Pictures of my sister (2)

 The tea was strange.  I didn’t like the way it dried my tongue when I swallowed and it had a powerful taste that I didn’t recognise.  My uncle watched my face, and then poured a little milk in, clouding it.  He stirred it and I tasted again, and we repeated this until I nodded.  The taste of the tea was hard to identify now and I definitely preferred the taste of the milk, which was dominant, but there was something about this that was getting better as I sipped.

“What is she drinking?”  My aunt’s voice carried well; when she wanted attention in a shop or a crowded hall, she got it.  It was a pleasant voice, usually, but when she was annoyed it went up in pitch slightly and seemed to cut through other sounds a little more easily.  This morning she didn’t sound annoyed, but there was definitely a note of disapproval.

“Milky tea,” said my uncle.  He shrugged.  “More milk than tea, I’d say, but she has to start sometime.”

My aunt pursed her lips but her eyes didn’t harden and I knew she wasn’t really annoyed.  “I’m not sure anyone needs to start drinking tea,” she said, but her voice had lost its edge.  “But I suppose if it means we can make a pot of tea without adding other drinks as well it saves time.”

My aunt liked to save time, along with lots of other things.  That thought made me wonder: were the missing pictures saved somewhere else too?

“We shall go to the department store today,” said my aunt, waving a hand at the teapot.  My uncle nodded and poured her a cup of tea, listening as she detailed the things she wanted to buy.  I sipped my tea as well, listening carefully.  While my aunt would never have dreamed of asking me to remember anything for her — ordering my uncle to was fine, but admitting she couldn’t do it herself would have been like announcing she was a horse — she did occasionally ask me if I’d been listening.  If I couldn’t answer her questions, I got a lecture on listening to adults which, oddly enough, was so rehearsed that I could practically repeat it myself.

“When we come back, we shall attend to the garden,” she finished.  Then she looked at me.  “You must have homework.”

I nodded, though it was less a question than an insistence.  “Good.  You shall do that then, and I shall look over it afterwards.”  I nodded again, but inwardly I cringed.  My aunt found more faults with my homework than my teachers did.

The department store trip was both tiring and boring.  Though the shop housed many things, often new and exciting, my aunt only had time and thoughts for the things she was buying and disliked ‘window shopping’ as she phrased it.  So my uncle and I trudged after her, occasionally pausing when we thought we weren’t observed to look at other things and then hurrying after my aunt to try and avoid being told not to dawdle, lollygaggle, or be accused of browsing.  I wasn’t sure why browsing was such a sin, but the stern look on my aunt’s face convinced me that it was problematic at least.  The car journey back was warm and the radio was turned on and I was allowed to listen to music.  My aunt occasionally humphed at things, but my uncle seemed to have more say in matters in the car and the radio was left alone.  I was happy; music was fun and made me feel cheerful and I didn’t see why my aunt might not like some of it.

Back at home, when the purchases had been carefully unwrapped and put away and tea had been poured and drunk (and I had slightly less milk in mine this time, with a quiet wink from my uncle and I thought I might be starting to like it more), my aunt led the way into the garden and my uncle strolled behind her whistling and I made my way upstairs to my bedroom and my schoolbooks.

I stopped on the first landing.  My room was on the second floor with a tiny, chilly bathroom next to it that I only used for going to the toilet.  The first floor had my uncle and aunt’s bedroom, the main bathroom that was bigger and warmer and had the fluffy, tassled bathmats that I loved standing on and wiggling my toes in, and the room that my uncle called his study.  The door was usually slightly ajar, by a couple of centimetres, but rarely closed unless my uncle was in there.  I’d peeked inside of a few occasions but the room was boring: there was a bookcase in one corner, a desk and two chairs, some pictures on the walls and a window and that was pretty much it.  But now I hesitated, remembering my thought from earlier: had my aunt saved the pictures from the photo album somewhere in the study?

I pushed the door gently.  I had seen my aunt and uncle both go outside and still I couldn’t quite get away from the feeling that one of them had someone sneaked back inside and was waiting in the study for me to catch me.  The door swung silently back and revealed the empty room.  I looked out of the window, but the study was at the front of the house and the garden at the back, so there was nothing much to see but the narrow strip of grass that made up the front lawn, the hedge that shielded it from the road, and the road beyond.  The room was much as I’d remembered it; the bookcase was there and the desk; the chairs had been pushed against the wall and there were papers on the desk.  I looked at them quickly, my heart pounding in my chest as I worried that my aunt or uncle might come up the stairs at any time for something they’d forgotten and they would find me there, but they weren’t pictures.  They had words and numbers and were probably bills, but to me they meant nothing.

I looked at the bookcase, wondering what my aunt might have saved the pictures in.  There were no photo-albums that I could see, and the books were all serious-looking: they were big, heavy and often had gold lettering on the spines.  The top two shelves were mostly full, but the bottom two held no books at all.  One was empty, and the bottom shelf had a couple of white cardboard boxes sitting on it.  One was open and I could see a scattering of paperclips, some string, a short metal ruler and other office-stationery type things and the other had a cardboard lid that closed it.

I was so nervous that I had to tiptoe to the stairs and peer over the bannister, listening as hard as I could.  The house was quiet and I thought that my aunt and uncle were still out in the garden.  I tiptoed back, holding my breath, and gently tugged on the lid of the box.  It slipped upwards easily — it was a little too large — and inside was a stack of paper.  I picked it out and looked at it, shuffling it in my hands.  Much of it seemed to be letters in envelopes addressed to my aunt, but between two of them was something glossier and firmer: the missing pictures.

I stared at them, and then put everything back in the box and the lid back on, tiptoed out of the room and closed the door almost all the way, then ran upstairs to my room.  I got my books out and sat down in front of them and stared blindly at the page of English comprehension questions.  All I could see was the pictures of my parents holding two children: one that was me as a baby and an older girl I didn’t recognise at all.

Pictures of my sister (1)

 The picture album was kept on the bookshelf in the drawing room.  Only my aunt called it the drawing room; my uncle, a tired-looking man with prematurely grey hair rolled his eyes every time she did.  I asked him once about it, when he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of milkless tea.

“Ronnie,” he said, for my aunt’s name was Veronica and forbidden to me, “likes to… see the best in things, shall we say.  Why not call it a drawing room?  If the house had more than five rooms and a lean-to then we might have call to need another name of it, mightn’t we?”

I would get the picture album down and turn the pages of it when no-one else was around.  That usually meant the mornings of the weekends, when my aunt refused to get up before 10 and my uncle, who got up before dawn every weekday, also took the opportunity to sleep a little longer.  In the silence of the house and the slanting rays of pale sunlight that crept past the branches of the trees in the garden and through the dusty glass of the bay window I would get the album down and run my hands over it’s fake leather cover.  It felt rough and plasticky and it crackled when I opened it.  The pages were filled with small square photographs, some in colour but most in black and white, each tucked into a pocket of yellowing plastic.  The pages were faintly sticky and I had to turn each page carefully to pull the plastic envelopes apart with another crackle.

I didn’t know anyone in the pictures for the first eight or nine pages.  They were young people who gradually got older as I turned the pages and studied each scene.  Initially there were six of them, three men and three women, who were playing croquet or sitting at a table and eating or drinking.  After two pages though the pictures showed only two of them, and I guessed that they had got married.  Then a baby appeared in the pictures, and for a page there were only photographs of the baby.  As the baby got older the pictures started showing all three of them more, and then the parents disappeared and the baby, now a young woman, started appearing with people I took to be her friends.  Soon enough those pictures became just her and a young man, and I recognised them as my mother and father.

The tenth page was where I spent most of my time.  The first two picture envelopes there were empty and there was no indication as to why the pictures were missing.  Then I appeared in the third picture, dressed in baby clothes and not-really-smiling at the camera.

The twelfth page was where the pictures stopped altogether.  There was a cutting from a newspaper, fragile and yellowing and I avoided opening it up or touching it in case it fell apart.  In three paragraphs my parents’s death in a car accident were recorded as though it were a shop opening or a minor social event.  The first time I read it hot tears fell from my eyes and a tight sensation knotted my stomach.  I had dim memories of coming to visit my aunt and uncle and waking up in the morning, puzzled that I was still in their house, and then my uncle sitting me at the table with him and gently explaining that my parents needed me to stay with him and my aunt for a little longer.

A little longer became a lot longer and I’m sure at some point they explained to me that my parents were dead; probably around the time they changed my school to one closer to where they lived, but by then I’d found the newspaper cutting and read about it for myself.  I’m not sure though; I’m not sure at all that my aunt thinks I’m old enough even now to know what happened to my parents. 

I set the album back on the shelf on Sunday morning, pushing it back between one of Jane Austen’s monstrosities and a hard-cover book on gardening.  The album made a faint squeak and I pretended to myself that it was a small noise of satisfaction to be back in its place.  I turned around to leave the drawing room, closing the door tightly behind me as though I’d never been there, and there was my uncle standing in the doorway.  Now it was my turn to squeak.

“Don’t let Ronnie know you’ve been in here,” he said and left quietly.

I tugged the drawing room door closed, making sure it looked just like it did when I’d opened it to come in and hurried into the kitchen to find him.  He was there alone, still looking tired even though he’d only just got up.  He was stood at the stove, with his back to me, setting the kettle on a burner and lighting the gas.

“Uncle?” I said.  My voice quivered just a little and I felt a shiver run down my spine.  My aunt was quick to admonish, to caution and to criticise but she left actual punishments to my uncle.  He was the one who would send me to my room, or smack me — a single slap to the back of my legs that would sting for thirty seconds.  He was always restrained, but the implication was that he didn’t have to be, and I knew that I didn’t want to ever push him to the point of thinking he needed to hit me twice.

“If she catches you there’ll be hell to pay,” he said.  He looked round and looked over my head so that I looked behind me too.  The hallway was empty.  “She won’t wait for me to come home.”

“But why?” I asked.  “Is it because of the missing pictures?”

He didn’t answer at first, instead taking cups from the cupboard and setting them down loudly on the counter-top.  Then he found a teaspoon from a drawer, rattling the cutlery.  Then the tea-caddy needing taking from its place at the back of the counter, lined up with the sugar and flour canisters against the white tiles.  Then he looked round again, checking once more that the hallway was empty.

“Don’t talk about them,” he said.  “Even if she catches you, don’t talk about them.”

“Bu—“

“Shush!”

He didn’t shout but I heard in that word the implicit threat that if I didn’t, I’d invite punishment.  I opened my mouth, and then thought about how hard that single word had sounded.  I nodded instead.

“Good girl,” he said and the harshness of his tone had mellowed back into the gentle voice he used almost all the time, and especially with my aunt.  “I think it’s about time you learned about an adult vice, isn’t it?  Let’s make you a small cup of tea.”