The Endsister

by Penni Russon

  ‘But there really was a Beatrix,’ Daddy will tell them. ‘That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? In Aunt Dorothy’s family tree.’ He brings the hand-drawn family tree down from the study. ‘Look. She’s the younger sister of my great-great-great grandfather. And she died when she was two. One of the Victorian diseases, I suppose – cholera or diphtheria. Their older sister, Alice, died the same year.’

  ‘Oh, how sad, look,’ says Mama, pointing. ‘Their mother must have died giving birth to Beatrix, the date of her death is the same as Beatrix’s birthday.’

  ‘I told you,’ says Oscar. ‘I told you. Not endsister. Ancestor.’

  ‘Okay. You were right. You don’t have to be smug,’ says Else.

  But it isn’t often Oscar gets to be the clever one. He can’t help enjoying it. ‘Can I sleep in the attic then?’ he asks Mama and Daddy. ‘If Sibbi is going to move back in with Else?’

  ‘The attic creeps me out,’ says Finn.

  ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ Clancy says again. ‘Definitely. Definitely. No such thing.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ says Else.

  ‘Of course,’ says Clancy. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘They’re gone anyway,’ says Sibbi. ‘All of the girls. Gone now.’

  ‘Gone where?’ Finn asks, curiously.

  ‘Away. Away and then past away.’

  ‘That’s that then,’ says Daddy. ‘No more ghosts. See? I told you it would work.’

  BEATRIX ELIZABETH ROSE

  ‘BEATRIX ELIZABETH ROSE Outhwaite, behave yourself this instant. I am your sister and you will do as you are told.’

  Beatrix Elizabeth Rose Outhwaite – for once in her life and in her long, long, lonely death – does as she is told.

  She stands in the middle of the room, blinking. For the ghosts, it is the living who now become insubstantial. The Outhwaite children – Else, Sibbi, Clancy, Oscar, Finn – fade to almost nothing at the edges of the room.

  ‘At last!’ breathes Annie. ‘A babe I can hold.’

  She scoops Beatrix Elizabeth Rose into her arms. Beatrix lays her head on Annie’s shoulder, sticks her fingers in her mouth – same two fingers as Sibbi – and peeps out shyly at Alice.

  ‘Your sister?’ says Annie. ‘Your sister.’

  ‘My sister,’ confesses Alice. ‘I had forgotten her. I had forgotten everything. And then Else brought the remembering. It came on the music, like a river sweeping through me. I almost remembered before, so many times, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to forget, so I forgot.’

  ‘But why? Why would you want to forget her?’

  ‘I will tell you, but you might hate me. She was born, and my mother died. Perhaps she missed Mother too, for in her first year, she screamed more than not. Nobody wanted her. Not my father, who was heartbroken, nor my brothers, James and Sebastian. My father, unable to cope with us all, sent the boys to boarding school, so I lost not only a mother but also my brothers, and in return was left with a changeling, or that was how I felt about her. Father left me to hire the nurses, and I chose only those with kind faces and caring hearts, so that they could love her as we could not. My own heart was closed to her, I willed it so.’

  ‘You were a child,’ says Annie. ‘You had lost your mother.’

  ‘I was bitter. I blamed her.’

  ‘You were a child,’ says Annie again, with love. ‘A grieving child.’

  ‘When she got sick, Father believed it was her violent emotions that caused her fever and had her confined to the attic. I asked the nurse to make it comfortable for her, and I thought to check on her by and by, but I had grown ill myself. She upstairs and I in this very room must have died our separate lonely deaths, for when I woke from death, it was to discover my father locking up the attic in his grief and guilt. He left the house after that and for many years the house was empty. Everything left me. My family, my history, my memories, until all that was left was my name, and hardly even that. When the family returned, I did not recognise them or myself.’

  ‘And Beatrix?’

  ‘In the attic all that time. Too young to even have her name, or to know what she was, to hold on to the shape of herself. I at least had that.’

  ‘And you knew she was there?’

  ‘I knew something was in there. I was afraid of it, and I pitied it. The way one might feel about a wild, wounded animal. I also knew it belonged to me, and that I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to own its wildness, its wounds, or my own wounds for that matter. So I forgot. And she protected herself, keeping people away from the attic by the sheer obstinate force of her will.’

  Annie smiles. ‘Her will. Your will. How alike you are. And now you remember everything?’

  ‘And she remembers,’ Alice says. ‘Most importantly, she remembers being Beatrix. Beatrix Elizabeth Rose Outhwaite. She is here and I am here.’

  ‘And me,’ Annie says. ‘I am here too. I wonder why?’

  Hardly Alice does not have the answer. ‘In death I had little interest in the living. They came and went, driven by clocks and calendars, while time congealed around me, a frying egg white thickening around its yolk. I paid none of you any attention, but one day you were there, the same as me. Dead, like me, and yet living on, in phantom form. Extraordinary. And yet ordinary, with your plain way of speaking and your bonny face, like sunshine entering a room, making the dust twinkle.’

  Almost Annie kisses Beatrix Elizabeth Rose Outhwaite’s forehead. ‘Poor wee babe,’ she says. ‘You tragic children.’ And she passes Beatrix over to Alice.

  ‘Me?’ says Alice, fumbling as she takes Beatrix in her arms. ‘I’ve never held a baby before. Well perhaps my brothers, when I was young.’

  ‘And now your sister,’ says Annie.

  Beatrix tolerates Alice for a moment. She reaches up to touch her face, then pull her hair, then wriggles to be put down. She takes Annie’s hand and tugs on it.

  ‘I’ve always had a way with children,’ Annie says, apologetically. ‘Or they’ve had a way with me.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Alice. ‘There’s your answer. She wanted you. She wanted a nursemaid more than a sister. What’s a sister to her?’

  ‘Well,’ says Annie, ‘she has us both now. And we have each other, Alice. You and I.’ You were a child too, thinks Annie, a haunted, wounded child. And it was your job to pick the maids. Perhaps you chose me.

  ‘Where on earth is she going?’ Alice asks.

  The little ghost Beatrix leads the big ghostly girls down to the front door, which is open, letting in the sweet air of the summer afternoon. A bicycle goes past, and children at play call to each other, and a dog barks somewhere.

  ‘We can’t go out there,’ Annie says to Beatrix. ‘It’s not for us, that world.’

  ‘No,’ says Alice, thoughtfully. ‘We can’t go out there. But I have a feeling – do you? – I have a feeling we can go through that door.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ says Annie. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ says Alice, and she takes Annie’s free hand in hers. This way the three ghosts proceed, going first away and then passed away, into the place where only the dead may go, and never, ever the living.

  ELSE

  ‘ARE YOU REALLY going to take Sibbi back to Australia?’ I ask Olly, as we sit side by side, wrapping teacups in paper and gently nestling them in boxes, ready for auction. Since Sibbi’s Endsister has gone, the house feels lighter, fresher. Dave has stopped going to Mr Brompton’s office every day. He’s trying to clean out Aunt Dorothy’s study, while Olly is takes a break from writing her thesis to tackle the kitchenware.

  ‘It’s the strangest thing,’ Olly says. ‘Dad and I fought all the way to the chemist. He was insisting we had to stay, and I knew I needed to leave, and take Sibbi with me, that she would never thrive here. Honestly, Else, my heart was breaking. I was sure our marriage was ending. I was gutted.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘And then we bought the medicine and we were walking home, and it was lik
e something, something just lifted. I could hear you playing in the house, and the sun was rich and golden. The sky was grey, isn’t the sky always grey here? But it was a marvellous, luminous grey, the light seemed to bounce off it. And then we did a total switch. Dave suddenly felt that he could leave, and I suddenly felt that I could stay.’

  ‘So we’re staying?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. We still don’t know if we can afford to keep Outhwaite House. Bridget Lane gave Dave the idea of turning it into two big apartments, and we could keep one and sell the other. Jonty is an architect, of course, so he could help us.’

  ‘Oh, it seems a shame to carve up Outhwaite House.’

  ‘Yes, I agree. And I am not sure I’m keen on raising Sibbi in an apartment. The cottage was small, but . . .’

  ‘At least Sibbi had trees to climb.’

  ‘Did you know that Aunty May’s nephew offered to sell us the cottage and Aunty May’s house?’

  I have a sudden image of the cottage on the hill, the galahs swooping over, and a massive wave of longing almost overwhelms me.

  ‘But you seem happier here, now,’ Olly says. ‘Aren’t you? You have your violin, and your Star Man and a contact at the Royal Academy. And could we really take Clancy away from Pippa? The twins seem to have settled in fine and Sibbi’s finally let her imaginary Endsister go.’

  ‘Hm,’ I say. ‘Hm.’

  ‘You think we should go back to Australia?’

  ‘I think you should ask us.’

  ‘Put it to the vote, you mean?’

  ‘I just think you should at least ask.’

  So that night, Olly makes two lasagnes, a veggie one and a meat one, and we sit in the kitchen, together.

  Dave tells Clancy and the twins and Sibbi about Aunty May’s house and the nephew’s offer.

  ‘We’d have to sell Outhwaite House,’ Dave says. ‘But we might have to anyway. It’s a big expensive house, and we have to pay the government a lot of tax for inheriting it. And even if we can afford that, there’s rates and heating bills and maintenance – it’s an old house and it needs work.’

  ‘Dad are you heartbroken? I thought you loved this house,’ says Clancy.

  ‘I felt beholden to it,’ Dave says. ‘I felt I owed it something, or that I owed Dorothy something. But when I thought I might have to choose between Outhwaite House and Olly . . . well. It’s just a house.’

  ‘We could sell Outhwaite House and buy somewhere else in London,’ says Olly. ‘Somewhere that doesn’t need so much work. We could even move to the English countryside. Pippa could come and visit on weekends, or you could come down to London, Clancy. And Else, maybe you could keep your job with the violin-maker. We could find a way for that.’

  ‘Or we could move back to Australia?’ says Oscar.

  ‘We all move back or we all stay?’ asks Finn. ‘Whatever we decide, we all do it together?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Olly.

  ‘Together,’ says Dave.

  ‘Then I don’t care,’ says Finn. ‘As long as we’re together.’ ‘What about you, Else?’ says Olly.

  ‘I can play violin anywhere,’ I say. ‘It’s not really up to me. In a few years I’ll be old enough to move out. Then I can live wherever I want. But in the meantime, if I had to choose, then I’d say Australia.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Finn. ‘If I had to choose.’

  Olly turns to Clancy. ‘What do you think Clancy? Could you bear to leave Pippa?’

  I watch the pain drift across his face. But: ‘I’d choose Australia too,’ says Clancy. ‘If it was up to me.’

  ‘Really?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re all so surprised,’ Clancy says gruffly. ‘I mean, I’ll miss Pippa. Of course I will. And if you all wanted to stay here, I’d adapt. That’s what living things do. They grow and develop and respond to their environment, and I can do all those things. But Australia is my habitat. Anyway, Pippa and Jonty are already planning to take a trip to Australia, so it’s not like I’ll never see them again.’

  ‘Would we live in the cottage or Aunty May’s house?’ says Sibbi.

  ‘Good question!’ Olly says.

  ‘We could live in one while we fix up the other, and then swap around,’ says Dave. ‘We’ll get a lot more money for Outhwaite House than it will cost us to buy Aunty May’s place. We’d have money to renovate, and a bit of money to put away for each of you kids. Else, you really would be able to study anywhere in the world.’

  ‘Oscar, are you crying?’ Olly says.

  Oscar wipes tears away from with the back of his hand. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But I’m not sad. I just really, really want to go home.’

  SIBBI

  HERE COMES SIBBI Outhwaite, skipping down the kangaroo track. Still wild, still made of sunshine and shadows, but her face is narrowing, and sharpening, she’s losing some of the softness of the jaw. She’s five now.

  Butterflies flutter in the grass. It’s December. Flocks of cockatoos settle to strip the seeds from the wallaby-grass.

  A wedge-tail eagle soars overhead, hunting food for his twin hatchlings. Aunty May told Sibbi the story of Bunjil the creator spirit, who, in the time before time, made this valley and all the land. Bunjil took the form of an eagle, so he could look down from the sky and keep an eye on things. Stories live and breathe. This one breathes inside Sibbi.

  ‘Wedge-tailed eagles mate for life,’ Clancy tells Sibbi, coming up behind her on the track. ‘The mummy and daddy eagles build the nest together, and take turns looking after their babies. Wedge-tailed eagles live in a huge territory’ – Clancy spreads his arms wide, huge – ‘and have lots of nests, but they usually have a favourite one, which they use over and over. I finally found his nest today. It’s probably really old.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Clancy shakes his head. ‘It’s bedtime. Come on, the bats will be out soon. There’s the first star.’

  ‘It’s for wishing on,’ says Sibbi and she stops in the path, but she can’t think of even one wish. From the house comes the sound of Else’s violin, notes climbing upwards to Bunjil’s sky.

  ‘Come on,’ says Clancy. ‘You’re blocking the path. Anyway, I don’t believe in wishes.’

  ‘I was wishing I could see the eagle nest,’ says Sibbi.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ says Clancy. ‘I’m going to take some photos of it to send to Pippa.’

  ‘See,’ says Sibbi. ‘Wishing is true.’

  ELSE

  OLLY STANDS AT the window, looking up at the cottage on the hill, just as she once stood at the window of the cottage on the hill, looking down at this house on the road. I pack up my violin but the song of it lingers in the air, the melodies resonate inside me, long after I finish playing.

  ‘Remember Sibbi’s ghosts?’ Olly asks Dave.

  ‘I wonder if she’ll remember them?’ I say. ‘I wonder if she’ll remember London at all?’

  ‘She’ll remember the story of London,’ says Olly. ‘We’ll tell the story of London forever. Our big journey. Our lucky story.’

  ‘Oh, stories,’ says Dave. ‘Slippery things, those stories. Hard to catch them in your hand.’

  I look at my own outstretched hand, as if I might catch one. And I do – I remember, with sudden vividness, the bird in the cage, Sibbi’s bird, in Hong Kong, a song in a bird in a cage in a city. How lost I had been. Poor, silly, lost Else, I think now, with fondness and pity and curiosity and joy.

  CLANCY

  DUSK FALLS, A gentle, forgiving, powdery dark. Oscar and Finn call to each other across the house. Sibbi looks upwards, believing in the stars. I take a mental photograph to send Pippa.

  I tell her a story in my mind, all the way across the world.

  I tell her a story like this one, a story that spreads its wings, that is guided by stars, a story that is a flightpath and also a song, singing itself into being. A story that ends where it begins: a story about coming home.

  I KNOW WHAT AN ENDSISTER IS

  It was my middle
child, Una, aged five at the time, who first conjured the Endsister, and her older sister, Frederique, who a few days later corrected her, giving this story its beginning and its end. One night, around the same time, I had a dream that my best friend gave birth to a baby girl and called her Annie Hardly Alice. It was Fred who had her heart broken in the bird markets in Hong Kong when she was five years old, and Kirsty Murray who pointed out what a fascinatingly male-centric space the bird market is. It was me who wrote a couple of years later, in the midst of a devastating period of writer’s block,

  The world is not waiting

  for you to write a poem

  Write. Don’t write.

  You may as well write.

  I don’t know how all these things (and countless other small moments) coalesced in my brain to make a story, but I know why they did, and that is because in 2014 I received an email from Molly O’Neill, who was working with Storybird.com, asking me if I would consider pitching a serialised novel for their creative partnership programme. So The Endsister began its life online, published chapter by chapter over the course of a year, on Storybird. It was read and liked and commented on by people of all ages all over the world. It feels strange to think now that what was basically a first draft of The Endsister still exists out there on the internet. Writers usually like to hide their work, but it’s out there, in its rawest form for anyone to read. I wonder if you could learn something – about writing, about me – by making a comparison between the two?

  During the time I was writing and publishing The Endsister on Storybird, my father, Bob Russon, died. The community of readers on Storybird kept me motivated to write during this time, their love of Sibbi and her family kept her real in a time when making up stories may have felt like a fool’s errand. My dad would have liked Sibbi; a primary school teacher, he had an enduring love and respect for children and childhood – something we shared. He was born in England like Dave, but halfway through his life came to Australia as a ten-pound Pom, met my mum, Frances, and together they made a home and a family in Tasmania.