The Half Sister. Catherine Chanter

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      Chapter One

      Over half of the sitting room is now a bright, brilliant dazzling yellow; the rest is rent grey. Whoever designed these flats in the 1970s in Bracknell never thought about the fact that the windows are too high to let you see out unless you stand up and too narrow to let the light in when the sun is low over the tower blocks opposite. It can get you down, if you let it, but this place where they have arrived is so much better than the prison they have escaped. Valerie has been singing along, but now she picks up her mobile and turns down the volume on the radio.

      ‘Sorry, who did you say you are again?’

      Less than two minutes later, because that’s all it takes, she is perched on the edge of the imitation leather sofa as if she has somewhere to go, knowing that there is nowhere to go from here, noticing that the Spring Sunshine has rubbed off from the paintbrush to the remote control to the cushion, the news leaving its fingerprints all over her life.

      ‘Oh, Mum,’ she says. ‘Not Mum. Not now.’

      There is no point in singing any longer. Valerie switches on the telly. The reporter is ill at ease, looking over his shoulder as if he is about to be attacked, but in fact the destruction behind him is something to do with a tsunami, not a war. It is all a long way away and the news leaves the victims picking through the wreckage and switches instead to people chanting the name of their new president and celebrating in their thousands, a young man with a child on his shoulders cheering to the cameras above the surge and the swell of the chorus. ‘This is what hope feels like!’ he shouts. That’s how Valerie’s come to think of herself recently, a woman with the weight of her young son on her shoulders, a load that both grounds her and leaves her light as air and dancing. Leaning against the kitchen counter with her first cigarette for a long time, she studies this, their safe place, and imagines her mother visiting at last, hesitating at the door with potted-up purple crocuses from the supermarket in one hand, making up for lost time in the other in a what-might-have-been parallel future.

      Valerie kicks the stepladder, which knocks the paint pot, which tips out a slow curl of a yellow tongue that licks last week’s paper spread out on the carpet, and a thin black cat springs from its sleep up onto the coffee table, rippling the scum on a cold cup of tea and sending part of a half-finished jigsaw of Elvis crumbling over the edge onto the floor.

      Some time later, the slam of the back door tells her Mikey is back.

      ‘I’m home.’

      Half in and half out of his anorak, the child first notices the smell of fresh paint and the proportion of the sitting room which has turned yellow while he’s been at school, and only then registers the fact that his mother is crying. Dropping his reading folder, he joins her in picking up the pieces of the broken jigsaw.

      ‘You all right, Mum?’ he asks.

      He doesn’t want to repeat the question or hear the answer, so he says nothing more, kneels on the floor and presses the cardboard joints back into their sockets, the two of them together quietly reassembling the letters above Elvis’s head – Promised Land. He hands her a glittery bit of the star’s suit, she slots it into place.

      ‘Come and sit here, you!’ says Valerie, patting the sofa.

      She budges up a bit, he sits cross-legged at the other end, picking at the hardened piece of glue on his school trousers which has not come out in the wash.

      ‘What’s СКАЧАТЬ