You and Me Page 11

  ‘You’re an auntie, aren’t you?’ says Caroline, smiling as Daisy reaches her chubby hands out to her mother.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, but I don’t want to talk about that: how I never see Rose. How I’ve never held her in my arms.

  When I get back to the estate, my flat feels different. I stand in the dark hallway for a moment, listening. There’s the tick of the clock, the burr of a plane passing overhead. Something feels unsettled. As if the air has been disturbed somehow. There’s an unfamiliar scent. Something sweet. Floral.

  The front room is exactly as I left it. The curtains open, the windows overlooking the white-grey sky and Great Western Road below. Crumbs on the counter, tissues blotted with lipstick on the coffee table. A hand mirror I borrowed from Mother’s room left out. I tidy away the tissues and wipe down the counter. I return the mirror upstairs to Mother’s room and hang up her dress, trying to decide if I need to take it to be dry-cleaned.

  In Ellie’s room, everything looks the same, too. It’s as tidy and bleak as always. Even when Ellie lived here, there was a lack of permanence to the space, as if we were still at boarding school. Like mine, there’s a double bed, a desk and cupboard. The only effort to decorate the place, or make it her own, is a poster of the ballerina Natalia Osipova on the wall – she loved Osipova, aspired to her steeliness and strength.

  The bed is still made up as it was when she left. From time to time I wash the linen and replace it. I never tell her about that. I want it to be a surprise when she returns. The same duvet cover as when she left, clean and waiting for her.

  Finally, I throw open the door of my bedroom and there, on the bed, is a huge bunch of roses. As delicate as tissue and the shade of a dusky sky. They’ve been wrapped in brown paper and placed carefully on the duvet. Nothing else seems to be disturbed. Beside them Branwell is purring, smug, as if he’d brought them himself.

  Lilac roses. Mother’s favourite. Ellie has been here.

  There is no trace of her in the flat, apart from the flowers. I kick off my shoes and get into bed next to them. I don’t know whether to feel angry or sad. Mostly, I feel bewildered in the way I did when we were children and she would always find somewhere new to hide. Somewhere I could never guess. Maybe she’s reminding me she cares. Or maybe she’s still trying to punish me.

  24

  Defeated, I sink into the sofa, the roses still in my arms. Whatever game we’re playing, my sister is definitely winning. Ellie never really had to try. She’s a natural winner. She struggled with reading and writing, it’s true, but some things were easy for her. Like Ratings.

  On the first day of the new year, the most popular boys from school would gather on the balcony of the dining hall at lunchtime. Everyone knew it was going on, but, apart from Mrs Morgan and Mother, whom I heard grumble about it, none of the staff seemed to mind or want to stop it. The boys would mark all the new girls out of ten. In the old days, they used to actually hold up numbers, but that had been stamped out for being tasteless. Now the marks were generally kept private by the boys, but things leaked out.

  One girl – who was pretty but a committed Christian – had been marked a nine early on, but, because of her chastity, her lack of interest in the boys, not many of them bothered to learn her name, so she was just Nine for the rest of her time at school. Juliet was a nine point five. Dickie used to tease her with what the half mark had been knocked off for – ‘Your little finger is crooked,’ he’d say flirtatiously, or, ‘You hadn’t plucked your eyebrows.’ As far as we heard, no girl ever got a ten.

  I privately hoped that Dickie hadn’t heard about Ellie’s toes. It was a silly thing – part of her charm, Mother always said – but the second and third toes on both Ellie’s feet were webbed like Father’s had been. One of those strange inherited traits in families like the way raw carrots cause Ellie and me to hiccup in the same way they did Mother, or body lotions make our legs itch.

  Mother and I used to tease her about it a little at home, but really it was a point of pride to us – a sign that Ellie was destined to be an excellent swimmer. A teacher at her primary school had been the first to notice her talent when she was nine. A well-built woman with a short, no-nonsense haircut, she stopped Mother as we left the leisure centre. ‘Has your daughter ever had any swimming coaching?’ she asked, and Mother laughed. The idea of anyone in our family having any sort of sports coaching was incongruous. ‘Well,’ said the teacher, ‘perhaps she should.’

  Four years later, on Ellie’s first day at Chesterfield, I was particularly nervous that someone – particularly someone with a big mouth, like Dickie – might find out about Ellie’s webbed feet. I hated the idea of being watched, of being judged, and lunch was the worst time for it. In the evenings, we ate in our boarding house, but during the day the whole school would gather in the enormous dining hall. There was nowhere discreet to hide. In our houses, there was a seating plan, so we always knew where we were meant to be, but in the hall you could sit wherever you wanted. The sweat would start to prickle at my neck in the queue to go in. It exposed you, you see. If you had no one to sit with, there was no hiding it.

  Unfortunately, I rarely did – Meilin often worked through lunch, or had her cello lessons – so I’d try to hide on my own in a corner. That wasn’t always possible, so I’d have to find a place at the end of a table, where a bunch of friends might be sitting together. It wasn’t enough that you were lonely – or alone – you had to advertise it in front of the whole school. But now Ellie had joined me, it would be different.

  I glanced at her approvingly. She looked so tanned and pretty from our summer spent outside. Her skirt was a bit on the short side, as if she’d hitched it up, and her legs were bare – we didn’t have to wear tights until later in the autumn term. She wore her wild hair down.

  As we reached the front of the queue, I said to Ellie, ‘Remember that the boys are doing that thing today, so don’t do anything to draw their attention.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about that,’ Ellie said. She didn’t so much as glance up at the boys on the balcony. ‘And I don’t know why you do, either.’

  As we picked up our trays and slid them along the metal rungs, Tom Bates, who had been queuing behind us, started to get impatient. He was in a rush to join the other boys. Tom was in my year, silent and huge. He wasn’t quick-witted like Dickie or classy like Charles – but his physicality lent him a power. To the boys he was a kind of hero. He was the only fifth year to play in the First XV with the sixth-formers and just the week before, in a match against Eton, had knocked out their best player. He’d had to sit out for the rest of the match but it raised him, in the eyes of the other boys, to the level of a martyr. Tom’s ‘red mist’ they called it – the fury that blinded him to everything but his aim. A secret weapon that could be utilised for the higher good. A few of the more suggestible girls in my year reacted to this change of status by batting their eyes at him.

  It could be because of his raised profile that he was so cocksure that day, harassing us in the queue, as Ellie lingered at the salad bar. ‘Why are you taking such a bloody long time?’ he snapped.

  ‘Got somewhere important to be?’ Ellie said, slowing down to annoy him.

  He didn’t answer, but he glanced up at his friends on the balcony.

  ‘Oh yeah, that,’ said Ellie in a derogatory way, dawdling over making her choice. ‘Comparing dick sizes, is it?’

  Tom and I both looked at her. That kind of bravado was usually the domain of the sixth-form boys. No one expected a cherubic first year to talk like that.

  He flipped a hand under Ellie’s tray so quickly that by the time I realised what he’d done, her plate of lasagne had landed face down on the floor with a crash. The dining room went silent for a second. My face burned at the feeling of hundreds of eyes upon us. Somebody started a slow handclap. I couldn’t help it then, I looked up to check if Charles had seen all this.

  From his position on the side of the balcony, he was staring straig
ht at us. I wished the ground would swallow us up. Ellie dropped to the floor to retrieve her plate but the broken fragments of it were mangled up with the lasagne. I gave Charles a despairing look and he smiled back warmly and right at that moment, without his having to say anything, I knew, I just knew, he was going to give Ellie a ten. I loved that he would do that for me.

  I couldn’t wait to tell her. Once her broken plate was all cleaned up, and we’d found her a new one, we sat down, though neither of us felt much like eating.

  ‘I reckon Charles is going to give you a ten,’ I said. ‘I just have a hunch.’

  Ellie played with her lasagne with a fork. ‘Why do you care so much?’

  I sighed, tried not to look at Charles again. ‘People like you and Juliet never care because you’ve always had attention,’ I said, spearing a carrot.

  ‘And you shouldn’t either,’ she said. ‘You’re far too clever for all that shit.’

  I didn’t know what to say. She was right. ‘None of them ever speak to me except Meilin and Charles,’ I said quietly.

  Ellie looked up at the balcony, where things had settled down a bit. ‘You really like him, don’t you?’ She could always see through me.

  ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,’ I said dramatically, adding, in response to her baffled look, ‘Wuthering Heights. That’s how it all started.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Ellie. ‘I don’t know about that.’ But she turned around and gave Charles a cheery thumbs-up, which, when Tom Bates glanced down, she flipped to the finger instead.

  It made me uneasy at the time – Tom was a bad person to make an enemy of; for all of her boldness, Ellie can be naïve. She sometimes seems to miss an essential ingredient necessary for survival in these situations: cowardice. In the years that followed I found myself wishing I could go back in time to apologise to Tom and smooth things over.

  It might have changed everything.

  25

  In the end, I throw the flowers away. I usually keep Mother’s birthday roses, but these carry with them the sting of disappointment. I can’t believe I missed her – if indeed it was Ellie who delivered them. I drop them down the rubbish chute, with only the slight clamminess of guilt as I hear them land softly. They must have cost a lot, but I don’t want roses, I say in my head to her again: I want you to come home. Not everything can be bought.

  As I walk across the communal garden to my flat, there’s the itch of someone’s gaze on my back, but when I turn around it’s only the dealer, standing there with a cigarette in his hand.

  ‘Afternoon,’ I say, wishing I could remember his name. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen my sister?’ I ask as casually as I can, as if Ellie had only just left.

  He shakes his head, looking faintly surprised. ‘I haven’t seen her for years.’

  ‘It’s just’—I stoop to pat his dog’s head—‘she left something for me.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’d remember seeing her.’

  ‘You didn’t see anyone else come in holding flowers? A delivery guy?’

  ‘Did you fall out?’ he asks, a sly look passing over his face. ‘Is that why she left?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I say, straightening my back, regretting that I sound like a Facebook status.

  I have the day off before returning to work on Saturday so I set up camp in Mother’s room, sitting in her rocking chair. On Facebook, the last photograph Ellie posted is still Rose on her skis.

  Thank you for the flowers, I begin in a Facebook message. I pause, remembering where they’d just ended up. Maybe I should have found them a better home. But I’d like to see you, if you’re back in town. I thought I saw you last night at the auction. Was that you? Are you still here? I’ll come to wherever you are.

  I look at what I have written and, as usual, remove the last sentence before sending it. Deciding to follow the message with an email, I continue with my news more cheerfully …

  I have so much to tell you. Last night at the auction, Charles made the winning bid on my lot – some book tokens. It’s a personal shopping session and I get to advise him on what to buy. But, most of all, it’s time with him again. Like the old days.

  I know you won’t approve – I know you’ll tut in that way you do and say that I never learn, but, Ellie, this is all I ever wanted. I will do anything – I can forgive everything if this is possible. If you want a sign that it was meant to be, Fiona was ill. Purely by chance. And he didn’t go home with her, he stayed on until the end of the evening. I spent the night at Caroline’s house – it was strange. Remind me to tell you about it …

  I want to give her something to come back for, so there are some details I save for my next email: my suspicions about Juliet, Caroline’s sleepwalking and Dickie’s sketches – but it will be so much easier if we can meet in person. If she’s still in London.

  While I’m waiting for her to get back to me, I check Juliet’s Instagram account and see that she’s already posted hundreds of photographs of last night – mostly of her on the red carpet, her hand resting on her hip, her feet in third position like a dancer. Her face looks sweatier as the night goes on.

  She gushes about Dickie in the posts, using hashtags #RIPDickieGraham #DickieGrahamOneInAMillion #DickieGrahamGoneButNotForgottten

  It’s embarrassing. Over the top. What are you trying to prove, Juliet? I stare at a photograph taken later in the night, where her shiny face is pushed up next to Caroline’s, making a show of how close they are. Would someone go to the lengths of organising a charity auction to cover up pushing a friend in front of a train? I wouldn’t put anything past her.

  She’s picked a particularly unflattering one of me on stage, my face pink and glistening under the spotlight, staring out needily into the crowd. I look at it for a long time, reliving the magical moment when Charles raised his flag. Then I go through all the photographs again, liking all the images with him in them.

  Unlike Juliet and the rest of us, he doesn’t look shinier and pinker as the evening wears on. At the end of the night he looks as calm and composed as he does at the beginning, so that if you were to take his hand, you just know it would still be warm and dry and firm.

  26

  When Caroline pops by the shop to pick up the tracksuit I borrowed, which I’ve taken care to wash and iron, there’s a lightness to her. You wouldn’t know, to look at her, that she might be the sort of woman to sleepwalk into your room and grab your arm so sharply the half-moon marks of her nails show the next day.

  Daisy smiles at me from her pushchair and throws her toy giraffe on the floor for me to pick up.

  ‘Do you want to come with us to BabyGap?’ Caroline asks. ‘Someone’s growing out of all her clothes – and you could get something for Rose.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say doubtfully.

  Baby shops make me feel uncomfortable. Any place with a high concentration of small human beings, in fact. Or their mothers.

  It’s like the time I briefly joined a book club with Brenda. Apart from the pair of us, they were all mums. We were reading The Hand that First Held Mine and ended up getting into a disagreement that culminated in the smuggest of the mums in the club saying to me, with a hand on her pregnant belly – her third: ‘I hate to say it, but that’s something you can only understand as a mother.’

  Do people realise how often you hear those three words as a childless woman? Or how the phrase can be used as a weapon in the way ‘as a daughter’ or ‘as a sister’ never could be. It is the trump card. As if the rest of us – who will always wonder what it’s like, who, whatever our circumstances or choices, will feel the tugging of sadness from time to time at that absence, or occasionally touch our breasts or bellies and think about another life where our bodies might have had a different fate – needed to be reminded of it.

  ‘I understand things,’ I said quietly that day. ‘As an aunt.’

  I thought of Rose then, of how I felt the pull of her from hundreds of miles away, how I woul
d do anything to protect her.

  But my argument didn’t have the power of hers. And I knew it. Brenda went quiet during all of this. She started putting her coat on, waited for me by the door.

  ‘I don’t want to go back to that book club,’ she said as we left, though the whole thing had been her idea.

  ‘Me neither,’ I agreed.

  I’ve always preferred reading on my own in any case.

  BabyGap is very light and bright with inappropriately loud thrumming music – maybe to keep the sleep-deprived awake. Caroline and I drift away from each other once we’re there. I pass a mother shuffling through packs of underwear, her son, a bored-looking child of around nine, kicking at the floor. Caroline goes to look at the baby stuff and I head for the girls’ section.

  There’s too much pink – Ellie wouldn’t like that – frilly princess costumes, glittered jelly shoes, unicorns. None of it looks right. I end up standing in front of a display of more muted denim – dresses and dungarees for three- to four-year-olds. She’ll be three soon, so better to buy something she can grow into. I think of Ellie as a tomboy infant, jumping into puddles, climbing trees. I pick up a pair of red dungarees – the sort of thing she used to wear. I want to buy her something that reminds her of home.

  Her email to me last night was probably the longest I’ve had from her since she went away and, despite my disappointment at missing her, it feels like something is changing:

  I’m sorry I missed you this time. It was a flying visit – and no, I wasn’t at the auction on the night, but I’ve seen lots about it on social media. Thanks, Juliet ; ) Was it difficult keeping your secret about Dickie from Caroline? Be careful with that, sis.

  As for Charles, I don’t know what to say, but I hope whatever happens makes you happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.

  PS I’m glad you like the flowers – enjoy!