In 2019 I was given something. It does not matter what. There was a small ceremony and family were invited and it was on a Friday in the spring.
I did not tell her it was happening.
I told her about it afterwards, in a phone call, as a thing that had already occurred, and I made it sound smaller than it was, and she said oh, lovely and asked whether I had eaten.
She would have come. She would have got the train and she would have worn the coat and she would have told everybody in that church about it for the next four years.
I did not let her, because Arabelle would have had to be invited too.
I gave up the only thing my mother would have loved most in order to avoid two hours of my sister’s face.
She was sixty-six. She had four years left and neither of us knew it.
And walking out of that funeral — I have been telling that for two years as an example of how calm I am.
It was not calm. It was a move.
I left my sister standing on her own by a coffee urn in front of twenty-odd relatives, mid-sentence, and I walked out into a car park in dress blues.
I knew exactly what that looked like from the doorway. I have known what that looks like since I was about fifteen.
And then there is the thing I actually cannot get past, which is two words.
Not yet.
I could have ended the whole of it before that bag ever left her hand.
Kettleman stepped forward. That is his job. He was asking me for a nod and it would have taken one, and he would have had her ten feet back from those crates in about four seconds with nobody touching anybody.
I shook my head.
I have told myself, and told two other people, that I was giving my sister one more chance.
That is not what I was doing.
I was letting her keep going in front of twenty people who had never met her, because for the first time in thirty-seven years the room was mine and she did not know it.
I was not giving her a chance. I was giving her room.
And I have to go one step further than that, because room is still too kind a word.
