The Sister(55)

After that, she knew for sure she should have gone to watch TV in the other room, but the preview, the glimpse of a girl who looked like her, kept her watching the whole programme and in doing so, started her remembering things she’d spent years trying to forget. It seemed she was destined to watch it tonight.

Such a long time ago. What was it, sixteen years? Since then she’d lost two children; married, had another child, lost a husband and built a thriving business.

The programme made compulsive viewing.

She found herself experiencing a rising level of discomfort after each case. She kept telling herself to turn the channel over, but she didn’t want to miss the reconstruction of what happened to the girl in the photograph. She kept watching. The next case was a reconstruction so similar to what had happened to her; it triggered a whole series of recollections she’d not thought of for years. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.

Although they showed the part using an actress, the interviewer spoke to the victim herself. She had waived her right to anonymity. She admired the bravery of the woman. It wasn’t something she could ever do herself.

Her situation was different, best left in the past. Once the programme was over, she would re-submerge the memories. She knew she’d have a spate of nightmares for weeks. The same thing happened the last time she thought about her ordeal. After a while, they would occur only occasionally. It was partly why she kept a prescription of sleeping tablets in the bathroom cabinet; they helped to suppress her nightmares. Don’t have nightmares; do sleep well.

She knew she’d be taking an extra one tonight.

The programme had ended; she’d gone right through the missing girl case, without taking any of it in.

What she’d wanted to see, she’d missed. What she’d avoided for years was in her thoughts again.

Fate has a way of catching up to you. She didn’t know who said it, but she was beginning to believe they were right. No matter how high the walls she built to hide behind, she was still afraid in the quiet of the night, still afraid of walking alone in wide-open fields and still wary of strangers.

What that woman did, brought her to the brink of confronting her own demons. She wondered if one day she might find the courage to pick up the phone, dial the number and say, ‘I’ve just seen your programme, and I'd like to go on air to talk about what happened to me, because there’s a chance it might help someone else who is going through the same thing, and also because I'd like the chance to purge myself of guilt by standing in the studio on television, in front of millions of viewers to say, ‘Look it’s me, Jackie Solomons; what happened to me wasn’t my fault, and I shouldn’t be ashamed!’’

She felt strangely empowered just by playing the role in her head.

Her attacker was probably in his fifties back then, which meant he’d be at least in his seventies now. The realisation made her feel physically safer than she had for a long time.

It put a different perspective on it all. She didn’t feel afraid anymore, but it also reminded her why she could never do what that woman did; she was hampered by a secret. Something she’d judged best kept from her daughter. Oh, she knew about the little stillborn brother that came and went before her, but Jackie had never told her about the rape or the older sister she would have had if she hadn’t given her up for adoption because the rapist made her pregnant.

She wondered what had become of her.

She never told Tina, because she was too young. It was just too big, too ugly a truth to tell. Now she was older; she still couldn’t tell her.

As her thoughts shifted away from herself, parts of the reconstruction she’d just seen came back to her. Missing for twenty-three years? She’s dead. Jackie was back to thinking about herself again. She might have gone missing too, if it hadn’t been for her friends.

‘What’s up, Mum, you look upset – is it the programme? I’ll turn it off.’

Jackie turned away from the screen to face her daughter, managing a thin, tired smile. ‘It’s nothing, love; I was just miles away thinking about that poor kid’s parents, that’s all.’

She picked up her plate; most of the sandwich remained.

‘I’m off to bed, night, love.’ At the door, she turned and blew her a kiss with her free hand.

‘Night, Mum.’ Tina watched her go.

Wide-eyed with weariness, even without make-up, she looked like Cleopatra. With her long dark hair tied back, she looked a little plump in her silk pyjamas, but still a very attractive woman. She couldn’t help thinking how lucky she was that her mum was so pretty. It meant there was a fair chance that she would be when she reached her age. She smiled at the adage: If you want to know what your girlfriend will look like in twenty years’ time, look at their mum!

She knew her mum was keeping something from her; she also knew she’d tell her one day when she was ready.





Lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come, Jackie thought about how she lost her father in 1979, killed in a car smash when she was four years old. He set off for work, and he never came home. It triggered a separation anxiety in her; that she’d struggle to cope with all her life.

Jackie drifted into thinking about the letters her mum and dad had written to each other. She’d found them in the loft, taped up in the same box where they'd been placed when the house was cleared after her father died. They’d lain together, in unsorted neat little stacks of pink and pale blue envelopes tied with thin and faded ribbons. She’d untied a pink one. A trace of perfume so faint it couldn’t have been more than a few molecules, triggered an image of her mother in her favourite summer dress, standing against the light shining in from outside, her outline unmistakable, her face partly obscured, dark hair tied up the way she liked to wear it in summer, clear of her face, with the exception of a few loose tendrils deliberately left hanging down in front of each ear.