My Sister's Bones(69)

I come back outside just as the sun breaks on the horizon. I’m desperately tired but I know what will come if I go to bed. She’ll come; with her dead eyes watching me. I won’t risk it. So instead, I sit down and drink.

I’m at the bottom of the bottle when I see it: a tiny mound of white on the grass that, as I look closer, turns into a living creature.

‘Oh no,’ I sigh as I stand up and go to it. ‘Please no. I don’t need this.’

The seagull doesn’t move and I assume it must be dead. Its eyes are cloudy, its beak partially open. But as I crouch down to take a closer look it makes a gut-wrenching sound. Not a cry but a sob; this bird is coughing up its death rattle. I can’t bear it.

I hear Hannah’s voice in my head.

‘Mummy, we need to help him.’

But he’s past help now, I think, as I step over him and walk to the kitchen. From the door I can still hear it: creee-oo, creeee-oo. It’s a pathetic sound, like a baby crying for its mum, and I know that I will have to do something. It could take hours to die.

So I go to the cupboard and take out the heaviest object in the house: the rolling pin. I think of my dad threatening Kate with Mum’s rolling pin as I wrap my hand round its rough surface. I remember Kate’s words in an article I read years later: Give someone a weapon and they become a warrior. ‘Give me strength, Kate,’ I whisper as I return to the garden.

The bird doesn’t move as I step towards it and I pray that it’s dead, that I won’t have to do this, but as I bend down to check, it flinches and starts crying again. It sounds like it’s coming from beneath the bird, somewhere deeper and darker. It’s creeping me out. It almost sounds like a child.

‘Don’t look at it,’ I tell myself as I raise the rolling pin above my head. I want to close my eyes but I know that I mustn’t or I risk missing the target and causing it more pain. No, I need to get it over with in one clean blow. But my hands are shaking as I bring the pin down and although I feel the crack of bones, I miss its head. The bird flounders and starts to walk away, dazed. I chase it, raining down blows again and again until the path is strewn with feathers and deep-red blood. With each strike the bird cries out and I want to block my ears but I can’t. The sound reverberates through my body as I finally manage to smash its skull and it comes to rest in a heap by the side of my foot.

I stand there for a few moments, the bloodied rolling pin still raised above my head, and I look at the remains of the bird. Its pink eyes are now black with blood. I don’t want to look at them any more. I just want this to be over.

I pick it up, the sharp needles of its broken wing pressing against my skin, and I slowly walk to the flower bed. Placing the bird by the side of the grass, I begin to shovel the soil with my hands. He needs a peaceful resting place, I tell myself, as the soil becomes damp under my fingertips. That’s what Hannah would want. I dig and dig, deeper and deeper, through tangled roots, disturbing worms as I go, and then my hand catches on something hard.

I look down and see a sliver of gold. Brushing away the roots and soil, I pull at the sparkly thing until it yields and then I sit holding it in my hands. My heart hurts as I remember picking out the slimline gold watch for Hannah’s sixteenth birthday. I turn it over and read the inscription on the inside of the strap:

To our beautiful girl on her 16th birthday. Love you always, Mum and Paul xxx

How did it end up here? Did she throw it away to punish me? But then as I sit rubbing my fingers over the cracked face I hear her voice.

Just let me go, Mum. You’re hurting me.

She was going to leave me. I was angry. I’d found an internet search on her computer. She’d been trying to get back in touch with her real dad, the little shit who got me pregnant when we were both fourteen. I told her he wasn’t interested, told her that his parents had moved away when they found out about the baby and told me to leave him alone. I told her that in sixteen years he’d never once tried to get in touch. I told her that Paul was her dad, that there was nothing to be gained from raking over the past, but she wouldn’t listen.

Just let me go, Mum.

Until now those words have been the last thing I could remember from that night, the night she left. But as I sit here, her voice ringing in my ears, I see something more. I see her standing at the door. She’s telling me I’m a drunk. I run at her, grabbing her wrists to pull her back inside.

‘Just let me go, Mum.’

I pull and pull at her; tell her she’s not going to leave me, that I won’t let her. She’s all I have. And then there’s a bang. A door slamming? Me falling over? I’m holding her watch in my hand. I have Hannah’s watch, but she’s gone. What happened? I can’t remember. I don’t know if I want to remember.

I look down at the watch with its rusty strap and broken face and my stomach knots. Paul can’t see this watch. He already thinks it’s odd that I don’t remember anything about Hannah leaving and he knows things were volatile between us. If he finds this watch he’ll know by my face that something went on and then I’ll have to tell him. I’m a terrible liar. And once he knows we fought that night he’ll blame me for her leaving and I can’t bear that. I have to get rid of it.

So I place it back in the hole I’ve dug and put the dead bird on top, folding its wing over its blackened eyes, then I cover them both with mound upon mound of earth until all that remains is a brown patch; an unremarkable square of soil in an unremarkable garden. Nobody would know, I tell myself, as I stumble back to the house and make for my wine stash. Nobody would know.