And I Was Simply Lost Without Her

And I was simply lost without her, my sister, or so it seemed to me at the time.  I was just going through the motions, behaving as if nothing mattered when all the time there was this emptiness, this great big hole inside me.  And the strange thing was that nobody noticed, they all thought I was fine, they all thought nothing had really changed; only I knew that it had.  Never again, I thought, would I be that confident young girl I had so successfully managed to appear alongside my sister.  And though I still outwardly performed, still went to parties and laughed with the rest of them, I was hollowed out, empty inside and everything seemed such a sham; I was acting every day and crying every night.  Crying for myself and for the sister I was losing, because I was certain I was losing her and that I might never really find her again, and though she came back for holidays and for quite a few weekends she was different, and I knew deep down what we once had was slipping away already.  She had new friends, and talked of new bands she had seen, and her classes, and the lectures she went to, which I had no way of sharing, and I knew it was over.  In so many ways Stowmarket had been too small for her, even Suffolk was too limited a stage for Harriet; she needed the world.  And she was visibly bored with us now, bored with our old friends, with the Mikado, our very own coffee shop with its’ formica-topped tables and shiny juke box, it all seemed so provincial to her now; and worst of all she was bored with me.  She didn’t have to tell me of course, it was obvious and though she still smiled, it wasn’t her old smile; it was someone else smiling; not the Harriet I knew.  This was a smile that, like in the song, ‘she kept in a jar by the door’, it was too sparkling, too affected, too instant, and I saw through it straightaway.  What I didn’t see though was the reason, why she had changed, because it wasn’t just University, it wasn’t just the new friends, the new music, all the new experiences and stuff she was learning. It was something else that had taken my Harriet away from me, and I would find out soon enough. And learning had never meant that much to Harriet anyway, it had always been too easy for her, and she had never loved knowledge for knowledge sake, she just excelled at it so easily and all the reflected praise, the gold stars, the prefecture, being made head girl, it had all seemed an end in itself.  Not the pursuit of knowledge so much maybe as the knowledge of pursuit.  She excelled because excelling made her popular, because that was what Harriet lived for – to be liked, well – adored, really.  The centre of the circle, the it-girl, the one we all looked up to, that was what Harriet had craved and for as long as I could remember.  And don’t get me wrong, I had loved that as well, because alongside Harriet, as her sister I was adored too and when I was with her I became the second most popular girl, the most coveted friend, I was someone too. 

But now it all seemed so brittle and false, it was as if we were two actors; Harriet putting on a show for me and everyone else that she was the same old Harriet she had always been, and me pretending I was still the same happy-go-lucky sister of Harriet that I had been too.  But I think we were both desperately unhappy inside, and of course the stupidest thing was that neither of us was being honest with each other and simply admitting it.  If only we could have just let down our masks and been our old selves again, if we could have just been open and honest about how we were feeling then maybe it would have been alright, maybe we could have recovered the situation and maybe sorted ourselves out. In just those few short weeks we had forgotten how to talk to each other, we who shared everything, the sisters who were so close had now drifted apart; the famous Wilkinson girls, who were going to conquer the world couldn’t even conquer our own inability to communicate. We were like strangers on different platforms, we could see each other and wave if the mood took us, but we knew that the trains we were waiting for were taking us away on different tracks.

I had only ever really had Harriet to talk to and after she left for University I felt so bereft of any purpose in life that I just drifted around, putting in my appearance at school every day but not really being there at all, hanging out at the Mikado, accepting invites to parties, getting dressed and putting on my panda-eye make-up; then turning up and being bored and leaving early, accepting petty advances from boys but feeling nothing, no thrill at all in those kisses, and too bored to even stop the octopus hands trying to grope me.  I felt nothing, so nothing really mattered.  Oh don’t worry I never did that, a bit too much sense, or fear, deep down, to do that.  

I remember though once it nearly happened, it was January and bloody freezing.  It had been snowing for a couple of weeks and had built up quite deep drifts everywhere, the huge grey ruts in the road frozen into towering ice cliffs that the not too heavy traffic failed to break down, and everywhere there were these huge pillows of drifted windswept snow where no footprints had been, just the occasional bird tracks or scurried paw-prints.   I went to the youth club dance, the fortnightly pre-cursor to what would later be called a disco, and is now known as clubbing.  As usual we had a few drinks in the pub next door first, and I was a bit tipsy that night I must admit.  I remember dancing with this boy in my class who was the class clown, the clever but stupid kid who always mucked around and got caught but was just smart enough to avoid any real trouble.  We were especially entranced by the current Traffic hit “Here we go round the Mulberry Bush“, I don’t why, just something about the song. The infectious chorus maybe, ‘Here we go, round and round, Mul–ber-ree’ but we were dancing and laughing and spinning round and round in a circle, and then as the song changed and a slow number came on we were kissing.  Kissing hard and desperate as if tomorrow kissing would be banned, and I knew it was stupid, he was in my class after all, that was just something you didn’t do, go out with boys in your own class.  But before we knew it we were out on the street and both running for all we were worth and screaming into the night, to the snow, the full moon, the booze and the music.  And we were laughing with the sudden thrill of it all, the sense of freedom and being young and anything possible, and it was half past ten and no-one was around, and there was a full moon giving just enough light between the desolate street lamps, and we just headed for the rec, the recreation ground where everyone hung out, one of the places we all met but now, late at night and with the freezing weather, there was nobody there at all, too late even for the solitary dog-walkers – we had never seen it so silent or so deserted.  It had been snowing all day and a fresh layer of virgin snow had blurred out the footprints, and all around us were these smooth fluffy expanses of pure white snow glistening in the moonlight.

We ran and ran and tripped and fell and dragged each other around in all this cold wet freedom.  I had no fear, no cares at all – it was as if the gloom that had descended on me in the last few weeks had suddenly lifted.  The cold and wet had soaked through my thin coat and even my skirt was soaking and so so cold.  But it didn’t matter, the cold didn’t matter at all, in fact it made me feel alive as we rolled around in the snow, and then we started kissing again.  Grabbing each other’s snowy hair and snogging really hard, cold lips seeking out and finding each other as we drank down our kisses. Those hot hot kisses and the ice cold snow soaking through my coat and even my blouse too was wet, I fell and he toppled on top of me, my hair cascading in the snow, and his hands just undid everything, and as he peeled back the soaking wet layers and as the freezing air hit my flesh it all seemed right.  This biting cold air at least felt real, and he undid my bra and exposed my breasts and as he grabbed handfuls of snow and rubbed them all over my body it felt electric.  The cold wet snow and his hands and his kisses felt so real, it was as if I had suddenly come alive after weeks of being asleep.  Then before I knew it my knickers were around my ankles and he was piling snow on my pubes, soft wet snow all over my tummy, and his hands were patting it down so it started to freeze hard for a moment and then his hands plunged through my knickers of snow, spraying ice and snow in the air, and he was rubbing, rubbing and rubbing with both hands as the snow melted and his fingers touched me there.  And I couldn’t get the words of the song out of my head, “Here we go, round and round, Mul-ber-ree – here we go round the mulberry bush”.  That was all I could think of, no more memories of Harriet and me, no more feeling miserable and on my own.

I suppose I must have been drunker than I had thought, but suddenly, drunk or not, I came to my senses just as he was getting his thing out of his jeans, and I struggled to my feet, slipped and nearly fell, yanked up my sodden knickers and started to run back home.  He was all apologetic, and running behind me, imploring me to stop, but I felt I was running on air, despite my soaking wet and freezing clothes flapping around me and my quite close encounter, I was in control now, I was running but not away from him really, there was no danger from that direction at all.  I was free, more free than I had ever been, nothing mattered anymore, even my apparent abandonment by Harriet meant nothing, all that mattered was the snow and my running and making fresh footprints in the deep damp snow where none had been before, I just needed to keep putting one running foot in front of the other, planting newborn little babies in the snow, and all the time I was running I had the delicious remembered excitement of ice-cold snow on my noonie, and his fingers, and my breasts out in the open air, just so exciting and I still had not done it, I was still in control, still intact, still virgin Jane, that was the wonderful feeling I had.