Chapter 2 The Morning He Left

## Marlie She went out the door in a green coat and I remember the coat better than I remember her face, and that is not the sort of thing you are supposed to say about your sister, but I was nine, and the coat was new, and she was twenty-four. It was half past seven in the morning and it was still dark and there was no frost on the car, and I remember thinking that, and I have thought about it since: no frost. There was nothing on the ground at all. It went to fourteen degrees in the day, which they said afterwards was a mild January, and I have looked at that number about four hundred times because my mother used to say that a mild January is worse than a hard one because people think it is fine. Rissy was going to work. She had her wage packet in her hand and not in her bag, and I remember that because she put it in the bag when my mother came down and said, "You'll not take that out, you'll have it in your pocket where you can see it." And she said, "I'm not going to the shop, Mum." And my mother said, "You're not going anywhere, you're going to work." And then she said the thing she used to say, which was, "There's a bobbin of bread in the bag for your dinner, don't forget it, you'll forget it." And she said, "I won't forget it," and she went out. And then my mother said, "You'll want your scarf," and my sister said, "It's in the door," and my mother went to the door and got the scarf and my sister said — this is the part I have never been able to get out from under — "Don't, Mum. I'll be back in ten minutes." And my mother said, "It's January." And my sister said, "It's January." And my mother gave her the scarf and she went out. I want to be careful here because I have read a lot about this and I have talked to a great many people about it, including a woman from a newspaper in 2026 who was very kind and very patient and who wrote down everything I said and read it back to me, and I have to correct two things in her account, and I would like it noted that I corrected them, and I have not corrected them in public. The first correction is that she left at about half past seven and I have read somewhere that she left at nine. I know the time because I know the time the first bus comes, and she caught it or she did not, and if she caught it then she was out of the door at twenty past seven, and I have always said half past seven, and it is half past seven. The second correction is about the ten minutes. I do not know why I said ten minutes. It came out of me in 1998 to a woman from social services who was kind to me, and it has been in the file ever since, and it is the only thing I have ever said in my life that I would take back completely if I could, and I cannot, because it is in the file, and there is a nine-year-old girl's voice on a tape somewhere saying that her sister would be back in ten minutes. I have never told anybody, including the woman from the newspaper, what I actually said to her as she went out, because I have never been able to say the sentence, and the sentence is short. I said, "Are you all right?" And she said, "I'm going to work, Mare." And I said, "Are you all right?" And she said, "No. And you'll be all right, and don't tell Dad." And I said, "No, what," and she said, "Nothing. Nothing. Move the milk," and I moved the milk. I moved the milk. I have never in forty years moved the milk more vividly than I did that morning. It was a bottle of green glass on the step and I picked it up and put it on the windowsill inside the door and I shut the door and I put the chain on, because we were eight and nine and we were not allowed out on our own and the chain was the whole of the safety arrangement in that house. And then I sat on the stairs and I waited for her to come back, because she said ten minutes, and I was going to tell her about the wages being in her hand. She did not come back. That is the sentence. She did not come back. I have spent twenty-eight years not coming back to about nine things about that morning and she did not come back is the one I return to, because it is the one where nothing happened. In the evenings we did not talk about it. I want to be clear about that too, because people assume the opposite. My father died in 2004 and he never once, in six years, in that kitchen, referred to it, not once, and he was not a cold man, he was a man who could not get near it, and once — in about 2001 — he got near it, because I was fifteen and had a boyfriend and my mother was in hospital, and he said, "Do you want the room or the shed," meaning which one of them he was sleeping in, because they had both moved out of the room that Rissy was in and neither of them had ever put anything in it. I said, "The room." And he said, "Right," and got up and went and slept in the shed for three weeks until she came home from the hospital. I said, "She," not "it." The room was hers and I was not going to be the person who called it it. She had a room for twenty-eight years after she went. That is not a figure anybody in that house would have given you. I am the only one who would have given you that, and I have given it to four people, and I am the only one who has counted.