Page 4 of Under Your Spell

The three of us knock back some more of the champagne in thoughtful silence. I can barely feel the bubbles anymore, a pleasing buzz hums through me.

‘I know what we should do,’ Serena says finally, and her words are smudged by the alcohol, just a little soft around the edges.

‘What?’ I ask.

She grins. ‘We should cast the breakup spell.’

Chapter Two

‘The breakup spell?’ I wrinkle my nose. ‘Like when we were kids?’

Something suspiciously like a cackle rises on Serena’s lips. ‘The Weird Sisters fly again!’

I groan, dropping my head into my hands. The Weird Sisters was a game we used to play when we were about ten and it had its basis in our slightly… unusual family set up.

It started as a comment in the newspaper, referring to our family as a ‘coven’ and my mum had laughed and said, ‘If the pointy hats fit!’ Then Petty and Ava laughed too, so the three of us girls joined in, even though we had to look the word up in the dictionary later.

The papers wrote about us often in those days. When Ripp Harris was revealed to have impregnated three different women practically simultaneously, it was just the sort of salacious story the press could get behind. My mother, Dee – twenty-three years old and an up-and-coming musician herself – had the dubious distinction of being married to Ripp at the time, and so the attention on her was relentless. What would she do? they asked breathlessly. Would she stay? Would she fight for her man? Would she do so literally and preferably in front of a camera if the other two women came within fifty feet???

In fact, my mum did none of those things. She packed up and left (with minimal protests from Ripp), and bought a farm in Hertfordshire with her sizeable divorce settlement.

Then she invited Petty and Ava to come and live on the farm with her, and the tabloids went wild.

RIPP’S EX OPENS BABY COMMUNE was Mum’s favourite headline. She had that page framed in our downstairs loo. None of us were ever really clear what a baby commune would look like, but our real life was nowhere near as scandalous or exciting as the paparazzi outside our gates wanted to believe.

Mum gave up singing, and the press attention receded but never fully died down. The house was our safe place. Mum stopped performing and started an arts charity which she still runs from her home office. She and I lived in the middle section of the long, low, ramshackle building, which had been slapped together over several different centuries, while Petty and Lil lived in one converted side of the house, and Ava and Serena lived in the other. Everyone had their own space, but doors usually remained open, and we tended to congregate in the giant central kitchen, or the worn-in living room.

I don’t know how Mum, Petty and Ava forged the relationship they did, especially under such circumstances, but for as long as I can remember it has been the three of them – best friends – and then the three of us – sisters – in and out of each other’s houses, running around the acres of neglected farmland, growing up together in a happy, loving tangle.

Ripp didn’t really feature in our lives. When asked about the whole three-babies-in-one-year thing, he would just shrug and say, ‘Hey man, it was the eighties,’ with a rueful smile, as if that explained everything, as if the fall of the Berlin Wall and a proliferation of leg warmers made it simply impossible for him to stop shagging everyone in sight, spreading his seed about. (‘Ew, don’t say seed,’ Lil had said when I voiced this thought aloud.)

We were all born within four months of each other in 1990 and though Ripp could presumably have blamed it on the new decade, we were not blessed with any further half-siblings. It’s hard not to take it personally when your dad gives a front-page interview about his vasectomy the week after you’re born. (IT’S THE SNIP FOR RIPP!) That had really given my therapist something to get her teeth into.

Anyway, the general public consensus was that our home was a sort of cross between a cult, a commune, and a site for the practice of dark magic. The reality was of course much more mundane, but it became something of an obsession for my sisters and me, this idea that we were witches – like the three sister witches in Macbeth.

As the Weird Sisters we had dressed ourselves in Mum’s Stevie Nicks-inspired wardrobe – tripping over long, spangled black dresses as we ‘cast spells’ over an old Le Creuset saucepan, cursing our enemies, and gifting one another with radiant beauty, numerous love interests, and – on one memorable occasion – ‘much bigger boobs’.

Mum and Petty hadn’t minded, but Ava said we should be asking for business acumen and stock tips because all that other stuff was for sale thanks to the Patriarchy. Patriarchy was another word we had to look up in the dictionary, and after that our spells got a lot… angrier.

Later, when we were teenagers, we had occasionally revived the tradition during periods of heartache.

‘We’re not kids anymore,’ I say now, but Serena is already rummaging through her ginormous handbag and she pulls out a small wooden box.

‘I thought we might need this tonight,’ Serena says and my mouth drops open.

‘Oh my God!’ Lil exclaims. ‘Is that…’

‘The breakup box?’ I finish breathlessly.

Serena nods. ‘You know Petty’s been renovating Granny Mac’s house and she found it buried in the garden.’

Lil’s eyes are wide. ‘That is some spooky timing. It’s like… destiny.’

I take the box from Serena and there’s a needle of pain in my chest as I pry off the lid. Inside there are several envelopes – one for every time one of us had broken up with our teenage crushes. On the top is a black envelope with a silver star drawn on it. I know exactly what’s inside… the last spell the Weird Sisters ever cast. The breakup spell.

It was right before I turned eighteen and a time of my life I don’t like to dwell on. I had just gone through a breakup that made this one feel like a walk in the park, and Serena and Lil had talked me into a night of drunken witchcraft. We were up in Northumberland at the time, at Petty’s grandmother’s house, and after we cast the spell we buried the box in the garden. I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.

Serena plucks the black envelope from the box and tears it open without ceremony. ‘Three Wishes and a Curse,’ she reads, then she looks up at me and Lil, grinning. ‘Time to reawaken these bad boys, don’t you think?’