Connie read and reread the brief lines.
Dear Connie,
I hope this address still finds you because I want you to hear this news from me, not from anyone else.
I have cancer. I won’t go into detail, but after several months of treatment and having our hopes raised and then lowered again, we were told this week that there isn’t any more to be done. Six months is the estimate.
I am beginning to work out for myself what this means. What does it mean?
It’s very hard for Noah. And for Bill. Both of them are full of love and concern for me, and I feel blessed in that.
There it is. I don’t want anything, except to know that you know.
Love (I mean this…)
Jeanette
Connie lowered her face into her hands. Her forearms pressed against the keyboard and, unseen, the screen split into layers of files. The immediate shock made her shiver. Jeanette had always been there: in her silence, in her brave focus on doing and being what she wanted, her influence most powerful – partly because of its very absence – in all Connie’s past life.
Behind her eyes, images of her sister receded into their remote childhood.
The chair she was sitting in became one of the pine set at the kitchen table in Echo Street. The desk became the knotty old table that had come with them from the flat before, the top half of a house in Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride lived downstairs.
Jeanette had planted the idea in Connie that their neighbour was a witch.
– At night, she rides in the sky. If you look, you can see the broomstick in her back kitchen.
Now Jeanette was sitting opposite her, eleven years old, full of hope and strength in spite of her deafness.
Connie lifted her head. She reached for her glass, and drank the wine.
The computer screen was blinking, asking her if she wanted to close down now.
It took an effort to reopen the email programme. Connie’s fingers felt uncertain on the keys, like a child’s.
She started a new message and typed a single line.
I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight. Connie.
The train from the airport ran past the backs of Victorian terraced houses, irregular and broken like crooked teeth in an overcrowded jaw. There were brief glimpses of clothes lines, cluttered yards, interiors veiled in dingy grey, all pressed beneath a swollen grey sky. Connie watched the terraces sliding past, absorbing the steady flicker of snapshot images from other people’s lives. This couldn’t be anywhere but England.
In an hour, she would be back in her London flat.
She was glad of this interval between the long flight and whatever would happen next.
The backs of the houses were identical, all of them clinging to the curves of railway lines and arterial roads and abraded by the dirt and noise that rose off them. Their bricks were dark with soot and the wan trees in patches of garden were weighted with layers of grime.
Echo Street was a terrace just like one of these, with a railway line carrying local trains into Liverpool Street, running through a shallow cutting beyond a high fence at the end of the garden.
Connie closed her eyes.
There was lino down the narrow hallway, dark red with paler bluish-pink swirls in it that looked like skimmed milk stirred into stewed plums. The stairs rose steep as a cliff, each tread usually with a sheet of the Daily Express folded on it because Hilda had just mopped them yet again. Hilda had a fixation with cleanliness. The smell of bleach always sent Connie hurtling back into her childhood.
In the old flat, Connie and Jeanette had shared a tiny bedroom, the two divan beds separated by a channel only just wide enough for one of them at a time to put their feet to the floor. There was a shelf above each bed. Jeanette’s displayed a neat line of books, whereas Connie’s was silted up with scribbled drawings and broken toys and crushed wax crayons.
But in Echo Street they were to have their own rooms. Jeanette was delighted with hers. As Tony was downstairs helping the sweating removal men to carry in the piano, she stood in front of her door and held on to the knob to show that her sister wouldn’t be admitted. She signed to Connie, folded hands to the side of her head and then clenched her fist to her chest: my bedroom, mine.
When Connie looked into the room that was to be hers, she saw a narrow box with a window that faced the brick wall of the next-door back extension. The lino on the floor was the same as in the hallway and the only other feature was a tall cupboard built across one corner. She twisted the handle and saw that the cupboard was empty except for two coat-hangers on a hook. In the dim light the hangers suddenly looked like two pairs of shoulders that had mislaid their heads and bodies, but which might easily clothe themselves on a dark night and come gliding out of the cupboard in search of little girls.
She ran for the safety of the landing. Jeanette’s door stood open by a crack, allowing a glimpse of a bigger room where the sun cast a reassuring grid of light and shadow on the bare floorboards. Jeanette was sitting with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up and her books and magazines laid out beside her. Her fair hair was drawn in one thick plait over her shoulder and she was thoughtfully chewing the bunched ends.
It was Connie who started the fight. Overtaken by one of the surges of rage that were her last resort in the unending series of skirmishes against Jeanette, she launched herself through the doorway and fell on her sister. The square box of the bulky hearing-aid battery that Jeanette wore strapped to her chest juddered between them. Magazines slithered and tore under their flying feet.
‘It’s not fair. I want the big room. It’s not fair.’
Connie yelled and pummelled her fists, then tried to haul Jeanette up and out of the room. An earpiece dropped from one ear and the wire tangled between them.
Jeanette shouted back, but no words were distinguishable.
‘Listen to me,’ Connie screamed.
At the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf the speech therapist had made little progress with helping Jeanette to talk. When she was upset or angry she gave up the attempt to verbalise and lapsed into shapeless bellowing.
In any case Connie and Jeanette had their own private hostile vocabulary, a shorthand matter of stabbed fingers and sliced-throat gestures that led to full-blown kicks and blows.
‘You sound like a cow mooing,’ Connie screamed. ‘I want this bedroom.’
Jeanette fought harder. Her face swelled close to Connie’s as she hooked her fingers in Connie’s tangled hair and propelled her backwards until her head smashed against the wall. Connie doubled up like a snake and closed her teeth on Jeanette’s upper arm.
The noise brought both
