My Sister and Other Liars Read online

  ALSO BY RUTH DUGDALL

  The James Version

  The Woman Before Me

  The Sacrificial Man

  Humber Boy B

  Nowhere Girl

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 Ruth Dugdall

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503942288

  ISBN-10: 1503942287

  Cover design by Mark Swan

  For Mum, with love.

  Thank you for sharing your stories.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  But it is going dark and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.

  Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

  Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

  Oscar Wilde

  CHAPTER 1

  30 December

  My body is eating itself. My brain too, apparently, is being consumed in its eternal search for sustenance. This is what the staff tell us, one of the topics of our enforced education, the damage we are doing to ourselves.

  What the staff don’t get: that is the goal. Every lecture, dished up daily, is not a scary warning but solace. My body is self-consuming and if it succeeds, taking my brain into the bargain, then great.

  I want to disappear, all five of us do. That’s the point; it’s so obvious that I have to sit on my hands to stop from slapping whichever well-meaning staff member is trying to save us that day. We were ready for the sessions to stop, we needed respite, and the final lecture before they left to celebrate Christmas was on food and celebrations. How turkey and fruit cake shouldn’t be feared, but savoured, a teen-mag slice of motivation before the Xmas exodus, relevant to every other girl but not to me.

  As Manda talked to us about mince pies and the magic of marzipan, I exchanged glances with Stacey, while Fiona and Joelle whispered behind skeletal hands, but all four of us were thinking the same thing: Fucking idiot. Mina gazed at the floor; what she was thinking was anyone’s guess, but she can’t have been looking forward to going home.

  Times like that, I have to shut myself up, though my body is already screaming as loudly as it can. And still the staff, that small team of dedication, compassion and superiority, persist in believing they can help us. But there is no help for a group of girls who want to starve.

  Autophagy. That’s it, the word Manda scribbled on the flipchart last week. It seemed a wonderful word to me, starchy-medical, so comforting to have a label with gravitas. ‘Auto’ meaning self. Ah, that’s the thing, though. The self, myself: that’s the real problem here on Ana Unit. We are all, each of us self-eating females, our own worst enemy.

  Autophagy may sound stern and scholarly, but it feels primal and real. It leaves me drunk with fatigue; my bones push to come out of my flesh, my stomach is an animal in its death throes. And all of this is so absorbing that I can think of nothing else; there is no space for thought or memory, just a wonderful gap.

  It’s so effective that I can feel my jaw creak; my cheekbones are perfect sharp corners in my face. Self-eating is the gateway to an empty body and mind, a nothingness to which I am dedicated.

  I don’t want food now; I’ve risen above it. My body is so empty, so clean, as though my insides have been scrubbed with salt. I ache with hollowness; the air that travels in my intestines is pure, and my mind is clean of memory. I haven’t needed to shit or piss in days. I am simple and clean and perfect, and very, very tired. Sleep is no good for me, though; sleep is not oblivion from the news that came today.

  I want to disappear. I close my eyes and wait.

  The other girls are gone now, off to fight the good fight against the temptations of chocolate roulade and laxatives, turkey curry and compulsive training. They won’t be back until after New Year, and the unit has been deathly quiet without them. Poor Manda had the task of telling me the news of my mother’s death. It hurt her to bring the news; she was sorry about the timing, as if it made any difference. I am too exhausted to feel; my emotions have been put on hold since I started to starve. I couldn’t even think of an appropriate response, of what a normal person would say, so I said nothing and let Manda give me the details.

  It was a neighbour who alerted the police, and I imagine Mrs Read with her notebooks, twitching the curtain and realising she hadn’t seen my mother leave the house since Christmas Eve. When they broke the door down, they found her in her chair; rigor mortis had set in days before.

  ‘There will have to be an autopsy,’ Manda told me. ‘Under the circumstances.’

  The circumstances: my mother was alone when she died. Her body was undiscovered; no friends, no family even noticed. Just a nosy neighbour peering through the letterbox at the pile of junk mail and unopened Christmas cards. Maybe one was from Dad; I wondered if he knew yet, that she was dead.

  ‘I’m afraid it will delay the funeral. But when we have a date, we can apply for a release pass for you to go.’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  I haven’t seen my mother, or anyone else, for eighteen months. I refused to see her or even think about her, preferring to scrub my heart of a need for her, just as I have stopped needing food. I chose emptiness, and a clean heart, and so I won’t mourn. But still, when Manda left me, I felt very alone. I couldn’t help a rogue thought creeping in of my mother, in that chair. Her body stiff and cold.

  I wish Stacey was here to talk to, but she’s at home with her family, celebrating Christmas and the New Year. She stuffs her head with trashy stories and problem pages from bitchy fashion mags, so she knows things. She’d be useful right now: she’d make me laugh with her anecdotes, she’d fill my head with her talk-show wisdom of coping with grief, and make me forget.

  Even though she pisses me off a lot of the time, Stacey has talents: lip gloss and too-tight tops and talking. The other girls, Joelle and Fiona, don’t like her much. I don’t think Mina likes anyone, least of all herself. But Stacey is the best friend I’ve ever had.

  Finally, I sleep.

  The brain i
s not like the body: it does not let go so easily and is harder to control, and as I drift to sleep it takes me elsewhere, to the place of all my nightmares. Grief plays tricks like this.

  In my dream, I am back home, in Ipswich. It is 25 April of last year, the day of my sixteenth birthday.

  I’m in the kitchen. There is the table, taking up most of the room, set for a birthday tea with a cake shaped like a heart. It’s a memory, a vision, and I flutter around the room hopelessly, and touch the pile of unopened presents, feeling again a whiff of longing, that heady sensation of being loved that I have managed to rid myself of so effectively when conscious.

  One present is already unwrapped. A camera, a special vintage one, gifted to me by my dad. It was his when he was a boy, his most special possession, and then it was Jena’s. On my sixteenth birthday he gave it to me.

  I hear my sister’s words, so clearly, her hurt and anger: You can’t give Sam that camera! It’s not right, Dad. You promised you wouldn’t. How can you do that to me?

  I feel again the intoxicating cocktail of guilty victory because it had been her camera, her special prize. Hours she’d spent, in the dark room, developing her prints or helping him edit the home movies he loved to make. But she’d stopped doing that. Dad accused her of losing interest, so he was giving the camera to me.

  It made Jena furious and sad, and it was why she stormed out that afternoon.

  The kitchen door hangs open, a pool of water oozes into the room and rain slaps hard on the windows. Outside, the world grumbles, and inside is a yellow flash; the fluorescent light blinks once then dies, creepy shadows are cast on the wall. I call into the silence, ‘Mum?’

  In my dreams I call for her often, but she never replies. She never will again.

  The dream is a fever; it sickens me. So real, I can feel the rain on my head as I step out into the weather, to search for Jena, who left in such a rage, and also for my parents who followed her. My T-shirt is soaked in seconds, water squelches in my shoes, and my cheeks are pricked by needles of rain. I make my way along the path at the back of the houses, trampling through long grass and nettles. The path eventually comes out beside the petrol station on Orwell Parade.

  I have that sense all dreamers have of danger. I should wake myself, to control these feelings that threaten to crack me open, but I’m too exhausted. Instead, I abandon myself to the pull of the memory and head down the scrabbly path, a narrow alley of overgrown elders. I feel it all, every sensation: shivery and wet, brambles scratching my arms, branches tugging the hem of my dress and pulling strands from my hair, but I carry on like a sleepwalker. Rain in my eyes, in my ears even, feet sinking in the mud, shoes slipping, but I don’t stop, can’t stop, because twenty feet ahead the path opens up and there will be light.

  There is never any light. Someone blocks the exit, up near the petrol station. My dream is playing tricks, and I see an impossibly large person in a dark raincoat, a hood covering their head. I wipe rain from my eyes, and see the hooded person raise a red crab of a hand towards a young woman, who is small and crouched. The hooded figure lunges, and the woman falls backwards, circling her hands, grasping for the raincoat and pulling it down with her.

  There is an almighty crack as the woman’s head hits concrete. A sickening sound that repeats again and again in my memory.

  The monster who attacked the young woman looks up, and seems to move towards me; with the hood now removed as the coat is torn away, I see a pale face and dark hollow eyes. A face with no features, a terrifying blank.

  I wheel my feet in an effort to backtrack through the mud, but slip and land smack on the ground. Just twenty feet ahead the young woman is sprawled on the pavement. Her face is turned towards me, her neck twisted, her head split open like a ripe fruit. The storm is directly above, and an arrow-flash of lightning reveals to me her face, and the fact I should have always known: the woman on the ground is my sister.

  Jena.

  CHAPTER 2

  New Year’s Eve

  ‘Sam!’

  A voice, tugging me back from the past. Bringing me back here, to my bedroom on Ana Unit, to the fact of my mother’s death. Voices throb in and out of my hearing, staff talking urgently above my head.

  ‘Sam. You need to wake up. Come on, Sam, stay with us.’

  I will not wake. I want to disappear.

  ‘Okay, Sam, I’ve got you. Stop struggling.’

  Of course I struggle. Sian pins me like a butterfly, while Manda coaxes me and readies the tube. They’ve done this before; they play the bad cop/good cop routine often. I twist and pull back, but they are strong. Eventually, I surrender.

  ‘Good girl. I’m going to pull your head right back, so don’t slump. That’s it. I’m just going to lubricate the tip, and then we’ll get started.’

  Sian has me held fast on the couch as Manda inserts the naso-gastric tube. Because I refuse to eat, they will feed me through this tube; it’s a sign of how close I am to winning. I’m panicking, because what I’m doing is giving up control; I’m fighting, but it’s a battle I’ve already lost.

  ‘Now, Sam,’ Manda coos, ‘you need to relax or this will hurt. I’m just going to slide it . . . That’s it . . . You’re doing great.’

  I can feel it there, at the back of my throat, coming down through my nasal passage. I gag, a reflex of rejection, but Manda doesn’t stop.

  ‘Just relax and it’ll be quicker. Keep still.’

  I retch; my throat is dry and painful. I manage to say, ‘Fuck you,’ but the words burn and Sian grips me tighter. It doesn’t stop what’s happening.

  Before she fed it into me, Manda measured the tube, placing it around my ear and then seeing the length needed to reach my sternum, but now that it’s inside it feels endless, too long.

  ‘Nearly there. That’s it. Now, no purging while this is in, Sam. You puke, the tube comes up too. And that wouldn’t be pleasant, now would it?’

  Patronising bitch.

  ‘Once this tube is in place, we can give you all the nutrition you need. It was our last resort, Sam. We can’t have you refusing to eat. Or eating and then purging, hiding food under your napkin.’

  ‘I never hide food.’

  Sian looks at me in a bitter way that says, You are lying and we both know it.

  I like Manda as a rule, though right now I want to hit her. But it’s Sian that has me held down, her fingers digging in harder than they need to; she’s the mean one.

  I try to feel nothing as I sip the water to help the tube find its place, as Manda tapes the feeding end to the side of my cheek.

  Finally, Sian releases me and says, matter-of-factly, ‘You nearly died today, Sam. You were slipping into a coma.’

  Oblivion. I felt it, the closeness. To be where Mum is, that place beyond all feeling.

  ‘You’ve given us no choice; we have to take drastic measures.’

  ‘Violating me.’

  There is a slight twitch to her lip that makes me think she is enjoying my anger.

  ‘As well as the tube, we’ve got something extra, just for you. You could call it intensive therapy. Controversial, even. But it’s our last shot. Afterwards, if you still succeed in killing yourself, we won’t be to blame.’

  You have to admire Sian’s candour.

  Intensive and controversial arrives an hour and a half later, after I’ve been x-rayed to check the tube isn’t in my lungs, and while I’m lying on my bed studying the ceiling for new stains. It doesn’t knock, it just opens the door and walks in. My room is small, cell-like, and the man fills it with the smell of worn leather and pipe-tobacco. It’s Clive, the director of the unit and a bit of an oddball.

  ‘Hello, Sam. I see the medical team have finished with you. How are you feeling?’

  Clive was the first person I met when I arrived at the Bartlet Hospital, that terrible day. I’d met a tag-team of professionals before I was transferred here, men and women with letters after their name, who wore glasses before they needed them just to en
hance the image; people paid to assess me and give me a label. Mad or Bad? I quickly got skilled at reading therapists: I could spot a cognitive behavioural from a transcendental on the shade of lipstick; I could tell a psychologist from a psychiatrist on the colour of tie. But I could not easily categorise Clive and that made me nervous, so I’ve stayed in the shadows when he’s doing a ward visit, and up to now his visits haven’t been for me.

  Today, he wears a tweedy jacket with old-school blue jeans, and his beard is pure vagrant. His face is crumpled, wind-beaten, but he probably treats his skin like he treats his clothes, and the smoking can’t help. He may be younger than he looks.

  Clive pulls out the old wicker chair from under the desk, and sits on it, his bottom filling the seat, meaty hands in his lap. He is holding a paper bag, the kind that American moms use for their kids’ packed lunches.

  ‘What’s inside?’ I ask, but he smiles as if telling me to be patient, places the bag on my desk, then returns his hands to his lap.

  ‘We haven’t really spoken recently, have we? But I’ve been monitoring you, keeping up to date with your progress. Or lack thereof.’ He pauses, as if to emphasise that I have disappointed him. ‘Do you recall our first meeting, Sam? You were in a terrible state that day.’

  Of all the five patients on Ana Unit I’ve been here longest. Some girls stay a few weeks, usually a few months, but I’ve been locked away for almost eighteen months, most of it here.

  ‘I have a great deal to do managing the Bartlet, administrative decisions and so forth. Fundraising and lobbying in the main, trying to keep our little cottage hospital viable, despite the council’s wish to sell it to the highest-paying property developer.’ He sighs, and I can hear his criticism of their greed.

  ‘I only get directly involved in a case if the staff have failed with every other route.’

  I hate him and his fat bottom. I hate his scratchy-looking beard and his tiny glasses. Most of all, I hate that the brown paper bag is on my desk and I don’t know what’s inside.

  ‘Sam, on 1 February there is a board meeting, to discuss your progress. You could be released, if it’s agreed you’re well enough.’