Sister полностью

I remembered back to Leo’s burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life,” you turned to me, “I don’t want sure and certain hope, I want sure and certain, Bee.”

At your funeral I wanted sure and certain too. But even the church can only hope, not promise, that the end of human life is happy ever after.

Your coffin was lowered into the deep gash that had been dug in the earth. I saw it brush past the exposed roots of grass, sliced through. Then farther down. And I would have done anything to hold your hand again, anything at all, just once, just for a few seconds. Anything.

The rain hammered down onto your coffin, pitter-patter. “Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, I hear raindrops”; I was five and singing it to you, just born.

Your coffin reached the bottom of the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Then Mum stepped forward and took a wooden spoon from her coat pocket. She loosened her fingers and it fell on top of your coffin. Your magic wand.

And I threw the e-mails I had signed “lol.” And the title of older sister. And the nickname Bee. Not grand or important to anyone else, I thought, this bond that we had. Small things. Tiny things. You knew that I didn’t make words out of my alphabet spaghetti, but I gave you my vowels so you could make more words out of yours. I knew that your favorite color used to be purple but then it became yellow (“Ocher’s the arty word, Bee”), and you knew mine was orange, until I discovered that taupe was more sophisticated and you teased me for that. You knew that my first whimsy china animal was a cat (you lent me fifty pence of your pocket money to buy it) and that I once took all my clothes out of my school trunk and hurled them around the room and that that was the only time I had something close to a tantrum. I knew that when you were five you climbed into bed with me every night for a year. I threw everything we had together—the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood—into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss that I thought I could no longer be there.

All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now? Nothing else from twenty-one years of loving you? Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because you were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthood—was that to be replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

I saw that Dad had been given a handful of earth. But as he held out his hand above your coffin, he couldn’t unprise his fingers. Instead, he put his hand into his pocket, letting the earth fall there and not onto you. He watched as Father Peter threw the first clod of earth instead, and then he broke apart, splintering with the pain of it. I went to him and took his earth-stained hand in mine, the earth gritty between our soft palms. He looked at me with love. A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down. I, of all people, should understand that.

Mum was silent as they put earth over your coffin.

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Mum’s silent screaming is in my head as I reach the CPS offices. It’s Monday and crowded with people. When I get in the packed lift I start fretting, as I always do, that it will get stuck and my mobile won’t get a signal, so Kasia will be unable to contact me if she goes into labor. As soon as I arrive at the third floor, I check for messages: none. I also check my pager. Only Kasia has that number. Overkill, yes, but like a recent convert to Catholicism, my conversion to being thoughtful is going to be done absolutely properly, with rosary beads and incense sticks, a pager and a special ring tone on my phone reserved for her. I don’t have the security of being born a considerate person. I’ve learned that, at least. I can’t treat it casually as part of my intrinsic makeup. And yes, maybe my anxiety about Kasia is a way of rerouting my thoughts for a while onto someone who is alive. I need the memento vitae.