Kicking off my boots and hanging my jacket on the hook by the front door, I call out Emily’s name. It worries me when I don’t know where she is; she’s so erratic at the moment, I fear for her safety. Before I get a chance to search for her upstairs, I hear tyres on the gravel outside and open the door to see Emily being dropped off in a car I don’t recognise. An orderly little woman in her early sixties tiptoes alongside Emily, and stops to talk to me in hushed tones as my sister, stinking of stale booze, disappears inside the house without so much as a hello. It seems that, while I’ve been out walking, Emily’s managed to get herself drunk and been in to school, where she’s caused a bit of a scene.
‘Tell her not to worry,’ Violet says in a whisper. ‘We all understand, and we all want her to get better. Maybe James could give Josie – Mrs Priestly – a call some time? Confidentially, of course.’ With that she tiptoes back to her car and drives away, her aura of apology wafting from her exhaust pipe as she goes.
Inside, Emily is slumped on the sofa, and I see the empty bottle of white wine that she must have polished off this morning. She gives me a rare look of regret, and I slide on to the sofa beside her, hooking my arm through hers, feeling alarm at the frailty of her thin body.
‘How about this?’ I say. ‘We’ll run you a bath, get you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, and then you can get your head down for an hour?’
‘James would be so ashamed of me, Jess. Look at me. I’m a bloody mess. I’ve ruined everything.’ She weeps into her free hand, turning her face from me.
‘Forget it!’ I say, trying to make out it’s nothing, when I know it is something, it’s the great-big-something of a woman going out of her mind. ‘James is at work – he doesn’t need to know a thing about this. While you’re having a nap, I’ll get started on supper. You can tell James you cooked it, and I’ll make myself scarce for the evening? Chloe said she’d be staying away for another night, so you can have the place to yourselves. I’ll even help you choose what to wear – just like the old days? How does that sound?’
It feels as though I’ve spent much of my life hoping for reconciliations with my older sister. After that awful time in our teens, when she convinced all our friends that my fainting episodes were faked, I had worried we would never be close again. I must have spent the best part of a school term isolated from the inner circle, excluded from sitting with them at break times, from walking with them to and from school, from their weekend trips to the town or seaside. Emily simply stopped talking to me. At breakfast she’d butter her toast across the table from me, her eyes down, focused on the task at hand, and at school she’d go to huge lengths to separate herself from me so that we might never be seen together. To a casual observer we might appear to be complete strangers, neither friends nor foe. At first I was crushed, but with time I slowly retreated within myself, and drew comfort from time spent at home with Mum and Dad, cooking, helping out around the house, sitting up and watching TV with them while Emily was off on some sleepover or another. I thought I was fine without her, until one Saturday morning when I was helping Dad to fix the guttering at the side of the house, and I passed out, causing him to drop the plastic gutter from a great height and me to cut my head open on the rockery as I went down. I came round in the back of the car, my head on Mum’s lap as we sped towards A&E, and all I wanted was Emily. I didn’t want Mum or Dad or anyone else – I wanted my big sister.
After two days of blood tests, tilt tests, ECGs, treadmill workouts and visits from endless bedside specialists, I was finally diagnosed with a form of cardioinhibitory syndrome. It wasn’t neurological, and it wasn’t heart disease, but a rare condition affecting the heart’s wiring, causing ‘episodes’ of fainting and breathlessness at random times, especially during periods of extreme stress or physical strain. It wasn’t immediately life-threatening, but it was serious, and something that would have to be monitored for the rest of my life. When Mum and Dad left my hospital bedside that afternoon they were shocked and upset; I on the hand, was relieved, to at last hear confirmation that these ‘funny turns’ of mine were real, and not, as Emily would have it, a figment of my overactive imagination. That evening, they returned with Emily … Emily who had barely made eye-contact with me in months. She entered the ward clutching an armful of magazines and chocolate, and she stood at the foot of my bed, looking close to timid.
‘Can you leave us on our own for a while?’ she asked Mum and Dad, and, knowing how things had been between us, they slipped away for a coffee in the hospital canteen.
‘Mum says you’ve got some kind of heart problem,’ she said quietly, carefully lowering her offerings on to the tightly tucked blanket at the foot of my bed.
I shrugged. ‘So they say. Cardio-something-a-jig.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Do you think they’d let me stay here with you tonight?’ she asked in a whisper.
‘I bet they would, if I asked,’ I replied. ‘I could tell them I’m really worried, and my heart’s feeling all jumpy, but it’s been better since you got here. If I said that, I bet they would.’
Emily smiled, and I budged up and she crawled in beside me, and we curled up just as we had on that first hospital visit, all those years ago when I was just nine.
Emily looks a whole lot better by the time we’ve finished getting her ready. We’ve curled and preened her hair until it shines, exfoliated and buffed her skin, and made up her face so her complexion glows and her eyes sparkle. Together we’ve picked out an outfit that best flatters her altered figure, one which covers up her hollowed collarbones and sharp wrists, and I’ve left her upstairs to finish up while I dash down to check on the casserole I’ve left simmering.
When James comes in through the door, he drops his briefcase in the archway to the kitchen and lifts his nose to the air, breathing in the cooking smells with approval.
I step away from the oven. ‘Nothing to do with me!’ I say, holding my hands up. ‘It’s all Emily. She’s been slaving over this all afternoon – wanted to do something nice for you, I think.’
‘Really?’ James says, scrutinising me suspiciously. ‘Are you sure? She didn’t look too much like someone wanting to do something nice for me this morning.’
I remember the way she had slammed her hands down on the table and run from the room. ‘Well, I think she’s probably had time to calm down now,’ I say. ‘Give her a chance.’
James fetches a glass from the kitchen cupboard and pours himself a large measure of red wine, offering one to me as he knocks his back at speed and pours a second. I decline, telling him I’m going out, and I start laying the table with two place settings, as he leans up against the island unit and watches me, ribbing me as I get the knife and fork the wrong way round in my rush. Emily appears in the doorway, and she stands, facing us, looking tall and slim and glamorous in her tan slacks and black roll-neck, her eyes on James, hopeful for his approval. I’m standing at the table in the space between them, and I go to leave the room, to give them this moment, but James’s mobile rings in his breast pocket and he turns away, answering the phone, presenting his back to Emily. There’s disappointment in the set of her mouth, and, by the time her husband hangs up and turns to face her, it’s been replaced by defiance.
‘That was the hospital,’ he says, and he sounds like a man at the end of his tether. ‘It’s Chloe – she’s been taken in with alcohol poisoning.’ He claps his hands to his mouth, a gasp of a sob rising up in his chest. ‘They’re pumping her stomach.’