Sister Sister

by Sue Fortin

  As if by thinking about her, I’ve conjured her up. Alice is already in the kitchen, setting the table for breakfast. She’s humming to herself, which I recognise as ‘Whistle While You Work’ from Disney’s Snow White. She turns and smiles at me as I sit Chloe at the table.

  ‘Morning, Clare. Morning, Chloe. I’ve just made a fresh pot of tea. Toast?’

  I’m taken aback by this cheery greeting. It’s as if nothing happened between us last night and I feel a certain amount of relief. Perhaps I’ve blown it all out of proportion.

  ‘Alice, about last night,’ I begin.

  ‘Last night?’ she looks confused.

  ‘On the stairs,’ I offer, as a memory prompt.

  She still looks blank. ‘The stairs?’

  ‘Yes. When I came out of my bedroom and you were leaning against the banister.’

  She waves a hand at me, as if wafting away a fly. ‘Oh, that. Forget it.’ She comes over and gives me a hug. ‘We were both tired. Now let me make you a cup of tea.’ She turns back to the kettle and pours the boiling water into the teapot.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, recalling last night’s conversation. There was definitely a sinister tone to it. At least, that’s what I recall.

  Alice turns to look at me. ‘Honestly, Clare, don’t sweat it. You’re under a lot of pressure. It can do funny things to people, you know. I remember once, my sister was under so much stress trying to put herself through college and bring up a young baby on her own, that one day, when she asked if she could borrow some money from me and I said no because I didn’t have any, she totally overreacted. Thought I was holding out on her. She accused me of all sorts. We had a terrible row. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when she had a mental breakdown, that we all realised how much pressure she was under and how it was affecting her. Since then, I’ve been so much more tolerant. That’s the thing with mental illness; you can’t see, and you don’t always recognise, the signs. I’m much more aware of these things now.’

  I sit for a moment trying to take it in. Something is not right. And then it occurs to me. ‘Your sister?’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘Who’s your sister?’

  Alice has her back to me now so I can’t see her face, but I don’t miss the tension in her shoulders. Then she turns and flashes me with a smile. ‘I mean my stepsister. You know, Roma’s daughter. She lived with us for a while.’

  ‘Oh, right. I haven’t heard you mention her before.’

  ‘Like I say, she was just living with us for a few months. I never really had any contact with her. She lived up in Georgia.’

  ‘Morning, girls,’ Mum says, coming into the room. She smiles broadly and gives Chloe a kiss and rests her hand on my shoulder momentarily. ‘Ooh, look, we’re being spoiled today, Alice is making breakfast.’

  Alice comes over and kisses Mum on the cheek. ‘It’s the least I can do after y’all looking after me so well.’

  I glance over at the calendar and scan the dates. ‘You’re over halfway through your stay already, just another couple of weeks before you have to go,’ I say, without missing the feeling of relief that flicks through me. I catch Mum and Alice exchanging a look between themselves. ‘What?’

  ‘About that,’ says Mum. ‘I’ve asked Alice to stay. Not to go back to America.’

  ‘You have? When? I didn’t realise.’ I’m flummoxed. I hadn’t seen that coming and I’m supposed to be an unflappable solicitor who is ready for anything.

  ‘I asked Alice yesterday.’ Mum puts her arm through Alice’s. ‘And, she said yes!’ Her smile couldn’t be any wider. She scrunches up her shoulders as if hugging herself. It reminds me of Hannah when I took her Disneyland Paris and she saw a real-life Cinderella. That’s how Mum looks now, thrilled. She has her own Disney princess, Cinderella. I feel like one of the ugly sisters, both inside and out. I can’t compete and the jealousy is eating me up inside, but as if on autopilot, I go over to Alice and hug her. ‘That’s great.’

  Hannah comes in and sits at the table, so I’m able to distract myself getting her breakfast ready.

  ‘Is Daddy up?’ I ask. I know Luke is not a morning person, but he never misses breakfast.

  ‘He’s just walked by,’ says Alice, before Hannah can answer. ‘I assume he’s heading for his studio.’

  ‘I’ll take him through a coffee,’ I say, deciding there and then, that I’ll make up with him properly tonight. We’ll go out and have a spontaneous date night. I’ll apologise for getting so cross about Alice. Perhaps she’s right, the stress of work is getting to me and not only am I overreacting, I’m starting to bloody imagine things too.

  Suddenly, Luke appears in the doorway. His face is like thunder and any notion that we might patch things up disappears in a second.

  ‘Clare.’ He says it with such controlled anger that it frightens me. ‘A word.’ He waits to make sure I’m getting up and then disappears back down the hallway.

  Mum looks apprehensive. Both the girls have stopped eating. Even Chloe seems to have picked up on his black mood. Only Alice seems disaffected. She smiles at me. I can’t work out what sort of smile it is, but I don’t have the inclination to analyse it. I need to see what’s up with Luke.

  The atmosphere in the studio is tense. It feels as though the whole room is being tasered. Luke is at the back of the studio, his back to me. I walk over and stand beside him, taking in what is before me.

  The portrait of Alice has been slashed. Not just once, not twice, not even three times. It must have at least a dozen slashes through it. The centre, her face, is in absolute tatters. It is beyond recognition. It looks like one of those door streamers from the seventies that your gran would hang up to stop the flies coming in. A silver-handled Stanley knife sticks out from the top right-hand corner of the canvas frame.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ is all I can manage to say.

  ‘You fucking idiot!’ says Luke. ‘What the fuck did you do this for?’ Now I’m used to Luke spouting the f-word now and again. I’m not averse to it myself, but I have never heard such rage in him before. He grabs my shoulders and spins me to him. His face is an inch from mine. ‘You’re demented. You’ve got a screw loose.’ He hammers his own head with his finger. ‘You’re fucking nuts!’

  He pushes me away and I stumble backwards. ‘I didn’t do it,’ I say. Even to me, my voice sounds unconvincing and pathetic.

  ‘Bollocks, you didn’t! You’re a solicitor. Let’s look at the evidence, shall we? We had an argument last night. You told me you didn’t want me to do this painting. You disappear downstairs. Next thing, I find this. Now you tell me, what does the evidence suggest to you, Mrs Big-Shot-Solicitor-Tennison?’

  I resist the urge to say that technically it’s all circumstantial. I get the point he’s making. ‘Luke, I swear to you, I did not do this.’ At least, I don’t think I did. I can’t deny the thought didn’t go through my head. What if I had some sort of jealous rage? What if I got the red mist that I’ve heard some clients refer to, where they actually have no control whatsoever over their actions? I’ve always been a bit dismissive of those lines of defence, but now I’m not so sure.

  Luke picks up the bottle of white spirit. The one I screwed the lid on last night. ‘Only you would do this,’ he says, almost smacking the lid. He doesn’t need to expand. We both know what he’s referring to. He chucks the bottle in the sink and then strides over to me and grabs my hand. He turns it over. A smudge of green acrylic paint on my wrist stares accusingly at us. ‘You were down here,’ he says.

  I can feel tears spring to my eyes. I blink them away, not wanting them to betray me. Luke will think they are tears of guilt, when in reality they are tears of fear. What if I did actually vandalise the painting? I think back to last night. I remember coming down here and looking at the painting. I remember vividly the feeling of jealousy it evoked and I remember picking up the Stanley knife. But I still don’t remember slashing the canvas. I look at the tattered fabric. That was done by someone in a rage.
It’s not a calculated act. It’s someone in an absolute frenzy. That’s how I would describe it in court. And if I were defending, I’d probably go for diminished responsibility. Could it have been me? Did I do that? Am I capable of such an act?

  Luke must take my silence and tears as an admission. He bundles me to the door. ‘Fuck off to work, Clare. I can’t bear to even look at you.’

  I stagger down the hallway to the kitchen. Alice is standing in the doorway, a witness to the whole episode. From nowhere, my own rage rears up.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I’m practically shouting. I’m storming towards Alice. ‘You did that, didn’t you?’

  A second before I reach Alice, my mother steps out of the kitchen and stands between us. Alice clings to Mum’s shoulders as if she’s a human shield. ‘Clare, stop it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Clare, please stop, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about.’ I’m screaming the words at her. Mum is pushing me away, she’s shouting at me to stop it, to leave Alice alone, but I can’t stop. I carry on shouting over my mother at my sister. ‘Admit it! Admit that you did it!’

  Two hands grab at my shoulders and pull me away. I know, without looking, it’s Luke. I’d know his touch anywhere, even amongst all this. I want to cry. I want to turn and bury myself in his chest. I want his arms around me. I want him to tell me it’s okay. But I know that’s just fantasy.

  I’m suddenly aware of Chloe crying. I look past Mum into the kitchen. Hannah is standing there looking terrified. The house has descended into some sort of pub brawl, except no one’s drunk.

  Luke bundles me down the hallway to the front door. He grabs my jacket and briefcase, snatching the keys from the key cupboard. ‘Get the fuck out of here, Clare. Come back when you’ve calmed down and can apologise to everyone.’ He opens the front door and manhandles me out onto the gravel drive.

  There’s a chill in the early-morning air and it knocks the anger from me. ‘I didn’t slash your painting,’ I say. ‘I would never do that.’

  ‘Well, someone did and I doubt very much Alice would do it. She’s the one who wanted the painting done in the first place.’ Luke’s voice is shaking as he fights to control his anger. I get it. I understand his fury. He puts so much of himself into his art, to have it mutilated in such a vicious way is no different to a personal attack of the same ferociousness on Luke himself. His paintings are an extension of him.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it. I know how much your paintings mean to you. Please, Luke, you must believe me.’

  I’m aware I’m begging. I think Luke is aware of this too. He clasps his hands behind his head and turns in a circle, going to walk away but then changing his mind. He exhales long and deep. He drags a hand down his face and drop his arms to his side. I sense that the explosion of anger has petered out but the flakes still float around us like volcano ash. Any one piece capable of sparking another explosion.

  ‘Clare, go to work. Get your head together. Talk to Leonard, even Tom, if you have to, but talk to someone to get this into perspective. I’m too close to it all, too fucking angry to have this conversation right now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. My words sound pathetic. I don’t even know what I’m saying ‘sorry’ for.

  ‘We’ll talk tonight, when you get back. When we’ve all calmed down.’ He holds my gaze with his for a moment, before turning and taking the steps to the door in one stride. I watch him let himself back in, close the door behind him, leaving me standing on the gravel drive looking at the house. My family all together, on the inside. Me all alone, on the outside.

  Chapter 14

  ‘Blimey, you look like you’ve lost a tenner and found a quid,’ says Tom as I get into work.

  ‘Not in the mood,’ I say. I want to march straight by and into my office, but it seems my feet have other ideas.

  Tom takes my elbow and guides me into the kitchen. ‘Coffee,’ he says. ‘Strong, by the look of it.’

  I lean against the worktop, my arms folded, as I watch him make the drinks. He’s humming to himself as he does. It reminds me of Alice this morning. I take the coffee from Tom. ‘Have I ever forgotten anything? I don’t mean just normal, everyday things. Like I might have forgotten where I put my keys or whether I picked up my phone. I mean important things. Like something I’ve done. Have I ever forgotten something like that?’

  Tom tips his head to one side, considering my question for a moment. ‘You once forgot to buy me a birthday present. It was my twenty-second birthday, if I remember rightly.’

  I want to raise a smile and any other time I would probably find this funny. It’s a standing joke that I didn’t get Luke a birthday present one year, but that was the time when Luke and I had been on a bender and I’d blacked out, staying in bed for three days, completely missing his birthday. ‘No, I’m being serious, Tom. What about sleepwalking? Did I ever do that when we were at Oxford?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. What’s up?’

  ‘You sure I never sleepwalked? Remember that time, not long after we had graduated and I said I’d had a really weird dream … you know, the one that I often have …’

  ‘What, that really weird dream?’ says Tom. ‘The one where you thought you’d …’ He dabs the air with his fingers, obviously not wanting to say it out loud. He means the dream where I woke up and was convinced I’d had sex the night before, although I couldn’t remember who with and I was also convinced I’d taken part in some sort of Playboy photoshoot.

  ‘Yeah, that one,’ I say, so Tom doesn’t have to say it out loud. Somehow it makes me feel so embarrassed it’s almost as if it had actually happened.

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’ asks Tom. ‘Do you think you’ve been sleepwalking? I mean, all that business with the dream; you weren’t very well that week at all. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yeah, headaches, shakes, stress, all that. I think it was my body’s way of telling me I was worrying too much. What with exam results and trying to find Alice.’

  ‘Perhaps, it’s all getting a bit too much for you again,’ says Tom.

  It’s now that Leonard picks his moment to come into the kitchen. ‘Ah, was looking for you two,’ he says. He stops and considers us both. ‘Okay, what’s up?’

  Leonard is so perceptive; he somehow knows when something’s not right. It’s as if he can see exactly what’s going on inside my head sometimes. ‘Trouble at mill?’

  ‘Yeah, you could say that,’ I reply. I give them a very much abridged version of events regarding the day out at the Sea Life Centre and the destruction of Luke’s painting. ‘I think Luke is more upset that I’ve destroyed his work rather than the reasons behind it.’

  Leonard holds up his hand. ‘Stop. You’ve just incriminated yourself when you’ve done nothing wrong, or at least there’s no proof.’

  I check myself. ‘Luke is more upset that I may have destroyed his work.’ I look at my business partners, who are both my friends and confidants. ‘I seriously think I might be cracking up.’

  ‘It’s bound to be difficult, for everyone,’ says Leonard. ‘These things rarely pan out like they do in the films. It actually takes a lot of hard work on both sides.’

  ‘What did you both think of Alice at the weekend?’

  Tom speaks first. ‘She seemed very nice.’

  ‘Jesus, nice! What is it with everyone saying she’s nice?’

  ‘Maybe because she is?’ says Tom. ‘Okay, a less-bland description. She seemed a bit nervous, but she also seemed very happy. Genuinely happy. When I spoke to her, she was very pleasant and couldn’t speak highly enough of you and your Mum. And Luke.’

  ‘Exactly. Luke. I swear she has a crush on him.’

  ‘Is it unrequited?’ says Tom.

  ‘Unrequited? I should bloody well hope so,’ I say, slightly peeved that Tom might even think Luke is interested in Alice. I’m allowed to think that privately, but somehow I don’t like anyone else thinking it. My defensive hackles ris
e an inch. ‘She’s just a bit full on, that’s all.’

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to offend you,’ says Tom, raising his hands in surrender. ‘I was just thinking out loud, you know, being flattered by someone else’s attentions, who isn’t your wife. I’m sure Luke’s not like that at all. He’s got too much at stake.’

  I shoot Tom a look. I’m not entirely sure what he’s implying.

  ‘Sometimes it’s best just to apologise and leave it at that,’ says Leonard, slapping his hand down on Tom’s shoulder. ‘I don’t think you’re helping now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Tom, with an apologetic expression.

  ‘Forget it.’ I wave it away as if it’s nothing.

  ‘I thought Alice seemed like a very agreeable young lady, who was perhaps trying a little too hard to be accepted,’ says Leonard.

  ‘So, you two don’t think she could have wrecked the picture, then. Which means, if it’s not her, then it must be me. It’s official. Luke’s right. I am fucking nuts.’ I put the coffee cup down. ‘I’d better get on. I’ve got some court papers to file and some correspondence to deal with for the McMillan case.’

  I leave the kitchen, aware that I haven’t exactly crowned myself in glory. Having asked for their opinions, I now appear to be sulking because I don’t like the answers. Ain’t that the truth?

  And then, as if my day can’t get any worse, I can’t find the McMillan file. I took it home with me to have a look at some of the previous statements on Sunday afternoon. I think back. I remember taking it out of the filing cabinet and I’m pretty sure I put it in my briefcase. In the end, I didn’t look at it on Sunday. So, where the hell is it? It should be in my case.