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run up some debts. I’ll have to get a job – it may take some time to sort myself out.’
    â€˜Stay as long as you like,’ she says. She looks anxious. Debt gives her the shakes. It reminds her too much of the past.
    â€˜You’ll straighten yourself out,’ she says bravely. ‘You have before, you will again.
    â€˜I’ll help,’ says poor deluded Robin. ‘What sort of debts?’
    Now this is an interesting one. Again, I must get the price right.But this time I have to find an amount which is outside her range or she will be tempted to help me out. It must be beyond her ability to bank-roll me but it must be possible for me – with hard work and application – to pay off in stages.
    â€˜Shit a coalpit,’ she says, when I tell her. She falls silent and chews the knuckle of her ring finger – a sure sign of high anxiety.
    I’m such a bitch, and it’s time to pull back a bit.
    I say, ‘I’m owed money too. That’s what caused the problem. Dog Records owes me for work I did with one of their new signings. And they’ve asked me to look at some raw talent in Oxford next week. They pay slowly, but they do pay in the end. The trouble is it’s all a bit hand-to-mouth. I’ll have to figure something out while I wait.’
    She says, ‘You can stay here. It’ll hardly cost you anything. If you
could
find some sort of job …’ Her voice dies under a justifiable weight of uncertainty. It is not simply rich living I am renowned for, it is also a contempt for sustained effort. I get bored and bolt. In short, I am flighty.
    â€˜Oh Lin,’ she says, ‘you could make a success of anything if only you …’
    â€˜Put my mind to it? Hung in?’ I smile. Because it’s funny how sisters define themselves in comparison to each other rather than by an objective standard. Thus, hanging in is Robin’s thing. Bolting is Lin’s. There are times, of course, when Robin bolts and Lin hangs in but those, according to family lore, are exceptions. Robin is the peat fire, Lin is the firecracker – that’s how we are stereotyped. And very useful it is too.
    We decide that I will stay with Robin, however reluctant I am to take advantage, and that she will filter all calls and act as my early warning system. While I take on the terrible task of ‘sorting myself out’.
    Perfect. Job done.
    It was hardly worth the effort. I could have just turned up with my bags – she would have taken me in anyway. But I wanted her invitation. I want her to feel she is actively protecting her little sister.
    I could have told her that I’d already lucked into a job, but Iwant her to feel that she has a stake in putting me on the right track. If you want someone to do a good job for you, you should build in job satisfaction, build in a degree of achievable success. Make her a shareholder.
    She sat at the kitchen table nibbling a cookie, her eyes vacant. She looked thick. She isn’t thick, but she dreams her way through problems. She doesn’t analyse – she tries on scenarios, like clothes, until she finds one she’s comfortable with. Just then she was dreaming her way through what she imagined was my problem. And if what she imagined was true, eventually she would solve it for me. Unfortunately, I misled her.
    I said, ‘Robin, sweetie, let me put a rinse on your hair.’
    â€˜A rinse? Why?’
    â€˜Grey hair is so ageing. It makes you look ten years older than you really are.’
    She laughed, distracted from my problem, and dismissed the subject without a second’s thought.
    â€˜Remember Auntie May?’ she said.
    I laughed too. Auntie May was our mother’s sister. She lived in Weston-super-Mare and worked as a waitress-cum-chamber maid at a hotel there. She had preposterously red hair and when we were kids she convinced us that it was natural. She said that redheads never