Chapter Thirty-Four
Allie
Norfolk is cold today – the sort of cold you try to fool yourself with in that classically British way. A refusal to take a coat and just a cardigan, because it is May after all, and cardigans like this were made for early summer.
And I’m surprised that Sian hugs me tight when she meets me in the restaurant for breakfast. She seems different.
Happy to see me. Grown up. There was a lethargy in her voice when I called her.
A voice of surrender. The voice of someone who was tired of fighting.
‘I’ve been waiting for you to call,’ she said on the line, and I knew, then, Iris was right. I know what she’s about to tell me.
We sit at a small round table. Faux ivy covers one of the walls and a neon-pink light spells, ‘Sit Back and Relax.’ Sian chose the place.
She said she can’t really hang out at the holiday park in the restaurants there, as she’s part of the staff.
‘If they see me sitting down,’ she texted, ‘they’ll more than likely shove me in a mascot bunny suit and you’ll never see me again. ’
Menus are placed in front of us, and it feels like we’re just dancing around broken glass.
‘How are you?’ she asks softly. ‘You look . . .’ She pauses. ‘Different.’
‘Better different?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she says, but she smiles kindly and runs a finger along a large letter C on the menu.
I used to paint those square, neat fingernails when we were kids.
I felt like I carried the weight of everything back then; would clock, somehow, that Sian was asking where Dad was, age six and totally oblivious, and I’d whisk her upstairs, aged eight, paint her fingernails, trace pictures from book covers for her to colour in.
And I realise I’ve missed her. Regardless of all of it, I have missed my sister.
We knew how to be kids together. That dynamic worked when we were little.
Protective older sister who always knew too much, who knew how to fix things, distract and divert; little sister, artsy and hopeful, always up for a fun task.
But when we became adults, it no longer worked.
And I realise now that you can be beside someone and still miss them like they’re not in the same room.
I have missed her most of my adult life.
Sian and I make more small talk – we talk about the weather, about her job, about how she’s been practising yoga and how she’s dating a man named Jake, who’s a karate instructor. She asks about my research, she asks about Iris and asks what my plans are later.
‘Are you staying near Stought?’ she asks. ‘Because you’re welcome to stay here. We could have dinner in my van. That’s if they let me actually have my shift off tonight.’
I smile. ‘That might be nice,’ I tell her.
It’s Milo’s award’s ceremony tonight. There’s another version of me, somewhere, flying there to be with him right now, instead of ordering scrambled eggs and hash browns. Maybe that version is already waking up in New York with him. My heart hurts. I miss him.
Everything aside, I feel awful about how things were left between us both.
For him. For me. It’s like I have all these loose ends, fraying, in my mind, that I have no idea what on earth to do with, or where to start.
Ignore them? Try to tie them up? Hope they simply disappear, disintegrate over time, like an old T-shirt?
Oliver has been in contact already. He sent a round-robin email to all the researchers and workers with the team in Svalbard and, also, the rest of My Planet, our funding agency, saying that it went ‘very well’.
Already, both Milo and Jameson have directed thousands of pounds in our direction, just from Jameson posting one ten-second clip on social media.
Polly and Iris were in it, just the back of them, and I actually felt sadness at the lack of .
. . me. The lack of evidence I was there at all.
I saw it. In your face, Allie, when we were in that picture together today.
‘Sian, I . . . Should we talk,’ I start.
‘Iris told me,’ she says. ‘About the movie. Milo and Jameson Merritt.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘She told me she’d been talking to you.’
Sian nods. A wordless ‘figured’.
A kind, smiling waitress appears, places down our drinks. My tea. Sian’s bright pink smoothie.
Her eyes drop pensively to her lap. ‘How was it? Seeing him? I can’t even get my head around what that must’ve been like for you. Knowing you. That sort of sudden surprise.’
‘Ha.’ I stiffen, lean back on the chair.
‘God, Sian, it was . . . awful. Then it was great. And then amazing, then . . .’ I laugh.
‘Bloody awful again.’ And I explain it to her, a short, condensed version, and Sian listens, her eyebrows inverted arcs, her lips apart, sipping her drink, never looking away.
She doesn’t glimmer, for a second, when I mention the diaries.
She just looks over at me, drops her head to one side.
Her wavy, mousy hair falls from resting on her shoulder.
‘Oh, Allie. I’m really sorry. That sounds totally pants. Just . . . dreadful.’
‘It was. Is. I mean . . . I know it was probably the right decision, but . . . it still hurts. A lot.’
Sian smiles softly. ‘Rite of passage,’ she says.
‘I sometimes wonder why anyone bothers dating. It’s painful when it goes wrong.
After my last break-up, I got a rash the doctor thought might be meningitis.
Turned out it was stress. All because Ian, that bloke I went out with who worked in Morrisons, dumped me on Christmas Day. ’
‘That’s awful!’
She shrugs, drinks more bright pink smoothie. ‘Part and parcel,’ she says. ‘Until you find the right one, anyway. And bloody Jake better be.’
We eat.
A tinny Phil Collins song plays from a speaker somewhere in the café.
And I think this is it. This is when she tells me.
She looks up at me with huge eyes, and for a second I see every version of Sian.
Five-year-old Sian, eyes wide, not wanting to go on stage and sing harvest festival songs, me smiling at her from the back of the hall, wordlessly urging her to be brave.
Eight-year-old Sian, looking up from her diary, having written, ‘sumtimes I’m scared Dad’ll never come bak,’ handing me the pen and giggling through tears as I drew something funny and slightly offensive.
Ten-year-old Sian, watery eyes, waiting for Dad at the window, and me making us a picnic in my bedroom instead.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she says finally.
‘Sian, I won’t be angry at you.’
‘Angry?’
‘I know for a while, it’s been . . .’ I pause, try to line my words up carefully. ‘I mean, since Mum it’s been tough and we’ve both been through a lot. But I won’t be mad. I just want to understand.’
‘Understand what, Allie?’ Her nose wrinkles, and her splatter of freckles make her look so innocent, I almost feel like saying nothing else.
‘I know. I know what you want to talk to me about.’
‘Do you?’
Silently, we stare at each other.
And instead of saying anything else, she tears away her gaze from mine and reaches into her bag. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you for so long,’ she says, shakily. ‘But I wanted to make sure I had everything before I did. Well, as much as I could get.’
She pulls out a thick envelope. It’s brown, A5 and filled with a whole pile of bent-in-half papers. She passes it to me, crinkling in my hand.
I look at her, slide out the thick wodge. Is this it? Is this where I find out it was her – that she leaked my diaries? Is this some sort of mad written confession?
But as I open it, she smiles nervously, brings her hand to her mouth.
My heart stops. A breeze from the restaurant door opening ruffles the pages.
Letters. Mum’s handwriting. Mum’s letters to her father-in-law.
To our grandad. To Dad’s dad. I glance over them.
I see June House mentioned. I see Dad’s name written in black ink.
‘Davey woke the children again, banging on the front door.’ ‘Davey has moved in with her now. He’s taking her children to school.
Can you believe it? My heart breaks for my girls.
Little Allie takes on so much.’ Tears sting my eyes.
Sian brings a nervous fist to her mouth, butter yellow cardigan sleeve covering most of it.
‘I’ve been in touch with cousin Victoria.
Do you remember her? Grandad’s brother’s daughter.
She reached out on Facebook. Uncle Tom was given a lot of Grandad’s stuff.
All the . . . stuff that wasn’t really worth anything.
He just put it all in the garage. Victoria let me take a look.
She’s nice. She’s a beekeeper now, how weird is that?
She lives literally, like, thirty minutes away from here, in North Walsham. ’
There’re so many letters.
Everything is here.
Everything about Dad.
Everything about our lives.
‘I don’t know what good it’ll do,’ she says. ‘But I’m thinking these might help get back what’s rightfully ours.’
‘Sian, this is amazing.’
‘I’m thinking if these letters prove what Dad did to us – the lying, the leaving us, over and over, the affairs, that Grandad wanted us to have that house – then, surely, we can get it back. We’ve never had a voice against him, and these letters – Mum’s letters – do that.’
I meet her eyes across the table and slowly sag into myself.
Relief floods me. Relief for Mum, her voice, her story, her truths set free again, in the words of those letters.
I can almost feel her here with us; could close my eyes, find the scent of her perfume in the air, evidence she’s here and listening.
Then there’s relief for Sian, too. Relief for us.
And I laugh. A burst of giggles. ‘Sian, I . . . I mean, first, this is amazing, but – I thought you were going to tell me that you published my diaries. That you leaked them on purpose.’
Sian’s whole face morphs. It’s like for a moment, her face is made of plasticine. ‘Erm, what?’