The Ugly Sister Read Free

in a grimy mac offering to let the girls stroke the puppies he had in his pocket, so long as he had access to a nice camera. By three o’clock on the following Thursday, West End Model Management had decided that they wanted Cleo for a client and less than six weeks later, by the time Abigail returned to Ashford Girls’Grammar School to begin her third
year, Cleo had been hailed as ‘the face of 1985’ in one of the national newspapers after some famous photographer or other had tipped them off. Abigail didn’t see her much after that.
    Cleo moved up to London just a few weeks later to share a dingy flat on the Brompton Road with two other girls she had met on a shoot somewhere, leaving Abigail to deal with all the envy and spite that her sister’s success had brought out in their school friends. Abigail tried to be pleased for her, and she actually managed it for a while, but the ease with which Cleo shrugged off her old life – her sister, her mum and dad, her friends, her beloved cat, George – left Abigail reeling. One minute Caroline was there, best friend, partner in crime, confidante, and the next she had gone from her sister’s life so completely that Abigail sometimes felt like she was an only child. At least she might have thought so if it hadn’t been for the constant refrain of ‘You’re Cleo’s sister?’ that would rise up to taunt her whenever anyone new found out about her celebrity connections. Always accompanied
by a look up and down her five-foot-one-and-three-quarters frame of course. Not that she ever told anyone about it herself. She avoided mentioning she had a sister at all if possible, but word always seemed to get around somehow wherever she went.
    It wasn’t that Abigail wasn’t proud of her. She was the younger by three years – it was a given. Carolinehad been her role model and brightly shining example since the day Abigail was old enough to toddle around behind her. She just found it hard to believe that the gorgeous enigmatic creature she saw in the magazines, so different from the gangly awkward sibling she had grown up with, shared her genetic material. She spent hours in front of the mirror trying to spot Cleo in her own less feline features. And sometimes she was there fleetingly, in an expression or a flick of the hair, but she never stayed for long.
    At first Cleo and Abigail used to write to each other quite often, although Abigail always struggled to find anything interesting to say – went to school, had the wart on my finger frozen off, George brought a frog in from the garden, that kind of thing. Cleo’s responses, which started off short and grew shorter with time, nevertheless glittered with the glamour of a world that was so alien to Abigail’s own that sometimes she wondered if her sister was making it all up. There were parties with celebrities, clubs, boys – no, make that men – hints of drugs. In the early days Abigail used to look forward to studying the letters on her walk to school but before long she barely recognized the person she found in them. It was only a matter of weeks before Caroline seemingly completely disappeared and Cleo was left in her place. And Abigail didn’t much like Cleo she had decided. Cleo was a show-off, full of stories of
the hearts she was breaking and the fabulous doors her looks were opening.Abigail responded by never mentioning anything contained in the letters in her replies. If she acted like that person didn’t exist, then maybe she didn’t.
    One half-term Abigail went up to stay in the flat on Brompton Road but Cleo was always busy and the other girls seemed only to be interested in talking about themselves or how rich and successful their boyfriends were. She moped around London on her own for a couple of days, with no money to do anything and no one to do it with. On the third day she had asked Cleo if she could go along to her shoot with her – Cleo had recently snagged a contract with Miss Selfridge and was