You Must Be Sisters by Deborah Moggach

entered, brief and unsatisfactory though that entry had been, into the closed world of the two sisters – a strange place rarely glimpsed even by their parents – and so had entered into a secret.
    Whatever the reason, they talked. As the trees loomed up out of the mist and flashed by, he talked about his job (an accountant), his flat (a nice room in Bayswater), his family (just a mother), and about how he’d once wanted to do all sorts of things but had somehow ended up doing a business course instead.
    And when they’d arrived back in Clapham and stopped outside her flat, the rain that blotted out the landscape no longer seemed a depressing backcloth. Instead it seemed to enfold them in their own cocoon of murmuring heater and sudden closeness, and to prompt them at last to stretch out their arms and kiss each other, cold noses and all, across the difficult bucket seats.

ten
    BECAUSE LAURA HAD never given her blood she felt alert and uneasy when the morning came. She had no idea what the day had in store, no idea at all. In fact, as she stood in her room, one arm in and one arm out of her coat, she nearly gave up the whole plan. If she had, the next few months would have been considerably different. But she didn’t. Don’t be feeble, she told herself, doing up the buttons.
    Outside it was densely foggy. Nothing was visible but the pavement in front of her. It was one of those days when you can’t see the houses that surround you, you can just feel them in your bones, as you can feel it in your bones when there is someone standing behind you and not speaking.
    Iron gates loomed and she was in the park. Pavement was replaced by grass; sounds faded. First-gear noises from cars grinding up the hill grew fainter, muffled in mist, and were replaced by birdsong ringing in the air around her. She met no one. Looking up she could make out the glow of the sun and, very faintly, the web-like branches of the trees. Like the red webs inside her body.
    Dreamlike, it seemed. She, Laura, usually so substantial with coat and shoes and money in her pocket felt vanished away, leaving only a miraculous body, blood vessels under the skin; complex busy blood vessels, webs of them. As if I’m a sacrifice, she thought. Perhaps they felt like this on the way to the blood-stained altar, walking in their white robes through a silent world. This day seemed portentous.
    ‘HOI! Wotcha think you’re doing!’
    A car brushed by. Laura leapt back on to the pavement, dreams scattered. The main road. The fog was lifting, the street busy and the clinic, when she arrived, quite unsacrificial.
    ‘Good morning, dear,’ said a pleasant plain receptionist. Laura was shown into a waiting-room which looked quite ordinary really – potted plants, a stout woman making tea, piles of
Punch
and
Woman’s Realm
. But she still felt odd, what with the fog, and the fact that she was missing a whole morning’s seminar and, above all, the unknown in store for her behind that closed door. And also odd because, since some time yesterday morning, she hadn’t said a word to a living soul. It startled her to realize it. Living in her bedsit, she had not used her voice for twenty-four hours. Long silent afternoons, long silent evenings.
    ‘Miss Jenkins?’
    Laura grabbed a
Woman’s Realm
as a sort of reassurance. Whatever took place behind that closed door, she could always bury herself in ‘Cakes for that Festive Occasion’.
    She was in a room full of motionless figures on beds. She didn’t look too closely. Clutching her magazine, she lay down where she was told. She thought of Tony Hancock and closed her eyes.
    Once the thing had gone into her vein, she felt able to open them again. She stole a glance down. There it hung, a plastic sack, reddening already and rocking ever so gently from side to side. As if becoming just a touch tipsy with her blood. Ugh.
    To avoid this she looked at the other people who lay like beached whales on either side of her. Her two