My Sister's Bones

by Nuala Ellwood

  “Fish and chips,” he says. “Herne Bay’s finest. I bet you missed them.”

  I haven’t but I feel strangely upbeat as I lead him through the passageway. For the first time in ages, I have woken with a clear head. The voices are silent. For now.

  “I wangled myself an extended lunch break so I thought I’d pop to Tellivers. I bet you’re dying for some real food after being in— Where were you again?”

  “Aleppo,” I tell him. “It’s in Syria,” I add, noticing the blank look on his face.

  “Yeah, well, I bet they don’t have food as good as this out there,” he says as he puts the bag on the table.

  It’s a fucking war zone, I think, as I stand in the kitchen doorway watching Paul set the table. There’s barely any food and the people are fighting to survive. The last thing I was thinking about in Aleppo was bloody fish and chips.

  “Actually, Paul, I’m not that hungry,” I tell him. “I’ve only just had breakfast.”

  “Oh, come on,” he says, patting the wooden dining chair next to him. “It won’t kill you and you could do with feeding up a bit. You’re all skin and bone.”

  He’s only trying to be friendly, I tell myself as I reluctantly join him at the table.

  “There you go,” he says as he piles my plate with fat chips. “Tuck in.”

  I put a chip in my mouth and chew slowly. It tastes surprisingly good.

  “I’ve spoken to your mum’s solicitor in Canterbury and she’s booked us in for one o’clock on Wednesday to sign the papers,” says Paul. “It shouldn’t take long. Oh, and you’ll need to bring some ID with you. Have you got a passport?”

  I stare at him incredulously.

  “Paul, do you think I could do my job if I didn’t have a passport?”

  “Oh, sorry.” He laughs. “Of course you have. Forgive me, my head’s full of work stuff.”

  He goes to the kitchen cupboard and brings out a dusty bottle of malt vinegar.

  “Want some?”

  I shake my head and watch as he drowns his chips with the pungent brown liquid.

  “Will Sally be coming?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, putting his fork down. His face looks grave.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s just Sally. She’s not feeling too good.”

  “You mean she’s drinking again?”

  “She’s had a few setbacks, yes,” he says, picking up a chip and twisting it distractedly between his finger and thumb.

  “Have you tried AA?”

  He shakes his head. “She won’t hear of it. She doesn’t think she has a problem. I wish you would speak to her. You might make her see sense. She won’t listen to me anymore.”

  “Oh, come on, Paul, she told me very clearly the last time we met that I wasn’t welcome. She practically pushed me out of the door.”

  “I know, but that was a long time ago and you know how sensitive she is about the Hannah situation. She thought you were blaming her.”

  “I was trying to knock some sense into her,” I say, pushing my plate away. “I don’t care if she was offended, she needed to know the truth. If she’d been sober, Hannah would still be here, it’s as simple as that.”

  “I know,” says Paul. “But at least Hannah’s okay. Thanks for your help with finding her, by the way. It really put our minds at rest.”

  “She’s my niece,” I reply. “I had to see for myself that she was safe, which is more than can be said for Sally.”

  “Look, I know you’re angry with her,” says Paul. “But Sally’s really deteriorating. Can’t you put this silly feud behind you and make up?”

  “I’m sorry, Paul, I just think there’s something odd about a mother who gives up like that,” I say, taking my plate and scraping the fish and chips into the bin. “I mean, does she even care?”

  “Come on, Kate, that’s not fair,” he says, wiping his lips with a piece of paper towel. “Of course she cares. Hannah’s leaving destroyed Sally. Her drinking got worse, she lost her job. She was in bits. She knows deep down it was her behavior that drove Hannah away—the drinking, the arguing—she knows that and it’s eating her up inside.”

  As I stand at the bin I see my sister’s terrified face all those years ago in the maternity ward. She was so young, just fourteen when she had Hannah, still a child herself. I remember sitting by the side of the bed, the baby in her little plastic crib, and Sally looked at me and said: “What do I do with it, Kate?”

  “They loved each other really,” says Paul, his voice interrupting my thoughts. “You should have seen her the first Christmas without Hannah, she was beside herself. But then you couldn’t have seen it, cos you were never here.”

  He picks up his plate and takes it over to the sink. “She’s your sister, Kate. She needed you then. And she needs you now.”

  “I tried,” I say, watching him as he skitters about the kitchen like a large confused bird. “But she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “No, you tried being the big reporter,” he says. “Investigating and phoning contacts. Which was great, because you helped us find Hannah. But Sally didn’t need to be interrogated; she just needed you to be her sister. She needs you now, Kate.”

  “Okay, Paul, but one thing at a time,” I say, standing up and opening the back door. The house stinks of stale vinegar and I need some air. “Let’s sort out Mum’s affairs first and then, well, I’m not promising anything, but I’ll think about it.”

  “Thanks, Kate. It would mean so much to Sally and to me if you buried the hatchet,” says Paul, grabbing his jacket from the kitchen counter. “I better get back to work now. But listen, I was thinking, you haven’t seen your mother’s grave yet. I can take you tomorrow in my lunch hour if you like.”

  The words “mother” and “grave” sound strange and I want to shake him and tell him he’s got it all wrong, that my mum’s just gone to the shop and she’ll be back in five minutes.

  “Kate, are you okay?”

  My eyes cloud with tears but I don’t turn around. I can’t let him see me cry.

  “I’m fine,” I say, blinking. There’s a solitary pink rose at the far end of the garden. If I stare hard at it the tears will stop.

  “But I would like to see the grave,” I say, still staring at the flower. “If you’re sure it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all,” he says gently. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Twelve thirty?”

  “Perfect,” I say, turning from the door. “And thanks, thanks for all you’re doing. I do appreciate it.”

  “Not a bother,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”

  I hear the door shut behind him and I sigh with relief. At last I can be alone with my thoughts.

  Stepping outside, I look at the garden. It’s a mess, a tangle of weeds and broken plant pots. My mother was a keen gardener. She’d grown up on a farm and I think part of her still yearned for the countryside. The vegetable plot she cultivated here was her little haven; a reminder of her childhood. She would spend hours in this garden tending to the potatoes and carrots and runner beans that she grew. Sometimes during the summer holidays I would join her and we would weave in and out of the beds, munching raw beans. “One for the pot and one for us,” she would say, her eyes shining with relief that for a few hours at least she was free of him. While he was at work she could be herself; she could laugh and sing and be a young woman again. Sometimes she would bring out her poetry books and we would sit on the patio and read together. It was my mother who I got my love of words from. She’d been all set to become an English teacher but abandoned her dream when she met my father and fell pregnant with me. “Back then careers and children didn’t mix,” she once explained to me. “You had one or the other. Never both.”

  I kneel down next to the spot where the rose bed had once been and place my hand on the gritty, dry soil. My mother had drenched the garden in flowers: tea roses with rag-doll heads, sweet peas that grew like clusters of fragile butterflies curled around tee
pees of twisted willow; nasturtiums with giant paw-shaped leaves that spilled out of an old tin kettle; candy-cane-striped peonies. And all along the path tall delphiniums that gave the garden an element of Edwardiana, of girls in white dresses and men in boaters. They were certainly an uncommon flower in suburban Herne Bay but that was probably why my mother liked them. It set her apart from the neighbors.

  But now the flowers are gone and all that remains is a mess of weeds and dry soil. This rose bed has haunted my adult life. I see it when I’m walking down the street in Soho or holed up in some bombed-out hotel. I see it when I close my eyes and pray for sleep. It’s the bittersweet symbol of my childhood, and as I kneel here I touch the ground and remember how it felt beneath me as I lay shivering in the cold.

  I was thirteen years old and my crime had been to intervene in one of my father’s tirades. Mum had cooked a chicken pie and he had come home drunk and made a fuss, saying it was dry. As usual I had stepped in to defend my mother while Sally just sat there like the doting daughter, agreeing with him. “Yes, Daddy, it is a bit dry.” God, she was unbearable. He really laid into Mum that night and I just saw red. I remember lunging toward him, putting my body between my terrified mother and his coil of rage.

  He stopped then and I thought for a moment that I’d helped, that he was seeing sense, but instead he grabbed me by the arms and marched me through the kitchen. After hitting me around the legs with his belt he opened the back door and shoved me out into the night. It was late November, bone-chilling weather, and though I was fully dressed it was still no weather to be out in. There was an empty compost bag by the fence and I fashioned a shawl out of it by ripping it down the middle and pulling it around my shoulders. But it was still so cold I could feel my teeth chattering. I hammered on the door, begging him to let me in. I called out for my mother, for Sally, but no one came. It seemed like hours as I watched the lights go off, one by one, in the house and I curled up on the softest spot I could find, my mother’s rose bed.

  Then a strange thing happens. As I stand in the garden all these years later a memory comes back to me, so vivid it almost knocks me off my feet. A small shadow in the window. Sally. As I lay shivering in the flower bed that night I’d looked up to see Sally standing at her bedroom window. I’d waved my arms and called out to her.

  “Come down and let me in,” I’d begged. “Please, Sally, open the door.” She wouldn’t have been able to hear what I said, but she knew I needed her help.

  She’d continued to look at me but her face was expressionless.

  “Please, Sally.”

  But she just shook her head, stepped back, and closed the curtains. A few minutes later I heard my father unbolting the door. He’d made his point and I was allowed back inside. It took me hours, huddled in every item of clothing I possessed, before I felt warm again. I see Sally’s face at the breakfast table the next morning, staring at me like I was a ghost, like she couldn’t quite believe that I’d survived.

  I shudder as I walk back into the house to fetch bin bags and a garden brush. How can a memory lie dormant like that for so many years, then spring forth unbidden? But I can’t let myself think of it. Not now. The memory is just that, a memory, a fragment of the past that has no place in the here and now.

  Instead I try to concentrate on the task ahead. I know little about gardening but I can weed and clear and that will be enough to while away a few hours and get the garden into some kind of order. I grab the bin bags from the cupboard underneath the sink and locate an old wooden brush in the pantry. The day is warm and I feel brighter as I make my way back out into the garden.

  It feels good to be in the fresh air, and the work, though laborious, is cathartic. The more clumps of tangled weed I drop into the black bag, the lighter I feel. After a couple of hours it looks like a different garden and I feel better too, though horribly hot and sweaty.

  I am just depositing the last of the bin bags into the wheelie bin by the wall when I hear a child laughing. It’s a warm sound and it flutters through my body as I walk back up the path. It sounds so much like . . . I walk toward the sound, and as I reach the rose bed I see him lying on his stomach reading his favorite comic; an old one that he’s read a hundred times. And he’s laughing, belly laughing, at the silly jokes. He had such a beautiful laugh.

  I look up and see a woman sitting in the garden next door. She is young, in her early thirties, and she wears a blue scarf over her hair. It is patterned with red roses and it makes me smile as I draw closer. My mother had one very similar that she used to wear across her shoulders when she went to church. Her rosy scarf we used to call it when we were kids.

  “Hello,” I call as I peer over the fence.

  She looks startled for a moment and puts the drink she is holding on to the grass next to her.

  “I’m Kate,” I say brightly. “I’m staying here for a few days.”

  “You are Mrs. Rafter’s daughter?” she says, getting up from her chair.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I say as she comes to the fence.

  “My name is Fida,” says the young woman. “Your mother talked about you lots.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” I say. “I miss her so much.”

  “I miss her too,” says the young woman, looking beyond me toward my mother’s garden. “She was kind. She used to give me . . . I can’t think of the word. They were pastries? Round with jam . . .”

  I can smell the doughnuts as I watch the young woman grappling with her words. My mother was a prolific baker and bread-based dishes were her specialty. She would always make doughnuts after my father had beaten me, and to this day I can’t eat them for they taste of both my mother’s guilt and my own sorrow.

  “Doughnuts,” I say. “Jammy doughnuts.”

  “Yes,” shrieks the woman, her face beaming. “Jammy doughnuts, that’s it. They were good. She would leave little boxes for me on the front step like . . . like Santa Claus.”

  “And your child, does he or she like doughnuts?” I ask, craning my neck to see if the little one is still there.

  The young woman’s smile drops and I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing.

  “Only I heard a child just now. They were laughing. It was lovely.”

  “I don’t have a child,” says the woman and I see a familiar pain in her eyes. “You must have heard children out the back. Sometimes they take a shortcut, the children from the school, they take the path by the fields.”

  “Either that or I’m hearing things.” I giggle, trying to lighten the mood.

  The young woman laughs but her eyes are sad.

  “You live alone then?” I ask, unable to quash the journalist in me.

  “Sometimes,” she says. “My husband, he is away a lot.” She gestures her hands up to the sky.

  “He works abroad?” I venture.

  “Yes,” she says. “Abroad.”

  “That must be tough,” I say. “Being alone so much.”

  “It’s fine. I’m happy,” she says, though she doesn’t sound it.

  “Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Iraq,” she says, her voice lightening. “Fallujah.”

  “Oh, I know it well,” I say. “I was there in 2004.”

  She nods her head and looks off into the distance. It is a look I have seen countless times before on the faces of people who have been forced to flee their homeland, a mix of sadness and confusion.

  “2004,” she whispers. “So you were there during the Battle?”

  “Yes, I was,” I reply.

  “I left just after that,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “My cousin was leaving and my parents they said go with him. Said it would be for the best . . .”

  She trails off, and a fat tear falls on to her dress. She hastily wipes it away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I understand. For me Fallujah was a work assignment but for you it was home. It must be so hard for you.”


  “Iraq is not my home anymore,” she says quietly. “This is my home.”

  She smiles but her eyes are still sad. There are so many things I would like to ask her but I know that this isn’t the right time.

  “Iraq will always be your home,” I tell her. “It’s part of you. Like this place is a part of me even though I left Herne Bay years ago.”

  She nods her head. “Sometimes I dream of Fallujah,” she says. “How it was when I was young and I wake up wishing that I could go back but I know it would not be the same now.”

  I am about to tell her about a recent article I wrote on the city when a loud crash stops me in my tracks.

  “What was that?”

  I look at the woman. Her smile has faded and her hands are shaking.

  “I have to go,” she says hurriedly.

  “Is everything okay? Can I help with anything?”

  “No, please, everything is fine,” she says, her voice trembling. “I have to go.”

  She pulls her scarf up so that it almost obscures her face then half walks, half runs toward the house. I stand for a moment looking at the empty space she has left behind and wonder what it was that made her react in such a way. But as I turn to make my way back to the house I see my mother reading in a threadbare armchair as my father’s key turns in the lock; I see her face turn from happiness to dread; and I think of the young woman next door, the fear in her eyes, and a shiver courses down my spine.

  5

  Herne Bay Police Station

  13 hours detained

  How long have you been taking sleeping pills, Kate?”

  I am standing by the tiny square window tracing an oval shape on the glass with my fingertip. I can hear Shaw breathing somewhere behind me. She’s annoyed that I’ve gotten out of the chair, that I’ve removed myself from her gaze.

  “Not much of a view, is it?” I remark as I look out on a small strip of parking lot. “It must depress you, all this gray concrete.”

  “Kate, could you answer my question?”

  Shaw’s voice remains steady though I know she is losing patience.

  “Sorry,” I say, turning to face her. “Could you repeat it?”