Our Sister, Again by Sophie Cameron

Author:Sophie Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stripes Publishing
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Flora is in her room when we get back, sitting on her bed with her computer in her lap. When she sees me, she quickly closes the laptop and claps her hands together with a big grin.

“I have a surprise for you!”

She runs out into the corridor and comes back carrying Stephen the vacuum cleaner. She sets him down on the carpet and presses the button to turn him on. He scoots forwards, the little brushes he uses to sweep up moving right to left, and bumps against the leg of Flora’s desk.

“Who put that there?” he says. “I can’t work under these conditions!”

For a moment I think I must be hallucinating. When Stephen ‘speaks’, it’s to give us updates about the cleaning and say goodbye when he’s finished. He doesn’t ask questions. He definitely doesn’t complain.

“What did he say?” I ask.

“I was mucking around with his settings earlier.” Flora crouches down and waves at him. “How’s the cleaning going, Stephen?”

“You people are animals,” he says in his mechanical voice. “Dust, dust, more dust. All I ever eat is dust.”

He sounds so fed up, it makes me burst out laughing. Flora beams.

“Look at this too! Play ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’, please, Stephen.”

The country folk song begins to play from the vacuum cleaner’s low-quality speakers. Stephen shifts from back to front, left to right, then round in a circle and back again, all in time with the beat.

“Is he … line dancing?” I ask.

“Yeah! He’s pretty good, right?” Flora bobs her head along to the music as the vacuum cleaner twirls around. “Do a waltz now, Stephen.”

I run across the hallway and tell Ùna to come and see. The shock on her face makes me laugh even harder. We make Stephen dance to BTS, the Weeknd and Lady Gaga, until Flora eventually tells him to turn the music off and get back to work. He grumbles, “Fine, whatever,” then trundles back out into the hallway, Ùna chasing after him as if he was a puppy.

“How did you do all that?” I ask Flora.

Mum and Dad are both so bad with technology that I had to set up Stephen when we first got him. There definitely wasn’t an option for snarky comebacks and line dancing. You could change the language he speaks – Ùna got him stuck in Finnish for a couple of weeks once – but that’s it. And, like Adhiti said, Flora is far from being some programming genius.

“Oh, it was easy. Adhiti showed me most of it. Plus, it’s not like he’s actually coming up with any of it himself. I just gave him a few extra tricks.”

I ask her a second time, but she won’t give me more details and she won’t meet my eye. There’s something Flora’s not telling me, like she didn’t tell me about her plan to come to Eilean Gorm. Even with our laughter still ringing in my ears, it feels like the tide is pulling her even further away from us, towards a horizon that I can’t see.

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