Sister: A Novel (7 page)

I passed a park ranger, in his brown uniform, talking to a man with a Labrador. ‘We were asked about the lido and the lake, and I thought that they were going to dredge them but the chief officer fellow decided to search our disused buildings first. Since the cuts we’ve got a lot of those.’ Other dog walkers and joggers were joining his audience. ‘The building over there used to be the gents toilets years ago, but it was cheaper to put in new ones than renovate.’

I passed him and his audience, walking on towards the police. They were setting up a cordon around a small derelict Victorian building half-hidden by bushes.

A little way from the cordon was WPC Vernon. Her normally rosy cheeks were pale, her eyes puffy from crying; she was shaking. A policeman had his arm around her. They didn’t see me. WPC Vernon’s voice was quick and uneven. ‘Yes, I have, but only in hospital, and never someone so young. Or so alone.’

Later, I would love her for her physical compassion. At the time, her words burned into my consciousness, forcing my mind to engage with what was happening.

I reached the police cordon. DS Finborough saw me. For a moment he was bewildered by what I was doing there and then his expression became one of sympathy. He walked towards me.

‘Beatrice, I’m so sorry—’

I interrupted him. If I could stop him saying the words then it wouldn’t be true. ‘You’re wrong.’

I wanted to run away from him. He took hold of my hand. I thought he was restraining me. Now I think he was offering a gentle gesture of kindness.

‘It’s Tess we’ve found.’

I tried to pull my hand away from his. ‘You can’t know that for sure.’

He looked at me, properly, making eye contact; even then I realised that this took courage.

‘Tess had her student ID card with her. I’m afraid there isn’t any mistake. I’m so sorry, Beatrice. Your sister is dead.’

He released my hand. I walked away from him. WPC Vernon came after me. ‘Beatrice . . .’

I heard DS Finborough call her back. ‘She wants to be alone.’

I was grateful to him.

I sat under a copse of black-limbed trees, leafless and lifeless in the silencing snow.

At what point did I know you were dead? Was it when DS Finborough told me? When I saw WC Vernon’s pale tearful face? When I saw your toiletries still in your bathroom? Or when Mum phoned to say you’d gone missing? When did I know?

I saw a stretcher being taken out of the derelict toilet building. On the stretcher was a body bag. I went towards it.

A strand of your hair had caught in the zip.

And then I knew.

4

Why am I writing this to you? I deflected that question last time, talked about my need to make sense of it all, my dots of detail revealing a pointillist painting. I ducked the real part of the question - why to you? Is this a make-believe game of the almost insane? Sheets and blankets make a tent, a pirate ship or a castle. You are the fearless knight, Leo is the swashbuckling prince and I am the princess and narrator - telling the story, as I want it. I was always the storyteller, wasn’t I?

Do I think you can hear me? Absolutely yes / Definitely not. Take your pick; I do hourly.

Put simply, I need to talk to you. Mum told me I didn’t say very much till you were born, then I had a sister to talk to and I didn’t stop. I don’t want to stop now. If I did, I’d lose a part of me. It’s a part of me I’d miss. I know you can’t criticise or comment on my letter to you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know your criticisms or guess at your comments just as you used to know and guess at mine. It’s a one-way conversation, but one that I could only have with you.

And it’s to tell you why you were murdered. I could start at the end, give you the answer, the final page, but you’d ask a question which would lead back a few pages, then another, all the way to where we are now. So I’ll tell you one step at a time, as I found out myself, with no reflecting hindsight.

‘A policeman I hadn’t met before asked me to identify her.’

I have told Mr Wright what I have told you, minus deals with the devil and the other non-essential detours from my statement.

‘What time was this?’ he asks and his voice is kind, as it has been throughout this interview, but I can’t answer him. The day you were found time went demented; a minute lasted half a day, an hour went past in seconds. Like a children’s storybook, I flew in and out of weeks and through the years; second star to the right and straight on to a morning that would never arrive. I was in a Dali painting of drooping clocks, a Mad Hatter’s tea-party time. No wonder Auden said, ‘Stop all the clocks’; it was a desperate grab for sanity.

‘I don’t know what time it was,’ I reply. I decide to chance a little of my truth. ‘Time didn’t mean anything to me any more. Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.’

When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing. A little too much for Mr Wright, I agree, but I want him to know more about the reality of your death. It can’t be contained in hours or days or minutes. Remember those 1930s coffee spoons, each one like a melted sweet? That’s how I’d been living my life, in tiny measured doses. But your death was a vast sea and I was sinking. Did you know that an ocean can be seven miles deep? No sun can penetrate that far down. In the total darkness only misshapen, unrecognisable creatures survive; mutant emotions that I never even knew existed until you died.

‘Shall we break there?’ Mr Wright asks and for a moment I wonder if I’ve voiced my thoughts out loud and he’s worried I’m a crazy woman. I’m pretty sure I managed to keep my thoughts under wraps and he’s being considerate. But I don’t want to have to revisit this day again. ‘I’d rather finish.’ He stiffens, almost imperceptibly, and I sense he is bracing himself. I hadn’t considered this would be difficult for him. It was hard for the Ancient Mariner to tell his tale, but hard too for the poor wedding guest forced to listen. He nods and I continue.

‘The police had brought Mum to London but she couldn’t face identifying Tess, so I went to the police morgue on my own. A police sergeant was with me. He was in his late fifties. I can’t remember his name. He was very kind to me.’

As we went into the morgue the police sergeant held my hand and he kept holding it. We went past a room where they do post-mortems. The shiny metal surfaces, white tiles and sharp lighting made it look like a high-tech designer kitchen taken to an extreme. He led me to a room where you were. The smell of antiseptic was overwhelming. The sergeant asked me if I was ready. I never would be. I nodded. He pulled back the blanket.

You were wearing your thick winter coat, my Christmas present to you. I’d wanted to make sure you were warm. I was stupidly glad that you were wearing it. There is no description of the colour of death, no pantone number to match your face. It was the opposite of colour; the opposite of life. I touched your still satin-shiny hair. ‘She was so beautiful.’

The sergeant tightened his fingers around mine. ‘Yes. She is beautiful.’

He used the present tense and I thought he hadn’t heard me properly. But I think now that he was trying to make it a little better; death hadn’t robbed you of everything yet. He was right; you were beautiful in the way that Shakespeare’s tragic heroines are beautiful. You’d become a Desdemona, an Ophelia, a Cordelia; pale and stiff with death; a wronged heroine; a passive victim. But you were never tragic or passive or a victim. You were joyful, passionate and independent.

I saw that the thick sleeves of your coat were soaked through in blood, now dried, making the wool stiff. There were cuts to the insides of your arms, where your life had bled from you.

I don’t remember what he said or if I replied. I can only remember his hand holding mine.

As we left the building the sergeant asked if I wanted the police in France to tell Dad for us, and I thanked him.

Mum was waiting for me outside. ‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t bear to see her like that.’ I wondered if she thought I could bear it. ‘You shouldn’t have to do that sort of thing,’ she continued. ‘They should use DNA or something. It’s barbaric.’ I didn’t agree. However appalling, I had needed to see the brutal reality of your no-colour face to believe you were dead.

‘Were you all right on your own?’ Mum asked.

‘There was a policeman with me. He was very kind.’

‘They’ve all been very kind.’ She needed to find something good in this. ‘Not fair the way the press go on at them, is it? I mean, they really couldn’t have been nicer or . . .’ She trailed off; there was no good in this. ‘Was her face . . . ? I mean, was it . . . ?’

‘It was unmarked. Perfect.’

‘Such a pretty face.’

‘Yes.’

‘It always has been. But you couldn’t see it for all that hair. I kept telling her to put her hair up or have it properly cut. I meant so that everyone could see what a pretty face she had, not because I didn’t like her hair.’

She broke down and I held her. As she clung to me, we had the physical closeness both of us had needed since I got off the plane. I hadn’t cried yet and I envied Mum, as if a little of the agony could be shed through tears.

I drove Mum home and helped her to bed. I sat with her till she finally slept.

In the middle of the night I drove back to London. On the M11 I opened the windows and screamed above the noise of the engine, above the roar of the motorway; screaming into the darkness until my throat hurt and my voice was hoarse. When I reached London the roads were quiet and empty and the silent pavements deserted. It was unimaginable that the dark, abandoned city would have light and people again in the morning. I hadn’t thought about who had killed you; your death had shattered thought. I just wanted to be back in your flat, as if I’d be nearer to you there.

The car clock showed 3.40 a.m. when I arrived. I remember because it was no longer the day you were found, it was the day after. Already you were going into the past. People think it’s reassuring to say ‘life carries on’, don’t they understand that it’s the fact your life carries on, while the person you love’s does not, that is one of the acute anguishes of grief? There would be day after day that wasn’t the day you were found; that hope, and my life with my sister in it, had ended.

In the darkness, I slipped on the steps down to your flat and grabbed hold of the icy railing. The jolt of adrenaline and cold forced the realisation of your death harder into me. I fumbled for the key under the pink cyclamen pot, scraping my knuckles on frozen concrete. The key wasn’t there. I saw that your front door was ajar. I went in.

Someone was in your bedroom. Grief had suffocated all other emotions and I felt no fear as I opened the door. A man was inside rummaging through your things. Anger cut through the grief.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

In the new mindscape of deep-sea mourning, even my words were unrecognisable to me. The man turned.

‘Shall we end it there?’ asks Mr Wright. I glance at the clock; it’s nearly seven. I am grateful to him for letting me finish the day you were found.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know how late it was.’

‘As you said, time stops making any sense when someone you love has died.’

I wonder if he’ll follow this up. I feel the inequality of our respective situations. He’s had my feelings stripped naked for the last five hours. There’s a silence between us and I half-think about asking him to strip off too.

‘My wife died two years ago, a car crash.’

Our eyes meet and there’s comradeship between us; two veterans of the same war, battle-weary and emotionally bloody. Dylan Thomas was wrong; death does have dominion. Death wins the war and the collateral damage is grief. I never thought when I was an English literature student that I’d be arguing with poets, rather than learning their words.

Mr Wright escorts me down a corridor towards the lift. A cleaner is vacuuming; other offices are in darkness. He presses the lift button and waits with me for it to arrive. Alone, I get inside.

As the lift goes down, I taste the bile in my throat. My body has been playing a physical memory alongside the spoken one and I have again felt the rising nausea as if I were physically trying to expel what I knew. Again, my heart has been pummelling my ribs, sucking the breath from my lungs. I leave the lift, my head still viciously painful as it was the day you were found. Then the fact of your death detonated inside my brain, exploding again and again and again. As I talked to Mr Wright, I was again blindfolded in a minefield. Your death will never be disarmed to a memory, but I have learned on some days, good days, how to edge around it. But not today.

I leave the building and the evening is warm, but I am still shivering and the hairs on my arms are standing upright trying to conserve body heat. I don’t know if it was the bitter cold or the shock that made me shiver so violently that day.

Unlike yesterday, I don’t feel a menacing presence behind me, maybe because after describing the day you were found I have no emotional energy left for fear. I decide to walk rather than take the tube. My body needs to take cues from the real outside world, not the climate of memory. My shift at the Coyote starts in just over an hour, so I should have time to walk it.

You’re astonished, and yes, I am a hypocrite. I can still remember my patronising tone.

‘But barmaiding? Couldn’t you find something just a little less . . . ?’ I trailed off but you knew what to fill in: ‘brain-numbing’; ‘beneath you’, ‘dead end’.

‘It’s just to pay the bills, it’s not a career choice.’

‘But why not find a day job that may lead on to something?’