Claire Kendal - The Second Sister

I have been turned to stone. Every trained reflex I have is paralysed. All that I have practised is dead. Is this what he really wants to do? How he really wants it to be?

I disappear from the park. I am somewhere else, in a city by the sea, and it is almost ten years ago, the last time Ted and I were lying in this position. And I want him on top of me, in this narrow single bed in this rambling old house that seems to come out of a dream and is full of twisting corridors and hidden bathrooms and seemingly vanishing loos as well as multiple other inhabitants I hardly ever see. Whenever he is able to visit, we spend all the time we can in this basement room, pressed against each other, the ocean in our ears. He is so beautiful as we kiss, his expression so soft and blurred, as if our kissing is all there is in the world, and he is lost in it, lost to himself. His eyes are closed but mine are open, wanting to see, unable to look away from his face, which I have loved since I first saw him in the playground sixteen years ago. He seems half asleep and half in a trance. All the time we make love I look at him, not knowing that this is the last time we ever will. Not knowing that as we kiss and I watch him, at this exact moment, you are vanishing.

There is a hissing in my ear, bringing me back. There is grass beneath me and sky above me and the scent of honeysuckle all around me though I am not sure how that can be possible and all I can think is that you loved honeysuckle.

There is a voice spitting questions and commands. Are you scared? Spread your legs. Were these the last ugly words you ever heard? There is a man squirming his feet between mine and using his knees to try to force my legs apart. There is a pebble bruising the small of my back, reminding me where I am.

But still I cannot move. There are women’s voices and they are saying my name over and over again, as if urging me to do something, but I cannot understand what it is. I cannot think who they are.

There is a horror-film face above mine and I do not know who it belongs to. I hear my name. It is not a question, and even though it is still in that same strange voice, it is not said with hatred. Even beneath its static fizz there is a note of concern that brings me back and I remember that the face is behind a mask and it is Ted’s face and I am glad I cannot see his expression. I am glad his murky green eyes are hidden beneath the tinted visor, and his hair is beneath the helmet so that I cannot be reminded of what it felt like ten years ago when I last cupped his head in my hands and pulled it towards me.

He is inching my knees farther apart and I am trying to keep my legs as fixed as marble but it isn’t working. My name is getting louder but Ted isn’t saying it. My name is a screamed chorus of female voices and it isn’t coming from me but it goes through my bones like an electric shock and jolts me and jolts me and jolts me awake.

I let out a grunt and roll onto my left side, taking Ted with me, taking him by surprise and in one continuous motion kneeing his upper thigh once, twice, three times in quick succession. He is crouching now, coming at me again, and I am sitting up with my legs bent in front of me. I raise a leg and kick him hard in the face again and again, until he falls onto his back. I scoot closer to him and bring my heel down on the helmet-shaped cage that covers his mouth and nose. Again it is once, twice, three times. Always the magic number three. My movements are controlled and exact. The impact is precisely as I wish it to be.

He is completely still. Everything is silent. Slowly I stand up, knees bent, looking all around me, holding my hands in front of my face for protection in case he pops back up.

‘Ted?’ I say.

He sits, pulls off the helmet, gives his head a shake. When he speaks this time, there is no hint of the muzzled villain. ‘Each and every one of you is going to be that good by the time she finishes with you,’ he says to the women.

I offer a hand and he takes it to pull himself up. ‘Then reward me,’ I say, so quietly that only Ted can hear. ‘Tell me what was on her laptop.’

‘What you need to emulate in Ella,’ he says to the women, ‘is that she never gives up.’

I pick up my towel and thrust it at him to mop up the sweat. ‘Too right.’

That snaps him back. He is beside me again. His mouth is near the side of my face so that his whisper whistles right down my eardrum. ‘If you meet Thorne you’re going to need to practise every move there is. And not just the physical ones. He’s an expert at the mind fuck.’ He turns to the women, restored to his usual relaxed and friendly stance. ‘So. Who wants to beat me up next?’

I am driving away from Bath, where I now live and you used to live. I am driving away from the city that you and I love, to the house in the countryside that our parents brought both of us home to as babies. They will never leave it. They want you to be able to find them. We all want this.

It is only midday, but the dense branches of the trees on either side of this rural lane meet and tangle overhead, plunging me into near darkness for what seems to be an endless stretch. For many miles, I do not pass another car. There are still no cameras along this winding lane. There are still no mobile phone masts. This is the road you made your last known journey on, and it would be all too easy to intercept somebody along it.

He could have moved you under cover of woods, or over one of the many tracks, or through fields on some sort of farm vehicle. He could have got you into a building and hidden you. He could have wound along this narrow lane, then accessed the large road that circles this land before speeding you into another county.

I am working so hard to imagine the different possibilities I nearly overshoot the turning to our parents’ village. It is a turning you and I have made countless times, and one I normally navigate on autopilot. I force myself to look around me more carefully, though I know this landscape so well it is the place I must always go to in my dreams. The old church and graveyard. The pub. The closed-down schoolhouse Dad converted several decades ago, now occupied by our parents’ closest neighbours.

Five minutes after the nearly missed turn, I am sitting with Dad at the same scrubbed kitchen table you and I used to do our homework on. Your son uses it the same way these days, though not right now, because he is in school eating the sandwiches Mum packed for him. She and Dad and I are about to have some private bonding time over the lunch she has cooked for us, and is currently putting the finishing touches to.

I start with the easier thing. ‘Luke wants me to take the doll’s house,’ I say. ‘He wants to have something Miranda loved when he’s with me.’

‘I’m not sure Miranda loved it as much as you did,’ our father says. ‘Though she knew how much it meant to you.’

‘Really?’ I am seriously surprised.

‘ Miranda loves it .’ It is our mother’s usual correction of tense. ‘ She knows how much it meant … But your father is right.’ She puts a bowl of broccoli on the table. ‘Cancer cells hate broccoli,’ she says.

‘They do,’ I say. ‘Can I take the doll’s house, then?’ I say. ‘Seeing as you both agree that I love it most.’