It was Connie who started the fight. Overtaken by one of the surges of rage that were her last resort in the unending series of skirmishes against Jeanette, she launched herself through the doorway and fell on her sister. The square box of the bulky hearing-aid battery that Jeanette wore strapped to her chest juddered between them. Magazines slithered and tore under their flying feet.
‘It’s not fair. I want the big room. It’s not fair.’
Connie yelled and pummelled her fists, then tried to haul Jeanette up and out of the room. An earpiece dropped from one ear and the wire tangled between them.
Jeanette shouted back, but no words were distinguishable.
‘Listen to me,’ Connie screamed.
At the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf the speech therapist had made little progress with helping Jeanette to talk. When she was upset or angry she gave up the attempt to verbalise and lapsed into shapeless bellowing.
In any case Connie and Jeanette had their own private hostile vocabulary, a shorthand matter of stabbed fingers and sliced-throat gestures that led to full-blown kicks and blows.
‘You sound like a cow mooing,’ Connie screamed. ‘I want this bedroom.’
Jeanette fought harder. Her face swelled close to Connie’s as she hooked her fingers in Connie’s tangled hair and propelled her backwards until her head smashed against the wall. Connie doubled up like a snake and closed her teeth on Jeanette’s upper arm.
The noise brought both parents running, their feet like thunder on the stairs.
Tony caught hold of Connie and hoisted her in the air, her arms pinioned and her feet kicking against nothing. He put his mouth against her ear and his moustache tickled her skin.
‘All right, Con. That’s enough. Calm down. Leave your sister alone now.’
Connie still wriggled and squawked that it wasn’t fair, but the rage was ebbing away. Its departure left her feeling breathless, and confused, and finally soaked in despair. She slumped against Tony’s shoulder, letting out little whimpers of grief. He stroked her hair off her hot face and rocked her against him.
Jeanette’s arm showed a ring of red puncture marks. Hilda pinched the corners of her mouth inwards and went for the first-aid box. She wrung out a hank of cotton wool in a bowl of water clouded with Dettol, and made a performance of disinfecting the tiny wound in front of Connie.
Jeanette’s eyes gleamed with the lustre of martyrdom.
‘Let go of her,’ Hilda said to Tony. He released Connie and Hilda took hold of her by the ear and marched her to the other bedroom.
‘You stay in here, my girl,’ she said.
Connie sat down, back against the wall and knees drawn up, instinctively copying Jeanette. She sat there until teatime, staring at the closed cupboard door, willing the ghosts to
stay where they were and not come shimmering out through the keyhole.
That evening, the first in the new house, Hilda was still only speaking when she had to, even after the tea had been cleared and the plates washed and put away in the unfamiliar cupboards that had already been lined with fresh paper. She shook aspirin out of a brown bottle and swallowed the pills with sips of water, in front of both girls.
‘Your mum’s got one of her bad heads,’ Tony told them.
Jeanette gave Connie a look that said
See? See what you’ve done?
‘Look at the state of this place,’ Hilda sighed. There were cardboard boxes stacked in the kitchen and along the hallway. Connie could see saucepan handles and the blackened underside of the frying pan sticking out of one of them. Everything ordinary looked strange because it was in a different place.
Tony said, ‘We’ve just moved in. There’s plenty of time. Why don’t you have a rest, love?’ But Hilda went on unpacking, wincing every time she stooped to a box. Jeanette sailed up to her bedroom to arrange her books.
Connie hated the thought of the darkness in her room. She had only been able to keep the ghosts in their cupboard in daylight by sheer effort of will. She knew that at night she would never be able to control them.
‘I won’t sleep in there.’
Hilda frowned at her. ‘Yes, you will.’ She massaged her temples and lowered her voice. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Constance.’ It wasn’t the first time Connie had heard her say this, and it always made her wonder whether she had swallowed a wriggling worm by mistake.
‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Connie murmured. She turned to her father. ‘Tell me a story first?’
‘You’re a big girl,’ Hilda said, but Tony had already taken her hand.
‘Come and sit on Dad’s lap, then.’
Hilda looked at him over Connie’s head. ‘Don’t you think I need any help with all this?’
‘Five minutes, love.’
The three-piece suite was in the front room, but put down any old how. They sat down in the old armchair that was wedged up into the bay window, facing out into the new street.
‘Why does Jeanette have the best things always?’
‘She doesn’t, pet.’
‘
I
think she does.’
Tony hesitated. ‘You know your sister’s deaf.’
Connie didn’t understand rhetorical questions. She wondered how Tony could imagine that she might not have noticed. Joseph Barnes School had been a long way away from their old flat, and so they had moved here to be nearer to it. One way or another, Jeanette’s deafness seemed to steer most of the things that happened to all of them.
One of Connie’s earliest and clearest memories was of being in the steamy back kitchen of the old flat, standing on a stool at the sink to splash some dolls’ cups in a bowl of soapy water. She had looked out of the window and down into the branches of a stunted tree that grew over the fence in the next garden. There was a moment’s silence, the only sound the faint popping of bubbles in the sink. Then a bird began singing in the branches of the tree. It was a pure, flute-like sequence of notes that utterly entranced her.
Even as she listened, the knowledge that one day soon she wouldn’t be able to hear this melody fell on her from nowhere. It had the force of a physical blow.
She jumped from her stool and ran to where Hilda was standing at the stove. She wrapped her arms round her mother’s knees and hid her face in her apron. Even then, she could feel that Hilda didn’t yield to the touch, or offer
a comforting pillow of flesh. Her arms bent under pressure and her back formed an angle, but they soon sprang back to their unbent positions.
‘I won’t hear the birds,’ Connie howled through her sobs, folds of apron stuffing her mouth.
‘What’s the matter? What are you talking about?’
‘I won’t hear the
birds
. Will I? When I’m deaf?’
Hilda took hold of Connie’s shoulders.
‘Don’t be silly. Jeanette’s deaf, not you.’
‘Won’t I be, when I’m big?’
Hilda shook her head. ‘No. You won’t. You’re just an ordinary little girl.’
This was how Constance learned that deafness wasn’t something that happened automatically to children in her family.
From about that time, whenever she looked at her sister a feeling that seemed bigger than herself had pumped through Connie. It was her first experience of pity and sympathy, and it was mixed with relief that she wasn’t going to be like her after all, and with guilt for being relieved.
She didn’t confess what she felt even to Tony – how could she explain what she didn’t properly understand herself?
It was just that plenty of people, not only Hilda, already made an extra fuss of Jeanette. Mrs Dix in the newsagent’s gave her a pink lipstick that came off the front of a magazine, and when Hilda took them to buy new shoes the shop man brought out half the pairs in the back room for her to try on. It took so long for her to choose that Connie had to have the same style as the old ones she had grown out of, which meant nobody could see they were brand-new. It wasn’t fair, even though Jeanette was deaf and Connie felt sorry for her.
Tony shifted Connie’s weight on his lap and hugged her tighter. ‘You know your sister’s deaf,’ he repeated. ‘Yes?’
Connie picked at one of the tiny brown looped threads in the arm of the chair. She tucked her head under Tony’s chin and gave the smallest nod.
‘It’s hard for her. She’s going to have difficulties in her life that you never will. We have to make allowances for her. It’s hard for your mum, too.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Jeanette inherited her deafness from Mum’s family.’
‘How?’
‘These things get passed down, from mothers to their babies. Like Martin’s hair, which is the same as his mum’s hair, isn’t it?’
Martin was a boy Connie knew from her old school – the one she wouldn’t be going to any more because it was too far from Echo Street. Martin and his mother both had hair the colour of the nasturtiums that grew in the front garden in Barlaston Road.
‘How do you get babies?’
‘Ask your mum about that. Do you want this story or not?’
‘Yes. Tell me about when you were little. About the milkman.’
Tony wasn’t good at making things up, but he often told her about what East London had been like when he was growing up. Connie loved these stories.
‘Oh, the milkman. In our street he had a little blue cart with a canvas canopy, and an old grey horse to pull the cart. The horse’s name was Nerys, and in the summer she’d have a bunch of cornflowers tied to her bridle. The coal used to come in sacks on the back of a wagon, and then the coal man carried the sacks on his back and tipped them into the cellars of the houses through a hole in the pavement. He had a leather coat with studs on the back of it,
so it didn’t wear out so fast from the heavy sacks rubbing on it all day long. Another man used to come up from Gravesend with fresh fish off the trawlers to sell door to door. He’d say, “Lovely fish, Mrs Thorne. Lovely fresh herring.”’
Tony was good at doing the voices. Connie pressed her ear closer against his shirt-front because she liked the way his voice seemed to come from deep inside his chest. She could hear the steady rhythm of his heart, too. She didn’t know then how finite was the number of those beats.
Connie opened her eyes. The train crept past Battersea Power Station and made a sighing arrival at Victoria. Announcements washed over her head. She lifted her small bag, dodging the sharp corners and wheels of other people’s luggage, and let the surge of passengers carry her off the train and into the thick of London. Only a taxi ride separated her from home. A version of home.
It was three months since she had last been in her apartment.
From the front door she could see that there was dust on all the glass surfaces and dead flies speckling the white floor. The air smelled as if it had been hot too many times; all the moisture it had ever held had been leached out of it. Connie’s lips and the backs of her hands smarted with dehydration from the long flight. She walked down the white corridor to her bathroom and turned on the shower and all the taps. She breathed in the steam, stripped off her creased clothes and stood under the spray until she felt clean again. Then, without giving herself time to think, she wrapped herself in a towel and padded back to the main room.
When she and Seb had shared this tall white space, they had given parties for musicians and composers and cooked dinners for the loose network of their shared friends, but nowadays she rarely asked anyone to come here. It was quiet enough, she thought, to hear the dust settle.
She stood for a moment at the window that ran the length of one wall, staring out at the view. The apartment was on the top floor and she could see a broad sweep of the city from Canary Wharf tower all the way west to the dome of St Paul’s. There were different cranes positioned like storks over new developments, but everything else was the same. London glinted weakly under a dirty sky.
Connie’s desk faced the view. She stared out at the towers and the brown streets, knowing that she was delaying the moment.
She made herself open the address book that lay next to the telephone, and looked up Jeanette’s number. She hadn’t committed it to memory; she had hardly ever used it.
They never saw each other, but Jeanette’s massive presence was always there like a headland jutting out into the sea. Jeanette was the only person left in the world who knew the same things that Connie knew from long ago, and Connie held her sister’s memories furled tight within her in just the same way.
It was
unthinkable
that Jeanette was going to die.
Connie realised that she had made the headlong journey from Bali as if she believed she could do something to change that.
She pressed the buttons of the handset. Her heart was thumping as if she were running for her life.
She listened to the ringing tone. Another thought rushed in on her, one she had been keeping at bay by holding Jeanette in the forefront of her mind.
In a second or two I’ll hear his voice.
Because Jeanette wouldn’t answer. She never went anywhere near the telephone.
If anyone picked up, it would be him.
It was almost fifteen years ago, now.
Connie went to a party in a newly completed glass tower in Docklands. There had been a view not unlike the one that faced her now.
One of the advertising agencies was moving out there, with a big fanfare to announce to the known world that a building site east of the City was the new Soho.
She looked past a group of chattering account people and clients and with a shock saw Bill watching her from across the room.
She put down her glass and went to him.
‘You look very beautiful tonight,’ he said.
There were shadows under his eyes, and he had been drinking.
‘Hello, Bill.’
‘We don’t often run into each other, do we? I am here because I have the privilege of handling the PR account for TotalTime TV. What about you?’
‘One of the creative heads at the agency is a very close and dear acquaintance of mine.’
‘Small world. And are you here with…’ his eyes scanned the room ‘…Sam?’
Connie and Sam had split up years ago.
‘No. I’m not here with anyone.’
They turned to each other, as if there was no one else in the room, as if there was finally no other move they could make but this one.