When I Had a Little Sister - Catherine Simpson

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A new prescription had pleased Dad. It meant things were being done. We all lived in hope of new pills and revised prescriptions because then we could imagine that something was being done. Dad drove her for the new pills – pleased he could also do this to help since the doctors had taken away Tricia’s driving licence. He dropped her back at the farmhouse afterwards where she’d said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort everything out tomorrow.’

      While forcing his lunch down he resolved to break in – he was now convinced she was lying in bed too ill to get up. He knew which windowpane in the conservatory could be forced from the outside and he went straight back to the farmhouse to gain access.

      Knocking the window open caused the whole sill of plants to crash to the floor, some smashing, all spilling soil and grit onto the lino. He stepped through the window, crunching over the pot fragments and scattered plants, and went into the house.

      This is when he found the body of his youngest daughter.

      He could not call an ambulance because of the broken phone so he dashed back to his own house, four hundred yards up the lane, to dial 999. Then he returned to the farmhouse and sat there, waiting.

      I cannot imagine the world at this time. I cannot imagine Dad in the house alone with Tricia’s body.

      Twenty minutes later the police arrived, and then an air ambulance landed in the field opposite. As the paramedics ran inside Dad said, ‘I’m afraid you’re too late.’

      After they confirmed Tricia was dead the paramedics tried to contact family members for Dad, using an old mobile of Tricia’s with barely any charge or signal. Dad couldn’t use a mobile because of his hearing aid and the paramedics said they weren’t allowed to explain the situation to Johnny when he answered Elizabeth’s phone. Elizabeth was in the shower and as Johnny tried to get her attention and hand her the phone it got cut off. This is what caused the chaotic half-messages that Chinese-whispered their way to me.

      Sometime after the paramedics left the farmhouse Tricia’s mental-health worker drove into the yard for an appointment. Tricia had a history of acute depression and visits from the mental-health or crisis teams were daily by then. The policeman went outside to explain what had happened. The woman did not come in to speak to Dad but stayed in her car writing notes before driving off.

      Mrs Smith, a neighbour from up the lane, had seen the helicopter land and ran down to the farm. She poked her head into the farmhouse and asked the policeman, ‘Is it Stuart or is it Tricia?’ The officer was relieved to hand Dad over to a friendly face but Dad didn’t want to leave Tricia alone in the house with police searching through her bedroom and her private belongings, tramping up and down the stairs looking for a suicide note.

      Mrs Smith eventually coaxed him away. The policeman stayed on in the house, waiting for the ambulance to take her body to the mortuary.

      The countryside can be enveloped in a heavy silence and, as the policeman waited alone with Tricia’s body, the quiet must have seemed crushing.

      An hour later, when Elizabeth and Johnny arrived at the farmhouse, they told the policeman who they were and Elizabeth made Johnny go and check on Tricia first. She was covered in a blanket. Johnny went to look – this was only the third time he had ever seen Tricia – and he reassured Elizabeth: it’s OK. Elizabeth went to see her but afterwards said she wished she hadn’t.

      By the time I arrived, Tricia had gone.

      I saw her on the Monday morning. The mortuary was tucked down the side of Lancaster Royal Infirmary in a single-storey, white building. I knocked on the door and a small man in late middle age answered. He ushered me and Elizabeth in. He looked sad even though he must greet bereaved relatives every day. He hesitated outside the door to the viewing room and looked at us, from one to the other; he clearly saw a family resemblance between us and Tricia. ‘She was very young,’ he said.

      She was forty-six. Three years younger than me, and six years younger than Elizabeth.

      Elizabeth hung back for a second. ‘Take a minute; whenever you are ready,’ he said, but I was keen to see Tricia. I felt I’d let her down by not being able to make contact with her sooner – she’d now been dead two days.

      I pushed the door open.

      Her hair had been brushed away from her face in an unfamiliar style but otherwise it was Tricia lying there on a table wearing her work clothes – the dark blue jacket and jeans she wore to feed and muck out her horses.

      Her hand was chilled. I touched it and asked her, out loud, ‘Oh, Tricia, what have you done? What have you done?’

       Chapter Three

      The dash south on the day Tricia died was an echo of a similar journey when my mother was on her deathbed seven years before. After hearing she’d taken a turn for the worse there had been the frantic packing of a suitcase followed by the same three-hour hiatus on the M6, but as familiar sights flew by – the bleak stretches over Shap, the promise of Tebay Services, the elegant verdigris dome of the Williamson Memorial – the familiarity was overridden by a surreal feeling of travelling into the unknown and the knowledge that everything in the world had changed.

      I was raised in a family of five. Mum’s death had taken that to four; now we were down to three.

      Mum had died in the scorching summer of 2006, six years after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her final years were a white-knuckle ride of scans, hospital appointments, inpatient, outpatient, chemotherapy, sickness and terror – hers and ours – with short reprieves when we dared to hope it was all behind us and that we’d be able to re-close our eyes and our ears to death and pretend it hadn’t come so close we could smell it.

      We buried her in the outfit she’d worn for a Buckingham Palace garden party she’d been invited to through Dad’s work with the Royal Lancashire Show: a silky blue dress bought from a boutique rather than a catalogue or being home-made which would have been more typical. I took her perfume, her glasses and her handbag to the undertaker’s. I put an ironed lace handkerchief inside her handbag. I took her lipstick and her face powder.

      I drew the line at her fascinator.

      I put everything in a carrier bag because I had seen someone else leave clothes at the undertaker’s and their underwear and skirt and blouse were left exposed, draped over the back of a chair in the waiting room. I could only imagine my mother’s tight-lipped, you-can’t-trust-anyone-to-do-anything eye-roll if her underskirt and tights were left draped for all the world to see.

      Her five grandchildren wrote notes to put in the handbag and did drawings. They wanted to because they loved her. She had never complained when they turned her house into an obstacle course or her entire living room into a den. Unlike when we were kids and she had berated us for making a mess, yelling, ‘When you’re grown up I’m going to come and jump on your settee and see how you like it!’ It always looked as though she enjoyed being a grandma more than a mother.

      The day after she died we tried to impose some order on her chaotic kitchen – sorting out, putting away, making space to put stuff down – things we were not allowed to do when she was alive. We’d been embarrassed the evening before when the nurses arrived with the morphine and couldn’t find anywhere to assemble the morphine driver. They’d looked at us, questioning, disapproving, maybe thinking we’d created this mess and obviously wondering why we didn’t sort the place out. Elizabeth and I had kept quiet, aware how ridiculous it would sound for two middle-aged daughters of a dying woman to gaze helplessly round the chaos and say: ‘But we’re not allowed!’

      I found her platinum wedding ring in the bottom of a jug in the kitchen. It had worn smooth and thin since her wedding forty-seven years earlier and was cut and misshapen – she must have severed it with wire cutters or pliers to remove it from her left hand when her finger swelled with the cancer treatment or her skin became too sensitive for jewellery.

      Dad

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