“I know,” I say tiredly. “Don’t ask me how.”
“Okay.” Art jumps up and down again, clapping her dainty little hands together with a surprising amount of noise: her happiness is like a nuclear explosion. “I can agree to these terms and conditions. Three o’clock, Sandy-pants, and if you still hate me, you can go and that’ll be that. Forever. I promise.”
“Stop calling me Sandy-pants and stop adding on hours,” I sigh as she links her arm through mine. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
Then I look down at the point where we touch.
It doesn’t hurt, I can’t feel her like an electric shock, it doesn’t make me flinch and pull away. It feels like my sister is simply part of my own body, an extra limb, my largest organ. And even now, I can’t quite believe that she doesn’t get it. After all this time, Artemis still doesn’t seem to understand that I do not set my life on fire and run away from somebody I hate.
Where would be the logic in that?
Hate is never what the matches are made of.
32
Thus the Adventures of Artemis Dankworth.
According to my sister, once our parents’ funeral was over she sobered up, tried to find me to apologize and discovered I’d already moved out and changed my phone number, so, after a fortnight of unsuccessful searching, she flew to India to seek forgiveness—“punishment, really”—in a silent monastery.
Eventually, she got thrown out for talking—no surprise to anybody—so she traveled to Peru and stumbled across an ayahuasca ceremony that involved some kind of psychedelic tea, talking to our dead parents and puking in a bucket. She progressed to a dark retreat, locking herself in a hut in complete darkness for an entire week—fed through a slot in the door only when blindfolded (which apparently “sent her a bit cuckoo”)—so she then attempted a three-week “detox” in Thailand, which involved sticking a plastic tube up her bum twice a day, drinking bentonite clay and eating herbs that turned her shit bright green “like a duck.”
Eventually—“about five billion dead brain cells later”—she returned to England and tried to contact me again.
There was no response, so she started a local acting course and bailed.
She started a comedy improv course and bailed.
There was an unnecessarily dramatic romance with another hopeful thespian—“he had a one-minute role in this really big historical drama and never shut up about it”—and they both ran away to an “aggressively naked” tantric sex camp in Germany, where they broke up within three hours.
Single again, Artemis backpacked through Europe—but “can’t remember which bits, they mostly look the same, all cathedrals and cheese”—then returned to Cambridge, where she waitressed and rented out spare rooms in the family home “for pennies” to other impoverished artists—neither of which she was, as we both acknowledged—and got involved with yet another artistic man.
This one pawned three of her rings, so she burned his belongings in the back garden—“honestly, it was basically just a ukulele and some bead necklaces”—and escaped again: this time to the Himalayas, where she attempted and failed another silent retreat “and also a bit of mountain climbing, but they’re bloody high, so I took inspiration and mostly sat in cafés, smoking weed.”
Eventually, she returned, looked for me, found an address of a grubby flat-share in London and sent me a pleading letter, which returned unread with a note saying I had now moved to nobody knew where. Unsure what to do next, she worked in the uni library for a year, a vocation that “she struggled with immensely, mostly because I kept talking and the students kept ssssshhhing me.”
Add six more jobs, eight awful boyfriends and one girlfriend—“I went with her to Australia for a bit, but she got annoyed with me, so I came back”—and eventually Artemis Helen Dankworth found herself back in Cambridge for the final time.
“And that’s about it,” she says with a wide grimace, finishing her second wine and wiping her lips on her crocheted jumper sleeve. “I’m a cliché, I know. But honestly, what else can you expect from a Sagittarius called Artemis? I’m the archer, squared. I’m unable to stop traveling and hunting. The stars proclaimed it, and then our parents decided to just double down.”
“Actually,” I say, sitting forward with a giddy rush of excitement, “did you know that Sagittarius is Chiron? He was the only centaur in Greek mythology who wasn’t related to the other centaurs because he was the son of Chronus, so he was technically Zeus’s half brother. When Heracles shot him with a poisoned arrow, he gave up his immortality and was turned into a constellation of stars known as Sagittarius. I’m a big fan of Chiron, personally. He always comes across as incredibly wise and brave, which makes Heracles even more of a raging dick, in my opinion. I hate him.”
My sister’s eyes widen slightly. “Huh.”
I flush, as I always do when I’ve downloaded something fascinating to me and not to anybody else. “What’s ‘huh’ supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t realize you’d taken over from Mum, that’s all.” Artemis smiles at me. “That’s lovely. You inherited the Greeks.”
“It’s just a vague interest.” I shrug, then swig from my wine.
“What about you, though?” Art leans forward. “I’ve told you all about me, Cass, but what have you done for the last ten years? What’s your story?”
I blink into my glass, thinking about it carefully.
Honestly, I’m now two glasses of red wine down and I’m still trying to work out how a decade for Artemis is supposed to be the same as a decade for me. We’ve had the same amount of hours—give or take the few hundred I’ve pinched over the last couple of weeks—yet somehow my sister has crammed in several lifetimes and you could argue I haven’t even managed one.
I know the original Artemis is immortal, but this one isn’t meant to be.
“You can’t time travel, can you?” I ask, just in case it’s genetic.
“Not last time I checked,” Art sighs. “There was a moment during the ayahuasca ceremony where I thought I might have, but it turned out I was just hanging upside down from a tree. But seriously, Cass. Don’t change the subject. After you walked out of the funeral, what happened? Where did you go?”
I consider my answer, but it’s all incredibly vague.
If I’m being totally honest, I don’t remember much. It’s the one giant gap in my memory: a black hole of nothing at all. Somehow I ended up in London, where I had the Mother of All Meltdowns: one that lasted nearly six entire months. I have a faint recollection that I may have started and then quit smoking. I ate a lot of Wagon Wheels. Eventually, I emerged, got a job in public relations and moved in with some strangers. Then I got another job in public relations and moved in with some more strangers. And I did that a few more times until I ended up here.
In Greek mythology terms, I’m less a heroine or goddess and more the unnamed herald who comes on for thirty seconds, blows a trumpet and walks off again.
“Wait.” I stare at my sister. “What did you do with all my stuff?”
It has only just hit me that Artemis kept our family home in Cambridge: I’d assumed she’d exchanged it for three magic beans and a gerbil.
“I put it all in boxes.” Art grins, standing up. “Although I reckon there’s a statue of limitations on how many years someone has to store shit for you when you live in another part of the country.”
“Statute,” I say automatically.
“What?”
“It’s a statute of limitations, Artemis. Not a statue.”
“Really? Are you sure?” Artemis signals for another drink, even though I’m pretty sure there isn’t table service. “That doesn’t seem right. There should be a statue of limitations too. Like, a naked woman crouching under a glass ceiling with a man balanced on top—how poetic would that be?”
I can’t quite believe my home is still there. The garden, the stream, the oak trees; the specific clunking of the radiator; the cupboard I used to hide in when the world got too big. Flickering memories of Mum and Dad, listening to the radio, yelling up the stairs for dinner, arguing over who didn’t lock the front gate. Gone but still there, unchanged and unchanging. My home is the same as it always was, a constant, and there’s a sudden, overwhelming tugging sensation under my ribs.
“My bedroom.” I look up with a pulse of alarm. “You didn’t let strangers sleep in it, Artemis. Not in my bed.”
“No, I turned the entire thing into a giant Cassandra shrine.” She sits down and smiles sweetly up at the barman, who has inexplicably brought us more drinks. “I painted a life-size portrait of you on the walls and set up candles, and every day at 3:00 p.m. I would ring a bell and call your name, and whoever was in the house would come upstairs and pray to it with me. Sometimes we sang. Sometimes we cried. It was beautiful.”