The Family Upstairs(60)

I should have guessed that it wouldn’t be long before we children were expected to dress like this too.

Birdie came into my room one day with bin bags. ‘We’re to give all our clothes to charity,’ she said. ‘We don’t need them as much as other people. I’ve come to help you pack them away.’

In retrospect I can’t believe how easily I capitulated. I never gave myself over to David’s ethos, but I was scared of him. I’d seen him fell Phin on the pavement outside our house that awful night the year before. I’d seen him hit him. I knew he was capable of more and of worse. And I was equally scared of Birdie. She was the one who had unleashed the monster inside him. So while I often moaned or grumbled, I never refused. And thus I found myself at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in late April emptying my drawers and cupboards into bin bags; there went my favourite jeans, there went the really nice hoodie from H&M that Phin had passed down to me when I’d admired it. There went my T-shirts, my jumpers and shorts.

‘But what will I wear when I go out?’ I asked. ‘I can’t go out in the nude.’

‘Here,’ she said, passing me a black tunic and a pair of black leggings. ‘We’re all to wear these from now on. It makes sense.’

‘I can’t go out in this,’ I said, appalled.

‘We’re keeping our overcoats,’ she replied. ‘Not that you ever go out anyway.’

It was true. I was something of a recluse. What with all the ‘household rules’, the ‘not going to school’ and the fact that I had nowhere to go, I barely left the house. I took the black robe and the leggings from her and held them to my chest. She stared at me meaningfully. ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘The rest.’

I looked down. She was referring to the clothes I was already wearing.

I sighed. ‘Could I have a moment of privacy please?’

She looked at me suspiciously but then left the room. ‘Be quick,’ she called through the door. ‘I’m busy.’

I climbed out of my clothes as fast as I could and folded them roughly into a pile.

‘Am I allowed to keep my underwear?’ I called through the door.

‘Yes, of course you can,’ she replied impatiently.

I stepped into the stupid black robe and leggings and observed myself in the mirror. I looked like a very small, very thin monk. I stifled the desire to laugh out loud. Then very quickly I ran my hand around the backs of my drawers, searching for something. My fingers found it and I stared at it for a moment. The bootlace tie I’d bought in Kensington Market two years ago. I’d never worn it. But I could not bear the thought that I never would. I slipped it under my mattress with Justin’s witchcraft books and his rabbit’s foot and then I opened the door. I passed my folded clothes to Birdie.

‘Good boy,’ she said. She looked, for a moment, as though she might touch my hair. But then she smiled instead and repeated, ‘Good boy.’

I paused for a moment, wondering, as she seemed momentarily soft, if I could possibly ask the question I desperately wanted to ask. I drew in my breath and then blurted it out. ‘Aren’t you jealous?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you jealous about the baby?’

She looked broken then, for just a split second. I felt as if I suddenly saw right inside her, right into the runny yellow yolk of her. She flinched and then she rallied. She said, ‘Of course I’m not. David wants a baby. I’m grateful to your mother for letting him have one.’

‘But didn’t he have to have … sex with her?’

I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever said the word sex out loud before and I felt my face begin to flush red.

‘Yes,’ she said primly. ‘Of course.’

‘But he’s your boyfriend?’

‘Partner,’ she said, ‘he’s my partner. I don’t own him. He doesn’t own me. All that matters is his happiness.’

‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But what about yours?’

She didn’t reply.

My sister had turned thirteen a few days after my mother’s pregnancy announcement. I would say, although it is not particularly my area of expertise, that she was blossoming into a very pretty girl. She was tall, like my mother, and now, a year since the ‘no haircut’ rule had been implemented, her dark hair hung to her waist and unlike Clemency’s hair and Birdie’s hair, which grew thin and scraggy at the ends, hers was thick and shiny. She was thin, as we all were, but she had a certain shape to her. I could imagine (not that I spent very long at all doing such a thing, I can assure you) that with another stone on her, she would have had a knock-out figure. And there was an interesting face with a certain impish charm to it starting to emerge from beneath the baby face I’d been used to seeing all her life. Almost beautiful.

I mention all of this, not because I think you need to know what I thought about my sister’s looks, but because you may still be envisaging a little girl. But she was no longer a little girl.

She was, when the next thing happened, much closer to being a woman.





44


Libby arrives at work, breathless, two minutes late for her meeting with Cerian Tahany. Cerian is a local DJ and minor celebrity who is spending fifty thousand pounds on a new kitchen and every time she walks into the showroom a kind of low-level electric buzz starts up. Usually Libby would have been ultra-prepared for seeing her, would have had the paperwork ready, coffee cup set up, she would have checked her reflection and eaten a mint and tidied her skirt. Today Cerian is already seated and staring tensely at her phone when Libby arrives.