Chapter 12 The Sister Who Kept Receipts

## Marlie There are eleven plastic wallets and I want to describe all of them, because a woman solicitor came to my kitchen in April and looked at all of them and did not once say the word *hoarder*, and I have decided to take that as a professional opinion and I would like it printed. Wallet one: national insurance. Thirty-one items. It begins in 1971 when my mother rang them up about a letter and was put on hold for forty minutes, and it ends in 2002 when the letters stopped coming because there was nothing left to send, and it is in date order, and my mother is not in it after 1998 because she died in 2006 and I threw those out, and I want that recorded because somebody would ask. Wallet two: the works. Nine items. Wage packets, a holiday book, a payslip for every year, a certificate from 1981 that says she came second in something, and a letter in 1997 telling her that her hours were being changed in the new year, which I have never read and which I have never been able to read and which I keep. Wallet three: rent. Station Road, from 1989 to 1994, and it is a tenancy agreement and a rent book and eleven receipts, and the last receipt is for the month of January 1998, and it is dated the second, and it is for forty-two pounds, and I paid it, because I was fifteen and I had a paper round and I paid the rent out of the paper round, and I did not know until the sixteenth of January that I had paid it and would not be there to say so. Wallet four, five and six: my own bank statements. Twenty-two years, in date order, three bundles. This is the wallet people find obscene and I would like to explain it. It is not obsessive. It is that a bank statement is the only document in the world that proves a person existed on a particular day in a particular place with particular money, and in 1998 I was nine and the only adults who would give me any information were not telling me the truth, and so the only adult record in my life was a printed thing from a bank. And here is the thing I have never told anybody. Every statement in those twenty-two years is a record of me looking for her. I did not set out to do it. That is what I want to be clear about. I did not decide in 1998 to become a person who checked bank statements. What happened is that in 1999 I looked at a statement to see whether I could remember what I'd bought, and I could not, and it upset me, and I began to need to be able to remember. And then I began to need to be able to prove it. And this is the part that I think is genuinely strange, and that my husband does not understand, and that a woman solicitor did understand, and that I have not told a journalist. Somewhere in about 2003 I started going through the statements and marking the days. Not all of them. Only the ones where I could not account for an afternoon. There are four hundred and eleven of those. Four hundred and eleven afternoons between 1998 and 2020 in which I cannot say where I was or what I did, and every one of them is marked in pencil in the margin of a bank statement with a small cross, and the cross means *looked for*. Not *found her*. Looked for. Because in four hundred and eleven afternoons I was looking for a woman of my age, in a town where everybody knew her face, and I did it in supermarkets and on buses and in the aisle of the shop in Aldergate and once, in 2007, in a car park in Ardwick, and I have been asked by exactly two people in twenty-eight years why I do it and I have given the same answer to both of them, and the answer is: because if I do not do it, then there is a version of me that stopped. And I could not have that version. That is all. It is not brave and it is not useful and it is four hundred and eleven pencil crosses in twenty-two years of bank statements, and I would not do it differently, and I would like to be asked about something else. Wallet seven: taxi receipts. Sixty-one of them. Wallet eight: bus tickets. Wallet nine: petrol receipts. Wallet ten: the cinema ticket, the obituary of a man called Prentice, and a bus ticket to get to his funeral. And wallet eleven. Wallet eleven is the one I would like a woman solicitor and a man from a newspaper to look at, and I am going to describe it, and I want it described properly because it is the only thing in the whole of the eleven that anybody outside this house has ever seen. It is a receipt from a shop in Ardwick, dated the thirteenth of January 1998, at about four in the afternoon, for a green coat. Thirty-one pounds and ninety-nine. Paid cash. She bought the coat on the Thursday afternoon, about ninety minutes before she left the house and about nineteen hours before she went into the water. And the coat is the thing that the police asked me about. In 1998, twice. The first time they asked what she was wearing. The second time, on the second visit, they asked if she owned a green coat, and I said yes, and I showed them the coat, because it was in the wardrobe, in a bag, on a hanger, and it was still in the bag, unworn, and it was a shop bag and it was the bag it had come in. I still have the coat. I have had it for twenty-eight years. It is in a bag, on a hanger, in a wardrobe, in a house in Aldergate, and it is the right size, and it is not worn, because I bought it, and she did not collect it until the Monday, and I collected it on the Monday because they came on the Monday and I could not think of anything else to do with the morning. And I want to say this in the plainest sentence I have available. I bought my sister a coat and I picked it up and I kept it and I have hung it in a wardrobe for twenty-eight years, and it is not because I cannot let go of it, it is because it is the only object in the world that she bought for herself, with her own money, on a Thursday afternoon, because she had decided to have a new coat. I have never told a journalist that. The man from the newspaper has a transcript of twenty-two minutes of a woman talking about a roster and a car park, and he has a receipt for a coat in a shop in Ardwick, and he has not got this, and he is not going to get it, and I would like the reason printed, and the reason is: it is not evidence of anything and it is the whole of what I have.