Wish You Were Here Read Online Free Page A

A-level results from one of Berkshire’s premier boarding schools had precluded university, but photography at art college had seemed a possibility, until Amelia had poured scorn, claiming that all art-school photography looked the same and she’d be better off doing it herself. She’d tossed her dark curls dismissively. ‘I’d rather find my own voice, thank you.’ I hadn’t dared glance at James at this but, to my surprise, he’d jumped at it.
    ‘Right, well, she can jolly well find her voice while she’s working,’ he’d said hotly as we’d got into bed later that night. ‘She can get a job. A proper one. Get off the frigging pay roll.’
    Knowing this would go down like a cup of cold sick, I’d suggested the gap year first, as a balm, unaware that Amelia considered it mandatory anyway. Like a polio vaccination.
    ‘Well, of course I’m having a gap year,’ she’d said scornfully when I’d offered it up to her magnanimously, beaming delightedly as I did so. ‘Everyone does.’
    ‘And then, your father thinks … a job?’
    ‘Well, obviously I’ll do something short term, everyone does that, too. To pay for my travels. In a shop, maybe. Or a bar.’
    No. Long term. For ever, James was thinking. A career. Working from the bottom up, as an apprentice. Whereas I still harboured dreams of further education of some sort, because I didn’t care if all her photos turned out like everyone else’s, or even if she arranged flowers for three years, I just wanted her to meet someone other than Toby Sullivan, with his ponytail and his van with the mattress
inside and his decks – I’d learned not to call them turntables – which she wouldn’t do working in a bar and living at home. This, though, I couldn’t share with James, whose focus was to stop paying through the bloody nose for his bloody layabout children, not to steer their emotional lives. Well, except Tara, perhaps. Tara had embraced her A levels and was keen to be a vet, and I could see James being very willing to accommodate the expense of her ambition.
    I sighed as I got out of the car and retrieved our case from the boot, lugging it up the path to the terraced house in a row of identical Victorian terraced houses. Identical lives, mostly, too. Stockbrokers and their wives, who’d once worked in advertising or publishing, bankers and doctors, hard-working professional people, many of whom I knew and who’d had children growing up with mine, all of whom were battling identical problems. Many far worse than the ones I had with Amelia. Some of their offspring sampled drugs on an epic scale: thank the Lord, Amelia was vociferous in her opposition to them, after a friend had died tragically in horrible circumstances at a festival the previous summer, reshaping my elder daughter’s world for ever. I wasn’t sure about the Trog, though, and when I’d asked Amelia she’d regarded me sternly and said everyone had to be their own person and what business was it of mine? Only that I cleared up her bedroom and, those funny little papers I found littering her carpet … were they really just for his roll-ups? And didn’t he smell quite strange? Or was that joss sticks? I’d tried to buy some to remember what they smelled like, but the Indian woman
in the gift shop on Lavender Hill had looked at me pityingly, saying there wasn’t much call for them these days.
    Heaving another great sigh up from the bottom of my recently purchased Parisian boots which, less than an hour ago, I’d been enjoying enormously but were now beginning to pinch, I trudged after Amelia to the front door, secretly admiring her trailing gypsy skirt scattered with tiny mirrors glinting amidst the embroidery, topped by a vintage matador jacket. If nothing else, Amelia had style. She turned to me on the step, twirling the car keys on her finger.
    ‘Oh, just to give you the heads up, Granny’s given everything the Swedish look. I said you wouldn’t mind.’
    I frowned.