‘Here, put this on your neck,’ she says.
I am not used to being looked after. I am not used to having an older sister. But I have decided to let Maranda take charge. I will play the role of a younger sister for the first time in my life. I rub the transparent gunge on to my neck.
We lounge on the cushioned mats, the heat rising through the marble floor, the beautifying masks slicked to our faces.
Biba sits a little way away from us, also wearing a face mask, even though she does not need it because she is not quite nine, watching cartoons on her iPad. I feel so carefree and happy. I don’t think that I have felt this way for a long time, perhaps ever.
‘Do you remember we had matching velvet jumpsuits, with a little zip up the front, mine was yellow, yours was brown?’ Maranda says.
‘No, I don’t remember,’ I say.
‘I was staying with you in the flat in Battersea for a bit, when we were really small. It was one night and the police were banging on the door. Dad gave us drugs to hold – he pushed the bags into our hands and then shoved us into the bathroom and shut the door. I remember being in that bathroom and looking down at you, at your blonde hair, you must have been about four, so I would have been about six, and I thought to myself, I cannot look after her, I cannot, because I am too small, and it makes me so sad.’
‘I don’t remember that at all,’ I say, and I find that I am crying a little, my tears absorbed by the mask. I am crying for many reasons, but mostly because I have discovered that someone else shares my experiences, someone else wanted to look after me when I was too small to look after myself. And it feels like walking through a door into a place that belongs to me but I never knew I had, a beautiful open place where I feel free.
Maranda has another gift for me. A memory of Candy. I explain how I can’t remember her.
‘I remember her,’ says Maranda. ‘I remember that she used to drive us mad. If we were trying to watch something on television she would stand in front of it and try to get our attention. She would not stop, even if we shouted at her.’
There is a photograph of Maranda in Marbella that occasionally appears on social media, Maranda as a chubby baby, naked but for a sunhat with a strap that goes under her chin, held by our father, who is showing her off to his long-haired, beaded, bohemian friend Mim. The comments underneath include an anecdote about a day Gavin and Kerstin went walking in the scrubby hills above Marbella with their new baby. They had neglected to take food, drink and milk. Soon enough baby Maranda began to cry, distressed by the heat, the noise of the crickets, the dry haze that rose from the bare, sharp earth. The adventurous, ill-prepared couple came upon a shepherd and this shepherd allowed Maranda to drink fresh milk from one of his goats. I imagine Kerstin and Gavin holding her under the goat so she could suck at a pink teat, warm milk dribbling down her cheeks, a tiny goddess, a founder of civilizations.
I like this story very much. I am even slightly envious of it. I feel like a weakling compared to my sister. She has survived so much. ‘For me, Dad was the sane one,’ she says, and I cannot imagine what that must have been like.
Maranda hasn’t heard from her mother for three years. Kerstin is still a drug addict, an alcoholic, the sort of person you see sitting on a bench with a bottle of vodka. The last time Maranda was in Stockholm she went to the flat where her mother lived, knocked on the door, called out. She could hear that someone was in the flat – her mother, she assumed – but no one answered the door.
‘It is my birthday tomorrow and I know my mum won’t even get in touch. But now you are here and I am so happy,’ she says, and she starts to cry.
On Maranda’s birthday we go to a terrifyingly sweaty SoulCycle class in Hollywood, we go to the shooting range in Burbank, we get matching tattoos, three birds for three sisters, and that night we get drunk at dinner with all her glamorous friends, who seem to include every famous Swedish person in Hollywood, including the actresses Malin Akerman and Britt Ekland.
Five months later, for the summer holidays, Maranda comes to England with Biba, who has never met her cousins before. We rent a house in Aldeburgh and eat chips on the beach in the rain. Hebe and Biba and Minna play and argue, run into a cold sea together, collect stones on the beach, the special ones with the hole in the middle.
‘Those are called hag stones,’ I explain. ‘They are magic. If you look through the hole you might be able to see ghosts.’
Later in 2017 Maranda’s mother, Kerstin, dies in deeply unpleasant circumstances involving drugs. Maranda cannot face returning to Stockholm to deal with this. Biba’s father (from whom Maranda is amicably separated) asks his mother to help clear out the flat, which is, apparently, shockingly horrible.
In 2018 I go to LA for my birthday. Maranda takes me to Joshua Tree National Park, we drink home-made absinthe with her friends, she cuts my hair into a sharp bob and on the evening of my birthday she asks one of her Tinder dates to take us to the Magic Castle to watch card tricks, illusionists and mind-readers. That summer Maranda organizes a beautiful farewell ceremony for her mother in Sweden, commissioning a bouquet in the shape of angel wings. Maranda tells me that now her mother is dead she finally feels free to be herself. She says she always felt unloved, unwanted, too much.
There is a bag of letters that have been found in Kerstin’s apartment, ones that our father wrote to Kerstin when he was stuck in Marbella with a broken leg and she had returned to Sweden. As the self-appointed family archivist I am the one to go through the letters (on another trip to LA). I am astonished by the neatness of Dad’s handwriting and how desperately he loved Kerstin. I find the letter Dad wrote to her after he learnt that she was pregnant and that she was considering an abortion. ‘Please! Please! Keep our baby!’ he writes. ‘Look,’ I say, showing Maranda. ‘You were wanted.’ She frames the letter and hangs it in her bathroom.
In the summer of 2018 Maranda and Biba visit the UK again. We go glamping in Devon, Maranda sitting on the pebble beach in Sidmouth wearing her skimpy black bikini, LA tan, gold jewellery (including Dad’s chain), perfect manicure, peroxide-blonde hair, multiple tattoos, buying the girls the biggest ice-creams she can find and laughing at the morris dancers who have congregated on the seafront. When we come back to London I take Maranda and Biba to see Dad and Candy’s grave, where we leave one of the hag stones we collected in Suffolk the summer before.
Three sisters in the same place for the first time in so many years.
35
2018, London
My mother has been hospitalized three more times since she got sepsis, once when she fell and broke her ankle taking the girls to school, and twice for other less serious falls. She walks with a stick now and is unsteady on her feet. She is still beautiful, though, her undyed hair barely grey, her violet-coloured eyes still changeable. She likes wearing jewel-coloured clothes and swanky shawls. She gets a fair bit of romantic attention at church.
And she still babysits for the girls, always bringing them a bar of her favourite dark chocolate (which she insists is healthy). Sometimes she will mistakenly call my older daughter Gavanndra and my younger daughter Candy.
The girls love their nanny. She likes to go shopping with them, and lets them buy whatever impractical and sparkly outfits they desire. Minna wore the Supergirl swimming costume (complete with red netting skirt) my mother bought her constantly for about three years, even to swimming classes.
Sometimes my mother seems giddy and girlish to me. She does not have much sense with money, even though she is a trained accountant. She invested all her savings in an apartment in Spain just before a property crash. My father stayed in the apartment, by himself, six weeks before he died. He’d had a bad chest infection and thought that the dry, sunny climate would be good for his health. Mum says that after he came back he suggested they remarry. She doesn’t know if he was joking. She thinks he probably just wanted to spend more time in her apartment in Spain. She had to sell it a couple of years after he died for a lot less than sh
e bought it for.
My mother has God and she has us.
She also has the memory of Candy.
It has taken me three years of writing, reading, imagining, grieving and various other therapies to feel brave enough to talk to my mother about my sister. But finally I am ready. I don’t feel scared any more. I only feel curious. Impatient even.
I walk to her flat on a crisp and chilly day, just like the one I spent with my daughters in the playground outside the Horniman Museum. My mother and I sit on comfortable chairs in her sitting room and I ask her to tell me about the daughter she lost.
‘She was a very pretty baby, just like you. She was an adventurous little thing. When she was fifteen months old, she climbed up the big plant we had in the sitting room. I was in the kitchen making her lunch and I heard this almighty crash. When I found her she was underneath the heavy plant pot. Her leg was fractured and she had to have a plaster cast. She had only just started walking and had to go back to crawling. Every so often she would say to me, “Do you remember when I had to crawl around with my leg?” And I would say, “Yes, and do you remember climbing up the flipping tree!”’
I laugh and so does Mum. She does not seem sad to be talking about Candy; she seems to be enjoying herself. I ask what Candy looked like, how she dressed.
‘She was a very flamboyant child. She always wore her big pink coat and her shoes undone. Sometimes, when I was taking her to school, I would walk a few paces behind her because she looked so extraordinary. As long as I could see her, I thought it was all right.’
I cannot remember walking to school with Candy, I only remember going by myself, taking the bus over the bridge, my keys in my school bag, always so independent and self-contained. I think what I learnt, very early on, was that I was the only person I could depend on. But Candy didn’t feel that way.
‘She was not as academic as you – it took her longer to learn to read – but she was very artistic, she loved dancing and swimming. She had very close friends.
‘I wouldn’t say that she was bossy, but she would never do anything she didn’t want to do. Once, during a swimming lesson, the instructor told her to put her face in the water. She said no, and he said, “Come on, put your face in the water, it’s all right.”
‘“No.”
‘“Really, it is OK, put your face in.”
‘So she just climbed out of the teaching pool and went to the big pool and started playing there. It was the same with her tutor; she really ruled the roost with him. Once, she had done some work and then called out, “Mummy, I would like a cup of tea.” And I said, “No. When you have finished you can have a cup of tea, darling.” So she tore up the work she had done. The tutor, who was only a young guy, was like “Ooh! What are we going to do with her?”’
I had a different tutor, an old man with dangling BFG ears who smelt of instant coffee and would show me how to solve maths problems with a sharpened pencil. I took our lessons very seriously. I cannot imagine being the sort of person who would tear up a piece of work on a whim. We must have been so different.
‘She was more attached to her cuddly toys than you. She was very careful with all her dolls. She would say, “There is no point in having a baby if you don’t look after it properly.” She was very precious about her things. I think the worst occasion for her was when the police came to search the flat. They went through all her stuff, and took her dollies’ hats off their heads to look for drugs. She was very particular about how her dolls were arranged, so that was just a complete nightmare for her, poor little sausage.
‘At night I would sometimes have to sit beside her for hours before she would go to sleep, and then when she was seven or eight years old she started to share a bed with us. She didn’t want independence. She wanted to stay close to us.’
Mum starts to look sad. She reaches for a tissue and blows her nose.
‘I think she had some kind of spiritual knowledge that she didn’t have very long with us. From a very early age she would say, “I am never going to live anywhere but with you and Daddy. I am not going to grow up,” and I would say, “Can you not say that, darling, I don’t like it.”’
‘Oh, Mum,’ I say.
But as heartbreaking as this conversation is, it is also beautiful. Just as I gave my daughters memories of Candy, my mother is giving me memories of her, placing them gently in my mind, bringing her to life.
I turn off the Dictaphone and we look through the red leather-bound photograph album that my parents compiled after Candy died, filled with pictures of her looking mad, fun, wild, happy, sad. Her school reports are also stuck in the album and I read these aloud.
1986
Candy is one of the youngest children in her age group. She has been very immature but recently her attitude and concentration on her work has suddenly improved. Her written content is good but her thoughts run away with her and she leaves out words.
1987
Candida gets on well with her peer group and has some special long-standing friendships. She enjoys school and is always willing and eager to take part in all the activities offered.
1988
Candy is usually a very helpful girl. She can be a little aggressive towards other children if they cross her but generally she is kind.
I feel if she listened and concentrated without being distracted she would make better progress. She needs lots of help and encouragement with her reading and lots of positive confidence-building.
1989
Candy speaks very well and should try not to use the babyish voice she uses sometimes. She has recently shown a great interest in writing stories so perhaps this will help her reading, which she finds rather a chore … Candida is outgoing and loving. She works enthusiastically if not always with care. She loves to paint and her work has improved tremendously over the year. She still needs to give a lot more attention to her reading. She has a tremendous sense of fun and is well liked by her peers. I have enjoyed her larger-than-life personality.
And then I suggest that we open Candy’s box.
After my father left home to live in Putney my parents could not agree who should have Candy’s box, so it came to me. I had it in my bedroom, by my bed. I kept my little black-and-white portable television on it, my glasses, ashtray, cigarettes, usually a cup of tea. I didn’t like the box. Sometimes when I was pissed or high I imagined it was full of toys that were decaying, melting Barbie dolls and mouldering pink fluff. The exterior might look all right, especially when I polished it, but inside was hell, just like me.
When my mother sold our flat, the autumn after I graduated from Cambridge, and I had to move out of home, my parents agreed that my father would have Candy’s box and ashes and my mother would have the photograph album. Over a decade later my father died. Candy’s ashes were buried with him and her box was returned to my mother.
It has never been opened.
‘If you like,’ says Mum. ‘If we can open it. You lost the key, remember.’
‘I didn’t lose the key!’
‘Well, that was how it came to me, without the key.’
‘It would have been Dad who lost the key.’
The key doesn’t matter – it was only ever ornamental. I find a long match and poke it into the fancy bronze lock. It springs apart.
The box was packed messily by my parents, in grief, during a time that was harrowing and unreal. I kneel by the box and begin to pull things out, item by item, my mother watching. I lay the items on her bed, fluffy chick puppets, a wicker box containing pencils, a mirror, a lipstick without its lid, wet-look gel and a large safety pin, her straw hat, her ruler with her name written on the back in pencil, a recorder, a tape of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, her purse containing twenty-two pence in coins and a shilling, a fluffy panda, a hand-sewn felt dog with a plastic bead necklace, a yellow neon hairband, a foam red nose, a glass elephant ornament, a screen print of a butterfly, goggles, the rubber perishing, two pairs of sunglasses, brown fluffy bear-foot slippers
with soft claws, a pink bikini, a red swimming costume, a swathe of pink chiffon that I recognize from a photograph of her in a school show, a bar of fancy soap in its plastic case, various other fluffy animals, a smudged red lipstick kiss on a white napkin, a tape measure, a small plastic Donald Duck, two identical plastic dolls with pink hair and sunglasses, a flower press, the album of tributes from her funeral, the clothes she wore the day before she died, a pink skirt and white broderie anglaise sleeveless top. The hood from her pink coat.
My mother picks up her bikini.
‘It’s so small,’ she says. ‘The dear girl,’ she says.
And she sits on the bed and sobs and I hug her and cry too.
Candy’s things are so much more powerful than any words. They radiate her individuality. Here is a person; here is a short life, mapped in possessions.
I arrange her things on the bed so that we can look at them all, pick them up, remember them, remember her, then I pack them away neatly, leaving the box unlocked. I take one of the plastic dolls with the pink hair and sunglasses, and my mother takes the other. This doll seems to contain so much of Candy’s personality: fun, flamboyant, devil-may-care. I put her in my handbag and take her to the theatre that night to see Angela Carter’s Wise Children, Candy balanced on the red velvet armrest next to me. I think she enjoys it, after being shut in the darkness for so long.
One of my favourite myths isn’t Greek or Roman, it is Egyptian, the story of the goddess Isis and her brother Osiris. As well as being brother and sister, Isis and Osiris were husband and wife. They also had a brother called Seth, who envied Osiris and made many attempts to kill him. Seth would do terrible things, like locking his brother in a jewelled coffin and tossing him into the sea. But Isis always managed to save Osiris. Finally Seth decided to thwart Isis by chopping Osiris’s body into fourteen pieces and spreading the chunks throughout Egypt, up and down the Nile, to make sure he could never be put back together. But Isis was determined to find every last bit of her brother and she travelled the kingdom, hunting for his remains. Eventually she found them all and laid the pieces of Osiris on the ground. She used spices and magic to bind him together, to make the bones fuse and the muscles tighten. She wrapped him in bandages, spoke elaborate spells and words of love, and his stilled heart began to beat and the blood to flow in his veins, so his eyes could flutter open and his brain recognize that he was alive and that above him was the face of Isis, looking anxious and beautiful.
The Consequences of Love Page 22