Sunflowers in February Read online

  Brian is waiting for them. He’s obviously been assigned the task of supporting my family, and I’m thankful that he looks … reliable, like a big rugby player with kind eyes. Just … maybe, fingers crossed, he’ll be strong enough to keep us all together right now.

  As they walk to the car, I realise their last possible shred of hope, that the body in that room might not belong to me, has evaporated. It shows on their faces, robbing them of several years while the colour of Brian’s skin only serves to highlight the lack of colour in theirs.

  Leaning with his back against the passenger door, Ben catches sight of Mum and Dad, their expressions confirming everything there is to know. His eyes peep out from beneath his black hair, which flops over his face, then they snap tight shut as if this will protect him from something he isn’t prepared to understand. But he does understand. With one hand on the wheel arch of the police car for support, he vomits repeatedly, until his understanding splashes against the wheel and his shoes, and gets caught in the folds of his jeans. By the time our parents reach him, my twin brother is left with nothing but the silent retch that is pain trying to get out.

  Nathan’s mum was making Sunday dinner, while the frequent sound of canned laughter came through the door from the lounge, where Nathan was watching television.

  She chose a bottle of red wine from the wine rack, and added a small glug of it to the juices surrounding the meat as it bubbled in a pan on their kitchen range. Then she got two large wine glasses and filled both. Taking a mouthful, she reached for a small terracotta pot and crumbled a little sea salt into the dish. ‘Are you going out today?’ she called to Nathan, glancing at the clock.

  Nathan paused the programme he was watching, leisurely stretched out his long legs along the huge feather-stuffed cream sofa and yawned. ‘No, tomorrow night. A few of us are going out but we don’t know where yet. Why?’

  ‘Because I’m making your favourite, sticky toffee pudding, but it won’t be ready for a while. I just wanted to make sure you’d still be here to eat it.’

  ‘Sweet,’ he called back. ‘Thanks, Mum.’ Then he flicked the TV back to life, knowing that his empty stomach was going to appreciate his mother’s cooking more than his ears were appreciating her intermittent singing from the kitchen.

  She took another sip of wine, before grinding a pepper mill liberally over the top and stirring all the ingredients with a wooden spoon before tasting it. Nodding to herself, she took another sip of wine and hummed the tune to an advert on the television, loudly singing the last few words of it, ‘… washing bright tabs dot com,’ just as Nathan’s dad walked in from helping a neighbour.

  He hung up his jacket in the coat cupboard, but the smell of the cold evening air still clung to his clothes. He lifted the lid of the pot to see what delight she had rustled up for his dinner, then gave her a kiss, causing a lock of her long auburn hair to come loose from its black velvet ribbon.

  ‘Nathan? Dad’s back. Set the table for dinner, love,’ she called, then she lifted the wine bottle towards his dad and smiled, saying, ‘Beef in red wine,’ and with her other hand she passed him a round-bowled glass. He cupped the glass gratefully, the very good wine slipping down his throat easily, leaving hints of blackcurrant on his tongue.

  Nathan appeared in the doorway, taking up most of the frame, his quiff of light-brown hair, creating the illusion that he was slightly taller than his dad. ‘Smells good,’ he said, smiling and giving her a look of approval, then he poured himself a pint of milk from the fridge and downed half of it, before making his way to the dining room to set the table.

  As the day progresses, I watch my family’s reactions shift and change in ugly turns.

  They have stayed in the kitchen surrounded by cold cups of tea and Ben’s half-eaten sandwich from the night before. Bacon, turned white from cold fat, pokes out of slices of white bread, now stiff and stale, reminding them of the exact moment that Ben knew, without a doubt, that something was very wrong.

  We’ve always had a thing between us, me and Ben. A ‘twin thing’, like we’ve always known without words what was going on with each other. Ben was capable of eating the entire contents of the fridge in one sitting, yet that sandwich had stuck in his throat last night, when he just knew.

  Next to the sandwich is an empty silver-edged frame. A pair of scissors lies alongside a large photo taken of us all at Christmas. Everyone was smiling at the camera and the light had caught our eyes along with the strands of red tinsel that I had draped over Dad’s neck. Mum was wearing a reindeer headband, her antlers waving at us, and Ben had my fingers above his head like rabbit ears. We had just finished dinner, totally full to a point where we thought we might split, when Granddad Peter had taken the shot. I remember him, slightly drunk, his purple Christmas cracker hat lopsided on his head, and how his false teeth had shot out of his mouth onto the table when he laughed at something. Ben and I had gagged at the sight of them, landing dangerously near to the honeyed parsnips. We were a normal family, nothing amazing about us, apart from our normality.

  The photograph has a hole in it where I used to be, and all that is left of me are my rabbit fingers above Ben’s head. I’m now in Brian’s file somewhere, used for the purpose of identifying me. No doubt my family had hoped, at the time, that I’d just got distracted by friends, or a party, or anything other than what had actually happened. Now they all stare out from the glossy paper on the table, and, as in real life, I am no longer with them.

  I’m totally helpless and I can’t think of anything I can do to get anyone’s attention. I can’t be heard and I can’t move objects, or pick up a pen to write a ghostly note. I’ve tried … I’ve really tried, but I’m literally trapped in some kind of virtual world, watching my family getting steadily more demented about my untimely death.

  Uncle Roger, Dad’s brother, rushes into the house trailing the shapeless and very useless Aunty Ruth. Aunty Ruth has always been what Mum politely calls socially incompetent, but Dad says if she was any more stupid, Roger would have to water her. And now, here she is, in a voluminous orange blouse, saying nothing except, ‘Cup of tea, Meil? Cup of tea, Jay?’ in her grating voice, shortening their names in her ever-irritating way. She chews the nails of one hand and dabs at her insipid grey eyes with the other, whispering ‘Poor Lily-Pad’ over and over, until Roger snaps at her.

  ‘You’re not helping, Ruth.’ Aunty Ruth has a nickname for everyone and everyone hates it.

  Uncle Roger dives into help mode by getting all practical. He phones my granddads and I can hear their cries of disbelief, strangely metallic down the receiver, and I feel bad for them when he finishes the call, leaving them alone with nothing but their news.

  I am on the outside looking in. I can see the shaking fingers and hunched shoulders of my family, the whites of their eyes growing a network of red veins and shining with salty tears, yet I’m not reacting in the same way. I suppose all of that belongs only to the living machine that drives the adrenalin and pumps the blood and beats the heart?

  I can’t feel how the pinkness of their skin is made warm by their flowing blood, and I know that I will never again feel the weight of their arms round me, or the softness of their kisses on my cheeks. I know every feeling by memory, but I can’t react with saline and chemicals like they are, and it seems wrong, and so unfair, that in a single breath it was all over.

  ‘Another sarnie, Benji?’ Aunty Ruth asks Ben. She scrapes the remains of yesterday’s bacon sandwich in the bin and looks at him with agonised eyes, as if the extreme sympathy in her expression should support him with any grief that he may feel.

  ‘No,’ Ben answers, bristling, as always, from her name for him.

  She tries again. ‘Biscuit, Benji?’

  ‘He doesn’t want any bloody food, Ruth,’ Uncle Roger hisses at her, which causes her to flinch like she’s been stung, and resume the nail-chewing and eye-dabbing. He lights a cigarette, placing his packet back down on the table but Mum unexpectedly reaches for on
e, and barely raising an eyebrow Roger leans over and sparks his lighter into life at the end of the cigarette, which is now balanced shakily in her lips.

  ‘Ew, Mum, no?’ I gasp at how strangely unfamiliar she looks with the curl of grey smoke coming out of her mouth, and how, for sure, she would have gone mad at me or Ben for doing it.

  Dad, who would always, without fail, waft the air whenever Roger trailed his smoky aura into our house, looks at them both. ‘Really?’ he says with a heavy note of sarcasm, and walks over to the back door, opens it and points outside, as if ordering a dog out. They dutifully prop themselves against the open door frame to the kitchen, and I notice how Mum sucks on her cigarette as if it is the only way she can now draw breath. Aunty Ruth shivers and reaches for a thick and bobbly beige cardigan, while Ben is eyeing Mum and the open packet on the table. He either hates the idea … or wants one.

  ‘Don’t do it, Benji,’ I whisper into his ear. ‘I’m still here.’ Then we all jump as Ben suddenly hits the table with his fist, and with his teeth clenched, in a burst of vented anger, he swears. ‘Bloody hit-and-run?’

  Brian had informed them of the initial judgement, but exactly what happened last night is a horrible, unanswered question on everyone’s lips, including mine. I’m pretty sure though, that if we had to choose the cause of my death, we would all choose hit-and-run, rather than rape, murder and a roadside dumping. Not that it’s much consolation. Dad joins in and repeats his threat from this morning. ‘I’m going to kill the bastard who did it, then tear his limbs off and shove them all down his throat.’

  Ben simply sits, rigid, hand still clenched, staring at those cigarettes.

  It isn’t fair. Someone out there will carry on with their life, while mine has stopped because of them. I want justice. I want the police to find them and ruin their life and the lives of their family as payback for mine, preferably before my dad gets arrested for dismembering someone.

  But most of all, I want my life back.

  Although I can move around with my family, I can’t seem to actually leave them, so I’ve no idea how Beth is coping with all this. I want to wind the clock back and be back in town, shopping with her, having a laugh … being alive. I don’t even know if Nathan knows yet. It’s as if I am caught in the family zone and can’t move away. I know Ben will tell his friend, Matthew, but he might not think to tell Nathan straight away. I want him to wrap me in his arms right this minute, to kiss the top of my head and tell me that this nightmare will all somehow be OK. I want him to tell me that he loves me, dead or alive.

  Stunned disbelief, like a person whose face has just been slapped, has filled the room all day, and when finally Uncle Roger goes home with Aunty Ruth, who despite his chastising, has left huge piles of sandwiches covered in cling film in the kitchen, my family detach themselves and head robotically to various parts of the house, to lick the wounds that they probably believe will never heal.

  Dad plants himself on the sofa with a bottle of whisky, and Mum crawls into bed with sleeping tablets and gin, as if they are merely clinging to the debris that is the remains of our family.

  I follow Ben into his room. Does he still know me, without words and beyond walls? ‘Can you tell I’m still here, Ben?’ I ask him. No one really understands how close we are, except us, and as I study Ben in his state of jagged devastation, I wonder if he believes that I’m now severed from him, or whether somewhere deep inside, he can feel me with him still.

  He puts a can of beer, swiped from the fridge, on his bedside table and with fingers shaking he holds up one of Uncle Roger’s cigarettes, and lights it.

  ‘Don’t,’ I plead with him, but he carries on, drawing on it, ignoring his obsession with fitness and sport. He takes a drag, then another, and carries on until the whole cigarette is nothing but a squashed and yellowing stub in the lid of a deodorant can. It makes him choke, and his choking turns into a sob, yet he wipes his face angrily, turns on some music and ramps up the volume, as if loud noise will replace the thoughts in his head.

  He reaches for his phone and texts Matthew to tell him, without softening the blow, that his sister is dead, then waits for the screen to light up and ring with Matthew’s personal Mission Impossible tone, signalling his reply, which, as it happens, is instant. Personally I don’t think that ‘Shit man, that’s intense’ is adequate at this point to support Ben through his grief, but within moments a second text comes through. ‘I’m coming over.’ After texting back a single word, ‘No,’ Ben switches his phone to silent and flops back on the bed, cocooned by the music yet clutching at the can of beer as if it is the only thing that will keep him afloat.

  My brother, such a huge part of who I am – was? – or whatever, has become a kind of agony where my heart should be, and I can’t bear that the very essence of who we, as twins, were, might have been ripped and ruined. I am trapped in an awful cavity between life and death and all I can hope for is that my twin brother will find me.

  Nathan’s mum’s beautifully restored vintage car, the shiny blue curves of its old-fashioned bodywork topped with a cream convertible roof, was parked in the garage for the second night running.

  She planned to get her car washed early before work on Monday, because Nathan’s dad, Alex, would have left the house by then, and Nathan was on half-term so would still be asleep. She really didn’t want to tell Alex that she had hit a deer, or whatever it was, coming home from the late lunch with her friends on Saturday. She didn’t want to explain the mud on her precious and normally pristine car, because she would then have to explain why she had cut across the countryside to avoid the main roads and the chance of more cars.

  She didn’t normally drink more than two glasses if she had to drive, but Morag had bought another bottle, and she had eventually given in to her friend’s pressure to ‘Go on, have another’. In the end, although she had been quite careful and felt totally fine, she had probably been over the limit by the time she drove home, but as someone else had been pouring the wine she wasn’t exactly sure how much she had consumed.

  She’d been looking for some mints on the way home, while avoiding the potholes at the same time, when she heard the thunk. There was nothing to indicate what she had hit as she looked into her rear-view mirror and her side mirrors, seeing only the inky black puddles and the darkening outlines of the trees and the nearby hedge. She had stopped, briefly, but couldn’t see anything from her seat, and when she had tried to get out to look she realised very quickly that her high heels, the increasing dark and bad weather would make it a futile task to hunt for an animal, and even then what could she do? She could hardly shove an entire deer into her car and take it home. No, better to let nature take its course, she thought, then drove home, desperately hoping her car was OK.

  They didn’t have secrets from each other in her family, but she was terribly embarrassed that she had lost track of her safe driving limit. She decided to keep quiet about the animal, and the mud, and wash her car on Monday.

  When the shreds of what had once been his family had dispersed, Lily’s dad, James, sat on the sofa clutching a bottle of whisky, and listened to the sounds in his own head. It was the noise of jarring disbelief playing over and over, stabbing at his soul.

  The two tiny babies that his wife had presented him with over fifteen years ago had completed his whole world. So vulnerable and perfect, he had held one in each arm, just looking from Ben to Lily, and being totally amazed and thrilled that they belonged to him. Amelia had smiled tiredly at him, flushed with exertion and pride, and he had loved her. In that moment he knew he was going to be a good dad and his heart had been a seesaw of joy and fear at the prospect ahead.

  Amelia would joke with him over the years that he was almost caveman in his need to be the hunter-gatherer of the family. His key function in life was to provide and protect. They were so happy with twins, one of each, they had decided to stop there. From little pink wriggling things to strong, healthy teenagers, he had revelled in every stage. He had
watched them over the years, how they fought with each other, defended each other and loved each other. Many times when they were little he had found them in the same bed, curled up, warm little hands clasped as if they needed each other even when they were asleep. He had admired his children for everything that they had become, their achievements, their talents, their personalities forming as they grew, and yet he hadn’t been able to keep Lily alive.

  He took a large burning gulp of whisky and dialled a number on the phone. The steady rhythm of the dialling tone filled his ear and he swigged at his whisky again. The drink stayed in his mouth as a tired voice on the other end simply said his name. ‘James?’

  James was unable to swallow past the huge lump in his throat, and the liquid trickled out of his lips and down his jumper as he spoke. ‘Dad?’ he mumbled into the receiver, and waited while his father gathered himself.

  ‘I’m here, son.’

  They sat like that for some time, receivers to their ears and only silence coming down the line until James quietly said, ‘I’ve failed, Dad.’ He took another gulp of whisky, then another, then more, hoping with every second that it would numb the pain, even just a little. ‘I didn’t keep her safe,’ he confessed into the receiver, the faceless bulk of his daughter’s killer lurking in the corner of his mind. ‘I can hardly bear …’ The rest of his words wouldn’t come out, but he thought about his wife and all the similarities there were between her and Lily and how she would now always be a stark reminder of the beautiful woman his daughter should have become. And Ben, so similar, the black hair and the shape of his face, but now with an empty space forever beside him. He put his face in his hands while his father’s words floated up from the carpet, where he’d dropped the phone.