The Perfect Girl

TESSA

When I arrive at Maria and Chris’s avenue I’m not allowed to drive down it. I park on an adjoining street and run until I’m held back by the raised arms of a police officer who’s guarding the strip of crime scene tape that sags across the entrance to their road.

‘I’m family,’ I say. ‘It’s my sister.’

He begins to explain why that’s not a good enough reason to encroach on the ‘crime scene’ but I can’t stand to listen, because I need to see, and so I duck away from him and under the tape and run the hundred yards down the street until I’m standing at the entrance to Chris and Maria’s driveway taking breaths that scorch my throat.

I’m just in time to see a body bag being carried out of the shed, and placed on a gurney. Faintness almost fells me and I have to lean against the golden stone column at the entrance to the driveway. It’s the realisation that this is true.

Maria’s my younger sister; she was always a sprite compared to me, a waif, she was my shadow when we were younger, the one who could make our dad beam even when he was supposed to be cross with her, and now she’s gone. Your younger sister is not supposed to die before you, it’s not right. As I have no child who I fear will predecease me, this upsets the natural order of things for me in a way that’s unexpectedly shocking. Our parents are both dead, but I didn’t feel orphaned until now, because I had Maria.

As I watch the men carry her, I imagine how it feels to them, because I know the weight of a dead body. I’ve hauled an animal corpse out of the back of a car, or off a surgical table, on more than one occasion. When all the tissues are lifeless and the heart has stopped pumping, the weight of death is extraordinary. If someone brings a dead animal to us, when we prepare to move the body from our surgery car park into the building for cremation, we usually wait until passers-by have gone, to spare their feelings, but the folks with the gurney outside Maria’s house take no such precautions. They’re not paramedics, because there’s no need for paramedics now. These are men whose jobs are rarely advertised, because they collect the lifeless bodies. They wheel the gurney towards the back of a van, which is unmarked. There’s no need for an ambulance now either.

The policeman is by my side, and he guides me away, but he’s kind enough to support me too and to explain gently that Maria’s body is in the care of the coroner now, pending a post-mortem investigation, and a murder inquiry has been launched.

And as I take my last look back at their house I think something that I’ve thought before: ‘What a waste.’ And even my sceptical soul can’t help but wonder if our family is somehow cursed.