Sister: A Novel Part 6

'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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ny 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-s.h.i.+ny 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 pa.s.sive victim. But you were never tragic or pa.s.sive or a victim. You were joyful, pa.s.sionate 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 hoa.r.s.e. 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 rea.s.suring 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, sc.r.a.ping 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 f.u.c.k 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 comrades.h.i.+p between us; two veterans of the same war, battle-weary and emotionally b.l.o.o.d.y. 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 b.u.t.ton 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 s.h.i.+vering 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 s.h.i.+ft 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?'

'It's not a day job, it's an evening job.'

There was something brittle behind your humour. You had seen the hidden jibe; my lack of faith in your future as an artist.

Well it's more than a day or evening job for me, it's the only job I have. After three weeks of compa.s.sionate leave my boss's sympathy ran out. I had to tell him one way or the other, Beatrice what I was going to do, so by staying in London I resigned. That makes it sound like I'm an easy-going person who can respond to situations in a flexible way, trading in senior manager of a corporate ident.i.ty design company for part-time barmaid with barely a break in my stride. But you know that I am nothing like that. And my New York job with its regular salary and pension scheme and orderly hours was my last foothold on a life that was predictable and safe. Surprisingly, I enjoy working at the Coyote.

The walking helps and after forty minutes my breathing slows; my heartbeat returns to a recognisable rhythm. I finally take notice of you telling me I should at least have phoned Dad. But I thought his new bride would comfort him far better than me. Yes, they'd been married eight years, but I still thought of her as a new bride - fresh and white and sparkling with her youth and fake diamond tiara, untainted by loss. Little wonder Dad chose her over us.

I reach the Coyote and see Bettina has put up the green awning and is laying the old wooden tables outside. She welcomes me by opening her arms, a hug waiting for me to walk into. A few months ago, I would have been repelled. Fortunately, I have become a little less bigot-touchy. We hug tightly and I am grateful for her physicality. I finally stop s.h.i.+vering.

She looks at me with concern. 'Are you feeling up to working?'

'I'm fine, really.'

'We watched it on the news. They said the trial would be in the summer?'

'Yes.'

'When do you reckon I'll get my computer back?' she asks, smiling. 'My writing's illegible, no one can read their menus.'

The police took her computer, knowing that you often used it, to see if there was anything on it that could help with their investigation. She does have a truly beautiful smile and it always overwhelms me. She puts her arm around me to escort me inside and I realise she was deliberately waiting for me.

I do my s.h.i.+ft, still feeling nauseous and headachy, but if anyone notices my quietness no one comments. I was always good at mental maths so that side of barmaiding comes easily, but the banter with the customers does not. Fortunately, Bettina can talk for two and I rely on her this evening, as I often used to on you. The customers are all regulars and have the same courtesy towards me as the staff, not asking me questions or commenting on what is happening. Tact is catching.

By the time I get home it's late and, physically wrung out by the day, I long to sleep. Fortunately, only three stalwart reporters remain. Maybe they're freelancers in need of cash. No longer part of a pack, they don't shout out questions or force lenses in my face. Instead it's more of a c.o.c.ktail party type of scenario, where they are at least conscious that I may not want to talk to them.

'Miss Hemming?'

Yesterday it was 'Beatrice' and I resented the false intimacy. (Or 'Arabella' from those who'd been too sloppy to do their homework.) The woman reporter continues, at a polite distance. 'Can I ask you some questions?' It's the reporter I heard outside the kitchen window on Sunday evening talking on her mobile.

'Wouldn't you rather be at home reading bedtime stories?'

She is visibly startled.

'I was eavesdropping.'

'My son's with his aunt tonight. And unfortunately I don't get paid for reading bedtime stories. Is there anything you'd like people to know about your sister?'

'She'd bought her baby finger-paints.'

I'm not sure what made me say that. Maybe because for the first time you weren't just living in the present, but planning for the future. Understandably the reporter wants something else. She waits.

I try to summarise you into a sentence. I think of your qualities but in my head it starts turning into a personal ad: 'Beautiful, talented, 21-year-old, popular and fun-loving seeks . . .' I hear you laugh. I left out good sense of humour but in your case that's entirely true. I think of why people love you. But as I list those reasons I wobble perilously close to an obituary and you're too young for that. An older male reporter, silent until now, barges in. 'Is it true she was expelled from school?'

'Yes. She hated rules, especially ridiculous ones.'

He scribbles and I continue my quest for an encapsulating sentence about you. How many sub-clauses can a single sentence hold?

'Miss Hemming?'

I meet her eye. 'She should be here. Now. Alive.'

My six-word summary of you.

I go inside the flat, close the door, and hear you telling me that I was too harsh on Dad earlier. You're right, but I was still so angry with him then. You were too young to take in what Mum and Leo went through when he left, just three months before Leo died. I knew, rationally, that it was the cystic fibrosis that made him leave; made Leo so ill that he couldn't bear to look at him; made Mum so tense that her heart knotted into a tight little ball that could barely pump the blood around her body let alone beat for anyone else. So I knew that rationally Dad had his reasons. But he had children and so I thought there were no reasons. (Yes, had, because two of his children were dead and the third was no longer a child.) You believed him when he said he'd be back. I was five years older but no wiser and for years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn't want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult. But I'm not so sure of that now.

Outside your window, I see the reporters have all gone. Pudding bends her purring body around my ankles, blackmailing me into giving her more food. When I've fed her, I fill a watering can and go out of the kitchen door.

'This is your backyard?' I asked on my first visit to your flat, astonished that you hadn't meant 'backyard' in the American sense of a garden, but in the literal one of a few feet of rubble-strewn earth and a couple of wheelie bins. You smiled. 'It'll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.'

You must have worked like a Trojan. All the stones cleared, the earth dug through and planted. You've always been pa.s.sionate about gardening, haven't you? I remember when you were tiny you'd trail Mum around the garden with your child-sized, brightly painted trowel and your special gardening ap.r.o.n. But I never liked it. It wasn't the long wait between seed and resulting plant that I minded about (you did, hotly impatient), it was that when a plant finally flowered it was over too quickly. Plants were too ephemeral and transient. I preferred collecting china ornaments, solid and dependable inanimate objects that wouldn't change or die the following day.

But since staying in your flat I have really tried, I promise, to look after this little patch of garden outside the back door. (Fortunately, Amias is in charge of your flowerpot garden of Babylon down the steps to your flat at the front.) I've watered the plants out here every day, even adding flower food. No, I'm not absolutely sure why - maybe because I think it matters to you; maybe because I want to nurture your garden because I didn't nurture you? Well, whatever the motivation, I'm afraid I have failed abysmally. All the plants out here are dead. Their stalks are brown and the few remaining leaves desiccated and crumbling. Nothing is growing out of the bare patches of earth. I empty the last drops from the watering can. Why do I carry on this pointless task of watering dead plants and bare earth?

'It'll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.'

I'll refill the watering can and wait a while longer.

5.

Wednesday.