Читать книгу The Half Sister - Catherine Chanter - Страница 8

Chapter One

Over half of the sitting room is now a bright, brilliant dazzling yellow; the rest is rent grey. Whoever designed these flats in the 1970s in Bracknell never thought about the fact that the windows are too high to let you see out unless you stand up and too narrow to let the light in when the sun is low over the tower blocks opposite. It can get you down, if you let it, but this place where they have arrived is so much better than the prison they have escaped. Valerie has been singing along, but now she picks up her mobile and turns down the volume on the radio.

‘Sorry, who did you say you are again?’

Less than two minutes later, because that’s all it takes, she is perched on the edge of the imitation leather sofa as if she has somewhere to go, knowing that there is nowhere to go from here, noticing that the Spring Sunshine has rubbed off from the paintbrush to the remote control to the cushion, the news leaving its fingerprints all over her life.

‘Oh, Mum,’ she says. ‘Not Mum. Not now.’

There is no point in singing any longer. Valerie switches on the telly. The reporter is ill at ease, looking over his shoulder as if he is about to be attacked, but in fact the destruction behind him is something to do with a tsunami, not a war. It is all a long way away and the news leaves the victims picking through the wreckage and switches instead to people chanting the name of their new president and celebrating in their thousands, a young man with a child on his shoulders cheering to the cameras above the surge and the swell of the chorus. ‘This is what hope feels like!’ he shouts. That’s how Valerie’s come to think of herself recently, a woman with the weight of her young son on her shoulders, a load that both grounds her and leaves her light as air and dancing. Leaning against the kitchen counter with her first cigarette for a long time, she studies this, their safe place, and imagines her mother visiting at last, hesitating at the door with potted-up purple crocuses from the supermarket in one hand, making up for lost time in the other in a what-might-have-been parallel future.

Valerie kicks the stepladder, which knocks the paint pot, which tips out a slow curl of a yellow tongue that licks last week’s paper spread out on the carpet, and a thin black cat springs from its sleep up onto the coffee table, rippling the scum on a cold cup of tea and sending part of a half-finished jigsaw of Elvis crumbling over the edge onto the floor.

Some time later, the slam of the back door tells her Mikey is back.

‘I’m home.’

Half in and half out of his anorak, the child first notices the smell of fresh paint and the proportion of the sitting room which has turned yellow while he’s been at school, and only then registers the fact that his mother is crying. Dropping his reading folder, he joins her in picking up the pieces of the broken jigsaw.

‘You all right, Mum?’ he asks.

He doesn’t want to repeat the question or hear the answer, so he says nothing more, kneels on the floor and presses the cardboard joints back into their sockets, the two of them together quietly reassembling the letters above Elvis’s head – Promised Land. He hands her a glittery bit of the star’s suit, she slots it into place.

‘Come and sit here, you!’ says Valerie, patting the sofa.

She budges up a bit, he sits cross-legged at the other end, picking at the hardened piece of glue on his school trousers which has not come out in the wash.

‘What’s happened?’ he asks. ‘Is it him?’

It is a physical pain in her chest, the knowledge that this is the first thing that occurs to him, only nine years old and looking over his shoulder. ‘No, love, no, and it’s never going to be. Where is he?’

‘Australia.’

The day he looks at her when he says it, that will be the time when she knows he really believes it. ‘Paul’s gone and he’s never coming back.’ She pushes his hair out of his eyes. ‘But I have got some news. You know your nanna from Bristol? She’s passed on.’

‘Where to?’

Valerie struggles to control the muscles in her face. ‘I’m sorry, love. What I mean to say is your . . . A doctor from the hospital rang up. Your nanna’s dead. I’ve lost her.’

Mikey has lost a lot of things, like his swimming trunks for instance, and he has managed to get by without telling anyone that all term, but he’s never lost a person he loved, although for a long time it seemed to him his mother was hard to find. But now she’s lost Nanna and won’t ever get her back, he senses the depth of the sinkhole which has opened up in the half-grey half-yellow room and tiptoes as close to the edge as he dares.

‘Sorry about Nanna,’ he says, staring at the television where people are running screaming from the sea, dragging their children behind them, everything wobbling as if the world is built on a boat. He changes the channel to their favourite daytime game show where the jackpot stands at £2,500. This should cheer her up.

‘Don’t cry, Mum.’ He hugs her. ‘You’ve got me.’

‘I’ve got you, all right,’ she says. ‘And Solomon.’

He’ll be out soon, she reminds herself, then they’ll be a family, nights in together with a takeaway and a box set, days out together with a picnic at a beach as golden as this sitting room. They will skim stones across the sea in summer and throw snowballs in winter and who can ask for more?

‘And Jesus,’ says Mikey.

‘And Jesus, of course,’ she says, ‘Sol wouldn’t want us to forget him.’

‘What happens now?’

Valerie doesn’t know. ‘Now’ seems to be an unnatural combination of blank days stretching on and on in which there is nothing to be done because nothing can be done, and a terrible urgency to arrange the things she imagines need to be arranged: clear out the fridge in her mum’s house before things start to smell, feed her budgerigar, caged and peck-peck-pecking at the stripped millet, call the undertaker, order the flowers, but how she’ll pay for it all she has no idea. Money is tight since she walked away, but it has been a small price to pay. There is one person who has money and then some. Her sister. Big sister. Half-sister. Diana.

Valerie blows her nose. ‘You get on with your homework, I’m going to phone your aunty.’

‘The rich bitch?’

‘Don’t you dare use language like that,’ says Valerie. ‘I should never have called her that.’

‘You said you haven’t spoken to her for years and years and years.’

‘I haven’t. I didn’t stay in touch with her or your nanna. Paul didn’t like it, did he? And Diana never called me.’

‘And you said she wasn’t a real aunty. You said she was only half an aunty.’

‘She’s family, Mikey, and family matters at a time like this.’

People often assumed that the final straw with Paul must have been him beating her or something violent like that, but they were wrong. It was the joke notice he bought from a gift shop and nailed to the kitchen wall: ‘Never Forget, As Far as Everyone Else Is Concerned, We Are a Perfectly Normal Family.’ Family, there is no one else left now who understood her childhood except Diana, no one to mourn with except Diana, and not just her mum, but mourn all of it, the graveyard that was their family life back then. She takes a deep breath. No reply. Leave a message. Silence taps its fingers with impatience until she abruptly rings off. Your mum passed away, you can’t do that on voicemail.

‘How did she get to be so rich?’ Mikey asks later. He has brought his duvet and Penguin downstairs and put on Titanic because that might help. He likes the height of the waves and the sinking; she likes the kissing bits and cries at the ending, but, like most stories, this has a boring part at the beginning before it all goes wrong and that’s where they are up to now.

‘She married it, didn’t she?’ Valerie corrects herself. ‘To be fair, that’s not totally true. She walked out the house when she was sixteen and that was the last we saw of her, more or less, but I think she worked her own way up the ladder even before she met Sir Moneybags.’

Later, there is trouble on the deck, the first mate is looking out through his telescope. Valerie calls her sister again. It’s getting late, but she hasn’t got her mobile number. There’s still no reply.

‘Why did she leave?’

Shifting her position on the sofa, Valerie considers the question. ‘Truth is, Mikey, I don’t know. I never really understood.’

They are jumping now, the passengers, choosing to hurl themselves into the churning sea, rather than die behind locked doors.

‘Anyway, maybe me and Diana can make up again.’

‘Doubt it,’ says Mikey. He reaches for his mother’s hand under the duvet, even as fingernails are slipping from the edge of the lifeboats. Nobody comes. Even though they are shouting across the icy sea, help me, help me, nobody comes.