The Whiskerly Sisters (12 page)

Surely, it couldn’t get any worse. Oh, but it could!

One morning, to the horror of her family, Izza announced her decision to move in with Tony. She packed her clothes and what few possessions she had and left the house without a backward glance. As it turned out, it didn’t last more than a month. Neither of them knew how to look after themselves let alone each other. Just when her mother had got used to her absence, she would hear the scratch of the key in the lock and the swish of an opening door. Jax would look up and there would stand Izza, make-up smudged, heartbroken, suitcase in hand, swearing it was over. She vowed she wanted no more to do with him. He was a filthy, two timing slime bag, he was a domineering, retarded weasel, he was a bastard waste of space. And she was never going back.

Two weeks later, she was stuffing her rucksack into the back of his car, made up, loved up and fucked up. Only he understood her completely; only he satisfied her needs unreservedly; only he knew how to love her. Her family were interfering, overbearing shitbags, old fashioned, psychotic control freaks, narrow minded, pig headed arseholes and she wanted nothing to do with them ever again. She was never coming back.

Until next time.

Izza had been persuaded out to a Candle Party with her sister on the evening her world fell apart. She was taking a short cut through the local park on her way home when it happened. She was surprised to recognise Tony’s car in a deserted corner of the grounds. Astonishing, given that he told her he was working overtime that evening. His car should have been at least fifteen miles away at the back of the golf club. Izza immediately decided that he must have lent it to someone. How else could it have got there?

She moved a little closer to the vehicle, which seemed to be rocking from side to side. The windows were all steamed up and she thought she could hear muffled snorts and wheezes from the inside of the car. She pulled away, anxious. She leaned in closer, intrigued. Her heart was thumping in her chest. She knew. She didn’t want to know.

Her sister, on the other hand, knew and did want to know. She marched straight up to the car, wrenched the passenger door open to find Tony and, what she later referred to as, ‘that total slapper’, making out on the front passenger seat.

Without thinking things through, Izza’s sister firmly grabbed a hank of the topless girl’s hair and yanked, thus uncoupling the hapless pair. Barely conscious of her own strength, she pulled the girl right out of the car and then suddenly let go, dropping her screaming to the ground. Without pausing for breath, she reached into the car and thumped Tony twice to the side of the head, shocking him with her viciousness. Despite the difference in size, she then hoiked the boy effortlessly out of the car and onto the grass beside his shocked lover. She slammed the door of the car shut, stepped neatly between the two stunned figures on the ground and moved round to the driver side where she deftly removed the keys from the ignition, locking the car with a double click of the fob and leaving the petrified half naked duo exposed to the elements. Walking briskly away from the car, without a backward glance, she threw the keys into the brook that rimmed the far edge of the park. She looked up. It was beginning to rain and the first fat drops were smacking her face. She felt as if she had just woken up.

It was then that she remembered Izza and turned back to comfort her, but Izza had disappeared. Whilst she herself felt delighted to have uncovered Tony’s nasty little secret, her heart bled for her little sister. She began to search the park, calling her sister’s name and ignoring the pleading and the shouting from the two semi-clad people huddled against the car, trying to shelter from the rain. Alarmed, she poked amongst the bushes and shrubs that fringed the edge of the green. In the end, she decided Izza must have run home and went to find her. She needed to know her sister was okay. To her dismay, Izza wasn’t there. She had not gone round to her father’s and increasingly frantic phone calls revealed that none of her friends had seen her either. Izza had disappeared.

She was gone for three days. Her family were beside themselves with worry and rang every one they could think of? Had they seen Izza? Had they heard from her? Did they know where she was? They visited their local police station and spoke to the Duty Sergeant, who calmly filled out a missing person’s report, said he would be in touch and then politely showed them the door. Outmanoeuvred and not even slightly reassured, they stood outside the station talking over their options and watched in amazement as the officer concerned walked out of the door, got into his patrol car and, giving them a cheery wave, drove in the direction of the high street, returning ten minutes later with a carrier bag full of fish and chips. Muttering something about tax payer’s money, Izza’s father stomped mulishly home.

Just as her mother was sitting down to a quick microwave lasagne before making yet another pointless drive round the streets to look for her daughter, Jax heard the familiar sound of a key in the lock and the gentle swish of the door and there stood Izza – unwashed, unkempt and famished.

Jax’s relief was palpable. She simply folded her face in her arms and wept. To her amazement, her daughter gave her a big hug and apologised for causing a fuss. Then she put the kettle on and made her mother a cup of tea. Jax dried her eyes and watched as Izza moved quietly around the kitchen. When her mother had calmed down, Izza borrowed her phone and called her father to let him know she was back. He came straight round. She assured her worried parents that she was perfectly okay and asked if she could make herself a sandwich. Her parents looked at each other puzzled. Who had stolen their daughter? Well, whoever it was, thank God for them because they vastly preferred this version of her to the one they had had to endure before. Then again, they told themselves, it might not last. Gently, they tried to get her to talk.

But no matter how many times they asked her, begged her and even tried to wheedle her, Izza simply refused to tell them where she had been, what she had done or how she had coped.

When he heard she was back, Tony sent a friend round to her place of work to let her know he was sorry. It was a one off. It would never happen again. He would meet her at the usual place at eight o’clock that night. Perhaps she would like to go for a curry. He would pay.

For once, Tony was on time. Izza stood him up.

S
ylvester had always known he was different. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reasons why – he just knew. He had never shown the slightest interest in the Dinky cars his father had brought home each Friday payday, preferring instead to sit quietly beside his mother, feeling the fabric of whatever it was she was stitching as she sat in front of the old Singer sewing machine in the back room where the light was strongest.

Despite his sturdy frame and endless stamina, he refused to join the junior football team and showed not the slightest interest in either cricket or rugby. In vain did his father try to encourage his son’s interest in sport. In the end, he gave up, pocketed his dream of ever walking down the street with his son on a Saturday afternoon to watch the local team beat the pants off the opposition and tried not to feel rejected. He struggled to understand why his only child preferred messing about with scraps of material.

The child had shown such an interest in his mother’s work that she had finally given up and secretly bought him a doll. Sly spent hours cutting and gluing, stitching and sewing, turning the tiny scraps of stuff his mother could spare into fabulous creations for the tiny puppet. In fact, it absorbed him. If there were no bits and pieces to be found, then he would pore over his mother’s enormous button box, sorting and sizing her fabulous collection. He loved the shiny ones best and squirreled them away into his bedroom where he began to build a small collection of his own, which he hid under the dresser out of sight. Late at night, when his parents were asleep, he would often open the box and run his fingers through the pile. He just loved the feel of them rippling under his fingers.

It didn’t take his father long to decide that his son had to be a pansy. His mother scolded her husband gently and told him that Sly was just in touch with his feminine side and implored him to leave well alone. She was sure it would all work itself out.

As far as his father was concerned, his son’s only saving grace was his passion for the sea. He loved anything to do with it and would happily abandon his sewing for a trip to the coast where he would immediately take off his socks and sandals, roll up his trousers and wade into the shallow, foaming waters at the edge of the sandy beach.

Satisfied, he would turn his attention to the boats sailing past because it wasn’t just the sea that tugged at Sly’s heart, boats did too – all kinds of boats – old fashioned, hand-made rowing boats with sleek oars and brass trimmings, dazzling white, multi-storied cruise liners, thronged with sightseers, brightly painted tin barges decorated with assorted pots of gardenias, enormous, ugly cargo boats stacked from end to end with containers – from riverboats to sailboats to motorboats – you name it Sly was fascinated by them.

When Sly had had his fill of watching the sea and the boats floating by, he would run back to his parents sitting in their stripy deckchairs, fall at their feet and turn his attention to the sand spread out before him. Yet here again, he had to be different. The lonely, single cast of an upturned bucket or the slightly more adventurous forts, trimmed with flags built by the other children were not enough for him. He designed amazing castles several storeys high, beautifully decorated with shells and bits and pieces of debris that he found scattered along the shore. To the astonishment of his parents and their neighbours on the beach, his creations showed great imagination and grew, as if by magic, before their very eyes. Sly was clearly talented. His father shrugged and tried not to wish that his only son preferred rugby.

Although Sly was often teased by his friends for his unusual hobbies, he was never ever bullied. Somehow, it was his openness about being different that seemed to protect him. He never showed the slightest sign of embarrassment for his love of dressmaking and design or for his attraction to the sea, but then again he never felt the need to talk about his hobbies either.

Sometimes his schoolmates would call round and suggest a game of soldiers in the nearby woods or an apple scrumping escapade and sometimes he would go with them, striving desperately to enjoy himself, but the truth was that he loathed the very physicality his friends seemed to stir up in one another – all the back thumping, arm wrestling and scuffling were simply not for him so he inevitably ended up shuffling along aimlessly at the back or simply looking after the coats.

When Sly was ten, to everyone’s astonishment, his mother fell pregnant. The old pram was retrieved from the shed and Sly’s cot was given a fresh coat of paint. His father, pipe jammed in his mouth, began decorating the spare room in anticipation of the happy event, secretly hoping for a more normal kind of child.

Although she was not old, Sly’s mother was no longer a slip of a girl and found the pregnancy long and hard. Her ankles swelled and her blood pressure rose. She was forced to rest, but Sly found it no hardship to help care for her. He would bring in her breakfast before he left for school and ran straight home to make her a cup of tea and run errands. Under her patient tutelage, he even learned to cook and soon began to serve up tasty suppers for the little trio. His father, embarrassed to see his son doing women’s work, tried not to wince.

He was sitting at the back of the geography class, drawing patterns on his exercise book when the headmistress popped her head round the door and asked him to come into the corridor. She took him to her room, sat him down and told him his mother had been taken into hospital. The baby was on its way. Sly felt ill. He didn’t know a lot about babies, but he knew it was too soon. Miss Frith brought him a glass of water and told him not to worry. His father was on his way and they would go to the hospital together.

All his life, Sly would remember the eau de nil of the hospital waiting area he seemed to sit in for hours and the nauseating smell of over-boiled cabbage mingled with some kind of disinfectant that permeated every inch of the place. Now and then, a nurse would pass by; the starch of her apron rustling as she walked or he might see a doctor, in a long, white coat with a stethoscope around his neck, hurrying by. A kindly lady, wearing a wraparound apron, offered him a cup of tea but Sly didn’t feel he could swallow anything. His father sat quietly by his side, fiddling with the edges of his cap, saying nothing.

Finally, when Sly felt he could endure no longer, a surgeon appeared in the corridor and approached them. His father looked up. There was something in the silent exchange between the two men that made Sly’s heart almost stop beating.

Something was terribly wrong.

Leaving Sly by himself, the doctor took his father into a side room and sat him down. Sly watched through the window as the news was imparted. The doctor tried to look encouraging. His father just sat there, still twisting his cap in his hands, grimly staring at the floor. Finally, the two men stood up and shook hands. The surgeon gave his father a final pat on the shoulder and showed him the door. He walked back into the waiting area to where his son, anxiety written all over his face, was waiting.