She hears the crying before her eyes have adjusted to the darkness, before they have found the figure sitting on the bed: her mum’s sobs are low and painful, a sound that seems to Lily to be filled not only with fear but with disbelief and a quiet fury that this should be happening. It is a sound that causes Lily’s heart to knock against her chest, gently at first and then more insistently, until she fears her mum may hear it.
She holds the palm of her hand against her chest. She knows she should not be there but now that she is – unnoticed, unheard – she is too scared to leave in case she accidentally reveals her presence. She allows only the smallest stream of air in and out of her mouth, the shallowest of breaths she hopes will not betray her.
As her eyes adjust to the darkness Lily sees that her mum is giving Zoe some medicine. With one hand, she lifts Zoe’s head from the pillow as gently as if she were handling a precious artefact in a museum. With the other, she drips medicine from a plastic syringe onto Zoe’s tongue. Her mum is crying, low, mournful sobs, and whispering declarations of love into the darkness: ‘I love you, angel. I will always, always love you.’ Giving Zoe the syringe of medicine seems to take for ever but when finally it is over, instead of putting the syringe back down, her mum picks up the bottle of morphine, fills the syringe again and drops more medicine into Zoe’s mouth.
Thoughts scramble to form an orderly queue in Lily’s head. She wonders whether her mum has forgotten or whether she is too upset to remember the rules that Lily has heard her parents discuss so many times over the past few days: When did you last give her some medicine? Remember, she’s not allowed more than one syringe of morphine an hour. She feels an urge to call out but the words stick in her throat and she realises she does not know what she wants to say.
Lily watches in silence as her mum finishes dispensing the second batch of medicine and then administers a third. Her heart is hammering, her lungs tight with the limited supply of oxygen, but still she says nothing as her mum reaches for the bottle, again and again, giving Zoe more and more medicine, until she is holding the bottle almost upside down to fill the syringe with the last of the morphine.
Lily’s skin prickles, her eyes straining in the semi-darkness. Her brain scrabbles to find possible – better – solutions to the shadowy thoughts creeping through her mind, but however much she tries to settle on a different narrative, the same dark story rises up through the gloom.
Still Lily does not move as her mum gets into bed beside Zoe, wraps an arm around her and holds on to her tightly. Her mum is still crying but she begins to sing through her tears and the sound is like nothing Lily has ever heard before: a sound so sad Lily knows she will remember it for as long as she lives. She tries to swallow her grief but instead tastes something bitter and metallic on her tongue and she knows it is the taste of fear.
She cannot stay in there any longer. She cannot stay because she knows – the truth of it clenching her heart in its fist – that what she has witnessed is all her fault. Her own words of eleven days ago come back to haunt her, echoing in her ears like a child’s playground taunt: It’s inhumane. For goodness’ sake, people do more for sick pets than they do for people. There must be something we can do. Please, Mum. Please stop it. You have to.
Lily backs silently out of the room and onto the landing, closing the door quietly behind her. Her heart is still thundering in her chest, her cheeks hot, the air slowly – finally – escaping from her lungs. She feels tears in her eyes and she blinks them away because she knows that if they begin to fall there will be no way of stopping them.
‘What are you doing?’
Lily jumps around, startled, the silent terror of the last few minutes shattered by the sight of Jess, at the top of the stairs, staring at her.
There follows a stand-off between them, Jess demanding to go in and see Zoe, Lily knowing that she has to do everything in her power to stop her.
The alarm on Lily’s digital watch beeps and she jerks her hand to turn it off, frantic that her mum shouldn’t hear, that she shouldn’t know she and Jess are loitering outside.
Lily holds her sister’s gaze, willing Jess to turn and walk away. And when, eventually, Jess retreats and begins to go down the stairs, Lily knows she must follow close behind.
All the way to school Lily manages not to cry. She must not let Jess see that she is upset, must not let her know that there is already cause to be grieving. But when they reach the school gates – when she has safely deposited Jess in the junior school playground and rounded the corner to her own senior school – she walks up the stairs to the top-floor toilets that are always empty at this time and locks herself inside. There she allows the horror of the past thirty minutes to catch up with her in loud, lonely sobs that reverberate around the cubicle as if they will never be silenced.
Chapter 61
Jess
Jess’s head reeled: a sense that the bench, her body, her feet were no longer anchored to the ground.
Her mum looked at her and Jess saw it in her eyes: an expression that tipped Jess’s world onto a different axis, sent it spinning out of control.
And then there was a torrent of words, unstoppable and unrelenting, her mum talking and talking, confessing to something Jess didn’t want to hear: something that undid the past and recast the present.
‘You have to believe me, both of you. I did what I thought was best for Zoe.’
Her mum dragged a tissue along her cheek and Jess turned to look at her, but it was as if she was staring at a stranger. ‘The best? How can you say that? How can that possibly have been the best for Zoe?’
There was hysteria in her voice, and passers-by turned to stare but her words had a momentum of their own and Jess couldn’t stop them.
Her mum reached out, tried to take her hand, but Jess yanked it away.
‘She was going to die, Jess. There was nothing any of us could do to change that. We brought her home to die.’
Her mum spoke softly but the words jabbed into Jess’s chest. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that at the time? Why did you all pretend that she was coming home because she was better? You should have told me the truth. She was my twin. I had a right to know.’
Her mum began to weep again, and Jess turned her head away, felt the blood pounding in her ears. ‘What about Dad? Did he know? Did the two of you plan it together?’
Her mum coughed into her hand, wiped it on a tissue, shook her head. ‘Dad wasn’t involved at all. He didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t tell him until after the funeral.’
Pieces of a jigsaw Jess had never been able to complete began to slot into place. Hazy scenes from her childhood pulled into focus as if they had been waiting all these years to be restored. Coming in from the garden one day that summer – barefoot, unintentionally silent – hearing her parents hissing at one another in the kitchen, the words long since forgotten but the tone of animosity and contrition still audible in her ears. Her dad’s changed demeanour that summer, his kindness and affection replaced by distant coldness, and Jess’s belief that it must be her fault for reminding him of the daughter he had lost. The four of them having Sunday lunch, the kitchen silent save for the muted orchestra of cutlery against crockery, her mum reaching out a hand towards her dad’s arm and him flinching, glaring at her and speaking with a ferocity Jess had never heard before: Don’t. Just don’t. All those nights her dad had failed to come home before Jess went to sleep, all those nights she had lain under the duvet, alone on the bottom bunk bed, believing her dad could no longer bear to be in the same house as her because he resented her for still being alive when her funny, brave, superior twin was dead.
‘That’s why Dad killed himself, isn’t it? He couldn’t bear what you’d done?’