Dark Sister Read online

  "You never miss a trick, do you?" said her father.

  "No," said Amy, looking into the fire.

  TWO

  Amy had been home from school about an hour. She and Sam had been playing spitting games in the garden. It was three days after the discovery of the diary in the fireplace. Maggie was busy at the kitchen sink—busy in that abstract way of gazing into the soap suds as if they revealed fleeting, iridescent patterns of the future—when a bespattered Amy and Sam hurtled into the kitchen.

  "Dot dug it up! Dot dug it up!"

  "And it wasn't dead and it's gone on the roof!"

  "If you've been spitting..." Maggie started, noticing the suspicious dribble on Sam's chin, but something about the children's urgency arrested her.

  "She did! Dot dug it up, so it isn't dead!"

  "What isn't dead?"

  "The bird we buried on Saturday. It isn't dead yet."

  "Nonsense."

  But Amy insisted Maggie should come and look for herself.

  Out in the garden, Dot was snuffling in the corner by the wall, looking vaguely guilty as Maggie approached. The dog was hacking, as if trying to clear its throat of something unpleasant. Amy pointed to the spot where Alex and the children had made a shallow grave for the bird they'd removed from the fireplace. The earth had been disturbed.

  "Dot dug it up and got it in her mouth and then the bird flew away. I saw it."

  "Yes it did," said Sam.

  Maggie looked hard into the cloudless blue of Sam's three-year-old eyes. He was going through a phase of lying habitually about almost anything. But Amy was usually a more reliable witness.

  "It can't fly away when it's dead, Amy. Dot must have eaten it."

  "Dot ate it," said Sam.

  "No, she didn't!" Amy protested. "I saw it fly!"

  Maggie took a stick and poked at the disturbed soil. It was true, nothing remained there now.

  "There it is!" Amy shouted, pointing above her mother's head.

  Maggie turned. Perched on the rusting pole of her washing line, not six feet away, was a sleek blackbird, feathers a lustrous blue-black, its eye fixed on her. She motioned her arm, expecting it to fly off, but it didn't move. It squatted there, immobile, watching her. Maggie took a step backwards.

  "That's not the same one. There are hundreds of blackbirds around here."

  "It is the same one," said Amy, "it is."

  "Kill it," said Sam.

  Maggie felt the prickly contagion of their childish fear. It transmitted to her, like static. It paralysed her. It left her shocked, unable to step out of the moment. She had a brief vision in which she saw herself, all of them, her children and the bird, all caught twitching at the fine strands of some miraculous web.

  Then she became conscious that Sam and Amy were waiting for her to do something. Ridiculous! It was ridiculous that this small, unremarkable bird should make her afraid like this! At last she picked up a rotting wicket of wood from the garden. Advancing slowly, she waved the stick before her. The bird, in its own time, hopped from the pole to the wall before flying away.

  Maggie collected up the children and ushered them indoors.

  THREE

  Alex came home late that evening complaining bitterly about the dig at the castle. A policy change had been enacted over his head. Since the episode with the bird, Maggie had had a particularly tiresome afternoon with the kids. Amy had stood on watch in the garden and had flatly refused to come in even when it had begun to rain; and when Maggie took her eye off Sam for three seconds while fetching Amy, he'd promptly emptied a box of breakfast cereal into the dog's dish. What's more, her period was about to start, and she frankly didn't give a shit about Alex's grubbing about in the castle ruins.

  Meanwhile Alex directed at Maggie the speeches he would like to have made at work. "Living archaeology they call it! So now we have to build a walkway round our work just so Joe Public can come and watch us in action. Maybe I should scatter a few dog bones around the site."

  "Haven't you ever stopped to watch three men digging a hole in the road?"

  Alex ignored her, tearing off his work clothes and throwing them in a corner of the kitchen. "I told them, just so long as you don't want to dress me up like Indiana Jones. Didn't know what I was talking about. Pretended not to. How would they like it?

  How many people have to tolerate having their work closely observed by the public?"

  "Footballers. Actors. Policemen. Dentists—"

  "Exactly. Run me a bath, would you?"

  "Any particular temperature?"

  Alex switched to a wheedling voice. "Sorry; but you know how I like to be pampered when I get steamed up about the job. And it's not as if you have anything to do all day."

  Alex flinched as he heard his own words crash. He reached out to her, but she pushed past him and went hammering up the stairs. In the bathroom she slapped the plug in the hole and throttled the taps open to release ferocious jets of hot and cold water; she then thumped heavily back down the stairs, shoved him aside, and snatched up his discarded work clothes. Alex made to say something conciliatory, thought better of it, and quietly made his way up to his bath.

  While Alex soaked, groaning and cooing loudly in the tub, Maggie shepherded the kids to bed, nursing a poisonous indignation. She came downstairs and put a match to their new living-room fire. It was crackling nicely when Alex appeared wearing a threadbare dressing gown she hated. He collapsed into an armchair and snatched up a magazine.

  She waved a glossy leaflet at him. "This came today. Want to look at it with me?"

  Alex glanced up, and winced. His sciatic nerve always rebelled when this subject came up. It was a prospectus for the local university. Maggie had a yearning to study for a degree in Psychology.

  "Do we have to go through this again? We've discussed it enough times."

  They had. Alex had expressed the view that psychology was a pseudoscience. Maggie said she didn't give a pseudo-damn about that. Alex complained that psychology promoted simplistic views of human nature. Good, Maggie had replied, I'm a simplistic person. Alex had had a dream about climbing through an open window one night, and made the mistake of telling it to Maggie. Now he pointedly referred to windows as "vagina-adultery-suicide-apparatus."

  "Alex. I really want to do this course. It's important to me."

  "But it's such lousy timing. You've got a young family to think about. Responsibilities."

  Yes, they had discussed it before; many times, and without resolution. The language they used had been repeated so often it had become symbolic. Maggie employed words like "important" as a stinging missile. Alex in turn sent up big barrage-balloon words like "family" and "responsibilities." The words were made available, but they'd stopped talking to each other.

  Underneath it all, Alex was secretly afraid he might lose her. It was an unspecified anxiety he chose not to analyze. He never took Maggie for granted; he counted her value above rubies and emeralds, and feared that one day someone might plot to take her away from him. And the more Maggie sensed this secret fear, the more trapped she felt.

  "I'll go mad if I don't do something. I mean really mad. I'm already going mad hanging around here. Weird things have started to happen."

  "What weird things?" He put down his magazine.

  "Today. There was a bird. In the garden. It looked at me."

  "It looked at you?"

  "Yes. It looked at me."

  Alex laughed. "Well. I daresay it did."

  Maggie stared at him. He pretended to duck back behind his magazine.

  "You," Maggie said at length.

  "Uh?"

  "You."

  The magazine dipped again. "Are you premenstrual?" he said. "Do you want a cuddle?"

  She outstared him. The grin vanished from his face. She had to take deep breaths between her words. "You don't— know—what—I'm talking about! You just—sit—there and you— DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!"

  "All right! Stop shouting and tell me
what you are talking about!"

  She waited until she felt more composed. "There was a bird, in the garden, and it looked at me! Not in any ordinary way. And it frightened me. The children saw it too."

  "What kind of a bird?"

  "A blackbird."

  "An ordinary blackbird?"

  "It wasn't ordinary at all. It looked into me. Through me. I can't explain it." It was as near to me as you are now, and it wasn't at all afraid. I tried to make it go away and it wouldn't."

  "Perhaps someone had tamed it. Looked after it."

  "Not this one."

  "How do you know?"

  "You weren't there." She chewed her lip, wondering whether to tell him the rest. "The children said it was the bird you buried in the garden."

  "What?"

  "Amy said that Dot dug it up and it flapped its wings and jumped onto the roof."

  "Ridiculous."

  "I know it sounds ridiculous, but the bird was gone from where you put it and I told Amy that Dot must have eaten it or something but I didn't believe it myself."

  "Look, you're just—"

  "I know! I know! I'm just neurotic! A completely neurotic housewife with two children and a dog and a dog's dish and a husband in a dirty old dressing gown! You don't seem to see the point!"

  "So what is the point?"

  "The point is..." Maggie had to draw a deep breath so that she could remember the point. "The point is that every day I'm stuck here I feel like a bird in a wire cage and I want to get out!"

  They simultaneously became aware of Sam standing in the doorway in his pyjamas. The shouting had woken him, and he was blinking at them with moist, frightened eyes. Alex leapt to his feet, gathered the boy to him, and brought him over by the fire. He kissed Sam's neck, a big, bruising, wet, noisy kiss. He told him it was all right, they were only playing a shouting game.

  That night in bed, she did something which she didn't do very often. When Alex put his hand on her belly, she turned away from him. He said nothing. They lay awake in the dark, and it was some time before either of them drifted off to sleep.

  FOUR

  Amy was at school and Sam was asleep on the sofa. Maggie had a precious moment to herself. She'd been woken in the middle of the night by a thump from downstairs, where she'd found Sam sleepwalking. She'd tried to pick him up to carry him back to bed, but he'd woken to complain about nightmares, so she let him climb in with them. Alex had snored on and Maggie had sighed with guilt. She knew the shouting had disturbed Sam.

  Sam had developed a touch of conjunctivitis, and after a bad night his eye looked sore. Maggie had a large, very old Family Medical Dictionary passed on to her by her grandmother. Her family doctor told her the healthiest thing she could do with it was toss it on a bonfire; he told her books like that only scared people. But she kept it, consulting the brittle, yellowing pages every time her children suffered some complaint or other.

  She read that conjunctivitis was an inflammation of the membrane that linked the eyelids and covered the white of the eye; she read that any but the slightest cases required immediate attention as blindness might result; and she read that a serious form was caused by gonorrhoea. She felt rather alarmed by all of this information. The book was returned to its shelf under the stairs, out of the doctor's sight.

  Sam turned in his sleep. Maggie thought about phoning the clinic for advice; it might even produce another visit to the doctor. She liked him. He was a young, handsome Asian GP with a wonderful sense of humour, who always seemed prepared to talk for longer than was strictly necessary. She picked up the telephone, looked up the number, and then something made her replace the handset.

  She noticed the diary resting on the mantelpiece above the fire. The diary the sweep had found up the chimney. Alex must have left it there.

  She made herself a coffee and sat down to leaf through the pages. As well as what appeared to be shopping lists, the diary contained lists of herbs, what Alex had called "folk remedies." Her idea was to see if she might find some gentle salve to apply to Sam's eye.

  Opening a page at random, she found a list written in beautiful copperplate handwriting. In places the blue ink had mellowed to purple and black with age, but the author was meticulous and neat:

  Acacia

  Anise

  Broom

  Comfrey

  Elder

  Eucalyptus

  Eyebright

  Hazel

  Lavender

  Marjoram

  Mastic

  Mistletoe

  Mugwort

  Nutmeg

  Peppermint

  Pimpernel

  Sandalwood

  Spearmint

  Thyme

  Wormwood

  That was all. There was no other entry on the page. Whether it had any relation to the date at the head of the page, 7th February 1891, Maggie had no idea. Neither did she know enough about herbs to deduce why this selection had been grouped together. The previous page contained a similar list:

  Balm of Gilead Cedar Cinquefoil

  Cypress Fern Honeysuckle

  On the following page, another list of herbs, rather longer.

  Maggie turned the pages more quickly. Some entries seemed to be no more than shopping lists, with no reference to herbs; occasionally there was a more intriguing entry. On one page was written simply:

  Sell your coat and buy betony.

  There were also practical remedies.

  All headaches. Make herbal sachet of light-blue cloth, sew-into equal parts bruised leaves lavender peppermint mugwort clove marjoram tie on blue thread and wear round neck. Sniffing is efficacious.

  But beneath that entry was written:

  A. hates me because of my red hair.

  So, the diarist too was a redhead. Maggie instantly felt an affinity with the writer, for reasons unclear. This detail of physical appearance, trivial in itself, excited a disproportionate wave of sympathy and identification. Sure, it was irrational: redheads weren't denied the fruits of the earth any more than anyone else and, in her experience, never laid claim to any sisterhood which might exclude a blonde or a brunette. Yet there it was, and Maggie decided that whoever the diarist was, she liked her for it.

  She leafed through the diary rapidly, alighting on whatever looked interesting. There were several "remedies," listing the preparation of poultices, salves, ointments, oils, and some which seemed simply intended to make smells. Many, however, were useless, since they didn't say what complaint they claimed to remedy. The diarist might have known, but Maggie couldn't guess. Then she found something for Sam.

  Soreness of eyes all eye complaints, wax.m. juice of fern camomile eyebright. Salve the sachet w clove garlic 1 eucalyptus 2 sage 2 saffron. Blue cloth. Can also bring f. to light.

  It all sounded a bit messy. But, she reasoned, it couldn't be any worse than having chemicals dropped into your eye, which was all the family doctor—however kindly he was—would prescribe. These were earth remedies, Maggie argued to herself, natural healing agents that had been handed down over hundreds and hundreds of years only to be ridiculed and dismissed by a medical industry hell-bent on profit and too clever for its own good.

  She put down the diary and moved to where Sam was sleeping on the sofa. She stood over him for a moment. When she put her hand on his forehead, he opened his eyes. There was still some inflammation in the corner of one eye.

  "Want to come shopping with me?" she asked.

  "No," said Sam.

  "No?"

  "Yes."

  FIVE

  Three days later Sam was still running around with a sore eye. He also had a dirty brown stain near the bridge of his nose where Maggie applied her homemade herbal remedy. Alex had quizzed her about it.

  "Ointment," she'd said. He'd sniffed and let the matter drop.

  Alex didn't seem to notice that Sam wore a sachet of herbs on a string round his neck. The herbs were sewn into a light blue cloth, and Sam carried it cheerfully, calling it hi
s treasure.

  Unfortunately it just wasn't working.

  Maggie had been conscientious. She'd dragged Sam around the shops to pick up every herb mentioned in the list. There'd been no difficulty in collecting them from general health food stores, except for the one called eyebright. The assistants all looked blank at that one, and when pressed on where she might try, they shook their heads pathetically. Then another customer, overhearing, suggested she might try a shop in the Gilded Arcade.

  The Gilded Arcade was an original four-story Victorian shopping precinct. It was unfashionable and off the main drag; consequently the many tiny stores operating from it were special interest or frankly eccentric. Rents were low and businesses had a habit of changing hands rapidly. The hollow echo of the arcade, its fitful little flights of business, and the peeling gold-leaf railings of its catwalks gave it the impression of a giant aviary. Colourfully dressed young people with startling hair and ironmongery in their ears and noses looked over the railings for hours, like exotic birds perched at different levels. Maggie approved of the unorthodoxy of the place, and of its dilapidated grandeur.