The Lost Sister. Laura Elliot
us through hell and back again.’ Rebecca, sitting behind her desk, looked and sounded exhausted. Her black hair, tied back in a tight ponytail, accentuated her wide, flat cheekbones and strong chin. There had been an incident the previous day between her and an alcoholic farmer who had brutalised a donkey. The donkey had been rescued but Julie doubted if the battle with the alcoholic farmer was responsible for the weary slope of Rebecca’s shoulders, the smudged hollows under her eyes.
‘Don’t you think Cathy was in her own personal hell?’ Julie demanded. ‘You’ve a short memory span if you’ve forgotten.’
‘I haven’t forgotten anything. Including how she misled us afterwards. Her deceit…’
Julie saw the familiar anger flare in Rebecca’s eyes, her lips compress, as if she was holding back bitter accusations. Their conversation petered out, as it always does when they speak about Cathy. Sitting beside her now, Julie shivers, as if the tension she senses in her older sister has transferred to herself.
The plane lifts higher. Clouds fall like blots over the familiar landscape and Julie is swept into a grey swirl that banishes the world she knows from sight.
Chapter Five
Rebecca’s Journal–1985
My mother’s words are like a song in my head. The kind of song you don’t want to hear yet one line keeps repeating and repeating until you long to hit your head off a wall to make it stop.
‘Look after Cathy for me,’ she said, but I’d other plans that night. Sheila Brogan’s parents were on holiday for a week and she was throwing a party. I guess that was the reason my mother–who always seemed to know everything she shouldn’t–wanted me to stay at home. That and Jeremy…
I glared at her and demanded to know why I was always the one who had to do everything? Why was Lauren, high and mighty Lauren, treated as if she was Ireland’s answer to Margot Fonteyn? We’d already been to the opening night of her concert. Why, then, was it necessary for Mammy and Daddy to attend on the closing night?
Oh, I was petulant that evening, sulking and rude and argumentative. I watched her flicking mascara on her eyelashes, spraying perfume on her wrists. She had delicate wrists and long fingers like a pianist. That’s what she wanted to be when she was young–a concert pianist–but she wasn’t good enough and she ended up marrying Gerard Lambert and playing marching tunes for us on the piano in the living room. ‘Marching Through Georgia’, ‘Heart of Dixie’, ‘Anchors Away’–and we marched like little soldiers up and down the floor. She played soft tunes too: ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Long Time Passing’. Joan Baez was singing it on the radio the other day. I lunged at it and switched it off before the others heard.
She ordered me to stop arguing. To stop giving cheek and do as I was told for a change. (It’s funny–although no one is laughing–how much I sound like her now.)
How could either of us have realised that those words would be the last we’d ever exchange? Angry words that would have been forgotten as easily as they were uttered but now they resonate beyond the grave and chain me to their power.
She dabbed her lips on a tissue and left the room. The next day I found the tissue crumpled on the dressing table. Her lips were imprinted like a bloodstain on the creases.
I didn’t look after Cathy that night. As soon as Daddy’s car disappeared around the corner, I persuaded Julie to mind her. They were snuggled on the sofa with Kevin Mulvaney when I left, the three of them watching Cagney and Lacey.
I wore my striped tank top to Sheila’s party, my best Levi’s and my new Adidas trainers. I remember so many things about that night. They come back to me in fragments. How Rory Jones broke a piece of Mrs Brogan’s precious Aynsley china. Sheila cried as she swept up the pieces but no one else cared. I remember how we turned away in disgust, but laughing, when Rick Martin threw up in the kitchen sink. I remember my reflection in the mirror with the gilt-edge frame that hung above the mantelpiece. I danced with Jeremy, cheek-to-cheek, and I could see the back of his head, hear my bangles jangling when I raised my hand and stroked my fingers through his thick blond hair. Our bodies, made for each other, our feet moving to the same step, and he was hard when he pressed against me, so hard it hurt, almost, and that, too, was part of the pleasure. He whispered into my ear, told me he loved me, wanted me, his breath hot on my neck, and I wondered if we dared slip away, slip upstairs to one of the empty bedrooms, and what would happen then, would we…could I…and he held me tighter still as we danced past the mirror, danced in a slow dark circle, oblivious to what was taking place on the bend of the coast road leading to Heron Cove.
I remember the silence that settled over the party when Sheila came into the living room with a policewoman. The policewoman’s mouth seemed full of glass when she tried to explain why a squad car was waiting outside to bring me home. I remember the room swaying. Jeremy tried to catch me before I fell. My head banged off the edge of the table. I don’t remember any pain. My new trainers struck out in front of me. Funny thing to remember, my heels clamped together, forcing my toes into a V. I don’t remember being lifted to my feet, but someone must have done so because I know I could never have managed to stand on my own. And I remember the whispering that started when the policewoman took my arm and led me away from the party. Jeremy came with me but I don’t remember anything he said to me, or if the policewoman spoke to either of us.
Lights were burning in the windows of Heron Cove. Doors were open. Neighbours were clustered in huddles in the hall and the kitchen. I remember their faces, Lydia’s tears. Julie’s screams as she broke free from Paul’s arms and ran towards me. And I remember thinking, as we held each other, that our lives had changed utterly and for ever.
Chapter Six
Havenswalk–January 2009
The attic in Havenswalk is reached by a spiral staircase. A handy place for dumping broken furniture that has some possibility of being repaired but is inevitably forgotten once the door closes. Next year, Cathy plans to convert the attic into a dance studio but, for now, it is a repository for all the bric-a-brac she and Alma have acquired and abandoned since they moved to New Zealand.
She switches on the light and browses for an hour among boxes and crates, sifts through account ledgers and old books that release the fusty smell of neglected papers. She stops to examine some clothes and toys belonging to Conor, items she decided to save for the memories they evoke. The silence is uneasy. She suspects unseen creatures lurking in the eaves and crannies, but only the spiders ignore her intrusion and continue spinning in gauzy corners.
The edge of the moon shifts from her gaze as she moves the broken frame of an awning to one side. It is heavy and almost topples over. She prevents it falling and waking everyone. Underneath it, she finds a wicker picnic basket. The weave is broken in places. Snapped reeds jut outwards and cobwebs trail like a shiver across her fingers when she snaps open the rusting lock. Her letters to Nirvana. Carefully she lifts them out. They are tied together with an elastic band that breaks with an exhausted snap when she stretches it.
She hesitates, undecided. Does she really want to delve into the past and relive those fragmented years when hormones, confusion and unresolved heartache formed their own convulsive mix? Never look back, Rebecca used to say. Nothing but dust around corners.
The date on the first letters startles her. Was she only eight years old when she wrote it? She always imagined she was older, probably about ten. The early ones were written on notepaper with delicate border drawings, Edwardian ladies with parasols and lacy, ruffled collars. A writing set, she remembers, given to her by Lydia Mulvaney as a starter present. Write to your mother, Lydia said, and when you are sleeping she will read your letters. Angels fly at midnight. Their first stop is home.
Cathy smiles, remembering how the image of hovering angels had comforted her and how, when the fancy notepaper ran out, she wrote on the torn-out pages of copybooks and refill pads, writing by torch light at night when the house was quiet, secret hours under a duvet tent.
If she read the letters before contacting Rebecca her courage