The Sister

by Poppy Adams

  Suddenly the house is unbearably large. I feel as if I’m part of a huge continent but that chunks of it are breaking off around me and drifting away in all directions, and all that’s left of me is this little island, floating motionless in the center as the other bits of land move farther and farther off, like icebergs from a glacier in summer. All of a sudden I wish it were her, not me, who had to suffer this silence. I’d like to lie down here and die as well, as if by complete coincidence, so that someone else has to deal with the problem of clearing up the both of us. But I can tell I’m not about to die. The events of the past couple of days have had quite the opposite effect. I feel a new life force coursing through my body, ousting the years of lethargy and inertia that I’ve learned to live with, waking me from slumber, showing me the world more clearly.

  I need to get up. I need to concentrate, to think through my options in a methodical way, to devise a strategy to help me out of this blunder and follow it through to a logical conclusion. I elbow off my blankets and inch my legs over the side of the bed, bringing myself to sit up on the edge. It’s the first warm day of spring. The early light, which has just begun to pour through the window, is bright and hopeful. Thrown about by the movement of the creeper outside, it dances over the bare floorboards, daring to touch my feet. Through my bed socks, I feel a sudden rush of icy blood fill my swollen feet, feeding the pain that overflows. I find if I concentrate very hard, it goes away or turns into something less like pain, more like heat or pressure.

  I lower my feet to the floor. They smart sharply as small needles race along them and up my lower leg. My feet and ankles are set solid as if, today, they have been carved together from a single block of wood. I turn my attention to getting to the bathroom, shuffling in the only way my body allows me, until I reach my halfway point and rest, leaning on the back edge of the nursing chair outside the bathroom door, supporting myself on it like a walking frame. No one can condemn me for lack of effort. I tried my best to rekindle our friendship. I tried to love her, to like her, to find her faults endearing and amusing as I once had by nature, to see them as Vivienisms, as Maud used to say, a statement of her free-thinking, fun-loving attitude, her breath of fresh air.

  After a minute’s rest I summon the strength to continue my journey to the bathroom, concentrating on the pain of each slow step. Both my hands are screwed into cold fists that I know it will take me some minutes to open. Once I reach the washbasin I lean my elbows on the edge to take some weight off my feet, their marathon over. I look at my hands—witch’s hands, with their crooked fingers and swollen red knuckles—and try to straighten each in turn, rubbing them between my legs to work up the circulation. I feel it would be less painful to be rid of these joints for good, have them chopped off and the stumps wrapped up in soft bandages. This morning it requires an enormous effort of will to twist on the hot tap. Finally I have it running until it steams and put both hands underneath, soaking them. I can already feel the knuckles start to loosen for the day.

  I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel like a murderer. After all, I only put it in her milk, I didn’t pour it down her throat. Then it was out of my hands. It’s almost as if I did it to get something off my chest, like writing a scathing letter in the temper of the night, only to burn it in the temperance of the morning. I hadn’t gone up to the attic for that reason. The moon led me up there. I hadn’t planned to pick up the cyanide or to bring it downstairs tucked up my sleeve. It seemed so natural, as if it was meant, one thing following another in a predestined way, as if somehow I were acting out of myself, the puppet for a force of something else.

  After I’d put it into her milk I sort of believed that it was either meant to happen or not, and if it wasn’t meant to happen she wouldn’t drink the milk, or it would spill in the fridge. I don’t think I ever really believed that she would drink it or that, if she did, it would kill her. I’m not a real, cold-blooded murderer. It’s not as if I loaded a gun and shot her between the eyes or smashed a lead weight across her head.

  I dry my hands and put on the black woolen mittens that I hung, as usual, over the storage heater last night so they’d be warm. I pull off my bed socks. My toes, like my hands, are peculiar. They’re driven to deform towards the middle, pushing together like the hoof of a single-toed goat. One by one I pick up the small scrolls of loo paper rolled carefully and left in a pile, for mornings like this one, and squeeze them between my toes, forcing them apart, a little trick I’ve developed to alleviate the constant painful pressure. Perhaps, I think, some cannabis tea would release the pain, and when I get back into the bedroom I turn on the kettle. Then I decide, quite irregularly, to forgo my normally stringent routine and go back to bed for a while. I feel thrilled by the deviance, like a naughty schoolgirl. I’ll wiggle my hands and feet, wait for them to wake up and listen for signs of life in the rest of the house.

  It’s as I’m getting into bed that I notice my wristwatch, the digital one on my left wrist, is eleven minutes behind my bedside clock (it’s my habit to check them against each other as I get into bed and they are rarely out of time). I check my other wristwatch, my backup one, and I’m horrified to find that it stopped in the middle of the night—at half past two. I feel completely disoriented. I find it extremely distracting if I cannot at once get an accurate time reference, especially first thing in the morning. I need to know the time to start my daily routine or I’m thrown off for the rest of the day. (Although I’m not the superstitious type, I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the coincidence that a watch that has never stopped should stop dead on this particularly haunting morning. I should think another, less pragmatic, less scientific sort of person would be spooked by the experience.)

  I consider the facts: I trust all my digitals over any of my dial clocks. My bedside clock is my number-one timepiece, followed by my digital wristwatch. However, my bedside clock now says 8:08 and I’ve not yet heard the longcase in the hall strike the hour. If it were to strike in time with my digital wristwatch I’d be more inclined to trust those two than my number-one clock.

  7:56 a.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

  The longcase in the hall has just struck but my wristwatch is still a few minutes off eight so I’m no closer to knowing the correct time. I’m going to stay here awhile longer until I can get my bearings on the day.

  9:55 a.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

  I hear the start of Monday’s bell-ringing practice at the church, even though my digital wristwatch isn’t yet at ten. Apart from Michael’s irregular visits and the rare encounters I have with strangers coming to the door, all of whom I invariably check the time with, this Monday ten o’clock practice is about my only weekly time reference. It’s not very accurate, though. I’ve learned that they are in no way reliable. They do not normally start on time and it can be up to a quarter past ten before I hear their first peal. But rarely, if ever, do they start early, and because my wristwatch hasn’t yet reached ten, I suspect that this is the faulty one. I don’t know which is worse, trying to work out the time or trying not to think about Vivien. Did I really kill her? I’m not at all sure anymore that I actually did it. I don’t feel as if that was something I did last night.

  I’m dreading the rest of today. I can feel its full weight on me now, pinning me to the bed, urging me not to participate in it any further. I’d like to freeze time right here and now. I’d be quite happy to be left alone, in eternal timelessness, comforted by the relief that I’ll never have to partake in the immediate future.

  I wonder grimly how long it will be before I start to smell her. It’s a maddening thing to have entered my mind because now that it’s there I cannot dispel it, and because it’s there I can already smell her.

  12:24 p.m. (by my bedside clock)

  I think I’ve just heard a small cry, but I can’t be certain. I’m up, out of bed, pulling my dressing-gown cord round my middle to take the sudden chill off my spine. I move over to my door, which is closed. As I put my hand o
n the door handle I hear it again. A small, distant cry. I freeze. If I open this door, I face a dilemma. I will not be able to ignore the cries and will be forced to make a difficult choice: Should I go to her aid, or should I leave her and live with the knowledge that I could have helped her? It would be like killing someone twice. I couldn’t bear it. However, if I don’t open the door and block up the gaps around the edges I might not be able to hear any distant disturbing noises. I could sit and watch the plaster crumble and the creeper invade the room and concentrate on the pains in my joints. Then I would never be sure that the cries I might have heard were real or not.

  The thudding of my heart is so strong that it’s making me rock slightly where I stand, back and forth, back and forth. I turn the handle and pull the door open by a hand’s width. And then I hear it. Scratching. Unmistakable desperate scratching, like a dog at a door. Now another cry, this time more of a whimper. Simon! He’s in the kitchen. I am instantly relieved, elated, even; I feel so thrilled I could almost giggle, like being in an accident that, just at the last moment, didn’t happen. But what do I do with Simon? I’d forgotten him, the dog that wasn’t going to last long. He’s lasted longer than Vivien herself. But surely he can’t survive independently of her—he can’t even walk. The quietest dog in the world is making noises he’s never made before. He’s probably hungry, I think. He’s not been fed today. I open my door and pad quietly along the landing and down the stairs, so as not to wake the dead, my bed socks soft against the wood.

  When I open the kitchen door, Simon looks up at me biddably, as if he knows his owner is gone and I am his only hope. I spot a little piddle in front of the fridge, as if it has leaked in the night. His bottom wiggles in an attempt to wag his stumpy tail, as if he’s sure this will please me. I don’t want to hear his noises. I just want to shut him up. I open the fridge door and see only Cheddar cheese and poisoned milk. I put the cheese onto the floor in front of him, then remember the cereal in the store cupboard. I tip a heap of Shreddies onto the cheese and Simon looks at it. I leave him and shut the door behind me, then go back to my bedroom and lock myself in, relieved, as if I’d been holding my breath the entire time.

  I know that nothing is going to happen if I stay here in my room all day. I must make a plan. I need to find someone else to discover her body. I need to think of a way to get someone to the house and then up to her room so they can sound the alarm and set the deceased-person engine in motion.

  Chapter 21

  Pranksters and a Second Dose

  2:11 p.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

  I’ve been standing, quite still, in the middle of the landing for the last fifteen minutes, and I’m just beginning to feel the effects of a draft, level with the skirting board, that drags itself east to west from the floor-to-ceiling arched window to the stairs. Before that—for the previous eight and a half minutes—I was pacing a rectangular path round the landing. For each of the long sides I tread the length of the same floorboard, while the short ends of the rectangle line up the door frames on opposite walls of the landing. I go anticlockwise and I can actually feel that it’s the wrong way, against the normal movement of all timepieces and even against time itself—so going that way helps me to feel that I am struggling against the problem, rather than being swept up by it and riding with it.

  I have been collaborating with myself, working through my options, boxing them up, assembling and assessing them, ordering, grading, cataloging, tabulating and selecting, trying to see the most succinct path through the maze. I have found that the pacing helps me Create—to come up with new ideas—and the standing very still is necessary to Evaluate. Over and over I have strained for a way to get someone else to the house to check on Vivien. I’ve even considered flooding it or setting fire to the loggia so that Michael or anyone in the south lodges might see it, anything that would allow someone else to deal with the problem of Vivien. But I’ve not come up with anything that doesn’t bring with it an extremely unattractive consequence further down the line, one that I know I couldn’t bear—too many people with too many questions.

  To my dismay, I’ve determined by this systematic process of assimilation and disqualification that no one is likely to come to the house for weeks, and the idea of waiting here and thinking of her festering down the corridor may send me quite mad. I know the only feasible option is to investigate Vivien myself but it’s as I’m finally mustering the courage to do so that I hear the urgent pounding of the brass door knocker—thud, thud, thud—as if in a last-minute answer to my pleas. The noise grates on me, as it used to Maud, all the way up my spine—it’s quite unnecessary to bang it so violently when a more than adequate noise is achieved with a good grip on the goat’s horns and a rattle from side to side—yet for the first time in my life I welcome it with unexpected delight. I hurry down the stairs. Perhaps they’ll also have the correct time.

  My excitement is shattered when I pull back the door. There’s no one there. A beautiful day dances on the fresh leaves of the beech hedge to my left and there’s a hum of activity over the area where a once-ornamental pond has been lost in the undergrowth. I feel betrayed by hope.

  I begin to Create and Evaluate once again, quickly, the possibilities of the door knocker being banged at one minute and yet at the next there’s no one there. Then a curious movement at the turn of the drive catches my eye and I see a shadow, now another, racing behind the laburnum hedge. I am being watched. Children. They dare each other to come close to the house of the Moth Woman and an exceptionally brave one must have mustered the courage to bang the door knocker. The shadows shift and disappear out of sight behind the conifers and along the Tunnel Walk to the brook.

  I review the day just because I can; sixty-nine degrees and rising, clear and dry. I suck my middle finger and hold it up to check the light wind—east to northeasterly. The wind seems faint, almost still, but that’s what people forget—it’s not about the wind. It’s the air currents that count, and often they run paradoxically to the wind. The rising heat and falling humidity point to thermals, and I notice the treetops are rustling, so at twenty-five feet it’s moderately gusty, far stronger than at ground level. Yes, I’d say strong, dry, upper thermals. A shiver of excitement runs up my back.

  Today is the perfect day for catching rare immigrants.

  For a prolific catch of immigrants—quantity, not quality—you’d wait for the south southeasterly air currents that blow them from the Med and across the Channel in their thousands, sailing effortlessly on the thermal smells of Spain, France and Portugal. On this type of current, I’d head straight to the poor patch of forgotten scrubland just behind the beach café at Branscombe. It’s an unnoticed little spot, often strewn with litter, but protected from the wind by the giant chalk cliffs guarding the sea, a warm oasis of wild petunia, viper’s bugloss and knapweed, a first-stop welcome for weary southern visitors. I remember a hot summer night, on a day that brought smells from Moroccan markets, when Clive and I trapped more than fourteen hundred moths on the dump behind the café. We anesthetized the entire catch with 20ml potassium phosphate and enlisted a local committee to help us count and log them.

  But today’s brood wouldn’t be for quantity but scarcity. It’s an unusual current, a hot east to northeasterly, which by tonight will bring many a rare species from southern Scandinavia and northern Europe, including the Clifden Nonpareil and the Bedstraw Hawk. I wonder where the Dorset and Somerset moth hunters will be grouping later, where they will join forces and head. I can almost feel the buzz of phones ringing round this small, exclusive group of people, arrangements firmed up for this evening’s hunt, all other engagements canceled, nothing too important to miss this great night of all nights of the moth-hunting season. Some will head for the high heaths of Ratnedge Deveril, or to the wetter lowlands—the bog in the Furze-brook Reserve, the meadows at Barton’s Shoulder, the clump of willows at Templecombe. It’s been a long while since I’ve hunted. I wonder if today’s hunters still know that th
e eastern edge of the Mawes Fir Estate was bordered by a footpath, just above Oakers Wood, where a few last elms huddled in a peaceful copse, having somehow escaped disease. The rare Norwegian Dogtail always found it and the next day, when news of the previous night’s catches flushed through the moth community, Oakers Wood would often turn out to be the Dogtail’s only sighting in the entire country.

  It’s as I stop my musings and start to close the door on the exceptional day that my eye is drawn to something on the ground. There, on the worn flagstones, I see a heap of freshly mutilated moths, victims of an unkind massacre.

  I bend over them. It’s the product of last night’s collection—fresh, spring specimens. I can feel the warm sun through my nightgown and I sit down on the smooth flagstones, like a little girl, to sort my prize. I make little piles, arranging them into residents and nonresidents, commoners, newcomers, crossbreeds, mutants and unviables. Among them are Tigers, Underwings, a Pug, two Marbled Carpets and three types of Hawk—beautiful specimens, recently emerged and vibrant. There’s nothing particularly surprising, perhaps the Carpets are usually farther south, but I’d really like to know where and how they were caught. They must have gone to more than a little effort because I presume it’s from at least two different locations; there’s a couple of Vapourers, which would never cohabit with the Satins and the Underwings. But the real delight for me is a Puss Moth caterpillar that I find all curled up at the bottom of the pile. Now, the Puss Moth is common around here, but it’s still my favorite. It’s the nearest you can get to communicating with a caterpillar. It has a soft coat, zigzagged in green and brown, and when you stroke it, it wriggles and squirms with pleasure. When it gets angry it hisses and waves the two hairlike protrusions on its tail and, if it’s in a real temper, it’ll spit at you.