Sister полностью

I was trying to concentrate on my design team’s roughs for a new corporate logo for an oil distribution company, noting with annoyance that they’d used PMS 683, which was already used in a competitor’s logo. You didn’t know there was any other chatter in my head.

“Thousands of children used to go blind because of a lack of vitamin A in their diet. But now with the new rice they’re going to be fine.”

For a moment I stopped thinking about the logo.

“Children are going to see because of the yellow in a daffodil.”

I think it was the fact that a color could save sight that you found so miraculously appropriate. I smiled back at Amias and I think in that moment we both remembered you in exactly the same way: your enthusiasm for life, for its myriad possibilities, for its daily miracles.

My vision is returning to normal again, the darkness transmuting into light. I am glad for the faulty electric light that can’t be turned off and the spring sunshine pouring in through the overly large window. I see Mr. Wright looking at me with concern.

“You’re very pale.”

“I’m fine, really.”

“We’re going to have to stop there. I have a meeting to get to.”

Maybe he does, but it’s more likely he’s being considerate.

Mr. Wright knows that I am ill, and I think it must be on his orders that his secretary makes sure I always have mineral water, and why he is drawing our session to an early close today. He is sensitive enough to understand that I don’t want to talk about my physical problems, not yet, not till I have to.

You’d already picked up that I’m unwell, hadn’t you? And you wondered why I didn’t tell you more. You must have thought it ludicrous yesterday when I said a glass of wine at lunchtime could make me black out. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t want to admit, to myself, my body’s frailties. Because I need to be strong to get through this statement. And I must get through it.

You want to know what’s made me ill, I know, and I will tell you when we get to that point in the story, the point when your story becomes mine too. Until then I will try not to think about the cause, because my thoughts, cowards that they are, turn tail and flee from it.

Music blaring interrupts our one-way conversation. I am near our flat and through the uncurtained window I see Kasia dancing to her Golden Hits of the 70s CD. She spots me and appears moments later at the front door. She takes hold of my arm and doesn’t even let me take my coat off before trying to make me dance too. She always does this, actually, “Dancing very good for body.” But today, incapable of dancing, I make up an excuse, then sit on the sofa and watch. As she dances, face beaming and sweating, laughing that the baby loves it, she seems so blithely unaware of the problems that she will face being an unemployed, Polish, single mother.

Upstairs, Amias is banging his foot on our ceiling in time to the music. The first time he did it I thought he was asking us to keep the noise down. But he enjoys it. He says it was so quiet before Kasia came to stay. I finally persuade a breathless Kasia to stop dancing and eat something with me.

While Kasia watches TV, I give Pudding a bowl of cat food, then take a watering can into your back garden, leaving the door slightly ajar so I can see. It’s starting to get dark and cold, the spring sunshine not strong enough to heat the air for long into evening. Over the fence, I see that next door your neighbors use the same outside area to house three trash cans. As I water the dead plants and bare earth, I wonder as usual why I’m doing this. Your trash-can neighbors must think I’m absurd. I think I’m absurd. Suddenly, like a magician’s sleight of hand, I see tiny green shoots in the dead twigs. I feel a surge of excitement and astonishment. I open the kitchen door wide, lighting the tiny garden. All the plants that were dead have the same tiny, bright-green shoots growing out of them. Farther away, in the gray soil, is a cluster of dark-red leaves, a peony that will flower in all its exuberant beauty again this summer.