My Sister's Bones

by Nuala Ellwood

  I will myself not to go in, to wait until morning when my brain will be ready, but it’s no use, my hands are already pushing at the door. I breathe in sharply. My father’s anger permeates the space and it feels like any moment now he is going to come charging at me, ask me what the hell I think I’m doing snooping around like this. But all is silent as I step into the gloom.

  Nothing has changed. I stand, incredulous, looking at the collection of dusty furniture. The same mahogany chest of drawers; the same heavy velvet curtains; the same horrid brown wallpaper with spiky dandelions threaded through it. I see my mother’s head hitting the wall over and over again, my father’s hand holding her hair while he smashed her into the golden flowers. The room smells of damp fabric and cheap air freshener. Paul has obviously tried his best to spruce it up but my mother’s blood is all over this room. Even if the visible marks are gone I can still smell it in the air: a musty scent of fear.

  I close the door and step out onto the landing. A framed picture of the Sacred Heart looms ominously in front of me. The bearded Jesus holds his hand out toward me, a blazing heart pulsating in his chest. I hated this picture as a child, couldn’t bear to look at it. For me it symbolized everything that was wrong with my family: blind faith in the face of violence and adversity; submission to a greater good. “Blessed Jesus pray for us,” I read aloud as I stand in front of the faded picture. Underneath those words in spindly blue handwriting my mother has written the names of her children—two living, one dead—her husband and, finally, always last, herself.

  “What good did you ever do us?” I shout and my voice echoes through the empty house.

  I glare at the beatific man in the frame. What kind of God takes a child’s life away? I read my little brother’s name again and wonder for a moment what it must have felt like to drown, to gasp and flounder and call out for a mother who never came. I think of another child who didn’t make it and I close my eyes, trying to keep the images at bay. Enough, I tell myself, and with a sweep of my hand turn the picture over to face the wall.

  I am delirious with fatigue as I open the door to Sally’s old room. Someone—most likely Paul—has made the bed with freshly laundered sheets and there is a large fluffy towel neatly folded on the chest of drawers. The thought of a long hot bath is tempting, but I know it is not a good idea with strong sleeping pills in my system. Still, a shower might help.

  I take the towel and make my way back across the landing to the bathroom. I turn on the light and am greeted by a sight so horrifying it makes my toes curl: my reflection in the full-length mirror. Here I am, looking all of my thirty-nine years and then some. My face is lined and puffy, my hair a thick ball of graying wire wool. I make a mental note as I turn on the shower to check in with Anton for a full head of highlights as soon as I get back to London.

  The water burns my skin and as I scrub my face I smile at the futility of worrying about my appearance. What are a few gray hairs compared to the horrors of the last few weeks? My life has imploded and all I can think of is a cut and blow-dry.

  But then I remember my lovely friend Bridget Hennessey, one of the most fearless journalists I have ever known and my mentor when I started out. She had just come back from reporting on the war in Kosovo when we met and had endured a mock execution at the hands of a rebel gang. For ten days she was held hostage with a sack tied over her head while the sound of gunshots rang out from the room next door. They told her they had killed her driver and cameraman and that she would be next. The psychological torture she endured would have sent most of us mad but she held herself together until she was released. I remember watching her in the newsroom as she calmly typed up the account of what had happened, her perfectly manicured fingernails tapping at the keyboard. I sat there with my unkempt hair and bitten fingernails and wondered how she could have gone through such a terrifying ordeal and still think it necessary to get her nails done.

  “But that’s the whole point, Kate, my dear,” she said when I asked her about it later. “Real life can’t stop—it mustn’t stop, otherwise those bastards have won.”

  I step out of the shower and wrap myself in the large white towel. Warmth envelops my body and I close my eyes, imagining I’m in our favorite hotel in Venice and Chris is waiting for me in the bedroom. I can feel his rough, warm skin next to mine as I walk along the corridor; his fingers working their way inside me; the taste of mulled wine on his lips. But the bedroom is empty and cold and the feeling dissolves as I slip under the polyester sheets and close my eyes.

  Moments later I am in a shop filled with dust. It swirls around the room, seeping into the cavities and crevices like poisonous gas. As I step farther inside, the dust thickens and I can’t see. My mouth is dry with fear but I must keep going.

  This shop was once full of customers, full of life. Piles of travel brochures and black-market cigarettes lined its shelves and a small boy ran down the aisles telling his stories to anyone who would listen, but now all is silence as I walk through the mounds of rubble.

  The ground is different here, slick and wet, and when I look down I see my boots are covered in dark red stains. I’m no longer walking on rubble but trudging through thick, glutinous blood.

  I hear a camera click and its flash illuminates the room. The shock of the light makes me lose my footing and I fall, facedown, into the fluid. Looking up, I see a pile of stones, a small shrine amid an ocean of blood, and I crawl toward it, sensing what lies beneath. I feel his heartbeat vibrating beneath my hands and I begin to dig. I am a burrowing animal as I pull away the rubble, clawing at it with my fingernails. Spots of crimson dot the stones and I realize it is coming from my hands though I feel no pain. Then I see him, lying on his back, eyes wide open, arms raised upward, a baby looking for its mother.

  I try not to look at his face as I bend down to pick him up. Behind me, the camera flashes and the boy is illuminated in a harsh white glare. I can’t see him; he is dissolving into the light. Stop it, I cry to the man with the camera, you can’t photograph this, and as my voice echoes against the shattered walls the ground shakes. The boy looks at me, pleadingly, and I try to grab hold of his hand but it slips through my fingers. He is dust and I watch as he returns to the earth. But in the final moments he calls out.

  “Help me!”

  It’s the last thing I hear as the camera’s flash blinds me and I blink myself awake.

  I am lying crouched on the floor, scraping my nails against the carpet, and though I know that I’m safe, that it was just another nightmare, my mouth still tastes of dust. Hauling myself up from the floor, I see that the room is full of a cold, bluish light. I’d been so tired I’d forgotten to close the curtains.

  I go to the window. The sky is clear and cloudless. Such a contrast to the polluted skies I see each night in London. I stand for a moment looking at the moon and the twinkling marine stars and I think of Syria. There, darkness came down fast. Like a guillotine, Chris used to say. And I feel myself disconnect. It seems as though all of that—Syria, London, Chris—is another life, and this life, this town on the edge of the sea, is the only one that exists. I’m no longer a fearless journalist, I’m a scared teenager crouching once more behind the curtains, scared of the nightmares that come when I close my eyes.

  3

  Herne Bay Police Station

  10 hours detained

  Perhaps we should go back a bit,” says Dr. Shaw, “to when you first arrived in Herne Bay.” She looks down at the paper in front of her. “I understand it had been some time since you were last here. What made you return?”

  I sit and watch as Shaw crosses and uncrosses her legs, as she sips tea from a polystyrene beaker, wipes the dregs from her mouth, and places the cup on the floor beside her feet. The large, oval clock that hangs on the wall behind her head ticks rhythmically as we sit in silence, one pondering the question, the other awaiting its answer. An answer I am sure she already knows.

  I will be forty years old in a couple of months and as I sit in
this tiny, strip-lit room I see a cake with lemon icing and buttercream filling. I see my mother flitting about in a tiny kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl that is as big as her head. And I see myself, four years old, balancing on the edge of the kitchen counter watching her every move. “I want a cake the color of the sun,” I had told her. And my mother grants my wish, for after everything we have suffered together she can’t bear to let me down. If I want a sunshine cake then she will make sure I get one.

  I hear Shaw clear her throat and I look up, my mother’s face disappearing into the woodchip wall.

  “I fancied a bit of sea air,” I reply.

  Shaw leans forward and takes a cardboard file out of her bag.

  “We’ve spoken to Paul Cheverell,” she says, taking a piece of paper from the file. “He’s your brother-in-law, yes?”

  I nod my head. My chest tightens. What has Paul been telling them?

  “He told us that you came back because there’d been a family bereavement,” she says, reading from her notes. “It was your mother, I believe?”

  “Yes.”

  I stare at the wall behind Shaw’s head, desperately trying to erase the image of my mother’s grave from my mind, but it’s all I can see.

  “Were you and your mother close?”

  I look back at Shaw and tell myself that the sooner I answer her questions the sooner I can get out of here. I shall pretend this is work, that I’m sitting in a meeting room, not a police cell, and the subject under discussion is someone else: an abstract mother; a person who doesn’t make cakes or call her daughter “lovey” or cry at Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems. If I imagine this other person and not my real mother, then I can get through this.

  “Yes, we were,” I reply, smiling. Smile at the difficult ones, get them onboard.

  “You visited her often?”

  “Not as much as I’d have liked.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, my job means I’m not often in the UK for more than a few days at a time, and when I am here it’s nonstop.”

  I know how lame it sounds as the words come out but I can’t tell Shaw that I found it all so difficult; that the thought of seeing my beautiful mother in a nursing home, her mind gone, was too much to bear.

  “She was suffering from dementia?”

  “Yes.”

  I try to hold on to the image of the abstract figure, the hypothetical mother, but it fractures and I see Mum bending over the kitchen table with a pile of scrap paper, trying to find out where she’d written my aunt’s phone number. Those scraps of paper were her memory, her lifeline, but then she would lose them and get even more confused. At one point I sent her a tape recorder and I remember her sitting on the sofa trying to work out the buttons, confusion etched on her face. She had no idea what to do with it.

  “How long had she been in the nursing home?”

  “Not long,” I reply. “Just a few months.”

  “She must have deteriorated rapidly.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Though Paul has told me since that it was peaceful; that she died in her sleep.”

  “She’d had a stroke, is that right?”

  “That’s what they told me,” I reply with a shrug. I want to change the subject.

  “Your brother-in-law said you couldn’t get back for the funeral.”

  Shaw’s voice is cold and dispassionate and it cuts through me, reinforcing my grief, my guilt.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why was that?”

  Her words are bullets and I have to force myself to stay in my seat when every part of me wants to jump up and fight back.

  “I told you, my work keeps me overseas sometimes for weeks on end. I was in Syria.”

  “And you couldn’t get back?”

  “No. I wanted to but . . . it was difficult.”

  “So you missed your mother’s funeral. That must have been tough.”

  “Yes. It was.”

  I try not to think of that afternoon, of the men and the blood and the child crying out for me, and instead I think about the journey back to the UK. Sitting there waiting for the plane to take off, I felt something inside me break; I even thought I heard it snap, somewhere in my chest. It hurt, it physically hurt, like when you stretch an elastic band to its limit and it breaks in your hand. And in the midst of my grief for my mother was a gnawing guilt; the knowledge that I was running from an atrocity that I had played a part in creating. I had done something terrible, something I could never forgive myself for.

  But I don’t want to tell Shaw any of this, it’s none of her business.

  “It must have been strange coming back to Herne Bay after all that time.”

  Shaw’s voice brings me hurtling back to the present.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand you’ve been staying in your childhood home,” she continues.

  I nod my head and instinctively start to pick at my arm. The cuts are beginning to scab and they sting. I close my eyes and imagine painkillers and a large glass of Chablis, knowing that neither will be forthcoming. Shaw notices my rubbing and frowns at the lacerations that zigzag up my arm.

  “That looks painful,” she says.

  “It’s nothing,” I say, folding my arm into my chest defensively.

  “How did you do it?”

  “I said it’s nothing.”

  She looks at me for a few seconds, then seems to make the decision to carry on.

  “And your father, is he still alive?”

  She must already know this too. “No,” I reply. “Thankfully not.”

  “Why thankfully?”

  “Because he was a violent drunk,” I reply. “I hated him and he hated me.”

  “Why did you hate him?”

  “Because he treated my mum like a punching bag.”

  I pause. I’ve said too much again.

  “Look, I appreciate the therapy session but what’s this got to do with anything? I understand how this works, Dr. Shaw. I interrogate people for a living. But the issue is not with me—it’s with her.”

  “Kate, I just need you to be honest,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “These questions will help us get as clear a picture as possible of what has led to your being here. Do you understand?”

  Reluctantly, I nod my head.

  “We can take a break at any point,” she says lightly, as though addressing a recalcitrant toddler. “Just say the word and we can pause.”

  “No,” I snap. “I’m fine. Let’s just carry on.”

  “Okay,” she says, shuffling in her seat.

  She looks flustered for a moment and this pleases me. For a few moments I am the one in control.

  “You said your father was violent and that he hated you. Why did he hate you?”

  “I have no idea,” I reply. “Maybe I reminded him of my mother, who he also hated. Look, my parents had lost a child, my little brother, and it broke them. My mother dealt with her grief by cosseting me while my father just got angrier and angrier. He blamed my mother for my brother’s death. He was an alcoholic and when he was drunk he would lash out.”

  “Why did he blame your mother for the child’s death?”

  “I have no idea. It was his way of coping, I guess.”

  “How did your brother die?”

  “An accident,” I reply brusquely. I’ve had years of practicing this response whenever well-meaning people ask. “He drowned.”

  “And your mother was with him?”

  I hear screaming. From the corridor? I’m not sure. I look at Shaw but she hasn’t heard it. My heart is racing and I try to remember what they told me the last time this happened. Breathing. I have to focus on my breathing. I close my eyes and slowly exhale, aware that Shaw is waiting for me to answer.

  “Kate?”

  I open my eyes and take a deep inhalation of clammy air.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as I breathe out. “I’d rather not talk about that. It was a long time ago and it has nothing to do
with why I’m here.”

  “Okay,” says Shaw. “What about your sister, Paul’s wife, Sally—did your father hit her too?”

  I shake my head.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Are you and your sister close?”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Is anyone close to their sister? Are you close to yours?”

  “I’m an only child,” says Shaw.

  “Lucky you,” I reply snarkily.

  “I was asking about your sister, Kate.”

  “Okay, okay,” I exclaim, shaking my head. “Why aren’t we close? I have no idea. I guess our lives are just very different.”

  Shaw nods her head and scribbles something down. As I watch her I think of the last time I saw Sally, her face contorted as she yelled at me. You swan in here when I haven’t seen you in years and think you can start telling me what to do? We’re not kids anymore, Kate. I make my own decisions now.

  “In what way?” continues Shaw. “In what way are your lives different?”

  “In every way.”

  I think of the e-mail that landed in my inbox as I sat huddled in a Syrian basement: Mum’s dead. Thought you should know.

  One line. That’s all Sally could give me. One terse line that told me my mother, whom I loved beyond words, was gone.

  Bitch.

  “What was that, Kate?”

  I look up at Shaw, the memory of that e-mail coursing through my head. Did I say that out loud?

  “My sister is not a particularly pleasant person, Dr. Shaw,” I say. “We don’t get along. Can we just leave it at that?”

  4

  Monday, April 13, 2015

  Paul stands on the step with a beaming smile. He’s holding a shopping bag.