Wiping her face, she got to her feet and walked directly into Daniel’s old room at the back of the house, empty save for the old single bed and the wardrobe with its door hanging off. She placed the notebook she was carrying on top of the pile of papers at the bottom of the wardrobe and closed the door as best she could. Then she took the dog’s lead from her pocket, shuffling her coat off her shoulders as she did so. She closed the bedroom door and looped the leather end of the lead over the coat hook, giving it a good tug. She left it hanging there, opened the door once more, and wandered slowly, taking her time, along the hall to Angela’s room, dragging her fingertips over the plasterwork as she went.
* * *
After Angela sent Daniel away to boarding school, Carla went round to visit less and less, until one day, she stopped going altogether. There wasn’t a reason, or rather, there wasn’t just one reason; she just found that she couldn’t face it any longer. Fake yoga was over.
Years passed. Then one night, a good six or seven years after Ben’s death, Carla was woken by a phone call, sometime after midnight, the allotted hour of dreaded telephone calls. She took a while to answer, to shake off the fug of chemically assisted sleep.
“Can I speak to Carla Myerson, please?” a woman said.
Carla’s heart seized—Theo was in Italy, holed up in some remote Umbrian farmhouse, trying to write, and people drove so badly there. Theo drove so badly there; he seemed to feel the need to join in.
“Mrs. Myerson, could you possibly come down to Holborn Police Station? No, no, everything’s all right, but we have a . . . Miss Angela Sutherland here, your sister? Yes, she’s all right, she’s okay, she’s just . . . she’s had a bit to drink and got herself into a bit of trouble. She needs someone to pick her up. Could you do that, do you think?”
Carla called a taxi and threw on some clothes. She stumbled out into freezing London rain, unsure as to how to feel, terrified or furious. The police station was quiet and brightly lit. In the waiting area a woman sat alone, crying softly to herself, saying, “I just want to see him. I just want to know he’s all right.”
The woman on reception, quite possibly the one she’d spoken to on the phone, nodded at Carla. “Domestic,” she said, indicating the crying woman. “He lumps her one, she calls us then decides that, actually, she doesn’t want to press charges after all.” She rolled her eyes. “What can I do for you, love?”
“I’m here to pick up Angela Sutherland. She’s my sister. I was told . . . I was told she was here.”
The woman checked her computer screen and nodded, called out to someone in a room somewhere behind her desk. “Could you bring Mrs. Sutherland out for me, John? Yeah, her sister’s here.” She turned back to Carla. “She’d had too much to drink and caused a scene at the taxi rank.”
“A scene?”
The woman nodded again. “She was being abusive to another man in line, a man who by all accounts had it coming, but in any case your sister was extremely vocal, and when one of the cabbies tried to intervene, he got it in the neck too. He called for assistance and when a couple of our officers turned up, they were called a bunch of effing c-words for their troubles.”
“Jesus.” Carla was appalled. “I’m so sorry, I’m . . . God, I’m so sorry. She’s . . . I’ve never known her to behave like that, she’s not that sort of person at all, she’s . . . quite civilized, usually.”
The woman smiled. “Ah, well, the drink does funny things, doesn’t it? If it’s any consolation, I think she’s feeling pretty ashamed of herself. And no charges have been brought, so there’s no harm done, really.” The woman leaned forward, lowering her voice. “I think she’s given herself a bit of a fright, if I’m honest.”
Carla’s overwhelming memory of that night was of shame too. The shame of being called in the middle of the night to pick up her drunk and disorderly little sister was completely dwarfed by the shame of seeing what her sister had become in Carla’s absence. Emaciated, hollow-eyed, her smooth cheeks spidered with veins, her shoulders hunched.
“Angela!”
“I’m so sorry, Cee,” she said, her eyes lowered, her voice a whisper. “I’m so sorry, I don’t even remember doing it. They said I was shouting at people, shouting and swearing and . . . I don’t remember doing it.”
They sat side by side in the back of a black cab on the way back to Angela’s house. Neither said a word, but Carla wrapped an arm around her sister’s bony shoulders and held her close. The sensation shamed her again: it was like holding a child, like holding her sister when she’d been a little girl—tiny and fierce and funny. Infuriating. Lifetimes ago. It felt like lifetimes since she had loved her, since they had been each other’s best friend. Carla started to weep.