The Half Sister. Catherine Chanter

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СКАЧАТЬ to apologise would be a strength, not a weakness. ‘I’m sorry, I want you to know I’m sorry, sorry for both of us, sorry that it all turned out like it did. And about this evening and everything else.’

      ‘Too late. You said the only words I’ll ever remember and never forgive.’ Diana mimics her sister. ‘I don’t believe a word you say.’

      ‘I feel sick.’

      ‘As long as you don’t spoil the sheets, you can choke on your own vomit, for all I care.’

      Now Diana is gone and all lights are out. It is an awful thing that has happened this evening, terrible things said by both of them, cats mewling and howling in a back alley, that’s what they’re like, cowering behind overfilled dustbins and scratching each other from walls topped with broken glass, and looking down from a window which will never open again, their mother, tapping and shaking her head. Valerie needs to use the bathroom, but at the top of the spiral stairs, she realises that she can’t find the switch, the stone steps fall away beneath her, probably all the way down into her sister’s top-of-the-range dungeon. Paul used to do that, take the light bulbs out, but he hasn’t been able to keep them in darkness in the end, has he? Diana is still down there somewhere. Valerie can hear the echo as the door from the passage to the landing is closed. Feeling her way to the window, she pulls open the corner of the curtain and looks down on the silhouette of the bronze boy. The moonlight shines on the child’s song hung on the wall. Diana tries to own everything with her posh words – not a ditch, a ha ha, not a picture, a sampler.

      ‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ hums Valerie, ‘where we sat down.’ She loves a bit of reggae and red, red wine. Reggae’s always been one of her favourites (second only to Elvis, who is definitely not dead), just the memory of the beat takes her back to the festival where she met Solomon for the first time and knowing he was something else straight away, dancing in the street as if there was no tomorrow.

      ‘Lift up your hearts, with the meditation lift them up.’ Without undressing, Valerie falls onto the four-poster bed. The visit has been like a grave robber; it has got out its spade and dug questions out of the ground where they have been quietly decomposing for years, and now the bones demand answers. Why did Diana do it? Why did she make it all up? Did she make it all up? She must have known the future would be impossible for her once she said what she did. To think of Solomon is to reconnect with his sort of wisdom. What’s happened must be forgiven. Tomorrow is another day. All we have is grace and hope. Tomorrow. Maybe there’ll be answers then.

      ‘Lift up your hearts, with the meditation lift them up,’ she sings drunkenly to herself as the room turns circles around her. Night night, Sol, love you. The thought of him in his cell is terrible, but it’s only three months and then they’ll be a proper family and the sky’s the limit. She can wait. Suddenly, she sits up. She never goes a night without checking on Mikey, she hasn’t kissed him goodnight, and him in a strange room in this strange house, but it’s too late now and she hopes Diana’s left the landing light on for him and the door open, like she promised. Night night, Mum, you sleep now, nothing left to fight about now. Night night, Mikey, God bless, she whispers as she slips under the silk bedspread.

      Her tears flow onto the huge goosedown pillows, and the song and her love for her son curl like a kind current around her head until she sleeps as she hums and she hums as she sleeps. ‘Let the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart, be acceptable in your sight, here tonight.’

      Her light is out.

      Leaning heavily on the closed door to the tower, Diana understands the turn of the key in her hand, hears the click of the catch, experiences its security like a zookeeper closing up for the night, turning his back on the restless beasts and stale cages and stepping out safe into the fresh air. She opens the landing window. The tower which has been like a child for her, coaxed and dressed and spoiled to death, is now polluted by her past in a way that Wynhope has never been in the three short years it has been her home. She was so full of hope. More fool her. Far from settling her slurried mind, the bitter air and the strange sounds of the night unnerve her: the barking fox, the relentless, repetitive bleating of a lost lamb and the breathing out of ghosts. In the centuries to come, there will be some other woman at this window and she will have become the ghost, nothing more than a footnote in Wynhope’s history, and her mother buried, even this same day. Her mother is never coming after her, Valerie and the boy will be gone tomorrow as well, taking with them their wheelie suitcase and sniggers and her last chance of ever being validated. So be it. She shivers. Somewhere beyond the stables, maybe in the Cedar of Lebanon, a tawny owl is shrieking.

      ‘Goodnight,’ whispers Diana as she creeps past Michael’s bedroom door. ‘Sleep tight.’ She can sympathise with a child who wants nothing more than uninterrupted sleep.

      In her bedroom, Diana undresses, holding tight to the bedstead and her routine, slips her silk dressing gown over her white cotton nightdress, takes up her place in front of the dressing table. Wiping from her face the thick layer of pale foundation applied for the funeral, she notices her mascara has run, and with cotton wool she disposes of the evidence that Valerie is able to make her cry. Downstairs, Valerie has stamped their mess into the very fabric of the carpet; however hard she scrubs, everything is stained.

      It is stupid to get in such a state. Tomorrow, today it must be now, Edmund will be home. She pulls the curtains across his parkland, his shadow sheep, his whole estate at night, as if by doing so she can bring him back in here with her; for someone who has made their own way in the world for over twenty years, it is extraordinary how she now feels incomplete if anything takes him away from her. She lies with one hand clutched tightly around the key to the tower in her dressing-gown pocket, like a child with a special object, the other hand pulling the empty pillow closer. She is thinking of the things she should tell him when he is back, he will believe her, because tonight of all nights, she realises, you never know when it might be too late, you never know when one drunken sleep might last a lifetime.

      Mikey is only small and not used to staying away from home. He didn’t want to sleep lost in this strange room in this half empty house in the middle of nowhere with nothing but fields and sheep and sky and trees and birds and poo. Mikey’s had three jobs so far in his life: the first is to make everything better for his mum and he’s the only one who can do that; the second is to do very well at school; the third is to stay awake, to be the lookout, and to make sure everyone goes to bed in one piece and stays that way until morning.

      Here, even the house doesn’t know how to go to bed quietly. It creeps around, it stands on the step which creaks, even its stomach rumbles. He is good at only being half asleep, at identifying stumbling on the stairs as the sound of grown-ups going to bed, and it triggered him to slip out from under the duvet and creep to his bedroom door, just to make sure. Which is why he was hiding behind his bedroom door like a spy, watching her, feeling the strange thin air of the countryside from the open window against his hot cheeks. He witnessed her turn the key, he saw her put it in her pocket, even though she promised she’d leave the door open, he heard the rattle of the handle as she checked it was locked, and then a quiet breathing out of something he thought was half way between laughter and cross.

      It didn’t make sense to Mikey. He was trying to unpick the magic trick with which Diana vanished his mother, along with the fantasy film of false candles and a four-poster bed and a spiral staircase which went all the way up to nowhere and all the way down to a hole in the ground. All gone, just like that, with one turn of the key. The house was fidgeting, it knew he was hiding there in his crumpled school shirt and trousers, it was going to give him away. What he wanted to say was give me the key, I’ll look after her, but even when he found the words, he was just not brave enough, never had been brave enough when it mattered, and then his aunt was turning towards him, surely she’d see him, hear his heart beating, but she walked on past and disappeared down the dark landing, like a ghost.

      Now СКАЧАТЬ