of damaged machinery.
The corridors were lengthy and yellowed. The doors were all shut. Staff skimmed the edges of distant hallways, but we never saw any other children. You could hear them, though. Echoing around the fancy cornices and the giant cast-iron fireplaces, the smothered sound of unquiet minds. Jessica waited for us in a panelled room. My sister, buttoned into someone else’s clothes, because no one wore their own things at St Catherine’s. There was a giant cupboard at the far end of each dormitory, and what the staff decided to dress you in was pot luck. All the beautiful outfits my mother had made were walking around on someone else. The four of us sat in a semicircle of matching high-back chairs and stared at each other. My mother would try to hug Jessica. Jessica would squirm away. Then the three of us would leave. It felt like a trip to the Natural History Museum. As though we had been to look at an exhibition no one else knew anything about.
They make documentaries about these places now. Cyril and I watched one. There was a presenter standing in a derelict room, waving his hands around and shouting about asylums. Black and white photographs. The stutter of an old film reel. All those broken lives, all those unheard stories. Except this wasn’t just a story. This was my sister.
Cyril was right.
Jessica isn’t stupid.
There’s little point in starting my day now until the rush hour is over, as London is held static in a charge of elbows and frustration. Cyril and I used to be in the middle of that. We spent years pressed into endless carriages, breathing into the material of strangers’ overcoats, standing on the right, living our lives behind yellow lines.
I usually set off from home around ten thirty. That way I can go about my business in peace. I take a packed lunch, because it can get quite expensive going to those little kiosks at the stations. I used to take my knitting, just to pass the time, but I quickly realized you need to have your wits about you to have any chance of success. It’s easy to miss someone in a crowded carriage, and you can spend the rest of the day trying to locate them again. I tend to look at people’s feet if I’ve a moment to spare, because it’s amazing what you can learn about someone just from their shoes. I try to guess the kind of person they belong to, and when I look up, nine times out of ten I’m right.
The only time I allow myself to daydream, is when we’re beneath Hammersmith. I know Jessica is up there somewhere. She has moved many times since the days of St Catherine’s. Sheltered. Assisted. Lodge. House. Home. Care. The same situation wrapped up in different words. Victorian panels were swapped for primary coloured walls. High-back chairs for activity rooms and sensory play. She was given a physiotherapist, a nutritionist, an occupational therapist. She even has a speech therapist who managed to find a voice no one had ever heard before. Jessica uses this voice sparingly, words chosen with care and usually released from her mouth one by one. In that way, I think she is probably wiser than the lot of us. Wherever she’s lived, though, it’s always been the same. She is forever out of sight. In the far corner of hospital grounds, or behind towering hedges, shuttered windows, closed blinds. Hidden away where no one else can see. It was the thing Cyril remarked upon the first time he met her. My parents were long gone, and I had been left to make the pilgrimage alone each Sunday, until Cyril volunteered to go with me.
‘Where is it then?’ he said.
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