The Half Sister Read online

  dire, o una sola,

  ma grande come il mare,

  come il mare profonda ed infinita . . .’

  Mirroring the performance, he takes Diana’s small, cold hand in his. It seems to him that these lines were written for the two of them, for this moment. ‘I have many things I want to tell you.’ But the time for telling is over. He will never know or understand.

  What he has forgotten is the awful silence when Mimi dies, how even the instruments are paralysed, and all that can be heard through the vast, choked auditorium are footsteps on stage and weeping. The absence of music seems to him to stir a response from Diana. It is not physical, no turned head, no smile, no speech, but a warmth felt like slipping into the gentle lapping of a still, warm sea. And he swims with her back into the night on an empty beach on the Gulf coast, moonshadows of palm trees on sand and the hot touch of her; and their bed is crumpled cotton in a hotel room in Siena looking out over the burned road and orange hills; and the white sheets are like snow on a smooth slope in Cortina d’Ampezzo, the only tracks in the snow behind them, theirs. Now, there is room enough for regret. If he had spent more time loving her and wishing her life and less time hating her and wanting her dead, it is possible this warmth would have been like music, like the river, enough to unlock the tight imprisoned throat, and they could have talked about all the things that have gone wrong, not just the earthquake, but before that, deeper histories and childhood stories with sad endings, and mothers and fathers and sisters and why they are like they are and who they could be. Diana is not a bad person; there was neither malice nor greed in the woman he loved, maybe anger and insecurity somewhere underneath that cool exterior, maybe a lack of trust in the future, but he had not recognised it for what it was. Is it now too late? Outside, even at this time of night, the tubers are feeding, the sap is rising. Earlier in this opera, Mimi feigns sleep because she wants to be left alone with Rodolfo. I have many things I want to tell you. O una sola. Well, just the one. As large, as profound as the ocean.

  ‘Are you awake, my love?’

  No. Diana is not pretending. She is not going to wake up and tell him.

  She has made a terrible request and he has made a terrible decision to grant it and, yes, it is too late.

  When the music finishes, with great care, half-lover, half-undertaker, he replaces her right hand on the sheet and creeps from the room.

  There is no one else alive. Driverless cars pass him and are gone. Occasionally, two red lights appear in front of him like a will o’ the wisp. He does not undress, does not sleep, and in the morning he ignores the stubble and sweat and takes his dishevelled self to the village church, abandoning his chapel for a reason: he found there what he wanted to find, the candles were also false guides in this swamp in which he lives. He saw in their flames the images he wanted to see, the miracles worked were those he already believed in because he made them himself.

  Here, in this public place with its mundane protestations of faith, the Sunday School map of the world, the half empty basket with tins of peaches for the food bank, yellowing postcards falling from the board giving advance notice of things that have already happened, pancake day, a fundraising coffee morning for victims of a tsunami, here, believing is much harder. In front of this crucifix and this Lenten altar, stripped of all colour, nothing but the plain white silence and wood, faith might be worth something.

  Thy will not mine be done.

  Other phrases take their seats in the empty chancel of his mind, cross themselves and leave.

  It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

  With the bones in his knees pressing against the kneeler, his head on his hands, Edmund is accusatory mood. You did it, he says, you sacrificed the one you loved so that others might live and be free. How can you condemn me, made in your likeness, for doing the same? Because I am guilty. We are all guilty. Forgive Diana, for her hatred of the boy, for whatever it was that happened with Valerie, for the thing with Liam, surely she too must once have been more sinned against than sinning to have done the things she’s done. Bless Mikey, he has been through too much, he is the only innocent victim in all this. Forgive me, whatever I do next, I only ever wanted the best for everyone.

  And that’s a lie in itself, he confesses. How far back do you need me to go, there is too much to be forgiven?

  The click of the latch of the door, heels on stone; behind him an elderly woman is unpacking her dusters and polish. He has been caught. She is getting everything nice for Holy Week, she tells him as he leaves.

  Easter Monday was a poor choice for Diana’s final trip, Good Friday would have been a better day, with the sun eclipsed at three o’clock and darkness over all the land.

  Before you go, the cleaner calls after him, here, this has all the service times on it and there’s a glass of wine after and nibbles, and she offers him the parish newsletter with its forthcoming events and a sentence from scripture.

  And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split.

  Edmund pulls the weight of the door closed behind him. This is a God who can play tiddlywinks with tectonic plates, but for him? There’ll be no deus ex machina, never has been, never will.

  With the Stourhead visit less than a week away, the tightness in Edmund’s chest slowly becomes less about the sentiment and more about the act. He reassures himself that he has said his goodbyes. He is doing the right thing. He is only doing what she has asked for. She is never coming home. Spring cleaning is what he calls it when Mikey wonders about his fervour and new-found addiction to decluttering.

  ‘You need to sort things out,’ says his solicitor.

  ‘Oh, but I am,’ says Edmund.

  Hours are devoted to getting rid of the unpalatable, as if you’ve smelled in advance the seafood you are about to serve for dinner and realised it is off, scraping it into the bin before the guests have even arrived. It is premature to take most of Diana’s things to the dump – people might wonder why – but some things can justifiably go: espadrilles for the beach where she will never swim again; silver flip flops for the little restaurant on the quay in Santa Maria di Castellabate where they danced after dinner, where she will not dance again; ballet pumps, walking boots, brand new bright red slingbacks he has never seen her wear. Maybe it’s something to do with the earthquake, that’s what he says to Mikey. Anniversaries do funny things to people; you look back at the past and into the future and need to find a way to put the two together.

  The queue at the recycling centre snakes back past the hazardous materials help point. It provides secure employment, working at a dump; people never run out of things they want to get rid of. The last rubbish bag splits as he is carrying it, spilling all the financial information he has cleared from his desk – annual reports on the fracking drills in which he no longer invests, glossy brochures for holiday complex developments in the Caribbean with architects’ impressions superimposed upon glorious headlands. He now feels uncomfortable investing in this new imperialism. The wind whips up the paper and a couple of people chase it with him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he calls after them, ‘thank you. What a mess.’ Suddenly, he spots something which shouldn’t be there, the Babylon sampler which all those months ago he rescued from the ruin and put in the third drawer down for safekeeping, now swept up with the rubbish by mistake. ‘No, not that,’ he shouts after a woman who is clutching the grubby cloth between her gardening gloves. ‘Sorry, that isn’t meant for the dump at all.’ Just in time, he stuffs the sampler into his coat pocket and closes his fist tightly around it.

  ‘Is it worth a bit then?’ asks the woman.

  The first day of the holidays is also the first anniversary of the earthquake. Maundy Thursday. On breakfast television, footage shows the Queen handing out pennies t
o the poor.

  ‘What does Maundy mean?’

  ‘It comes from the Latin. Mandate. A command.’

  ‘What command?’

  ‘Jesus’ command at the Last Supper.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That we should love one another.’

  ‘That’s what Solomon says.’

  It could be described as a loving act, a mercy killing, to use the common phrase. After all it’s not so different from examples he’s seen in the press. The mother smothering her pain-riddled baby. The replacement of an antibiotic drip with clear fluid, allowing the pneumonia to finally claim the beloved husband of thirty years in a way that the motorcycle accident had not been allowed to. Nearly always women. Did it look different if it was a man? More aggressive? Less loving? In the end it all comes down to motive and that is what plagues him. The news has moved on to a new item: one year on from the earthquake, an expert is hypothesising that a big tremor in London is overdue, and they run the standard clip of the car park collapsing and then move on to the sport. Would that it were so easy.

  ‘Do you want to do anything special to remember Mummy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We can go to the chapel and light a candle, or better still go to the village church with some lilies for her grave?’

  ‘Monty thinks we should clear out my room,’ he says. ‘Like you’ve been doing with yours.’

  ‘Grace could help you do that on Tuesday.’ Next Tuesday. The day after.

  ‘No. Now.’

  It is an unlikely request, but Mikey is an unlikely child and now he is possessed with a frantic energy. He raids the cleaning cupboard and loads Edmund up with everything he can find: polish, bleach, cloths, dustpan and brush, bin liners. It is impossible to carry anything else. Even the dog is given a duster, tucked into his collar. The hoover is thudded up the stairs behind him, chipping the skirting on the way. Once in the bedroom, Edmund notices the musical instruments calendar on the back of the door, nothing on it to mark next Monday. Flicking forwards, Edmund traces the year to come: July, holidays, in capitals, just like he used to; August, a blue squiggly line the length of a week with ‘seaside’ written with a question mark; September, one date coloured in yellow highlighter.

  ‘What’s this one?’

  ‘I’m very good with calendars, I got good when you were away.’ Standing on the bed with his recorder, Mikey toots a fanfare. ‘That’s for when Solomon can see me. One year, that’s what the judge says, so I worked it out.’ He jumps down. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  Picking a pen up off the bedroom floor, Edmund asks permission to write on the calendar and the boy says it is okay by him. ‘Solomon for tea.’ The boy can never be all his; maybe that was the mistake, thinking fatherhood was something to do with ownership.

  ‘Will that be enough?’ asks Mikey.

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Mikey replies. ‘Let’s start. You can do the bed.’

  As Edmund strips the sheets, Mikey hurls out all his clothes from the chest of drawers and then everything is sorted into pairs and piles, socks and school clothes, things that are too small, things that he does not like, things that are for summer which is coming, things that are for winter which has gone. The books have to be put in alphabetical order, the shoes and trainers lined up in the bottom of the cupboard, the Lego put back so that the top of the box shuts properly, the batteries on his old remote-control car tested, declared dead and replaced. Even his cardboard-box castle is squashed flat and put out for the dump.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  On his allocated tea break Edmund gets them both a drink and a packet of biscuits from the kitchen. She always chose the custard creams. It is these unexpected things which knock him off his feet, enfeeble him with the anticipation of grief, sick to his stomach with the anticipation of guilt. Back upstairs, Mikey is standing on the bed with his hands behind his back.

  ‘Swapsies,’ says Edmund. ‘You give me whatever you’re hiding and I’ll give you the biscuits.’

  In exchange for the custard creams, Mikey hands over the key to the tower. Confused, it takes a moment for Edmund to even recognise what it is. Slowly, he pieces it together. So Diana and the police were right: Mikey had the key all along. It was him who locked his mother in. That was his unspeakable act, not hers. In the now immaculate room, there is no place to hide, so Mikey stands like a statue, tears running down his stone face like rain. It is not such a surprise, it has been the working hypothesis for a long time, and there is no need to panic, Edmund reassures himself. There was no intention to harm his mother, he could never have known there would be an earthquake, he is still innocent. No wonder the child was silenced.

  Edmund knows better than to try to hug him. ‘It’s okay, Mikey. I understand. It isn’t your fault, none of it is your fault. Where was it hidden? We all looked everywhere.’

  Like the fool in blind man’s bluff, Edmund allows himself to be led by the sleeve along the landing to their bedroom and to be seated at Diana’s dressing table. The drawer in front of him is pulled open and a pregnancy test kit taken out and placed on the top. Taking the key back out of Edmund’s hands, Mikey slides it into the box and closes the lid. How, why did the child hide the key there, where anyone, Diana certainly, would find it? And what is she doing with a pregnancy kit? As if a magician has handed the box to him and challenged him to discover the secret mechanism by which it hides the truth, he turns it over in his hands, opens it, shakes out the key once more. He’s got it. The boy is not the magician, these are her tricks.

  ‘Diana.’

  Mikey nods.

  All those months, the police interviews, the inquest for Christ’s sake, even under oath, she said nothing, she confessed nothing. All that hysteria and protestation about the narrative verdict. Since that last night in the Angeline, he has been trying to redeem Diana, to put the pieces back together to rebuild the face he knew once, loved once, the better to bless her journey which he has booked and paid for, but here she is again, the devil woman. No wonder she cannot face the future here, although God only knows, Edmund stumbles on the thought, what other judgement will be passed on her. The boy wraps his arms around Edmund’s neck.

  Back in Mikey’s room, sitting side by side on the clean bed, Edmund says he is sorry, he thinks Diana is sorry too. ‘She didn’t know there was going to be an earthquake, none of us did, she didn’t mean to hurt Mummy, she didn’t want her to die.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘No, Mikey, she didn’t.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘She loved her. Mummy was her sister.’

  ‘Her half-sister.’

  ‘Listen, I think Diana wanted to tell us the truth about that night, but do you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The two of you have something in common: when you’ve dug a hole, you keep digging.’

  ‘But I haven’t buried anything,’ pleads Mikey.

  ‘When you’ve done something wrong, you don’t know how to tell anyone, how to say sorry.’

  With his attention turned to the one untouched item in the room, the circus animals box, Mikey gets down on his hands and knees. ‘It’s all right, you can come out now,’ he says to the clown.

  ‘That’s the thing about grown-ups,’ says Edmund, ‘sometimes we’re just like children. We haven’t really grown up at all.’

  ‘How sad,’ says the clown.

  Out trots the zebra, stood up on all fours on the now spotless carpet. The caged gorilla bosses everyone else around. ‘Come on out, hurry up.’ Tarum-tara goes the trumpet call on the mouth organ.

  So they all emerge: the ponies, the family of elephants, the brown bears, the three lions and the sad antelopes. Eventually, the box is empty and all the animals, plus the cars and the fire engine and the tanks and even the legless acrobats and the ringmaster and the pink ballerinas who are never usually allowed out, are arranged as if waiting for a show to begin.
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  Managing something close to a laugh, with relief Edmund takes this as the end of the cleaning. The revelations are shocking, but they change nothing; if anything, they confirm everything. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ he says as he gathers the mugs and the unopened biscuits, but, like a kidnapper, Mikey darts for the door and blocks his exit.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘One more thing.’

  ‘You can put the circus animals away on your own, you don’t need me for that.’

  Eyes staring, fists clenched, Mikey kicks the box and kicks it again and again until its sides cave in, but it does not split. The animals scatter, are trampled underfoot; some snap, others are pushed into the dark under the bed. Exhausted, Edmund puts everything down and waits for whatever it is the circus animals are going to deliver. Sofia always said Mikey would do this in his own time.

  ‘I know you’ve built a false bottom in the box.’

  Immediately the kicking stops.

  ‘But I’ve never looked at it. It’s your box, your secret, but it does seem today is the day for – what did you and Mummy call it – no more secrets, no more lies.’

  Squatting on the floor, Mikey rips at the box. The tape has been wound round and round until it forms a second skin and is impossible to tear. With growing frustration, he picks at it, strips it, pulls sections which come away but reveal nothing, until finally he climbs into what is left of the box and stamps so hard the bottom falls away and there is the yellow supermarket plastic bag and, inside, the black ring binder. Private. Do not Read.

  The warning is unnecessary. Edmund does not want to read it; whatever it is has been hidden because it is ugly and unpalatable. Two small white hands place the shiny black file on his knees. With the caged gorilla clasped tightly, Mikey waits at the door, half in, half out.

  Noticing the slip of his sweaty skin on plastic, Edmund opens the file. Inside is a set of instructions in different-coloured felt-tip. The first line reads like this:

  To Diana. What you have to do to get out.

  1. Write an account of what happened the night of the earthquake.