I’d always wanted a sister. I’d tried to build a relationship with Ciara in the haphazard way a nine-year-old tries to build friendships with anyone. I shared my sweets. (She didn’t like toffees.) I let her play with my dead mother’s make-up, even though I really wanted to keep it in a box to use myself when I was older. I gave her a bottle of perfume, one that Mum only used occasionally so it didn’t hurt too much to part with it. I offered her a loan of my dolls, even Scarlett.
She’d pulled a disgusted face. Said the dolls were babyish. Creepy. Like they were watching her. She told me no one played with dolls like that any more. I was a freak, she said, who no one loved.
But I still wanted Ciara to like me, and I wanted to be happy. I knew what happy looked like and felt like. I had been happy when my mother was still alive. I also knew sadness. I lived with it every day then. Knew it inside and out; so I knew Ciara had sad written all over her. If we could just get along, wouldn’t it be easier on us both?
I saw how wounded she looked when Joe turned his attention to me and not her. When she saw the latest book or jigsaw puzzle he’d bought me when she came to see us. He was forever promising her he would get her something ‘the next time’. Of course the next time never came and Ciara’s hatred for me grew. She never knew the presents were bought out of guilt, or to try to buy my silence about what he was doing. She never knew I hated those presents.
I wanted to tell her so many times that it wasn’t my fault he’d left her family. And that I never asked him for anything. No books, or jigsaws. Certainly not to stay in this house with me and look after me. I didn’t want him.
I’d act up more in front of Joe when she was around. Try to make him cross so he would favour her over me. It didn’t seem to work.
I can still remember the dejected look on her face. Her grey-blue eyes cast downwards, her mousy brown hair falling over her face. The sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands.
But when she looked up, it wasn’t him she glared at, but me. Because it was my fault. I existed and worse than that I seemed to have become the apple of her daddy’s eye. If only she knew what that meant and what he did.
It didn’t seem to matter, though. Nothing did. Nothing I tried or did or said made a difference. The lines were well and truly drawn.
The only thing I could do to protect myself from being hurt further was to start hating her as well.