My Sister's Bones(9)

I was thirteen years old and my crime had been to intervene in one of my father’s tirades. Mum had cooked a chicken pie and he had come home drunk and made a fuss, saying it was dry. As usual I had stepped in to defend my mother while Sally just sat there like the doting daughter, agreeing with him. ‘Yes, Daddy, it is a bit dry.’ God, she was unbearable. He really laid into Mum that night and I just saw red. I remember lunging towards him, putting my body between my terrified mother and his coil of rage.

He stopped then and I thought for a moment that I’d helped, that he was seeing sense, but instead he grabbed me by the arms and marched me through the kitchen. After hitting me around the legs with his belt he opened the back door and shoved me out into the night. It was late November, bone-chilling weather, and though I was fully dressed it was still no weather to be out in. There was an empty compost bag by the fence and I fashioned a shawl out of it by ripping it down the middle and pulling it round my shoulders. But it was still so cold I could feel my teeth chattering. I hammered on the door, begging him to let me in. I called out for my mother, for Sally, but no one came. It seemed like hours as I watched the lights go off, one by one, in the house and I curled up on the softest spot I could find, my mother’s rose bed.

Then a strange thing happens. As I stand in the garden all these years later a memory comes back to me, so vivid it almost knocks me off my feet. A small shadow in the window. Sally. As I lay shivering in the flower bed that night I’d looked up to see Sally standing at her bedroom window. I’d waved my arms and called out to her.

‘Come down and let me in,’ I’d begged. ‘Please, Sally, open the door.’ She wouldn’t have been able to hear what I said, but she knew I needed her help.

She’d continued to look at me but her face was expressionless.

‘Please, Sally.’

But she just shook her head, stepped back and closed the curtains. A few minutes later I heard my father unbolting the door. He’d made his point and I was allowed back inside. It took me hours, huddled in every item of clothing I possessed, before I felt warm again. I see Sally’s face at the breakfast table the next morning, staring at me like I was a ghost; like she couldn’t quite believe that I’d survived.

I shudder as I walk back into the house to fetch bin bags and a garden brush. How can a memory lie dormant like that for so many years then spring forth unbidden? But I can’t let myself think of it. Not now. The memory is just that, a memory, a fragment of the past that has no place in the here and now.

Instead I try to concentrate on the task ahead. I know little about gardening but I can weed and clear and that will be enough to while away a few hours and get the garden into some kind of order. I grab the bin bags from the cupboard underneath the sink and locate an old wooden brush in the pantry. The day is warm and I feel brighter as I make my way back out into the garden.

It feels good to be in the fresh air, and the work, though laborious, is cathartic. The more clumps of tangled weed I drop into the black bag, the lighter I feel. After a couple of hours it looks like a different garden and I feel better too, though horribly hot and sweaty.

I am just depositing the last of the bin bags into the wheelie bin by the wall when I hear a child laughing. It’s a warm sound and it flutters through my body as I walk back up the path. It sounds so much like . . . I walk towards the sound, and as I reach the rose bed I see him lying on his front reading his favourite comic; an old one that he’s read a hundred times. And he’s laughing, belly laughing, at the silly jokes. He had such a beautiful laugh.

I look up and see a woman sitting in the garden next door. She is young, in her early thirties, and she wears a blue scarf over her hair. It is patterned with red roses and it makes me smile as I draw closer. My mother had one very similar that she used to wear across her shoulders when she went to church. Her rosy scarf we used to call it when we were kids.

‘Hello,’ I call as I peer over the fence.

She looks startled for a moment and puts the drink she is holding on to the grass next to her.

‘I’m Kate,’ I say brightly. ‘I’m staying here for a few days.’

‘You are Mrs Rafter’s daughter?’ she says, getting up from her chair.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I say as she comes to the fence.

‘My name is Fida,’ says the young woman. ‘Your mother talked about you lots.’

‘That’s nice to hear,’ I say. ‘I miss her so much.’

‘I miss her too,’ says the young woman, looking beyond me towards my mother’s garden. ‘She was kind. She used to give me . . . I can’t think of the word. They were pastries? Round with jam . . .’

I can smell the doughnuts as I watch the young woman grappling with her words. My mother was a prolific baker and bread-based dishes were her speciality. She would always make doughnuts after my father had beaten me, and to this day I can’t eat them for they taste of both my mother’s guilt and my own sorrow.

‘Doughnuts,’ I say. ‘Jammy doughnuts.’

‘Yes,’ shrieks the woman, her face beaming. ‘Jammy doughnuts, that’s it. They were good. She would leave little boxes for me on the front step like . . . like Santa Claus.’

‘And your child, does he or she like doughnuts?’ I ask, craning my neck to see if the little one is still there.