Ivy’s Arch
Six Months After
Dear Gulliver,
I hope this letter finds you well, and you don’t mind the intrusion of me writing to you rather than emailing. I contacted your publisher and asked if they’d pass on your contact details, but they politely declined. I remembered Ivy staying with you at your lighthouse on Anglesey and did a little detective work and voila! I found your address.
We didn’t get much chance to speak at Ivy’s funeral, mainly because I wasn’t capable of speaking that day, or for many days afterwards. I know you have brothers, so I know you can imagine the pain of losing my sister.
Anyway, I’m not writing this as a form of therapy. I have a box of things of Ivy’s that she would’ve wanted you to have, all writery stuff. Please let me know if this is the right address to send them to and if so, I’ll post them. If not, let me know where best.
Of course, you might not want them at all, and I can completely understand that. I know you and Ivy were close friends and you were one of her favourite people, and her death was unexpected and hard and heart breaking and all of those things we never speak about for fear of crying.
I’ve heard from her agent that you’re working on the bones of a book she had ideas for, the one that you talked about when she stayed with you in the lighthouse. She talked about the lighthouse and Puffin Bay. She mentioned you so much when we spoke on the phone, you and your brothers and the Puffin Inn and the arch on the beach that she was fascinated with.
I didn’t chance to see those places or meet you properly when I came for her funeral. I was too mad at her for dying. Too mad at my parents for not being able to be there or to be who I needed them to be. Too mad at myself for not knowing her better the last few years.
There are reasons and explanations for all of those things and I’m not mad at her or our parents or me most of the time. I understand that this is grief, and grief is a terrible animal that sneaks up on you even on the sunshiny-est of days, never needing to show its sharpened claws because a gentle tap on the shoulder is sometimes the all it needs to remind me that my sister isn’t going to answer her phone when I call her, or laugh when I tell her I saw my future husband on the Tube again or send me a selfie of her smiling while she licks an ice cream in an obnoxiously dirty manner.
We’ll never talk at night together again. We’ll never share secrets about the boys we liked. We’ll never help each other get ready for a night out only to say sod it all and stay in wearing our pyjamas with a takeaway and a bottle of prosecco.
I won’t see her get old or get married or have babies or celebrate the release of another book. I won’t see her fall in love or hear her yell at me if I choose a bridesmaid dress for her that makes her look like a meringue – which I totally would.
She won’t ever see me use the greatest gift she ever gave me.
I’m sorry, Gulliver. This letter was meant to be just about sending you some of her things and I’ve made it all about me. I guess putting it down on paper has been therapeutic, even though I said this wasn’t a form of therapy. Sometimes we tell lies without knowing what they are.
I should’ve visited Ivy more while she was staying with you in Puffin Bay. My sister was half-wild and would always take that risk of driving too close to a cliff edge without fear. She’d said to me often enough that if her time was up, her time was up. She’d come back and haunt someone with dreams so they’d write the books she never got around too. She always wrote like she was running out of time, and yes, we both know Hamilton was her favourite musical.
I should’ve spent more time with her.
I keep thinking what would’ve happened if I’d been there on the night she died. Maybe she wouldn’t have taken the bike out when she knew there was a bad storm setting in. Maybe we would’ve been curled up on the sofa watching rom-coms and drinking hot chocolate with Bailey’s in, eating crap and she would’ve stayed in with me. Maybe we’d have already gone out for the night to celebrate her finishing her book. She always preferred writing The End rather than publishing day, because that was the day she finally got rid of those characters from her head.
But it doesn’t matter, does it? I wasn’t there and I can’t go back in time to change things.
Neither can you.
Neither of us and no one is to blame. We just have to live with our loss and recognise that the space she took up will be empty, but I guess both of us will fill it with our memories instead.
I think what I have here are things that will add to your memories.
We both knew a different side of Ivy. You saw her as a rival, in some ways, because you wrote the same genre, you seemed to banter with each other about whose books sold better and I know you both wrote victims in your books that were each other, or based characters on caricatures of yourselves. I know you were Detective Pearson’s stupid ex-boyfriend in one of her series, and that she was the mad cat lady in two of your books.
I don’t like crime fiction, but I read my sister’s stories because she was my sister, and I read yours because of my sister.
You saw her at her most mischievous. Her most playful. She sent me photos of the scarecrow she made that looked like you to freak you out and she was almost as proud as when she finished a book. She told me about the secret package she sent you, with one of your books and that she was sure she had you convinced you had a psycho stalking you.
That pleased her. She loved to torment you.
I know she loved you.
I asked her many times why she didn’t start a relationship with you because she talked about you so much. She’d laugh and say that wasn’t how it was.
She never told me how it actually was though.
Did you love her? Did you want more? You saw a part of my sister that I didn’t have access to.
You don’t have to reply to this, Gulliver. I’d be thrilled if you confirmed your address and that you were happy to have this box of tricks sent to you.
But if you ever want to talk about her – or write about her – I’m here.
Kindest of all regards,
Iris.
Dear Gulliver,
Thank you for the postcard and letting me know you’d like Ivy’s box of tricks. That’s how I’ve been thinking of it. While I waited to hear back from you I added more to it, some things from when she was growing up and some trinkets from when she lived in New Orleans during her wildest years. This letter should be in the box.
I’ve been thinking of what I’d write in this letter while going through more of her belongings from her apartment. The lease is up next month and I can’t extend it for another six months. That was fine to do last time as I couldn’t even bear the thought of going through her things, but now it’s time.
I don’t want to do this, because every item of clothing I put into a bag for the charity shop, every old stuffed toy that she kept because she could never bear to throw them away that I work out how to store at my house further underlines that she isn’t coming home.
There are days when it feels like my world has ended, only if she had a way of communicating with me now she’d tell me not to be so stupid.
I found postcards from her from Puffin Bay. She sent a couple each week, so it was fun to see that the postcard you’d sent me was the same as one she’d chosen – one of the lifeboat station on a night when the skies were lit with purples and blues from the bioluminescent plankton. I’d had to look it up when she told me, thinking it was another one of her tall tales. Instead, I’d found it was true.
I’ve put the postcards in here. I would like them back at some point, when you’re done with them, as they’re a snippet from part of her life I wasn’t fully aware of. When Ivy was in Puffin Bay with you, I was in Australia working on a six-month contract. She’d been thinking about coming out to stay with me if the contract was extended. Obviously, that never happened.
She told me about you being a twin, and how you and Rowan were completely identical. She found it fascinating that you were so different in so many ways, but you didn’t realise how similar you are too. She wrote to me about Finn, and I think she had a bit of a crush on him, only he only had eyes for Ruby, which I think she sussed out from the first time she saw them together.
She told me about the money behind the bar, that she’d send money to Amelie each month to pay the bar tabs for those who might struggle to make ends meet. It wasn’t the first time she’d done things like this – it was her way of doing something good. Ivy had the same thing set up at a pet shop to help people pay for food and litter for pet owners who were struggling. She did the same thing with a local food store and I knew she regularly sent food shops to a food bank in a part of Manchester she’d once lived for a few months when she was a student.
My sister was a good person. She was the best of our parents, with a sprinkling of wildness, like the plant she was named after.
She just couldn’t be tamed.
I remember when she’d first met you, years ago. She phoned me that night to tell me about this man she’d met. He was too good looking for his own good, that was what she’d said. She told me about how you’d stood up to do a reading from your book that was about to be released, and there was a buzz in the room that she said reminded her of Christmas Eve. Apparently there were people in there who were far more dressed up than they needed to be for such an event, women and some men who were obviously trying to get your attention.
Ivy was kind of jealous about all the attention you received, people gushing over even just the extracts that you read out.
She’d been sent an early copy and asked for a quote for the blurb. She’d liked the story, that wasn’t a problem, but she wasn’t sure she liked you.
Until you spoke to her. I don’t think you knew who she was, or she thought you were just being really rude at first, but then I think you’d met on a quiet corridor that led away from the buffet that’d been laid on and towards one of the bars that wasn’t being used. I think you’d told her how much you always hated the start of those events, and she’d realised that you were nervous, only you didn’t want to admit it, even to yourself.
Maybe she read you wrong and you weren’t nervous at all. But she liked you. There was something she saw in you that made her smile more and laugh. All the times she talked about you were filled with smiles, even if she only heard them in your voice.
There’s another manuscript I’ve discovered on an old laptop. For some reason she didn’t save it online – I don’t know why. It’s a standalone psychological thriller and it’s really good. I know you’ve accepted the request to be one of the trustees of her literary estate, which I’m grateful for. There are more works of hers that haven’t been published, and I’m not sure if she’d want them all to see the light of day. I know you have no interest – financially – in her works, but you have in her memory and you’ll make sure that only what she would have wanted will be shared publicly. Thank you for that. It’s hugely appreciated.
I read the interview in one of the papers last week that you did. In fact, I’ve read it more times than I’ve counted. What you said about the influence she’d had on you and how she’d made you a better writer was great to read. What you said about her as a person was even better.
We have the coroner’s inquest approaching and I feel sick about it. There are so many questions about the night she died, and I’m not sure we’ll ever have any of the answers. One day I think that she left before the storm started, too high on having finished her book to realise what the weather was about to do, and talking her motorbike out was a bad idea. The next day I wonder whether she was being Ivy and a daredevil and she wanted to be Icarus and see how high she could fly without getting burned.
We were told it was. I was told it was quick. I forgot now that there’s no we. Our dad doesn’t recognise anyone anymore, his dementia has been quick and aggressive. Our mother is still in America and her health is not good. She’s drinking and self-medicating and doesn’t want to speak to me because I remind her of Ivy and of other things – being young maybe.
She hit her head hard and wouldn’t have known anything after that. She wouldn’t have known what would come next. She wouldn’t have wanted what came next – to leave me and you like this. And my certainty around this isn’t borne of wishful thinking.
It’s from knowing her.
I know I’ll see you at the Coroner’s Court. I hope you enjoy the memories these items I’ve sent bring and maybe the questions they make you think.
Bestest of days,
Iris.