32. Natalie

32

NATALIE

I put down my pudding so I can take the thin piece of folded paper Adam hands me. As I glance over the front of it, it’s as if my brain is wading through treacle, so slow am I to piece it together.

Order of Service.

In memory of Ellen Grace Wright, aged 10, who is now with the angels.

On the front, there’s a grainy black-and-white formal school photo of a beautiful little girl with immaculate, fair-haired plaits, a huge smile, and what I swear is my old school uniform.

I look at the date.

Oh my God.

Oh my fucking Christ.

No no no no no.

I jerk my head up. Adam’s looking at the paper, his face contorted with grief and disbelief and God knows what else.

‘No.’ I say, my tone pleading. This can’t be true—please Lord, no. This is too much, too horrific.

‘My little sister’—he clears his throat, devastation evident in his voice—‘died in her sleep five days before I lost my shit.’ He pauses. ‘She had a bad hypo, and she went into a coma, and…’

Oh my God. Oh my God. I clamp a hand over my mouth, because I can’t bear it. My brain is a tornado of thoughts. Every time he’s tried to feed me, tried to check my levels, I’ve been a total bitch. I thought he was an overbearing pain in the arse. I hypoed in front of him, for Pete’s sake! Even through the haze of the aftermath, I recognised how upset he was when I came around.

He lost his little sister.

And when he attacked my brother, it was five days later.

I tug the blanket off and crawl over so I can straddle him, burying my head in his neck and wrapping my arms around him as tightly as I can, as if I can squeeze all that grief and horror and regret away. The tears come instantly.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say against his skin. ‘I’m so fucking sorry.’ I’m apologising as much for my irresponsible blood glucose management and ingratitude as I am for the unthinkable loss he’s endured.

‘Thank you,’ he whispers, putting his arms around me. We stay like that for a few moments, me weeping quietly against him, until I pull up and sit back on his thighs.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

He gives a little nod, almost as if he’s telling himself he can do this. ‘My, uh, mum was an alcoholic. Still is, probably. We’re not in touch. My dad worked his arse off, usually on night shifts. Ellen developed type 1 when she was six or seven. She was eight years younger than me, and I was the oldest—I’ve got another sister, Quinn. But I took on the role of caretaker, because Mum wasn’t capable. I went along to the doctors appointments with her and Mum, I spoke to her teachers about it, and when she wasn’t at school, I looked after her most of the time. I set an alarm for two every morning so I could do a pinprick test on her. This was before CGMs and integrated pumps and all that stuff, obviously.’

‘Jesus,’ I mutter. I remember those days well. The difference was, I had two parents who treated my diabetes as their utmost priority and cared for me with endless love and indefatigable commitment.

Little Ellen Wright didn’t have an adult capable of providing that for her, only a loving brother who was still a kid himself.

‘Yeah, well, we had our ups and downs, but we got through it. But’—he closes his eyes for a moment—‘I had a new girlfriend, and her parents were away one night so we made a plan that I’d go stay at hers. I remember I was so worried about leaving Ellen, but Mum had been dry all week and she swore she’d be fine. I fed Ellen and tested her before I went over to my girlfriend’s.

‘Mum was fine when I left. I’d set the alarm by her bedside table so she could do a middle of the night check, but she drank two bottles of wine and passed out and, I dunno. She swears the alarm didn’t go off, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain she turned it off in her sleep.’

I stare at him in horror.

‘And my sister never woke up,’ he concludes with a kind of quiet finality that chills me to the bone, as if I was still expecting, somehow, that his story would take a happy turn.

I close my eyes at the horror of it. I don’t want to know who found her, how Adam took this blow. There must be so much pain inside him—I have no idea how he lives with it. How he goes about his life with the ball and chain of such a loss weighing him down.

But he does, and he has, and the last thing he needs is me flaking out because even the thought of what he’s been through is too much to handle. So I open my eyes and I force myself to glance down at Ellen’s happy little face again.

It’s an emotional tsunami to absorb, but it strikes me that the guilt must be the worst part for Adam. The regret. The what-ifs. And the anger at his fucking mother, who couldn’t be trusted to keep her daughter alive for a single night while her son blew off some steam, explored a new relationship.

It makes me sick to my stomach, all of it.

‘I can’t bear it,’ I tell him now, cupping his face in my hands. ‘It’s horrific. The poor little thing. And poor you. None of it was your fault.’

‘It was, though. I should never have gone to stay at Lisa’s. I was the only person Ellen could rely on, and I wasn’t there, and I just…’ He trails off. ‘One fucking decision, and she died because I wanted to get my dick wet.’

‘You can’t think of it like that,’ I plead. ‘I sincerely hope I’m not the first person to tell you that this is categorically not your fault.’

He shrugs. His face is stricken. In the short time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him so defeated. ‘It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, because she died as a direct result of my not being there. So you can cut it any which way, but I wasn’t there, and she died. Anyway, it gets worse.’

I steel myself for more horror, and he pushes on. ‘Not worse than Ellen dying, obviously. Nothing could top that. But Dad found her when he got home from work. Mum was still unconscious. We’d agreed that I’d go straight to school from Lisa’s and Dad would get Ellen ready for school.

‘So he called nine-nine-nine, obviously, and the cops turned up with the ambulance. Apparently it was clear Mum was in a bad state so they breathalysed her, and after Ellen was declared dead they arrested Mum for negligence and involuntary manslaughter.’

‘Good,’ I mutter through clenched teeth.

‘You say that, but she was in holding and missed the funeral. They had social services crawling all over us—I was eighteen, so I was all right, but they were talking about taking Quinn into foster care. Dad was fucking destroyed—he blamed himself, too. But honestly, I was Quinn’s best chance of a remotely normal childhood, until…’

He stops and tugs his lower lip between his teeth.

‘Until you got yourself arrested,’ I finish with a mirthless laugh of disbelief, because holy fuck. You can’t make this shit up.