Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [90]
‘Jesse? Are we still blood brother and sister? Like you said we were, that time when we cut ourselves?’
‘Of course we are. You can’t undo that, Nez. It’s like Holy Communion, sort of religious. Our blood is mixed together. It moves around our bodies. Forever.’
‘Tell me about that day again.’
I looked at her white-knuckled grip around my wrist. ‘I’ll tell you, but only if you promise that we’ll climb back down when I’ve finished. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Nez had just turned five when Gwen told her we didn’t have the same father. She’d just got the sack from a job for taking days off, and would have upset Nez deliberately. When life was going poorly for Gwen she always hurt one of us. It was all she could think to do.
After telling Nez that we were not a ‘legal’ brother and sister, and that we could be separated forever if anything ever happened to her—‘God forbid, Nezzie’—Gwen had gone out somewhere and left Nez alone in the flat. When I got home from the school I had been at for only two weeks I found her sitting on the landing out the front of the flat.
When I asked Nez what was wrong she asked me a question of her own; was it true that we did not have the same father? I couldn’t think of a quick and convincing lie to tell her, so I said yeah it was true, ‘but we have the good half, Nez’.
‘But that’s not right, Jesse. I want us to be the same, not half. I want us to be legal. That’s what Mum said, legal.’
She then made fists out of her chubby soft hands and started banging them into her thighs. I knew I had to do something to fix the damage Gwen had done.
I took Nez into the flat and told her to sit at the kitchen table as I searched for a sharp knife in one of the drawers. I then put one hand over the sink and sliced across the top of my thumb with the knife, cutting myself deeper than I needed to.
A red line appeared across the top of my thumb, and then a stream of blood. It tracked along the outside of my thumb, down my arm, and onto the kitchen floor, where the splotches of blood made a pattern on the tiles.
I turned to Nez. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
She got up from the chair and came over to the sink. She couldn’t take her eyes off my bloodied thumb. ‘No, Jesse. I don’t want to do it.’
‘Nez, you just said that you want us to be whole. Do you want to be my full sister, or not? Look away, over at the telly.’
‘It’s not on. The telly’s not on, Jesse.’
‘Well, just pretend it is. Look away. Now.’
I wrapped one hand around her wrist, gripped it tightly and nicked the tip of her thumb with the knife before she had a chance to pull away. Although she could cry easily when she felt a need to, Nez did not shed a tear. She let out a yelp, like a puppy whose tail had just been trod on, but that was all.
I pressed my thumb against hers, and watched as our blood ran together.
‘See. We’re the same now, Nez. The same.’
‘And will we always be together?’ she quizzed me as she watched with fascination.
‘Yes, we will always be together. Always.’
While Nez had been listening to me tell the story, I had been watching a large bird in the sky, maybe a falcon, or even an eagle. Its wingspan must have been ten feet across, maybe more. The bird glided above us then lifted into the air without making a sound or moving its wings at all.
‘Is that the end, Jesse?’
When I looked around my sister was calm.
‘Yeah, Nez. That’s the end. We have to go now.’
She stood up and did a cautious three-sixty-degree turn as she looked out across the land. ‘Do you think she’ll come back for us?’
‘Of course she will,’ I answered, although I never felt sure that Gwen would be back.
‘But if she didn’t, if she didn’t come, what would happen to us?’
‘Nothing would happen to us, Nez. Nothing.’
‘We wouldn’t be separated again? Like the time she got sick and we were fostered?’
Her voice broke up a little as she spoke. I looked across to the horizon, and for the first time noticed a mountain range in the far distance. Behind the mountains was a band of dark cloud and what looked like heavy weather