PART 1
I said: that bag contains federal property. Put it down.
She looked over her shoulder at me, smiled, and threw it into the river.
It hit the water with a flat slap and went under almost straight away. Canvas fills fast. It did not float for even a second.
Behind me a young sailor said something under his breath that I did not catch and did not need to.
My sister turned back to me with her chin up, and waited.
She wanted me to cry. She wanted me to shout.
Most of all she wanted me to turn back into the little sister she has spent thirty-seven years convincing herself I still am.
I did not.
I just looked at her.
That was the first thing that morning that seemed to bother her, and I want to be honest about the fact that I noticed it bothering her, and that some part of me filed that away with satisfaction.
Arabelle and I have been playing the same two parts for most of our lives.
She attacks. I retreat. She performs. I go quiet.
It is such an old arrangement that neither of us has to think about it. She could do her half in her sleep and so could I, and we have both been doing our halves at family funerals and christenings since about 1996.
I have looked for the start of it and I cannot find one, which I think means there is not one.
The earliest thing I have is a school sports day. I am nine and she is sixteen and I have come second in something, and she tells our mother on the walk home that I only came second because the fast girls were not running.
I remember not arguing. I remember deciding, at nine, on a pavement, that arguing would make the walk longer.
That decision has been running ever since, unexamined, the way a programme runs on a machine nobody has looked inside for thirty years.
I joined the Navy at eighteen, four months after leaving school, from a house where nobody had done anything like it.
I spent the next nineteen years building a life a long way from that family, and my sister turned it into her favourite story about me.
That I think I am better than everybody. That I abandoned them. That I chose a career over my own people.
