When I Had a Little Sister. Catherine Simpson

to check she was really gone.

      Tricia beside the knicker bush, dressed as ‘Miss Ceylon’

      Inside, the house smelled of stale tobacco – a smell that hit me then like a punch and still does. To me the smell of stale tobacco is the smell of anguish and hopelessness.

      I stood at the door of the bathroom with its cold coffee and cigarettes on the wooden floor by the radiator. I moved about the house where I was born, a place that since yesterday had become the place Tricia had chosen to die.

      In the living room I saw the lights were lit on the CD player. It was playing with the volume turned down – Tricia must have left it on a continuous loop. I squatted down to turn it up and the room filled with the pure, clear voice of Alison Krauss singing ‘When You Say Nothing At All’. The suddenness knocked me over and from a squatting position I plumped sideways onto the carpet.

      In the kitchen I found the bin full of her long dark hair. I stared at it; so unexpected. She must have chopped it off last thing before she died because there was nothing thrown on top. Why had she cut her hair off? I did not reach into the bin and rescue a lock because the sight of her lovely hair there among the teabags and the soup tins reeked of despair and I couldn’t bear to touch it. Her long hair had been one of her trademarks ever since her early teens. There had been the occasional perm in the 1980s and it got shoved into a woolly hat when she was milking the cows or working with the horses, but it had never been anything other than long and dark and glossy, and now here it was tossed in the rubbish.

      On the kitchen surfaces I found boxes and boxes of lotion for getting rid of hair lice. Tricia did not have hair lice; at that stage she didn’t have close enough contact with anyone to catch hair lice. I examined the boxes, baffled and heartbroken because these boxes reeked of despair too.

      I learned later that a symptom of psychosis can be the sensation of a crawling on the skin that is impossible to alleviate. Memories of those boxes, and knowledge of the effort it must have taken Tricia to get out of the house and buy them for a problem she believed she had, swim into my mind often and have crystallized into the very image of loneliness.

      I went into her bedroom but hated to look at her bed with the sheets and quilt in a tangled heap and some of the last items of clothing she had worn discarded on the floor. Signs of activity made her seem so close and underlined how recently she had been alive, how recently we should have been able to save her. The finality of death and the knowledge – although still not the belief – that she had gone shocked and re-shocked me over and over again every time my eyes alighted on some other personal item: her bedside glass of water, her toothbrush, her gum shield for stopping her grinding her teeth as she slept. The air was thick. It was as though the house itself was holding its breath.

      I pushed open the door of my childhood bedroom – the familiar rattle of the latch, the whoosh of the door over the old shag-pile carpet – only to discover it had become a dressing room full of beautiful clothes. Tricia had been a farmer and a horsewoman; I remembered her in jeans and jumpers and grubby jackets with bits of straw clinging to them or maybe in a boiler suit, the top pulled down and tied round her waist as she wore a T-shirt in summer. This room used to contain two single beds and an ugly chest of drawers; now it appeared to contain a wardrobe and hanging rail stuffed with posh frocks. I found it hard to take in. I walked into the room and touched the hanging clothes. I could see a black satin halter-neck covered in red and yellow orchids and a black chiffon minidress with beaded cuffs, and alongside them were linen skirts, wool coats, silk blouses, fitted jackets, piles of scarves in every shade and texture, shelves of extraordinary shoes: gold sandals, red silk sandals, purple suede peep-toes, silver wedges and sparkly stilettos.

      There were other items folded in big stiff carriers with the names of local boutiques on the side and with their labels still attached along with handwritten invoices for hundreds of pounds. So this was how Tricia had been spending her inheritance from Mum. There were clutch bags, large and small, in every colour. The wardrobe was full, as was the hanging rail which stood beside a full-length tilting mirror. It was a room devoted to glamour and beauty and femininity. I knew my sister was beautiful but I had not realized she possessed all these lovely things, or that she cared so much about her physical appearance.

      Over the following months Elizabeth and I picked out pieces and took them home. Tricia was taller and more willowy than us, though, and one by one most of the outfits ended up at the charity shop.

      My sister had shocked me by killing herself but maybe there were many things I didn’t know about her even though I had known her all her life, and almost all of mine. I had loved her. Things had been difficult as her mental health deteriorated, but I had always loved her.

      All my life one gauge I used to decide if someone was acting unreasonably towards me was to ask myself: ‘Would I let them treat Tricia this way?’ I had always felt protective of her but in that I had clearly failed. I sat on the bed gazing in amazement at all these unfamiliar possessions – the possessions of a different woman altogether from the one I thought I knew – and I wondered: how well had I known her? How well can we ever know anyone?

      As I sat in the farmhouse, dazed, the telephone engineer arrived to mend the phone. He thought the problem was a fault with an overhead wire, he said. He was standing at the back door and I told him what had happened the day before. His face became stricken and his eyes flickered over my shoulder as though drawn to witness the trauma. He picked up his enormous toolbag and headed into the garden to do the repair. An hour later he reappeared. It was all fixed, he said, but in future could we get Dad to build his enormous bonfires somewhere else. He gave me a meaningful look and cast a furtive glance towards the orchard, then mouthed the words ‘or they’ll charge him a fortune’, and with a tap on the side of his nose he was gone. An act of kindness from the telephone man seemed enormously significant. In those first raw days I latched onto all small acts of kindness and humanity.

      We buried Tricia in her dressage gear – jodhpurs, fitted dark blue jacket, white shirt with a stock around the neck – and we put her riding crop in her hand. I never saw Tricia practising dressage, even though she had been doing it for some years, because she was shy about being watched. But I knew how much pride she took in it. I knew, on a good day, how enthusiastically she’d tell you about her ‘perfect trot–canters’ and her ‘flying changes’. My memories of Tricia riding were of the less-controlled variety. For instance, the first time she was put on the back of a friend’s horse, aged six or seven, and the horse bolted down the lane. I remember the screams of the friend’s mother and the panic followed by the relief when the horse was captured and led back – with Tricia still in the saddle, an enormous grin on her face.

      As we prepared Tricia’s outfit, Alice, a lady from the village, showed me how to tie the stock so I could explain it to the undertaker. We couldn’t find Tricia’s stock pin so Alice went home and brought back a gold stock pin with a little horseshoe on it which strangely looked like a symbol of good luck. Elizabeth spent hours polishing Tricia’s riding boots to a glassy sheen, all the time aware that the undertaker might have to slice right up the back to get them on.

      There was a line of framed photographs along Tricia’s mantelpiece in the farmhouse kitchen showing her Labrador, Ted, and her old collie, Roy, alongside pictures of her long-gone mare Hattie shoving her head over the denim-blue stable door. We took these photographs, and one of Dad sitting on the old water trough with Roy smiling at his feet, and placed them around her in the coffin.

      It was months before I realized that the only photograph we left behind on the mantelpiece was one of the whole family together: my mum (Margaret), dad (Stuart), Elizabeth, Tricia and me, at a family wedding smiling in our Sunday best.

      Dad, Mum, Me, Tricia and Elizabeth at Cousin Mary’s wedding

      Maybe in choosing the photographs of her animals to go in her coffin – as her ‘grave goods’ – we had unconsciously acknowledged that animals were a constant source of comfort