My Favourite Part

23: welcome to the family

Pip's got that incurious sort of look. If you look at him the way you look at a headline, preoccupied and presumptuous, you might make the mistake of seeing a favoured name haphazardly wrapped in an angsty exterior. If you're lucky enough to meet him the way I did, without the strain of frame or context, you'd meet quite the character – a little bawdy, but bursting with truth.

"See the pouty one with the red lipstick?" He says, pointing at a heeled lady of a petite stature, doing her best to yank an adamant child out of a car.

"Ye-es," I hiss, pulling his arm down in case she looks over. Pip rolls his eyes,

"That is sister dearest."

"Oh, um," I squint, trying to recall the name I saw in a tiny font online, "Eleanor?"

"Nelly."

"Nelly." I repeat it as though I'm learning a new language. In an odd way, I sort of am.

Nelly's the purest kind of pretty – with pale skin and a rounded jaw, she looks like an English princess. The impression's only shattered when her face twists and screws in frustration as she tugs on the stubby red corduroy-clad legs of a little boy intent on hanging from the door handle like a rung on the monkey bars.

"Her hair's so gorgeous..." It's lighter than mine, maybe an auburn, like Mum's used to be, with barely-there but unmistakable highlights of blonde, no doubt freshly done.

Pip claps, pattering fingertips on his palm facetiously,

"Very well done! Now just remember to tell her it looks like her natural colour and you'll be in her good books for sure."

"Piss off."

Just then, from the other side of the car, a little girl in a pinafore made of the same red corduroy hops down carefully, shuts the silver door behind her, and waits patiently for her brother's tantrum to subside.

"Nelly's sprogs," Pip identifies them, "sort of the troublesome twosome, except Alistair's the trouble, but we have to pretend Daisy's trouble too so Nel doesn't feel bad that Ali doesn't have a good male role model, blah blah blah. It's a whole psychobabble spiel."

I'm about to ask where their father is, when Pip, with clear disdain, points him out – a tanned man in a too-tight sweater, with his hand to his airpod, and his back decidedly to his wife and children.

"That prick is her husband, and you don't need to know his name because frankly, he won't remember yours."

"Ah, charming." It might just be his insistent ignoring of Alistair's shrieks and Nelly's pleas, but he does look like a prick. Or maybe it's the sweater clinging to his abs. Who the fuck wears a V-neck sweater without a shirt underneath?

"Oh, and then," Pip motions to the mousy man scratching his beer belly and coming out the house in, surprise surprise, boxers and a crumpled dress shirt, "that's-"

"Freddie, yeah, we've met." I sound more abrupt than I intended, but Pip seems to catch my drift, chuckling.

"Lucky you. Yeah, Freddie's... He used to be alright, but then he went to Cambridge, and then he got sent down from Cambridge for coke, and now he just hangs about for the free holidays, and no one can technically say anything."

"Wait, so he... does cocaine?"

"No, not really," Pip says dismissively, "just, like, socially." I've never really heard of 'social' cocaine use, but Pip shrugs like it's common. Maybe it's a posh thing.

Lolly's next out the door, so bright-eyed that I almost trip up at the sight of her. She was the first to start drinking last night, and the last to stop, but now she's bushy-tailed at 8:30am, in a silk white pyjama set, air-kissing the new arrivals. How is that even possible?