Sister

23

Hours must have passed, so he will surely be back soon. I don’t know how much sedative I swallowed, but all through this night I have felt a torpor of exhaustion sucking the warmth from my body and the clarity from my brain. I think I have slipped in and out of consciousness; in total darkness how could I tell? But if so, in my unnatural forced sleep I was still talking to you and maybe that was when my imaginings became peculiarly vivid.

Now I feel wide awake, all senses tense, buzzing and jittery; it must be adrenaline, a fight-or-flight hormone that’s powerful enough to restart a heart after a cardiac arrest, surely powerful enough to startle me into consciousness.

I try to move, but my body is still too doped and numb, and the bindings are too tight. The darkness feels almost solid now—not velvety like storybooks, not smooth and soft, but with spikes of fear, and if you prodded it, you’d find hard, jagged evil crouching behind it. I can hear something inches away from my face as I lie on the concrete. A mouse? An insect? I have lost sense of auditory perspective. My cheek feels sore; it must be pressed into a little unevenness in the concrete.

What if it isn’t adrenaline that’s keeping me awake, but I am properly conscious now? Perhaps I swallowed less sedative than I feared or have somehow come through the other side of the overdose and survived it.

But it makes no difference. Even if my body isn’t fatally drugged, I am tied up and gagged and William will be back. And then he’ll discover that I’m alive. And he’ll use the knife.

So before he returns, I need to make things clear to you. Everything happened as I told you, beginning with Mum’s phone call telling me you’d gone missing to the moment William left me here to die. But my ending will be the same as yours, here in this building, untold. I didn’t have the courage to face that, or maybe I just love life too much to let it go so quietly. I couldn’t fantasize a happy ever after, but I did imagine an ending that was just. And I made it as real as I could, my safe fantasy future, all details in place.

I worry that you’ve been waiting for DS Finborough to save me, but I think you felt a judder in the story when I told you about our lunch in Carluccio’s. It was only a comforting rug of a daydream to lie on instead of cold concrete, and it wasn’t admirable or courageous of me, but I know you understand.

And I think you’d already guessed, a little while ago, that there was no Mr. Wright. I invented a lawyer not only so I could play my part in a just ending—a trial and guilty verdict—but because he would make me keep to verifiable facts and a strict chronology. I needed someone who would help me understand what happened and why—and who would keep me from going mad. I’m not sure why being sane as I die is so important to me, just that it is, overwhelmingly. I do know that without him, my letter to you would have been a stream-of-consciousness scream, raging despair, and I would have drowned in it.

I made him kind and endlessly patient as I told him our story, and bereaved so he would understand. Maybe I’m more Catholic than I realized because I also made him my confessor but one who, even when he knew everything about me, may in some fantasy future have loved me. And during the long hours he became more real to me than the darkness around me, more than just a figment of a desperate imagination, acquiring his own personality and whims that I had to go along with, because he didn’t always do my bidding or serve the purpose I asked of him. Instead of helping me paint a pointillistic painting of what happened, I made a mirror and saw myself properly for the first time.

And around him I put a secretary with a crush and painted fingernails and daffodils and a coffee machine and inconsequential details that braided together made a rope of normality, because as I fell over the precipice of terror and my body became incontinent and shook with fear, I needed to grab hold of something.

And I made his office overly bright, the electric light permanently on, and it was always warm.

My pager sounds. I try to shut my ears to it, but with my hands tied behind my back, it’s impossible. It has sounded all through the night, every twenty minutes or so I think, although I can’t be certain how long I was fully conscious. I find it unbearable that I can’t help her.

I hear the sound of trees outside, leaves rustling, boughs creaking; I never knew trees made so much noise. But no footsteps, yet.

Why isn’t he back? It must be because Kasia is having her baby and he’s been with her all this time, and is still with her now. But I will end up mad if I think this, so instead I try to convince myself that there could be any number of reasons why William was called to the hospital. He’s a doctor; he’s paged all the time. His hospital delivers five thousand babies a year. It’s for someone else that he’s been called away.

And maybe DS Finborough investigated that “query” he had about your death, as he said he would, and has arrested William and even now is on his way to find me. It isn’t just wishful thinking; he is a diligent policeman and a decent man.

Or perhaps Professor Rosen has decided to do the right thing in the present and risked his mark on the future. Maybe he chanced his CF trial and academic glory and went to the police. He does want to do something for good, to cure, and his ambitions—fame, glory, even money—are so human against William’s hubristic lust for unadulterated power. And he did come to your funeral and he did try to find out what was happening even if, initially, he did nothing with his findings. So I choose to believe that Professor Rosen is, at his core, a good man as much as he is a vainglorious one. I choose to think the best of him.

So maybe one of these two men have set in motion the wheels that have led to William’s arrest and my rescue. And if I strain hard enough, can I hear a siren on the very edge of the night’s stillness?

I hear the trees’ leafy whispers and timber groans, and know that there are no sirens for me.

But I will allow myself a final daydream and hope. That Kasia isn’t in labor after all. Instead, she returned home as usual for her English lesson, pages of optimistic vocabulary learned and ready to tell me. William doesn’t know that she’s living with me now, that after you died, my conversion to being thoughtful was done absolutely properly. So when I wasn’t there and she couldn’t reach me on my mobile or pager, she knew something was very wrong. My castle in the sky looks selfish, but I have to tell her that her baby needs help to breathe. So I imagine that she went to the police and demanded that they search for me. She stood up for me once before, even though she knew she’d be hit for it, so she’d square up to DI Haines.

My pager goes again and my fantasy splinters into razor-edged shards.

I can hear birds. For a moment I think it must be the dawn chorus and morning already. But it’s still dark, so the birds must have got it wrong. Or more probably I’m imagining them, some drug-induced kind of bird tinnitus. I remember the sequence Amias told me: blackbirds, robins, wrens, tawny owls, chaffinches, warblers, then song thrushes. I remember you telling me about urban birds losing their ability to sing to one another and linking that to me and Todd, and I hope that I put that in my letter to you. Did I tell you I researched more about birdsong? I found out that when a bird sings, it doesn’t matter if it’s dark or there’s thick vegetation because birdsong can penetrate through or around objects and even over great distances, it can always be heard.

I know I can never fly like you, Tess. The first time I tried it, or thought I was, I have ended up here, tied up, lying on a concrete floor. So if that was flying, I crash-landed pretty spectacularly. But, astonishingly, I’m not broken. I’m not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. And if by a miracle I was freed and my fantasy played out, with William arrested and Kasia and her baby on a coach to Poland with me next to them, then that mountain I’ve been clinging to would tilt right over until it was lying flat on the ground and I wouldn’t need footholds and safety ropes because I’d be walking, running, dancing even. Living my life. And it wouldn’t be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.

I think I can hear my name being called, high and light, a girl’s voice. I must be imagining it, an auditory hallucination born of thinking about you.

Did you know that there’s a dawn chorus far out in space? It’s made by high-energy electrons getting caught in the earth’s radiation belts, then falling to earth as radio waves that sound like birds singing. Do you think that is what seventeenth-century poets heard and called the music of the spheres? Can you hear it now where you are?

I can hear my name again, on the periphery of the birdsong, barely audibly legible.

I think the darkness is turning to dark gray.

The birds are still singing, more clearly now.

I hear men’s voices, a group of them, shouting out my name. I think they must be imagined too. But if they aren’t, then I must call back to them. But the gag is still tight around my mouth, and even if it weren’t, my mouth is incapable of making a sound. To start with, I tried to spit out any saliva, fearful the sedative would have dissolved in it, but then my mouth became salt dry and in my imagination Mr. Wright’s secretary brought me endless cups of water.

“Beata!”

Her voice is clear among the men’s as she screams out my name. Kasia. Unmistakable and real. She isn’t having her baby. William isn’t with her. I want to laugh out loud with relief. Unable to laugh through the gag, I feel tears, warm on my cold cheeks.

William must have been right when he said the police think me capable of suicide and so would have taken seriously Kasia reporting me missing. Maybe, as he also predicted, they guessed that this would be the place I’d choose. Or was it just the two words odcisk palca that I texted to Kasia that brought them all here?

I can just make out a stain on the concrete. It really is getting lighter. It must be dawn.

“Beata!” Her voice is much closer now.

The pager sounds again. I don’t need to call back, because I realize it’s become a homing beacon and they’ll follow the sound to me. So Kasia has been paging me all through the night, not because she needed me with her while she had her baby, but because she’s been worried about me. It is the final fragment of the mirror. Because all this time it’s really been her looking after me, hasn’t it? She came to the flat that night because she needed shelter, but she stayed because I was grieving and lonely and needy. It was her arms, with red welts on them, that comforted me that night—the first night I’d slept properly since you’d died. And when she made me dance when I didn’t want to and smile when I didn’t want to, she was forcing me to feel, for a little while, something other than grief and rage.

And the same is true of you. The smell of lemons alone should have been enough to remind me that you look after me too. I held your hand at Leo’s funeral, but you held mine tightly back. And it’s you who’s got me through the night, Tess, thinking about you and talking to you—you who helped me to breathe.

I can hear a siren, wailing in the distance and getting closer. You’re right, it is the sound of a society taking care of its citizens.

As I wait to be rescued, I know that I am bereaved but not diminished by your death. Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being. And that fiber is visible—two strands of DNA twisted in a double helix in every cell of my body—proving, visibly, that we are sisters. But there are other strands that link us, that wouldn’t be seen by even the strongest of electron microscopes. I think of how we are connected by Leo dying and Dad leaving and lost homework five minutes after we should have left for school; by holidays to Skye and Christmas rituals (ten past five you’re allowed to open one present at the top of your stocking, ten to five you’re allowed to feel but before that only looking and before midnight not even peeking). We are conjoined by hundreds of thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of what you are. And inside me is the girl with caramel hair flying along on a bicycle, burying her rabbit, painting canvases with explosions of color and loving her friends and phoning me at awkward times and teasing me and fulfilling completely the sacrament of the present moment and showing me the joy in life, and because you are my sister, all those things are part of me too and I would do anything for it to be two months ago and for it to be me out there shouting your name, Tess.

It must have been so much colder for you. Did the snow muffle the sound of the trees? Was it freezing and silent? Did my coat help keep you warm? I hope that as you died you felt me loving you.

There are footsteps outside and the door is opening.

It’s taken hours of dark terror and countless thousands of words, but in the end it reduces down to so little.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

I always will.

Bee