And so, two days after the phone call from Denise, I found myself on the M1, on the way to Leah’s, all fired up. I’d told her I was just coming for a visit but I promised myself I was not leaving that house until I’d seen the urn with my very own eyes.
The Grand Union Canal winds through Berkhamsted and it was gorgeous at this time of the year, with a confetti of blossom scattered on the surface, brightly painted barges moored up to its banks (and the maddest, most vicious geese you’ve ever seen in your life). It was a lovely place to live, I could see that, but there was something about its tightly packed streets and neat gardens, its tight-knit-ness, that made me want to hotfoot it back to Archway, with its ever-present whiff of petrol fumes and Chicken Cottage and be absorbed by it. Perhaps, I just wasn’t quite ‘there’ yet. Leah always said I was a ‘young thirty-two’ (short translation: childless). Perhaps, once I’d popped one out, I’d spend my weekends going to barbecues and dinner parties and retire to the shires, too. She was in for a shocker.
Leah’s house was a four-bed, ‘executive pillared’ number on a cul-de-sac, with a gleaming BMW four-wheel-drive in the driveway (although I doubted she’d ever been further than Waitrose in it), next to several other ‘executive pillared’ houses with big cars and manicured hedges. My brother-in-law, Russell, answered the door looking exhausted and wearing a green, Superdry sweatshirt and jeans (this, I’d deduced, was the weekend uniform of the Berkhamsted commuting dad. Russell worked in the city as a management consultant) and a grim expression on his face, like he was a carer for the long-term infirm:
No change today, I’m afraid …
We did the strange hug that is reserved for me and my brother-in-law. He lunges as if to hug me, but then just ends up patting me on the back. I always feel like he is
this
far away from hissing in my ear: ‘Anything, I’ll pay you anything for respite care; you work with the mentally ill, don’t you?’
‘Surviving, Russ?’ I said.
There was a lot of thumping coming from upstairs. ‘
Russ!!!
’ I heard Leah yell. Through the gap in the lounge door, I could see that Niamh was here already, jousting with Jack, clad only in his pants. ‘
CAN YOU GET UP HERE, PLEASE. YOUR DAUGHTER IS CUTTING HER OWN HAIR!
’
‘Surviving? This is living …’ Russ deadpanned, before trudging up the stairs.
I escaped to the lounge, to join Jack and Niamh. I’d called my little sister immediately after Denise had called me and offered to pick her up and bring her here for the official ‘ashes showdown’, but the police job had taken her to a school nearby today and so she had just come straight from work.
‘Aunty Robyn, I’m gonna get you.’ Jack was now operating his light-sabre attack from on top of the settee. We’d just got into a three-way battle, when Leah opened the door: ‘JACK MITCHELL. IT IS QUARTER PAST SEVEN. IF YOU DO NOT GET DOWN FROM THERE AND UPSTAIRS TO THAT BATH NOW …!’ She disappeared again, leaving Niamh and I wondering what terrible fate awaited Jack if he didn’t do as he was told. Jack didn’t look too concerned, however.
He
surrendered his
Star Wars
light sabre to Niamh and dutifully made his way towards the door. ‘Honestly,’ he sighed. ‘She’s driving me up the wall.’
I love my sister. She is loyal, she is fearless, she is brilliant at her three-day-a-week job as PA to a family lawyer, more organized and decisive than I ever hope to be in my life. She loves her kids and I’m sure, deep down, she loves her husband, too, but, my God, is she mad? Niamh and I sat in the immaculate lounge – every single toy put away – barely daring to speak, cowering under the elephantine-stomping and shouting from upstairs, pretending not to have noticed the screaming irony of the four solid-silver letters spelling out the word LOVE on the mantelpiece; the wedding pictures in their gleaming silver frames; the canvas over the fireplace. It was of all four of them – Leah, Russ, Jack and our three-year-old niece, Eden, taken in a studio. Russ and Leah were lying on their stomachs, grinning, as the kids larked about on their backs.
Niamh was gazing at it, mesmerized.
‘Do you think they ever do that at home?’ she asked, so genuinely, it made me laugh.
Russell came in, looking like he’d just been twenty-four hours in a labour ward (him being the one to be in labour).
‘Just thought I’d check, are any of you staying?’ he said.
Niamh raised her hand tentatively. ‘I was going to.’
‘Because we’re … um …’ He scratched his head. I remarked to myself how there was definitely less hair than there was even six months ago. ‘We’re using the spare bedroom at the moment, so it’s fine, but I’ll have to make up the sofa.’
I was feeling any anger and resolve I’d arrived with (plus any lingering desires for normality – if normality meant marriage and two kids and love being something you had to display on the mantelpiece) dissipate, the more I saw the reality of my sister’s life, which was kind of annoying. Must stick to the plan.
There was more shouting and then, suddenly, deadly calm upstairs, possibly as the drugs went in. Then, the landline phone rang. Leah came running down the stairs and picked up.
‘Hello?’
Long pause.
‘Oh, hello, Joanna.’ Her phone voice. The three of us sat in the lounge pretending to look at the walls. ‘Yes, of course.’
Longer pause; some light, tinkling laughter. Niamh jabbed me in the side of the thigh. I jabbed her back, feeling the dreaded bubble of laughter in my throat.
‘No, that’s absolutely fine! You know we’re more than happy to have Amelie any time …
Aw.
’ Long pause. Then a bigger ‘AW! They’re so sweet together! Peas in a pod. Well, listen, don’t rush back, six-thirty is fine.’ I coughed to mask the little snort that escaped. ‘I’m basically a single mother in the week, anyway, so makes no difference to me …’ More tinkling laughter. ‘I know! Bye, Joanna, bye …’
She hung up. ‘JACK MITCHELL, DON’T THINK I CAN’T HEAR YOU STLL UP AND ABOUT UP THERE!’ she shouted. Two minutes later, she opened the door, carrying a bottle of wine and three glasses, her black hair held on top of her head with a bulldog clip, eyes slightly manic, looking unhealthily thin. She only had to look at Russ for him to sidle out of the room, like a dog that has to go to his basket at mealtimes. ‘Right,’ she said, unscrewing the bottle, ‘to what honour do I owe this? A visit from
both
my little sisters on a school night?’
I took a deep breath and looked at Niamh. It was best just to get this over and done with. ‘Leah,’ I said, ‘we’ve come about Mum’s ashes. You have them, don’t you?’
She confessed immediately (after practically inhaling what was basically a third of a bottle of wine; perhaps there was something in those hideous headlines in the
Daily
Mail
about middle-class, suburban alcoholic mothers, after all).
‘I just didn’t want Dad and Denise taking
our
mother’s ashes to their new, horrid little house.’
It surprised me quite how full of venom she still was for Dad and Denise. It looked exhausting.
‘But, Leah,’ I said, ‘nor did I!’
‘And I knew Dad wouldn’t give them to me, so I just took them.’
We all knew the reason Dad wouldn’t give them to her. But, like I’ve said, nobody ever mentions the funeral. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if
I’d
have done that, but try not to, because it makes me so cross.
All three of us sat there, Leah and I arguing over Niamh who was sitting in the middle, quietly sipping her wine, probably thinking how awfully bourgeois and uncool this all was – drinking Chardonnay on a vast, cream sofa in suburbia, her two middle-aged sisters arguing over their mother’s ashes – but I couldn’t help myself. I got why Leah didn’t want the ashes to be moved to Dad and Denise’s house, but why did she sneak off with them? And why not just tell me the truth when I asked her straight?
Leah poured herself another glass of wine. Neither sister had noticed so far that I’d barely touched mine.
‘I just wanted them for a bit,’ she said, childishly.
‘You could have told me. I was worried Denise had hoovered them up.’
‘Oh, Robyn, don’t be so dramatic.’
I thought this was rich coming from the woman who once took her daughter to A&E for a headache because she worried she might have a brain tumour.
‘I’m not! They’re not bits of Lego, Leah, they’re all we have left of our mum – they
are
quite important.’
‘I know! That’s why I took them!’
‘
Guys
,’ Niamh sighed. ‘Listen to yourselves, seriously.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said Leah, suddenly getting up off the sofa and walking out of the room.
I heard the front door being opened.
‘
Where are you going now?
’ I shouted.
‘
To the car!
They’re in the glove compartment.’
Niamh and I looked at one another in disbelief.
The
glove compartment
? I could have killed her.
But I was so utterly relieved to see the urn, safe and sound, that I didn’t go into this. Now was not the time.
Leah set Mum on the coffee table. ‘Happy now?’ she said.
‘Yes, I am, actually,’ I replied.
‘I just don’t know why we’re in such a rush to scatter them,’ she added.
‘I just think it’s the right time.’
‘Why though? Why suddenly now?’
I’d pictured this lovely, sisterly scene. Me announcing my shocking yet exciting news as we drank tea and ate cake and reminisced about Mum, but this would have to do:
‘Uh, well, it turns out I’m pregnant.’
Leah leaped off the sofa like she’d been stung by a wasp.
‘Oh my God,’ was all she could say, for what seemed forever. ‘Oh. My. God.’
Never having followed my big sister down any path in life so far, she clearly could not conceive of her little sister (who worked with loonies and was a spinster at thirty-two) doing anything in life that she had.
Niamh was hugging me. ‘I’m going to be an auntie again! This is so cool!’ Which is exactly how I’d predicted she’d respond.
‘Whose?’ said Leah, eventually.
‘Joe’s,’ I said.
‘
Joe’s?
’ Niamh said. ‘That is so romantic!’ (Again, exactly how I’d predicted.)
Leah, however, grew very quiet and pale.
‘Joe
Sawyer’s
?’ she said, eventually. It was barely a whisper. ‘Joe from Kilterdale?’
‘Yes,’ I said, cowering into the sofa.
Then, she burst into tears.
She claimed it was just shock, but I knew she was crying because of what happened with Lily, because last time I was pregnant it didn’t end well. I also suspected it was because she knew the whole story of what happened that summer. This, I couldn’t be one-hundred-per-cent sure of, but there had been a weekend in February 1999, exactly a year after I’d lost Lily, and eighteen months since what happened down Friars Lanes, where I’d gone to visit Leah at university and ended up, in some nightclub, drunk on beers with Sambuca chasers, attempting to confide in her, but I’m not sure how much she remembers. Either way, I now felt a bond I don’t often feel with my eldest sister these days. I was touched she’d got so emotional.
We didn’t get too far with the ashes after that. I’d hoped we might discuss possible places where we could scatter them, but Niamh was just drunk and excitable and Leah was drunk and wanted only to discuss the baby. She got completely carried away, rooting out all her old baby equipment.
Despite my protestations, she insisted on going up in the loft.
‘Breast pump?’ she was shouting down, as Niamh and I waited at the bottom of the stairs, shaking our heads in despair. ‘Moses basket? Sterilizer? I’ve got a whole bag of nipple creams and maternity bras here, if you like …’
‘You’re all right, Lee,’ I said. ‘Bit prem, perhaps.’
Niamh was killing herself laughing.
Every time I tried to bring the conversation back to the ashes (we’d got as far as Leah making a spreadsheet, with ‘no’/‘yes’ possible locations), Leah would change the subject to the baby. It was bizarre and also quite lovely; it was like she’d been waiting for this moment all her life.
We went to sit in the kitchen and Leah made me a cup of tea (decaf – defies the entire point of tea, surely, I said, but she insisted on grounds of responsible older sister) and poured her and Niamh yet more wine.
‘Okay, so, also, Robyn, you have to do Gina Ford,’ she slurred. ‘Made everything so much more bearable.’
‘What the hell is “doing Gina Ford”?’ I said. ‘Is it like doing the tango or the quickstep, a special dance routine you practise while pregnant so the baby slips out like a dream?’
Niamh sniggered. Leah waved her hand at me, mouth full of wine, too hell-bent on imparting her baby-whispering wisdom to laugh at any jokes. ‘The woman is a genius,’ she gushed, refilling her wine glass. ‘Her whole mantra is about controlled crying and not letting the baby think they’re in control and absolutely,
never
cuddling your baby – gives completely the wrong message.’
‘What the hell?’ Niamh and I said in unison. ‘Never cuddling your baby? Can’t you get done for neglect for that sort of behaviour?’
Leah wafted us away with her hand. ‘During sleep time, I mean! Obviously
.
’
Obviously.
We did eventually get round to discussing the ashes again, and various suggestions were bandied about: Kilterdale beach (mine), in the garden along with all our pets (Niamh’s), not scattering them at all and just having Mum on rotation (Leah’s), so one daughter has her for a few weeks, then another, but I said that made her sound like the guinea pig we used to take it in turns to bring home from school. Also, I had to move the ashes in the end, because Leah kept gesticulating drunkenly as she talked and more than once nearly swiped Mum right off the table.
It seemed that we were completely unable to make a decision because things I remembered about Mum and our childhood, Leah remembered differently, and Niamh didn’t remember much at all. Then there was the sore subject of the funeral (still skirted around), and how Leah had disappeared off to university in Brighton – about as far away as it was possible to get – and I’d hardly seen her for months. I missed her desperately then; it was almost visceral. I missed her like you might ache for a lover, which I found embarrassing at the time, and kind of still do. I missed the smell of her perfume (Poison by Dior; the entire house stank of it for four years), the soles of her feet on my thighs, on the settee, watching Saturday-morning TV, even stepping over her legs in the hall, where she’d sit for hours on the phone, having monosyllabic ‘conversations’ with whichever bloke she was with at the time, our cat-fights where we’d throttle one another, then feel terrible and declare our undying love. Plus, I felt like I knew things about Leah that nobody else in the world did: she might have acted like I was the shit on her shoes in front of her friends, but I knew that sometimes, in the middle of the night, she’d crawl into my bed because she’d had a nightmare.