Wish You Were Here Read Online Free

Chardonnay. ‘Our parents didn’t even know which O levels we were taking they took so little interest, and we had to work in shops, Mars bar factories, weren’t given bungee allowances!’ But our parents had had us in their early twenties – or, in my mother’s case, when she was just nineteen – so they were still young and involved in their own lives, not scrutinizing their children’s. There was a lot to be said for being a young parent. Except that Tara, who was eighteen months younger than her sister, and therefore had an even older mother, disproved this theory. She was less … grasping. Less sharp-eyed. But then, life was easier for her. If you were pretty and clever, life tended to plop into your lap more, didn’t it? There was less cause to be opportunistic.
    As
we neared home, lurching heave-makingly around the corners in our grid of Clapham streets, I wondered nervously if that purple thing I could see poking out of the back of Amelia’s T-shirt was another tattoo. Or just a label? I leaned forward to peer, but she braked suddenly at a junction and I nosedived hard into her neck.
    ‘Shit – Mum!’ she squealed.
    ‘Sorry, darling – sorry! Just wanted to – to see what speed you were doing.’
    ‘Thirty, obviously, in a built-up area, and that really hurt. I’ve just had Toby’s initials put there in Sanskrit.’
    You had to admire her candour. Her carapace. No shame. No guilt. She was eighteen years old and she’d jolly well do as she liked, thank you very much. No doubt always would.
    ‘Your father saved someone’s life on the plane,’ I said quickly, to change the subject. Needles full of purple dye piercing my darling daughter’s neck, the back of which, as a baby, I’d cradled as I’d lowered her into the bathtub, or, later, divided two plaits between as she went off to school, loomed heart-wrenchingly to mind.
    ‘Really? What – mouth to mouth?’ She turned to her father.
    ‘No, an EpiPen to the leg. Your mother’s exaggerating, as usual. Well, if you’re frittering away your allowance on a tattoo, I’m clearly giving you too much. You can foot the grocery bill
and
the petrol. Thank you, Amelia. We can walk to the kerb from here, in the words of Woody Allen.’
    Amelia had stopped outside the house and was about to reverse into a space, but her father was already out,
slamming the door and walking up the path to our front door, his back rigid.
    ‘What’s his problem?’
    I sighed. ‘He’s old-fashioned enough to imagine you at some glittering ball in a few years’ time, your hair piled on your head, a silk gown slipping off your shoulders, diamonds in your ears, Toby’s initials trailing down your back.’
    She gave it some thought. ‘Yeah, sounds good. Hasn’t hurt Angelina Jolie, has it?’
    Angelina Jolie’s looks and my daughter’s were similar to the extent that they both had long, dark hair.
    ‘No, it hasn’t,’ I muttered meekly.
    ‘And anyway, Tobes paid, so I didn’t use Dad’s precious allowance.’
    I was too weary to say that her boyfriend paying to have his mark branded on her neck for posterity would probably incur her father’s wrath only further, and left the conversation where it was. It was done, and that was the end of it. Apart from a skin graft, of course. Hideously painful and expensive, but always possible and, naturally, where my mind had already fled. Come two in the morning, I’d be creeping downstairs in my dressing gown having not slept a wink, googling it. And ringing Clare in the morning. Clare’s twenty-three-year-old son had recently had a dagger removed from inside his wrist before embarking on his new job at Goldman Sachs and, as a neat, cautionary tale Clare had made his fifteen-year-old brother watch from the gallery, to illustrate the lunacy of gap-year indiscretions.
    And of course this was Amelia’s gap year, she was
bound to spread her wings, make a few mistakes, even. But surely a gap had to be between something? Her