The Forgotten Sister

by Caroline Bond

  ‘Mum and Dad lied. They pretended that she doesn’t exist. All this time. Can you believe it? Even when I told them I wanted to look for my mum, even then, they kept their mouths shut. I have a sister they were never going to tell me about! Ever! They split us up when we were little, left her behind. Never once bothered to find out what happened to her.’ Erin hadn’t realised that she was shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Yes, they did! Her life has been crap – and it’s all their fault!’ Cassie was vibrating with pent-up energy.

  Erin shrank in the face of it, her mind scrambling to catch up, as her heart twisted and turned. It just didn’t seem possible. It was all such a mess: everyone lying to everyone else, all of them fumbling about in the dark. What she wanted, more than anything else, was for her mum to walk into the room and take the responsibility for it all away from her. But she didn’t.

  ‘And the money?’

  Cassie bristled at the mention of it. ‘Is for Leah.’

  Erin nodded, though she still didn’t really understand. ‘But if she needs some money, I can help. Like I said, I’ll get some out of my account. You don’t need to…take it,’ she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘steal’ again, ‘from Dad.’

  Cassie’s mouth hardened once more. ‘Erin. Stay out of it.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘There is no “but”. You’ve got to let me handle this my way. Leah is my sister. It’s up to me to start putting this right, and if that means Dad is a bit short, then it serves him right.’

  Erin flinched. It was all wrong. She was Cassie’s sister. Leah was a stranger. A stranger who was sucking Cassie into behaving in ways she’d never behaved before. ‘Do you get on with her? You can’t have much in common.’ Her voice faltered.

  ‘Other than a mother, and the first three years of my life.’ Erin’s heart twisted tighter. Cassie didn’t notice. ‘It gets a bit better each time I go over there. She’s starting to talk more. But it isn’t easy. She’s kinda closed off, defensive about a lot of things. I think it’s because of how she was brought up, on her own, in care.’ Cassie paused and both girls became aware of their environment: their comfortable, peaceful home, stuffed full of family pictures and nice things. Cassie seemed to decide that enough was enough. ‘Erin. You can’t tell them any of this.’ Erin nodded; what else could she do? ‘Not yet. If Leah finds out that you…that I’ve said anything about her to you, or to them, then that’s it. You do get that, don’t you?’ Erin nodded again, though she hated the thought of the secrets that were now tucked inside her. ‘Good. Nothing – to no one.’ Erin nodded one last time, disconsolately. ‘Okay. Well, I’m off out.’

  Despite the hurt cramping her soul, Erin had to ask, ‘Are you going to see her?’

  Cassie looked at her little sister. ‘No. I’m just going out. I’ll see you later.’ The door banged shut, and Erin was left alone in a house that now had the taint of Leah trapped inside it.

  Chapter 39

  LEAH’S COUGH was getting better, but her chest still hurt and she still looked like shit. The first day in bed had been a luxury. The second not. Too much time on her own in the flat was never a good thing; it just made her more conscious of other people’s lives. On day one she’d lain in bed and listened to people arriving and departing on the landing, catching snatches of conversation and the occasional harsh burst of laughter. On day two she’d dragged herself up and watched the comings and goings down below the flats: the girls pushing buggies, her ‘neighbours’ manhandling their shopping and their kids home, and a selection of identically bald men, in matching vests, being dragged across the scorched grass by their muscle-bound dogs. All of them seemed to have someone to stop and pass the time of day with.

  Not her.

  Naz was staying away. His version of sympathy had sounded a lot like neglect. ‘I don’t want your germs, thanks very much. Message me when you’re proper better.’

  On day three she was reduced to getting out the file – her only constant companion. She took it back to bed, pulling the duvet up around her, creating a nest. She knew that looking at the contents wouldn’t make her feel better, it always made her feel worse.

  Fourteen years of self-flagellation.

  A letter sent.

  A letter received.

  A letter read.

  Over and over again.

  Every year for fourteen years – without fail.

  As a child, Leah had developed a kind of sixth sense about the letters. In the weeks before the next episode from planet Happy Family arrived, she’d be plagued by an intense sense of agitation and excitement. The letters were like her own warped, very personal version of Christmas: longed for, eagerly awaited, prone to make her sick with nervous energy. But whereas Christmas was always a let-down – a half-hearted display of fake feeling – the letters were always incendiary, provoking more emotion than Leah the child, Leah the teenager, even Leah the adult could cope with. She clearly remembered turning eighteen and – despite consuming a skull-splitting quantity of vodka the night before, and waking up early on her birthday with the worst hangover of her life – her first thought had been: will the letters stop?

  They hadn’t. Still they came, a painful reminder of just how powerless she was.

  Leah had read each of the letters a hundred times over, in what felt like a hundred different bedrooms. She’d been lying to herself when she’d said she wasn’t an addict. The letters were her addiction. They were the never-ending itch that she was compelled to scratch, time and time again, reopening old wounds and raising new welts. But the pain was a release…at least it was whilst she was scratching. No addiction was without cost.

  The stack of letters had travelled with her every time she’d moved on…to something better, to somewhere more suited to her needs and, towards to end, into whatever was available at such short notice.

  There was no denying that Cassidie’s black bitch of a mother had a way with words. She was able to conjure up vivid images of reassuring routines, colour and warmth, humour and happiness, the mundane and the special – very effectively, in line after line of small, neat typeface. Her descriptions of family life always sounded so real, so solid, which of course they had been – for Cassidie.

  Every year a new instalment of nauseating normality would arrive, sometimes months after they’d been written. It was one of the surprising efficiencies of a chronically inefficient Social Services that no matter how often Leah moved, the letters still managed to reach her. It was as if the very people who kept failing her so miserably couldn’t resist parading their success with her sister. It was as good a way of punishing her as any – more so, really. The groundings, the sanctions, the threats had little or no impact on Leah, but the letters did. They served a dual purpose. Each neatly typed missive pushed her down harder and further, ensuring that she knew her place, whilst at the same time they kept alight the roaring, tearing rage that drove her half-mad.

  Because the letters – though beautifully descriptive – were also deeply frustrating. There was never enough identifiable detail in them. The bitch-mother wasn’t naïve. She knew how to protect what was hers. How to build a defence, whilst seeming to build a bridge. She never gave anything useful away, no clues as to their whereabouts, no real names or even specific dates or traceable events. Nothing that could be followed up. They were a clever exercise in Show, but don’t tell.

  The file was heavy on Leah’s lap – thick with a tsunami of officialese and buck-passing paperwork. Only the letters section was neat and organised. Each one carefully stored away in ascending chronological order. It made it so much easier to find her year of choice.

  On her sickbed, with life going on beyond the stuffy, sealed-off box of her tiny flat, Leah selected Cassidie at seven. Her own age, at the point they were ripped apart.

  At seven, Cassidie:

  …is loving her ballet lessons. She’s made lots of new friends. The class is so good for her confidence.

  They put on a performance before Christma
s, nothing too elaborate, just a small show for family and friends. She was picked to do a solo. She got very excited about it, doing lots of practising all round the house. She wanted to wear her costume all the time, even to school – she was a lion with a shaggy mane and a swishy tail.

  At seven, Leah went into the unit. She turned eight there. Another birthday to forget.

  It was a life lived behind glass, where she was observed twenty-four hours a day. Her every move, her every action, her every twitch assessed, as they judged whether she was safe to release back into the community. It took them nine months to decide that she was. And even then there were caveats.

  At seven, Leah wasn’t dancing and singing and swinging her lion-tail. She was screaming, and flailing and raging at the loss of the one person who mattered most to her.

  At nine, Cassidie:

  …is doing well at school. She has a lovely teacher who seems to understand her. Her teacher is encouraging her not to be afraid of making mistakes. She is thriving, loving art and literacy the most. A proper bookworm. But she still loves tearing around. Some of her energy is going into athletics. She’s joined an after-school club that lets kids try out all the different events to see which they enjoy the most. At the moment it’s long jump.

  At nine, Leah had a chance.

  The Mertons.

  She was taken to a house and shown into a room that made her heart beat fast. Clean white walls. Matching bedding and blinds, covered in sprigs of blue-and-yellow flowers. An armchair, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and, for the first time in her life, a dressing table with a mirror and a little stool with a fluffy white fur cover.

  Julie, her new foster mum, stood behind her, close but not touching, and said, ‘This is your room, Leah. We hope you’ll be happy here. I’ll leave you to have little look round. I’ll be downstairs in the kitchen, if you need me. Come down when you’re ready and I’ll fix us something to eat.’ Then she stepped out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  Her own room.

  Leah sat on the little stool. It creaked and swivelled. She turned a full circle – fairy steps – on the pale-blue carpet. A slow revolution, taking it all in, returning to face the mirror. She averted her eyes. Why spoil the moment? She picked up the little bottle of perfume and sniffed at it. It smelt of flowers. She didn’t spray it. It wasn’t hers, yet. She opened the drawer and saw that it was empty, ready for her things. She ran her hands across the cool glass top of the dressing table, her fingertips skimming the surface, fearful of leaving a mark. Then she picked up the hairbrush and held it loosely in her hands, looking at the pearly ridges on the back of it – letting hope take a small, shallow breath. Finally, she looked up.

  The room reflected in the mirror was clean and shiny and pretty.

  The girl in the mirror was not.

  But maybe she could make her so.

  Leah lifted the heavy brush and began to drag it through her hair, trying to make it look cleaner and shinier and prettier and, as she brushed, she vowed to be on her absolute best behaviour.

  At twelve, Cassidie:

  …found the transition to High School fairly straightforward, which was a relief. We thought she would be okay, but it is such a huge change. The school she’s now attending has a good reputation for looking after their students, as well as for academic achievement. She seems to be coping fine with the work.

  At twelve, Leah had the ugliest of the three Fitzpatrick lads sucking on her neck. She’d been the last girl picked, but at least she had been picked. The noise and the sensation of him leeching on her made her stomach turn. She craned her face away from him, but not her body.

  The darkness in Hulme Park was incomplete, the lights from the Mancunian Way kept it in perpetual muddy twilight. The park was busier at night than it ever was during the day. This late, it was alive with the aimless and the wilful, many of them kids like herself, absconding from whatever version of home they hailed from. The non-stop rumble of the traffic wasn’t loud enough to drown out the screeching and preening of the rejected girls or the barks of laughter from the boys.

  It was a community, of sorts, but a sharp-edged, uneasy one, membership of which came at a price.

  The lad stopped sucking at her neck and shifted position, but he wasn’t done – he was just getting started. His hand went up her T-shirt. It felt like one of those mechanical grabbers you saw at funfairs, but one that worked. He latched onto her chest and squeezed. She winced. It hurt. As he ground her nipple into her ribs in search of breast meat, she stared at the lights travelling along the motorway, tolerating his attentions.

  There were worse fates than being picked last.

  There was not being picked at all.

  At sixteen, Cassidie:

  …has been a little stressed. The pressure of GCSEs got to her just a bit. But she did really well in her exams, in all her subjects. The whole family were very proud of her. We celebrated with a family holiday away. Her good grades means that she’ll be going to the sixth form that she’s set her heart on, in September.

  At sixteen, Leah moved three times.

  The first move was out of her last family placement – she was deemed a bad influence on the younger kids. The second was out of a short-lived, supported-living flat – she wasn’t a good fit with the other residents. The third move was into a specialist unit – admission, at last, that an actual home was never going to be found for her.

  She only sat her GCSEs because they bribed her. Cash incentives, the last-ditch attempt to buy her a future that had long ago disappeared down the toilet. Her resultant poor grades surprised no one. They confirmed what everyone already knew.

  Her direction was set.

  Leah put the letters back into the file and closed it.

  Two girls.

  Two lives.

  Two paths that had diverged so wildly that it had seemed impossible they would ever cross again.

  And yet they had. Leah had made sure of that.

  For fourteen years the bitch-mother had done her utmost to keep Cassidie and Leah apart.

  But she’d failed.

  Cassidie was hers now.

  Chapter 40

  CASSIE WAS back in the park in Oldham. The same bench, another day, a different cover story. Her parents assuming that she was in college; college believing that she was at her great-aunt’s funeral. And Erin? Erin wouldn’t know for sure where she was, but Cassie knew she’d have her suspicions. She didn’t feel guilty about her deception, she felt justified. An eye for an eye, a lie for a lie, a rebalancing of the scales all round. And besides, she owed it to Leah. There were amends to be made and it was she who had to make them, no one else seemed to be willing to. Hence the money stashed away in her purse. It was only what Leah deserved, and only a fraction of what she was owed. And if it took cash to grease the wheels of their stop–start relationship, so be it.

  From her vantage point, Cassie watched the road that ran along the side of the park. She knew Leah would be late, she always was. Cassie felt she was beginning to understand her a little better, but that still amounted to hardly at all, because Leah’s guard was so often up. There were so many no-go topics of conversation. Cassie knew that Leah still held the power; she was the keeper of their past, a fact that she rarely let Cassie forget, but Cassie was beginning to notice the occasional chink in Leah’s armour: momentary lapses in her fierce defensiveness, fleeting glimpses of another, softer personality beneath the rock-hard surface. And, against the odds, they were establishing a relationship of sorts, even it wasn’t one that could remotely be described as affectionate or, at times, even friendly. They were certainly a long way off being sisterly.

  The park was quiet, fewer mums and kids about, which was a good job, as the vandals had been out and about, and busy. There was a rash of fresh graffiti on the concrete walls of the skate-park, and broken glass glinted in the sunshine on the ground around the bins. Near Cassie’s foot, the neck of a smashed vodka bottle poked out of the grass. She p
rodded at it tentatively with the toe of her trainer and considered picking it up, to stop any of the little kids finding it and hurting themselves, but the thought of whose mouth – or, more likely, mouths – had been wrapped around the rim stopped her; that and the fear that she would cut herself on the jagged frill of glass. The play area itself was also newly damaged. Big chunks of the spongy safety-floor covering had been gouged up, leaving a trial of black scars across the faded rainbow pattern. Cassie fought the sinking feeling that dragged at her, telling herself that she was focusing, unfairly, on the bad stuff. The park was just more messy, more well used than the ones in her home town, but the longer she sat there, the more the careless brutality of it all got to her.

  It was a welcome relief when she spotted Leah heading across the grass. Anticipation warred with anxiety within her. Suddenly she felt self-conscious about the sandwiches, snacks and drinks that she’d brought with her – it was hardly picnic-in-the-park territory. She pushed her bag underneath the bench, out of sight. She’d only mention that she’d brought lunch if the mood felt right; she didn’t want Leah thinking she was getting off on doling out charity. Leah had nearly reached the brow of the hill. As she approached, they acknowledged each other, Cassie with a smile, Leah with a dip of her head. She looked less ill than the last time Cassie had seen her, though she was puffing quite hard by the time she flopped down on the bench.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hi. You look better.’

  ‘Yeah. I am.’

  They fell back into awkwardness. What to do with each other? It was a problem they had yet to solve. All they had in common was blood, and a mother. No shared memories, no shared experiences, no shared interests – if you discounted their growing fascination with each other.