The Half Sister Read online

  ‘I’ve no idea, Val, I’ve never thought about it,’ Diana replies. ‘Does it matter?’

  His mother starts to sing one of her old reggae songs, ‘By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,’ and his aunt is joining in, ‘and there we wept’, and they dance in a silly way and they laugh when they run out of words. At one of the leaded windows which ring the room, Mikey opens the latch, letting in the evening air, and the song is blown away behind him. He can see out and hear different things. Over the giant Christmas trees which fringe the edge of the park, great black birds are ganging up, swirling and screeching in circles, waiting for everyone to go to bed in this vast, half-empty house before they attack. Taking refuge on the high bed next to his mother, he picks at a loose thread on the bedspread. He can tell she doesn’t want to sleep there and feels within himself the tight tummy of responsibility.

  ‘I like Mum to sleep closer to me,’ he mumbles, all in a hurry.

  ‘What did you say, Michael?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You let your mother enjoy a bit of the luxury she deserves.’

  So she heard him the first time.

  ‘Don’t you worry about Mummy. We’ll leave the door open at the end of the passageway onto the landing and she’ll be fine, I promise,’ she says. ‘Now, I’ll just check the bathroom.’

  They are alone together at last. His mother looks so lovely there, on the great bed in her little black dress, her toes curled up under her and her eyes huge and smudgy black. He can tell she’s crying, so he lays his head on her lap, he tells her he can sneak up there and sleep with her when Diana has gone to bed, but she sniffs and wipes her nose on the clean towel and says she’s just being a silly billy, it’s the funeral and seeing Diana and she’s just so sad about Nanna, but it’ll be fine, he’s not to worry. He doesn’t believe her. On top of the chest of drawers there is a large blue-and-white china bowl with a jug in it and a potty by the side. This will make her laugh. Mikey picks up the potty, puts it on the floor and makes a big thing of pretending to unzip his trousers. It works. His mum hides her face in the pillow, sobs turning to laughter; only he can do that, she always says to him, only he can make everything better.

  ‘Oh, Mikey,’ she gasps, ‘Stop it! She’ll find out!’

  And there she is, at the door, believing for one hideous moment that the boy is actually going to pee in her porcelain and the sheer physicality of him fiddling with himself appals her.

  ‘That’s worth a lot of money,’ she cries.

  ‘It’s just a potty,’ says the boy. ‘For pissing in.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that. If you’re not careful you’ll grow up as crude as your grandfather.’

  ‘What does she mean?’

  Taking the potty, Valerie thumps it back on the chest of drawers. ‘Don’t you dare, ever, speak to my son like that.’

  Truth hurts, that’s what Diana wants to say, but looking at them wound round each other like ivy, she sees they are insuperable, inseparable, this mother and son. Perhaps she overreacted, she isn’t used to small boys, so she retrieves the voice she keeps for other people’s grandchildren. ‘Do you remember the little door on the way up, Michael? That’s Mummy’s own proper bathroom! You can always do a . . .’ Diana hesitated. Pee pee? Wee wee? Piss? She doesn’t even have the language for them. ‘You can always use the toilet there, if you need to.’

  As Diana demonstrates the little bathroom, saying how they’d had a devil of a job with the wiring and how the builders didn’t dare disturb the tower too much in case it came apart from the main house, Mikey goes on ahead, down the spiral staircase.

  ‘Joshua fight the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,’ he sings as he jumps from step to step. Doesn’t he sing well, his aunt is saying, trying to make up for things, but she’s a long way away now. ‘And the walls came a-tumbling down.’ Stuffing his socks in his pockets, down he goes, each bare foot on the stone feeling like something separate from everything else.

  The candles are lit, but now he can see they’re just lightbulbs which flicker like flames. He counts them, eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . then there is the door to the in-between passage, but the stairs keep counting . . . fourteen, fifteen . . .

  ‘It doesn’t go anywhere, Michael.’ That’s her again. ‘The door at the bottom’s all locked up!’

  And it is, because, suddenly, in front of him is nothing but another great big, flat, hard, cold wall. He runs his hands over it and feels the difference between the bricks on one side and stone on the other. Just as he had gone up as far as he could, now he has gone down as far as he can. Something about the wall at the top and the wall at the bottom spoils everything. The door is locked. His aunt appears out of the shadows behind him.

  ‘Look,’ she says, trying to be all friendly. The key fits the lock first time, she pulls heavily on the door, and light comes cheating into the tower from the lawn which is lit up like a prison camp in a war film when the spotlights come on when you try to escape; it’s luminous green and strange. It seems impossible somewhere so wide, so open, so bright can exist on the other side of this small blackness.

  ‘And this is where the builders have made a new hole and the spiral staircase will go on down and down to the pool. They’ve bricked it up to be safe.’

  Wine breath. She locks the door again. It’s so dark he can’t see her or her new wall, but he can feel her, like she might spark if he poked her, he can hear her telling him to follow. He doesn’t want to stay at the bottom of the tower all on his own, but he doesn’t want to do what she tells him to do either. Just for a second, he sits down. He might stay there and they’ll all forget him and he’ll knock a hole through her bricks and go all the way down to the empty pool and lie down there and die down there like the people in the graves at the cemetery and then they’ll all be sorry. He’s sure he wouldn’t be the first body to be found in her ugly tower. He hoots like an owl.

  ‘Hello,’ he calls out to the ghosts. ‘Hello echo.’

  Chapter Eight

  Even the kitchen would have been nicer than this, thinks Mikey, but they’re eating in the huge dining room because Diana wanted to do things properly for them. The table is much too big for three people and it all smells like air freshener, but it might be the real flowers. There’s no ketchup and the lasagne is slimy and everything is made of silver so he can see his reflection bent out of shape wherever he looks. His mum is drinking too much too fast; it’s a long time since she was properly drunk so he feels sad and a little scared. Diana is probably drunk too, but she is fixed together tightly, so it isn’t so easy to tell if she’s falling apart. It hasn’t taken long. All evening it’s been the same: one moment arm in arm, giggling about the seesaw in the park opposite where they used to live, and the next squabbling like girls in the playground. Brothers and sisters always argue, that’s what his friends do, but they just argue over stuff; maybe that’s what they’re arguing about, stuff, because Diana has a lot of stuff and his mum doesn’t have much stuff at all.

  ‘Just because I made something of myself and you haven’t,’ Diana is saying.

  She can’t have made all this, she must have bought it.

  ‘Lady Muck!’ says his mum, reaching for the bottle. ‘You wait!’

  If Solomon was with them it wouldn’t all be down to him.

  ‘Off you go to bed, Mikey! Give your mum a big, big kiss!’

  Over his mother’s shoulder, Mikey can see his aunt raising her eyes. His mum’s neck smells of smoke, but that’s only because today is difficult and just one probably won’t kill her. Once he made a secret list of all the things that could kill her and then crossed them off so they wouldn’t. He’s the one who’ll do the killing, he’ll kill all her enemies, like Diana, for instance, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat in his head goes his imaginary machine gun.

  As he leaves, he overhears his aunt say something about him not being much of a talker. In the hall, with full on acting, he rat-a-tat-tats his aunt again, then he crou
ches on the bottom stair straining to hear what they’re saying, letting the ticking and the tocking of the grandfather clock match his pulse. The dog is shut in the kitchen, which is sad for them both. When Mikey’s been there what he thinks is probably a very long time and their voices are getting louder and his heart is beating faster than the clock allows, he struggles with the golden knob on the dining-room door which slides round between his hot hands and sneaks back into the room. Opposite each other at the table, his aunt is leaning forwards, jabbing her finger at his mum’s face. He doesn’t think they’ll hit each other because they’re both women, but he isn’t sure. When there was a girl fight at school, Ali said, ‘They scratched each other’s eyes out.’ ‘Really?’ Mikey asked him. ‘Really,’ Ali confirmed.

  Sifting through his word bank of phrases, Mikey selects something a child might say at a time like this. ‘Night night, then, Mum!’ he says. ‘Thank you for supper, Diana.’

  Neither of them even notice he is there.

  ‘Are you coming to bed soon, Mum?’

  His aunt is bending down, picking up something from the floor and his mother is lighting another cigarette from a candle, the wax dripping onto the table, the flame that close to her hair. He is a nobody.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says.

  ‘What’s he doing out of bed?’

  ‘Mikey, go back to your room. Now. I’m not joking.’

  ‘Fuck.’ He slams the door hard behind him, it’s the rudest and worst thing he can think of saying. ‘Fuck you,’ he shouts as he runs through the horrid hall in his slippery socks and up the stairs, and there is the door wide open and the bedside light on all ready for him and he throws himself under the duvet and pulls it over him until there is nothing of him showing. If anyone comes creeping through the house to kill him, even if the black birds from the forest come pecking on his window, they won’t even know he’s there, he’s that invisible, that quiet. And if he has to leave in a hurry, he still has his funeral clothes on and his rucksack packed and his trainers are ready by the front door. He knows how to escape, he does it all the time on Lockdown.

  Downstairs, his exit provides the right-shaped space for the argument to grow. Valerie can physically feel the size of the tumour between her hands.

  ‘Charming little boy you’ve brought him up to be,’ says Diana, sweeping crumbs across the polished surface of the dining room table into her palm.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ Valerie slurs. ‘Even you haven’t been able to buy children.’

  The heavy curtains are letting in a line of light from the security lamp outside. Diana corrects them and then resumes drip-feeding her abuse. Words spit from her like unpalatable food – chav, pissed, failure – they land on Valerie and dribble down her dress, adding to all the other stains where Paul has spilled his filth over the years.

  ‘We’re not so different after all. We’ve both been in the gutter, it’s just that your gutter is better decorated than my gutter.’ Valerie stubs her cigarette out in the butter dish. ‘And we both live on estates, so that’s hilarious when you think about it.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Diana tips the bottle before noticing it is already empty. In the kitchen she finds another Rioja in the everyday wine rack. The dog stretches, comes to her, but he is pushed away. Her head is swimming, she runs some water into a glass and gulps at it as if it might provide something different. Beyond the kitchen window, nothing but the night, no neighbours, the rest of the world is kept beyond the stone wall which marks the boundary of the estate. She is a grasping, selfish cow, her half-sister, always has been. When they moved house, Valerie must have been five, she was what, twelve? And there were three bedrooms in the new house: one double for her mum and stepdad; another double, with a window over the park, a built-in washbasin and a fitted pink carpet, like you’d think a teenager would have; then there was the little room, a single bed crammed in a corner, head next to the toilet wall so she could hear him farting and coughing up his phlegm, and that was her prison. Well, who has the best place now? Out of nowhere, she wonders what they did with her room when she left, whether they burned the poster of the ballerina she was going to be when she grew up.

  After struggling with the corkscrew Diana realises it is a screwtop. Back in the dining room, Valerie has gone and she realises she should never have asked her to come to Wynhope. Life was always better without her.

  In the downstairs loo, Valerie is clinging to the washbasin. They’re inching around the unsayable, Valerie feels its heat; she should just chuck on the petrol, watch the whole lot go up, at least that way they can start again with whatever is left in the ruins. Having splashed cool water over her face, she returns.

  ‘She got swallowed up, didn’t she?’

  It’s not clear to Valerie what Diana is going on about.

  ‘Mum, I mean. He just swallowed her up, she was never the same after she married your father.’ Like water from a stiff tap, the words, when they come, splutter across the table. ‘Your fucking father and then you. Fucking father, that’s funny, that is.’ Diana looks a little mad, appreciating her own puns. ‘All Mum had to do was say something, but she never did, did she?’

  ‘Spell it out, what exactly was it she was meant to say?’

  ‘You know.’ Using the table for support, Diana inches towards her. ‘Do you think I wanted to sleep on friends’ sofas, give up sixth form, live out of a plastic bag?’ Her voice is raised to cover the enormous distance between them. ‘There was Mum, little Val, the bastard – your father – and no room at the inn for me. So I left. He locked the front door, so I climbed out of the window and jumped. Is that so surprising? Then I made something of myself, without you, without any of you. And you know full well what he was like, you, tucked up safe and sound in your pink nylon sheets.’

  The meringue didn’t taste as good as Valerie expected; she scraped the cream onto her plate. ‘You’ve been watching too much daytime telly. Everyone’s at it, aren’t they? Abuse this, abuse that. My dad did a lot of bad things, but he never did that and you know it.’

  ‘You’re telling me he left you alone after I’d gone? The way you behaved afterwards, dodgy relationships and unwanted pregnancies, shoplifting, abusive partners . . . I bet you go around fantasising about setting fire to things, just to see the engines arrive. Textbook. I know, I’ve read all about the signs.’ Diana waves her hand in a circle as if to imply that the extent of Valerie’s depravity is at least the size of their house.

  But Valerie is hardly listening, she’s thinking how it is true that her father never left her alone, he wrapped her up so tightly in attention that she could barely speak. But not that. He divided them all, that was true as well, he drove Diana out, demonised their mother, sanctified her and, yes, he was a controlling man, she recognises that now. But not that.

  ‘I knew,’ she begins, and as soon as she says the words she wonders what she knew for certain. ‘I knew, I think, that I was spoiled, sitting in the front seat, staying up later, better presents under the tree, everything always your fault. But whatever it looked like to you, I didn’t like it because I wanted you to be my best friend. What was I meant to do, Diana? I was so young.’

  ‘You’re avoiding the question. Once he’d finished with me, did he start on you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And after all this time, you’re still saying nothing. Keeping mum, that hits the nail on the head, doesn’t it, Valerie? You’re still claiming you never knew what was going on?’

  ‘I was a kid, Diana. When you left, I was Mikey’s age. But the reason I didn’t know what was going on, as you put it, is because nothing was going on, was it? Let’s say it like it is, shall we? Use the proper words. My dad was not a paedo. He did not sexually abuse you in your poxy little bedroom. Truth is, you were always looking for someone to blame for what you were like. Controlling, bitchy, always falling out with your friends, causing trouble, wanting things all your own way. You always had to be king of the castle. You could never share a
nything or anyone, not even Mum.’ Valerie empties her glass. ‘And you always were a liar. Pants on fire, that’s what they called you at school. They were lies then, and they’re lies now. Maybe you’ve taught yourself to believe them, but they are lies, Diana, or make-believe, whatever. You need help.’

  ‘What do you think it was like for me?’ screams Diana.

  ‘And did you ever stop to think what it was like for us?’ Valerie springs up and the plate of uneaten meringue slides onto the carpet, face down; everything always falls butter side down. ‘What it was like for Mum, left behind in that street, in school, after all that? It was all lies then and it’s all lies now.’

  ‘You still don’t believe me?’

  Having wiped her mouth with the napkin, Valerie pronounces her verdict as clearly as she can. ‘I don’t believe a single word you say.’

  Punctured, Diana deflates, sags to the floor crinkling in on herself, cross-legged, her dress exposing the tops of her thighs, the years collapsing until she is a little girl again, head down, hands and hair covering her face. Valerie can only just make out what she is repeating, over and over again, in time to her rocking body. You don’t believe me. You don’t believe me.

  Finally, Diana uses the wall to push herself back up. ‘I’m going to bed. I should never have tried,’ she says, then with renewed venom she remembers her trump card, ‘and you, you’re all on your owny-o in the tower.’ She blows out the candles and leaves.

  Like a new baby who throws their hands into the air and finds no one to hold them, Valerie panics. ‘Wait for me, Di.’ She crawls after Diana, up the stairs, slumps and clasps the banisters, refusing to follow her into the tower. She doesn’t want to sleep there, she’ll sleep with Mikey, but hands drag her to her feet, push her along the landing, through the narrow passage, up the spiral staircase. She’s slipping on the stone, staggering against the steepness of the steps. Her hands, his hands, whose hands, I can fall and she’ll never pick me up, she can push me, and no one will ever be any the wiser. Every year women are found dead at the bottom of staircases they know like the back of their hands. Even once she reaches the tower room, Valerie’s heart does not slow; there are drunken footsteps on the landing when the lights go out.