Laura Elliot - The Lost Sister

Paul was supposed to drive her to the airport but an early morning emergency call from the office put paid to that plan. His worried expression and hassled apologies as he hurried towards his car, his mobile phone already ringing, had added to her sense of guilt.

Since Cathy’s unexpected phone call, Julie has dithered over her decision to attend the wedding. Paul declared that it was a ‘preposterous’ decision to make. He used his end-of-this-discussion voice and made it sound as if Julie’s being reunited with her long-lost sister was of far less importance than the smooth running of Chambers Software Solutions. Since he established the company from a redundancy package he received during the dot com collapse, Julie has looked after the finances. If she had a business card it would have read ‘Financial Controller’. But she has no business card to flash at meetings and her work environment is a laptop on the kitchen table, which competes with the dishwasher for attention.

They argued bitterly over her decision to take time off work. The row lasted a week. In the evenings they hid their anger under a veneer of normality, carrying on conversations at two levels: one audible and polite, so as not to upset their sons, the other inaudible but loaded. Finally, Paul arrived home early from work one evening and presented her with a bunch of flowers and a guidebook called Traversing New Zealand.

‘I suppose you’ve made up.’ Jonathan, her eldest son, dropped his sports kit in the hall and eyed the flowers she was arranging in a vase.

‘Made up what?’ she asked, the pleasure of their reconciliation still warm on her skin.

‘Give me a break,’ her son sighed. ‘We could scrape our nails off the atmosphere for the past week. Are you going to the wedding or not?’

‘Going.’ She plunged the irises into water.

‘Good for you,’ he replied. ‘We’ll look after Dad while you’re gone. What’s for dinner? I’m starving.’

On reaching the departure terminal, her sisters greet her with relief and hurry her towards the check-in desk. Lauren has ignored Rebecca’s instructions about luggage and the expandable lids on her matching suitcases are strained to the limit. Steve looks in danger of a ruptured hernia as he heaves them onto the weighing scales. The excess fee will be exorbitant but he will pay it without a quibble.

‘What’s with the wardrobe?’ Julie demands as they await his return from the excess baggage counter. ‘We’ll be living in the bush, not the Ritz.’

Lauren is unrepentant. ‘I barely managed to fit my knickers into the first suitcase.’

‘How come I managed with a rucksack?’ Rebecca asks.

‘I don’t do rucksacks,’ replies Lauren, and Julie has to smile at the idea of Lauren bent under the weight of an enormous multi-purpose rucksack.

Steve, returning and overhearing their conversation, says, ‘Call me when the going gets rough. My offer still stands.’

‘Thank you, Steve.’ Julie leads the way towards the departure gate and turns away when he embraces his wife. Spring and autumn conjoined. She has never grown used to their marriage, never will.

‘I’ll phone as soon as we reach Bangkok.’ Lauren hands her boarding pass to the attendant and glides beyond his reach.

An hour later they are airborne. The plane rises from the runway and crosses the Broadmeadow Estuary. Housing estates, surrounded by swatches of green, slant into view. White-capped waves ride towards the viaduct. Yachts and cruisers are moored in the marina, a new addition since their Heron Cove days. Julie strains her neck and is able to pinpoint the house where they spent their childhood. The old chestnut tree still grows in the garden, its bare branches forming a black filigree against the sky. The next house, where Lydia Mulvaney lived until her death, is also briefly visible.

Is Cathy sleeping now, Julie wonders as she settles back in her seat. Or is she lying awake, aware that the day of departure has finally arrived? Is she nervous? She has much to explain and Rebecca will demand answers.

‘How come you changed your mind about visiting Cathy?’ Julie asked Rebecca one afternoon when she called into the sanctuary to collect her sons, who had been volunteering during their Christmas holidays.

‘I want to ask Cathy face to face why she dragged us through hell and back again.’ Rebecca, sitting behind her desk, looked and sounded exhausted. Her black hair, tied back in a tight ponytail, accentuated her wide, flat cheekbones and strong chin. There had been an incident the previous day between her and an alcoholic farmer who had brutalised a donkey. The donkey had been rescued but Julie doubted if the battle with the alcoholic farmer was responsible for the weary slope of Rebecca’s shoulders, the smudged hollows under her eyes.

‘Don’t you think Cathy was in her own personal hell?’ Julie demanded. ‘You’ve a short memory span if you’ve forgotten.’

‘I haven’t forgotten anything. Including how she misled us afterwards. Her deceit…’

Julie saw the familiar anger flare in Rebecca’s eyes, her lips compress, as if she was holding back bitter accusations. Their conversation petered out, as it always does when they speak about Cathy. Sitting beside her now, Julie shivers, as if the tension she senses in her older sister has transferred to herself.

The plane lifts higher. Clouds fall like blots over the familiar landscape and Julie is swept into a grey swirl that banishes the world she knows from sight.

My mother’s words are like a song in my head. The kind of song you don’t want to hear yet one line keeps repeating and repeating until you long to hit your head off a wall to make it stop.

‘Look after Cathy for me,’ she said, but I’d other plans that night. Sheila Brogan’s parents were on holiday for a week and she was throwing a party. I guess that was the reason my mother–who always seemed to know everything she shouldn’t–wanted me to stay at home. That and Jeremy…

I glared at her and demanded to know why I was always the one who had to do everything? Why was Lauren, high and mighty Lauren, treated as if she was Ireland’s answer to Margot Fonteyn? We’d already been to the opening night of her concert. Why, then, was it necessary for Mammy and Daddy to attend on the closing night?

Oh, I was petulant that evening, sulking and rude and argumentative. I watched her flicking mascara on her eyelashes, spraying perfume on her wrists. She had delicate wrists and long fingers like a pianist. That’s what she wanted to be when she was young–a concert pianist–but she wasn’t good enough and she ended up marrying Gerard Lambert and playing marching tunes for us on the piano in the living room. ‘Marching Through Georgia’, ‘Heart of Dixie’, ‘Anchors Away’–and we marched like little soldiers up and down the floor. She played soft tunes too: ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Long Time Passing’. Joan Baez was singing it on the radio the other day. I lunged at it and switched it off before the others heard.

She ordered me to stop arguing. To stop giving cheek and do as I was told for a change. (It’s funny–although no one is laughing–how much I sound like her now.)

How could either of us have realised that those words would be the last we’d ever exchange? Angry words that would have been forgotten as easily as they were uttered but now they resonate beyond the grave and chain me to their power.

She dabbed her lips on a tissue and left the room. The next day I found the tissue crumpled on the dressing table. Her lips were imprinted like a bloodstain on the creases.

I didn’t look after Cathy that night. As soon as Daddy’s car disappeared around the corner, I persuaded Julie to mind her. They were snuggled on the sofa with Kevin Mulvaney when I left, the three of them watching Cagney and Lacey.