Sister

I’m not sure what made me say that. Maybe because for the first time you weren’t just living in the present, but planning for the future. Understandably, the reporter wants something else. She waits.

I try to summarize you into a sentence. I think of your qualities, but in my head it starts turning into a personal ad: “Beautiful, talented, 21-year-old, popular and fun loving, seeks …” I hear you laugh. I left out good sense of humor but in your case that’s entirely true. I think of why people love you. But as I list those reasons, I wobble perilously close to an obituary, and you’re too young for that. An older male reporter, silent until now, barges in. “Is it true she was expelled from school?”

“Yes. She hated rules, especially ridiculous ones.”

He scribbles and I continue my quest for an encapsulating sentence about you. How many subclauses can a single sentence hold?

“Miss Hemming?”

I meet her eye. “She should be here. Now. Alive.”

My six-word summary of you.

I go inside the flat, close the door, and hear you telling me that I was too harsh on Dad earlier. You’re right, but I was still so angry with him then. You were too young to take in what Mum and Leo went through when he left, just three months before Leo died. I knew, rationally, that it was the cystic fibrosis that made him leave, made Leo so ill that he couldn’t bear to look at him, made Mum so tense that her heart knotted into a tight little ball that could barely pump the blood around her body let alone beat for anyone else. So I knew that rationally Dad had his reasons. But he had children and so I thought there were no reasons. (Yes, had, because two of his children were dead and the third was no longer a child.)

You believed him when he said he’d be back. I was five years older but no wiser, and for years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn’t want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult. But I’m not so sure of that now.

Outside your window I see the reporters have all gone. Pudding bends her purring body around my ankles, blackmailing me into giving her more food. When I’ve fed her, I fill a watering can and go out the kitchen door.

“This is your backyard?” I asked on my first visit to your flat, astonished that you hadn’t meant “backyard” in the American sense of a garden, but in the literal one of a few feet of rubble-strewn earth and a couple of wheelie bins. You smiled. “It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”

You must have worked like a Trojan. All the stones cleared, the earth dug through and planted. You’ve always been passionate about gardening, haven’t you? I remember when you were tiny you’d trail Mum around the garden with your child-sized, brightly painted trowel and your special gardening apron. But I never liked it. It wasn’t the long wait between seed and resulting plant that I minded about (you did, hotly impatient), it was that when a plant finally flowered, it was over too quickly. Plants were too ephemeral and transient. I preferred collecting china ornaments, solid and dependable inanimate objects that wouldn’t change or die the following day.

But since staying in your flat, I have really tried, I promise, to look after this little patch of garden outside the back door. (Fortunately, Amias is in charge of your flowerpot garden of Babylon down the steps to your flat at the front.) I’ve watered the plants out here every day, even adding flower food. No, I’m not absolutely sure why—maybe because I think it matters to you, maybe because I want to nurture your garden because I didn’t nurture you? Well, whatever the motivation, I’m afraid I have failed abysmally. All the plants out here are dead. Their stalks are brown and the few remaining leaves desiccated and crumbling. Nothing is growing out of the bare patches of earth. I empty the last drops from the watering can. Why do I carry on this pointless task of watering dead plants and bare earth?

“It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”

I’ll refill the watering can and wait a while longer.

5

wednesday