The Sister Surprise Read online

  I turn around. There’s a gap between the warped timber beams, through which I can partially see Moira. She has her arms wrapped around a hefty sow, towards which Kian wades through a sea of jostling rumps. He jabs a vaccine into the pig’s side. Moira grins, her fringe stuck to her forehead. Her chin isn’t as pronounced as mine, but it’s obvious now. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it straightaway. The same groove in mine is there in hers, set within a square jaw which might look masculine if it weren’t counterbalanced by high-set, apple-round cheeks.

  I examine the parameters of my common sense. Moira McCauley. It can’t be a popular name, and definitely not in a village of three hundred, so, yep, that’s almost definitely my half-sister. She looks a few years younger than me, so her father – our father – had a relationship of some kind with Moira’s mum after mine. That, or there are a number of Moiras dotted about the isle. Did she know him when she was little? Does she have any siblings? Which, of course, means: do I have any more siblings? Ones that haven’t logged their details on The Ancestry Project?

  I turn around and slide down the wall, the concrete floor cold through my jeans. This was the whole point, wasn’t it? Answers are surfacing, so why do I feel like folding myself into a piece of human origami? This sisterhood project feels so untidy, especially when you factor in the diary entries I’m still being asked to write for Snooper.

  In my bullet journal, I have a clear line down each weekly spread; one for work, one for life. I’ve got no idea where to place things now; everything is scrawled across the middle. This was never just about my job, like my conveyor-belt life in London was never really about preferring the comfortable option. If you never try to change anything, you can’t expect anything to change.

  If I’d known about Moira as a kid, I could have presented her with a matching friendship bracelet and offered to badly French braid her hair; aka Friendship 101 when you’re eight years old. We could have sent each other letters written with scented gel pens. We could have met in the summer holidays and gone camping. We’d have bought ice-creams with two balls of chemically flavoured chewing gum in the bottom and swapped transfer tattoos. It would have been like The Parent Trap, except neither of us are rich and ‘summer camp’ would likely be a caravan site on a blustery clifftop near Skegness.

  We’re not kids. I don’t know how to do the family thing with anyone other than Mum. I’ve had years of being an only child. In public, anyway. Let’s face it, vomiting on the internet is going to be pretty hard to beat, but I still don’t want Moira to be blindsided like I was.

  I pick at the orange nail polish that has clung on since my last full day at Snooper. Chipped flakes fall to the floor, garish against the mud like radioactive lice. I’ve speculated about the moment I found Moira, but every time it was detached and clichéd, like shaking up a snow globe and watching the scene settle from a distance.

  If instinct feels like anxiety, mine is so intense it’s like a shard of broken glass lodged between my ribs. Finding Moira is my opening paragraph, metaphorically speaking. I can’t dash out the rest of the story without thinking about the consequences. I’m not a cupcake. I can’t just spring myself on her and expect a good reaction.

  ‘Ava?’ says Kian. He can’t see me tucked round the corner. I pinch the skin between my thumb and index finger. My body feels tightly wound, like I could cry or laugh or scream, maybe at the same time.

  ‘I’m here,’ I say, stepping out.

  ‘Great. We’ve still got fifteen to go. It’s anarchy out there,’ he says, like he’s taken reprieve from hand-to-hand combat in a war zone.

  I push my sleeves up, swing my leg over the fence, and hop back inside the pen. Moira is standing in the middle like a ringmaster, the pigs jostling in a circle around her. I clap my hands, surveying the scene. This fizzy energy has got to go somewhere.

  ‘We can do this,’ I say. ‘Kian, pass me that board. Moira –’ the name catches on my lips like I’m talking with my mouth full ‘– pull that fence in tighter. I’ll funnel them in the right direction. When you’ve jabbed, I’ll mark them. Kian, chuck that here.’

  He takes the spray can out of his pocket. ‘Are you demoting me?’

  ‘Sorry. But not sorry,’ I say, catching the canister. I want to keep analysing Moira’s face for similarities, but don’t want to come across as a massive weirdo. We stand, elbow to elbow, the top of her head an inch or two below mine.

  We work through the remaining pigs until I’m so hot I’ve had to de-layer to my T-shirt and jeans. My bra feels clammy and my arms are a delightful shade of corn-beef purple, a look I last exhibited during unenthusiastic netball matches at school. Kian is covered in straw, his jogging bottoms loose at the waist, whereas Moira looks no different, as though catching pigs is her favourite past time.

  ‘Last one!’ I call. We face into the pen, a tank-like sow between us.

  ‘A word of warning – Edith is hormonal,’ says Kian.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  The only kind of hormonal I recognise involves eating a family-size bag of Doritos and curling up in the foetal position, all whilst my uterus attempts to punch its way out of my stomach. What do pigs do? Cry into their potato peelings after promising yet again to only eat one trough’s worth of dinner?

  ‘Edith’s having a phantom pregnancy. She thinks she’s carrying piglets, but there’s nothing in there. Makes her over-protective,’ says Moira.

  Oh God. That’s really sad. I shiver as the wind draws warmth from my damp skin. Edith looks from one of us to the other, her trotters tapping on the concrete. She grunts on an outward breath.

  ‘Shall we just let her through?’ I say. ‘Herd immunity?’

  ‘I can’t risk it. It’ll be worse if she gets sick. Can’t do much about it if that happens,’ replies Kian.

  ‘Come in slowly,’ says Moira, ‘that’s it.’

  Kian and I pad across the barn. I smile at Edith, hoping she’ll take reassurance from it. It takes less than three seconds for our tentative approach to fail. I squat, but she must interpret this descent to eye-level as a hostile move, because what happens next has all the co-ordination of a dyspraxic moth in a cyclone.

  Edith launches forward like a porky battering ram and headbutts me with the full force of a skull two inches thicker than mine. My eyeballs feel like they’ve been knocked to the floor. I clutch my face to check that it’s still there and roll onto my side, away from the frantic scuffling of Edith’s hard trotters as she tries to heave herself from the floor. Our collective agreement to stay calm is abandoned as Kian grapples with her ankles. ‘Do it now!’

  My vision is blurred around the edges, but even then, it’s hard to say where Kian ends and the pig begins. I push myself up onto my elbows as Moira jabs the vaccine gun in Edith’s general direction, but the uncanny human screech that accompanies it suggests that this was a misread target. Kian jumps up with such alacrity that the gun is knocked from Moira’s hand, skittering across the floor towards me. What had looked like the fleshy underside of Edith’s rump was in fact Kian’s left arse cheek, which now smarts with a bullseye-shaped ridge, pink and tender against his pale skin. He rubs it whilst tugging his trousers up, but going by Moira’s wide eyes and unwavering gaze on Kian’s crotch, I expect she copped an eyeful and didn’t hate what she saw.

  Edith, entirely unperturbed, has made it onto her feet. In her eyes, I am clearly as intimidating as a wingless mosquito, because she uses my stomach as a stepping stone in order to walk away.

  I don’t want to body shame, even if it is a 300-kilo pig, but the weight of Edith through a pointy little trotter is enough to inspire violence. Best make it productive violence. I reach for the vaccine gun, tickling the handle with my fingers until it’s pulled closer, and jab it into Edith’s side.

  ‘Fucking yes!’ I scream, as Edith trots away on swollen ankles. I flump backwards, my head on the straw, and expel the last of my adrenaline on an outward breath. I’m radiant. I’ve got more ex
crement streaked across my face than foundation, and yet I feel fucking fabulous.

  ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I think we need a drink.’ Kian rubs his face with his forearm. ‘Moira, reckon it’s time to open The Locker?’

  Chapter 18

  The last of the sunshine cuts in at an angle, stretching shadows across the floor. I pull on a pair of fluffy socks and tuck my feet closer, trapping warmth from the hot shower I took half an hour ago. I try and type quietly, using the pads of my fingers. From downstairs, I hear Moira humming in the kitchen. The start of a headache pinches between my eyes, which isn’t surprising considering my quite literal head-to-head combat with a hormonal sow.

  I twist at the waist, stretching my sore muscles, and scan over the diary entry I’ve just typed up as a ‘vomit draft’. I’m stuck in a frown, which doesn’t make my headache any better. As much as I’ve tried to add high-octane Spielberg drama to the piece, there’s only so much peril you can try to shoehorn into a blog post about pigs. It’s hardly like fighting a grizzly bear to save a group of Brownies from a fatal mauling.

  ‘Ava, you coming? We’ll get started without you …’ says Kian from the corridor, the steam from his shower billowing along the ceiling and into my room.

  ‘Yep, I’ll be there in a minute.’ I stop over-analysing and attach the document in an email to Duncan to get a sense of whether I’m heading in the right direction. I know what he’s going to say, but I’m reluctant to do it. He wants me to lean into the whole ‘My Long-Lost Sister’ narrative, but it feels a bit … icky. So far, I’ve included a super nerdy version of Kian and whacked a pseudonym over the top, but now Moira’s on the scene, everything is more complicated. I haven’t had a chance to process the reality that I’ve got a sister, let alone coherently enough to put it in an article. For now, I’m keeping her off the page.

  The sound of Moira chatting away grows louder as I reach the kitchen, which makes a nice change. Although it’s been a couple of weeks, I’ve found it hard to adjust to the noise here. In fact, it’s more the lack of noise. There’s so much in London and it’s far more aggressive. If Kilroch is Lorraine Kelly, London is Piers Morgan. One soothes you to sleep and the other shouts at you until you’re aching from exhaustion. Here, it’s like the synthesiser is pushed down, replaced by a constant, heaving wind that pushes up the cliff and smacks the farmhouse walls, writhing and whistling through cracks in the window frame. On the handful of clear days we’ve had, I go outside and it’s so quiet I assume everyone on earth has died and I want to scream just to check I still can.

  I go into the kitchen to find Moira warming her bottom on the tea towel rail by the Aga. She grins and shuffles over to make space for me, so I slide in next to her. Heat permeates my thermal leggings and settles on my skin.

  ‘Oh God, this feels so good I’d be willing to freeze my toes off all over again.’

  We both glance up as Kian walks through from the living room, a towel pulled tight around his waist.

  ‘I can’t find my house trousers.’ He wrenches the back door open, peering down the side of the house to check the washing line. Moira catches my eye and glances away, her gaze darting towards Kian’s thinly clad backside. It’s quite sweet, really. I didn’t think that fleece-lined shirts and threadbare towels were icons of the female gaze, yet here is the evidence presented before me.

  ‘A-ha!’ says Kian, pulling back a kitchen chair, on which his affectionately termed ‘house trousers’ are crumpled up in a ball. He disappears into the living room and comes back pinging the waistband tight, a content smile on his face.

  ‘Are you sure we should crack open The Locker?’ says Moira, pushing her thumbs through two frayed holes is her sleeves. ‘I’m just remembering last time …’

  ‘Is this some kind of Highland initiation test?’ I ask.

  ‘Exactly that,’ says Kian. He drags out a bleached wooden chest from the back of a cupboard and puts it on the table, tapping the lid with his knuckles. ‘If you can still stand at the end, you’ve passed. Jesus, I don’t think I can sit down,’ he adds, rubbing the spot where he was unwittingly inoculated, eyes smarting.

  ‘I thought it was meant to be a “cruelty free” method of immunisation,’ I say.

  He pulls open the waistband of his pants to inspect the injury.

  ‘It is if you’re a pig. They’ve got thicker skin than us,’ he says, rubbing the spot with the heel of his hand. ‘You really hit the bullseye, Moira.’

  ‘Ah, I’m sorry. In my defence, it looked similar.’

  ‘Geez, thanks,’ says Kian, looking hard done by.

  ‘Not like that, I mean, you moved and I was already there. It’s a compliment! Edith’s rump meat would fetch a decent price if you sold her.’ Moira’s eyes are wide and earnest.

  ‘Not going to do that, though, am I?’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I can make more money using them to work the woodland. I’m going to get truffles growing up there.’

  ‘It was pig racing last week,’ says Moira, rolling her eyes affectionately.

  ‘To be fair, I know a few people in London who would see truffle hunting with a bunch of delinquent pigs as a real expedition. It’s that quirky countryside thing, isn’t it?’

  Kian nods as though this has confirmed a long-held theory, then riffles through a drawer. He jots something down, scratches his chin, and looks at the folders I’ve organised, quietly intimidated.

  ‘You’re going to be upset if I don’t put this in the right place, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ha, I’m not that neurotic,’ I lie. ‘Leave it on the top. I’ll show you where to slot it another time.’

  ‘Right you are,’ he says, reaching for a set of dusty tumblers.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have the money now?’ says Moira, caution softening her words.

  ‘Sure, but I’m not sending any of them to the abattoir.’

  ‘Not even if it would make that pile less scary?’ she says, nodding to the invoices that I neatly stacked in a wire paper tray this morning. I’m glad someone has noticed without me having to point it out. I scraped a C in my maths GCSE, but even I know that negative signs usually mean that numbers are going in the wrong direction. ‘The bank will hold off, but only if they can see that you’re trying to balance things up—’

  ‘Moira. No more business talk, all right? Ava’s here, the pigs are fine, I’m more than fine – going by the recent boost to my immune system – and it’s Friday. If we were in Edinburgh, we’d be at a bar lining up Jägerbombs by now.’

  Moira looks at Kian from under her thick fringe, made fluffy from a slapdash attempt to dry it with a hand towel.

  ‘You know I can’t open The Locker without you,’ says Kian.

  Moira’s cheeks twitch with a barely contained smile. ‘Oh, go on then.’

  ***

  ‘I’m still not convinced this is safe to drink, you know,’ I say, tilting my glass in the light. ‘It looks like it’s been dredged from a riverbed.’

  ‘Look, this is the finest whisky that’ll pass your lips, lass,’ says Kian.

  ‘Is it normal for him to get more Scottish when he drinks?’ I ask Moira, whose head is slumped in her hand.

  ‘Oh, aye. He lost a lot of his accent when he moved away for university, didn’t you?’

  Kian leans back in his chair, a lazy smile on his face.

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t want to get banded together with the other lads who jumped when a tram went by and only drank the stuff their daddy’d brewed in the cow shed.’ I laugh, expecting Moira to join in, but she has her eyes down, tracing a line of wood grain on the table. ‘Either that or they went completely the other way, you know? Cocaine five times a day until they got raging heart palpitations in a lecture and had to go home for the rest of the course.’

  I take a tentative sip from my glass. The taste is musty, like licking the inside of a tobacco tin. ‘I didn’t do the whole “university experience” thing. Stayed at home.’
r />   ‘Ah, I’m a homebird too,’ says Moira, brightening.

  ‘Don’t you go to college?’

  ‘Oh, aye. But it’s only a wee bus ride away.’

  ‘Moira studies veterinary nursing. That’s why I can get her down here to sort the animals out and don’t have to pay her anything,’ says Kian, with a wink.

  I’ve not got the mentalist skills of Derren Brown, but I’m pretty sure that if Moira were 500 miles away and asked to castrate a pedigree Rottweiler in Kilroch, she’d be out the door and on the way before the scalpel clattered to the ground.

  ‘Ah, I don’t mind. It’s cheaper staying at home. I wanted to save a wee bit of money from my grant, but it got cut right before I started. I give horse riding lessons every now and again, but we sold the ponies to pay for house repairs after the river burst its banks and took half our garden with it. We’ve only got a wee Shetland now. She’s good for the odd gymkhana, but there aren’t enough kids who want to learn.’

  Kian pulls the cork out of a teardrop-shaped whisky bottle to top up his glass.

  ‘Veterinary nursing is good, aye, but it’s mostly snipping tubes and tying off testicles, you know?’ says Moira, blowing her fringe out of her eyes, her cheeks increasingly pink.

  Kian winces and crosses his legs.

  ‘I like bigger animals. Ones you can’t wrap your arms round. Larger than a Golden Retriever, smaller than a camel,’ she says, nodding purposefully.

  ‘Could you do a conversion course or something?

  Kian raises his head, his eyes a little bloodshot. ‘Hey, what about that thing with the teeth? Ah, Christ. What’s it called?’

  ‘Dentistry?’ I offer.

  He clicks his fingers and points at me in confirmation.

  ‘Animal dentistry,’ says Moira, delicately sipping from her glass. ‘Equine, specifically. I’ve got an interview, but … ah, I don’t know.’ Moira cups her chin in her hands, a dreamy look passing over her face. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve read about it. When I close my eyes, I dream of teeth rasping.’