The Trouble with my Sister
I don't remember the time when my parents delightedly showed me my baby sister. I remember seeing all the photos of us very little and I was smiling and affectionate, and she is not. Even though I was barely 9 months older than her I had it pressed into me I was supposed to look after "your baby sister".
The first "slight" she can remember was before we were three. She was whining to go on the roundabout, she whined the whole time I was on it. So I got off the roundabout and placed her on it. Then I turned on my heel and went home. I do not remember where my parents were or why as children under three we were entirely alone outside of the house in a small park near the common.
Even after the age of 30 my sister had not forgiven me for this childish abandonment.
It wasn't a nice thing to do, but I was tiny child, with no parent around to look after us.
My sister detested being "the baby" and while nothing I ever did was "good enough" my sister could do no wrong, at least no wrong that was punished.
She was a whiny bratty child that did as she pleased and my father didn't much like that but was not often allowed to parent. When he did, he would lose his temper.
I remember her at the farm face down on the hood of his car getting a thrashing. This would be the pattern. She was wind people up, refuse to do anything, whine and sulk for hours until my parents snapped and acted out violently.
Still she was my best friend, my closest ally, and I was sort of her nurse maid. If she wet the bed, I would change the sheets, put down towels. If she had a bad dream I would soothe her back to sleep. If my step-dad and mum fought I would hide her behind me, after I gathered all the sharp knives.
She was the only person I told my darkest secret to.
I had crawled into my mother and step-dad's bed. My mother had got up and my step-dad asked me to "get a hold of that 'eld one" (old one) and pushed his genitals into my tiny hand. I can still recall the smell of him of Golden Virginia rolling tobacco, cheap whisky and man-stink.
I felt confused and sick and weird. I only told my sister.
I don't remember how long passed before we were sat in my father tiny Ealing flat. His bright sunny kitchen with a table cloth of gingham and a large round clock above the cooker. I father's striped dressing gown almost falling open as he adjusted himself for our shared breakfast.
"You don't want to see that!"
My father beamed.
"Lucy's already seen one of those," with a big grin.
Time slowed down and I remember staring intently at a crumb on the blue square of the tablecloth. I burned with shame and betrayal. The ticking of the clock made me uncomfortable with the noise for years to come.
Slowly I begin to explain what happened.
My sister wasn't grinning any more.
The police came and I told my story over and over. In the end I was too young to go to court. I was an "unreliable witness".
I remember being in an old fashioned train carriage as my mother ranted and raved. My sister and I exchanged a look. The look pleaded, "don't tell her it was me".
I tightened my lips and let the vile torrent of abuse against me and my father continue. I never did tell her. The dynamic between my sister and I got weirder. If I did something "wrong" I was swiftly and viciously punished, my mistake used like a weapon to beat me with over and over. If my sister did the same thing it was either ignored or we were both punished "because your the eldest and you should know better".
I because nursemaid, whipping boy, and on occasion punching bag. She couldn't play my games, and when we played hers she either won, or table flipped. I never wanted to be seen as competitive if that was what competitive was.
I wanted to die. I was eight years old. I was about that age when my mother told my sister to stop kicking me "because social services will think I'm battering her." I was about eight when I started judo, my sister insisted though she was under age to join too. Of course she excelled at it.
When puberty kicked in her favourite trick was to punch me repeatedly in the same tender breast. This went on weeks until my mother kindly asked her to stop "or you might make her deformed". My mother had all but given up disciplining her. If I was grounded I was grounded for two weeks straight, she barely had to do three days. When I asked her about this she said it was because "she was just too annoying to have in the house".
This was her way, she manipulated people either by making them want to do things for her by charming them or by making them fear her.
My sister got in a couple of fights at school but never got in trouble. The only time I did was with her.
She would spend hours baiting me, torturing me, poking and prodding, until I snapped. I spent a lot of my time avoiding my sister, but for the most part we were made to share a room. She could make anybody crazy. She re-named me h'Ugly, for a whole year. She played Shakin' Stevens at me hour after hour after hour. I had a whole list of things that were not "allowed" in my room so I had to keep them on a window sill on a landing. It was an altar before I knew what that meant. If she was asleep and you woke her she would swing for you, she was never in trouble for this. She would practice her choke holds, sometimes until I almost blacked out.
Even my mother would joke about how she would have "made the Pope swear". The C.I.A or MI6 would have loved her as an interrogator. Maybe that is what she does, she does work for the Government. She takes pleasure in hurting others.
She was nicer after she started her serious judo training. Having a different punching bag seemed to mellow her a little. She got a boyfriend and it was all consuming, the way it is as a fifteen year olds are prone to do. It ended badly and something happened to her, it was like she promised herself no-one would ever hurt her like that again. She and my bitter divorced mother of forty plus were the same amount of jaded. It was like the tiny amount of light that was in her was extinguished. She revelled in the darkness of it. She no longer needed to hide her cruelty. Except when she need to charm someone.
I suppose it had the opposite effect on me. It made me very aware of the masks and insincerity of people.
I got into a relationship just as I turned eighteen. It wasn't a good relationship but it was "away" and better than home. In fact my first year of university aside (that's a shit-sandwich for another day) my sister was the reason I moved out.
She did what she does, she prodded and poked me until I was so furious, so incandescent with rage rather than hit her, which was what she wanted, I walked out. I walked twelve miles in that rage, my hapless teenage fiancee in tow.
To this day I don't know why she did it. He was a pretty shitty guy but why attack me? She became the wedge that drove me and my mother ever further apart.
I never lived with her or my family again, I was just nineteen. There were a couple of times that we almost got reconciled and then she would do or say something truly awful and it was destroyed again.
I meet Ken and got married, she was my witness and I even gave my daughter her name as a middle name. Yet a less than a year later she is on the phone to me tell me I have "ruined my life" by getting married and having a family. That I was a "disappointment" and my life was now "a waste".
Some people think those things of young parents ( I was twenty two) but nobody says them.
Six days after we buried our youngest daughter she takes the carefully constructed trifle I had made in it's cut glass bowl I had borrowed, topped with silver balls and sprinkles for the Christmas dinner for my living daughter out of the fridge and takes a spoon and ate it from the fridge.
I sort can see into the kitchen while she is doing this. She looks at me, and gives me the "what are you going to do about it?" look as she does so. I think I just stood there for a moment; mouth agape. Then I go and pick up the frying pan that is on the hob and put it down. I pick it up again, then put it down. I go out and take some air. My mother comes out and starts making her usual excuses.
Something broke in me, that night. A thread, a connection to both of them.
It wouldn't be the last time she pulled this stunt, she used it to ruin the relationship between me and my father too.
After telling me that marriage and babies was a "waste of my life" I shouldn't be surprised I wasn't invited to her wedding in Cuba. Neither should I have been surprised that when she struggled with fertility she told me I "should be glad I had a child that died".
I didn't think she could have ever hurt me more. I thought it impossible.
Yet when she told all the staff at the hospital where my mother lay dying that she was sole next of kin, and I was asking what was happening to her they said "you will have to ask the family".
In that moment I was that eight year old child again, in so much pain she wanted to die.
She threatened people so thoroughly I could not find anyone willing to tell me when and where my mothers funeral was. My daughter couldn't go to her grand mothers funeral. Even in death she kept us apart. She pulled the same stunt when my father died six months later. She called the police on me. Even though I have more legal right than she to know the when and where, and have access to his body. I even told the officer (whose tone changed drastically) "I suppose she did the damsel in distress did she? Big bad sister, trying to take advantage? I bet she didn't tell you she stopped me from attending my mother's funeral? Or that is what she is trying to do with my father?"
She won of course.
That's she does, win or flip over the table. She still has not produced or sort out my mother or father's estate. My father had a will, and it has not been submitted to the right authorities. It's been a year.
In the truest purest sense my sister is dead. She is still breathing as far as I know, but that girl, the one I sang and soothed back to sleep, is dead. It is an odd thing to lose your whole family. To have nothing from them save your bad sinuses, dodgy left ankle and auto immune disorder, it sort of feels like panic, like you have lost your handbag, with all of the things that identify you as you.
I have been wrestling with my pain and my anger. Trying to refuse to allow that final twist of the knife. She is the product of a strange childhood, one that distorted and hurt her too. She was so very different than me. She couldn't imagine, literally can't do it, which is a real thing that happens. She couldn't play my games, couldn't empathise, couldn't read and be transported into a whole different life.
I pity her. All that money and power, all that important career, all that and she has no idea what it is like to imagine better; or enjoy getting lost in a book riding dragons soaring above the world.
The precious joy of being "mum".
