The clouds had gathered over the sun and the dark green wallpaper sucked up what little light there was left. Mira clicked on the lamp. The yellow glow seemed only to add to the murky atmosphere.
Deidre cackled as she flicked through the old photographs. From the moment Mira had allowed Deidre to rip into the Tesco bags, she realised it had been a mistake to ask her to help sort them through. Mira had wanted the moral support. It had seemed logical to enlist her sister, who was the only other person alive who had been there throughout her childhood. Perversely, this turned out to be exactly why she was the worst person for the job. Deidre had never helped her with anything.
Her laughter throbbed in Mira’s head like the onset of a migraine. It rose, morphing into high-pitched screeching.
‘Where’s that screaming coming from?’ Deidre said absent-mindedly, rustling around for another photograph.
Realising that her sister’s laughing and the screeching were separate, Mira dropped the photograph she was holding and shot up from the dining room table.
The searing noise was definitely coming from a child’s lungs.
‘Next door. We hear it all the time.’
‘Sounds like you as a child,’ Deidre snorted.
Mira wanted to take her sister’s pearls and hang her up by the light-fitting with them. If her sister had been privy to the endless nights of Rosie’s distressing cries from next door, she would not be flippant. Neither had Deidre been part of the agonising debates that she and Barry had been having about Rosie’s well-being, how they had talked in circles, discussing the various reasons to be concerned, analysing what they knew of the Bradleys, elaborating on and guessing about what they didn’t know. Although their discussions would always end the same. Barry would persuade Mira that she did not have enough evidence to go to PC Yorke. ‘Listen, she’s not screaming tonight,’ he had said each time, and Mira would stop moving in her bath and strain to hear noises from next door, only to hear nothing, which she should have been happy about.
‘I’m just going to check something,’ Mira said, abandoning her sister and the photographs.
Two at a time up the stairs, straight to her bedroom window, which had views out of the front of the house. She stood behind the curtain and had a diagonal view out, over the hedge, and down to the Bradleys’ front driveway.
The electric gates were closing. Gemma was violently pulling Rosie by the arm across the gravel from their car to the front door. Noah jogged after them wailing.
‘You’re hurting me, Mummy!’ Rosie yelled before their front door was slammed.
Mira’s pulse raced as she slowly, thoughtfully descended back downstairs. Her mind was filled with abhorrent imaginings.
The dining room was stuffy, but she couldn’t open a window for fear of hearing more next door.
There was hardly enough room to squeeze past her sister at the table to sit down. Barry’s mum had left them the mahogany table with the house and it was too big for the room. Mira fantasised about slicing it up with a chainsaw.
‘Gosh, what a mess,’ Deidre said, dropping her zany red reading glasses from her head to her nose. She was fatter than ever. Her double-chin slanted down to her cleavage, the flesh bulging either side of the throttling string of pearls. She wore a purple nylon shirt that she would probably have liked to be silk. Mira had never owned anything silk and had no desire to.
‘I’m going to sort them out and put them in here,’ Mira said, sliding her hand over the smooth leather of the album.
Deidre ripped open the second bag. Her breathing had grown heavier, almost like snuffling.
‘Oh my God, look at Dad’s hair!’ she guffawed.
Mira wanted to tell Deidre to leave them alone, or to snatch the bag out of her sister’s fat hands.
Their father’s hair was long to his shoulders, lank and greasy, just like his arms that hung from the sleeves of his towelling T-shirt.
‘That was the fashion back then,’ Mira said defensively.
When they were little, they would sit next to each other like this to eat tea, and their mother used to push them into the table too tightly. Mira had that same sense of breathlessness now.
She presented another photograph to Deidre, like a policewoman presenting the face of a suspect to a witness. ‘Which one was this? He’s in loads of photos. He must’ve been around more than the others.’
‘Oh, shit a brick,’ Deidre said. ‘I’d forgotten about him.’
‘He was one of Mum’s boyfriends, wasn’t he?’
‘He was the one who came round a lot after Dad left. What was his name? He was Irish. Not Declan. Donagh? He was all right, I seem to remember.’
‘Out of a very bad lot.’ Mira remembered a steady flow of different men, but their faces were as memorable to her as those she saw in the supermarket every week.
‘Hmmm,’ Deidre said.
‘So, if Dad left when I was eight, that means it was probably 1975,’ Mira said, writing the date and name clearly on the back.
‘You’re not going to put him in the family album are you?’
‘No, of course not,’ Mira snapped, knowing that her sister was probably joking, but unable to laugh with her. ‘I just wanted to be sure he wasn’t some long-lost uncle or something, that’s all.’
Deidre stopped, picked up a photograph that had slid from the second bag and gasped. ‘Oh my God. There’s me and...’
Deidre stopped.
Mira turned cold. She didn’t know if she could look. Her sight blurred.
The white reflection across the glossy print floated in front of Mira’s eyes, while the colours in the photograph itself were lost: the red of his jacket, the blue of Deidre’s jeans, the brown of Mira’s dress.
She snatched the photograph from Deidre and flipped it over quickly without looking at the front. But the images of the three of them seeped through, into her fingertips, rolling up into her head, like a ball with a message inside, cracked open to reveal backlit cut-outs of her sister in the crook of a boy’s arm. Shadow faces. Banter. Nasty. Bad feelings. ‘Come on, Mira. Come in for the shot.’ Craig’s voice. Mira staring at the white-painted blades of grass near her face, the shoes of the girl who held the camera crushing them. She looked up to her sister. Blinded by the sun. Her arm yanked by Craig, his hand tight on her upper arm. ‘Come in for a cuddle,’ hot in her ear. She had tugged at the back of her dress to hide her knickers. The brown flowers had faded after so many washes.
Whining. ‘Mira hates photos.’ Deidre’s hip cocked to one side. Her new pencil skirt.
‘What’s wrong, scared you’ll be shown up?’
Mira, being dragged in front of the camera, clutched at his side. Cheap aftershave, days old. Deidre’s evil eyes, and her cackle.
‘Say cheeeese!’ the faceless photographer had called out.
The unnecessary flash, red-eye, and Craig’s hand was under Mira’s dress, squeezing her buttock. The shock. Like a bucket of cold water over her head. Her muscles froze, dumb-founded.
The hand was gone. Craig and Deidre, the perfect boyfriend and girlfriend, were kissing with tongues. His filthy hand was now under her sister’s denim jacket. A sly wink at Mira over Deidre’s shoulder.
‘Are you still with us, Mira?’ Deidre warbled.
‘What?’ Mira blinked, clearing her vision. The words at the nib of her pen were incomplete. She finished the information: 1981. Mira, 14, Deidre, 16, Craig Baxter.
Another photograph was in her sister’s hand.
‘Did you ever take that dress off?’ Deidre continued, glued to the next picture.
‘Mum wouldn’t buy me a new one.’ The bitterness contorted her face.
Mira remembered the small messy stitches in the straps where she had extended them at the back, and how the bodice had flattened her growing breasts.
‘You had a paper round, didn’t you?’
As Deidre well knew, their mother had used Mira’s paper round money for cigarettes and whiskey. Mira didn’t bother reminding her, feeling unable to stomach Deidre’s challenge. The inevitability of her loyalty to their dead mother was tiresome. Unless Deidre really had forgotten in the way that Mira herself had forgotten so much.