by Julie Corbin
‘Are you listening?’ Jem’s voice is suddenly loud in my ear.
‘Do you ever find Mary Percival a bit strange?’ I say.
‘How did we get on to talking about her?’
I summarise what I’ve just seen. ‘Odd, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe she wanted to invite you to a party: Tupperware, Jamie at Home, Ann Summers?’
‘Then why not just ring the bell?’
‘She’s quite shy. Bit lonely maybe. Let’s face it’ – I hear her take a puff of a cigarette – ‘she doesn’t have the best social skills, but she’s great with the kids. Adam’s come on in leaps and bounds since he started there. She has a knack of bringing out the best in him.’
‘She remembers absolutely everything I’ve ever told her,’ I say, thinking about details I’ve given her about Lisa’s illness and how she can repeat them back to me, word for word. ‘Spookily so.’
‘Maybe she has perfect recall.’
‘There are eighteen children in her class and almost every mother talks to her at the beginning or the end of the morning and yet last week she actually remembered Lisa’s blood count. I mean, you’re my friend and you don’t remember the details.’
‘No, but I don’t have that sort of brain.’
‘And almost half the time I look out of my window she’s out there with Douglas . . .’
‘Maybe he has a weak bladder?’
‘I kid you not, Jem, she’s practically always outside my house.’
‘I know!’ She gives a dirty laugh. ‘She fancies you.’
I roll my eyes. ‘That must be it.’
‘Have you found out what those two men are up to yet?’
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her that they’re policemen, but I don’t because Mary Percival is still over the road, hanging around. It’s too much. ‘I’ve got to go, Jem,’ I say. ‘Talk to you soon?’
‘Yup. Have a good day.’
I run out through the front door and across the road. Miss Percival looks up as I approach and smiles tentatively. The rain has eased off and she collapses her umbrella. Without pause for thought I say, ‘Every time I look out of the window, you’re there.’
She steps back, startled. ‘I’m sorry. I—’ She stops, tries again. ‘I want to . . .’
‘You want to what? What’s going on with you?’
Her cheeks flush and her eyes fill up. My clipped tone is wounding her, but I can’t back off. She is in prime position to harm my child. She’s made a teacher’s pet of Bea. She has Bea’s trust. I remember one of the emails – This morning Bea played in the sandpit . . . I could have taken her then. I could take her still. And you’d never see her again – and I know I can’t let her off the hook.
‘Why are you so strange with me? You’ve made a favourite of Bea and yet you can barely look me in the eye.’ I try to soften my tone. ‘If you have something to say, then you should say it.’
‘I do have something to say. I do have something to tell you. I haven’t been able to up till now. I never intended to tell you, but then Bea came to the nursery and I made the connection and—’
‘What connection?’
My arms are folded; I’m tapping my foot. Not conducive to her coming clean with me and I’m not surprised when she says, ‘When you’re less . . . busy.’ She’s clutching the dog’s lead with both hands as if he’s about to run off. ‘I won’t bother you now.’
‘No.’ I hold her upper arm. She makes no attempt to shrug me off. ‘We need to clear this up here and now. Or else I will have to give your name to the police.’
‘What? Why?’
‘The magazine article you were reading. The one about Pavel Georgiev. Do you know him?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Are you involved in something that you no longer want to be part of? Something that’s got out of hand?’
She stares at me, incredulous.
‘Do you know what’s going on in my family at the moment?’ I drop my voice to almost a whisper and lean in close to her. ‘My husband is being blackmailed by someone who intends to kidnap Bea unless he gives her the information she wants.’
‘My God, I’m so sorry.’ I’m taken aback as I watch her face collapse with horror. Her jaw hangs open and tears slide from her eyes. ‘So very sorry. If there’s anything I can do . . .’
‘Yes. There is. You can eliminate yourself from the enquiries. Because someone in my life, and in Bea’s life, is feeding information to this blackmailer and I need to be sure it isn’t you.’
The sun chooses that moment to come out from behind a cloud and shine down upon us both as if we have been singled out for extra light and warmth. I hold my hand up to shield my eyes so that I can see Miss Percival’s expression. She looks completely crushed. She appears to have diminished in size: her shoulders wilting, her spine shrinking, her limbs pulled in tight towards her body. I search for signs of deception, but all I see is a woman who is devastated. It doesn’t make sense. Most people, whether guilty or innocent, would have come back at me by now with ‘How dare you!’ or ‘What makes you think you can talk to me this way?’
‘Miss Percival, Mary,’ I say, more gently now, ‘this is clearly upsetting you. Will you please tell me what’s going on?’
She glances down at Douglas. He has lain down on a patch of grass and rolled on to his side. His eyes are shut and he looks a picture of contentment. She unclips the lead from his collar and walks over to a bench, positioned in the shade under an oak tree. I follow her and sit down beside her, both of us facing one another at an angle.
‘The timing for this can never be right,’ she begins. ‘I don’t want to upset anyone or to change the view you have of your father.’
‘My father?’ I almost laugh. ‘What does he have to do with this?’
She takes a huge breath. ‘I am an only child. I was brought up near Brighton by my mum and dad – or at least for thirty years I believed he was my dad. But then, six years ago, in May, my mum told me that in fact she’d fallen pregnant to someone else. I got in touch with this man – your dad. I took a DNA test and the result was positive. He was very kind to me, but I was confused and angry that I’d been lied to all my life and I left Brighton for a while. I came back a couple of years ago, made up with my parents but discovered your dad, my biological father, had passed away.’
She says all of this in a deadpan tone as if she has stepped out of her body and her mouth is repeating these words by rote. I, on the other hand, feel as if I’ve landed slap bang in the middle of an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show and I’m shaking my head so quickly that I can feel blood swish in my ears. ‘You’re telling me you’re my half-sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve been Bea’s teacher since September and you never said a word!’
‘I know. It took me a while to get my head around it. I knew that you and Lisa existed – your father was very proud of you both – but we were a couple of weeks into the term before I put two and two together and realised we were related.’
‘So why not tell me then? October? November? Christmas?’
‘Because Lisa had been diagnosed with cancer and I didn’t think it was the right time.’
I stare at her, still shaking my head. My mind is reeling. My father had another daughter. My father had another daughter? I find it impossible to comprehend, like squeezing an elephant into a phone box – I don’t have the space to contain such enormous news.
‘You’re right – I have been strange towards you,’ she continues. ‘I’ve tried to be normal, but I just couldn’t keep it up. I kept thinking that you were my sister and—’
‘Why didn’t my dad say something?’
‘I asked him not to and, as I said, when I returned to Brighton, he’d passed away.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m supposed to believe all of this. You’ve spent nine months looking after my daughter, your niece by the way, and not once did you bring this up.’
�
��I wasn’t sure how to approach you. You’re so . . .’
‘I’m so what?’ I realise I’m glaring at her and then I realise something else. This could all be part of an elaborate deception, a way to push further into Bea’s life. ‘I’m sorry, Mary – I suppose I’m allowed to call you that now? – but I don’t believe you. You bear no resemblance to my father, or me, or Lisa.’
‘I take after my mother.’ She digs around in her bag. ‘This is a letter your dad sent to me.’
‘That you just happen to have with you?’
‘It’s the only thing I have of him.’ She holds it out. ‘I always carry it with me.’
I don’t touch it, but still I can see that it’s been repeatedly read. The paper is fraying at the edges and the two pages are heavily creased. And it is my dad’s handwriting. No mistaking the long strokes on the ‘f’s and the ‘t’s and the flourishes at the end of each sentence. It begins with ‘My dear Mary, I was so delighted to meet you . . .’ I have a sudden sense of him standing in front of me, smiling with that hundred-watt, winning enthusiasm that always made me feel special. Yes, he had his faults – not least his infidelity to Wendy – but he was my dad and I loved him with the same passion and trust that Bea feels for Julian.
‘I don’t want to read it.’ I hold my hands up and back away from her. ‘I can’t deal with this now.’
‘I understand.’ She composes her face. ‘You need time to think about it.’
‘I have to go.’ I walk away from her. My ears are ringing and I feel nauseous. When I reach the car, I sit in the driving seat and hold my breath while a powerful shake flows through my body, beginning in my stomach and ending in my toes and fingertips. What the hell just happened? I can’t believe it. I have another sister. A younger sister. I’m already calculating that Mary would have been born a couple of years after my dad married Wendy. Wendy, who, two years after my mother’s death, defied all stepmother stereotypes and came into our lives, bringing generosity and caring for two small girls and a grieving man. I wonder whether she knows that my father had another child. And should I tell her? Should I tell Lisa? I’m someone who values family above all else, so this should be good news, shouldn’t it?
I don’t know what to think or feel. I don’t know what to do. On top of everything else that’s going on, this is one more thing to squash into my already very full brain. It takes me only a second to decide that I’ll do nothing. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll pretend that it hasn’t happened. I’ve known Mary Percival for nine months without her giving me so much as an inkling of her relationship to us. This is something that doesn’t have to be dealt with now. Another few days or weeks are not going to make any difference.
I take a few deep breaths, start the engine and head to the hospital. Lisa is sitting in an easy chair, her belongings in several bags arranged around her feet. When she sees me coming, she smiles wider than I’ve seen her smile in weeks.
‘My rescuer!’ she shouts, then leans in for a hug. ‘Who needs a knight in shining armour when I have you?’
Lynn comes into the room to brief me on Lisa’s medication regime. She has it all written up on a chart – some need to be taken with meals, others an hour before or after food.
‘As if I’m not perfectly capable of working it out for myself,’ Lisa chimes in.
‘Little sister’s in charge,’ Lynn says, playfully nudging Lisa’s shoulder before turning back to me. ‘The community nurse will call on Tuesday, but if you need her before that, here’s the number.’ She points to it on the chart. ‘And if Lisa gives you any trouble, Claire, you bring her straight back.’
‘Not in a month of Sundays.’ Lisa stands up. ‘Much as I love you all, I have no intention of coming back.’
‘Good on you, love.’ Lynn hugs Lisa tight and gestures to me over her shoulder – her thumb to her ear, little finger to her lips. ‘Phone me,’ she mouths.
When we’re outside, Lisa takes a huge breath of air. ‘What happened to summer?’
‘What’s a bit of drizzle?’ I say. ‘We’ve had far worse in June.’
‘You’re right.’ She throws her arms up above her head and then lets them fall back down to her sides. ‘It’s great to be outdoors again.’
My heart skips a happy beat.
‘I can sit in the shade and watch Bea playing and you can bring me jam sandwiches and homemade lemonade.’
I smile. The food of our childhood. Wendy would make us up a tray and we’d take it to the bottom of the garden and lie on our backs munching on squares of sandwich while sticky lemonade dribbled down our chins.
‘Happiness is all about small moments and simple pleasures,’ Lisa says, climbing into the car.
‘My sister the guru.’ I climb in beside her and reach across to help her with her seatbelt.
‘You mark my words.’ She waves her finger at me. ‘Those are the things we remember in the end. Do you remember Dad used to always say’ – she deepens her voice and raises up her shoulders, pushing out her chest – ‘“You have to live life to the full, girls. No regrets.”’
Dad. My eyes slide away from Lisa. Do we really have another sister? If so, when she came to see him six years ago, why on earth didn’t he tell us?
‘He was all about seizing the day.’
‘From what I remember, the rest of us had to accommodate his seizing of the day,’ I say, negotiating my way out of the hospital grounds and on to the main road. ‘All those affairs. I mean, honestly! Who does that?’
‘He never had an affair while Mum was alive.’
‘It was Wendy who copped the brunt of it.’ I shake my head. ‘And why didn’t he comfort us when Mum died? He acted like she’d never existed.’
‘Some people don’t do well with loss. They can’t cope with the grief.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Nowadays there’s grief counselling, but in those days you were expected just to get on with it.’
‘That’s true,’ I say. ‘But we were only kids, Lisa. You were six, and I was four – Bea’s age. We were practically babies.’
‘We had each other, Claire. Dad must have felt very alone. We had all our little games and imaginings and that made it easier.’
Our mother is a subject Lisa and I haven’t spoken about for a while. Lisa is able to accept her death, but for me, it’s always felt like unfinished business. She died of a brain haemorrhage. One sunny September day she dropped down in front of us, passing from life to death in the space of one ordinary moment. An extreme, abrupt ending that my child’s mind found impossible to absorb. Every morning I woke up expecting her to have come back to us, but every morning the house was cold, breakfast unmade, our clothes lying where we’d dropped them. My dad put everything that was left of her in the wardrobe in their room. Piece by piece, crawling commando style, Lisa and I sneaked some of Mum’s belongings out of her old room and into ours. Our dad never noticed and, in retrospect, I think the subterfuge was unnecessary. He seemed to have forgotten all about her. Lisa and I treated these objects with reverence, as if they were magical and would somehow bring her back. We kept a box under Lisa’s bed. Inside were a silk scarf, some sling-back shoes, a bottle of perfume and a pair of earrings: small pearls set in silver. We had one photograph of her. We took turns placing it underneath our pillow. For years we believed that she would come home. We lived in a kind of limbo and said things to each other like ‘When Mum comes back, we’ll ask her if we can have riding lessons’ or ‘When Mum finds out we haven’t been cleaning our teeth for three minutes, she’ll tell us off’ or ‘We should eat an apple every day because Mum always said that keeps the doctor away.’
I must have been twelve before it really hit me that, of course, she wasn’t coming back. She was dead, for God’s sake! I cried then, for her and for myself.
‘The secret with grief is, don’t fight it, don’t run from it,’ Lisa says. ‘Let it wash over you. And when the next wave comes, bend your back and take that too.’
I know t
hat she’s partly talking about our parents and about herself and coming to terms with her illness. And I know, too, that she’s partly talking to me, helping me see a way through it. Lisa knows I struggle with grief and with acceptance. I have an inbuilt, visceral fear of losing members of my family. Death is so final, so utterly irrevocable. I think back to the way I behaved after Kerry Smith’s death – having quick, escapist sex with Mac. Perhaps I am more like my father than I know. It’s not a pleasant thought and I automatically turn the radio on, hoping to shut out the voices in my head.
The sound of a man singing fills the car. Lisa reaches over to turn the volume down and then she squeezes my knee. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘I heard you.’ I look sideways to give her a quick smile.
‘Do you mind if we stop by my flat on the way back to yours? I want to pick up some bits and pieces.’
‘Course.’
Before she was diagnosed with cancer, Lisa taught biology in a girls’ school in Brighton. Her flat is between my house and the hospital. Parking is a nightmare, so I risk stopping in one of the disabled bays close to the entrance to her flat. It’s on the first floor. We go inside. She stops halfway up the stairs and leans the top half of her body on the banister while she catches her breath.
‘This weakness is just so irritating.’
‘Take your time,’ I say. ‘There’s no rush.’
‘I don’t want you getting a ticket.’ She sets off up the last half a dozen steps. ‘You know what the traffic wardens are like around here.’
‘I’ll sit at the window and watch out for them.’ I unlock her front door, pick up the letters on the mat inside and hand them to her. ‘If necessary, I’ll drive round the block a few times.’
She lives on a busy corner, almost on top of a small roundabout where seven roads branch out: to the station, to the seafront, others inland. I sit at the window to watch for wardens. It’s a hectic Saturday morning and the whole world and his dog seem to be converging in this small space. There’s a grocer’s on the corner and five teenage girls come out. They are giggling and hanging on to each other. One of them is texting and the others peer over her shoulder, breaking into fits of laughter as they watch the words come up on the screen. It makes me smile.