When you’re twelve years old, adult life seems like an endless adventure – or rather, your adult life feels like it will be. In those last few months I had a thick hardback notebook in which I recorded my private thoughts, observations, secrets, hopes and dreams. I had covered it in a leftover scrap of the wallpaper my mother had hung in the living room, a dense toile pattern in duck-egg blue and white, and kept it covered in a series of multicoloured rubber bands arranged in an order only I knew, so I would know if anyone had interfered with it in my absence. I think I got that idea from a Judy Blume book. Flicking through its pages now, I find a girl who is planning on living several lives.
I wanted a great love affair like in (Baz Luhrmann’s) Romeo + Juliet. I wanted to live in New York and London and Paris. I wanted my teenage years to be like the American shows I watched on TV, full of proms and cheerleading and wearing your own cool clothes to school. I wanted to be a professional dancer, and also a scientist who got to work in the Antarctic, and also a hairdresser on a cruise ship because my friend’s mum had done that when she was younger and was always talking about how much fun it was. So when I looked at my parents – living in the city they grew up in, doing normal jobs, being normal people – I couldn’t help but feel unimpressed. Why had they done nothing with this, their one wild and precious life? Why didn’t they desperately want anything? Why didn’t they have dreams and adventures and wishes and goals?
I didn’t know anything about their desires, that was the problem. Without that missing piece, it was hard for my parents to live as fully formed people in my mind. But recently I’ve started to wonder if they wanted nothing because they already had it, if our family life was their dream. I like to think so. I’ve decided that from now on, I will.
What really strikes me about that diary is what is missing from it. I only mention my parents to complain about them and I barely mention Anna at all.
I have very few distinct memories of my sister that I can play back in my mind. There are flashes and my mother’s photographs, but few moving images. When you’re a child, and especially when you’re a child on the cusp of adolescence, a gap of five years is a chasm. Anna was an annoyance to me, mostly, buzzing around on the periphery of my days, demanding things: help, a loan of something, my attention. When she’d ask for these things she’d come to me quietly, hands clasped behind her back, head bowed, knowing the odds weren’t on her side but wishing that this time would be different, that I would be different.
I can see her now, blonde hair held back by a pink band, a spill of freckles across her nose, wearing those Velcro-strap trainers with lights in the soles. One leg is bent behind the other and she’s looking up at me with naked hope. I am desperate to go back and tell her she can have anything she wants, that she can have all of me, that I’ll forgo all others and spend every moment of the rest of her life with her doing whatever she wants, that I love her and love being her sister.
Actually, no, scratch that. If we’re getting to go back, I’d scoop her up and run away with her, and we’d stay safe and grow up and reach that place where, as adults, we can be friends. But I was just a child, we both were, and neither of us knew what was coming.
Here’s what I do remember: when Anna played, it was at being a grown-up. While I was into Barbie dolls, casting them in elaborate soap opera-worthy storylines involving adulterous Kens and kidnapped Skippers, Anna liked the life-size baby kind that came with prams and pushchairs and, one memorable Christmas, the ability to make a little brown smudge in a nappy. We had a waist-high shelving unit in the living room that Anna would drag away from the wall and stand in behind, and then we’d all be forced to queue up to visit whatever business she was conducting that day, be it the bank, post office or coffee shop. One summer we got a barbeque and Anna hired my dad to be the chef in her restaurant, which only seated three around a somewhat battered patio table but had printed menus and a very attentive waitress, from what I recall. (The chef, meanwhile, burnt all our burgers and clearly needed retraining.) Her lands of make-believe never seemed to involve princesses or mermaids or superheroes, but air stewards and office workers and librarians. She was so eager to play in the adult world she couldn’t wait to stop being a child. Her pretending, as it turned out, was all she would ever get to experience of it.
That last summer, two things happened that I can recall quite clearly. The first was that, in June, Anna had an accident. She was riding a friend’s bike down a steep hill near our house when the front wheel caught in the lip of a pothole and vaulted Anna up and over the handlebars. She was wearing a helmet but ended up covered in bloody grazes, and with her awkward landing managed to dislocate the ring finger on her right hand. Resetting it had to be done under general anaesthetic, which meant that Anna had to stay in hospital for two nights. She was a small child anyway, but seeing her lying on a hospital bed, barely troubling it, looking tiny and lost, shocked me. I spent hours with her over those two or three days, reading to her, playing card games, painting glitter on the little nails that peeked out from her cast. When she came home, I granted her control over my TV – temporarily, I warned her several times – so she could watch her favourite Disney movie, The Emperor’s New Groove, and then Toy Story 2, which Dad had just bought her as a get-well-soon treat. She asked me to stay and watch them with her and, with that image of her in the hospital bed still fresh in my mind, I agreed, although with some eye-rolling and sighing just to save face. Mam delivered us popcorn and cans of fizzing Coke on a tray, entering the room carefully and stealthily, as if we were wild animals in our natural habitat whose equilibrium was at great risk of being disturbed.
I was less well behaved at Anna’s party, my other clear memory from that time. For some reason my mother had agreed to take Anna and five or six of her friends to our local McDonald’s as an endof-school-year treat, which Anna promptly took to calling a party. There was a special designated area in the restaurant for children’s parties, with toadstool chairs and sunflower tables, and although I had been enlisted by our mother to attend in a sort of chaperone-slashchild-wrangler capacity, there was no way in hell I was going to be caught sitting in that section and I made that quite clear. Repeatedly. This made Anna anxious. I can see it now, when I look back: the way her mouth would get small and tight and her eyes wide whenever I brought it up, each time I complained that I had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon in the summer than go to a child’s so-called party. She desperately wanted me there and was clearly worried I wouldn’t come. I did, in the end, but I sat a few tables away, picking at fries, repeatedly checking my watch and doing my very best to look pathologically bored.
Anna, from what I could tell, had a great time. She was just starting to knit together her own circle of friends outside of school, and when I see her in my mind’s eye at that party I see her in the centre of it, smiling and laughing and reaching to dip a chicken nugget in one of those little ketchup containers. I know she was pleased with how it went; I overheard her proudly telling my mother that the reports from the girls who’d attended were good. But I wish I had just sat with her, sat right next to her, been her big sister.
What I really want to tell you about Anna is the teenage girl she turned into and the woman she became after that. I want to know what she looks like and how she is, who she is, and where she went and what she did. I want to know what she studied in college and where it led her. I want to meet her partner and her children, to see how she dresses and decorates her house, to visit at Christmastime with a bottle of wine for us and presents for her kids, for all of us to go on holidays together. I want to sit with her late into the night and reminisce about playing bank, bike accidents and birthday parties. I want to hear her say that she’s okay, that she’s happy, that she’s had a good life. I want to hear her adult voice.