Sunset

by Jessie Cave

Genres: Friendship

Synopsis

'Heartbreaking, funny and bittersweet. A phenomenal debut' DOLLY ALDERTON

'Let this bittersweet ode to siblings fill the Fleabag-shaped hole in your life' ELLE

'Fierce and unsparing, everything you'd expect from the brilliant Jessie Cave' EVANNA LYNCH

'Jessie Cave's reflective debut will make you laugh before breaking your heart' COSMOPOLITAN
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One summer can change everything . . .


Ruth and Hannah are sisters. Bonded by love and friendship, they are perplexingly different characters.

Hannah is radiant, organised and hard working. Ruth is forever single and totally aimless. Together they are invincible.

Every summer they go on a budget holiday together where they bicker, laugh, fight and make up.

But this time is different. Something bad happens.

And now everything is changed forever.

This bittersweet love story is about needing someone else as much as they need you. It is an ode to our most powerful bonds, how they build us and break us, and how, when all seems lost, we can find joy in the most unexpected places.
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'Heart-achingly beautiful . . . A stunning debut about the raw and destructive power of grief' INDEPENDENT

'The most beautiful, furious, real book about siblinghood and grief . . . Astounding' PANDORA SYKES

'Exquisite and raw' SARA PASCOE

'It made me want to hug my sister' MEGAN BAYNES, PRESS ASSOCIATION

'Funny, heartbreaking, and with that delicious edge Jessie brings to her heart' CARIAD LLOYD

'Full of beautiful and well-observed details . . . Its true skill is in how brave and raw and honest it is' JOSIE LONG

Release date: June 24, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

We’re holding hands and walking up a hill. Our hotel sits at the top. A messy red plait hangs down her back and her summer dress is too short so it keeps riding up. She doesn’t notice, or maybe she doesn’t care because we’re on holiday. She’s pulling me along, and as my heart starts pounding I regret not keeping up with swimming, keeping up with anything. I wish I had her discipline, her strength. My pink flip-flops are digging into the sides of my feet and sand nestles in a new blister; my calves ache from walking on the beach today. I’m so full of pizza I beg her to sit down.

We sit on the edge of a grassy mound and catch our breath as the sun goes down. The sky is splashed with neon pink and orange like a painting. She points to the setting sun.

Her: That was lucky –

Me: I planned that.

Her: Come on, up we go –

Me: Hannah, I can’t, please –

Her: You can –

Me: Let’s just stay here for another minute and watch the sun go down –

Her: It’s gone. But there’s always another one tomorrow.

She sprints ahead in the dark, laughing. I sit still, unable to move without her, refusing to move without her. She comes back. Of course she comes back.

* * *

List of weird things I’ve done in the last eight months:

We’re in Departures and I’m waiting for her to get off the phone. I know she’s speaking to him because her lips curled up at the sides when she saw who was calling. She knows that I find the ‘in love’ version of her annoying, so she slides off on her own for the call. I watch her leaning on a metal rail. She got Mum’s legs; I got Dad’s thighs. I pretend for a second that she’s not my sister and I wonder if I would look at her and find her attractive, from behind, at first glance. I think I would.

I’m in an old grey Adidas tracksuit, huge pants and no bra. My usual travel attire. My sister is wearing a short brown skirt to annoy me. She always wears tight skirts on flights, and says she doesn’t dress intentionally sexy to annoy me, but she absolutely does. She’s also wearing a tight ribbed white T-shirt and thin grey tights. It’s slightly too early to ruin the holiday so I won’t say anything about her outfit. I’ll just wait until we board the plane. We’ll get settled in our seats, then she’ll look around sheepishly and undo the top button of her skirt. I’ll turn to her and say, ‘If it’s uncomfortable then why are you wearing it on a flight?’ She’ll insist she’s totally comfortable. She’s a liar, but then I am too.

I don’t have a person to call like she does, so I go and get our coffees. We have this ritual now of getting to the airport early and sitting with a coffee and watching the planes. She makes me guess the place we’re going. I always guess wrong, and then feel surprised about where we’re going because it’s never that cheap. She insists on paying for everything, and I protest, even though I have no money. She insists that she’s the big sister, she’s the one with a salary, and that she loves me. I don’t know why she loves me – I’m an awful person.

I slept over at Hannah’s last night. She has a spare room for me but I never use it, I always sleep in her bed. I had a bath while she read an article to me – an article I didn’t understand but pretended to – then she got in the bath and I got out. It’s gross, but she gets a kick out of saving water. I wrapped a towel round my bottom half and lay on the floor, pretending to be a mermaid. No one laughs at me the way she does, it’s like a superpower I have which only works with her.

As kids, we pretended to be mermaids by squeezing both of our legs into pyjama bottoms and swivelling and swishing along our bedroom floor, like we were trying to escape. I think it was an amalgamation of The Little Mermaid and a heist film. We made each other laugh, our parents less so, but at least they would watch for a second before going downstairs to start their evening. I only realised relatively recently that quite often they would leave to go out as soon as we were quiet. We wouldn’t be asleep though, we would still be giggling softly in the dark, unable to stop.

In adulthood, I tend to go through phases of becoming a new person for about five days at a time before I get bored and give up and stop trying to be better. I go over to Hannah’s to lie in bed with her and she tells me what I need to do to get my life in order again: who to stop texting, what foods I should eat to give me more energy, and which conditioner I should be using. She draws bullet points in the air in soft strokes and I follow the path of her fingers.

Her flat is way too nice for her age, in a converted warehouse in King’s Cross. She’s four years older than me, and although I hope that I’ll have a flat this nice by the time I’m her age, when I’ve got my shit together, I highly doubt it. Her pictures are in frames, not just blu-tacked or taped to the wall. She has mirrors to make the rooms look bigger, vinyl records, a weird cactus and a fireplace with real wood which scares me. She’s even got her own lamps – fancy ones with light bulbs so specific that you have to order them online, not just shitty lamps left behind by the previous tenants, like mine.

My flat is quarter the size of Hannah’s, nearby in Caledonian Road. It’s an ex-council property that our parents bought when they had some extra money in the nineties – the one sensible investment they’ve ever made – and it was supposed to be insurance that we would have somewhere to live when they became extremely rich and famous and had no time to worry about us as adults.

I never think about money. Hannah does. She plans and she saves but she isn’t anal about it. She doesn’t buy new clothes very often except fancy power-suits for work. She goes to charity shops, and she gives to fucking charity shops, to homeless people. Sometimes I tease her by saying she only does that to seem benevolent, but then secretly goes in the next day in disguise to buy her stuff back. She doesn’t like it when I say that. We have a very different sense of humour when it comes to moral integrity.

While she snored soundly in a giant T-shirt she’s worn for a decade (the faded Betty Boop one which used to belong to our mum), I sat restlessly in the bathroom and stared at her endless collection of products. I was bored so I tried some of them out. She has so many hair creams and stylers and serums for curly hair, which I find funny because I know that her hair is naturally quite straight. As I was inspecting the ingredients of a bottle labelled ‘Eternal Radiance Goddess Hair Oil’ I noticed that there was a man’s deodorant in the bottom left shelf. This is the first time any of her boyfriends has left a trace of himself behind.

I order our coffees at Costa – the barista doesn’t speak to me, he just turns the iPad towards me to pay. I look at another Costa employee hanging up wall art above the bit where you can get sugar, sweetener and those little sticks that hurt your tongue. The picture he’s hanging is a generic shot of London. Black-and-white apart from a bright red post box. It’s devoid of meaning and ugly, but I kind of like it.

I sit down and wait as Hannah’s decaf oat latte gets cold. I’m having a mocha with an extra shot, the grown-up’s hot chocolate. I start drawing on a Costa napkin. At art school, they told me I should try drawing something other than my sister, but I said I wanted to keep trying until I got her just right. She finally gets off the phone and sits down opposite me – I wait for her to glance at my cup and tell me off about my choice of drink. So much sugar, she’ll say, after which she’ll google exactly how many grams of sugar there are in a large Costa mocha with an extra shot because she genuinely finds that kind of thing fun. But she doesn’t. Instead she looks at my doodle with a glowing smile, takes my pen and draws me in less than a minute, on another napkin, capturing me perfectly. I’m enraged by the ease of it.

I don’t ask her about the phone call. She gets out a bunch of plastic folders with our passports, boarding passes and travel insurance as well as everything else we need. I let her keep my passport in her bag because I lost it once before boarding and we missed our flight. She didn’t get angry, and we found it in the toilets an hour later, but she hasn’t trusted me with my own since. We have to get them renewed soon. They will expire shortly after this holiday and Hannah will put them safely in her collection of our old passports. She likes collecting things.

We watch the planes in contented silence. The sounds of the airport soothe and excite me.

Her: I need my books!

She likes crime novels. We go into WHSmith; some pop music is playing and she’s bobbing her head and humming as she reads the backs of books and puts them down again. Finally she picks two. I’ve forgotten to bring the book about philosophy I’ve been pretending to read for six months, but I don’t think I’ll have time to read anyway. I’ll be having too much fun.

She goes to the self-service counter to pay and I try to add some sweets for the plane, a bag of fizzy Haribo. She holds the bag up with her thumb and index finger, like it’s a mouse, and doesn’t let me buy them. She pointedly pulls out a huge bag of almonds from her tote bag.

Hannah: They’re good for you, vitamin E is great for your skin.

Me: Vitamin E! Wow, thank you.

Hannah: You’ll thank me later.

I really regret not wearing a T-shirt and not wearing a bra. I’m already boiling like an idiot and don’t know what I was thinking, getting dressed so early. Why didn’t I put on a T-shirt? Hannah tucks her hair behind her ear and I see she’s wearing the faded gold hoop earrings I got for her from Claire’s years ago. We both share a taste for cheap hoop earrings that look slightly dirty. As she bends down to put her books in a bag, I see a man look at her bum. I scowl at him but he doesn’t flinch. I am used to feeling invisible standing next to Hannah.

I know people see us together and assume we’re sisters because we have similar faces, lips and eyes, though all of her features seem more pronounced, fuller, more finished. We even have similar voices though hers is more high-pitched and nasal, which I like to tell her often. I look like the one who hasn’t tried. Hannah sometimes buys me clothes in an attempt to get me to dress more ‘for my shape’ – but I insist that I have no shape. I’m slim but somehow still formless. I tie my mousy hair back up, and a strand of hair sticks to my sweaty forehead. Hannah turns around and unsticks it for me.

Her: Have you got the factor fifty?

I nod. I have it in my bag, the same bottle I took with me on our last holiday. We’ll have to get a new one for our next holiday, probably later on this year – as long as Hannah isn’t pregnant or married by then. I feel bad that I hope she won’t be. I don’t need the factor 50 as much as she does. She’ll have gained a hundred freckles by the time we’re home.

I suddenly realised I wasn’t wearing any pants. Mum and Dad had just started letting Hannah take me to school on her own, she was in Year 5 and I was in Year 1. It was a sunny day, but really windy. I knew we were already late and there was no time to run home. I burst into tears and told her I was scared that I’d get found out and be told off. Hannah led me behind a tree, checked no one was looking, took off her knickers and gave them to me. They were too big and had purple butterflies on. Then I held onto on her backpack string (we called it a ‘lead’) and she started running, towing me along all the way to school. It felt like I was on a fairground ride.

I waited for her to pick me up at the end of the day. Her classroom was on the other side of school, so I was usually the last to be fetched, waiting with a teacher who had glossy black hair with a white streak in a tight bun. I don’t remember the teacher’s name but I remember that she wore the same long blue skirt every day and smelt of lavender soap. When I saw Hannah running towards me, I held my arms open, lunch box in one hand, ready to be swooped into her arms.

Her: Did they stay up?

Me: What?

Her: The pants. Did they stay up?

Me: Yes.

Her: Good. I was so worried.

We could see cigarette smoke clouds and smell bacon when Mum opened the front door in her fancy sunglasses, with a teacup of wine in her hand. She’d wear these sunglasses most days, and liked telling the story of how she’d stolen them from a shop when she was twenty, and felt so terrible about it that she wore them every day to make up for it.

My parents were having one of their afternoon parties, full of actors, writers and people masquerading as producers or casting directors. People in flamboyant flamingo shirts were sitting on the piano or sprawled on our sofa. The TV was covered with one of Mum’s headscarves which confused me – why hide the TV? Even though I was only about six, I sensed that these people were dead behind the eyes when I was forced to say hello to them. All they wanted to do was keep telling everyone their audition anecdote rather than be interrupted by an uninterested child.

Mum only kept us downstairs when she wanted us to perform for her guests. Hannah would be much keener than me to sing a song. I got nervous and watched her from the stairs. After she had done her duty we’d rush upstairs to our bedroom to make a fort. We liked it when they had parties because we had hours to play and no bedtime.

Hannah would make us a ‘magical kingdom’ – bedsheets hung over high-backed chairs stolen from the kitchen, and piles of pillows stacked in every corner. Inside the kingdom we’d tell stories with a torch under our chins, distorting our faces. Or Hannah would get us to leave the fort and come back in, each time pretending we were in a different country, an exotic foreign place full of exciting things, putting on funny accents and describing the sights. She made me see these places, really see them. By the time we went to bed and Dad stumbled in to turn our light off with a drunken mumbled goodnight, we had travelled to faraway lands, told hundreds of stories and barely noticed that we’d forgotten about dinner.

The next morning there would be a random man or eccentrically dressed couple asleep on the sofa as we ate a huge breakfast – two bowls of mixed-up cereal was our favourite. Crunchy Nut corn flakes and Coco Pops. Hannah tidied up while I took Mum’s headscarf off the TV and watched cartoons. When we said goodbye and looked in on our parents, Mum would most likely be gone already. Dad would sleep until we got home from school. When we asked how his day was he’d say he’d spent it ‘thinking’.

I went to do an art foundation the year after sixth form. I got in easily, because my entrance portfolio included life drawings I had stolen from Hannah’s sixth-form artwork, which were amazing. She could draw better than me, paint better than me, but didn’t want to be an artist like our parents. I always had good ideas, I just didn’t know what to do with them so I let them disappear, let myself forget. Occasionally when I told her an idea late at night, she’d make me stop talking until I got my notebook and pen out.

Her: You won’t remember if you don’t write it down.

After my foundation, which apparently I excelled in, I started my fine art degree with hope, but I was quickly derailed by myself. I became obsessed with boys who weren’t obsessed with me. Rich boys who tried their very best to appear poor, hands and faces smeared with paint, charcoal fingernails. At the beginning this was basically every girl’s ‘type’ at art school, but gradually all the boys became tragic tattooed clones of each other, and most girls came to understand (as they thought more realistically about their chances of becoming the next Tracy Emin) that it was neither hygienic nor beneficial to their health to be fingered by one of these wannabe tortured souls. They moved on. I stayed behind.

I wake up early because of the light. I see her by the window looking out to the sea, tying the curtains up. I can tell she’s already got her make-up on – I never catch her without gold eyeliner. She’s doing her chirpy morning yoga routine.

Me: You’re just doing that to annoy me –

Her: No, I’m energising my soul.

Me: Your soul doesn’t need energising.

Her: Let’s go and find a good spot –

Me: One more hour, please –

Her: All you have to do is get on your swimming costume and walk out the door –

I’m not ready to leave my pretend bedroom for the week. I want to stay in bed for a little longer, to take my time. I’m not a morning person like she is. On her way out, she closes the curtains again for me and strokes my cheek.

I fall back to sleep and I wake up feeling anxious and want to rush to her. On the way to the beach, down the big hill, I text her some emoticons which I know she’ll understand are my way of saying ‘sorry for sleeping in’. She replies quickly with some emoticons to say ‘no worries’. Her happiness since she met him, even via text, is outrageous.

I notice some beautiful flowers on the side of the hill. Bright pink and red; everything seems so much more colourful here. I crouch down to smell them but all I catch is the salty tang of the sea. I feel self-conscious that somebody will notice me trying to smell the flowers so I stand up and scan the beach below.

I spot her immediately, wearing her fuchsia pink swimsuit which is a size too small, so that her bum pokes out of it slightly. She’s laying a towel on a beach chair. It feels urgent to shout her name, so I do, doubtful that she can hear me from up here:

HANNAH!!!!

But she does hear. She looks up and waves. I wave back and we stand there stupidly waving and laughing for a moment. She turns her back to me as soon as I arrive at the deck chairs she’s specially selected. This is my cue to spray factor 50 all over her.

Her: Nice sleep?

Me: I don’t know what happened, sorry. I had weird dreams.

Her: They’re always weird when it’s bonus sleep.

Me: Were you bored without me?

Her: No. I had a nice little walk. Can you see those people jumping off that cliff over there?

She points to the huge cliff to our right. As I look I see a little person diving off it, so small it’s like watching a mini Lego figurine tumbling off the side of a table.

Her: Let’s do it!

Me: What?

Her: Do what they’re doing, look –

Me: I am not jumping off a fucking cliff – are you mad?

I buy one of those mini iced coffees you can only get on beaches, served in plastic shot glasses. It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted.

Her: You should stop surviving on sugar and caffeine –

Me: Have you tried one of these, though?

I make her take a sip. She smiles.

Her: OK, I had one earlier. They are amazing.

Me: Ten of these would be my last meal on death row.

Her: You think about your last meal on death row too often.

She gets up and runs to the sea. I dig a hole in the sand with my hands, put our phones in the little plastic bag we used for toiletries at the airport and bury it. Our own makeshift safe. I run after her and we swim out together. I swallow some seawater and start coughing. She gives me a piggyback, standing on a big rock while I recover. We see a jellyfish as we race to the buoy bobbing in the distance, about twenty-five metres away. I win, for the first time ever.

Me: Did you let me win?

Her: Maybe.

Me: Why are you being so nice? It’s disconcerting.

Her: I’m not –

Me: You are.

She splashes at me to shut me up, and then tells me some semi-interesting facts about jellyfish – ‘Did you know that the jellyfish’s mouth is in the centre of its body?’ – and I mimic her in a geeky voice. She loses her sunglasses under the water. We both try to retrieve them but fail. Usually she gets very upset about things like this – she hates losing stuff – but today she’s carefree. She gazes over at the cliff again, like it’s calling out her name.

We breaststroke back to the beach. She is humming, her usual song which I don’t know the name of. I hum along with her, off-key as usual. People on the beach are asleep in the lunchtime sun, burning obliviously. I observe the books people are reading, and notice that three women have the same one.

Hannah holds my shoulders and stares at me with a wild look in her eyes that I’m not used to. The light from the sun is making the green that she insists is in her eyes (I maintain they’re just plain blue) glint beautifully. She looks like a goddess. I would hate her right now if I didn’t love her so much.

Her: I have something to ask you, and I want you to know that if you say no, I’ll be totally OK with that.

Me: Oh God, what?

Her: Well … I was wondering if you would mind – please don’t be angry – if Rowan came out?

Me: What the fuck?

Her: I honestly don’t mind if you say no –

Me: ‘What the fuck’ kind of implies no, surely –

Her: But can you just think about it. Please?

She lets go of my shoulders and smiles. She’s unravelling slightly; she needs me to say yes. I like the power shift. But the idea of them all over each other in front of me is unbearable, sitting on each other’s laps, kissing tamely out of politeness, whispering to each other in their secret language – even playing that out in my head is infuriating.

Me: No. I don’t want to have to make him like me –

Her: He already likes you –

I collapse in a huff onto the beach. She sits next to me and puts her hand on my sandy knees, which are bony next to hers.

Her: Look – he’s already coming. I’m really sorry – I genuinely thought you’d be fine with it. You seem so great at the moment –

Me: What’s that supposed to mean? ‘At the moment’?

I flip too quickly.

Her: Please? We still have today, just us. Let’s get some lunch and go on a walk or something. I’ll buy you stuff.

She’s chewing her lower lip.

Me: You’ll buy me lots of stuff.

Her: Is that a yes? It’s a yes.

Me: I need to eat.

Her: I knew I should have waited to ask until you’d eaten –

Me: We both know you were never actually asking me, bitch.

As she hugs me she lets out a contented screech. We walk along the shore. She points discreetly at a tall brunette woman. Her body, a perfect hourglass, looks like it’s been moulded for her neon pink bikini. She has a deep tan, muscular thighs and such a round bum she could be a Kardashian. Men are staring at this woman from the other side of the beach. Hannah and I stop and stare too.

Her: I don’t concentrate on my bum enough.

Me: I think you have enough to concentrate on –

Her: But I’m thirty. I need to start doing more lunges.

Me: You’re not thirty yet –

Her: I’m almost thirty, which is basically thirty.

Me: True. God, I can’t imagine being that old.

Her: You will be. So you’ve got to get your shit together, OK –

Me: It’s too early for a pep talk –

Her: And I’m going to get a bum like that woman.

She starts doing walking lunges in the sand, looking so silly. I imagine what it must be like to have a sister you have debates with about philosophy and politics, serious conversations about ways in which the world is ending. I’m sure she’d be well equipped to have those debates with someone else. But with me, she reveals her true self. My Hannah loves shitty reality TV, likes gossiping about celebrities and knows the exact calorie contents of a Twix, KitKat, Twirl and Mars Bar. I like being the one with whom she chooses to have the Mars Bar chats.

We continue to walk normally again as the woman with the good bum starts wading in the sea taking selfies. Hannah checks her phone and lets out a sigh.

Her: I’ve never felt like this before about anyone –

Oh but she has, she definitely has. She gets swept away and then forgets that she’s been swept away maybe nineteen or twenty times before. I don’t mind that she rewrites her history.

Her: Honestly, this time it’s different. I love him.

Me: You loved the other hims –

Her: He’s so, so different though. He’s vulnerable, he’s kind. He’s cr. . .