Sisters

My sister leans against the worktop, in front of where the washing machine lurks in the gloom.

I am grilling cheese and boiling pasta. Halloumi, sheep’s milk sent to curds and pressed, all salty in its briny whey, sitting on the grill pan, hissing and spitting beneath the red hot glow of the element. I turn the pieces and imagine the cheese squeaking against my teeth as I chew it.

My sister leans and does nothing; says nothing. Her long legs are encased in denim, the jeans held up by a pink leather belt. Her arms are folded across her chest and her long dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

The pasta is bubbling. The pasta is done. I lift it from the water and place it onto our plates. The halloumi hisses on the grill. My sister does not move.

“Do you want a drink?” I ask, and reach the rum down from the cupboard.

Rum tastes like autumn, like Christmas, like the promise of gifts or wrapping up in a too-thick jumper. I pour two measures into glasses. I top up with cola.

“Here you go,” I say, handing one of the drinks to my sister, although she didn’t say yes to my question.

She takes the glass from my hand and continues to stand there.

I check the halloumi. It is golden brown and sizzling. I lift the pieces from the grill pan and share them between our plates.

My sister sips her drink.

Handing her a plate, I think of how I started a story today, and how quickly its nascent form was chased away by the doings and goings and listenings of the day.

My husband is at work, and then will be at squash. My children are at after school clubs, and later will be at friends’. My sister has arrived unannounced and unspeaking, and although I welcome the diversion, I wish that she would say something.

She is as curved and wordless as my teenage daughter. She sits at the dining table, half on the chair, half off. She pushes the pasta and halloumi around the plate with her fork. I eat. I am ravenous. The halloumi squeaks. It doesn’t let me down.

My sister sips her drink again.

Her silence breaks.

“I shouldn’t be drinking this,” she says. A pause, a pushing of food on plate, then, “Is this cheese pasteurised?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Why?”

I know full well why, but I’m not about to do her the service of guessing correctly straight away. Besides which, she has dropped these hints before, and their distant rumour has borne no fruit.

She eats a piece of pasta, followed by another, and one more. Halloumi squeaks in my mouth. I pause to take a swig of rum. I pretend to myself that I am a pirate. It amuses me to play these games.

I eat pasta and think about all the stories I have begun and never completed; never set down on paper or computer screen; never allowed my fingers to create in sparse black on soulless white.

I am paused in thought, my fork poised in mid-air, pasta cooling on its tines.

“What are you doing?” my sister says. Her face is lip-curlingly incredulous. Her mad sister has disappeared, her eyes gone distant, her face remote.

I pull myself back.

“Thinking,” I say. “Just thinking.” I place the now cold pasta into my mouth and chew. My mouth still full, my jaw still working, I break one of the cardinal rules of good table manners.

“So you think you’re pregnant again?” I say.

I am suddenly bored of the game.

My sister sighs and pushes her plate away from her. She turns her face away from me, placing her hand on the back of her neck and squeezing.

She sighs again and continues to look away, over her shoulder, away from me, from the room, from the disinterested question and the disinterested way in which I asked it.

“I don’t know,” she says to nothing and no-one in particular.

I finish the food on my plate. The yellow knots of egg and flour, filled with tomato and cheese paste, gone forever, leaving behind an oleaginous sea, and my fork lying silver across the white expanse of the plate.

“You should take a test, then,” I say and pull another round mouthful of rum from the glass into my mouth. I am like a fish, pulling oxygen-rich pond swill across my gills.

“Where’s Tony?” my sister asks, turning to face me, changing the subject.

“Work and then squash,” I reply.

She plays with the cold food on her plate, keeping it at arms’ length, never threatening to resume eating. I watch her fork, like a hoe, or a rake, pushing and pulling a single piece of pasta to and fro.

“Don’t play with your food,” I say, as though I am her mother. The fork clatters from her hand and in the same moment I am on my feet, gathering up the plates and carrying them to the sink. I use the clattered fork to push the redundant meal from her plate into the waste-disposal unit. It grinds away the food until there is nothing left to be seen.

I want my sister to leave. I am tired of her presence in my house, eating away my time. I wish that she would exist somewhere else; not here; not with me; somewhere distant. Hermetically sealed in another universe.

I put the dishes and the pans, each item that I have used to prepare the meal she did not want, into the dishwasher. I close the door. There will be more to go in there later; my house is littered with unwashed cups and dishes; but for now I close the door.

“Do you want another drink?” I ask, crossing the kitchen to lift the rum bottle again from the cupboard. I look across at her, my hand frozen in its flight through the air, reaching up to the handle on the cupboard door; I look across and see that she has not drunk the first one. I drop my hand and cross the room. I finish my own drink and chase it with hers.

“I’m tired of this,” I say. “I’m tired of lies and omissions. I’m tired of pretence. I’m tired of your silences and your hints.”

Hazel eyes look back at me as I speak. They are blank. She is tired too, her eyes are telling me. Tired of what, I do not know, and do not want to ask. My tiredness competes with hers. I think we are equally matched.

“If you have something to say, you should say it,” I tell her.

“If you want me to do something, to say something, to help, you should ask,” I say.

“Are you scared of something?” I ask her.

“Is there something you need? Something I can do?”

“Do you even know why you came here tonight?”

I realise that I am standing over her, my hands gripping the back of my chair, my knuckles whiter than marble, whiter than bone bleached by the sun and the sea. I realise that my voice has been rising in pitch and volume; that I am almost screaming at her.

Her hazel eyes continue to look at me.

I sit down. I try to calm down. I try to remember that she is my sister, my flesh and blood. I remember the story I was beginning to write today, forming the words in my head. I remember that it began, “I used to want to be adopted.”

My sister sighs, breathes deeply but shortly through her nose. She stands.

“I should go,” she says.

I am tired now, remembering the story I chased away with thoughts of housework. I am tired, remembering the errands I ran rather than write.

“Are you pregnant?” I ask, all the stress on the first word of the question.

She doesn’t answer. She walks through the living room to the hallway. She pulls her coat from the coat rack.

“You don’t have to go,” I say, but she has already opened the front door and closed it behind her again.

“Do you want another drink?” I say to myself, and go over to the cupboard so that I can reach down the bottle of rum again.

“I’ll ring her later,” I tell myself, although I know that I won’t. It is another of the lies of which I am so tired.

I fix my drink and leave it on the side. I walk through the house on a dirty pots trawl, gathering up abandoned plates, mugs, glasses and cereal bowls. I drag my heavy net behind my ship and land its catch into the dishwasher. This time I start the cycle. This time I mean business.

I am on my fourth drink and snoozing on the sofa by the time my husband returns with our offspring.

“Has your sister been here?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “How do you know?”

“I can smell her perfume,” he replies. “What did she want?”

“The usual,” I tell him, because I don’t know what else to say. I am too tired, too drunk, to think of a useful description of my sister’s visit. “How was squash?” I say.

“Good,” he replies from the kitchen. “I won.”

“Good,” is my response from my slump on the sofa. “I’m glad.”

He reappears in the doorway with a beer in his hand.

“Have you eaten?” I ask.

“I’m not hungry,” he says.

“I’m drunk,” I tell him.

He smiles. “So I see.”

“She thinks she might be pregnant again,” I say. “Although her exact words when I asked were ‘I don’t know’.”

“Oh,” he says. Then a heartbeat’s pause before, “Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know.” And it’s true. I don’t. Either that she is pregnant, or that she doesn’t know. I belch. Too much gas.

“Nice,” says my husband, and comes to sit with me on the sofa. He lifts my legs over his and strokes them from knee to ankle and back again.

“She needs to be more careful,” I say.

“Mmm,” comes back the non-committal response. “Mmm.”

I am sleepy and curl towards my husband, resting my head on his shoulder, safe within the crook of his arm.

“She needs her own you,” I murmur into his chest. “Not these nobodies she sleeps with and never sees in daylight.”

He holds me tight against him with both arms around me.

“I love you,” he says.

I am almost asleep, too stupefied by rum to remain conscious.

“How do you know her perfume?” I ask him.

He does not answer.

© J R Hargreaves March 2007