Free Miss You by Kate Eberlen

Cuthbert’s talked about. Lusting after George Clooney was something I had in common with a staffroom of sympathetic middle-aged
women, where conversation often centred on topics like varicose veins and the menopause.
    ‘A bit old for you, isn’t he?’ said Doll.
    ‘I’m never going to meet him, am I?’
    ‘You always did have a thing for the older guys,’ Doll mused.
    ‘How d’you work that out?’
    ‘
Little Women
, remember? You didn’t mind when Jo got that old professor bloke instead of nice Laurie. It’s the one book I’ve read all the way through,’ she
admitted when she saw me looking at her, astonished. ‘Only ’cause you made me.’
    ‘So who would it be for you?’ I felt obliged to ask.
    ‘If we’re talking a famous person, Tom Cruise.’
    ‘Yeah, he is pretty gorgeous.’
    ‘He’s too short for you,’ said Doll immediately, as if I was planning to snatch him from her.
    She got up and removed the video cassette from the machine.
    ‘What about blokes we know?’ she asked.
    I was about to say that men hadn’t been uppermost in my mind for the past few weeks, when I heard Dad fumbling with his keys at the front door, so jumped up to tidy away the pizza debris.
You could never tell what mood he’d be in after the pub.
    A cloud of curry entered the room with him.
    ‘So you girls had yourselves a pizza, did you?’ he asked, seeing the box on the table.
    ‘We did.’
    ‘None left for me?’ He lifted the lid of the box, in a twinkly rather than menacing way.
    ‘Sorry!’
    ‘How much does one of these takeaway pizzas cost, then?’
    ‘Doll paid,’ I said quickly.
    ‘You’ve got yourself a job, have you?’ Dad asked her.
    ‘I have, Mr Costello. I’m working full-time at the salon now.’
    While I was in the sixth form, Doll had been at the local college, doing her diploma, but she’d always worked evenings and weekends at the town’s poshest hairdressing salon since she
was thirteen, graduating from the girl who swept the floor all the way up to junior stylist.
    ‘There now,’ said Dad, giving me a look.
    ‘I’ve been offered a job as well,’ I heard myself telling him, my heart sinking at the inevitability of accepting Mrs Corcoran’s offer. ‘I’m going to be a
proper teaching assistant on the staff after Christmas.’
    ‘You’ll be getting the pizza in then,’ said Dad.
    Not well done, or anything like that. Dad hadn’t forgiven me for choosing university rather than work, even though I hadn’t gone.
    Doll and I exchanged glances.
    ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ said Doll.
    ‘I’ll walk you,’ I said, hoping that Dad would have fallen asleep by the time I got back. You would have thought with Mum dying we’d have got along better together, but
if anything, Dad seemed more cantankerous than ever. Perhaps it was one of his stages of grief.
    The cool air was refreshing after being indoors all evening.
    ‘Oh, I forgot! Mum said you’re to come for Christmas,’ Doll announced.
    ‘Seriously?’
    ‘All of you.’
    I almost wept with gratitude. I’d been so worried about Christmas. I hadn’t been able to decide whether to get the tinsel tree down from the loft, or decorate the lounge with paper
chains, in case it seemed disrespectful. Whenever I tried to speak to Dad about it, he’d say, ‘Christmas? Doesn’t it get earlier every year?’
    And there’d be some excuse – the pub, the snooker, the match – as to why we wouldn’t talk about it yet.
    The cards we’d received were piled up on the hall table, except for the one Hope had made at school in the shape of a Christmas tree, so loaded with glitter and glue it never properly
dried. That went up on the knick-knack shelf in the kitchen and each morning while she was eating her Coco Pops, Hope gazed at it, saying, in rather a good impression of Mrs Corcoran’s Irish
lilt, ‘That’s really very good, Hope, isn’t it now?’
    I’d dreaded tackling the Christmas lunch. My cooking skills were