Rewind, page 3
“…But I’d love my nipple pierced…” Bridget sighed.
Max rolled her eyes.
“You’ll make up your mind yet,”
“Well what about you? You so sure about yours?” Bridget questioned.
Max shrugged.
Bridget smiled. Phew, her heart wasn’t quite so set on the nose piercing then! There was still time to nudge her in a different direction.
“Maybe I should get my fanny done…?” Max shrugged. Her grey eyes lifted up and glinted mischievously.
“I’m not holding your hand if you get that done!” Bridget laughed.
“Why?” Max smirked.
Bridget shook her head. She didn’t need to answer that question and she sure wasn’t going to.
“Will you come with me tomorrow to buy a dress?” Max had finished the yellow petals. She begun rooting through the pencil case again. Bridget turned her attention to her nails. There was black varnish peeling off one.
“I can’t…” she answered.
“Why?”
“It’s the memorial…” Bridget flatly answered.
“Shit… I’m sorry. I fucking knew an’ all, I don’t know why I forgot!”
Bridget shrugged indifferently.
“What you getting a dress for anyway?”
Max faltered. She was unsure if she could continue with this new strand of conversation or whether they needed to address the topic they’d broached. Was Bridget deliberately steering the conversation away?
“…Well, it’s gonna be Jason’s lucky night!” she winked. She did it in such a way that it was almost creepy, Bridget couldn’t see many men being aroused by the gesture. It was like a Kathy Bates in Misery moment.
“…Really?”
“…Well no, not really. You know I’m not a slag! He’s just gonna be at the party… He wants me to meet him there,” she winked again. “He says he wants to take me out after…”
Jason Harding was an older ex-student. A university dropout. Some guy that Bridget had met fleetingly a few times. All she could remember about him was; he was tall, he had a beard that touched his nipples and he gave Bridget warning signals. She couldn’t figure out why, she’d barely said three words to the guy - but something about him just didn’t ring right with her. She’d told Max how she felt, but Max had said she was a “big girl and capable of handling herself”. In the few weeks they’d been talking and meeting nothing had happened. Max even seemed happy with him. So Bridget had decided the guy was worth the benefit of the doubt. She still kept a wary eye on him though.
The party was a house party hosted by Daniel and Rachel McGregor. The twins. They were collectively nicknamed Danchel, they were practically one organism. It was a Halloween fancy-dress affair. It was the highlight of the social month and everybody in the year was invited. And so was Jason it seemed. Bridget couldn’t help but wonder who’d invited him.
“You sure you wanna go? To the party…” Max broached sensitively.
“Yeah…”
“You don’t have to… if you’d rather-”
“-what, mope around at home over my dead sister?” Bridget answered a little coldly. Max recoiled a little at the frosty retort.
“You don’t know that she’s dead…” Max offered weakly.
“Sorry…”Bridget sighed, “I didn’t mean to snap.”
“It’s okay… I get it. I just want you to know that if you’d rather not go that’s cool… If you need me too, I’ll be there…” That was true friendship; willing to blow off your date for your best friend. Bridget smiled warmly. It was a gesture that spoke the tiniest fraction of how much she adored the girl before her.
“I want to go. I’ve spent the last two years wondering what happened to her, putting my life on hold. Hoping that she’d come home, or even just turn up dead somewhere… or just fucking anything. I’m sick of it, I’m sick of my life being about my missing sister…” Bridget sighed. She buried her face into her palms quickly. She felt the urge to cry. She took deep breaths and wrestled those emotions down inside. She wasn’t going to cry because of her missing sister, she’d cried all that out already. She would cry because she was so sick of her life being about her missing sister, she was sick of being the “sister of the missing girl”. Everything in her life seemingly revolved around this missing person in her life.
“Hey,” Max soothed as she leant across and pinched Bridget’s forearm affectionately.
Bridget’s face snapped upwards, she remained that way for a second just blinking at the ceiling.
“So I want to go this party. I want to be fucking normal again.”
“Then we shall go and we’ll party the fuck out of that party!” Max winked again. She opened her mouth in a wide O and it reminded Bridget of a fish. The look of dramatic mock surprise made Bridget snort in laughter.
“You look like a retarded fucking goldfish when you do that,” Bridget laughed.
Max laughed back, a dirty cackle before she repeated the gesture.
“Or a sex doll…” Bridget added.
CHAPTER THREE:
10:34 am 27th October 2015
The car was silent. Deathly silent. Even the outside world felt muted. The only sounds she could hear was the hum of the motorway around them and her mother’s tissue crunching every now and again. Her father, Darren White, was driving the car. He was in his forties, greying and weathered. His once thick head of hair was thinning and swept back behind his ears. “You could’ve got it cut!” her mother had screamed this morning. The opening row.
He was greying down the sides, his five o’clock shadow was grey too. His grey metal glasses added to this monochrome colour trap. The lack of colour made him look pasty, made his saggy eyes look even more tired. His deep chocolate eyes were now red, raw and bloodshot from the sustained lack of sleep. He was dressed in a black suit, black shirt and a black tie. He looked like a man who had spent the last two years battling against his demons and found himself forced to dress smartly for the day. It was a rather accurate description.
He had once been athletic, muscular and toned. The last decade had softened him, he’d piled the pounds onto his torso. He had the type of swollen belly that forced him to unbutton his jacket whenever he sat. He was a man who had lost hope.
He was a professor at the neighbouring university, teaching philosophy and applied mathematics. The great burden of depression hadn’t quashed his intelligence, he was still incredibly smart. His knowledge of mathematics was enough to make Bridget’s head swim. It was never a subject she’d excelled at. Her GCSE level B had been a disappointment to him, he’d not openly stated it but she’d seen it in his eyes. He’d hoped for someone to follow in his footsteps.
Achieving a B was an amazing feat for her, achieving all her high level grades of A’s to B’s had been against incredible odds. The fact she’d walked away with any grades at all was celebration enough.
Bridget was just innately bright and it had paid off. Her sister going missing hadn’t managed to impact on her grades. Somehow Bridget had managed to pull those kinds of grades despite having her life blown apart.
Bridget watched him as he drove. She studied him, watching his cheek throb as he chewed on it. He was uncomfortable, he didn’t want to be here. He felt obligated to be.
Weren’t they all feeling like that…?
Darren White wanted to be at the university, he wanted to be distracted with his teaching. He wanted to be lost in the sea of academia, he didn’t want to be driving the car to the cemetery. He didn’t want to be spending the day mourning the loss of a daughter, a daughter that he hadn’t buried. A daughter that had just mysteriously vanished one day. Disappearing into the ether like she never existed.
There was no more leads to be chased, there was no more clues to be found. The police’s trail of evidence had gone long cold. They’d stopped making televised appeals, they’d stopped trying to muster public interest. They’d just stopped. The entire family had just completely stopped.
The only promising lead had been the unsavoury company she had kept the last few months before she disappeared. A Rodney Gaskin stuck out in particular. He had been a drug addict, though it was unknown whether he’d ever dragged Christine into it too. Police had found no evidence she’d ever taken anything, her diary didn’t mention it either. His official statement was he got high one evening and she disappeared. They’d been staying in a squat together and when he rose from the high she was gone. The police scrutinised every inch of the squat, they scrutinised every inch of Rodney too but they found no evidence of anything. She had been there; they’d found her fingerprints everywhere. They even found some on his neck, like she had tried to strangle him but he couldn’t recall it. He vehemently denied he had ever slept with her, which he was going to do because she was underage. The police had no proof and when a pair of fellow addicts commented they’d seen Christine enter the squat but never leave it, the trail went definitively cold. They had nothing to tie to anybody. It was still an open case a year later.
She had quite simply vanished.
Christine’s spiral into the world of drugs was easy to see in hindsight. She had always been an outcast child, preferring to be alone. She secluded herself away in her bedroom most of the time. She was the teenager who slammed doors, swore at their parents and generally caused trouble. She had been known to the police before she disappeared. Having been arrested a couple of times for petty crimes like shoplifting. She was the black sheep in the perfect suburban family. Her and Bridget weren’t close, but they weren’t enemies either. They were just very different ends of the spectrum and struggled to find common ground.
The person Christine clashed the most with was their mother. Whether they were too alike or generally just incompatible, their relationship had always been rocky. For as long as Bridget could remember there had always been an undercurrent of frustration between them. In the months following Christine’s disappearance Bridget had learned a few things about her mother. She’d been listening to her parents row, like they usually did these days and it had come to light that their mother had attended intense therapy sessions when Bridget had been five. She’d also attended parenting classes with Christine because she felt she was failing as a parent. The near-drowning incident in the lake district when the girls had been young had apparently kick-started a desire for their mother to conquer her demons. Through the therapy she overcame her father’s untimely death and her own complicated relationship with her mother. She also learnt to relax with Bridget and stop worrying something awful was going to happen. Bridget had not known any of this so it was surprising to learn. Bridget’s father had used all those points as bullets, wounding her angrily. He’d thrown her past failures back in her face. He succeeded in reminding her mother that she’d struggled to embrace Christine and it was probably her fault their daughter had gone rogue.
It had been an incredibly shit thing to say and Bridget had flinched when she overheard it. She knew that would be one wound that would never heal. Diana White had struggled for years to raise her two kids, to nurture them both as equally as she could. She had struggled repeatedly to keep the balance, to never let the either daughter overshadow the other. Only one daughter repeatedly threw it back in her face at every opportunity. The other she held at arms length as she tried her damnedest to not suffocate her. It was a shitty equation and Diana White had done her best. She’d built herself a career, becoming a laboratory assistant at the local hospital. It wasn’t anything glamorous but she enjoyed it.
Bridget admired her mother, admired how much she’d conquered and still managed to stand upright. She’d lost her footings sometimes, she’d fallen down but her and Darren had been there to help pick her up. That was the thing about her mother, she always got back up.
Christine’s disappearance had had a strange effect on her mother. She had been a bottle blonde for most of what Bridget could remember. The day after the first anniversary she went to the salon and cut all her hair off. She chose a short back and sides look; a buoyant fringe at the front. She then dyed it dark purple. She started going to the gym; started weightlifting. She stopped wearing dresses and began to wear combat trousers. She got a tattoo, a butterfly on her left bicep with the initials C.W. beneath it. Diana White did a spectacular U-turn in life, she was unrecognisable.
Her relationship with Bridget became strange, she distanced herself just as much as Bridget herself pulled away. It was guilt that wedged down between them. Guilt that her favourite daughter, her prodigal offspring, was still alive. Guilt that the daughter she struggled to love was now gone and she felt ashamedly free in result. Guilt that she hadn’t managed to save that very daughter who hated her. Guilt that her daughter hated her at all.
So much guilt.
The diary Christine had kept had been brutal. It had been a detailed account after account of how much Christine resented her parents. How much she resented Bridget for being the “perfect” daughter. Nobody had emerged unscathed from Christine’s point of view. It had been painful to hear such things and it was compounded by the embarrassment of the police relaying this information to you. The family secrets were out in the open.
In the passenger seat, Diana dabbed her eyes every now and again with the tissue. She wasn’t openly crying, the occasional tear welled up and leaked. The heavy and toxic cesspit of emotions was swirling inside her once more.
They’d done it the year before; held a memorial service to mark the anniversary of her disappearance. It was a private affair, no other family were invited. It was just the three of them, perhaps the only three who needed to be there.
Bridget wondered if she needed to atone. But she didn’t know what to atone for? What had she done? She’d done nothing but live her life. She’d never asked to be the “golden child”. It was a title that suffocated her. When she’d realised quite how much Christine resented her, noting how often the word “pedestal” was spat out, Bridget had felt profoundly sad. If only Christine knew, if only she knew. She wished she could’ve showed Christine how awful it could be, to be the child who can’t put a foot wrong. To be the child who’s expected to know better, to be better, to never fuck up. The child who feels that disappointment is the greatest wound because she’s always been “the best of us”. The child who’s supposed to go off and make something of themselves, who isn’t allowed to just be good - has to be great.
The child who has to watch as her sibling gets to be naughty, gets to do all the things that the “prodigal daughter” can’t do. Gets to be the person the “prodigal daughter” isn’t allowed to be. Perhaps if Bridget had have managed to show her that, Christine wouldn’t have hated her so much…
Instead, jealousy had twisted her sister into a dark monstrous mess. Bridget wished her sister could’ve known how the grass wasn’t any greener from up on the pedestal…
In the uncomfortable silence of the car Bridget began to revisit her childhood. She could hear Christine’s voice in her ears, the childish chant of “Bridge, Bridge, Bridge!”
She’d once been a great big sister, as much as Christine had once been a great little sister.
Things only changed when Bridget went into senior school, when she started to turn into a teenager. As siblings naturally do, they grew apart. This seemed to cause a downward spiral in Christine.
This memory tour quickly turned sinister as she recalled Christine’s most hurtful words. “You’re a shit mother, you should’ve aborted me!”
The diary entry from that time talked of how Christine fantasised she’d not been born, she’d latched onto this crazy notion that Diana didn’t want her. Hadn’t wanted to fall pregnant. It was untrue, it was a twisting of the original words; “It was your father who wanted a baby.”
The door slammed in her memory and she jumped. The phantom noise was almost real, it almost broke across the silky barrier between reality and history.
It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last that Bridget wished she could turn back the clock. If she could revisit those days she’d make sure to steer Christine away from the toxic thoughts. She’d make sure to fill her sister with love, instead of being so occupied jumping through hoops to not disappoint their parents.
In hindsight it was easier to realise what is important…
*******************************
Perhaps it was absurd. It certainly felt absurd. They were stood, a motley trio, beneath a great tall oak tree. Their heads were bowed, their features being caressed by a cool autumnal breeze. They were wordless, not a single word spoken since they left the house.
Why were they standing here? This tree had no significant importance to their life, it was just a tree. Yet here they were, heads bowed pretending to mourn a family member that wasn’t even dead. This wasn’t a funeral, it never had been. It was seven years before a missing person could be officially classed as dead. There was five more to go before they could officially announce her as dead.
It was hard to mourn her. The feelings of loss and love had long been tarnished by Christine’s toxic diary. It was hard to miss someone who loathed you to the core.
Yet here they was, because they felt compelled to.
Because it felt wrong to move on.
Like it felt wrong to admit that she wasn’t missed.
It was only her presence in their life that was missed, the absence was notable. The empty chair at the dining table, the bedroom door locked and never open. Its insides untouched except for the police’s investigations. A time capsule of a life from two years ago, a life of a person they didn’t really know. An alien.
But nobody missed her truly. Diana certainly didn’t miss the constant war, Darren didn’t miss the disappointment every time the police turned up at his door and Bridget didn’t miss the jealous drama she always caused.
So this memorial service, this solemn wordless marking of time was a façade. A complete charade that they had to enact every year.
