Читать книгу The Lost Sister - Laura Elliot - Страница 15

Thank goodness for spring. There’s green shoots in the ground and the forsythia will soon bud. I thought we’d never get through the year but we did…we did. The mass was nice, the church packed and it’s good to know people remember them. I felt a hypocrite having the mass when I don’t believe in God or any religion that forces us to accept there is a divine plan to anything. But I can’t let on. What’s the sense in saying there’s nothing left except bone and memory when Cathy believes she’s writing to an angel and Julie’s convinced she’ll meet them in heaven?

To lose so much in a year…it’s too much…too much…but it’s nice to stand in the garden and look at the green shoots. They promise so much. Unlike Jeremy, they’ll deliver.

He’s still with Rose Moore. Do I care? No way, José. Julie calls him a ‘wanker’ and Cathy sneaks her hand into mine and squeezes it when his name is mentioned. Their pity unhinges me. Even Lauren came out of her shell for a while after he broke off with me.

Jeremy is not a wanker. He just doesn’t know how to deal with it all. I can’t blame him. I don’t want to sit in every night either, but I’m too tired to go out and, when I do, I’m worried about Julie being in charge, knowing she’s alone with Paul, and Lauren’s locked somewhere deep inside herself and Cathy’s probably crying or writing those letters, and if I get plastered, like my friends, I won’t be able to get up in the morning, and that’ll be the very time Mary Green calls and writes her notes and makes me so nervous I want to sit on my hands to keep them from shaking.

On the positive side, my driving is improving. Lydia’s a good teacher and doesn’t get worried when I can’t engage the clutch and the traffic builds up behind us. She’s going to help me paint the rooms. But not yet…not just yet. Little steps, she says. Everything can be done in little steps. She started art classes after her husband died. She said it started as therapy and became her grand obsession. Her paintings are strange and weird, ruins of abandoned cottages in the middle of nowhere. She calls them ‘famine echoes’. If women could work and rear children in such a hostile environment, she says the least she can do is follow their footsteps and record what is left of their existence. Her paintings look similar; crumbling walls almost invisible under ivy, weeds growing like spun sugar from chimney breasts. It’s her use of light and shade that makes the difference.

Gramps is beginning to pull himself together. His cheque arrived on time this week. He’s promised to stop drinking and come with me and Lydia to the inquest. I dread it…and the court case. It’s like the anniversary mass. Another stepping stone that walks them further away from us. Life moves on…tick tock tick…and a year has passed.