When I knock on the door of Polly’s office there’s no reply but, after hesitating for a moment, I go in anyway.
I sit down on the plastic school chair and wait.
The room feels different without Polly in it, darker, colder. After a while, I stand up again, because the chair is uncomfortable and the room is too still and quiet. There’s a pile of boxes stacked against a wall which turn out to contain swimming nappies and tins of beans and sardines and assorted cleaning products. I squeeze between them and the desk to the window to check on the health of the cacti. The jug next to them has a dribble of water in it. I pour it onto the parched soil of the one closest to me and hum Jingle Bells for the benefit of the others.
Then I look at the postcards and notes on the pinboard behind Polly’s desk. There are a couple of photos of her with people I assume are her girlfriend and her family. I look more closely at the family one and realize I recognize the woman in it. I close my eyes. I can smell her expensive perfume, see her concerned face looking into mine. Stay awake, little match girl. The woman at Grandpa’s café. Polly’s sister.
As I’m looking at the photo, Polly bursts in through the door.
‘Oh!’ she says, breathless. ‘Clem. You’re here already.’
‘I just came in to wait,’ I say, feeling my face flush. ‘Sorry. That photo,’ I say, pointing at the pinboard, ‘it’s your sister, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’d forgotten. I can’t really remember it.’
‘You were very ill. Delirious.’
‘She was kind.’
Polly looks at me with an expression I can’t read. ‘That’s not the word most people would use to describe Nina,’ she says. She walks over to the pinboard, takes down the photo and looks at it. ‘But you’re right. She is kind.’
‘And sad,’ I say. I don’t know why.
Polly looks at me, curious. ‘You reminded her of someone,’ she says. ‘Her daughter actually.’
I nod. Anna, I think, but don’t say. I’m surprised at the memory, which seems to come from nowhere: the woman, Nina, talking about her, stroking my hair as I lay on the cold ground.
‘I’ll be seeing Nina over Christmas, as it happens. It’s the first time in a while we’ve spent it together. I’ll be off for ten days so we won’t have any sessions during that time.’
I find, to my surprise, that I’m disappointed by this. I try not to show it.
‘I know it’s hard,’ she says. ‘Being away from family. Even harder than it always is, I mean.’
I remember last Christmas, without Claudia.
‘She asleep?’ I said to Dad as he collapsed onto the sofa and helped himself to a handful of Quality Street.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘At last. As she should be, given she woke up at five a.m.’
There was nothing new about Billie waking up painfully early on Christmas Day, but everything felt different this year. She was excited, but Christmas Day just made the gap where Claudia should have been more empty. Billie’s excitement was fragile and felt like it might shatter at any moment.
Somehow, though, Claudia was still organizing us anyway. Dad had found a bag of stocking presents for Billie and me at the back of the wardrobe that she’d bought and wrapped throughout the year. She’d baked the Christmas cake with Billie’s help back in early autumn when the leaves were just turning orange outside the kitchen window and the weather was still surprisingly warm. It had sat in its tin in the cupboard under the stairs, wrapped in layers of greaseproof paper and foil, steeped in brandy, undisturbed by the upheaval of our lives around it. Billie remembered it at the last minute, because icing it and adding the decorations was a Christmas Eve ritual, and then Dad had panicked about whether you could even get hold of marzipan and icing sugar any more with all the food shortages. There’d been mass brawls in supermarkets over turkeys and Christmas puddings and they’d had to bring in extra security and ticketing systems that led to people queuing all round the car parks for hours, all of which just caused more fights.
‘Season of goodwill, eh?’ Dad said. ‘Nobody even liked Christmas pudding until they thought they couldn’t get it.’
But it turned out Claudia had thought of that too. I understood now why she’d seemed so frantic and distant in those weeks she’d been at home: she’d foreseen all this. She’d prepared herself for what was coming and then she’d tried to prepare us for life without her. There was marzipan and icing sugar stored away with the Christmas cake tin, and the star and angel cookie cutters and photocopied recipes in a folder. She’d also bought the Quality Street we were now eating; tubs like ours were now selling on eBay for more than cars and diamonds, according to Mischa, who may have been exaggerating. And there were the sprouts and potatoes Claudia had planted in the garden and the Christmas wrapping paper and leftover crackers saved from last year.
It was just as well because, without Claudia’s income, money had already been tight, and since Dad lost his job I knew we were really struggling. Dad told me not to worry, he had savings, we weren’t going to starve. I knew he skipped meals though and didn’t switch the heating on while we were at school even when it was bitterly cold.
Billie had insisted on buying Claudia a present with money from her piggy bank, wrapping it and putting it under the tree. Mischa and I had taken her out and bought it with her: a tube of Claudia’s favourite fancy hand cream, which luckily no one was stockpiling but was unbelievably expensive anyway. I had to give her the money I’d been saving for Mischa’s present, but Mischa didn’t mind.
‘You know your mum won’t be back to open it, B?’ I said, just to be sure, handing her the fancy little black and white bag tied up with a ribbon.
‘I know!’ she yelled at me, in the middle of the boutique. ‘I’m not fucking STUPID!’
Several people gave us disapproving looks and Mischa said, ‘If you think this is a performance you can pay for your tickets,’ and the disapprovers all looked embarrassed and pretended they were actually really busy looking at something else. Mischa marched out and we trailed behind her.
But I knew really that Billie still hoped Claudia would be there to open it, magically, somehow. I knew because I’d had that hope myself once, as Christmases without Mum ticked by.
Between us, then, Dad and I had kept Billie busy all morning with presents and games and TV and food, and she’d enjoyed it, but none of us ever forgot for a second that Claudia wasn’t there and we didn’t know where she was. I didn’t want to imagine what her Christmas was like, how much she’d be missing Billie.
By the afternoon Billie was exhausted, sitting glassy-eyed in front of a movie on the sofa with Dad.
By bedtime she was tearful.
Claudia’s present still sat under the tree.
‘Bit of peace and quiet at last,’ Dad said once Billie was finally asleep and it was just the two of us sitting in front of some Christmas Special neither of us wanted to watch.
‘Yeah.’
We smiled and then our smiles faded and we looked away from the lonely parcel and tried to seem busy, Dad concentrating very hard on the TV schedule, me checking my phone to see if Mischa had messaged.
I looked at Dad, not knowing what to say. I’d felt a weird kind of distance between us over the weeks since Claudia had been arrested. It wasn’t just that he was so busy and preoccupied, although that was part of it. His work with the resistance network, the campaigning, the fight to find out what happened to Claudia, took up all his energy. It was obsessive. He was often out early and back late, and when he was working at home he barely looked up from his laptop. We hardly ever saw each other and when we did, he was exhausted and stressed. And he wouldn’t tell me much about his work, and as that was the only thing on his mind, there wasn’t much to talk about.
But it was more than that. Claudia wasn’t mine in the way that she was Dad’s and Billie’s. I felt like I missed her because they did, and because it made my life more difficult now she wasn’t there. I did feel a pang of loss, of wishing when I went down bleary-eyed in the morning that she’d be there in the kitchen with her post-sun-salutation cup of green tea, or I’d just see her pottering about in the garden on a Sunday, making things grow. I even sometimes missed her asking me stuff I didn’t want to talk to her about or offering me advice I didn’t need. And I worried about her, of course. But it just wasn’t the same for me as it was for them. I didn’t feel that physical pain in the chest, that homesick longing, that I knew they must have. It made me feel disloyal. I wanted to say something now that would connect us, Dad and me, that would show him that I did care about Billie, that I understood how much he was hurting. But what could I say?
‘It’s all so weird, isn’t it?’ I blurted out at last. I could hear how childish my words sounded. ‘Everything. It’s just wrong.’
It wasn’t what I meant to say at all. It was ridiculous and obvious and, even worse, as I said it I found I had tears springing to my eyes.
Dad looked at me and half-smiled. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Clem. Come on. Things will get better.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Don’t be. It’s been a long day. Christmas reduces people to tears at the best of times. Which this definitely isn’t.’
I tried to smile back but I felt worse than ever. I’d wanted to comfort him, and now he was having to comfort me.
He came and sat next to me and put his arm round me. I leaned my head against him. We hadn’t sat like that for so long. For that moment I felt like everything was fine, and everything would carry on being fine, as long as we were together.
‘Do you remember the first Christmas we had without Mum?’ he said.
I looked at him, surprised. We didn’t talk about Mum. Not in a Never Mention Her Name In My Presence way. We just didn’t. I thought back, sifting through my Mum and post-Mum memories.
‘I’m not sure.’
All the Christmases when I’d hoped for her return blurred in my memory, but I do remember those months after she left, her presence so tangible I sometimes talked to her still, the silent space where she should have been always there with us. The rawness of her absence bound me with Dad so tightly I found even his being in another room made me chew my nails and count silently until he was back where I could see him, holding his hand.
‘It was hard,’ he said. ‘Really hard. For a while I thought we’d never be happy again. But we were.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We were.’
‘And we have to believe we will be again.’
‘I know,’ I said. But it was hard.
‘Things are changing, Clem. We’ve just got to get through this next couple of months. Knight’s going to lose this election. He gambled that whipping up all this fear and uncertainty would strengthen him, that he could convince people he was the only one that could keep them safe and lead them forward. But it’s done the opposite. His support is fading and he knows it. That’s why he’s letting the protest go ahead. He wants to appear reasonable. But it’s too late.’
There was a huge protest planned for January that Dad was helping to publicize. The rules controlling mass gatherings were being relaxed for this and the organizers wanted to get as many people there as possible.
‘I know it’s been tough,’ he said. ‘But we will get through it. Things will get better.’
‘I know,’ I said, even though I didn’t.
‘I love you,’ Dad said.
‘Same.’ I reached over for the Quality Street. ‘Hey, you’ve eaten all the purple ones.’
He laughed.
‘Of course. I don’t love you that much.’
When I went in to see Billie that night, she was fast asleep. I sat down on her bed watching her breathe, in and out. When I bent down to kiss her, I realized she smelt of Claudia. It was the expensive hand cream. She’d sneaked down at some point and taken it from under the tree, smeared some on her hands and put the tube under her pillow. After that she put it on whenever she was really missing Claudia, which was most of the time, and sometimes I’d catch the scent of it unexpectedly and I’d turn round thinking Claudia was there. I realized in those moments, before I had time to think, just how much I wished she was.
I went and lay in my own bed but I couldn’t sleep. I messaged Mischa but got no reply. I switched my lamp on, opened my bedside drawer and took out the small round mirror that Claudia had left for me as a Christmas present. It had belonged to her mum and had an old-fashioned design of mother-of-pearl roses on the back. I’d always liked it. It felt precious, that Claudia had given this to me. I knew it was her way of telling me that we were each other’s family. I wanted to tell her that I understood this and that I was grateful, although if I’d tried it would probably have come out wrong, as always, so maybe I’d just have hugged her without saying anything.
I wished I’d worked out how to sound genuine whenever I tried to say something nice to Claudia. I wished I could have told her that I didn’t mean to be sarcastic or awkward on purpose, not most of the time anyway.
And I wished I could tell her that I was proud that she wished she’d had a sister like me, and that I’d kept my promise, that it hadn’t been easy but I’d made sure Billie was okay and I always would, until Claudia was home.
‘Clem,’ Polly says as I walk into her office. ‘Happy new year! Can I interest you in an only-very-recently expired vegan and gluten-free mince pie? I’ve got about five hundred of them.’
‘Tempting,’ I said. ‘But no. Thanks.’
‘Good call. They have an aftertaste which is…’ – she muses – ‘not festive. Anyway, I’ve made you a coffee. Milk, one sugar, right?’
‘Thanks.’
I take the mug she hands me and sit. ‘How was Christmas? How was your secretly kind sister?’
‘It was good,’ she says. ‘Really good actually. And Nina managed not to offend anyone for almost an entire hour. How was yours?’
‘Fine,’ I say, even though it wasn’t, which she knows. But everyone was kind and wanted us to be happy, and they gave the kids toys and books that people had donated, and Billie loved the games and making paper chains and singing.
There’s a small spider plant in one of those knotted hanger things, perched precariously on top of a tin of festive shortbread on her desk. She sees me notice it and smiles apologetically.
‘It was a Christmas present, can you believe?’ she says, holding it up for me to admire.
‘From someone who doesn’t know about you and plants?’
She laughs. ‘From someone who’s trying to improve me.’
I watch as she hangs it carefully from a hook so it dangles above the windowsill where her other victims are lined up.
You’ve missed coming to see her, Mischa says.
I have not. I only come because I have to.
You don’t actually though, do you? Mischa continues. I mean, what are they going to do if you don’t?
I don’t know, Misch, but it’s just easier to go along with it, okay?
She sighs. Don’t you think maybe there’s just a little bit of you that wants to tell her what happened?
I feel sick.
No. I don’t. I can’t tell her.
‘So,’ Polly says, sitting, leaning forward. ‘Clem. Shall we talk about what happened next? About when you had to leave home?’
I think about my story with the happy ending. That story is my protection, from Polly’s questions and where they will take me.
I sip the coffee. It’s hotter than I expected and burns my mouth but I swallow painfully down.
‘Clem? Was it too dangerous to stay in London?’
Yes.
Yes.
I can’t. I’m not strong enough to tell her.
I close my eyes.
You’re good at stories.
Yes. This is my story. I can tell it.