Weird Sister by Kate Pullinger Read Free Book Online

what is put in front of her. Jenny is a good girl.
    Number two: Blow-dry hair every day. Jenny’s hair is blonde and fine with a tendency to curl and frizz and she likes to keep it straight, shiny, and the only way to do this is to mousse it and blow-dry it with a brush every day. She envies Graeme and Robert their dark thick hair; if hers was like that she would wear it short and slicked back like them. But she is a blonde and Graeme tells her that blondes have more fun, all the best girls are blonde, and Karen scowls at him and says not to listen. Sometimes Jenny feels persecuted by her blondeness, as if she can’t really be a Throckmorton. Karen tries to help, she supplies Jenny with hair products, but they’re never the right kind. I could be a foundling, Jenny reasons, how would anyone know? My mother’s dead, and my father, well, he’s not saying. I might not belong in this family after all.
    Number three: Talk more at school. Jenny never talks at school. When she was younger she was horribly shy; she doesn’t feel shy any longer but she hasn’t mastered the art of talking. Chatter. The other girls are good at chatter. They will talk about anything – they will say anything – they swear and shout and giggle. Jenny practises swearing as she lies in bed. ‘Motherfucker,’ she says, ‘mothafucka,’ raising her voice. She wonders if Agnes says ‘Fuck’. She bets she does. Maybe they’ll say ‘Fuck’ together, when Agnes moves in, when Agnes becomes Jenny’s fully fledged sister-in-law.
    Sister-in-law. Sister. She longs for a sister. Karen’s never been like a sister, she’s too motherly for that, too tied to the ironing board and sink. Imagine having a sister. Girl-talk. Make-up. Sister things.
    Jenny is a lonely girl. Even now, at sixteen, she knows she brings this loneliness upon herself. She’s not good at having friends. Robert has noticed this, and Karen, and they’ve done their best to encourage Jenny to invite people round to the house. She tries – Lolly Senior comes from time to time – but she never remembers. She forgets to be sociable. It’s as though there is too much going on in the Throckmorton family, this crowd of people, effectively parentless; Robert and Graeme can’t be Jenny’s parents, no matter how much they try. Jenny regrets not having parents and this makes her feel disloyal to her father who is, after all, alive.
    Resolution number four: Be more outgoing.
    She should join something. She’s never belonged to anything. Not Brownies or Girl Guides. Not the Drama Club. She’s never taken piano lessons or riding lessons or ballet. She doesn’t know how to swim. She hasn’t got any hobbies. She can’t sew – no one sews anymore, she thinks. She doesn’t read much – she can’t afford magazines. Robert gives her a pound a week, he’s given her one pound every week since she was six. She should save her pounds and take up smoking. But Agnes doesn’t smoke.
    Resolution number five: Be like Agnes.

Elizabeth
    They were like a weird family out of a novel, Stephen King perhaps. Not that I’ve ever read Stephen King, not that any of them would have read Stephen King either, not even Graeme. That was one of the oddest things about that household, as well as one of the things I liked best about it – the complete absence of popular culture. It wasn’t that they were particularly high-brow, but more along the lines of no-brow. They weren’t interested. They were interested in themselves, in each other. They were absorbed in getting by. They didn’t need television or radio or movies or gossip magazines. They didn’t watch the news, they didn’t buy newspapers. I’d never thought it odd before, it was just, well, a Throckmorton thing.
    The person in whom this characteristic, this absence, was most noticeable was, of course, Jenny. The teenager. Teenagers are supposed to be pure popular culture these days, and little else. With Jenny I think that initially it was