When I Had a Little Sister. Catherine Simpson

      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