Something Only We Know (35 page)

At that, hot outrage swelled up in me. I wanted to jump up and grab her cashmere sweater and shake her till her teeth rattled.
OK,
I would yell in her face,
you can stop this bloody
pretence right now. Don’t you understand what you did, Saskia bloody Fox-Lawrence? Do you know how much DAMAGE you caused? You bitch! You cold-hearted, manipulative bitch! Because I’ll
help you remember. I’ll lay out the results of your twisted bloody experiment. Come home with me and see how you hollowed out my beautiful sister and left her stranded and ruined.

‘Her name is Helen,’ I whispered.

‘Helen. And which year did she leave?’

Again it was like a slap across the face. I pictured Hel slumped over the table, crying because she wanted to sit her final exams, and Mum arguing that she had to get better first, trying to use
the situation as yet another bargaining chip, and each of us keenly aware that there was no way she’d be going back to school that year. There would be no prom for Hel, no shirt-signing and
leavers’ photo and super-soaker fights across the playing field. She’d slunk away from St Thom’s prematurely, under a cloud of rumour and shame. A couple of half-hearted visits
from the nicer girls in her class, a dribble of Get Well cards, and that was it. Game over.
Don’t you know all this, Saskia? Don’t you know?

And then, like thunder breaking across the tension of the moment, the Lambins’ front door banged opened and shut again, and there was the clatter of keys being thrown down.

‘Sass? Sass, darling? You in there?’

She and I were just staring at each other.
What in God’s name is going on with you?
said her expression.
What is the matter? Look, my husband is home and because I have
excellent manners I am going to skate over the funny business by pretending you are normal and that this has been an ordinary, pleasant chat, the way it was at the start. Before you got your
knickers in a twist about some vague school acquaintance who I can’t even picture. So shall we buck up, eh? Do you want to do your job?

‘Yes, Luc,’ she called brightly. ‘The
Messenger
lady’s arrived. We’re sitting by the hearth. Come and say hello. She’s a fan.’

A tanned, rangy man with a fine head of greying hair walked into the room. Like his wife, he wasn’t conventionally good-looking, but there was an attractive air of confidence about him.
They were a glossy, Sunday-supplement kind of couple. He wore a good-quality grey shirt and fitted jeans. His body language was easy.

‘Well now,’ he said. ‘Jennifer, isn’t it?’

I got to my feet, unsure what to do. I’d almost forgotten what I was there for.

Meanwhile Lambin crossed the floor and bent to kiss his wife. ‘So how’s it going? Has Sass been keeping you entertained?’

‘Yes.’

‘Excellent. She’s good at that. And we’re ready to roll, are we? You’ve got your notepad primed? OK, then. If Sass has shown you the pieces down here, you should come up
to my study and take a look at my design notes. I’ll talk you through some of the processes I use, and some of the inspirations. I want you to leave with a real understanding of the Lambin
vision.’

He nodded his head towards the glass staircase and moved to usher me along. In a dream I did as I was told. And as I began to climb those transparent steps, my hand smoothing up the icy
banister, it seemed to me that the place was unreal, a stage set. If I struck them, the walls would be revealed as cardboard, and the view through the window a painted screen. Nothing here was
solid or sound. ‘Hey, you should know, Jennifer,’ he said, pausing mid-way and half raising the bottle, ‘not everyone gets to come up here to see the inner sanctum. You’re
privileged. But it so happens you catch me in one hell of a good mood. For the next hour, I’m yours. You can go right ahead and ask me anything you want. I’m your scoop of the
day.’

I took a deep breath, fighting to keep a grip on the situation, on my job, on Rosa’s expectations.

In the space between my shoulder blades I could feel Saskia’s eyes pricking curiously at the flesh.

When I got home that evening, Mum was sitting at the table with two tins of loose photographs and a pile of family albums. ‘I thought this was a job I could be getting on with,’ she
said when she saw me. ‘Come and see.’

The last thing I wanted to do was pore over old photos, not the way I was feeling. It had taken me all the energy I could muster to get through the afternoon. What I wanted to do was crawl
upstairs and put my head under the duvet. But I laid my bag on the sofa and went and stood dutifully next to her.

This was an old album that she hadn’t brought out for a while. One by one she turned the stiff pages, flipping backwards through time.

‘When were these taken, Mum?’

‘The Nineties. The years when I was useful.’

I ignored the maudlin comment and instead stared at the pictures. Mainly what we had was Helen at various ages feeding ducks, red squirrels, chaffinches, a lamb. And here was I, much younger,
pretending to drip ice cream on Dad’s head, balanced on a scooter, whacking a puddle with a stick. Because we were flipping from the end to the front, Helen got plumper and more normal-shaped
as we went on, more relaxed about being in front of the camera. Her clothes were ordinary, not the bundles and layers she’d insisted on wearing at her most ill. There was one particularly
striking shot of her embracing a standing stone, dressed in simple jeans and stripy T-shirt, with her russet hair blowing across the granite. She’d have been about thirteen then.

Mum
, I imagined saying,
I met Saskia today.
Mum’s face freezing in horror, her colour draining, her hand coming up to clutch her chest. Helen running in:
What have
you done, Jen?
No, that was a meeting I wouldn’t be sharing.

Instead I said, ‘You ’ve a lot more photos of Hel than you have of me.’

‘She’s been around longer. She had a seven-year start on you, remember.’

I sighed.

‘What?’ said Mum.

‘I wish I looked like Helen.’

‘Oh, don’t say that. You’re lovely as you are.’ We gazed down at a photograph of me in a PGL canoe, an orange crash helmet jammed on my head. If that had been Helen in a
boat, the picture would have shown a punt or a prettily painted rowing boat moving under willows, and she’d have been languishing in a white dress and sun hat. But that said, here she was at
about ten with the guinea pig on her lap and laughing her head off, nothing serene or wistful about that.

‘Wait a minute.’ I took the thick edge of the page and lifted it over. ‘Was that Norris?’

‘It was.’

Norris was a three-foot resin garden gnome my dad had picked out of a hedge in a lay-by and brought home because he said he ‘felt sorry for it’. Mum had wanted to put Norris straight
in the bin, but I’d pleaded his case, so Dad had hosed him down with the pressure washer and we’d found a spot under the Leylandii, pretty much out of sight. Shortly afterwards,
however, Norris moved, apparently under his own steam, to the edge of the patio. Mum accused me of shifting him – a daft suggestion as I was only six and not a lot taller than Norris himself
– then she had a pop at Dad. Neither of us knew anything about it, though. She put Norris in his place again, and the next day he was back at the patio window, leering in. Every few days the
gnome would travel some short distance, and I’d be beside myself with excitement to see where he’d got to. Indeed, as time passed, he got more daring and could be found balanced on
neighbours’ doorsteps, on top of walls or wedged in a tree. Then one morning I came downstairs and he’d just disappeared. We searched and searched but no joy. Dad said he must have got
lonely and gone to find some other gnomes to be with, and sure enough, a week or so later I had a card from Norris postmarked Llandudno saying he’d gone off to live with some mates, and not
to miss him and to behave at school.

‘God, I’d forgotten about him. What was the deal there? Was it you moving him about?’

Mum smiled. ‘It was Helen. She’d get up especially early to do it. Only sometimes you were up before her and those mornings he had to stay where he was.’

‘Helen? Oh! So why did she stop? I was gutted, you know, when it finished. I truly believed he was alive. I suppose she got bored with the game?’

‘No, the bin men took him. She’d forgotten it was collection day, and she’d posed him on top of the wheelie bin. She was very upset when she realised. We even drove her to the
municipal tip to see if she could get him back, but the manager said he thought everything would have gone in the crusher. Then, do you remember Norris writing to you? Dad had one of his drivers
post the letter from Wales. It was her idea, though.’

My complicated sister. Just as you think you’ve got a handle on who she is, she morphs again.

‘Look,’ Mum went on, ‘here you are at the Millennium scarecrow festival. That was a day. Half an hour before he took that photo, your dad had to rescue you.’

‘From what?’

‘Oh, you marched up to some teenage boys who were interfering with Dr Who’s scarf and told them to leave it alone. Told them they were vandals and to go find something useful to
do.’

‘Did I?’

‘You did, yes. They were much older than you but you weren’t frightened. And then the woman whose scarecrow it was came out to say thank you. Don’t you remember?’

‘No. Nothing.’ I racked my brains. ‘Oh, unless – wasn’t one of the scarecrows done up as a burglar climbing into an upstairs window? Because for a minute I thought
it really was a burglar. And afterwards we went to a café where Dad sat on some chewing gum and you were furious with him because you’d only just had his trousers
dry-cleaned?’

Mum looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know about that.’

Why did we all remember different versions of the same story? It was weird the way we each sifted the past.

At Mum’s elbow was the tin of loose and jumbled snapshots. I could see a baby Helen in a highchair, Dad standing in front of one of his lorries, Mum twenty-something in a brown pinafore
dress. I poked the top layer and a picture of my parents slid out, must have been from a time before us kids arrived. They were sitting on a low wall with a cold grey sea behind, Dad much slimmer
and Mum much smilier, and they were holding hands.

There was a photo of Toffee inside his hutch where the wire mesh was in focus but the guinea pig behind it wasn’t. There was a seaside hotel which I remembered specifically because Mum had
left our swimming costumes to dry on the windowsill and they’d blown off onto the flat roof below and the manager had to send someone up on a ladder. There was a too-dark print of St
Thom’s school stage, with three spot-lit Year 12s performing a comedy routine written by me.

I fished out a snapshot and held it up so I could see better. ‘I know where this is.’

Me, in junior school dress and cardigan, plasters on both my knees, walking along the top of a wall while Mum held my hand for safety. That wall no longer existed; it had been at the end of
Mason’s car park, but that store was gone and a B&Q in its place.

Mum leaned in to examine the detail. ‘Oh, you were a devil for climbing. I had to watch you or you’d be up some tree before I could say Jack Robinson.’

‘You’re not watching me there, though. You’re looking the other way.’

‘Am I?’

It was plain her gaze was on something else, something not in shot. ‘You’re looking at Helen, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know how you can tell that.’

‘Because you always were.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I’m not. I’m not getting at you, I’m just saying. People look at her and not me.’

‘
No
.’

‘Yes, Mum. You’ve always paid her more attention. It’s OK, I don’t mind because Dad pays
me
more. That’s just the way this family works.’

Her mouth came open. She seemed genuinely shocked. Why? I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know.

‘It’s not like that at all, Jen. Oh, love, how could you think that way?’

‘Because it’s the truth.’

A clattering noise from the kitchen. I realised Helen was just the other side of the door, making our tea.

Mum said carefully, ‘Listen, love, however it’s come across, you’ve got it wrong. What it is, your sister’s more . . . needy. And I don’t mean just the . . . the
being ill. Even before. When she was little. She used to wait for me in the street, and stay close by my side as we walked, and ask me to help with getting dressed and, when she was older, with
things like homework, everything. She needed the reassurance. And I was her mother so I was happy to give it. Then you came along and you were so different. So different. If you and I went out to
the shops together, you wanted to walk ahead on your own. I had to shout at you to hold my hand when we were crossing the road. You wouldn’t let me put on your coat for you or do up your
toggles. I never even
saw
any of your homework. You wanted to be independent right from the word go. And you made friends at the drop of a hat, whereas Helen’s always hung back.
Everything that’s come your way, you’ve jumped right in. Gosh, I remember when you were eleven and you went on that PGL trip to Menai, I worried myself stupid because Helen had been
homesick and had a rotten stay there. But you loved every minute.’

‘You make that sound like a bad thing.’

‘No,
no!
I was proud of you. And it’s been – ’ she lowered her voice – ‘a
relief
that you were able to manage the way you have. Do you
understand? That you didn’t need the same amount of support. At times it’s been exhausting.’ Her face was working as she tried to think how best to express herself.

‘So by and large you left me to get on with it.’

‘Because that was what you wanted, I thought! That was how you liked to run things. But just because I didn’t go hovering around you, it doesn’t mean I loved you any the less.
You didn’t really think that, did you? When you left to go to university, I sat on your bed and cried for a week. Don’t look at me like that. I did. Ask your dad. Ask Helen.’