‘I told you, please don’t call me that.’
I turn and leave the room, feeling their gazes on my back all the way out. The hall is brightly lit, but the first floor is in darkness. I don’t put the lights on though, finding my way upstairs without any help, my hand sliding along the smooth wooden banister.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five . . .
In my head, I count all the stairs up to the second floor, reaching twelve and stopping. It’s pitch-black at the top of the house. My bedroom to the right. Rachel’s to the left. Her room locks, mine doesn’t. I can still see marks on the wooden frame of her door where there used to be a bolt, too. On the outside, to keep her safely locked in when she was having one of her violent tantrums. Our shared bathroom lies straight ahead.
The house is silent up here.
Oppressively so.
I tuck the necklace under my knitted top, but I can still feel it there. The silver cat is cold against my skin. Cold and heavy.
Pushing the door to my room open, I grope along the wall for the light switch.
The light comes on.
I look up, straight into Rachel’s eyes.
Chapter Eight
Of course, it isn’t Rachel. It’s just my own reflection in the full-length mirror opposite. But it frightens me enough that I gasp, take a sudden step back.
Someone – Kasia, perhaps? – has hooked one of my old black evening dresses on a hanger over the framed edge of the mirror.
For a second, looking into the mirror is like looking through a second doorway. A doorway into the past, and not a very flattering one.
Rachel was thinner than me, and slightly taller too, being older. Otherwise we were quite similar, so that people often mistook us for each other. In this instant though, I glimpse Rachel as she might have looked if she’d survived into adulthood. The narrow face filled out, her long hair chopped unflatteringly, hips somewhat broader, the suggestion of a rounded belly where Rachel was flat as a board. A slight coarsening of the features, too, which shocks me, examining myself in contrast to my dead sister.
There was always an air of elfish malevolence about Rachel that has kept her ever young in my memory. But if she’d lived, she might have looked very different by now. Perhaps even unrecognisable, if encountered on the street.
I lied about the headache.
My primary impulse downstairs had been to escape. To flee the claustrophobic atmosphere of the kitchen, where I’d felt – and acted – like a child again. That’s how it always seems to go when reunited with my parents. Pure regression, everything driven by kneejerk reactions that date back to childhood. One excellent reason for avoiding them all this time, though I can hardly admit that to my mother.
Daddy, I called him.
As though I were a little girl in short socks, and he was my hero. The best man in all the world.
‘Ugh.’
I drop backwards onto the bed, which is made up with fresh linen as if they told Kasia I’m staying the night. I won’t stay, of course.
But dinner won’t do any harm.
The mattress creaks beneath me in its wooden frame as I shift, getting comfortable. A sleigh bed, both ends curved like a Russian troika. My initials are carved into the wooden scroll at the head end.
There’s a photograph on the wall: me and Dad, soon after we returned home from Switzerland, taken by Mum in the back garden.
I look young and vulnerable. No make-up, my clothes ill-fitting. I would go on to lose a lot of weight in my mid-teens, my body a kind of stranger during adolescence. By contrast, Dad looks easy and self-assured in jeans and shirtsleeves, his top button undone. No tie, I notice. He took several months off work after Rachel’s death, which pleased me as I got to spend so much time with him alone.
Dad’s arm is round my shoulder, hugging me close. His smile is warm and open. Yet there’s a sadness about him, too. A distance in his eyes.
We had just lost Rachel.
His hair was only faintly threaded with silver in those days. Tall and broad-shouldered, but with a leanness that made his jeans sit low on his hips, he dominates the shot. Behind us stands the gigantic magnolia tree that is still the focal point of the garden, especially in spring when its petal buds open into vast, waxy-leaved, bowl-like flowers. Even now I can almost smell that rich, citrus scent that is always so overwhelming when sitting beneath it in the shade . . .
Did Dad love Rachel more than me when we were kids? Was I some kind of consolation prize for him after her death?
I often wonder, yet never dare ask him directly. And with my adult mind, it’s a possibility that makes little sense. Rachel was an unpleasant child, always in serious trouble, always doing something not merely mischievous but downright appalling.
Yet my parents usually like to pretend that she was normal.
‘You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,’ they told me once, after an inadvertent mention of Rachel and some dreadful crime she’d committed. Their disapproval was tangible.
Rachel, the saint.
Canonised after death, and quite undeservedly.
I bring out the cat necklace from under my top, straightening it on my chest. I both love it and hate it at the same time. A conflict which hurts and causes me confusion. The very fact that my mother can buy me a gift like this, and not know how painful it must be, makes me question my own memories.
Yes, I wanted a cat as a child. A soft, fluffy kitten who would run after dangled wool and cuddle up to me at night.
But there was a very good reason they decided against getting a cat. Because of Rachel’s hatred for animals. Not least the day she tortured and killed that unfortunate stray in front of me. And further traumatised me by plucking out its eye, and . . .
The snow globe.
I close my eyes and push that memory away. It’s easier to do than I feared. But then, it was always quiet here at the top of the house. The windows are specially double-glazed to be soundproof, and the noise of traffic below is barely audible. That’s one reason I spent so long up here after Rachel’s death. I felt cocooned, a rook in a high nest, cut off from the rush and confusion of the city below. Like I was all alone in the world, and nothing could bother me. Not even the most troubling memories of my sister.
I let myself drift into sleep. I’ll mention Rachel’s snow globe at dinner. That’s why I’ve come to see them, after all.
We eat in the dining room, not the breakfast room, which surprises me. The dining room is long and very grand, and normally reserved for when my parents have company. And I hardly count as ‘company’. But the table was laid by Kasia before she left, Mum tells me. It has been covered with a cream damask tablecloth, and laid with wine and water glasses, and slender silver cutlery. There’s a floral centrepiece too, white roses with delicate green candles, and for each person a damask napkin enclosed in a silver-plated napkin ring.
There’s an empty seat opposite me. No place setting, but the seat is there.
I glance at it briefly, and then away.
‘How’s Dominic getting on at the hospital?’ my mother asks, and I smile, turning to her, only too happy to talk about someone other than myself.
While I describe Dominic’s recent issues at St Hilda’s, I’m aware of my dad watching me, his eyes intent. Such close scrutiny makes me uneasy, but I keep talking. I know what he’s thinking. That Dominic isn’t good enough for me. Such crap. None of the boys I’ve dated have ever been good enough for him. At first I was disheartened by his patent disapproval of Dominic – ‘A male nurse?’ Dad had repeated when I first mentioned his job, clearly horrified – but Dominic himself persuaded me to let it go.
‘Parents never like the guys their daughters date,’ he assured me, grinning. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
I did worry though, but secretly, and certainly didn’t allow Dad to influence my choice of boyfriend.
Dinner over, Mum disappears into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, again rejecting my offer of help.