When I Had a Little Sister

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Catherine Simpson 2019

Family tree © Martin Brown

Catherine Simpson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image by kind permission of the author

All images supplied by the author, from her family collection. While every effort has been made to trace owners of third party copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008301675

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008301651

Version: 2020-03-03

Dedication

For

Cello

Nina & Lara

Mum, Dad

Elizabeth & Tricia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Tree

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Family Tree

New House Farm, the Simpson family home since 1925

Chapter One

Saturday 7th December 2013, late afternoon

I peer into the bathroom and from here the room looks like a tableau with the main character removed. On the wooden floor is a striped mug half-full of cold coffee. I move closer and see the milk cold and pale, risen to the top. Beside the mug is a packet of opened cigarettes, not Tricia’s usual baccy and Rizla papers, and next to that her blue plastic lighter. There are four floating dog-ends in the toilet bowl.

It is dark outside and gloomy in, and the house is filled with a terrible quiet.

Tricia must have sat on the bathroom floor with her back to the radiator long enough to smoke four cigarettes, dragging hard, taking the smoke deep into her lungs and holding it, holding it, for long seconds at a time, before blowing it out of the side of her mouth, eyes squint, then when she’d got down to the filters grinding out the butts and dropping them in the toilet bowl one after the other. She was smoking in the bathroom to help her cut down – she had banned herself from smoking anywhere else in the house because she wanted to be healthy.

On the night she died she was still trying to be healthy.

When did she decide to die? Was it before midnight on Friday the 6th, because she couldn’t face another night, or was it before dawn on Saturday the 7th, because she couldn’t face another day?

Did she think about us? Did she think about her dog, Ted, or her cat, Puss, sleeping on Grandma Mary’s old sofa in the conservatory and who would be waiting for her to feed them in the morning? What about her horses in the stable – Billy and Sasha – who she called her ‘babies’? Did she think about them? Did she imagine Dad finding her? It would have to be Dad, after all. It couldn’t be anyone else.

Did she know what she was doing?

Saturday 7th December 2013, earlier that day

A late start for the Christmas shopping. I call a friend and say let’s not bother buying for each other this year – I need to simplify. I’m tired; only back a day or two from a trip with my elder sister, Elizabeth, and 87-year-old father to the First World War battlefields at Ypres to see where my grandad fought in 1917. We’d planned it for Dad – he’d always wanted to go. We thought it would give him time away from the farm and be a break from worrying about our younger sister, Tricia – although he worried about her constantly anyway.

Now I am worn out and too tired for Christmas.

My husband Marcello, known as Cello, drives me to Haddington, a market town in East Lothian, to begin the Christmas shopping.

I choose turquoise leather diaries for both my sisters. I also pick out art supplies for Tricia: paints and pastels and a sketch pad. She likes painting and drawing. She is good at it.

There is a café in the shop and as a reward for starting the Christmas shopping Cello and I tuck into coffee and scones. We enjoy what I think of afterwards as the last bit of normal life for a long time.

As we leave the shop my mobile rings. I dump my carrier bags on the pavement and root through my rucksack. I can never find my phone. I hate my phone. I have an autistic daughter and over the years I have come to associate a ringing phone with trouble.

My screen flashes up ‘Johnny’, Elizabeth’s new boyfriend. I have only met Johnny a handful of times. I smile as I say hello.

‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’ His voice is urgent and there is scuffling at the other end as the phone is handed to Elizabeth. I prickle with fear and my body goes onto high alert. My breathing stops, my scalp fizzes.

What is it? I can feel my voice rise. What is it? It must be Dad.

Or Tricia. Which one is it? Dad? Or Tricia?

We have been living on a knife-edge for so long I know this is something big.

Elizabeth struggles to speak but eventually says, ‘I think something’s happened to Tricia.’ What’s happened? Elizabeth’s voice wavers. ‘Paramedics phoned from the farm. I think Tricia might be dead.’

It’s as though a great boot has caught me hard under the ribs – a knockout blow to the solar plexus – and my knees buckle. There is no breath left in me. I grip the shop’s windowsill and I am aware of the tinsel in the Christmas display twinkling at the corner of my eye as my face hangs over the pavement. The world sways and I have an urge to get onto the ground to feel secure, but do not. My husband grabs my arm. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘It’s Tricia,’ I say, ‘Elizabeth thinks she’s dead,’ and I am unaware whether I am whispering or wailing.

‘Oh no,’ I hear Cello say again and again. ‘Oh no.’

Shock and grief are very physical and it will be weeks before I lose the sensation of reeling backwards, of staggering, unable to grasp onto anything sure and safe that will enable me to regain my balance and find my footing again.

For years it will take nothing but the sight of tinsel in a window or the feel of Christmas in the air to bring me crashing back to this moment when my heart was broken.

The family farm where Tricia lives, near Dad, is in Lancashire. I am in Scotland. Elizabeth is in the Midlands. The world seems impossible and chaotically out of control.

I am panic-stricken and fight the desire to tear at my hair. I sob as I stumble to the car, aware that all around me shoppers still shop, shopkeepers still sell, and for everyone else Christmas continues.

Cello drives us home and I say, ‘I hope Tricia is alive and this is a horrible mistake; if not, I hope she is dead.’ I cannot bear the thought of Tricia in a coma, Tricia in a hospital bed, Tricia suffering any more than she already has over so many years.

We arrive home and I throw things into a suitcase, folding on top a black funeral dress and black shoes. I also put in my iPod which I think may help us choose the funeral music. Everything is in a state of confusion and turmoil and uncertainty but a part of me has gone hard, cold and distant. I have begun to organize, to plan, to try to wrest some control from a world turned ugly and terrifying.

Over and over I try to reach Elizabeth. Does she know anything else? Have I imagined this whole nightmare? But I can’t get through. There is no answer at Dad’s house. There is no answer at Tricia’s farmhouse. Where is everyone? I sit at the kitchen table with my coat fastened up to the chin waiting for Cello to drive me 170 miles to the farm. I am icy, I am shaking and my ears are full of a high-pitched ringing. I am not fully in the room; I am here but I am not here. For the moment I have been removed from my body.

My mobile rings and I grab it. It’s Johnny again: there has been no mistake. The worst has happened. Tricia is dead.

Chapter Two

I expect my dad to die. I do not think he can survive the discovery of the body of his youngest daughter.

After the three-hour drive from Scotland I walk into Dad’s living room, breathless and dizzy.

It has not killed him.

He is sitting in his armchair. He looks at me and shakes his head and he is crying. ‘Poor lass, she didn’t know what she was doing. Poor lass.’ He will repeat this many times over the next few weeks.

I gather the story, about how Dad knocked on the farmhouse door this morning to ask did Tricia want a newspaper? He was going to the shop. Did she want her usual tin of tuna? Soup? When he got no answer he didn’t go to the shop. He went home for his lunch but could barely eat – he felt something was wrong. It wasn’t unusual for Tricia not to answer the door. She had poor sleep habits and was often in bed at odd hours. Still, Dad sensed something was very wrong.

Phoning was no use – Tricia’s phone was out of order. The last thing she’d said to him yesterday was: ‘Don’t worry; I’ll sort out the phone tomorrow.’ He’d dropped her at the farmhouse yesterday evening after taking her for a new prescription because the psychiatrist had been out to the farm and upped her medication. A new prescription had pleased Dad. It meant things were being done. We all lived in hope of new pills and revised prescriptions because then we could imagine that something was being done. Dad drove her for the new pills – pleased he could also do this to help since the doctors had taken away Tricia’s driving licence. He dropped her back at the farmhouse afterwards where she’d said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort everything out tomorrow.’

While forcing his lunch down he resolved to break in – he was now convinced she was lying in bed too ill to get up. He knew which windowpane in the conservatory could be forced from the outside and he went straight back to the farmhouse to gain access.

Knocking the window open caused the whole sill of plants to crash to the floor, some smashing, all spilling soil and grit onto the lino. He stepped through the window, crunching over the pot fragments and scattered plants, and went into the house.

This is when he found the body of his youngest daughter.

He could not call an ambulance because of the broken phone so he dashed back to his own house, four hundred yards up the lane, to dial 999. Then he returned to the farmhouse and sat there, waiting.

I cannot imagine the world at this time. I cannot imagine Dad in the house alone with Tricia’s body.

Twenty minutes later the police arrived, and then an air ambulance landed in the field opposite. As the paramedics ran inside Dad said, ‘I’m afraid you’re too late.’

After they confirmed Tricia was dead the paramedics tried to contact family members for Dad, using an old mobile of Tricia’s with barely any charge or signal. Dad couldn’t use a mobile because of his hearing aid and the paramedics said they weren’t allowed to explain the situation to Johnny when he answered Elizabeth’s phone. Elizabeth was in the shower and as Johnny tried to get her attention and hand her the phone it got cut off. This is what caused the chaotic half-messages that Chinese-whispered their way to me.

Sometime after the paramedics left the farmhouse Tricia’s mental-health worker drove into the yard for an appointment. Tricia had a history of acute depression and visits from the mental-health or crisis teams were daily by then. The policeman went outside to explain what had happened. The woman did not come in to speak to Dad but stayed in her car writing notes before driving off.

Mrs Smith, a neighbour from up the lane, had seen the helicopter land and ran down to the farm. She poked her head into the farmhouse and asked the policeman, ‘Is it Stuart or is it Tricia?’ The officer was relieved to hand Dad over to a friendly face but Dad didn’t want to leave Tricia alone in the house with police searching through her bedroom and her private belongings, tramping up and down the stairs looking for a suicide note.

Mrs Smith eventually coaxed him away. The policeman stayed on in the house, waiting for the ambulance to take her body to the mortuary.

The countryside can be enveloped in a heavy silence and, as the policeman waited alone with Tricia’s body, the quiet must have seemed crushing.

An hour later, when Elizabeth and Johnny arrived at the farmhouse, they told the policeman who they were and Elizabeth made Johnny go and check on Tricia first. She was covered in a blanket. Johnny went to look – this was only the third time he had ever seen Tricia – and he reassured Elizabeth: it’s OK. Elizabeth went to see her but afterwards said she wished she hadn’t.

By the time I arrived, Tricia had gone.

I saw her on the Monday morning. The mortuary was tucked down the side of Lancaster Royal Infirmary in a single-storey, white building. I knocked on the door and a small man in late middle age answered. He ushered me and Elizabeth in. He looked sad even though he must greet bereaved relatives every day. He hesitated outside the door to the viewing room and looked at us, from one to the other; he clearly saw a family resemblance between us and Tricia. ‘She was very young,’ he said.

She was forty-six. Three years younger than me, and six years younger than Elizabeth.

Elizabeth hung back for a second. ‘Take a minute; whenever you are ready,’ he said, but I was keen to see Tricia. I felt I’d let her down by not being able to make contact with her sooner – she’d now been dead two days.

I pushed the door open.

Her hair had been brushed away from her face in an unfamiliar style but otherwise it was Tricia lying there on a table wearing her work clothes – the dark blue jacket and jeans she wore to feed and muck out her horses.

Her hand was chilled. I touched it and asked her, out loud, ‘Oh, Tricia, what have you done? What have you done?’

Chapter Three

The dash south on the day Tricia died was an echo of a similar journey when my mother was on her deathbed seven years before. After hearing she’d taken a turn for the worse there had been the frantic packing of a suitcase followed by the same three-hour hiatus on the M6, but as familiar sights flew by – the bleak stretches over Shap, the promise of Tebay Services, the elegant verdigris dome of the Williamson Memorial – the familiarity was overridden by a surreal feeling of travelling into the unknown and the knowledge that everything in the world had changed.

I was raised in a family of five. Mum’s death had taken that to four; now we were down to three.

Mum had died in the scorching summer of 2006, six years after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her final years were a white-knuckle ride of scans, hospital appointments, inpatient, outpatient, chemotherapy, sickness and terror – hers and ours – with short reprieves when we dared to hope it was all behind us and that we’d be able to re-close our eyes and our ears to death and pretend it hadn’t come so close we could smell it.

We buried her in the outfit she’d worn for a Buckingham Palace garden party she’d been invited to through Dad’s work with the Royal Lancashire Show: a silky blue dress bought from a boutique rather than a catalogue or being home-made which would have been more typical. I took her perfume, her glasses and her handbag to the undertaker’s. I put an ironed lace handkerchief inside her handbag. I took her lipstick and her face powder.

I drew the line at her fascinator.

I put everything in a carrier bag because I had seen someone else leave clothes at the undertaker’s and their underwear and skirt and blouse were left exposed, draped over the back of a chair in the waiting room. I could only imagine my mother’s tight-lipped, you-can’t-trust-anyone-to-do-anything eye-roll if her underskirt and tights were left draped for all the world to see.

Her five grandchildren wrote notes to put in the handbag and did drawings. They wanted to because they loved her. She had never complained when they turned her house into an obstacle course or her entire living room into a den. Unlike when we were kids and she had berated us for making a mess, yelling, ‘When you’re grown up I’m going to come and jump on your settee and see how you like it!’ It always looked as though she enjoyed being a grandma more than a mother.

The day after she died we tried to impose some order on her chaotic kitchen – sorting out, putting away, making space to put stuff down – things we were not allowed to do when she was alive. We’d been embarrassed the evening before when the nurses arrived with the morphine and couldn’t find anywhere to assemble the morphine driver. They’d looked at us, questioning, disapproving, maybe thinking we’d created this mess and obviously wondering why we didn’t sort the place out. Elizabeth and I had kept quiet, aware how ridiculous it would sound for two middle-aged daughters of a dying woman to gaze helplessly round the chaos and say: ‘But we’re not allowed!’

I found her platinum wedding ring in the bottom of a jug in the kitchen. It had worn smooth and thin since her wedding forty-seven years earlier and was cut and misshapen – she must have severed it with wire cutters or pliers to remove it from her left hand when her finger swelled with the cancer treatment or her skin became too sensitive for jewellery.

Dad and Elizabeth said she must be buried with the ring so I took it to the undertaker’s even though I wanted to keep it. I wanted to repair it, to make it into a complete circle again and to wear it. I did not want it forever lost underground.

She did not have an engagement ring to bury because she was the only woman I ever knew who rejected a diamond ring as nothing but a nuisance. She thought engagements were meaningless. You are either married or you are not married – what is engaged? My mother could infuse a single word with such contempt.

I visited Mum several times in the days leading up to her funeral. I accompanied my nephews and my father to the viewing room to make sure everything had been done right; that the wedding ring had been placed on the third finger of her left hand and the handwritten notes and her glasses and lipstick were in her handbag which nestled beside her in the coffin.

As I checked the grandchildren’s notes I slipped my fingers into the silken pocket inside her handbag and found, sunk and hidden at the bottom, a thick gold chain and engraved locket that once belonged to my great-grandmother. I drew it out. My mother did not like sharing. Even though she found jewellery cumbersome and irritating she didn’t want anyone else to have it. Maybe it was growing up as the oldest of eight siblings during the Second World War. When she died she would have taken everything with her if she could. I held the chain up and the locket swung and spun and I felt a fleeting, incongruous moment of triumph. ‘You nearly got away with that one,’ I said and I fastened the chain around my neck.

Later, as I went through her jewellery box, I again felt that reversal of power; I was here and she was not. Her things had been out of bounds when she was alive but now they were not. As children we had longed to sit at her dressing table and try on her beads and gold chains and rub scent on our wrists.

Now all these treasures were ours. There was no one’s permission to ask.

I examined her dressing table, half-expecting to hear: ‘Stop rooting! I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, you know!’ I discovered the perfume was congealed and most of the jewellery was broken. I got her pearls restrung but I never wore them. I saw on the television that you can tell real pearls by rubbing them against your teeth. If you feel tiny bumps they are real, if not they are fake. I went to the jewellery box and took out the pearls and tested them. My mother’s pearls were fake.

I was reminded of when we were children and the biggest bedroom was out of bounds because the roof leaked. It was full of stacks of material, wool and haberdashery, with the odd bucket to catch the drips. When Mum went shopping we sneaked into this room to root among the treasures. We discovered a doll still in her packaging behind moulded plastic; staring eyes, solid hair, her own little kitchen sink behind the plastic too. How we longed to play with this doll but we could not mention it without admitting we’d been where we shouldn’t. Over the years as we visited the doll the plastic packaging got grubbier and more opaque as her staring eyes disappeared behind the dirt. Then one day Mum brought the doll out but by this time we were too old for it. When we took it from its plastic we discovered the doll was so cheap she didn’t even bend at the hips. We threw both her and her kitchen sink in the bin.

My mother had particular hands – hands I would recognize anywhere, with flat almond-shaped nails always cut short. Several days after her death her fingers had gone a creamy pale blue but they were still recognizably, uniquely hers. I touched them and they were deathly cold. It took me a visit or two to realize that the chill was caused by her body being refrigerated in between because, in fact, death is room temperature.

I photographed her hands.

Weeks later I was flicking through the photographs on my camera and unwittingly came face to face with the close-up of my mother’s mottled hands. I was shaken and a bit embarrassed. What would people say if they knew I was keeping a picture of my mother’s dead hands?