Underground. Various

Jessica hadn’t succumbed to one infection or another, when she wasn’t struggling to swallow, when she wasn’t filled with rage.

      My parents tried everything. A carousel of specialists in distant rooms. My mother, thick with misery. My father, fingertips barely touching the edges of reason. I don’t remember much of the conversations, but I do remember one doctor smiling at my parents across the width of a desk, and saying, ‘Why not have another baby? This one really isn’t going to bring you very much joy.’

      Keep. Throw away. Undecided.

      Jessica couldn’t speak, but she understood. As she grew, she learned other ways to communicate. Kicks. Bites. Scratches. It would take my mother hours to dress her each morning as I watched from a doorway. There were days my mother painted her face in coats of bright optimism, and other days when she would curl up in the corner of the room and have to be coaxed back into the world again by my father.

      When Jessica was five, it was decided she was uneducable. Disabled of the mind. She couldn’t be sent to school, and so the education authority thought she should be put into an institution instead. The health authority agreed. My parents, who looked after Jessica every waking minute of her life, and who were the greatest authority of all, were never listened to.

      ‘We fought to keep her at home,’ my mother said for years afterwards. ‘We fought as hard as we could.’

      I never really knew if she was telling me, or telling some past, long-forgotten version of herself.

      Jessica was sent away. It was for the best. Everything was for the best. My parents said it to each other. People said it to my parents. Doctors. Friends. Strangers in the street. For the best became attached to every sentence, like a quietening balm. A balm that soothes but never heals.

      The first place was a sprawl of Victorian melancholy in a far corner of Essex. We travelled there, each Sunday. Whilst everyone else went to church, my parents went to worship at an altar of their own self-loathing. Getting there and back took the best part of a day, and I would stare through the smeared windows of train carriages and watch London ebb and flow, until it was replaced by farms and fields, and the scatter of nameless villages. St Catherine’s, it said at the gate. Children’s Home for the Mentally Defective. As though all the children inside were small pieces of damaged machinery.

      The corridors were lengthy and yellowed. The doors were all shut. Staff skimmed the edges of distant hallways, but we never saw any other children. You could hear them, though. Echoing around the fancy cornices and the giant cast-iron fireplaces, the smothered sound of unquiet minds. Jessica waited for us in a panelled room. My sister, buttoned into someone else’s clothes, because no one wore their own things at St Catherine’s. There was a giant cupboard at the far end of each dormitory, and what the staff decided to dress you in was pot luck. All the beautiful outfits my mother had made were walking around on someone else. The four of us sat in a semicircle of matching high-back chairs and stared at each other. My mother would try to hug Jessica. Jessica would squirm away. Then the three of us would leave. It felt like a trip to the Natural History Museum. As though we had been to look at an exhibition no one else knew anything about.

      They make documentaries about these places now. Cyril and I watched one. There was a presenter standing in a derelict room, waving his hands around and shouting about asylums. Black and white photographs. The stutter of an old film reel. All those broken lives, all those unheard stories. Except this wasn’t just a story. This was my sister.

      Cyril was right.

      Jessica isn’t stupid.

      There’s little point in starting my day now until the rush hour is over, as London is held static in a charge of elbows and frustration. Cyril and I used to be in the middle of that. We spent years pressed into endless carriages, breathing into the material of strangers’ overcoats, standing on the right, living our lives behind yellow lines.

      I usually set off from home around ten thirty. That way I can go about my business in peace. I take a packed lunch, because it can get quite expensive going to those little kiosks at the stations. I used to take my knitting, just to pass the time, but I quickly realized you need to have your wits about you to have any chance of success. It’s easy to miss someone in a crowded carriage, and you can spend the rest of the day trying to locate them again. I tend to look at people’s feet if I’ve a moment to spare, because it’s amazing what you can learn about someone just from their shoes. I try to guess the kind of person they belong to, and when I look up, nine times out of ten I’m right.

      The only time I allow myself to daydream, is when we’re beneath Hammersmith. I know Jessica is up there somewhere. She has moved many times since the days of St Catherine’s. Sheltered. Assisted. Lodge. House. Home. Care. The same situation wrapped up in different words. Victorian panels were swapped for primary coloured walls. High-back chairs for activity rooms and sensory play. She was given a physiotherapist, a nutritionist, an occupational therapist. She even has a speech therapist who managed to find a voice no one had ever heard before. Jessica uses this voice sparingly, words chosen with care and usually released from her mouth one by one. In that way, I think she is probably wiser than the lot of us. Wherever she’s lived, though, it’s always been the same. She is forever out of sight. In the far corner of hospital grounds, or behind towering hedges, shuttered windows, closed blinds. Hidden away where no one else can see. It was the thing Cyril remarked upon the first time he met her. My parents were long gone, and I had been left to make the pilgrimage alone each Sunday, until Cyril volunteered to go with me.

      ‘Where is it then?’ he said.