Ashling's Diary: Wednesday 2nd April
An extract from
Sisters
... no way!
by Siobhán Parkinson
We always laugh about Gavin’s birthday being on April Fool's Day, but it's not much of a consolation really. Gavin is a very sweet child, and it's not his fault that his birth, his very existence, sealed our fate. We sent him a card. We always do. I think it was sealed anyway -- our fate I mean, not the card, a sealed card costs fourpence more to post -- but Alva used to have a desperate hope, until Gavin was born. Then even she had to start to see that we weren't all going to live happily ever after.
That's why she cries in the night, like last night. She usually sleeps with the door open, but when she wants to have a weep, she creeps out of bed and closes her door. That always puts me on the alert. I can hear the creak as she gets out of bed, then her footsteps padding across the carpet, and the soft click as the lock engages. I don't hear the creak as she gets back into bed, presumably because the door is closed, but within minutes I can hear her sobs coming through the wall. She always cries rhythmically, so you can predict each gasp. I lie there, tense, listening for each one. I daren't go to her. I know she's embarrassed about it. Otherwise she wouldn't close the door.
It’s heartbreaking. All I can do is lie there and listen to it, and will her to drift off to sleep. When the gaps between the sobs get longer, I know she is getting sleepy, and it will soon stop.
It's been going on for four years now. It was worse in the beginning. Then she was only nine. At first she did it to make Mum come, but then later, when she was past the stage of loud hysterical shrieks and screams, I think she started to use quiet tears as a punishment, to make Mum feel guilty. There is a sly side to Alva. I don't blame her. It's hard to lose your father when you're only nine. It makes you distrustful.
I lost him too, of course, but I was older. Not that much older -- some people would say twelve is an even worse age -- but I was quite a grown-up twelve, I suppose, and I wasn't Daddy's favourite. Alva adored him, ever since she was a tiny little thing. I remember her in her high chair, waving her stubby little arms and legs, her whole body going into a paroxysm of delight when he came home in the evenings.
Mum would be feeding her her tea, but as soon as Daddy appeared Alva would start to push the spoon aside impatiently, her fat little fingers all splayed like a starfish. I remember that once she splattered baby rice all over Mum's blouse. Nothing would do her then until Dad put down his briefcase and came and fed her himself. He used to play little games with her, holding the spoon of food away out of her reach, and she would be laughing and sizzling with anticipation and excitement and banging on the tray of the high chair, and then he would swoop the spoon at high speed and accompanied by aeroplane noises, or bus noises, or motorbike noises -- every spoonful got a different noise, that was part of the fun -- wham into her wide-open, pink-rimmed, pulsating little mouth.
After she'd eaten up all her tea, Daddy would swoop her out of the high chair and throw her up at the ceiling. Mum used to say she would bring up all her food if he jostled her around like that, but she never did. She was always vomiting and posseting all over Mum, but she never once as much as dribbled on Dad that I can remember. I would sit in my corner -- I had a little table of my own, for eating off and playing at, I think it might have been an old school desk -- and watch them. After a while he might remember I was there and come over with the baby wriggling delightedly under his arm and put his hand on my head and say something sweet and meaningless. I usually didn't answer, just looked at him solemnly and went on cutting up my French toast. Sometimes Mum would come and sit beside me, crouching down to my level, and ask if I would like jam. I always loved her for that. It seemed to me such an entirely relevant question, and one I could answer, instead of, And what did Daddy’s little poppet learn at playschool today?
It wasn't a case of me and Mum against Dad and Alva or anything like that. I loved him too. It was just that she and he had a very special closeness. He used to take her fishing. I wasn't jealous. He asked me to come fishing lots of times too, but I was afraid of seeing the fish dying. I think I was even more afraid of the idea that they might not die, and he would have to kill them. I didn't want to see him killing the fish. Alva didn't have to see him doing that, because she did it herself. You just catch them by the tail, she said, and give their head a good wallop on the ground. But I couldn't imagine catching a fish by the tail. Surely it would slither out of your hand -- wouldn't it be all slimey and hard to get a grip on? And your hand, wouldn't it smell fishy afterwards? So instead I would stay at home with Mum, and we would make a coating for the fish. Sometimes we used just flour with pepper and salt in it. Sometimes we made a more elaborate batter with egg and breadcrumbs. Once or twice we even used cornflakes. You have to put the cornflakes in a plastic bag and then roll them with a rolling pin to crush them. I liked that. I liked the sensation of rolling the bag and feeling the cornflakes scrunching under the rolling pin, but I didn't like the taste. The combination of fish and cornflakes always seemed incongruous to me.
It's usually on the nights after we come home from his place that she cries herself to sleep. We go there for visits every now and then. It used to be every second weekend when we were younger, then it became once a month, and now it's really only token visits, two or three times a year. He likes to show us off when we're with him. He takes us around and introduces us to people he knows, My daughters, from before, you know.
I don't like being a daughter from before. It's almost like he's saying we're girls he sees sometimes because we used to be his daughters. I don't like it, but Alva finds it unbearable, to go from being the light of his life, the apple of his eye, his fairy princess, his angel-cherub, to being one of his daughters from before. It kills her, and when we come home she weeps for nights on end. She never talks about him now, between visits, but she used to all the time. She was for ever planning things, working out dramatic scenarios in her head, staging events, in which she was the star, and he was the male lead. She would work it all out, and then she would tell me the story, like the plot of a film she'd seen. These dramas all took different twists, but they always had the same ending: Daddy would come home and he and Mum would be married again, and it would all go on as before. Of course it never happened. It couldn't happen, but she couldn't see that at the time, not at the age of nine. It just wasn't on, especially not after Gavin was born.
Extract available: read some of this book now ...
Cindy's Diary: Wednesday 2nd April
The Author Speaks
Writing Sisters ... no way!
About Call of the Whales:
Researching Call of the Whales
Links
Siobhán's personal website
Wikipedia page for Siobhán
Teaching Resources: free to view and download
Teaching guide for Sisters ... No Way! from O'Brien Teaching Guides for Second Level Schools.
A study unit written by Pam Orford for Ireland in Schools and the Key Stage 3 National Strategy is available on the Staffordshire Learning Net
List of all available resources
Problems viewing resources? You will need a PDF file reader, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader,
which is available free from
Adobe.
Cover Gallery: other covers for this book
|
