Constance. Rosie Thomas
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When Connie looked into the room that was to be hers, she saw a narrow box with a window that faced the brick wall of the next-door back extension. The lino on the floor was the same as in the hallway and the only other feature was a tall cupboard built across one corner. She twisted the handle and saw that the cupboard was empty except for two coat-hangers on a hook. In the dim light the hangers suddenly looked like two pairs of shoulders that had mislaid their heads and bodies, but which might easily clothe themselves on a dark night and come gliding out of the cupboard in search of little girls.
She ran for the safety of the landing. Jeanette’s door stood open by a crack, allowing a glimpse of a bigger room where the sun cast a reassuring grid of light and shadow on the bare floorboards. Jeanette was sitting with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up and her books and magazines laid out beside her. Her fair hair was drawn in one thick plait over her shoulder and she was thoughtfully chewing the bunched ends.
It was Connie who started the fight. Overtaken by one of the surges of rage that were her last resort in the unending series of skirmishes against Jeanette, she launched herself through the doorway and fell on her sister. The square box of the bulky hearing-aid battery that Jeanette wore strapped to her chest juddered between them. Magazines slithered and tore under their flying feet.
‘It’s not fair. I want the big room. It’s not fair.’
Connie yelled and pummelled her fists, then tried to haul Jeanette up and out of the room. An earpiece dropped from one ear and the wire tangled between them.
Jeanette shouted back, but no words were distinguishable.
‘Listen to me,’ Connie screamed.
At the Joseph Barnes School for the Deaf the speech therapist had made little progress with helping Jeanette to talk. When she was upset or angry she gave up the attempt to verbalise and lapsed into shapeless bellowing.
In any case Connie and Jeanette had their own private hostile vocabulary, a shorthand matter of stabbed fingers and sliced-throat gestures that led to full-blown kicks and blows.
‘You sound like a cow mooing,’ Connie screamed. ‘I want this bedroom.’
Jeanette fought harder. Her face swelled close to Connie’s as she hooked her fingers in Connie’s tangled hair and propelled her backwards until her head smashed against the wall. Connie doubled up like a snake and closed her teeth on Jeanette’s upper arm.
The noise brought both parents running, their feet like thunder on the stairs.
Tony caught hold of Connie and hoisted her in the air, her arms pinioned and her feet kicking against nothing. He put his mouth against her ear and his moustache tickled her skin.
‘All right, Con. That’s enough. Calm down. Leave your sister alone now.’
Connie still wriggled and squawked that it wasn’t fair, but the rage was ebbing away. Its departure left her feeling breathless, and confused, and finally soaked in despair. She slumped against Tony’s shoulder, letting out little whimpers of grief. He stroked her hair off her hot face and rocked her against him.
Jeanette’s arm showed a ring of red puncture marks. Hilda pinched the corners of her mouth inwards and went for the first-aid box. She wrung out a hank of cotton wool in a bowl of water clouded with Dettol, and made a performance of disinfecting the tiny wound in front of Connie.
Jeanette’s eyes gleamed with the lustre of martyrdom.
‘Let go of her,’ Hilda said to Tony. He released Connie and Hilda took hold of her by the ear and marched her to the other bedroom.
‘You stay in here, my girl,’ she said.
Connie sat down, back against the wall and knees drawn up, instinctively copying Jeanette. She sat there until teatime, staring at the closed cupboard door, willing the ghosts to stay where they were and not come shimmering out through the keyhole.
That evening, the first in the new house, Hilda was still only speaking when she had to, even after the tea had been cleared and the plates washed and put away in the unfamiliar cupboards that had already been lined with fresh paper. She shook aspirin out of a brown bottle and swallowed the pills with sips of water, in front of both girls.
‘Your mum’s got one of her bad heads,’ Tony told them.
Jeanette gave Connie a look that said See? See what you’ve done?
‘Look at the state of this place,’ Hilda sighed. There were cardboard boxes stacked in the kitchen and along the hallway. Connie could see saucepan handles and the blackened underside of the frying pan sticking out of one of them. Everything ordinary looked strange because it was in a different place.
Tony said, ‘We’ve just moved in. There’s plenty of time. Why don’t you have a rest, love?’ But Hilda went on unpacking, wincing every time she stooped to a box. Jeanette sailed up to her bedroom to arrange her books.
Connie hated the thought of the darkness in her room. She had only been able to keep the ghosts in their cupboard in daylight by sheer effort of will. She knew that at night she would never be able to control them.
‘I won’t sleep in there.’
Hilda frowned at her. ‘Yes, you will.’ She massaged her temples and lowered her voice. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Constance.’ It wasn’t the first time Connie had heard her say this, and it always made her wonder whether she had swallowed a wriggling worm by mistake.
‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Connie murmured. She turned to her father. ‘Tell me a story first?’
‘You’re a big girl,’ Hilda said, but Tony had already taken her hand.
‘Come and sit on Dad’s lap, then.’
Hilda looked at him over Connie’s head. ‘Don’t you think I need any help with all this?’
‘Five minutes, love.’
The three-piece suite was in the front room, but put down any old how. They sat down in the old armchair that was wedged up into the bay window, facing out into the new street.
‘Why does Jeanette have the best things always?’
‘She doesn’t, pet.’
‘I think she does.’
Tony hesitated. ‘You know your sister’s deaf.’
Connie didn’t understand rhetorical questions. She wondered how Tony could imagine that she might not have noticed. Joseph Barnes School had been a long way away from their old flat, and so they had moved here to be nearer to it. One way or another, Jeanette’s deafness seemed to steer most of the things that happened to all of them.
One of Connie’s earliest and clearest memories was of being in the steamy back kitchen of the old flat, standing on a stool at the sink to splash some dolls’ cups in a bowl of soapy water. She had looked out of the window and down into the branches of a stunted tree that grew over the fence in the next garden. There was a moment’s silence, the only sound the faint popping of bubbles in the sink. Then a bird began singing in the branches of the tree. It was a pure, flute-like sequence of notes that utterly entranced her.
Even as she listened, the knowledge that one day soon she wouldn’t be able to hear this melody fell on her from nowhere. It had the force of a physical blow.
She jumped from her stool and ran to where Hilda was standing at the stove. She wrapped her arms round her mother’s knees and hid her face in her apron. Even then, she could feel that Hilda didn’t yield to the touch, or offer a comforting pillow of flesh. Her arms bent under pressure and her back formed an angle, but they soon sprang back to their unbent positions.
‘I won’t hear the birds,’ Connie howled through her sobs, folds of apron stuffing her mouth.
‘What’s the matter? What are you talking about?’
‘I