'Pearl Fisher' by Chris Cottom

Dad believed, with the zeal of an armchair economist, in the division of labour. Household jobs were blue or pink. Blue-collared Buster the Labrador was Head of Security. Susie and Daisy helped Mum with cooking, ironing and mending. Dad cleaned the car.

Every Sunday he’d don his polythene poncho to wash the coquettishly named Hillman Minx with quasi-religious fervour. Once a month he’d double-anoint its pinky-beige panels with Turtle Wax and measure its mysterious levels and pressures.    

When Susie announced after Saturday Swedish meatballs that she wanted to try for university, Dad pushed aside his pineapple upside-down cake. Girls in his world grew up to be typists, like those in the pool at the Pearl Assurance Company in Reigate where he ruled the claims department. Daisy imagined his Neptune-like throne in an aquamarine lido where elegant starlets in gingham or polka dot bathing suits dived to claim their pearls.

She dreamed of working for Dad. She told Mum she ate the heavy school dinners, when she really had salads, kneading the soft white rolls into balls before dropping them into the bin. As Susie trawled her textbooks, Daisy used Mum’s tape-measure to track her vital, so vital, statistics, locking the results in year one of her five-year Jackie diary.

Susie butterflied into a stripey-scarved sociology student going steady with a tufty-faced Jeremy, and only came home in what she called the vacations. Daisy waited for her first boyfriend to appear. He’d be taller than her and might be called Malcolm. Or Kenneth. Either way, he’d bear an extraordinary resemblance to Donny Osmond. His job would be to navigate them through the jigsaw puzzles of light petting. Hers would be to resist. You had to stay focused to be a pearl fisher. And slim. That was the job.