The Sister

The sister and myself were always one thing or t’other. When we got on we were best of mates and when we fell out we did it in some style. I remember one time the minister calling by, for a routine visit. Up the road to Westview Terrace. He was the cove with the moustache and a big smile. He had no objections to me bringing a book along to the services to keep me quiet, instead of kicking my heels. He did suggest The Water Babies might be more suitable than some of the texts under my arm.

We were squared up shouting as he walked through the door. The olaid was only next door for a Nescafe and a fag. It’s a wonder she hadn’t heard us. The minister spoke softly, calmed us down. I found out, a lot of years later, he translated Burns into Gaelic.

The sister took her chance to build a new life in Canada. This is a traditional route for emigration, over the years, in The Broch as well as the Islands. It worked out for her. Nursing was a better career there than here at that time – with proper coffee on the go, non-stop, along with first-name terms. You couldn’t return to the hierarchical systems of the NHS after that. Or the coffee.

When she said that, I thought of the paramilitary motifs of my own trade. I was a servant of Her Majesty. I might be there yet if it wasn’t for the residue of post-Thatcher ideas in the public services. You spent so much time accounting for your time that you had very little time left for watch training. Or team building. Or yarning, which of course is both of the previous items combined.

How can you say how resentments build up? My mother’s eyes would light up when her former cycling partner would arrive from the airport. Not on the first night but on the first day, the sister would rearrange the stuff in the cupboards in the kitchen. OK, she’s a woman and I don’t know much about them. I know more about trout really or I used to at least.

The home-help would be on leave when the sister was staying. Kirsty had her own systems. And they did seem to work.

The olaid made it pretty clear. She wanted to stay in her own house right up till she was taken to the hospital to get ready for satellite re-entry or whatever was going to happen next. If anything.

For me, the sister’s visit was a time to catch up on this, that and the other. And I’d messed up in style not once but more than that. The appointment for the podiatry department was an outing for the olaid. Not a hassle but a wee excursion. I forgot at least one appointment.

The stroke club annual Christmas dinner was a laugh with other people of like mind and body. All of them had plenty of bloody marbles, nothing short there, and they all relaxed in each other’s company, flirting and chatting because they didn’t have to pretend. Knew they didn’t have to prove they were compos mentis, even though they talked with a slur or had lost the use of some muscles. In that setting, they didn’t have to prove a damned thing. A crew, a team. Similarities to the angling society or the boat-owners’ association. The legion. You could rant about your obsession without worrying about being abnormal.

I had a grand time the first year I went. The olaid had the home-help pin the next year’s invite up by the mantelpiece in good time. She knew it took time for things to register in my mind if I was doing research or on the tools. She reminded me more than once because she knew what I was like.

But I still got involved in a moorings operation, because it was the only day, for months, the tide would ebb far enough. After you’ve lost one boat from a mooring dragging, you lie awake imagining wear and chafe and unrelenting forces on the points of strain. The black pram was a modest craft but she was a link with my daughter and she was a link to my uncle and a connection with my surviving mentor. So I came dashing up the road far too late. I could still have got my arse down to the Caberfeidh Hotel to grab the pudding and say sorry and join in the banter and wheel her out again. But I was stinking of SY hoil mud which smells like nothing else. But not as bad as the shame. I hesitated at the door when I realised I was late and the olaid was down the road in the minibus.

So part of the tension between the sister and me was sheer simple guilt. I could see how the blone’s professionalism was showing up and how my own was wanting. And now that I’d finally quit Her Majesty’s Service, that made everything worse. Of course you’ll have plenty of time now, folk kept saying. They just couldn’t know that you’d never have less, first years of trying to establish a wee living for yourself. Of course the more Gabriele would say, ‘We can get by even if you don’t earn anything at all,’ it made it kind of worse. She was teaching German, part-time. But she had good weeks and bad weeks. I was chief cook and bottlewasher.

So it was a crunch when the sister quietly said that she would only be going back to Canada for a fortnight to tidy up loose ends. She was needed here full-time for this stage. Because I knew somehow, somewhere beyond conscious thought, that she was right.

Don’t know how it came to writing notes to each other. Talking via the home care system – home-helps to give respite to the sis so she could get shopping and get to the few vestiges of normal life. Gabriele and me just somehow stopped having her to meals on her night off. There was a very intense night when Kirsty was round and she just started reliving a case of hers, caring for a terminally ill child. Anna was very sensitive these days and Gabriele and myself were taking turns at trying to catch my sister’s eye. But she had to continue.

Now I know she had no choice. Maybe the timing could have been better. But the need to tell it just surfaced right then and that’s how it was. Better than leaving something that should be said, still unsaid. I think I knew there was something else between us we hadn’t dealt with yet.

Once the note-writing starts, the game’s a bogey. You’ve lost it. So I would time the visits down the road to when she wasn’t there – ‘Phone me when you’re going shopping and I’ll go down then.’ That was good in a way because it meant a continuity of company for herself.