"There are, Irene has always felt, few frustrations to match that of being read a certain way by family members. To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling's approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things that happened to be true at the age of seventeen. Irene, then, at the age of seventeen: first blond, then a crispier, bleach-fried blond, self-consciously furious in every direction and seldom polite enough to let anyone reach the end of a sentence before starting one herself. An Irene who, to this day, lingers like a supplementary presence, superimposed over the top of the current version, making her harder to see. Well, Isla will say, affecting the older-sister voice that implies an age gap of decades rather than barely a year, you've always been political, you get upset, you never let anyone speak. Will turn to her wife, Morven, and say, Irene's spiky, she's always been spiky. You have to watch what you say, as though Irene is not in fact in the room. (Morven, an anthropologist turned office worker, will nod along as though this makes perfect sense, as though it's not a ridiculous thing to do to someone, nailing them down forever to one particular scrap of floor.) The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again. Too hard to explain to her sister that she does know how to listen, that she's too old or too spent to be angry all the time."
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