The Half Sister Read online

  ‘Mikey, Diana! Let me out. Mikey, are you there, love? Are you all right?’

  In her heart she knows the door is locked from the other side. She might have been drunk last night, but there’s no mistaking what she heard. She must go on down to the door onto the drive, and even if that’s locked, they’ll be out there. Someone will hear her calling, but what if they’re not, what if she’s alone, what if the house has collapsed and Mikey is, what if, not that, please God anything but that. Finally, there are no more steps. She can go no further. This is the bottom, stone to her left, stone beneath her feet, stone close above her head, damp and slick to the touch and smelling of cellars, and here to her right, rough brick. With a sick lurch in her stomach, she remembers the cavernous pool excavated beneath her feet and she panics, clawing at the vast oak door, tracing the metal brackets of the hinges, finding the handle and grasping it. Although she can feel blood on her knees like a child who has fallen in the garden, she holds on to the fact that she is safe. Only one word matters now, only one word has ever mattered.

  ‘Mikey.’

  ‘Diana! Mikey! Is there anyone there? Mikey!’

  From their world, the unlimited outdoors, they hear her. Valerie is calling madly the names of anyone she has ever loved, anyone who might have ever saved her.

  ‘Solomon? Mum, are you there? Somebody help me. Mikey.’

  Mikey hammers at his aunt with his fists. Why is she standing like that, a skeleton statue, her bones sticking out from her nightie, her hair thin like a witch and straggling? He is so scared by this woman who is his aunt and by this thing that has happened that is called an earthquake and by the screaming of his mother that dizziness spins him and he has fairground feet. A grown-up should say what they are going to do, but there is no one, there never is anyone to see what is happening or do anything about it. They turn a blind eye, that’s what his mum says, but although it’s night, he can see, and although he has his hands over his ears, he can hear, and there are no other sounds in his world, only the screaming of his mother and the hammering on the door of the tower.

  Di. Unlock the door, please. Di, don’t leave me. Mikey. Di, Di, Di.

  With his thin pummelling arms in her hands, Diana seizes the boy, holds him writhing like a monkey. ‘Stop it,’ she shouts at him. ‘This isn’t helping. I can’t bear it, I can’t think straight, stop it.’

  The stitching on her dressing-gown pocket rips from the seam as he lunges for the key. ‘Let her out, let her out.’

  The pounding in the tower is violent now. The boy yanks at her, grasping her nightie, exposing her breasts.

  ‘Get off me.’ She pushes him so violently he falls.

  ‘Please,’ he sobs from the ground, ‘it’s my mum. Let her out. I’ll be good, I won’t tell, I promise, please.’ His mother’s cries are a lurch in the pit of the stomach.

  ‘Mikey.’ Behind the thick walls and slit-eyed windows of the tower, Valerie has heard the voice that matters. ‘Mikey, is that you? Are you all right, baby? Thank God.’

  ‘I’m here, Mum. I’m coming to get you.’ The boy crawls on the grass, gets up, slips, stumbles towards the house. He will get to his mum. He will go back inside the house, up the wide staircase, past the pictures of the old men, onto the landing and turn right because that door leads to the round and round staircase. In his mind there’s no need for keys in this rescue mission, there are no locks. He can navigate the first five levels of Lockdown on the computer, all it needs is for him to be there for her, to make it all better; she always says he is the only one who can do that for her.

  As lightning pins its victims, simultaneously energises and paralyses them, in a matter of milliseconds voltage snatches away both breath and thought, so Diana is disabled. Something has struck through her, it is not lightning, but she feels the shock of it as if it were lightning. The key brands the palm of her right hand and she holds tight to the burning and relishes the pain: she does not run; she does not save; there is something in the crying and the darkness which electrifies her. The earthquake is over. Let Valerie scream a little longer, if only to know what it feels like to call for help and for no one to come. Let her wait and see.

  It is only Edmund’s voice in her ear which cuts through her strange hypnosis and challenges this mastery. She hears him so clearly it is as if he is right next to her.

  Diana, what are you doing standing like a rabbit in the headlights? Your sister is trapped, the key is in your pocket, save her.

  His words earth her and she is released. The toes of her right foot press into the soft earth, the heel of her left foot rises above the wet grass, she is coming, she cries, but it returns, galloping behind her, beside her, overtaking her, hooves reverberating and churning and turning the ground. The boy is ahead of her, he’s almost at the house. Diana reaches him just in time, she falls upon him, she saves him from himself.

  As the earth trembles beneath Mikey, some new beast falls on top of him and knocks all the air out of him, pins him to the ground, its breath hot on his neck, its heaving weight pressing down into him. Its bare breast slides against his grazed cheeks, he can see the stains of blood on its translucent skin and smells its scented sweat, feels its nakedness. It’s much bigger than him, this monster. He can never escape from it. He’s trying to say get off, get off me, but it doesn’t speak his language. My mum is in there. She needs me. I love her. Without her, I am nothing. There are no words for this. With great effort, he pulls his knees up under his body, the gravel grinds into him but he hardly feels it, he summons great strength to throw the humping thing off his back, to get to his feet, to get the tower, to get to his mum to save her, but even when he is free, he cannot stand because its long nails fix his bare ankle and trick him, trip him again.

  The second tremor is weak and mean, the feeblest member of a gang who puts in the boot at the end when the hard work has been done by the others. It is looking for imperfection, senses it in the joists which connect the tower to the house; they don’t belong together, never did, the relationship makes no sense, and now even their foundations are unaligned, unearthed. At that moment of extreme stress, there is no resilience. For years, unnoticed, the tower and the house have been bickering, winter after winter the frost picks at the crevices, drop by drop the rain weakens the mortar, then someone starts digging up the past and like a family facing uncertain times, they realise they have nothing keeping them together. With a terrible moan of separation, the cracks between the two structures widen, the house loosens its hold and, unsupported, the tower crumbles to its knees, head in its hands. There is no way of telling what is falling, except there is falling and the sounds of falling, of stone, beams, turrets and gargoyles and wires and pipes, and when it is all fallen, it is anarchy softened only by smoke, stillness and silence.

  No more shaking. No more screeching. All the lights are out. No more barking. Only a sort of nothingness, an absence of what has ever been relied upon before. Like the earth under their feet and the sky over their heads.

  ‘Oh God.’ Diana drags the boy away from the billowing dust. ‘Oh God,’ she chokes over and over again.

  Mikey allows the holding on and the letting go, but does not know it. He shakes as if the disturbance of the tremor has found its way inside him and he has taken on the spasms of the earth’s core as if they are his own.

  His fitting is unbearable to Diana. ‘What could I have done? Stop it, Michael, stop.’

  He cannot stop.

  ‘I was just about to go in and then . . .’ Diana’s speech is swallowed up by coughing.

  His head jerks and his limbs twitch; all thought, all language gone.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Diana is oblivious to the age of her partner. ‘I can’t go in there, what if it all comes again? Where’s my phone? I’ll call nine-nine-nine.’ Suddenly she recognises that this is a child and she sinks down to his level, fumbling towards a hug and failing, pulling at his sleeve and promising. ‘She’ll be all right,’ she says, her teeth chatterin
g. ‘People live for days after buildings collapse, in air pockets, things like that. I’ve seen it on the news. Mummy will be all right. I love her too. If only Edmund was here, he’d know what to do. But it will be all right. I promise you, it will be all right.’

  Chapter Eleven

  It’s true, earthquakes of all sorts are nothing new to Edmund; he is a well-travelled man, geographically at least, so when he was woken up in his city flat by the loose change rattling on the mantelpiece and the gin bottle chiming with the decanter, he recognised what was happening. Turkey. New Zealand. But it was Japan that came back to him as he stood in his pyjamas looking out over the Thames and the night-winking City of London, feeling the subtle tremor slip away. Tokyo was another year, another escape from some unpleasantness or other; then he’d watched skyscrapers actually shaking as if someone had knocked the Christmas tree and he’d wondered if he was going to die there, and he’d hoped, half hoped that it might be so. This was a poor relation of an earthquake.

  Kept awake by a nagging feeling of guilt that he should have pulled himself together and gone with Diana to the funeral, Edmund was restless anyway, and now he knows it’s pointless to try to get back to sleep and he sits on the edge of the bed playing with his phone. Within minutes Twitter has got a #earthquake and it is not long before an app alert is triggered automatically by significant price movements in British shares on stock exchanges in the Far East. Property. Lloyd’s Insurance. Land development companies. Energy. All significantly down. On the news feed he selects the map and with finger and thumb slowly focuses his way through the concentric circles – England, the south, Twycombe – until the epicentre of the earthquake is revealed as no more than a few miles away from home, and as he returns the map to its former size, the circles look like ripples in the river at Wynhope when the surface of the pool has been broken by no more than a falling acorn. Diana’s phone goes to voicemail, the landline is unobtainable. Dressing quickly, he keeps one eye on the coverage on the television, disoriented by being here when he should have been there, where everything is happening in flickering orange and flashing blue lights. He feels the unfairness of all those ordinary decisions we take unaware of their extraordinary consequences. Already viewers are sending in live selfie recordings: late-night half-empty beer bottles dribbling across a coffee table; a shelf stacker from a supermarket capturing the moment when all the tins of tomatoes take to the aisles; a webcam proving that animals feel it first as a cat leaps from the sofa and flees through the flap seconds before the room starts to tremble. The narrative runs along the bottom of the screen. Earthquake 5.4 rocks southern England. At least one aftershock. Two fatalities reported so far. Hospitals on full alert. Emergency services overwhelmed and requesting the public not to call unless absolutely necessary. Safety procedures activated at Bindley nuclear power plant. People are advised to remain in their homes if possible.

  Edmund’s overwhelming need is to get back to Wynhope. Although there have been more times than he can count when he has wished the place flattened, fantasised about fires and coming home to find nothing but dust and a chance to start again free of the past, now that this is a possibility, however unlikely, he finds his own foundations shaking. He is making assumptions that Diana is fine and he is not going to challenge them; Diana is nothing if not a survivor and he is nothing if she has not survived. No news is good news. It might be a cliché, but like so many clichés, there is a truth in it which helps him sleep at night. Let sleeping dogs lie, that is another. He prays for Monty to be alive.

  As he drives towards Wynhope, the thin yellow line of dawn is behind him and an imperceptible watering down of darkness lies ahead.

  Chapter Twelve

  A rumbling in the distance disturbs the dull night – not again, surely not another aftershock, Diana can’t stand much more – but this is just a car coming up the drive over the cattle grid, its headlights illuminating the pale trunks of the silver birch trees standing watch in front of the coach house. Edmund? No, he’s in London, probably doesn’t even know what’s happened. It is Mrs H and her husband John. Feeling an unfamiliar relief that everything can be given to someone else to sort out, she runs to meet them as they pull up behind the garages, but the thought of the housekeeper seeing her like this, bedraggled like a bag lady, and John seeing her in the clothes she wears to bed, slows her down. They have coats done up over their pyjamas and a torch. The spotlight exposes everything about her; they would like to do that, she knows, expose everything about her.

  ‘We’ve got a crack in the back wall at the lodge,’ says John, ‘so we came up to make sure everything was all right at the house.’

  ‘Mikey, come here, my love, you’re freezing. Look at you still in your shirt and your best trousers.’

  Gratefully, Diana relinquishes responsibility for the boy to the housekeeper, who wraps her arms around the child and presses her cheek against his face. Mikey allows himself to be folded up in her. He holds on tight to Grace’s coat, and when he is sure she is not going anywhere he lets go, just a little, and struggles to think how he can tell her what’s happened, what he saw and what he heard and how his aunt has got the key in her pocket and how nobody knows what’s important and how nobody’s doing anything, but it’s hard to make sense of it all and in the end it’s something much simpler he needs to say. He takes her arm and drags her to the drive.

  ‘Please can you help my mum?’ he asks her and he points.

  ‘Of course, my love, where is she? Valerie?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ says John as he turns the corner and instinctively covers his mouth against the dust. ‘What the hell?’ He systematically swings the torchlight from the house to what is left of the tower, then on around the garden where the last of the snowdrops blink white beneath the twisted rose bushes, and on past the impenetrable wall of yew hedges, all vaguely shrouded in a layer of unnatural cloud. For John, the image in front of him takes on the characteristics of Belfast in the 1980s: sirens, the smell of sweat on uniforms and urine on the kiddies’ pyjama bottoms, counting the men in his platoon and finding the numbers short. He rounds on Diana.

  ‘This can’t just have been the tremor, it wasn’t that strong.’ Suddenly he laughs loudly, incongruously. ‘It was the pool, wasn’t it? Bloody ridiculous, that pool. Destabilised the whole lot. I said so. That’s what’s done it. So where’s your sister?’

  ‘She was going to sleep in the tower, John,’ says Grace. ‘Oh my, you don’t think . . .’

  ‘In there?’ John directs the beam to the wreckage then starts to run. ‘She might still be okay.’ He shouts, ‘Hello? Valerie, isn’t it? Can you hear me? Valerie! Valerie!’

  ‘Valerie!’ Hand in hand, Grace and the boy catch up with him. ‘Valerie, my love, can you hear us?’

  The only other sounds are the dog howling from the house and the relentless pulse of guilt inside her head. Valerie is dead, Diana knows it. The key is in her pocket. She hasn’t done anything wrong, she was put in a terrible situation, and, yes, she failed in some ways, but it was not her fault. Everyone will blame her, no one will believe her. The familiar phrases beat their logic into the rails like an oncoming train, whining their threat down the track, the time to save herself is now. They all have their backs to her. In one swift and violent movement, she flings the key to the tower into the border behind her. It must have fallen in the shrubs, a shining lie, bright amongst the dark leaves and red berries, or perhaps it fell beneath the camellias. Edmund taught her that yews protect against evil and camellias hate the morning sun; they both have reason enough now.

  She joins in with a more confident voice. ‘Valerie, can you hear me?’

  Everything is failing: the security lights do not come on again, the alarm is reduced to an intermittent whine, Monty howls and stops, howls and stops, and Mrs H is possessed with pointless questions. Whatever happened? Did anyone hear her calling? Why couldn’t she get out? Instinctively Diana glances back at the flowerbed behind her, smelling of secrets and dri
zzle. John is the gardener; she imagines him, fingers probing the warming earth.

  ‘What is it? What’s in there? What have you seen?’ cries Grace. ‘Is it her?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ says Diana, turning away, ‘there’s nothing to be frightened of there.’

  ‘Is the house safe?’ asked John.

  ‘The boy will catch his death out here,’ says Grace.

  ‘What about Monty?’ pleads Diana. ‘Sir Edmund will never forgive us.’

  ‘I thought you said you could help my mum.’

  After one last check, John makes the decision. ‘We can’t risk it on our own. It’s too unstable. We’ll need to wait for help. The coach house is a better bet.’

  Scooping Mikey up in his tattooed arms, John carries the boy. He is passive and unresisting in the strong man’s hold, head lolling down and neck crooked at an unnatural angle. Diana and Grace follow him in a line, like night travellers.

  As they blunder into the barn conversion, Diana is reminded yet again that the flat was someone else’s refuge once, until she evicted her, and now she expects these walls to protect her? Aunt Julia was dispatched to a home fairly promptly after they got married and died soon after that. Edmund was right when he said moving from Wynhope would kill her; he sent extravagant flowers to the funeral, apparently it cost less than sending himself. The coach house was left smelling of care staff and bed sores, and Diana redecorated swiftly and pragmatically, painting over the suffering in New World White, which she thought would be nice for entertaining, although this was not the party she had in mind, the pathetic group of them bundling in from the cold night with their chaos for luggage and one person missing.

  This is what Diana used to do for a living: walk into unlived-in, high-end flats, check them out for marks on the cream carpets, open and close the drawers in the designer kitchens and count there was still twelve of everything. She was known for her eye for detail, her rigorous control of contracts, it was what helped her work her way up, that and her ability to bring a veneer of class to the most shabby of rental properties, the damp on the wall and the faulty wiring all concealed behind a makeover; now she doesn’t know what her job is, except perhaps looking after the boy, and God knows she hasn’t got a qualification in that. Mrs H and John have hurried back to the lodge to call the emergency services. She is alone in the shadows with Michael. He is not much more than a silhouette against the window opposite her, pressing the remote control repeatedly, but before she can explain again that the electricity is off, he is turning the light switch on and off, on and off, on and off.