Vampire State of Mind by Jane Lovering

Reasonably cheap. Needs work, but it could be lovely.’
    Abbie is fourteen years older than me and sometimes she behaves more like my mother than my mother does.
    â€˜We were thinking of moving up north,’ my dad, balancing a cup and saucer on his knee and with Jasper comfortably occupying the central portion of his lap, waved a hand, ‘maybe getting a croft on the islands. You could come with us, Jessie. Try a change of career.’
    â€˜And what if Rachel gets married? You’ll have to move out then, and Mum and Dad won’t have room for you, and you can’t come to me – I suppose you could always rent somewhere in the suburbs.’
    â€˜The Orkneys are very beautiful, I’ve always thought.’ Dad carried on his parallel, and not quite continuous, conversation. ‘Bit chilly, but the grazing’s good, apparently.’
    Nice. Abbie, much as I love her, have
always
loved her, tends to plan her life out in ten-year segments, which drives me mad. And, I noticed, she’d got Rach married off but never contemplated that it might be
me
settling down. And Dad was always trying to get me to do something other than Liaison work, but even by his standards, moving to the Orkneys was a bit extreme. I ignored both of them and pretended to dust a shelf, a move they would both have seen through at once, since dust and I had a complicated, and slightly symbiotic, relationship.
    My mother came in from the kitchen, carrying a plate of Battenberg. I noticed, with a sudden shock, that she was looking old. Her face was more lined than it had been last time I’d seen her, her hair more wispy and she was stooping. I’d been a ‘last-chance’ baby, born when my mother was forty-three and my Dad forty-eight, so I’d been used to her being the oldest mum in the playground, but she’d always worn her years lightly. Although her hair had started going grey before I was born she’d kept it pinned up so the white hairs didn’t show, then later she’d started dyeing it strange colours, meeting me from school with purple hair or electric blue – just to see my face. Now, however, it was completely white. My heart squeezed.
    â€˜Mum.’ I shuffled up on the sofa to make room for her. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit tired.’
    â€˜We’ve lambed forty ewes this spring, it takes it out of an old body. You ask your dad about it. It was his bright idea to buy in some Jacobs, and they’re stroppy old buggers at the best of times.’ She settled back against the cushions and fiddled in the sleeve of her cardigan for a handkerchief. ‘But I’m all right really.’
    I looked up, and met Abbie’s eyes. She has our parents’ eyes, bright blue like cornflowers, although Mum and Dad’s have faded a little over the years to a bleached version of their former glories; I’m the odd one out with my orange-brown pair. ‘Different milkman,’ Mum always used to say when people remarked; apparently I was the spitting image of her
grandfather. Only without the pipe-and-whisky habit and the inexplicable fixation with Bakelite that I’d heard about from Dad.
    Abbs was giving me a ‘tight-mouthed’ look, as if something was my fault. When the parents had left to go and watch their film, I cornered her. ‘So? What’s been going on?’
    â€˜Nothing.’ Abbie coaxed her large frame into a particularly unflattering tweed coat. ‘I’d better go, I promised to drop in on some friends while I’m in town and then give the parents a lift home after the film. I’m on duty in the morning.’
    â€˜You’re not going until you tell me what’s up with Mum and Dad! They both look worn out, and you’ve been doing bum face at me over their heads all evening.’
    â€˜They’re
worried
about you! Can’t you see that? At the moment all they seem to talk about is you; getting you