My Sister's Bones

by Nuala Ellwood

  The color drains from his face.

  “I’m sorry, Paul. It must be hard. I know you were close to Hannah too.”

  “Ha. As close as you can get to a feisty teenage girl.” He laughs hollowly. “She was thirteen when I got together with Sal. Do you remember, they were living with your mum?”

  “Yes,” I say, smiling. “I remember Sally called me and said she’d met this gorgeous guy over the garden fence and I thought she’d lost her mind because the only person I remember living next door was this bloke called Mr. Matthews and he was about ninety.”

  Paul laughs.

  “Your parents had bought it, hadn’t they?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Old Matthews was put in a home and his son sold it to them,” he says. “That was in 1994, just after you left. They had a good few years, then they died within a few months of each other.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Nah, they’d had a good innings,” he says. “Still, it was a blessing and a curse them leaving me that house. I’d never really liked Herne Bay. I always found it depressing. My folks would drag me here on holiday every year and I just wanted to stay home in Bethnal Green and hang out with my mates. But Mum and Dad loved it. They always said they would retire here and they got their wish.”

  “It seems strange that you stayed here when you hated the place,” I say, pouring myself another glass of wine. “You could have just sold the house. What made you settle here?”

  He leans forward and smiles, his eyes glazed with the drink and the lights.

  “Sally,” he says quietly. “Sally changed everything. I’d decided to rent out the house and the plan was to stay in my flat in London but then when I was showing the estate agent round the garden I heard a whistle. I turned and there she was. All my plans went out the window.”

  He takes a sip of beer. I can see this is hard for him.

  “She was so excited,” I tell him. “Said you looked like a short Liam Neeson.”

  Paul splutters on his drink, then wipes his mouth.

  “Liam Neeson? Was she having a laugh?”

  “Just happy, I guess.”

  “Yeah, we were happy,” he says. “But I could see right from the start that she had her hands full with Hannah. Boy, did that girl give her some stick. I remember the first day I came round for Sunday lunch. We got as far as the second course and an almighty argument broke out between the pair of them. I can’t remember what it was about, too much gravy on her spuds, I don’t know, but I was taken aback. I know if I’d called my mum the names Hannah called Sal I’d have been given a good hiding. But she wasn’t my daughter; it wasn’t up to me to discipline her.”

  “Do you think the drink played a part in their problems?”

  “Possibly,” he says. “Though it was more of a social thing at that point.”

  “But drinking can make people short-tempered,” I say, remembering how my father’s rage would be magnified when he’d had a skinful.

  “Looking back, I probably was a bit blinkered,” says Paul. “I think I just wanted to see the best in Sally.”

  “We all did.” I drain my glass and, without thinking, pour myself another.

  “It was your mum who finally told me about Sally’s drinking. I think she thought I should know,” says Paul. “She said that when Hannah was a kid Sally used to drag her to the pub and make her sit outside while she got drunk.”

  I nod my head, remembering my mum’s frantic phone calls, her terrified voice telling me that Sally and Hannah had gone missing again. Then the follow-up call to let me know they’d been found and that Sally was just a bit under the weather.

  “But that was before she met me,” says Paul. “And I convinced myself that I’d fixed her and she wouldn’t slip into her old ways again. But it helped with Hannah. When I found out about what she’d been through as a kid I started to cut her some slack. And I told Sally to go easy on her too. After that things were better. I got on well with Hannah, we started to do things as a family. It was wonderful.”

  His voice breaks and he squeezes his hands together.

  “I moved them out of your mum’s place and we bought the house on the Willow Estate. Sally was still working at the bank so there was plenty of money coming in. But then it all went pear-shaped.”

  “What happened?” It suddenly hits me that I’ve never actually asked Paul for his side of the story. The only version I had was Mum’s.

  “Well, Hannah started asking questions about her real dad but Sally was having none of it. I think she was worried that Hannah would get hurt. But I told her it was only natural she’d want to meet her dad. If I was her I’d want to know who my father was. I thought things had settled down, then one night I came home and found Hannah in a right state. Apparently Sal had found her searching her father’s name on the Internet. She’d gone mad and shouted at Hannah, said some terrible things.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh, you know Sally once she gets going,” he says, raising his eyebrow. “She told Hannah that this bloke, the dad, had wanted her to have an abortion. It was probably true but she shouldn’t have said it. Hannah was devastated. I mean, no one wants to find out that their dad wanted to abort them.”

  “He was just a kid,” I say. “Same age as Sal, barely in his teens when it happened. His family moved away soon after. I think it was his parents who were pressing for the abortion.”

  “Sound like a nice bunch,” says Paul, taking a sip of beer. “I mean how spineless can you get?”

  “They probably thought they were doing the right thing,” I say. “As I said, he was just a kid. Anyway, they left no forwarding address so Sally had no way of getting in touch when Hannah was born. I think the chances of Hannah finding him on the Internet were pretty slim.”

  “Yeah, but it scared Sally,” says Paul. “She got paranoid that Hannah was going to find her dad and leave her. It made Sally really jealous. She started drinking heavily again and that’s when her other side started to come out.”

  “Her other side?”

  “It was like she was two different people,” says Paul, his voice heavy with drink. “One minute she’d be telling me how much she loved me, and then suddenly, whoosh, she’d just go mental.”

  “You mean violent?”

  “What? No, not really,” he says brusquely.

  “Paul, I need you to be honest,” I say, leaning toward him. “About Sally, about what’s happening to her. Look, I saw your arm. Is that something to do with her?”

  He puts his head in his hands and sighs.

  “Paul, please.”

  “Okay, yes,” he says, lifting his head. “Yes, she did it. Are you happy now?”

  “Of course I’m not happy. This is horrific.”

  “Well, how do you think I feel?” he says. “I’m a man. I should be able to look after myself.” He looks down at his drink, not meeting my eye.

  “What happened?”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” he says, lowering his voice, aware of the other men in the room. “It was a few weeks back. She’d run out of wine and I caught her with the car keys in her hand, just back from the off-license. I grabbed the keys and said she was crazy, that she could have killed someone driving in that state. She was so drunk she dropped the bottles, and then she went ballistic. She grabbed one of them and came at me with it, would have got my face if I hadn’t put my arms up to defend myself.”

  “My God,” I gasp. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought I could deal with it, but truth be told, after that night I was scared. I still am. I just don’t know what she’s capable of when she’s drunk.”

  I think about my visit to Sally earlier, the venom in her eyes when she talked about Mum. That awful grin on her face.

  Paul drains his glass and I can’t help looking at his arms and wondering what else he isn’t telling me.

  “Paul, do you think she ever hurt Hannah? Physically hurt her?”

  He puts his glass down and stares a
t me for a moment.

  “Be honest.”

  “I don’t know.” He sighs. “If you’d asked me that question a year ago I would have laughed at you, told you there was no chance Sally would have laid a finger on her child. But after that night with the wine bottle . . . She was like a different person, Kate, like a monster. The anger, it was like nothing I’ve seen before.”

  I nod my head. He may not have seen it before but I have. He might as well be describing my father. I think of those nights when I would cower in my room after a beating and have to listen while my father kicked the shit out of my terrified mother. It would go on for hours and hours. And the next day I would ask Sally if she’d heard it and she would look at me as though I was talking nonsense.

  “You need another drink,” I say to Paul, putting my hand on his. “Same again?”

  When I return from the bar he is gone, though his coat is still on the back of the chair. I put his pint down and take another long sip of my wine. The bottle’s nearly finished. Funny how after years of abstinence drink can so quickly become a habit again. I think of Sally and tell myself that after tonight I’ll go back on the wagon. I look up and see Paul weaving his way through the bar.

  “Sorry about that,” he says as he sits down. “Call of nature.”

  “Cheers,” I say, lifting my glass.

  “Cheers,” he replies. “And thanks for the pint.”

  I drain the glass and pour myself another. I feel quite tipsy. Tomorrow I’ll stop, but tonight I’m going to enjoy this warm fuzzy feeling. It feels like I’m holed up in a cocoon where nothing can get me, no nightmares, no voices, no images of Chris.

  Paul is talking about his work but I’m not really listening anymore. I catch snippets of words—Calais, paperwork, migrants—and I make sympathetic noises as he tells me about the upcoming forty-eight-hour strike by the French truck drivers.

  I swill the wine in my glass, and feel the bar spin slightly. I rather like it.

  “It’s going to cause chaos. . . . Have to work late that week.”

  As his story continues I take another gulp of wine, then another and another until his voice forms a strange snake-like coil around my head, binding me to the past. I’m aware of Ray watching me from the bar and suddenly I’m seventeen years old again, sipping Vermouth and lemonade with some unsuitable lad while Dad’s friend keeps an eye on me. But somewhere in the center of my consciousness I know why I’m drinking. I’m thinking of him.

  “Where are you, Chris?” I whisper to the swirling room, and for a moment I think I see him over by the bar standing next to Ray, but the image disintegrates and Paul is back, telling me that if the strike goes ahead he might have to “stay over in Dover.”

  “Ha! Over in Dover. That rhymes.” My voice is jagged and I feel the words tensing against my teeth as I speak. “Over in Dover. That’s brilliant.”

  I go to grab my glass to make a toast to Paul and the truck drivers’ strike and the delights of Dover but I miss my target and warm liquid seeps underneath my arm.

  “Whoa, careful! Time to call a cab.”

  I hear Paul’s voice through the clanking sound of a bell ringing somewhere on the edge of my consciousness. Then a hand clasps around my waist, a gust of cold air whips into my face, and I am on the ground, shuffling on my belly toward the men. I feel blood in my mouth, congealing and thickening as I try to breathe. Then the sound of gunshot pummels the air. I put my head down, close my eyes, and start to count, and when I open them I see his face.

  14

  Herne Bay Police Station

  30.5 hours detained

  Did you sleep well?”

  I look up at Shaw as she waits for my reply. She looks refreshed. Her navy trouser suit has been replaced with a cream skirt and black polo neck sweater. She will have slept in her own bed, next to her husband. She will have eaten breakfast at her own table, showered in her own bathroom. She is a free woman. As I sit here in yesterday’s clothes, the smell of the police cell embedded in my hair and skin, my back aching from the hard mattress I spent the night on, I try to remember what being free feels like. It seems like I’ve been held here forever.

  “What do you think?” I shoot back. “It’s not exactly the Ritz, is it?”

  Shaw smiles awkwardly, then begins.

  “Can you tell me about the incident in Soho, Kate?”

  I look up at Shaw again. She is reading from a new set of notes.

  “What incident in Soho?”

  “The Star Cafe on Great Chapel Street?”

  My body tenses. She knows.

  “What about it?”

  “You went there the day after the incident with Rachel Hadley, didn’t you?”

  She looks at me unblinkingly, her face a mask.

  “Yes,” I whisper, and as she prepares to ask me more questions I see myself that evening, fresh out of the hospital and pumped up with painkillers, walking and walking like a zombie through the streets of Soho.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I was going for a coffee.”

  “But you didn’t quite make it to the cafe, did you?”

  I look down at the linoleum floor, remembering the big hole outside the Star that was blinking and groaning at me like some great sea monster.

  “What stopped you from going inside, Kate?”

  “I was looking at the billboards.”

  Shaw looks confused.

  “They’re extending Tottenham Court Road Tube station and digging up Soho left, right, and center. They’ve dug a great big hole outside the cafe.”

  “And the billboards?”

  “The billboards are meant to hide the hole, make the whole thing look more attractive. They show the timescale and blueprints for the new station.”

  “What made you look at them?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I think it was the mammoth bone that caught my eye.”

  Shaw frowns.

  “It was a photograph,” I tell her. “Of a mammoth bone they’d excavated the previous month. It was the developer’s way of saying that all this disruption was for a greater good. Look, we’re not just ripping up ancient streets and destroying Soho, we’re giving something back, something of historical interest. Here’s a mammoth bone.”

  It is clear that Shaw has no idea what I’m going on about. I don’t think she’s ever even been to Soho.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Things like that just make me angry.”

  She nods her head and writes something down in her notebook.

  “So you were looking at these billboards,” she says. “And then what happened?”

  I close my eyes and remember the sensation I felt that night. It was like the ground was moving beneath me and I was being pulled down. And then the noises started up. Screams. They were gentle at first but they grew louder and louder until I had to cover my ears with my hands. Then suddenly, bang, the explosion, everything flying up into the air: a head, a foot, an arm, a torso, raining down on me in a bloody twisted mess.

  “Kate,” says Shaw, interrupting my memory. “What happened?”

  “I fell over. And, er, this girl tried to pull me up.”

  “Rosa Dunajski?”

  How does she know her name?

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “She’s a waitress at the Star Cafe?”

  I nod my head.

  “She came out because you were making a bit of a disturbance, shouting at people to run for cover.”

  “No, that’s not true,” I say, my voice shaking. “I just fell and this girl started fussing and grabbing at me.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I—I pushed her away.”

  Shaw looks down at her notes and begins to read.

  “‘You pushed her so hard that she was knocked onto the ground, hitting her head on the pavement.’”

  “I didn’t mean to—I explained all this later—she just gave me a shock, that’s all.”

  “That’s what yo
u said later to the police,” says Shaw. “The manager of the cafe called them and you were questioned but Rosa didn’t want to press charges. It seems she had a soft spot for you.”

  “There was no need for the police to be called,” I say, my hackles rising. “The manager overreacted. Rosa knew it wasn’t my fault. The police could see it was just a misunderstanding. Christ, there are more serious crimes being committed in Soho than that, Dr. Shaw. They didn’t want to waste their time on something as trivial as a woman falling over.”

  “I think you lashed out at Rosa because you were scared,” she says, putting the notes on the floor beside her feet. “That’s what happened, isn’t it, Kate? You didn’t fall over, you had a hallucination, isn’t that right?”

  Why is she doing this? Why won’t she just let it go?

  “It was a momentary thing, just a memory,” I say. “Nothing serious.”

  Shaw nods. “And have you had anything like this since? Any more hallucinations?”

  “No,” I reply, making sure to hold her gaze. “I can assure you, I haven’t.”

  “Are you being honest with me, Kate?”

  “Yes.”

  She picks up her notebook and turns to a fresh page. I look at the clock and wonder how many more questions Shaw has waiting for me; how much more of my life I have to expose to her. As long as we don’t go back to Syria, I tell myself—as long as we don’t do that—then I can cope with anything.

  15

  Thursday, April 16, 2015

  The sheets are hot and moist against my skin as I come around. The room is dark. It’s still night. I try to remember how I got home but my brain is mush and the only thing I recall is sitting in a bar talking about striking truck drivers. After that, all is a terrifying blank.

  My eyes are stinging and I have a raging thirst but I can’t lift my head from the pillow. As I lie here, immobile, the events of the evening come back to me in fragments. A large glass of wine gulped down in one . . . an empty bottle . . . How could I have gotten so drunk on just one bottle of wine? Or was it two? I try to think clearly but I can’t.

  The room spins and as I sit up the pain starts; thick, jagged pain that stabs at my temples. I need pills. I get out of bed and feel my way toward the door, stubbing my toe on something sharp. Looking down, I see the shape of my handbag lying on the floor, the contents scattered all around and the thick silver buckle that ought to be clasped shut undone. I turn on the lamp, then kneel down gingerly to check that everything is there. Mobile, pills, change purse. The zip of my change purse is open and coins and notes spill out of it. I don’t think I’ve lost any of it though. I pile them back in and see a crumpled bit of paper among the twenty-pound notes. Unfolding it, I see the words “Marine Taxis” and a fare for £3.50. Paul must have bundled me into a cab for the five-minute journey home. I try to picture his face but my thoughts are liquid and I can’t get ahold on any one thing. Yes, it must have been Paul who helped me get the taxi, it has to have been.