Aunty Lena, Mother’s best friend, usually picked me up from primary school, walked me home and saw me safely inside before she returned to her own house to keep an eye on Uncle Den. His leg never got better after being severed in an accident down the mine. ‘I’ve worked so long underground that I turned into a mole,’ he’d say to make me laugh, sticking his front teeth out and shutting his eyes to a black chink.
‘You know where I am, come and knock on the door if you need me,’ Aunty Lena implored every time she dropped me off from school with a smile, before walking back down the path and shutting the gate behind her ample bottom. She only lived a few doors down the street and I was used to making that short journey along the cracked pavement. There were twenty-five pavement slabs between our houses and I was so proud the day when I first managed to hop on each slab, counting them as I went along. I smile at the memory.
‘How are Aunty Lena and Uncle Den?’
‘Den can’t leave the house now. Elaine’s bearing up. She said she’d pop round tomorrow to see you.’
‘I’d like that,’ I say with genuine enthusiasm. Aunty Lena had been the nearest thing I’d had to a mother. I forwarded my address to her when I moved to Leeds but as the years passed any Christmas cards and letters she may have sent were left unanswered in that first house share because I’d moved on, crafting out my new life. I still kept the same mobile number though, hence mother dearest calling when she wanted something from me.
‘Did you think that about seeing me again? You’ve stayed away so many years, Annie.’
Here we go.
I think about my answer before I reply. ‘I’m sorry you’ve got cancer.’ It is the truth and the most I can give her. There, for today, she lets it lie and moves the conversation on to the ingredients for a shepherd’s pie she has in the fridge. I offer to make it whilst she goes upstairs for a nap. She’s tired, she says, a side effect of the medication.
She always did have an excuse to shut herself away in her bedroom.
Whilst mother is upstairs I feverishly chop up the onion and carrot with a sharp knife, slicing them to smithereens. After I put the meal in the oven I wash up, scrubbing, foaming and rinsing to rid the mugs and pans of their inner brown stains. When I reach for the tea-towel with one hand, the mug I’d used slips through my other wet hand and smashes on the floor.
Whoops.
I quickly sweep up the pieces and dump them in the bin, destined for the dustbin lorry and landfill, buried and never seen again.
Dinner passes in relative silence with comments about the state of the weather, it is unusually cold for this time of year, and the meal is followed by two hours of soap operas and dramas Mother follows on the television. I am glad for the diversion, to be able to sit not talking yet staring at a box. The only time my phone vibrates is when delivering a text from my bank telling me I have nearly reached my overdraft limit.
I lie still in the homogenous spare room single bed that night, as usual awake for much longer than I should be, recalling my secret childhood dream, the one thing that comforted me deep in the night when everyone else was asleep, but rest didn’t come to me. If I’d told anyone they would have tarnished it by laughing and thinking it childish and silly. I know it is. I’ve known it ever since I was a little girl and first thought it, a few nights after the police came and our house went cold but my secret kept me warm. Since then I’ve updated it and embellished it, holding it tight in the darkest hours.
I used to daydream that I was adopted and my real parents were longing to find me. Or perhaps I was swapped as a newborn in the hospital and they’d only just found out that who they thought was their daughter was actually a cuckoo in the nest and the true birth daughter of a bland, lower-middle class couple, the father now long dead. My real parents, whether I was adopted or swapped in the maternity ward, would be hiring lawyers and petitioning their MP: fighting to find me, to hold me in their arms. Mum would be called something like Margaret, Mags to her good friends. She’d have reddish cheeks, a short bob turning grey, a smile that shines past her lips into her eyes and a little middle-aged spread – won’t we all in our mid-fifties? – but the sort that comes from good home cooking and lots of long Sunday lunches with red wine and friends who love her for who she is. Dad would always do the washing up. He’d tease Mum about her cooking but secretly was proud of her, pleased that out of all his friends’ wives Margaret was the most friendly, the best cook, and the happiest. Dad, called something like Fred, would have a tanned face from hours on the golf course. Margaret would make fun of his addiction to the nineteenth hole, but she’d like the social life that came with the golf club and wouldn’t want a husband who stayed at home under her feet all the time. They’d have retired early because Fred had a decent job in industry and got a good pension payout. Some of their free time they spent holidaying at their caravan in the Lake District.
Yet the hole in their life, the empty place at their dinner table, would be me. Margaret and Fred wouldn’t have any other children. Oh how they’d long to find me and make their family complete. This is not my life. I was not meant to be thirty, single, jobless and back at my childhood home, nursing a woman who only matches the definition of the word ‘mother’ in the biological sense.
Every few hours I hear her shuffle to the bathroom, flush the chain then return to her bed. No noise comes from Gemma’s room, bar the sound of a creaking heating pipe. I don’t really remember when it ever did, what it was like when she was alive and loud, playing music and shrieking with friends in the way that teenage girls do. Or did Gemma ever do that? I didn’t, not in this house.
I was five when she never came back from school. When a police search failed to find her, and no one responded to my parents’ television pleas; her case was quietly placed on the back burner, lacking enough evidence to pursue it further. If she had run away there was no trace of her, but Father swore that to leave without telling them was completely out of her character. Her purse was never found, although she hadn’t taken a change of clothes, her building society pass books or anything of value when she went to school that day. The police case is still open but there is an assumption that Gemma is dead and her killer unknown.
The majority of what I remember doesn’t actually come from my own memory, it has been pieced together by things I’ve learned later on: snippets of conversations; overheard whispers; a police report I sneakily took from father’s desk and read; a photo album that was brought out on every family occasion to remember Gemma as Mary in the school nativity play (thank goodness my parents didn’t own a video camera – can you imagine me having to sit through home movies of her again and again?), Gemma in her Brownie uniform, Gemma performing in a ballet show (the only after-school activity I ever had was trying to cook beans on toast myself when I was so hungry that my stomach rumbled out loud) and blowing out the candles on her sixteenth birthday cake. If I try to picture her face it’s one of those photos that appears in my imagination, stuck in time forever in a split second.
When I try really hard to think of her, screwing my eyes up tightly to take me back to the young me (hell, I hardly remember even being five) it’s more a series of impressions rather than visualisations of her that come to me. The floral scent of a body spray mixed with the throaty cough of inhaled hairspray; noise around the house, something that absented itself since her disappearance; a body much bigger than mine but not quite yet a grown-up; and an intermingled sense of longing and fear when thinking about being around her. I don’t remember though her being the type of big sister who doted on the newborn and played second mum. No cosy, huggy, family set-up here.
The morning light is fighting to come through the thin curtains of the spare room. From my mother’s room I hear the calming low mumbling of a talk radio station but no sign of life.
Downstairs I’m once again on my own in this museum of a house. I’m staggered by how, despite my bedroom’s makeover, little else has changed since I was a girl. Yes, the TV is now a
flatscreen and the old yellow kettle with a farmhouse pattern on the side has been replaced by a shiny chrome version, but the sofa, most of the carpets, the wallpaper, the pictures, in fact all the basics you see when you walk through the front door, are the same. Perhaps the paintwork has been touched up but I doubt it has since Father died because I never knew my mother to do DIY or pay for a handyperson to do it for her. The house reminds me of an elderly lady dressed in her one best outfit that went out of fashion thirty years ago and is pulling at the waist and bust.
The only thing I can find to eat in the cupboards is bread. There’s a little bit of milk left but the freezer is bare. I make a mental note to go to a supermarket today and replenish the stocks – surely mother should be eating healthy, fresh food in her condition? My bank account is, however, as empty as the cupboards themselves and I’ve nothing to top it up with. Suddenly the stark reality of my situation hits me. I own nothing but my car, and even that was bought with a loan. The place I used to call home belongs to Shaun and he doesn’t want me back. I only have clothes and a few personal items to call my own. My whole life fits into two measly, battered suitcases that I bought in a rush two days ago from the local charity shop. Even the suitcases are second hand.
I feel tears building up behind my eyes and a prickling situation in my nose. I blink the tears fiercely away before they come. I have done enough crying over him. I will not waste any more tears mourning his lack of understanding and compassion over what I did. I must harden my heart, for where has love ever got me? Stuck back in 22 Greville Road that’s where, with a sick woman and a mausoleum to a dead sister.
The vibration of my mobile phone puts an end to my maudlin thoughts. I breathe quickly until I look at the screen: it’s not Shaun, it’s Priti. I quickly press the green ‘accept call’ button.
‘Annie, where the hell are you? It’s been ages!’ she greets me buoyantly, as loud as her effusive personality and colourful sari dress sense. Immediately I sigh with relief. I might not have money, a boyfriend or a life but I still have a friend on my side.
‘Priti! It’s so good to hear from you. I know, I know I should have called. It hasn’t been the best of weeks. How are you?’ What strange conversational formalities we English go through before knuckling down to what we really want to say.
‘Never mind me, what about you? Mark told me you and Shaun have split up and you’ve moved out. Where are you? Are you OK?’
I pause, wanting to let it all out but I know if I do it will be hard to put the cork back in to the emotional bottle.
‘Well,’ I giggle slightly nervously, ‘I’ve been better. Um, yes, Shaun and I have split up and he kicked me out. Is it only a fortnight ago that I last saw you, that wine night down the pub?’
‘Sounds like you could do with a bottle now.’
Priti knows me well. We met at a company I temped at eight years ago, a dull as dishwater telemarketing job that saw me sworn at down the phone on average fifteen times a day (I did the maths in an effort not to take the vehement strangers too personally) and we clicked immediately. She sat opposite me in her little pod, with her headphones on, pulling grimaces as her lilting accent poured sweet nothings about double-glazing into the phone’s receiver. That little act of rebellion brightened up the repetitive day and soon, when the supervisor wasn’t walking round our section, we struck up a competition to see who could pull the worst face whilst waxing lyrical about the product we had to cold sell. The trouble was I found it hard not to laugh, and one particularly boring Tuesday I found myself letting out a snort of hilarity when Priti attempted to stick her pointed tongue up her left nostril, lamentably at the same time the customer was telling me that she could do with some double-glazed patio doors for her back room because her grandson had run into the old one, concussed himself and now possessed a permanent scar on his forehead that had required seven stitches. However unfortunate that was for the boy it was even more so for me because my line manager so happened to be listening in on my performance at that point. Back to the temping agency the next day I went. My friendship with Priti, however, has lasted longer than any subsequent jobs. It was through her friend Mark that I met Shaun, them having been school friends who never moved away from their hometown and still hanging around with the same crowd.
‘What happened?’ Priti presses. ‘And where are you? Do you want to meet up?’
‘Well… you’ll never believe this. I’m staying with my mother.’
I move the telephone earpiece away from my ear to temper the high-pitched laugh that screeched out of it.
‘Yeah right, seriously, where are you?’
‘At my mother’s.’
Stunned silence.
‘God you must be desperate. Are things really that bad? You told me you never wanted to see her ever again.’ Priti isn’t one for subtlety or euphemisms.
‘I wish you could stay with me but with Tamwar’s brother still hogging our sofa-bed there’s no room. You really don’t want to sleep in the same room as him Annie, he’s disgusting. Snores like a pig and the room needs airing for hours once he’s out, only for him to do it all again the next night. And he hasn’t yet grasped the concept of tidying and washing up. He left his dirty underwear all over the bathroom floor until I threatened Tamwar with divorce.’
I get the picture. I can’t stay with her, not that I was angling for it. Living with a happily-married couple would not be best for my emotional state of mind at the moment.
Priti continues: ‘What happened with Shaun, Annie, have you split up for good?’
‘Looks like it. He threw me out and I haven’t heard from him since.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a long story.’ My voice begins to quiver so I shut up.
‘He threw you out?’
‘Yes, why do you say that?’
‘It’s just that, well, Mark also said that Shaun has been, er, quite close to another woman recently. Some blonde slapper. He only said this to me last night or I would have told you already.’
‘What?’
‘Shaun was down the pub with her last night and they were together. From what the slapper was saying they hadn’t recently met. I’m sorry Annie, he’s a shit. Shaun the Shit.’
So after everything he said, and all the blame he piled on me for what I did, getting rid of me was what he wanted all along.
The tears come down my face in torrents, turning my nose into a snivelling mess. How could I have spent two years with a man about whom I’d obviously known so little and meant even less to?
‘Oh Annie, I shouldn’t have told you over the phone, I’m sorry, so sorry… foot in mouth syndrome again.’
In the corner of my eye, amidst my sobs and sniffles, I see the shadow of my mother shuffle into the room, look at me, hesitate, then walk straight out again.
‘Can I see you at the weekend, Annie? I could come and stay a night. What you need is pizza, Prosecco and Priti.’
I think of the spare bed in Gemma’s museum that serves as an untouched memorial. Fat chance I’d have of mother letting Priti sleep there. It’d probably finish her off.
‘Yes, that would be great.’ The tears stop now and my eyes sting sorely. ‘I don’t think you can stop here though I’m afraid. There’s only my sister’s old room.’
‘The sister who died? Don’t worry, I’ll find a B&B. Tamwar will be happy having a lad’s night in with his brother.’
‘Yes, that’s her. It’ll be really great to see you.’
‘What about your job?’
‘I was made redundant last week. They didn’t give me any notice. Bit of a double whammy.’
‘Oh hell. Poor you… is it strange being back with your mother?’
‘She’s got cancer. She rang and left a message on my phone asking me to come back and help her. It was the only option I had.’
‘Cancer? That’s rough. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. We’ll find you another option. Trust me. Onward and upwards.’
‘
Gemma’s room’s still untouched. It’s like a museum,’ I tell her.
‘Annie, I don’t think you ever said, what happened to your sister?’
I take a deep breath and stare at the bland painting on the wall of a Victorian gentleman and lady promenading on the beach, seemingly without care or artifice.
‘I don’t know. Nobody does. She just never came back. That’s all I’ve known since I was a little child. Gemma went to school but didn’t return home.’
‘It’s the not knowing that must be so difficult for you.’
‘Well, she’s dead. It’s obvious. Gemma hasn’t been heard of or seen since 1989. She must be dead. You can’t fake a whole adult life.’
‘Could she have killed herself?’
That shocks me. ‘Well, I’ve never thought of that. Why would she want to? I think the police worked on the lines that she had been abducted.’
‘It’s fascinating. Don’t you ever wonder what was going through her head, what she was thinking, what did actually happen to her?’
‘No. I’m sick of hearing about her. She was all that was talked about until I left home.’
A pregnant pause. ‘That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?’
Priti’s not mincing her words today.
‘I guess so. I didn’t really ever know her,’ I reply, slightly tersely. ‘What you don’t know, you don’t miss.’
‘It must have been rough for you growing up in the shadow of that,’ backtracks Priti. ‘Hey, there might be something in her room, something that the police missed?’ She always did like murder mystery dramas on the television. I’m more of a reality TV fan myself.
I hear someone on the other end of the line calling Priti’s name. ‘Look, I’ve got to get back to work now, I’ll call you soon to make the arrangements for Saturday. Take care Annie; don’t let Shaun the Shit get you down. Love you.’
She hangs up. I walk through to the front room where mother is immersed in mind-numbing daytime television.
‘Morning,’ I say, with fake cheer.
My Perfect Sister Page 2