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massage?’
    ‘No, of course I don’t want a massage. I’m not that desperate for human contact that I’ll let you stick your nails in my spine. I haven’t forgotten the havoc you wreaked with my Barbies, thanks, never mind real humans.’
    ‘How am I ever going to get my massage business started if you won’t let me practise?’
    ‘You’re opening a “massage” business?’ asked Olivia. ‘Do you do extras?’
    ‘She’s got a degree in bioengineering. Of course she’s not going to open a massage business,’ said Katie. Thefour-year age gap was meant to disappear as you got older, but she’d seen no evidence for it yet.
    ‘Well, there you go, maybe I haven’t quite got my degree,’ said Clara, poking her tongue out as usual. ‘But that doesn’t matter, because before I start the business, I’m going to India.’
    Katie sighed looking back. She had been two years into her job then, working all hours, living on hardly any money. It was fun, of course, living the life of a young professional, meeting friends for drinks after work, feeling terribly grown-up and important, but she’d loved her six months travelling around India at the end of her degree. The sense of escaping; of doing something different…she’d loved living on coconuts and fresh air with young people from around the world. And now, here she was, jealous of her baby sister off to do the same thing. How could she feel nostalgic at twenty-nine? And really, what was she doing here anyway that was so great?
    She supposed she could chuck it in any time she wanted to. People were always talking about it down here. They were off to open a vineyard in France, or start an adventure holiday business, or import silk. Nobody ever did. London seemed to exert some kind of mystical centrifugal force on everyone, that sucked all ambitions other than a corner office and a cottage in the country out of you as quickly as it sucked the money from your pockets.
    Plus, look what the outcome had been. She’d thrown a party for Clara’s leaving. It had been a really good night, actually, full of people (although some of them had dogs on bits of string). Clara spent the whole night holed up in a corner with Max, with whom she’d always had acheeky, flirtatious relationship. Louise scarcely noticed. Max was furniture; part of her life, and Clara was the baby sister.
    Max left his job and flew to India two days later. The one who got away.
    And look at the mess you left behind you, Katie thought. If the whole world just did what they wanted all the time, the whole damn place would fall apart.
    After assuring Louise through the tears and tequila haze which followed that he would immediately see sense and come back crawling with his tail between his legs, begging her (and, more pertinently, his employers), he hadn’t. Actually, what made it much, much worse was that he decided he needed to rent the flat out to subsidise his new wacky lifestyle, and gave Louise notice to quit, which is how she’d ended up making loud noises in the tiny room Katie had once earmarked as a study.
    Clara didn’t seem to have a big problem with it. They were having fun, chilling, and ‘finding themselves’. In fact, over the last six months, as Louise had careered further and further away from the home and hearth she’d thought she’d shared with Max, Max and Clara got more and more relaxed about how exactly they’d got together in the first place and were practically sharing an email address. No one knew when, or if, they were coming home. Louise was dealing with it through a twin approach of martinis and dating, tiger-pouncing any man that crossed her postcode. Max’s name was best not mentioned, but sometimes – like now, when Katie got an email, it was difficult.
    Hey Sis!
    Clara still liked to use fonts to make her wacky and different, Katie noticed. It was like being shouted at by a Dickens novel.
HoWZIT? HOT in HERRE! Goa just amazing. Coconuts for twenty pence,