In 1985...

... when bread cost 31p and an average house cost £30,000, she was crowned Ampthill Festival Queen. The local paper came round to take photos. They had her sitting on our lawn under the old yew tree, the sun playing with her blond curls. I stood in the shadows, my hands over my belly and bit my lip.

She made the front page – Festival beauty with brains. It made her out to be some super academic and my eyes stung as I read it. If I couldn’t have the beauty at least I had the brains.

She attended wine tastings and dances; she walked down catwalks in Woburn Abbey. I trailed after her, grabbing for the reflected glory that flashed through my fingers.

After all, wasn’t this the way it would always be? She had an adopted child across the Atlantic named after her. She had a boyfriend with a car and stubble. She had blond hair, blue eyes and long limbs. She was always going to be two years and three weeks better than me.

When she came home from the hospice – we got out all of her scrapbooks. She had kept the red sash and the cheap tiara that I had secretly danced around my bedroom in. She had kept the newspaper clippings; the programme of events, and in a small square box wrapped in tissue paper was the icing shoe on top of her celebration cake – a wedding cake for beauty.

I was there the night she won. She whispered I should enter too as the compere winked at her. Instead, I sat against the wall and watched her crowning, scuffing my shoes along the squeaky floor of the Rugby club bar.

“Maybe you can enter next year,” she said, when we got home and she twirled around my room, all bouncing hair and white teeth.

“Nah! It’s not my kind of thing,” I lied, wishing she would go to bed so I could get lost in the Stephen King book the librarian had given me from the drawer in her desk.        

“Oh Juey, you’re beautiful too, you know that,” she cooed, and I could hear the caveat echo between us – for a short arse.