My Sister's Bones(17)

Beside me, Paul starts to sing the opening lines of ‘Abide with Me’. I look at that damned mulberry tree as Paul sings about the eventide and I wish my mother hadn’t had to deal with such violence. She was a good person and she didn’t deserve it.

Paul stops singing and looks at me.

‘Sally chose the reading,’ he says. ‘Even though she couldn’t make the funeral, she still wanted to have a bit of input.’

‘What reading was it?’

‘One from the Bible,’ he says. ‘She said your folks had it at their wedding. What was it again? “Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” That one.’

My body goes cold and any sympathy I was beginning to feel for my sister dissipates. Why would she choose such a thing? It was nonsense, and a huge slap in the face to our mother, a woman who had endured more than she should ever have had to at the hands of that man.

‘So you see, Sally did care,’ says Paul. ‘She still wanted to be involved.’

‘Paul, you know very well that Sally couldn’t stand our mother.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t go that far. Yes, they had their ups and downs but they loved the bones of each other really.’

‘Which is why it was you who arranged Mum’s care home and drove her to mass and ferried her to the shops,’ I reply, feeling the anger pounding in my temple like a pulse.

‘I cared about your mum, too,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mind doing those things because she was a lovely lady. She welcomed me into the family so kindly, especially after my own mum died. I was happy to help.’

‘I know you were,’ I say gently. ‘And you’ve been a great son-in-law. Better than either of us were as daughters. I just wish I’d seen more of her in her final years.’

As I stand here I have a sudden memory of Ground Zero, where I first met Chris. I see the forensic anthropologists in space-age suits hauling bodies from shallow graves. The perversity of that image, the ‘wrongness’ of a body coming out rather than going into its grave, makes me go cold.

‘Come on,’ says Paul, noticing the state I’m in. ‘Let’s get you home.’

He takes my hand and guides me back through the graves, past the Minnie Mouse balloon and Alexandra Waits, past the church holding my mother’s secrets, but it is all too much and as we reach the gates I let go of his arm and sit down on the grass verge. The tears that I’ve spent the last few weeks holding in come springing forth and I put my head in my hands and cry for the mother I’ve lost.





9


Herne Bay Police Station

17.5 hours detained

‘You’ve witnessed some terrible things in the course of your career, Kate, haven’t you?’

I don’t want to answer her. I’m tired of her questions. Instead, I look down at my bracelet and he’s with me. I feel the warmth of his hand as he strokes my bare skin, his soft lips kissing the back of my neck, and I ache with longing for him. Human touch is a primordial need, I think to myself, as I watch Shaw flicking from page to page. It’s not love that I miss, it’s not even the sex; no, what I miss above all else is the reassuring touch of someone else’s skin. His skin.

Chris’s hands were rough and scarred, the legacy of twenty years exhuming graves. But the feel of his hands wrapping round me as he slipped into bed in the early hours of the morning, not speaking, just holding me close, was all I needed, it gave me the strength to pack my bags and head off to the next war and the next and the next. The memory of his skin, the promise of it, was what kept me going all these years. And now I will have to learn to live without it.

‘Things that would have broken most ordinary people.’

Shaw’s voice brings me hurtling back to the here and now. I feel exposed. But I know I have to stay focused and answer her questions. Even if I don’t like them.

‘But I didn’t break or else I wouldn’t have been much use,’ I reply. ‘It’s the first rule of journalism: stay impartial.’

She writes something down and I wonder if in my effort to stay calm I’m starting to sound too cold and detached. Isn’t lack of emotion a psychopathic trait? I decide to change tack, to soften my edges a little and keep her onside.

‘The one that stays in my head is Layla. A little girl who lost both her legs when a shell hit her home.’

Shaw looks up, startled that I’ve begun to talk unbidden.

‘She was so brave,’ I continue. ‘Still smiling despite the pain. I remember she took my hand and said something I didn’t understand. She said it over and over again, so when the doctor came in I asked him to translate for me. He told me she was asking where I had put her legs and when would she be getting them back.’

Shaw shakes her head and sighs a long, deep sigh, the sigh of a mother who knows her children are safe at home.

‘She was four years old and all alone in one of the most dangerous places on earth. The rest of her family had been killed in the attack. No one knows how she survived. I sat by her bed listening to her cries of pain.’

I take a sip of water and try to steady myself as Layla’s moans fill the room. ‘Painkillers were in short supply and they’d cauterized the stumps of her legs without anaesthetic. At one point I reached into my rucksack and pulled out three boxes of cheap Paracetamol. When the doctor came in I handed them over and he looked at me like I’d just come up with a cure for cancer. I looked at Layla and wondered what kind of future lay ahead for an orphaned child with no legs in a country seething with . . .’