In the morning he asked me to get hold of my sister, and so I said I would, although I had an address but no phone number. It turned out her number was unlisted, but it wasn’t that difficult to find Sheila’s number in London and so I called her and broke the news about Mum. She was silent, and then when I asked her if she was coming to the funeral she simply said “yes.” When, two days later, she turned up with her friend, it took all my self-control to stop myself from saying something to my younger sister. Now was not the time to be introducing Dad to such lifestyle choices, for he was fragile enough as it was. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been more angry, but luckily Dad was too grief-stricken to notice what Sheila had done. My so-called husband Brian played the role of peacemaker, and somehow we all survived the funeral. And then Dad started to get worse. His ailments seemed to all flare up together. The chest from all the years on the pipe. Then his hips, which had long been riddled with arthritis, went from bad to worse, and then finally his eyes started to mist over with glaucoma. Six months after we buried Mum he had become so bad that he couldn’t go to the toilet, or take a bath, or do much of anything by himself. To start with, I was travelling up from Birmingham and spending every weekend with him, but his doctor finally told me that unless we got a nurse he’d have to go into a home. So I asked the doctor to be honest with me and say how long he’d got left. He knotted his fingers together and said maybe a year, but probably less, and so we arranged for a retired midwife to live in the spare room. Soon Dad couldn’t leave his bed, but he still made the poor woman’s life miserable, even going so far as to tell her that he didn’t believe in good women, only women who lived under the influence of good men.
Less than a year after Mum went, he passed away in his sleep, and the sour-faced midwife made a performance out of leaving the house before his body was even cold. Again, I telephoned my sister, and this time I got her answering machine and left a message, but I heard nothing. I wasn’t surprised, and if truth be told I was somewhat relieved that I would be spared a rerun of Sheila’s selfishness. It had been her own wilful decision to leave home at seventeen, and for nearly thirty years Mum and Dad had hardly had any contact with her. It was something they’d reluctantly learned how to deal with, and they’d become well schooled in the practice of deflecting questions, telling half-truths and hiding their grief. Mum, in particular, seemed to suffer. Sheila’s rejection of them both, and her determination to live her own life in the south, caused Mum to retreat even further from people and conversation. Mum began to eat by herself, and there was something deeply painful about seeing her sitting alone with her Bible and her face furrowed in lonely concentration. Dad had argued any real faith out from under me, but Mum still believed, although she didn’t bother with actually going to church. I used to wonder if things might have been better for her if I could have given her some little ones to be proud of, but I soon came to realise that nothing would help. Mum had lost her youngest daughter, and even the blessing of grandchildren wouldn’t have begun to compensate for this loss. Dad, on the other hand, continued to rail about every subject under the sun, but the one subject he refused to take on was that of our Sheila.
Over the years, whenever I’d returned home I always knew that I could find him in his shed. I’d go down past the old cottages, then across the wasteland till I came to the patchwork quilt of allotments, with their turnips and runner beans laid out in obedient rows. He’d be there sucking on his pipe and bemoaning the fact that we were giving up our English birthright and getting lost in a United States of Europe, or the fact that one never sees men in collars and ties on Sundays, or expressing his continued astonishment that ordinary folk could have any respect for the memory of Churchill, a man who during the 1926 General Strike had, as Dad had been telling me since I was a small child, referred to the workers as “the enemy.” I would listen, knowing that I would never hear a word from either him, or Mum, about Sheila, but everything about their behaviour suggested a profound pain at having failed to hold on to one of their two children. It was, of course, easier for me; she was my younger sister, and although I missed having her in my life, I didn’t depend upon her in any way. I never had.
The young man who is weeding among the tombstones recognises me. We have one of those “nod and a wave” relationships. He seems to enjoy his work, or at least he never complains about it, which surprises me. I’m so used to young people who either don’t want to work, or who make it clear that although they are working they are doing so reluctantly. This young man’s work ethic seems to have been born in an earlier generation. In fact, he dresses as though he were from an earlier generation, with his flat cap and big boots. I stand and look down at my parents, their names freshly picked out with a wet cloth. I can feel the young man’s eyes upon me, and it suddenly occurs to me to ask him if he’s ever seen anybody else standing here looking at Mum and Dad. Maybe Sheila has visited out of some vaguely remembered sense of duty, choosing her times to coincide with my absences. For a moment I toy with the idea, but the truth is Sheila would never bother to cultivate such cunning. Not my Sheila, the seventeen-year-old girl who ran away from home while I was at university, and who showed up penniless on my doorstep. Once I’d recovered from the shock of opening the door on Sheila and her lopsided grin, I asked her in. She left her rucksack by the door and sat down on the edge of my single bed.
“Where have you been, Sheila? You look like a cat dragged you backwards through a hedge.”
She stared at the Jean-Luc Godard poster on my wall and said nothing, so I made her a cup of tea and waited for her to speak. I had concert practice that evening, but I knew that I wasn’t going to make it. While the tea was brewing I quickly excused myself and dashed down the dormitory corridor. I slipped a note under my friend Margaret’s door. I didn’t feel like explaining anything to anybody, so a note was easier. I told Margaret that something had come up, which it had, and that they would have to manage without me tonight. I hurried back to my room and closed the door behind me, then locked it. Sheila didn’t look up. I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help but notice how much bigger on her chest she’d become. I poured us both a cup of tea and then sat next to my sister, ready to talk. But she wasn’t ready to talk, and her eyes began to fill with tears that eventually spilled out and ran down her gaunt cheeks.