The Endsister

by Penni Russon

  ‘Wait,’ Dad tells us.

  I look from Mum to Dad to Sibbi.

  ‘What do we do?’ Finn asks.

  The front door opens with a crash. It’s Else. She stands framed by the lounge-room door, crackling with fury.

  ‘What is going on here?’

  We all turn to Else. Dad looks worried, Mum looks ashamed, Oscar looks interested (he’s generally for chaos), and Finn looks frightened. I don’t know how I look, but Sibbi looks terrible.

  ‘What is that noise? It’s hurting Sibbi? Who are you?’ Else demands of Bridget Lane. ‘Who’s she?’ she asks me.

  ‘Turn it off,’ says Mum, quiet and firm. ‘Turn it off now.’

  I run to the middle floor and then upstairs, while Finn flicks the box in the kitchen off. The noise stops, though I think I can still perceive a high-pitched humming in the walls.

  We bring back Bridget Lane’s devices.

  ‘Fine,’ says Bridget Lane, shoving them back into her case. ‘Live with them. They’ll fill your house with their noise and their mess. They’ll suck the energy out of you. They’ll give nothing in return. You’ll never be truly alone again. They’ll be there, all the time, watching, listening, needling. You’ll never make them happy.’

  ‘What’s she on about?’ says Else. ‘Is she talking about you kids?’

  ‘Sibbi’s ghosts,’ Oscar tells Else.

  ‘They’re not just Sibbi’s ghosts,’ says Finn. ‘They’re everyone’s ghosts.’

  ‘I thought you said ghosts didn’t want anything,’ I say to Ms Lane. ‘That they didn’t have feelings. That they were just leftover energy.’

  ‘I don’t know why people like you insist on living in these gloomy old houses,’ says Bridget Lane. ‘I grew up in an old house and it never caused my parents or me anything but trouble. I was glad when they finally got divorced, and Mum and I moved out. Give me a brand-new streamlined apartment any day. Bright dazzling white. All new appliances and city views. Not a ghost to be seen. Not a smudge of history in any corner.’

  ‘We don’t mind mess, do we, Mum?’ says Else. ‘We can live with trouble and noise.’

  ‘I’ll see myself out,’ says Ms Lane.

  ‘We’ll all see you out,’ says Else, and holds the lounge-room door open.

  Ms Lane sniffs, and leaves.

  ‘But did it work?’ asks Finn. ‘Are the ghosts gone?’

  Everybody looks at Sibbi. She sways. ‘I know what an endsister is,’ she whispers.

  ‘Hush, Sibbi,’ says Mum. ‘Hush now.’ She looks at Dad, and her voice is high and shrill, not like Mum’s at all. She sounds haunted. ‘I don’t like this house, Dave. It’s making me sick. It’s making Sibbi sick. I know you feel you belong here, and maybe you and the older children do, but I don’t. I’ve been telling myself that I’d never make you choose between me or this house, but I can’t stay and I don’t think Sibbi can either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks Dad. ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘I want to go home. I want to go back to Australia.’

  ALMOST ANNIE AND HARDLY ALICE

  ‘I’M STILL HERE,’ says Almost Annie, with relief. ‘Are you still here?’

  There is no reply.

  ‘Alice? Are you still here?’

  The house looms emptily around Almost Annie. She has been here dead for much longer than she was ever alive, though time passes quickly to a ghost, or rather time has no meaning and so a ghost will never notice it passing. But there has always been Alice.

  ‘Alice?’ Annie calls. ‘Are you still here?’ She wanders through the hallway where the children are huddled together. ‘Did it work?’ Finn is asking. ‘Are the ghosts gone?’

  Almost Annie hears these words from very far away. She peers into the kitchen, the formal lounge room, and then drifts up the stairs. The house, full of people, feels lonely, empty.

  Annie lingers in the nursery, and in the room that was most recently Dorothy’s study but in Annie’s lifetime was the governess’s quarters. She’d fantasised, in life, of becoming a governess herself, if she could get herself enough education. She listened in on lessons while nursing babies or chasing toddlers and, even while preoccupied with the infants, had picked up Latin faster than any of the Outhwaite children.

  As a ghost she’d continued to sit in on the children’s lessons, soaking up as much knowledge as she could. She’d watched Dorothy’s father grow from a tiny baby to a businessman, learning all about the way a business should be run. In life she’d been restricted, a girl born working class. In death she was able to stroll through all the doors of the house. No knowledge could be kept secret from her. How strange it was to know so much, and yet have such a small existence.

  She went up the next flight of stairs into the boys’ bedrooms, the parents’ bedroom. She thought about what it would be like to be a ghost in the house alone, and began to grieve, for already, even with Alice, it was a lonely existence, a pointless one. What did it matter what she learned, what she knew, if there was no one to share it with?

  Finally she went up the steep ladder and into the attic.

  And there she was, Hardly Alice, crouched against the wall, hugging her legs, her face shimmering with ghostly tears.

  ‘You’re still here!’ Annie says. ‘Why didn’t you answer me? I was calling.’

  ‘I’m still here,’ Alice whispers. ‘And so are you.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Almost Annie. She sits down next to Alice and holds her hand. Though they are both made of insubstantial stuff, there is still a little comfort to be taken from the gesture.

  SIBBI

  AT FIRST IT is a stain on the wallpaper. Sibbi watches it. The form of it thickens, it’s a blob on the wall, and then it’s a thing, it’s the Endsister. Made of cobwebs and shadows, of dust and forgetting. It creeps across the floor and hunches at the end of the couch where Sibbi lies. No one can see it but Sibbi.

  Else sits by Sibbi, stroking wisps of hair out of Sibbi’s eyes. ‘She’s shivering,’ Else tells Clancy. ‘She’s so pale. What were Mum and Dad thinking? What was that woman even doing here?’

  Mama comes in. ‘The nurse on the National Health Service line says to try giving Sibbi some paracetamol to get her fever down, rather than dragging her out to the medical centre, but we don’t have any. Can you keep an eye on her, Else, while I go to the pharmacy?’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ Clancy asks.

  ‘He’s coming with me. We need to talk.’

  ‘Are you really going back to Australia?’ Finn asks. ‘What will happen to all of us?’

  ‘Sibbi and I might go back and stay with Nan and Pop for a while.’

  Daddy stands unhappily in the doorway. ‘Nothing’s decided yet,’ says Daddy. ‘Nobody wants the family to split up.’

  Sibbi watches from very far away, from very deep inside her own body. She thinks Mama has decided. Mama won’t change her mind now.

  When Mama and Daddy have gone, Else looks over at Clancy, who leans forward on the big armchair, watching Sibbi with worry in his face. Finn sits cross-legged on the floor beside the couch.

  ‘What were Mum and Dad thinking?’ she asks again.

  Finn says, ‘They were trying to get rid of the ghosts.’

  ‘But they don’t even believe in ghosts.’

  ‘I know what an endsister is,’ Sibbi tells Else.

  Oscar scowls. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’ The Endsister – dust! disappointment! – stirs.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Oscar says again, loudly. ‘There is no. Such. Thing.’

  The Endsister swirls and thickens. Shadows. Dust. Sibbi cowers.

  ‘Oscar!’ says Else.

  ‘What?’ says Oscar. ‘If you really want to know, I’m sick to death of all of you. I’m sick of this family. It’s all about Else and her violin. Or Sibbi and her precious endsister. Or Clancy and Pippa. No one’s ever asked me what I think about moving to England. No one ever thinks about what I want. It’s just Oscarandfinn. Finnandoscar. Nobody
cares about me.’

  Rage. Rage. Sisters and sisters. Brothers and brothers. Sharp tongues. Quarrelling squabbles, squabbling quarrels. This is what the Endsister wants. This is what it grows fat on.

  ‘I know,’ moans Sibbi, ‘I know what an endsister is.’

  ‘You’re such a baby,’ says Oscar. ‘It’s not an endsister, you idiot. It’s an ancestor.’

  ‘What did you say?’ says Else. ‘Endsister,’ she says experimentally. ‘Ancestor.’

  No! The Endsister pushes upwards now, she’s a real thing, coming into being – endsister, endsister. That is the name of her. Sister. Endsister.

  Oscar keeps on at Sibbi. ‘It’s an ancestor,’ he says again. ‘Not a ghost. It’s, like, your grandmother’s grandmother. Your aunty’s aunty’s aunt.’

  No! No! Rage. Rage. Endsister is rage. Abandoned. Wasps and spider husks. Endsister is revenge. Swirling. Swirling. Tit for tat, measure for measure, eye and tooth, eye and tooth. Endsister.

  ‘Can you smell that?’ Clancy asks.

  ‘Can anyone see that thing?’ says Finn, rubbing his shining, watery eyes, though they only seemed to become waterier and waterier.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ asks Else. ‘What’s that awful noise?’

  THE BLACK CLOUD grows darker and bigger, pulling into itself all the dust, all the dark. Now all the children can feel its presence. The cloud feeds on their fear and sorrow and envy and rage.

  Sibbi feeds it. All her fears of being abandoned or unloved or not listened to, of being left behind, a baby forever, as the other children grow and grow. Other fears too, the regular fears of childhood: fears of the dark, and giants, wolves, of things that swoop or crawl or wait in the hidden corners of night.

  It feeds from Else, all her whirling self-hatred and shame, the waste of money and time and happiness, the loss of her violin. The cage of unhappiness she built around herself. No! Else tries to tell herself. Things are getting better. But suddenly it seems to Else that happiness is fleeting, and it can never last.

  Clancy feeds it too. He thinks of the girls on the bus back in Melbourne, teasing him all the way home. He imagines that Pippa is there too, that she sits next to him on the bus and the girls start up with their teasing and he can’t defend himself or Pippa. What would she think of him if she saw who he really was?

  And how long has Oscar secretly hated being a twin? Oh, the Endsister stirs it all up, that secret longing in Oscar to be out in the world on his own, without Finn always there, a mirror showing Oscar who he is and who he is not, limiting who he might be, given a whole chance. A twin never gets a whole chance. All a twin can ever expect is half. Half a chance. Half a life.

  Finn feels it all, spinning through the room. It’s like his family’s feelings all pass through him, the loneliness, the anxiety, the despair, the jealousy, the self-loathing. Finn feels all of it, as if the family itself is spinning up there, in that bitter black cloud, spinning apart into pieces, no longer a whole, wonderful, messy thing, but parts of something broken. He can hardly bear it.

  Dave and Olly walk down the street towards the pharmacy, and they feel it too, filled with the hopelessness of their situation. Olly can’t stay and Dave can’t leave. Is this how a marriage ends? Olly wonders. I still love Dave, but I can’t live this life.

  Is this how a marriage ends? Dave wonders. Can you love someone and let them go at the same time?

  The Endsister eats the darkness that leaks from the split between them.

  ‘It’s too loud,’ says Sibbi. ‘It’s so loud. It’s all the noise inside me.’

  ‘But,’ says Else, realising. ‘I know this noise. It’s from inside me too.’ She looks around the room. ‘And from Finn, and Oscar, and Clancy.’ And then she has a flash of understanding. ‘I think I know what to do,’ says Else.

  ELSE

  THE LOUNGE-ROOM DOOR slams behind me, and the hallway is quiet and still. The violin case is just inside the front door, where I left it. I open the case, take out the violin, and place it on my shoulder, and plucks the strings, listening. I feel the strings inside myself, my own longing and desire, certainty and doubt, being plucked. Plink plink plink. I pull out the bow and dance it across the strings. The sound is good enough – thin, a little constricted, it is only a student violin – but it will do.

  I hold the instrument and its bow in one hand and push at the living room door but it’s stuck. I shout for the boys, thump at the door, but I can’t get it to open, and, trapped in that room, with all that energy whirling around, they don’t seem to be able to hear me.

  ALMOST ANNIE AND HARDLY ALICE

  ALMOST ANNIE AND Hardly Alice watch from the stairs. ‘We need to help her,’ says Almost Annie. ‘Please. We need to help the children.’

  Alice passes her hand over her eyes.

  Annie says, ‘You know, don’t you? You’ve been here longer than me. You know what was in the attic. You must know.’

  ‘But I don’t know,’ cries Alice. ‘I don’t know what I know.’

  Else pushes at the door, but the force of the wind – the Endsister – pushes back. Annie and Alice push too, one on either side of Else. Almost Annie, Hardly Alice and Else use all their anger, their rage and disappointment, the things they’ve lost, the things they’ve left behind, the most tattered parts of themselves. They push on the door, three teenage girls, each of a different time, but all the same pattern of longing and loss, the warp and weft of presence and absence.

  The door gives way and Else staggers inside.

  ELSE

  ‘YOU’VE GOT A violin,’ says Clancy as I burst into the living room at last. ‘How can you have a violin?’

  I don’t explain. I close my eyes, and start to play the Mozart. Easy for a child, difficult for an artist. And it’s so, so hard. My hands, are soft with lack of practice. The strings cut into my fingers. But I play on.

  At first all I can hear are mistakes, dead music being forced out of a lifeless instrument. My mistakes feed the cloud, the dark whorl of disappointment, despair, loss, sorrow, abandonment, pain . . . it gobbles up my mistakes and grows fatter.

  I realise I’m holding my breath. My shoulders are tense and my arms are stiff. I stop playing for a moment, put the violin under my arm in rest position and roll my shoulders backwards and forwards. I stretch my neck from one side to the other. I breathe: in, out . . . in, out . . . in . . . out. I feel my chest expand and contract. I place my feet squarely on the floor. I draw my attention up my spine, aware of each knobbly vertebra, and down to the tips of my fingers. No one is asking you to play the violin. Play, don’t play. I raise my instrument again.

  I picture Sibbi, back home in Australia, running, playing, imagining, climbing, hiding, seeking, rolling down the hills, resilient as a grass flower, the wind rushing through the reeds, white clouds racing across the sky. I see myself too – the child I once was – spinning in my orbit between Olly and Dave, fierce and determined.

  You may as well play.

  The bow hovers over the string, and the music begins. I am not playing the Mozart. The music is playing me, giving itself form and spirit inside my body. The cloud takes form too, at first a funnel of dark smoke, and then something with a shape, with a form, with a spirit of its own.

  ALMOST ANNIE AND HARDLY ALICE

  ‘WHAT IS IT?’ asks Annie, curious rather than frightened, as the form finds its shape. And then, ‘Who?’

  ‘Who?’ echoes Hardly Alice. ‘Oh, who . . .?’ She squeezes her eyes shut, not to hide this time, not to deny, but to remember.

  ‘Think, Alice. What don’t you know?’

  ‘I don’t know who I am.’

  ‘What else don’t you know? You were alive once, alive in this house. You like the boys – you had brothers? You had a father. A mother.’

  ‘My mother? She took my mother from me.’

  ‘The ghost? The Endsister took your mother?’

  ‘The Endsister? Yes, yes. My mother had a baby, and the baby lived, but my mother died.
The baby. My sister.’ Hardly Alice looks at Almost Annie. ‘I remember. I remember everything.’

  ‘What do you remember?’

  Alice whirled, and pointed at the black cloud. ‘Beatrix!’

  The music plays on, but the air grows still, poised, listening.

  ‘Beatrix Elizabeth Rose Outhwaite, you behave yourself this instant. I am your sister and you will do as you are told.’

  The shape thickens and slows, comes together, spinning more slowly now. Beatrix? Elizabeth? Rose? Outhwaite?

  Forgotten. Lost. Beatrix? Elizabeth? Rose?

  Almost forgotten. Not yet lost.

  Annie gasps. Hardly Alice stands tall. The music hovers, an extended moment of time – a ghost moment of ghost time. All the Outhwaite children remain inside the stillness and the silence between notes, but the littlest ghost girl wriggles herself into being. Sorry, not sorry. Sorry, not sorry.

  SIBBI

  LATER NONE OF the Outhwaites would quite agree what happened.

  ‘She was a girl,’ says Sibbi. ‘The Endsister.’

  ‘Ancestor,’ Oscar will correct.

  ‘Ancestor,’ Else agrees, absently. But: ‘Of course there’s no such thing as ghosts. Is there?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Clancy will say. ‘There is definitely no such thing as ghosts. Definitely.’

  ‘There was a girl who didn’t know she was a girl,’ says Sibbi. ‘She thought she was dust. Except she wanted to play with me.’

  ‘There was no girl,’ says Oscar.

  ‘There was something with the electrics, I think,’ says Finn, doubtfully. ‘It got dark.’

  ‘Beatrix,’ says Sibbi. ‘Her name was Beatrix. Else played her back. She was lost, but Else found her.’

  ‘I was lost,’ Else says. ‘But then I understood what I needed to do.’

  ‘Of course there’s no such thing as ghosts, Sibbi,’ says Mama. ‘You have such a big imagination.’