Sisters

by Michelle Frances

  Ellie had been shocked. Not so much that her sister had got married on the quiet, but how much it had hurt. When they were small, all Ellie had wanted was for Abby to play with her, to make up games together in the garden, pretend they both had imaginary pet dogs that they could take for a walk around the small lawn, but Abby was always aloof, would go off and do her own thing. This continued as they got older, Abby always seemingly with her eye on some private goal, something Ellie knew nothing about. Abby would be building a den in her room, an idea that she hadn’t shared with Ellie; she would arrange to go to a friend’s house for tea when Ellie was hoping to ask her about her new make-up; she’d come back to say she’d passed her driving test when Ellie hadn’t even known she’d applied for it; and, of course, the biggest betrayal was the years and years she’d spent saving and investing, never once sharing her goal or her financial savvy with her sister. Then out of the blue – wham! – Abby announced she was leaving the workforce forever. See you later, sucker – that was the message she seemed to be sending, while Ellie had been left abandoned and feeling like an inadequate fool.

  You’d think she would have become used to it, hardened herself to the hurt, but one memory was still imprinted on her brain and, even after twenty-two years, it had the power to move her.

  Ellie had been in the first year of secondary school, a place she found isolating after her sporadic primary education. She’d been placed in the bottom set in every subject; the years of missed schooling had taken their toll, and she felt slow-witted and ashamed of not being anywhere near her older sister’s league. One group of girls in particular noticed this fact. There were three of them who went around in a pack, two lesser bitches flanking the ringleader, and they would mock her for her stupidity. When Ellie had been found crying her eyes out, hiding behind the temporary classroom block, and Abby had extracted a name, Ellie had followed her sister from a safe distance back to the playground, wondering what on earth Abby was going to do.

  She was rewarded by seeing Abby punch the ringleader on the nose. All hell had broken loose: blood and screams and a rapidly ballooning crowd.

  Three big things changed after that: the nose was broken and would forever have a kink, Abby was suspended for a week, and the bullies never touched Ellie again. But the one thing she really wanted to change still didn’t happen. Abby was just as aloof and it had hurt even more because deep down Ellie now knew that, on some level, her big sister cared for her.

  She suspected she knew why there had always been a distance between them: Ellie was their mother’s favourite, something that was never said aloud but was blatantly clear. In fact, Susanna had paid little attention to Abby’s successes, as she’d been so preoccupied with Ellie’s childhood illness, the doctors and hospital appointments, the constant care. If Abby did well in her exams at school, she was told not to speak of it, for fear that it would make Ellie feel inferior. The same if Abby achieved something sporty – Ellie had suffered from so much sickness, it was ‘unfair’ to ‘flaunt’ it in Ellie’s face.

  Ellie had felt guilty for being so sick and blamed herself for Abby’s upset, but was often too ill to have the energy to try and make it any different. As they grew older, Ellie watched the gap between them widen, and even when the illness seemed to abate, years had gone by and she never caught up. Abby did so much more, achieved so much more, and Ellie’s confidence slowly disintegrated.

  She looked again at the paintings. These, at least, were no masterpieces, and she was just turning to leave the room when her eye caught something.

  She stopped. Frowned at the small bookcase in the corner of the room. Then she kneeled down in front of it, her heart racing.

  There, on the very bottom shelf, was a collection of children’s books. Not just any old children’s books but first editions: The Hobbit, Where the Wild Things Are, The Wizard of Oz and an extensive collection of Roald Dahl including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They were worth thousands of pounds.

  Hand trembling, she reached out and touched them, hurt and confused by the sight of them. Not wanting to believe how they had come to be placed on a bookshelf here, in Abby’s house.

  FOUR

  1994

  Ellie was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, her shoe-clad feet planted on the hall floor, trying to imagine them sticking to the wooden floorboards, growing roots so she didn’t have to leave. Her and Abby’s suitcase was upright by the front door and, if she turned her head she could just see through into the living room where her sister was kneeling on the sofa, leaning over the back so she could watch out of the rain-pelted window for the car.

  Her mother was scarce, doing something busy in the kitchen, as she always did on these occasions. Ellie still didn’t quite understand why she never accompanied them on their trips to Grandma and Grandad’s, except that Susanna had said that she had had a ‘falling-out’ with her parents over ‘Daddy’ years before. Ellie couldn’t even ask ‘Daddy’ to explain more as he had left before she was born.

  ‘It’s here,’ Abby called through flatly and climbed down off the sofa, just as the large silver car pulled up and her grandparents’ driver, Harold, who had worked for them for two decades, climbed out.

  Susanna appeared from the kitchen. Saw their downcast faces.

  ‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’

  ‘It’s horrible, Mummy,’ Ellie burst out. ‘They are always asking us questions. Questions, questions, questions!’ She felt on the verge of tears.

  ‘What musical instruments are you learning? What are your grades like? Why don’t you ever wear dresses?’ intoned Abby, as the doorbell rang.

  ‘It’s only twice a year,’ pleaded Susanna. ‘It’s not too much to ask, is it?’

  ‘And their house is so big,’ continued Ellie. ‘And full of breakable things! I’m scared of breaking something like last time. They were so cross. They said it cost thirty hundred pounds.’

  ‘Three hundred,’ corrected Abby, and Ellie felt humiliated. She always got things wrong. ‘For a vase,’ added Abby incredulously.

  ‘But it’s nice to have lovely things, isn’t it?’ said Susanna. She spoke carefully. ‘Just think. Some of those things might be yours one day. They’re your only grandparents. It’s important to get to know them. And it’s only for a week.’

  Ellie, already feeling desperately homesick, couldn’t bear it any longer. She flung herself at her mother and burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to go. Don’t make me – please, Mummy. What if I get ill again?’ she suddenly wailed.

  She felt her mother’s strong arms embrace her but then they loosened their grip and the familiar, comforting warmth was taken away.

  ‘You won’t get ill. You’ve been so much better the last few weeks. Now, Abby, why don’t you let Harold in and you can be on your way?’

  Ellie and Abby sat in the back of the cavernous car, their seat belts unable to keep their small bodies from sliding around on the leather seats as Harold navigated the rain-slicked roads. Ellie pressed her nose up against the window, trying to keep the image of her mother in her mind, her kind face getting smaller and smaller as they’d driven away. The journey wasn’t long, as their grandparents lived in Weybridge, just a few miles away. However, despite the short distance, the two houses could not be more different.

  Grandma and Grandad lived in a place called St George’s Hill, which, when she was five, Ellie had thought might also harbour dragons. But now she was eight, she realized this was a ludicrous notion and, in fact, it only housed very rich people. Grandma Kathleen and Grandad Robert’s place was a large, flat-fronted mansion with pillars either side of the imposing front door. Whenever she arrived, Ellie felt as if the dozens of windows were staring at her, or there was someone hiding behind the balustrade that ran around the top of the house. Grandma was waiting at the top of the steps as the car pulled into the enormous drive and Ellie scrambled out, knowing her grandmother was already scrutinizing her.

  She felt intimidated here – h
er grandmother set great store by the acquisition of knowledge and would turn each and every conversation into a test. ‘What’s the capital of Peru?’ she’d ask, when she found Ellie gazing up at a picture of Paddington Bear on the landing (an original artwork, Grandma said), or ‘How much milk would you have left if I poured you a quarter of a pint from this bottle?’ when she was so dying of thirst she couldn’t even think straight. Even if she could, she wouldn’t have been able to answer. Ellie was always pitiful at answering the questions. She’d missed so much school from being ill. She was back in a classroom at the moment but had spent lots of time having lessons with Mummy at home. She’d loved having her mother all to herself, especially as they didn’t really do much work but would often go to the park instead and she would sometimes even buy her an ice cream, something she had to keep secret from Abby. Also, being at home meant that she got a break from the children who teased her. Some of the really mean ones called her ‘Illie’: ‘Hey, Illie, why are you at school? Illie, are you going to be sick?’ It made her want to cry. But the worst thing about being ill was having to go to see doctors all the time. They asked so many questions and made her lie on a bed and poked her tummy and put a needle in her arm and stole half her blood and she was worried she wouldn’t ever get it back, even though they said she’d grow more. She hated it. She’d even had to go to hospital where they asked even more questions. Most of them Mummy answered, thank goodness.

  ‘How long did your journey take?’

  Her grandmother was asking her a question already, looking at her pointedly as if she were her teacher at school, and Ellie felt her insides curl up in fear as she didn’t yet know how to tell the time. She didn’t know anything much, not like Abby. She couldn’t even read properly and was well aware she was on the bottom table in school for maths, English and spelling, even though the teacher gave them different names like ‘Badger’ table for spelling and ‘Triangle’ table for maths.

  Grandma was waiting for an answer. She was always dressed nicely, with lots of scarves, even indoors, whereas Ellie and Abby had hardly anything new. Their mum had new things too but she said that was because she worked in a boutique and she had to look nice, so the owners sold the clothes to her cheaply. If Grandma was rich, and they were poor, then Ellie wondered why she didn’t give them some of her money.

  ‘Thirty-three minutes,’ said Abby, as she walked past and Ellie felt herself go weak with relief.

  ‘I was asking Eleanor, not you,’ said Grandma.

  Days consisted of hanging around the house or the garden – their grandmother seldom took them anywhere and their grandfather worked until late at night. He had a business importing wine and they only really saw him at the weekend. He would call them into his study and ask them to read aloud to him, something else that Ellie failed dismally at, and so he’d taken to only asking Abby.

  As today was a wet day, there was no going outside. They were expected to entertain themselves with board games; TV was strictly off limits. Abby decided to take herself up to her room and Ellie followed, but Abby closed her door firmly. Ellie sighed, knowing this was an emphatic ‘do not disturb’ message. She wandered back downstairs, listening out in the large silent house that she still sometimes got lost in. She could hear a far-off hoover, which was the cleaner doing her daily rounds. At the foot of the stairs Ellie could see into the drawing room where her grandmother was sitting in a small armchair, her heels up on a footstool as she read her newspaper. A cup and saucer lay on the side table. Ellie knew from experience not to disturb her grandmother during her mid-morning ‘downtime’ and so she slunk away. She found herself outside the library and peered inside. It was a room she avoided as it intimidated her – all those books she couldn’t read – but this time something caught her eye. A butterfly was trapped inside, fluttering futilely against the windowpane. Ellie watched as it withdrew a distance, took a small circle and then headed back to the window, desperate to get out to the air it must have sensed outside.

  She ran in and pushed a chair against the wall in front of the window, then climbed up so she could reach the catch. She opened the window and watched as the butterfly made its bid for freedom, her heart leaping as it escaped, and then she tried to keep sight of it until eventually it disappeared from view.

  Ellie turned away from the window and sat in the chair, swinging her legs. The time went so slowly here, painfully eked out minutes and hours. She suddenly missed her mum so much it hurt. Her feet abruptly stopped swinging and she felt tears form, something she tried to stop as Grandma said tears were for babies and people who couldn’t articulate themselves well, except she didn’t know what that meant. She looked around and on her right was a small case with a glass front, inside which were yet more books. On the spine of one of them a word caught her eye. A word that she could actually read very well.

  Chocolate.

  She slid to the floor and opened the case. Pulled out the book, which was old. The front cover was nearly filled with a picture of a large bar of chocolate with the corner bitten out, an image that made her salivate. A ghost-like boy’s head was beaming underneath it and sitting on the boy’s arm was a man in a top hat. The book was called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, written by someone whose name she couldn’t read.

  Ellie opened it up. For no other reason than that she had nothing else to do, she started to read the first page, and before she knew it she’d got to the bottom and was turning it over. She finished that one too, and the next, and the next, until she sat up and felt the thickness of the pages she’d turned and was shocked and delighted to be able to squish a significant amount of paper between her thumb and forefinger. It was a most unusual feeling but she didn’t stop to think about it too long as she wanted to know if this boy Charlie was going to find a Golden Ticket. She read on, stumbling in places, but something about this story kept her turning the pages, until she heard the gong in the hall that meant it was lunchtime. She was astonished. How could it be lunchtime already? Time never went this fast. And she didn’t want to go and sit in the large dining room with the loud ticking clock and answer questions from her grandmother, she wanted to find out what was going to happen to Augustus Gloop now he’d put his face in the river of chocolate.

  Ellie knew better than to disobey the gong and she struggled through lunch and the questions and being told she was using the wrong cutlery, but for the first time she didn’t feel like crying into her plate. All she could think about was going back to the library and reading the book.

  Which, the minute lunch was over, was exactly what she did. Once she’d completed the story, breathless with wonder, desperate to go to Willy Wonka’s factory herself, she was wistful for grandparents just like Charlie’s who all shared a bed together and were kind and funny, instead of what she’d been given: one strict, one absent. She pulled out another book from the cabinet. This one was called The Magic Finger.

  She was just about to start it when something struck her so wondrous, so impossible, that for a moment she forgot to breathe.

  She’d just read her first ever book. The whole thing. With no help from anyone.

  FIVE

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Abby stopped in the doorway when she saw Ellie leafing through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At that moment, Ellie looked up and Abby was struck by the hurt and anger in her sister’s eyes.

  ‘Why do you have this?’ asked Ellie, raising the book aloft.

  Oh God, why did I forget to move them?

  ‘This was Grandad’s, wasn’t it?’ Ellie indicated the bookcase. ‘They all were.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why are they on your shelf?’

  ‘He . . . left them to me.’

  ‘In his will?’ asked Ellie, incredulous.

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Abby.

  ‘But . . . why you? I mean, he didn’t leave me anything.’

  Abby felt a flicker of irritation. Ellie sounded so pitiful – the victim. Again. It wasn’t her fault their grand
father had singled her out.

  ‘He gave them to me because . . . he thought they would be safer.’

  ‘They’re here on a bookshelf, hardly kept at a controlled temperature under glass.’

  Ellie was staring at her and Abby wilted under her gaze. ‘Not like that . . .’

  ‘How do you mean, then?’

  ‘He wanted them kept in the family.’ Abby bit her lip as her sister’s face contorted in growing disbelief. She was unsure if the message had sunk in. ‘Forever,’ she added for emphasis.

  Ellie was crushed. ‘He thought I’d sell them?’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No!’ Ellie stood abruptly, tears pricking at her eyes. ‘I loved these books. These books were my friends when you never bothered to spend any time with me. When you hated me.’

  ‘I never hated you.’

  ‘Yes, you did. You hated the fact I got all Mum’s attention when I was small. That my illness took her away from you.’