The Half Sister Read online

  Finally, a subtle difference in the body language of the dog and the fire-fighters.

  ‘We’ve got something,’ confirms the handler. ‘Positive!’

  ‘Have they found Mummy?’

  ‘Bless him,’ says Grace, to no one in particular. Diana is all on her own and the housekeeper takes a step in that direction to comfort her – Valerie is her sister after all, half-sister – but she stops. It isn’t as if her offer of support would be welcome even if she made it. Instead, Grace is overwhelmed by the sight of the back of the little boy’s head and the tall, tense man beside him, and how dreadful this is for Edmund too, given everything that’s already happened here, and she offers up a little prayer. It’s not something she usually does, but what else can you do at a time like this, apart from hope that there’s someone or something out there who can put things right?

  Edmund is a man accustomed to prayer, but ironically he finds himself without handholds, wrestling with the binary future which lies ahead of the boy, just as it did for him, once. With your mother or without. Mikey has stepped just a little away from him and he lets him go. It is a truth that this will happen to the boy on his own. There is no other way.

  Chill creeps over her skin with insect feet. Diana puts her head between her knees. I will look up and they will be carrying her out saying, she’s alive, it’s a miracle, and the nine o’clock news will confirm it’s a miracle like the pope does with the confirmation of saints and the healing of sinners, except she can see Valerie as she was when she was small, running in from the garden when her dad gets in from work, face red, bleeding knees and broken fingernails and she will tell on me, all sorts of lies she’ll say, about what I did, how it is all my fault. Everyone will believe her. Tracing the tooth marks on her arm, just one budding drop of blood where the skin is broken, Diana prays for Valerie to be dead. Can she really do that? She can. Deep down inside, that is what she’s always wanted since Valerie arrived in this world – for Valerie to be gone. Leaning forwards onto her hands, she presses into the grass and pushes herself slowly up onto her heels.

  ‘Ed,’ she calls over, weakly.

  He doesn’t even turn round. ‘Darling! Keep hoping.’

  ‘Quiet!’ The call went up.

  One of the firemen is calling out, he is lying flat on his stomach with his head at a peculiar angle. ‘Valerie? We’re here to help you now, Valerie.’ He is stretching into the bowels of the collapsed tower. ‘I’ve got her wrist!’

  The lead officer shouts over abruptly. ‘Keep hold of the boy, it’s not safe.’

  Edmund holds the child tight. ‘Wait with me. He’s got her wrist, they’ve found Mummy, we just need to wait.’

  ‘Mum, it’s me. It’s me, Mikey. Can she hear me?’

  ‘Do we have a pulse?’

  A small scurry of stones slides down the fractured walls of the tower.

  ‘Stand back, stand back.’

  The waiting. For all of them, the cold waiting will never be forgotten. Having been so sure Valerie must be dead, now Diana chews the very real possibility of her living, a piece of meat impossible to swallow or spit out in company. Mikey is so sure she must be alive, his faith makes him jump up and down on the spot, energised by hope and his unshakeable faith in his mother.

  Inch by inch, the fireman is sliding out of the collapsed tower, climbing over the rubble slowly, so slowly, two or three others clustering around him. He is shaking his head. They are turning away, tired now, they seem, all action ceased.

  Dead then. After all that. Her little Valerie gone. Breath is snatched from Diana, as if death is catching.

  Since he has been wound up like a jack in the box, Mikey is still jumping despite the weight of Edmund’s arm heavy on his shoulders, he cannot do anything else. Up and down, round and round he goes, he does not know where to go, which way to turn.

  That way is the bronze boy and the wood and a little garden sunk beneath stone walls where you might hide and never be found out; that way, behind the house, just fields and woods and sheep ganging up, and he’s never been anywhere like that in his life, he would not know how to live in a place like that, all on his own; and over there, the woods with the giant Christmas trees where the birds were circling and screaming last night, they were the most frightening of all. But past the coach house, that’s where the drive goes, he can’t remember how it goes or where it goes, but it goes, away from here, all the way to the tall gates and then the road and then the town and then home where she’ll be in the kitchen, feeding the cat or maybe in the bedroom drying her hair or maybe in the yellow sitting room finishing her jigsaw. Where does this bit go? Mikey runs. Edmund is calling after him, but he runs all the same, very fast, faster than he knew he could. It is vital he outruns what has happened to stop it catching up with him. The cattle grid stops him. It isn’t that he can’t balance on the rails or avoid the gaps in between them, it is more that if he does cross it, he doesn’t know who he’d be, if he’d even still have the same name. Behind him Edmund is coming towards him, slowly, with his arms out wide.

  ‘Fuck off,’ shouts Mikey.

  Then he remembers they were the last terrible words he ever said to his mother. Words she said she never wanted to hear him say again in her lifetime. She never will. The stitch in his side is so sharp he wonders if he too will be dead soon. What is dead? He slumps onto the gravel, and with his head in his hands, he feels dead. He has never met dead until his nanna’s funeral and now he has met dead twice in two days, but he still doesn’t quite understand what it is.

  It is the flapping of a flock of fat pigeons when the coffin slides out of the boot.

  It is made up of crows. Here, one black crow perches on the back of a white sheep, pecking at its wool.

  It is to piss and to cry at the same time.

  ‘Mikey, there was nothing anyone could do. I’m sorry.’

  That’s Edmund’s tall shadow above him. He doesn’t mean to lie, but he is lying. Someone could have done something.

  Mikey doesn’t reply. There is nothing left to say.

  The drive on the other side of the cattle grid goes nowhere that matters.

  Behind him, there is nothing left.

  The truths are heavy as earth on top of him, all breath blocked, all words buried.

  It begins to drizzle. Sullen grey clouds loiter over the park with nothing better to do than make things worse, and a listlessness and tearfulness seep into the scene; everyone moves more slowly, the sense of urgency is gone. People huddle, the man has put his heavy camera down, the rescue dog is back in the van, Grace checks her phone again and goes to her husband. She is desperate to reach her daughter, there’s still no news of Liam, there’s nothing else they can do here. Diana can overhear her quite plainly although the argument with John is conducted in angry whispers.

  ‘We can and we should go now. After all that’s happened, are you going to put her family before our own?’

  Now Edmund joins them. There is a brief muttered debate about whether the boy would be better off going with them. All three of them turn to look at Mikey, picking at the bark on the cedar tree as if there might be something beneath it after all. Privately, Diana is torn: she wants him gone, she can’t bear the way he looks at her; she needs him close when he starts telling everyone, she must be there to translate. She realises she might need to learn to love him, she may be all he has left. Her mind trips over its laces as she moves towards him to claim him.

  There is not much that Mikey knows. His mind, which was so out of breath the pain was unbearable, is now out of focus as well, but his instinct tells him he wants to stay with Grace and he wants Grace to stay here at Wynhope. He can’t leave here because here is where his mum is, but he can’t stay here with his aunt, not on his own. His mum always says he’s razor sharp when it comes to people, and he’s razor sharp now, recognising that there is no love lost between Grace and his aunt, and if he has to choose he knows whose side he’s on. Even the dog looks as though he wants to go
with Grace, waiting by their car and wagging his tail. When they drive away without either of them, Mikey realises how cold he feels in his socks and his funeral shirt.

  ‘We need to get you sorted out, young man,’ says his uncle.

  Back inside the house, a different sort of anarchy greets Edmund, Diana and Mikey: the detritus of that last supper is everywhere even though the Stafford porcelain figurines are still dancing in pairs on the sideboard and the freesias stand upright on the windowsill, just a few petals fallen, confetti at a funeral. Edmund says he does not understand it, how some things can be destroyed, but others left untouched. As he guides the boy towards the staircase, Edmund picks up the pieces of the smashed china horse and runs his finger over the rough edge of its snapped leg.

  ‘My father’s, Flash in the Pan he was called. He fell at Hereford and had to be shot. The whole household was in tears over that.’

  The boy finds the leg on the floor and gives it to him.

  ‘Thank you, Mikey. Look, it fits perfectly. A bit of glue and everything will be as right as rain.’ The words are out before he realises how empty they are. What has fallen, what is damaged, what seemed repairable and what has survived. That is the reckoning, always has been.

  Forbidding them to follow him, Edmund leaves to examine the damage upstairs, instructing the boy to sit tight on the bottom of the stairs, just for a minute or two. From here Mikey can see straight out through the front door, which is open because it won’t close properly. His trainers are still on the mat so he puts them on. If the house falls down again, he can escape that way and from here he can see the firemen. He can’t allow himself to think about what they’re doing, just that they’re out there and strong, and his mum is still here. And from his waiting place he can see the statue in the lily pond, and the bronze boy and the dog seem like the only two people who matter. Diana frightens him, even the sound of her frightens him. He can hear her in the dining room clinking this and clunking that, trying to clear up the big mess she made arguing last night, like that’s all that matters when the firemen are still out there and so is his mum. And maybe she’s not dead after all.

  Diana is in the dining room, it’s true, but she doesn’t know why or what to do with the filth. She picks things up and she puts things down again, then because the boy is in the hall, spying on her, she retreats to the utility room where she screws her dressing gown into a ball and pushes it down to the bottom of the black sack, knowing it is the sort of thing criminals do and drags the torn and bloody nightdress over her head. Naked, she sorts through the laundry basket, finds dirty pants, leggings, the cashmere jumper stained with lily pollen and is it only yesterday, the funeral? In the hall, she tries to give the boy a shrunken blue jumper that Mrs H ruined by putting it in the washing machine, but he refuses it and, at a loss as to what to do with him next, she sits at the kitchen window and watches her story being played out on the lawn.

  Mikey’s glad she’s gone. He’s lost sight of the men, but he can hear them calling now like people do on the building site opposite his house – left a bit, up here, that’ll do – and the same sort of sounds, metal on metal and engines. The more he sobs, the tighter he sucks his funeral shirt. He allows Edmund to lead him to a sofa and tuck him up tight in a blanket and say he’ll be back in a jiffy and give him his rucksack in case he’s got something he wants in there, but Mikey doesn’t open it; he just holds it tight, as tight as he can. It’s all he has left even if it is almost empty.

  The fire crew inform Edmund of their progress; they have been surprisingly efficient given the unfamiliarity of the task. Normally when he visits his development sites, Edmund wears a yellow helmet and a hi-vis jacket, but it’s all too late for risk assessment now. Who knows what the insurance position is, this is probably considered an act of God. Valerie is lying in an air pocket, the beams and masonry crisscrossed above her, except the one monumental block which crushed her chest and her pelvis. It takes a long time to lift it, but once it is winched away, all that is left is her body. To die in the dress you wore to your mother’s funeral – he doesn’t know why that hits him, but it does. The rain falls harder, hammering against a piece of corrugated iron propped up against the potting shed, puddles forming in the tyre tracks on the grass. Ground, dust, sludge: the earth is losing its identity.

  The redundant ambulance crew have left and been replaced by an unmarked van. The trolley stretcher gets stuck in the gravel, Diana could have told them that would happen; Valerie’s wheelie case did the same, and what will she do now with her suitcase and everything in it? She can’t see the remains of the tower from the kitchen, it’s almost as though it is offstage and here is the player, walking across the lawn wearing gloves and carrying Valerie easily, thin as a rake she always was. He lays her on the trolley. The zip gets stuck half way up the bag, caught in her dress perhaps. It delays the moment in which Valerie is wrapped in black for ever. When the van has gone, at the kitchen table, Diana flicks through the messages. #earthquake. One hundred and forty will never be enough. My half-sister is dead. She counts the letters. People who know her have sent direct messages and she realises Wynhope must be on the news. She snaps the phone case shut and bursts into tears.

  The vehicles have left deep ruts in the grass; Edmund presses the edges with his foot, instinctively trying to even things out. There is a deafening quality to the remains of the day. There will be things to be done: reseeding the lawn for instance, calling the builders, although what they’ll do about the bottomless pit that is the pool, God only knows. Someone will need to contact the electricity board, is there anything to eat, and ordinary things after that, like catching the train and going to his office and renewing his fishing licence. They’ll all still line up along the hours, very close to the edge. And there is a motherless boy on the sofa and he promised him he’d be back in a jiffy, but he can’t face it, not quite yet. He is physically shaking.

  Soaked to the skin, Edmund stays outside and throws the ball for the dog into the long grass and the dog brings it back to his feet and waits. He throws the ball again and the dog retrieves it and waits. Remember the dead, pay attention to the living, that’s what the school chaplain told him. Least said, soonest mended. That was what was called counselling in those days. Sometimes terrible flashbacks return, as they do now even after so many years – the firemen and the police shouldering their padded bodies and helmeted heads against the wood, he can hear it, the counting down, the battering, the splintering of the door. He has no memory of their pulling his father’s body from the tower. He does not know if that is because he did not see it or does not want to remember it. There is the smell of Jeyes Fluid, the disinfectant usually kept for the stables, but later thrown over the doorstep to the tower, bucket after bucket of water splashing over the stones like the tide, and the rain runs over his head and down his face, trickling under his shirt, and he wants so much to cry and never stop crying. It will pass. Edmund hurls the ball high into the air, like he used to when he was hoping for a place in the First Eleven; for a moment, it is lost in storm light, but then he spots it again. He keeps his eye on the ball as it falls from the sky and he catches it safely. Again he throws the ball and again he catches it. Just playing cricket in the rain. Once more, he is about to send the ball back up when the boy appears tear-stained and dishevelled in the porch. Embarrassed, Edmund wonders what the child thinks, to see a grown man playing catch with himself in front of the place where his mother has died. As no words come to him to explain himself, he simply holds the ball up in his right hand.

  ‘For you?’ he says.

  The child nods. Edmund throws it very gently towards him in a long slow curve. It falls towards the two cupped palms and the boy catches it and there develops a song of sorts, a rhythm and harmony on this, the ugliest of days: the silence of the throw, the thud of the catch, a safe pair of hands.

  It is a long time since Wynhope has dared to welcome a child.

  Chapter Fifteen

  That night
was difficult. Clutching duvets, candles, food, bottles of water, they struggled back to the coach house, asylum seekers of sorts, and as if to ensure they were not mistaken for the dead they both slept fitfully although the boy seemed virtually unconscious; Edmund said he used to sleep for hours and hours, never wanting to wake up.

  In the morning, the spring storm has passed but left in its wake a thin drizzle, greyness creeping soft-sandalled into the main house. The gash in the landing wall has allowed rain to splatter over the carpet and Edmund feels the splintered edges of the oak panelling and its violated passage and tests his weight on the floorboards, then he leans out over the edge, the rubble like rocks on a beach beneath him, strewn with the coloured clutter of day trippers who have swum out to sea and never returned. The remains of the spiral staircase are crazy – Escher architecture going nowhere – and somewhere within him is a dizzying desire to follow their lack of logic and plunge. Stepping back sharply, he catches hold of the banisters behind him. He phones John, hears his own voice sounding unreliable when Valerie is mentioned, and feels on safer ground asking for help with boarding up the gap.

  ‘I would wait,’ Edmund says, ‘but it’s too dangerous with Mikey here. Anything could happen. Oh, and Liam?’ He kicks himself for his thoughtlessness. ‘Is everything all right?’ Liam is fine. John will be over later to make things safe, on a temporary basis, at least.

  The council is meant to be sending an engineer to assess the house and the lodge. They are close to the top of a short list because it turns out that for nearly everyone else the impact of the earthquake was little more than slates off the roof and cracks in the brickwork of 1950s extensions and shattered glass in poorly constructed conservatories. Wynhope is a high priority case; there was, after all, a fatality. Edmund is of the view that apart from the tower, Wynhope, structurally at least, looks as resilient as ever; Diana is not sure that the house has ever really put its faith in her, but she is relieved to reclaim it all the same and now she wants the place all to herself.