You Must Be Sisters by Deborah Moggach Page A

neighbours, in particular, she inspected with curiosity. Were they surviving? On one side lay a gaunt leathery woman, her eyes closed. Not a flicker. She looked definitely yellow. Perhaps she’s dead, thought Laura. Perhaps they’ve forgotten to stop her pump thing and it’s just going on and on till she’s drained.
    She turned to the left. He was younger and he looked relaxed yet somehow incongruous, as if someone had put him there by mistake. Perhaps it was the way he was wiggling his toes in their holey socks. Plus his wild hair spread all over the dainty white pillow. Not what
Woman’s Realm
would choose for a hero.
    She was thinking this when a nurse approached him and released his arm. He sat up, scratching his head and saying something to the nurse that made her laugh in that humouring nurse-like way, as if he were a silly child.
    Once he had left the room she could concentrate on her arm, which after all wasn’t half as bad as she thought. To be absolutely honest, it didn’t actually hurt; just a benign firmness, a smiling pressure in the grasp of the rubber round her vein. Against the wall stood a fridge. The nurse opened it and Laura glimpsed a row of fat red sacks, each smug with its treasure. Her neighbour’s sack , identical to them, was placed at the end of the row and the door was closed.
    Five minutes was an awful long time to do nothing in. She tried to turn the pages of
Woman’s Realm
but they were too floppy to be managed with one hand. So she listened to the tactful little hum of the machine busy at her arm, and gazed up at the ceiling.
    ‘All over, dear.’ The nurse stilled the swinging bag and dismantled the apparatus. It relinquished its vein with a sigh.
    ‘Now sit up carefully, dear, just in case you feel a little dizzy.’
    Laura hoped she would feel a little dizzy, as proof of her loss, but she didn’t. She watched her sack being put into the fridge next to his, touching it. This made her feel odd, as if he and she were already acquainted.
    He hadn’t left. He was still in the waiting-room, sitting in a chair and rolling a cigarette.
    ‘Reckon we deserve a Guinness after that,’ he said, looking at his cup of tea. ‘Could manage a pint nicely.’ He was growing a moustache, Laura noticed, a tentative moustache; its shadow on his face looked curiously mannish.
    The stout woman set down another cup of tea for Laura and turned to him. ‘Now you
know
,’ she said, shaking her finger, ‘that there’s no smoking for half an hour after giving blood.’
    ‘It’s me nerves, me nerves,’ he said.
    She chuckled. However corny they were being, everyone got pampered in this room just for five minutes.
    ‘Well, be it on your own head,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to catch you if you faint.’
    ‘
She
will,’ he replied, looking at Laura. ‘Won’t you?’
    Yes
, thought Laura. She smiled into her teacup.
    The stout lady went back to her urn. Now they were alone, Laura wondered what she could say. He looked content enough, idly turning the pages of her
Woman’s Realm
and raising his eyebrows at some pictures of Princess Anne. Nice eyebrows; humorous, quizzical ones. She would ask him a question.
    ‘Have you been here before?’
    ‘Yeah. It’s me only good deed for mankind.’
    ‘I was terrified at first, but there’s nothing to it, is there?’
    ‘Right. And they give me time off, too, to come here. If there was Guinness it’d be perfect.’
    He stubbed out his cigarette, pocketed a couple of biscuits and stood up. Laura stood up too, perhaps because vistas of his less good deeds intrigued her. She would leave at the same time.
    Outside it was sunny. He stood still and considered for a moment; then he turned to the right and wandered along the pavement. Why shouldn’t she turn to the right also? The only alternative was turning to the left. She looked at his back view; he was ambling along as if he didn’t mind her catching him up. Ah, now he’d stopped; he was munching a