifteen years, let alone three years older. ‘Billy, tell Jayne to get the cider,’ Rachel had ordered.

      ‘Um, Jayne, I think you should get the booze, you look really old.’

      ‘Gee, thanks Bill, way to win new friends.’

      ‘Um, I, er, just meant that with your, you know, natural assets …’ He’d broken off to mime two mountains jutting out from his chest, ‘and your height, you’re the best choice.’

      ‘Well, thank you for the impromptu game of charades just there, but I’m actually the same height as Rachel.’

      ‘Yeah,’ Rachel had interrupted, ‘but your hair adds about five inches. For the love of all that’s holy Jayne, get the frickin’ booze, and remember, 11^th October 1982, 1982, 1982.’

      Having confidently secured the contraband the three teens had headed to the park to drink their stash, lament their luck in being allocated such crap parental role models and to lie back on the grass and gaze up at the light pollution. As the days had turned into weeks, and aided by cheap