Letters From My Sister Read online

  The crowds are filtering away, leaving a dull grey lifeless platform. Where is she? She can’t have missed the train. I can’t bear it. I walk down the platform looking into each carriage, but no sign of anyone. Then I hear a door open and see a small figure stepping out of the train. She’s wearing a denim jacket covered with lots of badges, a round embroidered hat that looks more like a doily over her head, and a red football scarf. She carries a large purple bag and a couple of plastic Sainsbury’s bags.

  ‘Bells!’ I say, quickening my pace towards her.

  ‘Hello, Katie. How’re you?’ I’m so relieved she has arrived that I almost hug her, but instead I take her luggage. ‘Well done! You made it,’ I say, as we walk away from the platform, past the guard at the entrance. There’s a heavy silence after the mobs of people have moved on.

  *

  We arrive back at Sam’s and I show Bells around the house. The kitchen is in the basement; on the ground floor is a large airy room that looks like a smart waiting room. In here are Sam’s new leather sofas and a fireplace controlled by slick silver controls; he has a dark mahogany bookcase filled with glossy hardback books that he hasn’t touched. He doesn’t read anything apart from the FT. On the second floor are the bedrooms, and a cosy room with suede beanbags and a large Stanley Spencer print. The bay window looks out on to the other rainbow-coloured houses along the crescent. If we’re in, we pretty much live in this room. Sam plays poker here. On the top floor is the steam room with the old-fashioned bath. ‘This is my favourite room, Bells,’ I tell her.

  ‘Sam rich?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, he is. He works very hard.’ I take her back downstairs to her room, a large bedroom with a double bed, wardrobe, a long mirror whose frame I gilded and one small bedside table with an orange and white stained-glass lamp on it. More or less everything in this room is white – the shutters, the walls, the bedspread. The only other piece of colour is the rug with great big orange and red circles on it. Bells sits on the bed, looking around. It’s hard to know what she makes of Sam’s house.

  ‘What’s your room like in Wales?’ I ask, sitting down next to her.

  ‘I wish you would go and visit your sister sometimes,’ Mum says to me.

  ‘She’s a forgotten sister,’ Dad adds.

  ‘Not big like this,’ says Bells, waving her arm around. ‘Have small bed and television and lots of posters. Room looks out on garden and sea. In my plot of land, I grow carrots and potatoes. We grow strawberries this year too. You like strawberries, Katie?’ She sticks her thumbs up at me.

  ‘I do. We don’t have a garden here,’ I say apologetically. ‘I think you have Mum’s gardening skills. I’d kill everything! There would only be weeds in my plot of land.’ She doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Now, you’ve got your own TV in here, so that’s something, isn’t it?’ I point to the big silver machine with the wide screen in the corner of her room. ‘You can watch the tennis. Who do you think’s going to win Wimbledon this year then?’

  ‘Agassi.’

  ‘You cannot be serious,’ I say, imitating John McEnroe.

  She looks at me with no hint of a smile. I’m going to have to try harder than a poor imitation of John McEnroe.

  ‘Shall we unpack?’ I open her zip bag and out comes a medley of junk and clothes. ‘Why have you got Mary Veronica’s jumper?’ I ask, showing Bells the nametag in the jumper, like the ones we used to have to sew on our school socks and PE kit. ‘Bells, you don’t have many summer clothes in here. Is this all you packed? Odd jumpers, a few T-shirts and a pair of dungarees? Oh, hang on, you have one frilly pink blouse here that says it belongs to Jessica Hall. I think I’m going to have to get you some new clothes,’ I say, talking to myself rather than to her. ‘You put all this away while I put the fish and chips on. Deal? You like chips on Fridays, don’t you?’

  ‘You have crinkle chips, like ones Mum makes?’

  ‘I’m going to make homemade ones, like Aunt Agnes’s.’

  ‘Oh,’ she acknowledges, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s pleased or not. ‘How’s Aunt Agnes?’

  ‘I think she’s fine.’

  ‘Uncle Roger? He died. Poor Uncle Roger.’

  ‘I know. Poor Aunt Agnes too. I think she gets lonely.’

  ‘Poor Aunt Agnes. How’s Mum?’

  ‘Well, you know she’s on holiday.’

  ‘How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s on holiday too. Aren’t they lucky? They’re in France.’

  ‘In France, that’s right. How’s Granny Norfolk?’

  Our mother’s mother, Granny, lives in Norfolk, hence the name. I don’t know how she is, I haven’t spoken to her in months. ‘Look, you’ve got your own music system,’ I tell her, trying to stop the tirade of questions about the Fletcher family.

  I can hear my voice, but it’s not me. I can’t seem to stop talking to her as if she were ten years old.

  ‘Anyway, you’ll meet Sam soon,’ I say.

  Sam. I still feel nervous about him coming home. When I tried to call him earlier, his secretary said he was either ‘on the other line’ or ‘in a meeting’. He has her well trained. ‘He’s really looking forward to meeting you. You’ll be good, won’t you?’ I can’t help adding. ‘No dramas, right. We’re going to have a really grand two weeks, aren’t we?’

  ‘No dramas,’ she repeats.

  ‘Good. Come down when you’re ready.’

  *

  The chips are frying and I’m on to my second vodka. These last few days I’ve been counting down the minutes until I can have my first drink in the evening. Let’s forget the cup of tea and go straight to the hard stuff. First hurdle is over. Bells is here, we are getting on fine, I think. The second major hurdle is Bells meeting Sam.

  Stevie Wonder starts to blast out of Bells’s bedroom. I run upstairs and open the door. Bells is on the bed, pinning up a poster of David Beckham, his diamond earrings sparkling.

  The lovely white room is now covered in football badges and stickers with a Beatles poster stuck to the door, SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL written in big black letters at the bottom. It reminds me of Bells’s bedroom in our parents’ home. She had the master bedroom with the sink that I was envious of, and wallpaper with flowery borders. Bells didn’t like the wallpaper, though, so she drew pictures of animals and pinned up posters of her favourite pop singers, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and the Beatles. I remember she had a picture of Bob Marley on the wall too, smoking a joint. Mum did not mind her ruining the wallpaper. She wasn’t strict in that sense. She let us get on with it half the time.

  The entire floor is covered with clothes, joined by a tattered poetry book, a sketchpad, a small wooden case of oil paints, a collection of CDs and a photograph album. I take a deep breath and bend down to pick the mess off the floor. ‘Bells!’ I shout. ‘Turn it down! It’s so loud in here.’ I climb on to the bed. ‘What are you sticking the posters down with? You’re not putting pins in the walls, are you?’ Oh, God, she is. ‘Bells, don’t put pins in the walls!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It leaves a hole.’

  She continues to push a pin into the white paint.

  ‘Bells, hey! Don’t do that. What did I just say?’

  ‘We do in Wales. Mum lets me too.’

  I look down at the bedspread. ‘I don’t care what you do in Wales, you’re staying with Sam and me now.’

  ‘Katie bossy,’ she says.

  I shrug. ‘Bells, can you take your boots off? Sam likes you to take your shoes off when you come into the house.’ She is still wearing these peculiar little pixie boots.

  ‘Why?’ she asks, and then starts to use the bed as a trampoline, while telling me that in Wales they have one in the garden and Ted can jump the highest, apparently.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I hear from behind. I spin round on the bed and almost lose my balance.

  ‘Hello,’ Bells says, extending her small hand. ‘You handsome.’

  Sam looks at her strangely
. ‘What did she say?’ He looks around. ‘This room’s a bloody pigsty.’

  When Bells makes pig-like noises I want to disappear under the floorboards.

  ‘Is this your …’ He can hardly get the words out.

  ‘This is my sister Isabel. Bells.’

  ‘Hello, you Sam?’ she says again, still offering her small pale hand.

  He shakes it, limply. ‘This is Bells?’ He looks around the room again, despair written over his face.

  I nod. ‘Sam, I’ll tidy the room later, don’t worry.’

  He stares at the posters. ‘She hasn’t put drawing pins in the wall? Tell me she hasn’t, Katie?’

  I jump off the bed, rush towards him. ‘I’m sorry, I’ll deal with it, honey, I promise.’

  Sam puts his head into his hands.

  ‘What’s that burning smell?’ he shouts above the noise, then marches over to the stereo and turns off the music, followed by the television. ‘Jesus Christ, even my grandfather doesn’t need the snooker on so loudly.’

  ‘No like Sam,’ Bells says.

  ‘Bells! Don’t be rude.’ Thankfully I don’t think he understood what she said. He’s still sniffing the air with a look of disgust. ‘The chips,’ I yelp, and dart out of the room.

  ‘Fucking hell, can today get any worse?’ I hear Sam cursing as he runs after me.

  *

  It’s been a long day when finally I make my way upstairs to bed. The chips burned and Sam hated the mushy peas. ‘Who eats mushy peas anyway?’ he protested.

  I looked in Bells’s direction and he shrugged. He attempted to ask her a few questions about the train journey. ‘I haven’t got a clue what she just said,’ he kept on repeating when Bells was staring at him for a response. She started to hit the kitchen table with her fork in frustration, repeating her questions in vain.

  ‘If you don’t understand Bells, just pretend you do,’ I tried to persuade him after supper.

  I know Sam is still angry with me for not telling him about Bells and I don’t blame him. What was I thinking? He has gone out for a few drinks with Maguire.

  I turn off the light and close my eyes. He couldn’t get out of the house quick enough.

  *

  I scream when I see a small figure silhouetted at the end of my bed.

  ‘Bells, what are you doing?’ I sit up abruptly. ‘Go back to bed.’ When I get a glazed response, I jump up and shake her awake.

  I can hear Mum coming upstairs and then pacing down our creaky corridor in her floaty nightdress and bed-jacket. ‘You shouldn’t wake her up,’ she scolds me, ‘if it happens again take her back to her bedroom. Bells darling, do you want to go to the loo before you go back to bed?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she says, lifting up her white cotton nightie and crouching on the floor.

  ‘NO!’ Mum and I cry together. Mum starts to laugh, and so do I. And then Bells copies us, doing her mad-lady-locked-up-in-the-attic Jane Eyre laugh.

  *

  I feel disorientated as I turn on the light and look at my watch. It’s only midnight. I shiver. I can hear both Mum and Bells now, as if it were yesterday.

  The house is deathly quiet. When we were children, Bells used to sleepwalk almost every night. Mum had to put thick white bars over her bedroom window. I step out of bed and walk down the corridor, towards Bells’s room. I find myself opening the door, the light glaring out at me. Mum had told me Bells still hates sleeping in the dark and that I must keep a small light on in the corner of her bedroom.

  I can hear her deep breathing as she turns over in bed. She’s so tiny, just under five feet tall. She looks young for her age because of her height. She could also be mistaken for a boy from behind because of her short auburn hair. Dad says he never wants Bells to grow her hair. ‘You must never hide behind your hair,’ he told her when she started to be a self-conscious teenager who wanted to look like everyone else. ‘You look the world in the eye,’ he said.

  I kneel down by her bed and watch as she sleeps, absorbing each line and movement of her face. There is the familiar scar over her upper lip that crosses like two letter Cs. She always wears three small stud earrings in her left ear; one of them is a green stone surrounded by gold.

  Her hand pokes out from the duvet, the skin so pale you would not believe there was blood pumping through the veins. Gently I touch it and it feels as soft as melting butter.

  After Sam went out, Bells and I tidied her room and put the snowy owl that Mum made for her on the bedside table. Bells loves owls. Mum made me a cheetah. His name is Charlie. Bells carefully placed her inhaler on the bedside table, along with her small photograph album that she has covered with David Beckham stickers. Mum told me she takes her album everywhere when she’s away from home, it’s like her comfort blanket. I pick it up and quietly leaf through the pages. By each photograph, inscribed on a small white sticker, is a precise date, time, location and description of the person photographed. There’s a picture of Mum in her studio, her hands caked in clay, smiling right into the camera; there’s a terrible picture of Dad with red eyes reading the newspaper; there’s a picture of the water meadows where we used to walk as children. My parents live in St Cross, Winchester. There’s a picture of a man wearing a purple tracksuit and football sweatshirt, holding a parrot. He has an identity card around his neck. ‘Ted, 1990, St David’s, in the garden, summertime.’

  Bells opens her eyes and looks straight into me. I panic, thinking I shouldn’t be here, but then she shuts them again. I wonder what she dreams about when she goes to bed at night. When she was little she used to have nightmares so we had to keep a light on in her room. It was a little pink light in the shape of a house. Dad said Bells was terrified of the dark as a result of all the surgery she had to go through as a baby and young child. She developed a phobia about anaesthetics and would scream before each injection. She didn’t know what anaesthesia was, but she knew exactly what it meant. Blackness. Dad was good at talking to me and explaining. He was naturally gentle. In the end it was Emma’s sister, Natalie, who came up with a solution called ‘The Black Box’. We had to cut off a piece of Bells’s hair – it had to be something physical rather than an item of clothing. We put the strand of hair in a box and the alternative practitioner did a kind of absent healing. Mum and Dad thought we were mad but realized there was little to lose. Besides, we were all going insane from lack of sleep. I can still remember Natalie asking me to kiss the box. ‘Gives it good vibes,’ she claimed. After a few days Bells’s howling at night stopped. It was like magic.

  I stand up, the stillness of the room contrasting strongly with the chaos earlier in the evening. As I’m about to leave the room I hear her muffled voice.

  ‘Nothing around me?’ she says groggily.

  ‘Nothing around you,’ I whisper back, just as Mum used to reply when she was a child.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  1989

  I climb the three steps into Mum’s studio. Her classical music is on in the background, just as it always is. Mum’s studio is like a zoo with the parrots, a pair of cockatoos, a zebra, a giraffe, a tiger, a lioness and a few monkeys perched on shelves, some half-finished, some that Mum calls ‘rejects’ because they slope too far to the right or left. Mum’s a sculptor. Her last project was a camel on bended knee. A friend of hers went to the Sahara Desert and fell in love with the camel she rode and asked Mum to do a sculpture for her from a photograph. She has an entire pin-board full of postcards and letters from happy customers who have commissioned monkeys or fish or whatever.

  Mum’s long table in the middle of the room is covered with jam jars filled with brushes and open paint tubes. The room has that familiar smell of white spirit, clay, chalk and dust. ‘How are you, darling?’ she asks, her neck craned over her work. Her auburn hair is tied back in a navy and white dotted scarf and she’s wearing large silver hoop earrings that make her look like a gypsy.

  I realize the only tim
e I get to see or talk to Mum is either when she’s cooking and the kitchen smells of garlic – Mum likes to put at least ten cloves of garlic into everything – or when she’s in the studio.

  ‘Good day at school?’ she mutters, continuing with her work and humming along to the background music. Her hands are sticky from the clay. Mum, turn around, I think. Instead I walk in front of her. ‘Good day?’ she repeats distractedly.

  I drop my satchel on to the floor. I don’t tell her that I got told off yet again for wearing mascara. ‘Go and wash that black goo off your face,’ my boring maths teacher says again and again. Last weekend I was caught stealing black eyeliner, mascara and a block of spot cover-up from Boots, and the police came by the house to talk to Mum and Dad. It has been suggested that we need family counselling.

  ‘Stealing isn’t clever, Katie,’ Dad sighed. ‘Or if you have to steal, why don’t you make sure it’s something better than an eyeliner? And don’t get caught next time.’

  ‘Not bad. What are you listening to?’

  ‘Madam Butterfly.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a cheetah.’ She sits back and admires it. ‘When I was about your age, my mother took us to a wildlife orphanage in Africa. I always remember this cheetah rolling on its back like a big tame cat. I was tempted to put my hand through the bars to stroke it. I would have done too if Mum hadn’t pulled me away. You see, they could take a bite out of you, and more.’

  I flinch. ‘What do they like to eat?’

  ‘Beavers, game birds, impala, warthogs.’

  ‘I love its spots.’

  ‘Did you know, the name “cheetah” comes from a Hindi word meaning “spotted one”?’

  I shake my head. ‘What are those dark lines by its eyes? Has your paint run?’

  ‘Run? No! You are funny. Those are tear lines.’ Finally she looks at me. ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘The cheetah, silly.’

  ‘Oh, I love him. He’s beautiful.’

  ‘Here, have him, he’s all finished.’

  ‘Really?’ I smile. ‘But who were you making it for?’