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Chapter One
“You can’t marry a singer in a band.” Amelia put her glass down on the bar with a sense of finality.
“Why not?” asked Cass. “I mean, she’s not talking about getting with Adele or Taylor Swift or anything.”
“Both of which are solo artists, not singers with bands,” said Amelia.
Jules tried very hard to ignore their sniping, wiping glasses behind the bar and keeping her eyes trained on Alea, whose sultry voice was curling around the cozy pub and sending shivers down her spine. Well, it was that or the fact that Alea’s dark hair was curling around her shoulders and her eyes were soulfully closed in a way that Jules thought was probably very similar to how she looked under other circumstances. Bed kind of circumstances.
“My point stands,” Amelia said. “You can’t just go around marrying singers in bands.”
“It’s not singers in bands,” Jules said, finally giving in to her sister’s poking. “It’s a singer in a band. And it’s Alea, not just any singer. And apart from anything else, why not?”
“Well…” Amelia said more carefully now. “Well… we don’t even know if she’s… you know.”
“Gay,” Jules said. “It’s the twenty first century, and this is Whitebridge, not Afghanistan, you can say it.” To prove her point, she called on the old man at the end of the bar. “Hey, Dave, what do you call it when two women are in love?”
He paused over his pint for a minute and then hesitantly said: “Queer?”
“Close enough,” said Jules. “And she is. Well, she’s bi, so close enough for me. Or pan, I forget which.”
“Which is the peril of sinking ten pints with someone whilst trying to get to know them,” observed Amelia.
“Listen, why don’t you mind your own beeswax for once and let nature take its course,” Jules said, pulling out a pint glass and tilting it under the beer tap.
“Just because mum said you’d be married by the time you’re thirty doesn’t mean you have to go around chasing pub singers.”
“Yeah,” agreed Cass. “Your mum was full of shit.”
“Oy,” both Jules and Amelia said at the same time.
“Oh, right,” Cass said, blushing slightly. “Is full of shit, sorry.”
“She’s not dead, just gone,” Amelia reminded her. Cass was Amelia’s best friend and had been since playschool and therefore was treated like a member of the family. Even if that meant occasionally being insulted, because after all, wasn’t that what families did to each other?
“And she wasn’t always full of shit,” said Jules. “What about when she predicted the score of the Arsenal game? Or when she said that we’d find Mini-mia dead?”
“The match was on DVR,” Amelia said. “And frankly, the chances of finding a three year old hamster alive after it’s been out of its cage for a long weekend are slim to none.”
Jules grunted and moved down the bar to serve Dave his next pint. She knew that Amelia had never bought into their mother’s clairvoyance, and in public Jules tried not to either. But then in the dark of the night when she was alone she had a hard time not believing. Or maybe she just wanted to believe, that was what Amelia said.
Which was a fair point. She’d been eleven when mum had gone walkabout. Old enough to remember the important stuff, old enough to be hurt and sad, but not really old enough to understand why. Amelia, on the other hand, had been fourteen, and more than old enough to not only understand, but also to act out and start spraying graffiti and smoking and a ton of other disgusting habits.
Granddad Jim had fixed all that of course, as well as letting them live under his roof and signing all their school papers and keeping the social off their backs, but then he’d always been less than forgiving of his daughter’s dubious fortune-telling gifts.
Dubious enough that when he moved into the oddly fancy old people’s home on the edge of town he’d left his terraced house to Amelia and Jules. And to Cass by default since she and Amelia were joined at the hip.
Jules put Dave’s money into the till and went back down the bar. Alea was still singing, a more upbeat song now, something Jules recognized but couldn’t name. She tried to keep her eyes off Alea’s hips when she worked. The distraction was enough that she’d broken more than one glass already.
“Is Josh around?” Amelia asked.
“He’ll be in later,” said Jules. Josh was the landlord, but just at the moment he was far too engrossed in this season of Strictly Come Dancing to worry about something as banal as running a pub. “Why?”
“Want to ask him if it’s alright to put up some posters,” Cass said airily.
Jules looked from her sister to Cass and back again. Something was brewing. Yet another of their get rich quick schemes, she suspected, as she saw how Amelia’s eyes danced and how Cass was practically bouncing in her seat. “What kind of posters?”
Amelia sniffed. “For our new business.”
