The Switch(7)

I shouldn’t paint her that way, as if she looked weak – she was still so Carla, still fiery. Even on Leena’s last visit, just days before she died, Carla would take no nonsense from her big sister.

She was in her special hospital bed, brought into Marian’s living room one evening by a group of gentle NHS staff, who put it up with astonishing efficiency and cleared out before I could make them so much as a cup of tea. Marian and I were standing in the doorway. Leena was beside the bed, in the armchair we’d moved there once and never shifted back. The living room didn’t centre around the television any more, but around that bed, with its magnolia-cream bars on each side of the mattress, and that grey remote control, always lost under the blankets, for adjusting the bed’s height and shifting Carla when she wanted to sit up.

‘You’re incredible,’ Leena was telling her sister, her eyes bright with tears. ‘I think you’re – you’re incredible, and so brave, and …’

Carla reached out, faster than I’d thought she could, now, and poked her sister in the arm.

‘Stop it. You’d never say that sort of thing if I wasn’t dying,’ she said. Even with her voice thin and dry, you could hear the humour. ‘You’re way nicer to me these days. It’s weird. I miss you telling me off for wasting my life away.’

Leena winced. ‘I didn’t …’

‘Leena, it’s fine, I’m teasing.’

Leena shifted uncomfortably in the armchair, and Carla raised her eyes upwards, as if to say, Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’d grown used to her face without eyebrows by then, but I remember how strange it had looked at first – stranger, in some ways, than the loss of her long brown curls.

‘Fine, fine. I’ll be serious,’ she said.

She glanced at me and Marian, and then reached for Leena’s hand, her fingers too pale against Leena’s tanned skin.

‘All right? Serious face on.’ Carla closed her eyes for a moment. ‘There is some stuff I’ve wanted to say, you know. Serious stuff.’ She opened her eyes then, fixing her gaze on Leena. ‘You remember when we went camping together that summer when you were back from uni, and you told me how you thought management consultancy was the way to change the world, and I laughed? And then we argued about capitalism?’

‘I remember,’ Leena said.

‘I shouldn’t have laughed.’ Carla swallowed; pain touched her features, a tightening around the eyes, a quiver of her dry lips. ‘I should have listened and told you I was proud. You’re shaping the world, in a way – you’re making it better, and the world needs people like you. I want you to kick out all the stuffy old men and I want you to run the show. Launch that business. Help people. And promise me you won’t let losing me hold you back.’

Leena was crying, then, her shoulders hunched and shaking. Carla shook her head.

‘Leena, stop it, would you? Jesus, this is what comes of being serious! Do I have to poke you again?’

‘No,’ Leena said, laughing through her tears. ‘No, please don’t. It actually kind of hurt.’

‘Well. Just know that any time you let an opportunity slip, any time you wonder if you can really do it, any time you think about giving up on anything that you want … I’ll be poking you from the afterlife.’

And that was Carla Cotton for you.

She was fierce, and she was silly, and she knew we couldn’t manage without her.





3


Leena


I wake up at six twenty-two, twenty-two minutes after my usual alarm, and sit bolt upright with a gasp. I think the reason I’m freaked out is the strange silence, the absence of my phone alarm’s horrendous cheery beeping. It takes me a while to remember that I’m not late – I do not have to get up and go to the office. I am actually not allowed to go back to the office.

I slump back against the pillow as the horror and the shame resettle. I slept terribly, stuck in a loop of remembering that meeting, never less than half-awake, and then, when I did fall asleep, I dreamt of Carla, one of the last nights I spent at Mum’s house, how I’d crawled into the bed and held Carla against me, her frail body tucked to mine like a child’s. She’d elbowed me off, after a bit. Stop getting the pillow all wet, she’d told me, but then she’d kissed me on the cheek and sent me off to make midnight hot chocolate, and we’d talked for a while, giggling in the dark like we were kids again.

I haven’t dreamt of Carla for a good few months. Now, awake, reliving that dream, I miss my sister so much I cry out with a little, strangled, Oh God, remembering the gutting sucker-punches of grief that floored me in those first few months, feeling them again for a heart-splitting instant and wondering how I survived that time at all.

This is bad. I need to move. A run. That’ll sort me out. I throw on the Lululemon leggings Ethan got me for my birthday, and an old T-shirt, and head out the door. I run through the streets of Shoreditch until dark bricks and street art give way to the repurposed warehouses of Clerkenwell, the shuttered bars and restaurants on Upper Street, the leafy affluence of Islington, until I’m dripping with sweat and all I can think about is the inch of pavement in my eyeline. The next step, next step, next step.

When I get back, Martha’s in the kitchen, attempting to wedge her very pregnant body into one of the ridiculous art deco breakfast stools she chose for the flat. Her dark-brown hair is in pigtails; Martha always looks young, she’s got one of those faces, but add the pigtails and she looks like she should not legally be bearing a child.