Being Gil's Sister

Lisa Stewart

Description

Sunny is outshone by her exceptional brother, Gil, but when he unravels faster than a spaghetti jumper, Sunny finds herself chasing love, aliens and a runaway nun to get their lives back on track.

Informations

• Publié par: Help for Writers
• Date de parution: 13 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910823170
• Langue: English

Extrait

Being Gil’s Sister
Lisa Stewart
For John and Michael
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Catherine Dunn and Nikki Halliwell from Help for Writers Ltd. Book cover design by Patrick Knowles Design.
Thank you to my mum and dad (Anne and Joe Patrizio).
I’ve been in business for six weeks, two days and the best part of this morning. My mother drew on her fifty-one years of life experience and told me to ‘get a job’. More precisely, she told me to ‘do something you’re good at’. Something I’m good at? Hiding under the duvet all day? Surfing the net? Sipping a Bacardi Breezer on the balcony of a five-star hotel in Miami? I could be under some kind of misapprehension but, unless any of the above skills also involve sex, I’m pretty confident that I can’t rely on a regular income from any of the things I’m good at.
I didn’t exactly get off to a flying start as far as my career was concerned. My parents divorced in the middle of my O-grade examinations. I’m fairly sure that this wasn’t intentional. Probably more to do with my father having an affair with our French neighbour, whose most significant allure (apart from her magnificent chest and the fact that she was an aerobics instructor) was the scarlet vintage Morgan sports car that she had inherited from a wealthy bachelor uncle. The fling was over before Dad could say ‘star jump’, but by then the damage had been done. Even to this day my mother boycotts garlic and refers to chips as ‘wench fries’.
Of course, I blamed myself. I blamed myself for quitting the Brownies after three weeks (in the days before bullying became illegal). I blamed myself for never eating a Brussels sprout, mangetout or any other green vegetable that came directly out of the ground without passing through some kind of re-processing (into a hamburger shape). But most of all I blamed myself for spending a large proportion of my teenage years shouting, ‘I hate you both and wish I’d never been born!’ How original.
I struggled to achieve four reasonable Higher grades. The only feasible explanation for this unforeseen accomplishment was the bribe that my idiosyncratic father offered me: on graduating high school with any type of Higher certificate I would be rewarded by a travelling extravaganza that would necessitate the use of a passport. He kept his word and, as a cynical seventeen-year-old, I scowled at him expectantly as we boarded a plane for New Jersey. We hired a recreational vehicle (I can assure you that no form of recreation whatsoever happened within this vehicle) of dubious age and roadworthiness and he taught me to drive in one afternoon. I was instantly promoted to chief chauffeur. This wasn’t such a shoddy deal as it meant we could travel to wherever I felt drawn. Mostly by ludicrous town names such as Hogweed and Spittelshee. My father had no complaints. After all, one American dive bar looks pretty much like every other and, apart from slight dialectal differences, most fights are pretty much the same. My roles, apart from chauffeur, included navigator, shopper, chef and ‘person who hauls her father out of a bloody brawl’. Okay, so no one in the USA knows that Scotland isn’t a town in England. Big corn-dog deal.
My father now lives in a pink-and-cream static caravan on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He is part of a duck-feeding, barbequeing and bingo-playing community. He is never likely to travel the world in search of truth and enlightenment, but at least he believes he has the potential if he felt so inclined. It was nothing that four wheels couldn’t sort.
Of course, one thing I can definitely blame him for is my absurd name: Sunny. He grew up a budding hippy in the sixties and by the time he collapsed into a drug-hazed seventies, Sonny and Cher were established as the King and Queen of pop. I’m not sure that being called Cher, Ike or even Donovan would have been any worse. I spent all my school years explaining away ‘Sunny McIntosh’ (an oxymoron by anyone’s standards) to my bewildered friends whose parents had never felt the need to delve into the seventies for inspiration. Never could a name be so poorly harmonised with my glowering, dismal and wholly lukewarm personality. One of my snotty neighbours referred to me as ‘Sunshine’ for five years until they moved house; a well-meaning teacher insisted that ‘Sunny’ must be short for something. Parents of Britneys and Kylies be warned – simmering teenagers have enough ammunition in their arsenal without conferring on them a hand grenade with the pin removed. No bitterness there, then.
Having tired of the never-ending trail across America with my father, I opted to give the second in reserve a chance and returned to live with my mother, who was still polishing the chip on her shoulder. Following the divorce (after all, it was the only divorce that mattered, wasn’t it?) my mother had taken herself off to a small miner’s cottage in Fife that needed her TLC. Stripping walls and shaling roofs gave her another cause to focus on. She could while away her evenings gazing across the Forth and throw sticks at the seagulls whenever she had an un-Christian thought about her roaming ex-husband.
What I could do with the rest of my life evaded me. I couldn’t picture myself doing any kind of job (and, believe me, if I could have carried off the role of flight attendant or laboratory scientist I would have) and I lacked the inspiration for vocational training. All the recruitment propaganda served to do was remind me of how I didn’t want to spend my working days. As a result, I was grudgingly manoeuvred into a variety of minimum wage and tediously unsatisfying jobs: serving truculent students in pizza parlours, forcing ill-fitting shoes onto bloated feet and general office gofer. The only job that even vaguely kept me from snoozing was when I was appointed – mistakenly, as it happens – to the post of admin assistant in a local council office. My lack of experience led me to grapple unsuccessfully with the process of settling invoices, which resulted in my squirreling away in a locked filing cabinet any paperwork that I could not pass off to anyone else. I ingratiated myself by memorising the team’s tea and coffee preferences and managed to read an entire collection of Agatha Christie novels in one summer.
My knack for hiding documents was mistaken for efficiency and I was soon elevated to the role of fire extinguisher auditor – if and when they had last been serviced. It afforded me a huge sense of importance to stroll around unsupervised, clipboard in hand and smug look on face. Even now I find it difficult to pass a fire extinguisher without checking it in a technical and enlightened fashion.
Last year I considered applying for a university place but found it impossible to decide on which curriculum to focus. I tried flicking through a prospectus and jabbing a finger but couldn’t quite reconcile myself to four years of nuclear engineering. So I took some time out to review my options and to find out whether I could achieve the level of responsibility that is required to become a ‘mature’ student. Somehow the world of academia is not one I’d embrace as enthusiastically as, say, the world of shopping.
Anyway, my mother’s unswerving words of wisdom got me thinking. What was I good at? I felt my main strengths lay in the ‘general dogsbody’ category. I was perfectly accustomed to friends and family ringing me up with, ‘Since you’re not working, can you collect my parcel for me?’ or ‘Can you help tidy my pigsty?’ or ‘Can you babysit my two kids while they spit in your face and throw meatballs at the ceiling?’ This was my forte. I was queen of ‘Can you?’ and ‘Will you?’ and ‘Don’t worry, Sunny will do it’. I made an executive decision to devote this year to making money out of these assumptions.
I had a very brief start-up meeting with myself (I particularly appreciated the complimentary coffee and doughnuts) and established my business, Do Me A Favour. Translated, this means that I’m willing to do anything if I’m able, the financial reward is justified and it’s legal.
To improve my employment opportunities, I sweet-talked my brother into allowing me stay with him in his flat in Edinburgh. This didn’t take too much persuasion. What man wouldn’t want his younger sister to move in rent-free on the understanding that she will carry out all domestic duties? He tried not to sound too excited at the prospect but I felt certain I could hear him slavering down the phone. Since I’ve moved in, I’ve taken over responsibility for shopping, cooking and all cleaning except for his room. I once ventured in to hoover, caught sight of a pair of his used underpants and have never felt the same way about shepherd’s pie again.
My brother Gilbert (another unfortunate throwback from the seventies relating to large frizzy hair and an over-enthusiastic dog) is, on the scale of family relations, moderately acceptable. He’s three years older than me and lives in computerland. He’s such a stereotypical computer nerd that if he happens to be sauntering through any PC shop, as is his habit, people stop him and ask technical questions. And he’s more than happy to assist. He does for computers what Jesus did for public speaking. Gil wears black-rimmed glasses and has the delicate hands of a worker oblivious to hard labour and the intellectual air of one who genuinely understands the functions of all the buttons on the TV remote control.
Gil is a walking, talking cliché. He inherited the straight, dark hair and brains; I inherited the wild auburn curls, freckles that join together when the clocks spring forward and an unhealthy wanderlust. Naturally, he is remunerated by some ridiculously high-paying company for designing computer apps. By night he’s a mad scientist. He locks himself away in his room to invent things. I swear I’ve walked past his room at night and have heard ‘bang bang chitty chitty bang bang’ whispering behind the door. Last year he returned from a trip to Be