Sister: A Novel (23 page)

The snow hadn’t been cleared from the paths up to the Art College and most of the windows were in darkness. The secretary with the German accent told me it was the last of three inset days. She agreed to me putting up a couple of notices. The first was information about your funeral. And the second asked your friends to meet me in a café that I’d seen opposite the college in a couple of weeks’ time. It was an impulsive note, the date of the meeting chosen randomly, and as I pinned it up next to flat shares and equipment for sale I thought it looked a ridiculous kind of notice and that nobody would come. But I left it anyway.

When I got home, I saw Todd waiting in the darkness, his hood pulled up against the sleet.

‘I don’t have a key.’

I’d thought he’d taken one with him. ‘I’m sorry.’

I unlocked the door and he went into the bedroom.

I watched from the doorway as he packed his clothes, so meticulously. Suddenly he turned and it was as if he caught me off guard, for the first time we were properly looking at each other.

‘Come back with me? Please.’

I faltered, looking at his immaculately packed clothes, remembering the order and neatness of our life in New York, a refuge from the maelstrom here. But my neatly contained life was in the past. I could never fly back to it.

‘Beatrice?’

I shook my head and the small movement of denial made me vertiginous.

He offered to take the car back to the car hire people at the airport. After all, I clearly had no idea how long I’d be staying. And it was ludicrously expensive. The mundanity of our conversation, the attention to practical detail, was so soothingly familiar that I wanted to ask him to stay with me, plead with him to stay. But I couldn’t ask that of him.

‘You’re sure that you don’t want me to stay for the funeral?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Thank you though.’

I gave him the keys to the hire car and only when I heard the car start up realised I should have given him the engagement ring. Twisting it around my finger, I watched through the basement window as he drove away and continued watching long after his car had disappeared from sight, the sounds of cars now strangers’ cars.

I felt caged in loneliness.

I have told Mr Wright about my notice in the college but not about Todd.

‘Shall I go and get us some cakes?’ he asks.

I am completely taken aback. ‘That would be nice.’

Nice
- I should bring a thesaurus tomorrow. I wonder if he’s being kind. Or hungry. Or maybe it’s a romantic gesture - an old-fashioned tea together. I am surprised by how much I hope it’s the latter.

When he’s left, I dial Todd’s number at work. His PA answers the phone but doesn’t recognise my voice, it must be fully re-anglicised. She puts me through to Todd. It’s still awkward between us but less so than it was. We’ve started the process of selling our apartment and discuss the sale. Then he abruptly changes the subject. ‘I saw you on the news,’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah. Fine, thank you.’

‘I’ve been meaning to apologise.’

‘You have nothing to apologise for. Really, it’s me that—’

‘Of course I should apologise. You were right all along about your sister.’ There’s a silence between us, which I break. ‘So are you moving in with Karen?’

There’s a slight pause before he answers. ‘Yes. I’ll still pay my share of the mortgage of course, until it’s sold.’

Karen is his new girlfriend. When he told me I felt guiltily relieved that he had found a relationship so quickly.

‘I didn’t think you’d mind,’ says Todd and I think he wants me to mind. He sounds falsely cheerful. ‘I expect it’s a little like you and me, but the boot on the other foot.’

I have no idea what I can say to that.

‘“If equal affections cannot be”,’ says Todd, his tone light, but I know not to misinterpret that now. I dread him adding ‘let the more loving one be me’.

We say goodbye.

I reminded you I studied literature, didn’t I? I’ve had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they had always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than providing an uplifting literary score to it.

Mr Wright comes back with the cakes and cups of tea and we have five minutes time out from my statement and talk instead about small inconsequential things - the unseasonably warm weather, the bulbs in St James’s Park, the emerging peony in your garden. Our tea together feels a little romantic, in a safe nineteenth-century kind of way, though I doubt Jane Austen’s heroines took tea from Styrofoam cups and had cakes packed inside clear plastic boxes.

I hope he isn’t slighted that I was too nauseous to finish my cake.

After our tea, we go back over a couple of pages in my statement, as he double-checks a few points, and then he suggests we end for the day. He has to stay and finish off some paperwork but he still accompanies me to the lift. As we walk down the long corridor, past empty unlit offices, it feels as if he’s escorting me to my front door. He waits for the lift doors to open and I am safely inside.

I leave the CPS offices and go to meet Kasia. I’m blowing two days’ wages on tickets for the London Eye, which I had promised her. But I’m worn out, my limbs feel too heavy to belong to me, and I just want to go home and sleep. When I see the length of the queues I resent the Eye that’s turned London into an urban Cyclops.

I spot Kasia waving at me from the front of a queue. She must have been waiting for hours. People are glancing at her, probably anxious that she’s about to go into labour in one of the capsules.

I join her and ten minutes later we are ‘boarding’.

As our capsule climbs higher, London unfurls beneath us and I no longer feel so ill or tired, but actually elated. And I think that, although I’m hardly robust, at least I didn’t blackout today, which must be a good sign. So maybe I should allow myself to hope that I’ve survived this intact; that everything really might be OK.

I point out the sights to Kasia, asking people on the south side to move so I can show her Big Ben, Battersea Power Station, the House of Commons, Westminster Bridge. As I wave my arms around, showing off London to Kasia, I feel surprised - not just by the pride I feel for my city, but also by the word ‘my’. I’d opted to live in New York, an Atlantic ocean away, but for no discernible reason I feel a sense of belonging here.

14

Monday

This morning I have woken up ludicrously early. Pudding is a furry, purring cushion on my legs (I never used to understand why you took in a stray). Mr Wright told me that that today we are going to ‘cover’ your funeral and at five thirty I give up on the idea of sleep and go out into your garden. I ought to go through it in my mind first, make sure I can remember what’s important, but my thoughts flinch when I try to look backwards with any focus. Instead I look at the leaves and buds now flourishing along the lengths of the once-presumed-dead twigs. But there has been one fatality I’m afraid. The Constance Spry rose was killed by a fox urinating, so in her place I’ve planted a Cardinal Richelieu. No fox would dare to wee on him.

I feel a coat draped around my shoulders and then see Kasia sleepily stumbling back to bed. Your dressing gown doesn’t meet over her bump any more. There’s only three days to go now till her due date. She’s asked me to be her birthing partner, her ‘doula’ (it sounds too posh for my rudimentary knowledge of what to do). You never told me about ‘doulas’ when you asked me to be with you when you had Xavier, you just asked me to be there. Perhaps you thought I’d find it all a little off-putting. (You’d have been right.) Or with you I didn’t need a special name. I’m your sister. And Xavier’s aunt. That’s enough.

You might think Kasia is giving me a second chance after I failed you. But although that would be easy, it’s not true. Nor is she a walking, talking Prozac course. But she has forced me to look into the future. Remember Todd telling me ‘
Life has to go on
’? But as my life couldn’t rewind to a time you were still alive I’d wanted to pause it, moving forward was selfish. But Kasia’s growing baby (a girl, she found out) is a visual reminder that life does go on - the opposite of a memento mori. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a memento vitae.

Amias was right; the morning chorus is really noisy out here. The birds have been singing fit to burst for an hour already. I try to remember the order that he told me and think it must be the larks’ turn now. As I listen to what I think is a wood-lark playing notes similar to Bach’s preludes, a little amazed and strangely comforted, I remember back to your funeral.

The night before I stayed in Little Hadston in my old bedroom. I hadn’t slept in a single bed for years and I found the narrowness of it and the tightly tucked in sheets and the heavy eiderdown securely comforting. I got up at 5.30 but when I went downstairs Mum was already in the kitchen. There were two mugs of coffee on the table. She gave me one. ‘I would have brought your coffee up to your room for you, but I didn’t want to wake you.’ I knew before I took a sip that it would be cold. Outside it was dark with the sound of rain hammering down. Mum distractedly drew back the curtains as if you could see something outside but it was still dark and all she could see was her own reflection.

‘When someone dies they can be any age you remember, can’t they?’ she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued, ‘You probably think about the grown-up Tess, because you were still close to her. But when I woke up I thought of her when she was three wearing a fairy skirt I’d got her in Woolworth’s and a policeman’s helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger, so tiny they didn’t even meet. I remembered the shape of her head, and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times, she’s thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her every time I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses is my daughter.’

At 10.55 a.m. we walked to the church, the wind blowing the driving cold rain against our faces and our legs, making Mum’s black skirt stick coldly to her damp tights, my black boots were splattered in mud. But I was glad it was raining and windy, ‘blow winds and crack your cheeks’; yes I know, this was hardly a blasted heath but Little Hadston on a Thursday morning with cars parked two deep along the road to the church.

There were over a hundred people standing outside the church in the slicing rain, some under umbrellas, some with just their hoods up. For a moment I thought that the church wasn’t open yet, before realising that the church was too full for them to get inside. Among the crowd I glimpsed DS Finborough next to WPC Vernon, but most people were a blur through rain and emotion.

As I looked at the crowd outside the church and thought of the others packed inside I imagined each person carrying their own memories of you - your voice, your face, your laugh, what you did and what you said - and if all these fragments of you could be put together then somehow we could make a complete picture of you; together we could hold all of you.

Father Peter met us at the gate to the graveyard leading up to the church, holding an umbrella to shelter us. He told us that he’d put people into the choir stalls and got extra chairs but there wasn’t even standing room left now. He escorted us through the graveyard towards the door of the church.

As I walked with Father Peter, I saw the back view of a man on his own in the graveyard. His head was bare and his clothes soaked through. He was hunched over by the gaping hole in the ground that was waiting for your coffin. I saw that it was Dad. After all those years of us waiting for him, when he never came, he was waiting for you.

The church bell began tolling. There is no more ghastly a sound. It has no beat of life, no human rhythm, only the mechanical striking of loss. We had to go into the church now. I found it as impossible and terrifying as stepping out of a window at the top of a skyscraper. I think Mum felt the same. That single footstep would inexorably end with your body in the sodden earth. I felt an arm around me and saw Dad. His other hand was holding on to Mum. He escorted us into the church. I felt Mum’s judder through his body as she saw your coffin. Dad kept his arms around us as we walked up the seemingly endless aisle towards our places at the front. Then he sat between us holding our hands. I have never been so grateful for human touch before.

At one moment I turned, briefly, and looked at the packed church and people spilling out beyond in the rain and wondered if the murderer was there, amongst us all.

Mum had asked for the full Monty funeral Mass and I was glad because it meant there was longer till we had to bury you. You’ve never liked sermons but I think you’d have been touched by Father Peter’s. It had been Valentine’s Day the day before and maybe for that reason he talked about unrequited love. I think I can remember his words, or just about:

‘When I talk about unrequited love most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn’t return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died they can never love us back. At least that it is how it feels . . .’

After the Mass in the church we went outside to bury you.

The unrelenting rain had turned the snow-covered white earth of the churchyard to dirty mud.

Father Peter started the burial rite: ‘We have entrusted our sister Tess and baby Xavier to God’s mercy, and we now commit their bodies to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’

I remembered back to Leo’s burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ you turned to me,
‘I don’t want sure and certain
hope, I want sure and certain, Bee.’

At your funeral I wanted sure and certain too. But even the church can only hope, not promise, that the end of human life is happy ever after.

Your coffin was lowered into the deep gash that had been dug in the earth. I saw it brush past the exposed roots of grass, sliced through. Then further down. And I would have done anything to hold your hand again, anything at all, just once, just for a few seconds. Anything.

The rain hammered down onto your coffin, pitter-patter; ‘
Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, I hear raindrops
’; I was five and singing it to you, just born.

Your coffin reached the bottom of the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Then Mum stepped forwards and took a wooden spoon from her coat pocket. She loosened her fingers and it fell on top of your coffin. Your magic wand.

And I threw the emails I sign ‘lol’. And the title of older sister. And the nickname Bee. Not grand or important to anyone else, I thought, this bond that we had. Small things. Tiny things. You knew that I didn’t make words out of my alphabetti spaghetti but I gave you my vowels so you could make more words out of yours. I knew that your favourite colour used to be purple but then became bright yellow; (‘
Ochre’s the arty word, Bee’
) and you knew mine was orange, until I discovered that taupe was more sophisticated and you teased me for that. You knew that my first whimsy china animal was a cat (you lent me 50p of your pocket money to buy it) and that I once took all my clothes out of my school trunk and hurled them around the room and that was the only time I had something close to a tantrum. I knew that when you were five you climbed into bed with me every night for a year. I threw everything we had together - the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood - into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss, that I thought I could no longer be there.

All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now? Nothing else from twenty-one years of loving you. Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because you were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthood - was that to be replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

I saw Dad had been given a handful of earth. But as he held out his hand above your coffin he couldn’t unprise his fingers. Instead, he put his hand into his pocket, letting the earth fall there and not onto you. He watched as Father Peter threw the first clod of earth instead and broke apart, splintering with the pain of it. I went to him and took his earth-stained hand in mine, the earth gritty between our soft palms. He looked at me with love. A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down. I, of all people, should understand that.

Mum was silent as they put earth over your coffin.

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Mum’s silent screaming is in my head as I reach the CPS offices. It’s Monday and crowded with people. When I get in the packed lift I start fretting, as I always do, that it will get stuck and my mobile doesn’t get a signal, so Kasia will be unable to contact me if she goes into labour. As soon as I arrive at the third floor I check for messages: none. I also check my pager. Only Kasia has that number. Overkill, yes, but like a recent convert to Catholicism, my conversion to being thoughtful is going to be done
absolutely properly
, with rosary beads and incense sticks, a pager and a special ring tone on my phone reserved for her. I don’t have the security of being born a considerate person. I’ve learned that at least. I can’t treat it casually as part of my intrinsic make-up. And yes, maybe my anxiety about Kasia is a way of re-routing my thoughts for a while onto someone who is alive. I need the memento vitae.

I go into Mr Wright’s office. He doesn’t smile at me this morning, maybe because he knows that today we have to start with your funeral; or maybe the flicker of a romance I thought I felt at the weekend has been doused by what I am telling him. My witness statement, with its central topic of murder, is hardly a love sonnet. I bet Amias’s birds don’t sing to each other of such things.