The Waiting List (Strong Women Book 5)

by Sarah Till

  We had already begun to write down our wishes and place them in the jar. Charlotte repeated what she had written on her slip.

  “I wish for a boyfriend with blond, curly hair. Then, when we are married, we can have babies with blond, curly hair.”

  I nodded.

  “Yes. And I wish for a boyfriend with brown hair and brown eyes so my babies will have brown hair and brown eyes.”

  She stared at me.

  “No. If I have babies you won't. Don't copy, Clem. Don't copy.”

  She had thrown her wish into the jar and slammed on the lid before I had a chance to put my wish slip in. The door slammed and she was gone. I remember wondering, perhaps for the first time, why I shouldn't have the same as her. Why was she so special? Why did she have everything and I always got the leftovers? Later that evening, I made a cave under my covers and switched on my torch. I took my sketchpad and my coloured pencils and I drew them. Me, a dark-haired, faceless husband and our children, a boy and a girl. Charlotte was still in a mood with me and didn't ask what I was doing. When she had finished reading, she switched off the light without asking. For the first time, I felt that I could survive without her. I had my torch and my husband and children.

  One week later, I moved into my own room. Mum told me that Charlotte needed her own space now she was going to secondary school and I was settled into the spare room. I took to it immediately, loving the solitude and in no way yearning for my sister’s company. Life became more relaxed for me in the extended hours she was at school. I could do as I pleased, no weddings, no endless chat about preferences where I was bullied into an opposite position. I began to dream my own dreams, still marriage-based, still in Charlotte's detailed format yet with my own diversions. It was then that I made my first list. It was written in a ring-bound jotter in felt-tip pen and I considered it a work of art. There were ten items that my ideal boyfriend should have. I was still too afraid to choose blond, sporty boys, the best I could do was light brown-haired horse-lover. I'd noticed my cousin Jason's huge feet and found them weird, so the foot thing was on my list even then. Brown eyes, tall, slim, jolly, can sing. Lots of appearance criteria. But I was only eleven. Charlotte never knew about my lists. I kept them hidden on purpose, only getting them out when she wasn't there.

  As we entered our teens, things changed. We became more like friends and she wouldn't order me about so much. She clearly had better things to do, with her records, homework and her friends taking priority over her sister. Boys and girls would call round and whisk her away, with her returning only on the very cusp of her deadline. Of course, I had friends too, but mine were more girly-night-in types who were interested in talking about makeup and pop stars. Real boys scared us and if we did go out, we hung around in groups, guarding our outer perimeter against male intrusion. I had a few crushes but when they became obvious, Charlotte would intervene and charm the boy away with her superior confidence and longer eyelashes. She was like a witch who could immediately capture anyone I had contact with and entrance them.

  I'd seen her. I'd seen her with different boys around the corner. My bedroom window looked out onto the back of the house, and she would stand against the bushes behind our back garden with them. By the time she was fourteen, she was spending every night of the week up against the bushes, their wandering hands in my clear view as I peeped through the lace curtains. The same type of lace curtains we had played weddings with, except these were grown-up games she was playing. I would watch her, kissing them passionately, feeling them, them feeling her, hands becoming invisible inside clothes. I began to feel what was now an all too familiar tingle between my legs, something that then I didn't know how to deal with, an aching that made me want to kiss someone myself. For me, it was a battle between the kiss and confidence, so it never came to the kiss.

  Six months before she went out, we had a conversation in her bedroom. She had noticed that I now had breasts and she passed on one of her bras to me.

  “Put it on. Go on. Try it on.”

  It was a white, lacy, underwired affair with a pink rose on it. I reluctantly took off my shirt and pink vest and strained it over my chest. Charlotte's face became redder and redder. I thought she was embarrassed and I blushed, too.

  “What's wrong? Char? What is it?”

  “You're bigger than me. It must be fat. Puppy fat.” She went to the door and shouted.

  “Mum! Mum!”

  Seconds later, Mum came in wiping her hands on a tea towel. She took in the scene, Charlotte's angry face and my half-naked body.

  “What is it, love?”

  “It's her. I gave her one of my bras and it won’t fit her. She needs to go on a diet.”

  Mum looked confused.

  “I don't think she does, Charlotte, love. People are different shapes. Clementine's just grown a bit, that's all, and you'll catch up. All right, girls?”

  We nodded and she left. Charlotte turned on me.

  “No wonder all the boys are after you, staring at you. Talking about you.”

  I blushed redder. This time with fury.

  “Well, at least I don't shag them behind the bushes. Like you.”

  “You've been watching me, you pervert. Get your kicks that way, do you?”

  She snatched the bra from me and I crossed my arms across my chest.

  “Everyone can see you, Charlotte. If I can see you, so can everyone.”

  I quickly pulled on my shirt and went to leave her room. She caught my arm and squeezed it until it hurt.

  “You'd better not tell.” Her nails bit into my arms and I saw a tiny stripe of blood trickle down and drop on the carpet. “Or else.”

  I left and she slammed the door shut. The next day was if none of it had ever happened. Mum bought me a bra and Charlotte kicked me under the table at dinner when they asked her who she was going out with. I thought about what she had said the night before. She hadn't denied anything. I knew she was having sex.

  My visits to Charlotte's room became rarer. She went out a lot and I had friends round and soon we only saw each other at family mealtimes. I didn't watch her from my bedroom window in case she saw me and doled out more punishment. I noticed that she had grown rounder and somehow her face had changed slightly. She eventually started to stay out all weekend and Mum and Dad didn't seem to mind. I wasn't entirely sure if they’d noticed she had gone, but I was too scared to say anything in case it alerted them to her having sex and she found out. I'd continued to dream about my perfect man. As I matured, I added more abstract concepts to my list, such as money and a sense of humour.

  I remember thinking carefully about being someone's first, losing my virginity. Somehow, sex mattered a lot to me even then, and the feelings I experienced in relation to this made me breathless and hot. I fantasised about how it would be and resisted, waiting for my first time patiently and secretly thinking of this as revenge on my perfect, already sexually active sister.

  The day she went out, we had spent a rare hour together in her room. She had passed on some makeup and a pair of shoes she had bought with her Saturday job money. She had spent the whole time lying on her bed in a reclining pose, and at the time, I thought she was being pretentious. Nothing about her seemed odd, nothing to suggest that soon she would be gone.

  “Try this, Clem. It'll match your eyes.”

  I let her rub the blue eyeshadow onto my lids and brush on some bright blue mascara. I lay beside her on the bed and for the first time I felt relaxed with her. She seemed to have somehow mellowed. She didn't really say much, but she gave me some items in a bag; shoes, clothes, make-up. We had chatted about her friends, the girls she had been around in her school life. I asked her what she was thinking of doing when she left school and she rolled her eyes upwards and told me Mum and Dad wanted her to go to university, that she would study English language. I never doubted a word she said. After about an hour, I had left her room. She had never said goodbye to me, she never even flinched or moved, just lay on the bed.


  The next day, when she had been gone twenty-four hours, the police came to question me. I remember thinking that it was unnecessary as she would be back soon and all would be back to normal. The policewoman had asked me if I had thought anything had been strange about Charlotte. Had she seemed distracted? Had she made a fuss of saying goodbye? Had she said anything cryptic? Had I noticed anything strange or different about her behaviour? I told them that she had been normal that afternoon, perfectly normal. There had been nothing strange about her behaviour. It was only in later years that I realised that, although her behaviour had been normal for any other person, there was something that stood out on that day. It was the first time that we had spent any amount of time together and she hadn't bullied me. I should have noticed at the time and told the police that she had been abnormally nice to me, but it was such a relief that she had treated me normally that I hadn't wanted to break the spell, and I also thought they wouldn’t understand.

  In hindsight, now, I realised that I should have told my parents about the bullying and about the sex. But, before I'd been too scared and afterwards it just seemed like I was rubbing salt into an open wound. It was too late for that now. I shook her from my mind, an illusionary version of my sister where I'd joined the dots of my scattered memories. She would have inevitably changed into someone I didn't know, and tomorrow I would find out who she had turned into.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Next morning, I was up and about early. I drove over to parents’ house around nine-thirty and parked up outside. Dad peered through the curtains and then appeared at the door.

  “Morning. Early bird catches the worm.”

  I walked past him into the lounge. Mum had abandoned her rubber tyre and sat on the sofa. A smile broke out when she saw me and she reminded me of an excited child. She had a blue suitcase beside her on the sofa.

  “Clem. Are we ready? Oh, my tummy feels all funny. I got these out so you could have a look.”

  She opened the suitcase and started to remove the contents, so I sat beside her and looked at them, afraid to touch. There were photographs, mostly from school, of me and Charlotte. There were lots of pictures of Charlotte on her own, and with Mum and Dad. Charlotte's school reports. Pictures she had painted as a child. Friendship bands she had woven, and a hairbrush, the head carefully wrapped in a polythene bag. Newspaper cuttings from when she had gone out and afterwards. The digitised time-enhanced pictures. A sock also wrapped in a polythene bag. She delved deeper and held up the prize.

  “This is her hair. You know, when she had it cut, I kept some of it.” She stroked the bag. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

  I looked at Dad. He was wringing his hands frantically. The box held a small universe of Dad, Mum and Charlotte, where I had disappeared somewhere around the age of twelve. There was no trace of me in the box after then. It was as if part of their lives had filtered off at a tangent, to be contained in a small blue suitcase.

  “Look, Mum, can we go? I need to get this over with.”

  “Yes. Let's go. I've cleaned that kitchen from top to bottom. Do you think she'll want to come back here for something to eat?”

  “I don't know. Let’s get the first bit over with. Are you ready?”

  She stared at me. Her features were soft and she gently took my hand. It felt strange to have her touch me.

  “Thanks for doing this, Clem. You know it means the world to me. We'll be one big family again, won't we? Won't we?”

  She looked from me to Dad and back again.

  “I don't know, Mum. What if it's not her?”

  “But it is, Clem. You've seen her. Are you suggesting that I don’t know my own daughter? My own child?”

  “No, Mum, but we have to be prepared for anything.”

  “I know. I know. But I've been waiting here for this for sixteen years.” She pulled out a ream of paper from her bag and thrust it at me. “These lists. Everyone whose body's been found since the day she went out. Every single person.”

  The early lists were handwritten and contained scrawled details of the descriptions of the body found. Sometimes complex but often just male or female. Later lists were typed and contained common features such as hair colour and eye colour. There was a box on the top for a description of the situation in which the body had been found and a box at the bottom for the name when identified. As I flicked through, hundreds of names of missing people flashed before me, a population of disappeared family members, their lives suspended in the grief of loss. The families had been left behind to make sense of it, to grapple with the microscopic speculation of every aspect of their lives. Only a few of Mum's lists lay in the 'solved' section of the file. Many of the old, scrawled lists sat at the bottom of the file, the paper thin and old like the face of someone you can only just recall. The newer ones retained a sharp crispness, like a new memory before it degrades. Charlotte's list lay on top.

  “Why are you putting yourself through this, Mum? You're stuck somewhere where you can never get on with your life. Can't you let it go?” I thought of my own lists and my own Timorial. And of Tim's Caroshrine. Now Mum's Charbox. “Could you try not doing it for a while?”

  “Not doing it? I can't bloody help when the news tells us about someone who's been murdered and buried somewhere, can I? What am I supposed to do, ignore it? Don't you see it and wonder if it's Charlotte? Don't you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. But I don't speculate, making a case out of each one, stopping time and just waiting until the name matches.”

  I thought about my own waiting list. That was exactly what I was doing. Collecting the hours and minutes I spent giving my all to the wrong person. Filing them away until the right name came up to match my list.

  “You're not a mother, though, are you? You can't ever know how I feel about Charlotte.”

  “You're my Mum as well though.”

  “Yes. But you're like him.” She nodded in Dad's direction. “You're nothing like me. Charlotte was almost my double. Not just in looks, but in personality. You're nothing like me.”

  Tears stung my eyes but Dad just seemed to be studying the pattern on the carpet.

  “I'm more like you than you think. A lot more.”

  She threw the memories roughly into the Charbox and slammed the lid shut.

  “Well, it won't matter after today, will it? I'll have my little girl back and it'll all be back to normal, won't it?”

  She went upstairs and I looked at Dad.

  “But it won't, will it? Everything will change.”

  He nodded.

  “Yes. It will all change. She doesn't mean it, you know.”

  The tears that had welled up in my eyes had escaped onto my cheeks, and I rubbed them sideways to avoid smudging my mascara.

  “It hurts though, Dad. It’s as if she doesn't care about me. She's cold. The only thing that matters is Charlotte.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, Clem. Believe me, I've had sixteen years of it. We've had our moments, few and far between, but we haven't been happy for a long time. But, make the best of a bad job. Yep. Make do and mend.”

  He stalked into the back garden and I watched as he went into his shed and shut the door. Great. Not only was my sister about to reappear with the man I loved but now my parents were on the brink of divorce. I sat down next to the Charbox and opened the lid. It really was crammed to the brim with everything Charlotte. She had loved pink and black together, even down to her shoelaces. Mum had kept the laces from her trainers. I supposed that if I hadn't been cast in the role of abandoned sister, the contents of the box would be heart-breaking. The remnants of someone's life, all that was left of a day to day happiness, of just being with a person. Then they are gone, leaving a hole where they used to be. The impossibility of not being able to see them embossed on the lives of those who knew them. Like Mum and Dad. And like me. I held the shoelaces between my finger and thumb and wondered what it would be like later today, when we had found her again and plugged the gap.

&nbs
p; Mum reappeared, made-up and combed, as if nothing had just happened. As if she hadn't just discarded her relationship with me and passed me over to Dad. I guessed I would just have to understand. She was about to get her beloved daughter back.

  “Come on then. Let's go.”

  She strode to the door and Dad appeared from around the side of the house. We silently got into my car, Dad squashed in the back and Mum in the front. It was an eerie atmosphere, almost charged, as I drove to Carlisle Crescent. When we arrived, I parked right outside number four. I could see the curtains were open and a lamp was on. I turned off the engine and looked at Mum.

  “Ready?”

  She stared straight ahead.

  “Yes.”

  We got out silently and filed up the path. I took the initiative and knocked loudly. Almost immediately, a shadow filled the crinkled glass and the door opened. Caroline, the woman from the pictures in Tim's back bedroom, stood in front of me in close-up. Except it was Charlotte. Face to face I could see the features, so similar to my own, the shape of the eyebrows, the Clooney clump gathered upright at the end of the right brow. The soft line of her mouth, her wide eyes and heart-shaped hairline. Everything that had sat opposite me at the dinner table. The first person I'd seen in the mornings for fifteen years of my life. It was her. She raised her hand and brushed a stray hair away and the dolphin tattoo catapulted me back into the present. Her eyes darted from Mum to me to Dad.

  “What do you want?”

  Mum rushed forward but Charlotte held out her arm and gave a little cry.

  “Charlotte. It's me, love. Your Mum. Oh, Charlotte, we've missed you.”

  I watched her closely. Her eyes were cold and her face expressionless.

  “I've no idea what you are talking about. I'm Caroline Simmons. I think you're mistaken.”

  She went to close the door but I stopped her with my arm.

  “I know it's you. Why are you doing this?”

  Tim appeared behind her, all sleepy eyes and bedheaded. He saw me and I was shocked at the familiarity. He obviously thought I was there to persecute him and spoke slowly.