And I made his office overly bright, the electric light permanently on, and it was always warm.
My pager sounds. I try to shut my ears to it, but with my hands tied behind my back, it’s impossible. It has sounded all through the night, every twenty minutes or so I think, although I can’t be certain how long I was fully conscious. I find it unbearable that I can’t help her.
I hear the sound of trees outside, leaves rustling, boughs creaking; I never knew trees made so much noise. But no footsteps, yet.
Why isn’t he back? It must be because Kasia is having her baby and he’s been with her all this time, and is still with her now. But I will end up mad if I think this, so instead I try to convince myself that there could be any number of reasons why William was called to the hospital. He’s a doctor; he’s paged all the time. His hospital delivers five thousand babies a year. It’s for someone else that he’s been called away.
And maybe DS Finborough investigated that “query” he had about your death, as he said he would, and has arrested William and even now is on his way to find me. It isn’t just wishful thinking; he is a diligent policeman and a decent man.
Or perhaps Professor Rosen has decided to do the right thing in the present and risked his mark on the future. Maybe he chanced his CF trial and academic glory and went to the police. He does want to do something for good, to cure, and his ambitions—fame, glory, even money—are so human against William’s hubristic lust for unadulterated power. And he did come to your funeral and he did try to find out what was happening even if, initially, he did nothing with his findings. So I choose to believe that Professor Rosen is, at his core, a good man as much as he is a vainglorious one. I choose to think the best of him.
So maybe one of these two men have set in motion the wheels that have led to William’s arrest and my rescue. And if I strain hard enough, can I hear a siren on the very edge of the night’s stillness?
I hear the trees’ leafy whispers and timber groans, and know that there are no sirens for me.
But I will allow myself a final daydream and hope. That Kasia isn’t in labor after all. Instead, she returned home as usual for her English lesson, pages of optimistic vocabulary learned and ready to tell me. William doesn’t know that she’s living with me now, that after you died, my conversion to being thoughtful was done absolutely properly. So when I wasn’t there and she couldn’t reach me on my mobile or pager, she knew something was very wrong. My castle in the sky looks selfish, but I have to tell her that her baby needs help to breathe. So I imagine that she went to the police and demanded that they search for me. She stood up for me once before, even though she knew she’d be hit for it, so she’d square up to DI Haines.
My pager goes again and my fantasy splinters into razor-edged shards.
I can hear birds. For a moment I think it must be the dawn chorus and morning already. But it’s still dark, so the birds must have got it wrong. Or more probably I’m imagining them, some drug-induced kind of bird tinnitus. I remember the sequence Amias told me: blackbirds, robins, wrens, tawny owls, chaffinches, warblers, then song thrushes. I remember you telling me about urban birds losing their ability to sing to one another and linking that to me and Todd, and I hope that I put that in my letter to you. Did I tell you I researched more about birdsong? I found out that when a bird sings, it doesn’t matter if it’s dark or there’s thick vegetation because birdsong can penetrate through or around objects and even over great distances, it can always be heard.
I know I can never fly like you, Tess. The first time I tried it, or thought I was, I have ended up here, tied up, lying on a concrete floor. So if that was flying, I crash-landed pretty spectacularly. But, astonishingly, I’m not broken. I’m not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. And if by a miracle I was freed and my fantasy played out, with William arrested and Kasia and her baby on a coach to Poland with me next to them, then that mountain I’ve been clinging to would tilt right over until it was lying flat on the ground and I wouldn’t need footholds and safety ropes because I’d be walking, running, dancing even. Living my life. And it wouldn’t be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.
I think I can hear my name being called, high and light, a girl’s voice. I must be imagining it, an auditory hallucination born of thinking about you.
Did you know that there’s a dawn chorus far out in space? It’s made by high-energy electrons getting caught in the earth’s radiation belts, then falling to earth as radio waves that sound like birds singing. Do you think that is what seventeenth-century poets heard and called the music of the spheres? Can you hear it now where you are?
I can hear my name again, on the periphery of the birdsong, barely audibly legible.
I think the darkness is turning to dark gray.
The birds are still singing, more clearly now.
I hear men’s voices, a group of them, shouting out my name. I think they must be imagined too. But if they aren’t, then I must call back to them. But the gag is still tight around my mouth, and even if it weren’t, my mouth is incapable of making a sound. To start with, I tried to spit out any saliva, fearful the sedative would have dissolved in it, but then my mouth became salt dry and in my imagination Mr. Wright’s secretary brought me endless cups of water.
“Beata!”
Her voice is clear among the men’s as she screams out my name. Kasia. Unmistakable and real. She isn’t having her baby. William isn’t with her. I want to laugh out loud with relief. Unable to laugh through the gag, I feel tears, warm on my cold cheeks.
William must have been right when he said the police think me capable of suicide and so would have taken seriously Kasia reporting me missing. Maybe, as he also predicted, they guessed that this would be the place I’d choose. Or was it just the two words odcisk palca that I texted to Kasia that brought them all here?
I can just make out a stain on the concrete. It really is getting lighter. It must be dawn.
“Beata!” Her voice is much closer now.
The pager sounds again. I don’t need to call back, because I realize it’s become a homing beacon and they’ll follow the sound to me. So Kasia has been paging me all through the night, not because she needed me with her while she had her baby, but because she’s been worried about me. It is the final fragment of the mirror. Because all this time it’s really been her looking after me, hasn’t it? She came to the flat that night because she needed shelter, but she stayed because I was grieving and lonely and needy. It was her arms, with red welts on them, that comforted me that night—the first night I’d slept properly since you’d died. And when she made me dance when I didn’t want to and smile when I didn’t want to, she was forcing me to feel, for a little while, something other than grief and rage.
And the same is true of you. The smell of lemons alone should have been enough to remind me that you look after me too. I held your hand at Leo’s funeral, but you held mine tightly back. And it’s you who’s got me through the night, Tess, thinking about you and talking to you—you who helped me to breathe.
I can hear a siren, wailing in the distance and getting closer. You’re right, it is the sound of a society taking care of its citizens.
As I wait to be rescued, I know that I am bereaved but not diminished by your death. Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being. And that fiber is visible—two strands of DNA twisted in a double helix in every cell of my body—proving, visibly, that we are sisters. But there are other strands that link us, that wouldn’t be seen by even the strongest of electron microscopes. I think of how we are connected by Leo dying and Dad leaving and lost homework five minutes after we should have left for school; by holidays to Skye and Christmas rituals (ten past five you’re allowed to open one present at the top of your stocking, ten to five you’re allowed to feel but before that only looking and before midnight not even peek
ing). We are conjoined by hundreds of thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of what you are. And inside me is the girl with caramel hair flying along on a bicycle, burying her rabbit, painting canvases with explosions of color and loving her friends and phoning me at awkward times and teasing me and fulfilling completely the sacrament of the present moment and showing me the joy in life, and because you are my sister, all those things are part of me too and I would do anything for it to be two months ago and for it to be me out there shouting your name, Tess.
It must have been so much colder for you. Did the snow muffle the sound of the trees? Was it freezing and silent? Did my coat help keep you warm? I hope that as you died you felt me loving you.
There are footsteps outside and the door is opening.
It’s taken hours of dark terror and countless thousands of words, but in the end it reduces down to so little.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
I always will.
Bee
Acknowledgments
I’m not sure if anyone reads the acknowledgments, but I hope so because without the following people, this novel would never have been written or published.
First, I want to thank my UK editor, the wonderful Emma Beswetherick, for her creativity, insight, and for not only having the courage of her convictions but inspiring other people to share them. I would also like to thank Sarah Knight and Christine Kopprasch at Crown for all their support and for getting this story across the Atlantic!
I would like to thank my agent, Felicity Blunt, at Curtis Brown, as well as Kate Cooper, Nick Marston, and Tally Garner, also at Curtis Brown.
I want to thank, hugely, Livia Firth, Michele Matthews, Kelly Martin, Sandra Leonard, Trixie Rawlinson, Alison Clements, and Amanda Jobbins, who helped in so many practical ways.
Thank you, Cosmo and Joe, for understanding when I needed to write and for being proud.
Last, but most of all, my thanks go to my younger sister, Tora Orde-Powlett—the inspiration for the book and a continued blessing.
AN EXCERPT FROM ROSAMUND LUPTON’S NEW BOOK
AFTERWARDS
Coming in June 2012
PROLOGUE
I couldn’t move, not even a little finger or a flicker of an eye. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream.
I struggled, as hard as I could, to move the huge hulk that my body had become, but I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving was impossible.
My eyelids were welded shut. My eardrums broken. My vocal cords snapped off.
Pitch dark and silent and so heavy in there; a mile of black water above me.
Only one thing for it, I said to myself, thinking of you, and I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the black ocean.
I swam upward toward the daylight with all my strength.
Not a mile deep after all.
Because I was suddenly in a white room, brightly gleaming, smelling pungently of antiseptic. I heard voices and my name.
I saw the body part of “I” was in a hospital bed. I watched a doctor holding my eyelids open and shining a light into my eyes; another was tipping my bed back, another putting an IV into my arm.
You won’t be able to believe this. You’re a man who dams rivers and climbs mountains; a man who knows the laws of nature and physics. “Hogwash!” you’ve said to the TV, when anyone talks about anything paranormal. Although you’ll be kinder to your wife, not consigning my words to be fed to pigs, you’ll think it’s impossible. But out-of-body experiences do happen. You read about it in the papers; hear people talking about it on the radio.
But if this was real, what should I do? Push my way through the doctors and elbow out the nurse who was shaving my head? “Excuse me! Gangway! Sorry! My body, I think. I’m right here, actually!”
Thinking ridiculous things because I was afraid.
Sick, goose bumps, shivering afraid.
And as I felt afraid, I remembered.
Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.
The school was on fire.
1
You were in your important BBC meeting this afternoon, so you wouldn’t have felt the strong, warm breeze—”A godsend for sports day,” parents were saying to each other. I thought that even if a God existed he’d be a little tied up with starving people in Africa or abandoned orphans in Eastern Europe to worry about providing free air-conditioning for Sidley House School’s sack race.
The sun shone on the white lines painted on the grass; the whistles hanging around the teachers’ necks glinted; the children’s hair was shiny-bright. Touchingly too-big feet on small legs bounced on the grass as they did the one-hundred-meter dash, the sack race, the obstacle course. You can’t really see the school from the playing field in summertime; those huge pollarded oaks hide it from view, but I knew a reception class of four-year-olds was still in there, and I thought it was a shame the youngest children couldn’t be out enjoying the afternoon too.
Adam was wearing his “I am 8!” badge from our card this morning—just this morning. He came hurrying up to me, that little face of his beaming, because he was off to get his cake from school right now! Rowena had to get the medals, so she was going with him; Rowena who was at Sidley House with Jenny all those moons ago.
As they left, I looked around to see if Jenny had arrived. I’d thought that after her A-level disaster she should immediately start revision for her retakes, but she still wanted to work at Sidley House to pay for her planned trip to Canada. Strange to think I minded so much.
I’d thought her being a temporary teaching assistant at seventeen was challenge enough—and now she was school nurse for the afternoon. We’d gently crossed swords at breakfast.
“It’s just a little young to have that much responsibility.”
“It’s a primary school sports day, Mum, not a motorway crash.”
But now her shift was almost over—with no accidents at all—and soon she’d be out to join us. I was sure she’d be itching to leave that small, stuffy medical room stuck at the top of the school.
I’d noticed at breakfast that she was wearing that red frou-frou skirt with a skimpy top and I’d told her it didn’t really look very professional, but when did Jenny ever listen to my advice on clothes?
“Just count your lucky stars I’m not in bumsters.”
“You mean the jeans that hang around boys’ bottoms?”
“Yup.”
“I always want to go and give them a hitch up.”
She bursts out laughing.
And her long legs do look rather wonderful under the too-short, gauzy skirt, and despite myself I feel a little proud. Though she got her long legs from you.
On the playing field, Maisie arrived, her blue eyes sparkling, her face one large smile. Some people dismiss her as slightly eccentric in her fun shirts (long sleeves a different pattern to the rest), but most of us love her.
“Gracie,” she said, giving me a hug, “I’ve come to give Rowena a lift home. She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur Mum to the fore!”
“She’s getting the medals,” I told her. “Adam’s gone with her to get his cake. They should be back any minute.”
She smiled. “What kind of cake this year?”
“A chocolate tray bake. Addie dug out a trench with a teaspoon and we took off all the candy and replaced them with soldiers. It’s a World War One cake. Which is violent but fits with the curriculum, so I don’t think anyone will mind.”
She laughed. “Fantastic.”
“Not really, but he thinks so.”
“Is she your best friend, Mum?” Adam asked me recently.
“Probably, yes,” I said.
Maisie handed me a “little something” for Adam, beautifully wrapped, which I knew would contain a spot-on present. She’s brilliant at presents. It’s one of the many things I love her for. Another is that she ra
n in the mothers’ race every single year that Rowena was at Sidley House, and she always came in last by a mile but didn’t give a hoot! She has never owned a piece of Lycra clothing and, unlike virtually every other mother at Sidley House, has never been inside a gym.
I know. I’m dawdling on that sunny playing field with Maisie. I’m sorry. But it’s hard. What I’m getting to is just so bloody hard.
Maisie left to find Rowena in the school.
I checked my watch; it was almost three.
Still no sign of either Jenny or Adam.
The PE teacher blew his whistle for the last race—the relay—bellowing through his loudspeaker for teams to get in position. I worried that Addie would get into trouble for not being in his designated place.
I looked back toward the school, thinking surely I’d see them coming toward me any moment.
Smoke was coming from the school building. Thick black smoke like a bonfire. I remember the calm most of all. The absence of panic. But knowing it was accelerating toward me, like a juggernaut.
I had to hide. Quickly. No. I am not in danger. This terror isn’t for me. My children are in danger.
It hit me in the chest, full-on.
There is a fire and they are in there.
They are in there.
And then I was running at the velocity of a scream. Running so hard that I didn’t have time to breathe.
A running scream that can’t stop until I hold them both.
Darting across the road, I heard sirens blaring on the bridge. But the fire engines weren’t moving. There were abandoned cars by the traffic lights blocking their path, and women were getting out of other cars just left in the middle of the road and were running across the bridge toward the school. But all the mothers were at the sports day. What were these women doing, kicking off their high-wedged shoes and tripping over flipflops and screaming as they ran, like me? I recognized one, the mother of a reception child. They were the mothers of the four-year-olds coming to do their usual pickup. One had left a toddler in her abandoned SUV, and the toddler was hitting the window as he watched his mother in this ghastly mothers’ race.
Sister Page 31
