My Sister's Bones

by Nuala Ellwood

“Harry says he told you to take the rest of the week off.”

  “Yes, he did,” I say. “And he was great about it. I’m sorry, truly sorry for what happened to Rachel. I don’t like the girl but I shouldn’t have hit her. I do know that.”

  “And can you tell me what happened when you left the office?”

  I look at the papers in her hand and my mouth goes dry. She can’t know. It’s not possible.

  “Kate?”

  “I’m sorry . . . My head is spinning. I just need a second. . . .”

  I jump up from my seat and walk to the tiny window, placing the palm of my hand on the glass. Behind me Dr. Shaw shuffles in her seat and as I watch the light fading over the parking lot I try to blink away the memory of that night.

  “Kate, are you okay?”

  Her voice merges with the others in my head and as I stand looking out at the gray expanse of concrete and the bleak sea below I think of my mother and how she implored me to get out of this town and make a better life for myself. And I did it. I got away, as far away as possible. But now I’m trapped in its clutches again. And I know that this time there is no escape.

  8

  Tuesday, April 14, 2015

  The graveyard is deserted when we arrive and I hang back while Paul walks on ahead of me through the ornate wrought-iron gates.

  “It’s this way,” he calls as I stand on the path, clutching a posy of sweet peas to my chest.

  “Yes, I know,” I reply, and as I step inside the gates my stomach grows heavy with dread.

  “I hate this place,” I say, catching up with Paul. “Always have.”

  He smiles and pats my shoulder.

  “We don’t have to stay long,” he says, his voice upbeat. “Whenever you want we can get out of here.”

  “I just want to see her,” I reply as we weave in and out of the gravestones. “I want to see my mum.”

  There are so many graves. It is hard to imagine the town producing enough people to fill the vast space, but here they are spreading out in front of us, the great and the good of Herne Bay from the nineteenth century to the present day.

  I shudder as we pass the church, squat and unremarkable in its neat grassy plot, remembering how, as a child, the smell inside that place would make me feel sick. Every part of it, from the clammy troughs of holy water at the entrance, contaminated by strangers’ hands, to the claret carpet that snaked its way from the aisle up to the altar, felt like it was closing in on me. When the priest finally uttered the words, “Go, the mass is ended,” I would clamber across the parishioners, clutching my chest as I ran for the door. Sitting in that church was the closest thing to being buried alive that I could imagine. Yet, for my mother, it was comfort and salvation; the place where her grief could be soothed with incantations threaded along the beads of her stark white rosary. I never understood that.

  Paul catches me looking up at the ugly building.

  “I used to bring your mum here,” he says. “Before she went into the home.”

  “She couldn’t get enough of the place,” I reply with a half laugh. “Used to bring us here every week when we were kids. Never on Sundays for morning mass like most people, but Saturday night, because that was when the priest heard confessions.”

  “Yes, it was always Saturday night,” says Paul. “I’d wait for her in the car and she would be hours in there. I used to wonder what terrible sin she’d committed to make her confess every single week. I mean, your mum was one of the gentlest, kindest women I’ve known. What could she have felt so guilty about?”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “Who knows, but she’d had a lot of grief to deal with. Maybe talking to the priest helped.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” says Paul.

  We walk on as row upon row of headstones open out before us. I recognize the older ones, the ones crumbling and caked in lichen that date back to the 1800s.

  “I don’t know about you,” says Paul, frowning as we step through them, “but when I go I want to be cremated. A nice neat dispatch.”

  “Me too,” I say. “I’ve already stipulated it in my will.”

  “I should do the same,” says Paul. “Then there’s no confusion.”

  We walk through the older graves and my stomach contracts when I see a familiar name.

  “Alexandra Waits,” I say, stopping at a moss-covered stone. “Still here.”

  “What are you talking about?” asks Paul. “Who’s Alexandra Waits?”

  “She’s the girl with angel wings,” I say, pointing to the ornate sculpture atop the grave. “When I was little I used to scare myself by imagining I could see ghosts in this graveyard. I particularly liked this stone because of the wings and the fact that the little girl was my age. I used to sit here and talk to her, tell her my problems.”

  “That’s a bit weird, Kate,” says Paul, laughing awkwardly.

  “It was probably all the gothic stories I was reading,” I say, running my fingers over the gnarled wings. “But, seriously, I always felt calm when I came and sat with Alexandra. It felt like she was really listening.”

  “Like your mum and her priest,” says Paul.

  “Yeah, I suppose so. I used to hide out here while the mass was going on. Sometimes I even had a sneaky cigarette.”

  “Always the rebel,” says Paul.

  “Hardly.”

  “How old were you?”

  “About eleven,” I reply. “I would sit for hours and imagine what kind of life Alexandra had lived, what she looked like. I guessed she would have had dark hair like me and that she liked writing, but because it was the 1800s and she was just a girl no one took her seriously. So she threw herself into the sea, because if she couldn’t be a writer, then it was no use living anymore. That’s the story I came up with anyway.”

  “It’s a good story,” says Paul. “Though she probably died of TB like everyone else in those days.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I say. “The last time I visited her I got scared out of my wits. I was being silly and trying to summon her by repeating her name over and over: ‘Alexandra Waits, Alexandra Waits.’ And I heard someone say my name. My full name.”

  “You serious?” says Paul, frowning. I can tell he’s uncomfortable with all this.

  I nod my head and look back at the angel wings, remembering the terror of that evening and how I ran all the way back to the church, looking over my shoulder to see if Alexandra was chasing me.

  “That’s really creepy,” says Paul, shuddering. “I hate anything like that. Makes me go all funny.”

  He stumbles as we leave the old graves behind and I smile. I didn’t realize he was so easily scared.

  “There’s no need to worry,” I say as we head toward a cluster of new graves. “Sally told me, years later, that she’d followed me out of the church and hidden behind a tree. It was her voice that scared me half to death.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” says Paul quietly. “She’s still scaring us half to death, isn’t she?”

  I nod my head as we go on, names and ages flashing in front of my eyes: Helen Stamp, 56 years; Judy Turner, 78 years; Morgan Hyatt, 6 months; Ian St. Clair, 30 years. Some of the gravestones have photographs on them and ones where babies are interred are festooned with balloons and pictures of cartoon characters. A halogen Minnie Mouse floats in the breeze above a white headstone, its smiling face bearing down ominously onto the graves.

  “Look at that, eh,” says Paul as we pass the tiny gravestone. “Six months old. No age to die that, is it? No age at all.”

  I shake my head and try not to think of that terrible night but as we cross the path I’m back in the lift, falling through space. I put my hand on Paul’s arm to steady myself and as I look up I see the mulberry tree and I know that Mum is near. She’s come to save me from falling farther.

  “Bury me beneath the mulberry tree,” I whisper.

  “What’s that?” asks Paul.

  “Oh, nothing,” I say. “Just a memory of Mum.”

 
; It was something she had written at the back of her Sunday missal. I never knew what it meant but the line stayed with me over the years. Now it all makes sense. She wanted to be buried next to her baby son.

  “It does that to you, this place,” says Paul. “Brings back all sorts of memories.”

  “Yes,” I reply, walking past the stones that lead to the tree.

  Past Rita Mathers who has been “sleeping peacefully” since 1987 and Jim Carter who has been “one more angel in Heaven” for the last thirty years, until there it is. A simple rectangular piece of granite, slim and unobtrusive, marking the final resting place of my parents and brother.

  As I look at my father’s name I go cold. Why would she want to be buried with him? But then I think of the mulberry tree. David is here. There is nowhere else my mother would want to be.

  “Here we are,” says Paul, standing back so I can get a closer look. “The stonemasons got it finished in time for your visit, thank goodness.”

  “Yes,” I mumble as I stand holding the sweet peas tightly in my hands.

  The flowers that must have been placed there on the day of the funeral lie shrunken and brown on the grass by the stone. I pick them up and set them aside, then place the fresh sweet peas on the ground. The air smells of soil and the delicate scent of the flowers as I crouch by the stone and read the inscription. Here it is. Mum’s life and death neatly summed up in three lines.

  Gillian Louise Rafter

  14th November 1945—26th March 2015

  Forever in our hearts

  I skim over my father’s inscription and read the writing at the bottom of the next stone.

  In Loving Memory of

  David Robert Rafter

  18th January 1977—23rd August 1978

  Sleep in the arms of Jesus, little man

  I close my eyes and try to imagine what my brother would have looked like as he grew up; what kind of a life he would have led. But like Alexandra Waits, he is just a name inscribed on stone. If only I could remember him. I let myself sink down to the grass as the smell of sweet peas wafts across the air, and I trace his name with my finger.

  But as I go to stand up, someone screams.

  “What was that?” I say, looking up at Paul.

  He is standing above me, his face blurred by the sun.

  “What?”

  “That . . . noise,” I say, holding a finger to my lips. “Listen.”

  “I can’t hear anything,” says Paul. “Unless it’s your friend what’s-her-face.” He laughs nervously.

  “It was . . .” I begin. “It was nothing. Probably a sea gull.”

  But I know what it was. It was the old woman. Why won’t she leave me alone? I kneel down by the grave again.

  “Sally told me a bit about your brother,” says Paul, coming to kneel next to me.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Not much really, just that she had a brother who died before she was born. That he’d had an accident.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “I don’t remember him. I was only three years old when he died. He was just a toddler. Mum had taken him to the beach one day and he got into the sea. She tried to rescue him but the waves were really strong and they carried him away. That’s as much as I know. Mum never liked to talk about him.”

  “It must have been devastating for your parents.”

  “It was. They never got over it. Sally and I spent our childhood trying to put them back together. It didn’t work.”

  “It’s tough being a parent,” says Paul. “Or stepparent in my case.”

  “Yes, but it’s not really the same, is it?” I say. “You know that one day you’ll see Hannah again. But for your child to die, well, it’s just . . .”

  I swallow the words. This place is starting to get to me.

  “Have you never wanted to, you know, do the whole family thing, settle down?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “So there’s no one on the scene at the moment?” he says jokily. “No fella back home in your swish London pad?”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Paul,” I say as I stand up. “You know I’m a terminal singleton. Now, tell me more about the funeral. Did many people come?”

  “A few,” he says.

  “Really?” I press.

  “Yes,” he snaps. “I didn’t let your mum down, okay? We gave her a good send-off.”

  He sighs and pushes a stray bit of hair away from his eyes. He suddenly looks exhausted.

  “I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me. I know these last few weeks must have been hard for you and I really am grateful you were here for Mum at the end.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and he looks at me and smiles.

  “It has been hard,” he says. “But we coped. We got through it.”

  I watch as he picks up the sweet peas and puts them in the stone vase by the grave.

  “All the old crowd turned up,” he says, arranging the flowers. “Your aunt Meg came down from Southend and a few of your dad’s mates from the pub.”

  “And Sally? Did she come?”

  He rests his hands on the stone and closes his eyes.

  “Paul?”

  “She—she wasn’t well enough,” he says. “And then . . .”

  “Paul, what is it? Come on, you can tell me.”

  He gives up trying to keep it in. “When she heard about your mum she just lost it. She’s locked herself in the conservatory with a stash of booze and she won’t come out except to buy more drink when I’m at work. She doesn’t wash, she barely eats. I don’t know what to do, Kate. I’m scared.” He buries his face in his hands.

  I kneel down next to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” I say soothingly. “You’re not on your own. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  “Will you?” he says, looking up at me. “Do you mean that? You see, I’ve tried everything—kindness, tough love, I even tried forcing her to AA—but none of it’s worked. She needs you; even though she pushes you away, she needs you.”

  I stand up and look at my mother’s name on the headstone. She would want me to do whatever I can to help Sally.

  “I made sure they played all her favorite hymns,” says Paul softly as he gets to his feet. “‘I Watch the Sunrise,’ ‘Queen of the May,’ and ‘Abide with Me’ as they brought her in.”

  As I stand listening to Paul’s account of the funeral I close my eyes and imagine my mother’s coffin sitting in front of the altar, a tiny casket, hanging there in the air like a frail bird.

  Beside me, Paul starts to sing the opening lines of “Abide with Me.” I look at that damned mulberry tree as Paul sings about the eventide and I wish my mother hadn’t had to deal with such violence. She was a good person and she didn’t deserve it.

  Paul stops singing and looks at me.

  “Sally chose the reading,” he says. “Even though she couldn’t make the funeral, she still wanted to have a bit of input.”

  “What reading was it?”

  “One from the Bible,” he says. “She said your folks had it at their wedding. What was it again? ‘Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’ That one.”

  My body goes cold and any sympathy I was beginning to feel for my sister dissipates. Why would she choose such a thing? It was nonsense, and a huge slap in the face to our mother, a woman who had endured more than she should ever have had to at the hands of that man.

  “So you see, Sally did care,” says Paul. “She still wanted to be involved.”

  “Paul, you know very well that Sally couldn’t stand our mother.”

  “Oh, come on,” he says. “I wouldn’t go that far. Yes, they had their ups and downs, but they loved the bones of each other really.”

  “Which is why it was you who arranged Mum’s care home and drove her to mass and ferried her to the shops,” I reply, feeling the anger pounding in my temple like a pulse.

  “I cared about your mum too,” he says. “I didn�
��t mind doing those things because she was a lovely lady. She welcomed me into the family so kindly, especially after my own mum died. I was happy to help.”

  “I know you were,” I say gently. “And you’ve been a great son-in-law. Better than either of us were as daughters. I just wish I’d seen more of her in her final years.”

  As I stand here I have a sudden memory of Ground Zero, where I first met Chris. I see the forensic anthropologists in space-age suits hauling bodies from shallow graves. The perversity of that image, the “wrongness” of a body coming out rather than going into its grave, makes me go cold.

  “Come on,” says Paul, noticing the state I’m in. “Let’s get you home.”

  He takes my hand and guides me back through the graves, past the Minnie Mouse balloon and Alexandra Waits, past the church holding my mother’s secrets, but it is all too much and as we reach the gates I let go of his arm and sit down on the grass verge. The tears that I’ve spent the last few weeks holding in come springing forth and I put my head in my hands and cry for the mother I’ve lost.

  9

  Herne Bay Police Station

  17.5 hours detained

  You’ve witnessed some terrible things in the course of your career, Kate, haven’t you?”

  I don’t want to answer her. I’m tired of her questions. Instead, I look down at my bracelet and he’s with me. I feel the warmth of his hand as he strokes my bare skin, his soft lips kissing the back of my neck, and I ache with longing for him. Human touch is a primordial need, I think to myself, as I watch Shaw flicking from page to page. It’s not love that I miss, it’s not even the sex; no, what I miss above all else is the reassuring touch of someone else’s skin. His skin.

  Chris’s hands were rough and scarred, the legacy of twenty years of exhuming graves. But the feel of his hands wrapping around me as he slipped into bed in the early hours of the morning, not speaking, just holding me close, was all I needed, it gave me the strength to pack my bags and head off to the next war and the next and the next. The memory of his skin, the promise of it, was what kept me going all these years. And now I will have to learn to live without it.

  “Things that would have broken most ordinary people.”