in silence for a while, before one of them remembers to ask about my first day. I’ll tell them it was fine, talk a little bit about the teachers and my classes and they’ll pretend to listen. As soon as Dad has finished eating, he’ll take what’s left of the wine and go to his study. It used to be Nana’s sewing room. Dad renamed it but he doesn’t do any studying in there, he watches the little TV. Mum will wash up and I’ll sit in the lounge by myself watching the big TV until it’s time for bed. Then, at nine o’clock, Mum will tell me to go upstairs. She sets an alarm to remind herself to do this. Once I’m in bed and they think I’m asleep, they’ll start arguing again. Nana used to sing me a song to help me go to sleep when I was little. ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round.’ I didn’t used to like it, but now I sometimes hum it to myself to drown out the sound of Dad shouting and Mum crying. That’s pretty much my life. I told you it wasn’t as interesting as Anne Frank’s.
I can hear heavy rain, like a relentless army of tiny fingernails tapping on the window, trying to wake me from this bottomless sleep. When each angry drop fails to break the spell, I picture it turning into a tear and crying its way down the glass. I think it must be night, it’s quieter than before. I imagine being able to stand up, walk to the window and reach my hand into the outside, to feel the rain on my skin and look up at the night sky. I long for that and I wonder if I will ever see the stars again. We are all made of flesh and stars, but we all become dust in the end. Best to shine while you can.
I am alone, but I keep hearing Paul’s voice in my head. Hold on. I’m trying to, but things keep slipping from my grasp. I don’t understand why he and Claire were arguing, they’ve always got on so well. My sister is younger than me but has always been one step ahead. I’m told we do look alike, but she is blonde and beautiful and I’m more of a dark-haired disappointing cover artist. She was the new and improved daughter my parents always wanted, they thought she was perfect. So did I at first, but as soon as she arrived into our family, I was forgotten. They never knew her the way I did, they didn’t see what I saw.
I feel myself start to drift away. I fight it for as long as I am able, then, just as I’m about to surrender, the door opens.
I know it’s her.
Claire has always worn the same perfume as our mother; she is a creature of habit. And she always wears too much. I can also smell a subtle waft of her fabric-conditioned clothes as she slowly walks around the room. I expect she’s wearing something fitted and feminine, something far too small for me to squeeze into. I hear her kitten heels tap the floor and wonder what she is looking at. She takes her time. She is alone.
She pulls up a chair and sits down close to the bed, her turn to read to me in mute now. I hear pages being turned sporadically, she came prepared. I can imagine her manicured hands holding the book on her lap. I start to picture my room as a sterile library, and myself as a ghostly librarian who imposes a sentence of silence on all who enter: Shhh! Claire reads fast in real life, so when I don’t hear the pages turn too often, I know she’s just pretending. She’s good at that.
‘I wish our parents were here,’ she says.
I’m glad they’re not.
She wishes they were here for her, not for me. They’d probably think it was my fault, like always. I hear her put the book she’s been pretending to read down and come to stand a little closer. My thoughts get louder until I am forced to listen, but they rush around my head and collide with each other, so I can never stay on one thought long enough to make any sense of it. Claire’s face is so close to mine now that I can taste the coffee on her breath.
‘You still have glass in your hair,’ she whispers.
As soon as her words land in my ears, I feel myself being pulled back quickly. It’s like going through a very long dark tunnel, backwards. I find myself sitting on a high branch of a dead tree, I look down and notice I’m still wearing my hospital gown. I recognise the street beneath my feet, I live near here, I’m almost home. There’s a rumble of a storm in the distance and I can smell burning, but I’m not afraid. I reach out to touch the rain that has started falling, but my hand remains perfectly dry. Everything I see is the darkest shade of black, apart from a tiny light in the distance. I’m so happy to see it, until I realise that it isn’t a star, it’s a headlight. It’s joined by a twin. The wind picks up and I see a car coming down the road towards me, too fast. I look down at the street below and see a little girl wearing a pink, fluffy dressing gown in the middle of the road. She’s singing.
Twinkle twinkle little star . . .
She turns her head up towards me.
How I wonder who you are.
She’s got the words wrong.
Up above the world so sad.
The car is close now, I scream at her to get off the road.
It’s not the drugs. You’re going mad.
It’s only then that I notice she doesn’t have a face.
I watch as the car swerves to avoid her, skids, then smashes into the tree I am sitting in. The force of the impact almost knocks me from the branch, but someone in the distance tells me to hold on. Below me, time has slowed. The little girl laughs uncontrollably and I watch in horror as a woman’s body smashes out of the windscreen. She flies through the air in slow motion, wearing a cape of a thousand shards of glass. Her body lands hard on the street directly below. I look back at the little girl, she’s stopped laughing. She raises her index finger to where her lips should be: Shhh. I look back over at the body of the woman. I know that it’s me down there, but I don’t want to see any more. I close my eyes. Everything is silent, except the car radio, which is still playing Christmas songs from within the twisted metal shell. The music stops abruptly and I hear Madeline’s voice on the crackly airwaves. I sit on my branch and put my hands over my ears, but I can still hear her repeating the same words over and over.
Hello and welcome to Coffee Morning.
Nothing happens by accident.
I start to scream but Madeline’s voice just gets louder. I hear a door open and I fall straight from the tree, back into my hospital bed.
‘I’m back,’ says Paul.
‘I can see that,’ says Claire.
‘Which means you can go now. When I’m here, you’re not. That’s what we agreed.’
‘That’s what you agreed,’ she says. ‘I’m not leaving.’
Claire picks up her discarded book from the end of the bed and sits back down in her chair. Everything is silent for a while, then I hear Paul sit down on the other side of the room. It feels like we stay like this for a very long time. I’m not sure if I’m awake or asleep for all of it, I don’t know if there are moments that I missed. The hours are being stolen from me, episodes I wanted to see deleted before I’ve had a chance to watch.
I hear more voices, new ones. Everyone seems to be talking over each other at first, so that the words get tangled on their way to my ears. I have to concentrate very hard to straighten them out.
‘Mr Reynolds? I’m DCI Jim Handley and this is PC Healey. Could we speak with you outside?’ says a man’s voice from the doorway.
‘Of course,’ says Paul. ‘Is it to do with the accident?’
‘It might be best if we spoke alone,’ says the detective.
‘It’s fine, I’ll go,’ says Claire.
The knot in the pit of my stomach tightens as she exits the room. I hear the door click shut