Blue Dress Hot Mess

I am looking at her back and I see the aisle like a runway ahead of her, fuzzy like the heat off an airplane, like landing in India or Dubai. There is moisture in the air and thick, fatness like thunder inside the Church, like marshmallows, like the smog of burning coal. I touch her arm – let her go. We push our shoulders back: walk.

It feels somehow like the end of enfance. The end of our shared childhood. A final sever between sisters. 

I sit on the train and I think I ought to write and I know I want to dream. A girl compliments my dress on the tube and asks me where it’s from. I smile at other people’s lives; the sticky notes on the bedroom window which I see from the train, GCSE revision and sweaty exam halls and timetables hour by hour. I picture the teenager behind them (she is, in my vivid, tired imagination, spotty. She has big bug-eyed glasses and her hair is scraped back in a bun which she has piled on top of her head in the way you must absolutely never do in company but which every girl does, alone, as soon as she comes in in the evening or enters her bathroom to brush her teeth. She is 15. She is looking at Chemistry (pink Post-It notes), and thinking about Kristallnacht). The sun shines, and it all seems incongruous.

It is the most beautiful evening. One they dream of and one I write about, from the window of a train. Mid-summer. The year at its peak. The sky is as blue as my dress and the clouds are transparent like my heart. The sentence is overly-hyperbolic and romanticised, but I am going home for my sister’s wedding and I feel I have every right to be nostalgic. It is the ending of my youth. The fin of our shared childhood, of our joint memories, of the experience of being One and yet not-quite-One which all siblings must share – part of the Whole, but little beings in themselves, two children made distinct by parental treatment, by defiant minds, by food preferences and clothes choices, by curly or straight hair. We used to play Robin Hood and she was Maid Marian. We used to bring our dollies to France and kiss them to sleep each night. We used to build barricades of wine boxes between us on the car journey home, fortresses of my father’s fortune, and argue over its top with angry glares which spoke louder – hurt deeper – than the pinches and the punches the barricade had been built to avoid. She used to laugh at Jeeves and Wooster so I said I hated it (I didn’t), and she only liked carrots so I said I preferred peas (I do). Our grandmother cooked her pizza and me pasta every Monday evening for five years, when I would be lying on the sofa (I suffered from Monday-Fever) and she would be watching The Simpsons (closely followed by Top Gear). She used to drink orange barley water so I said I liked lemon. She always had long hair so I cut my hair short (I now wear it long, but remain unable to un-see the shortness of it compared to that of my sister, so still try fruitlessly to grow it every so often in ineffectual bursts of specialist-shampoo buying shopping sprees). We used to make up songs and plays and collect bones in our Wendy House. We used to troop down to the river and swim naked with our friends, and be chased by angry black cows protecting calves from picnicingseven year olds. We used to be so close and fight so much. She used to hit me, hard. I used to shut myself in my wardrobe – watch the sticky glow in the dark stars twinkle from the wall, behind the clothes (her hand-me-downs) – and cry. She is getting married tomorrow. She is not mine. We are not the same, her and I. We never were. We used to play Robin Hood together. She was always Maid Marian, and I was always Robin. 

And suddenly there I am again; at the end of the tunnel — the train. Driving back through sunlit flitting countryside, watching them bailing the hay – make hay when the sun shines – with my father in the car, both mentally preparing, neither saying much (we talk about the cricket; the pigeons on our roof). I have made it all about myself again. How successful. It may be the only Wedding I ever yet. 

The vicar tells us ‘I’ll wear less under my cassock on the day’. I block the image from my mind, and focus on where to put the bouquet. 

People keep saying Good Luck like I am running a marathon. Like I am instrumental in the success of my sister’s marriage. Perhaps I am. Perhaps the pink-ness of my dress, the curli-ness of my hair, the pearli-ness of my earrings will really make a difference in their happily ever after. In the happily ever after of the day, at least. I suppose that’s something. 

I ignore the single magpie and delight in the red sky. I wish upon the jockey moon and put the dog to bed. I go to bed too. 

I think I am only just beginning to realise quite how much we have been through as a family. Two grandfathers dead and a mother with cancer. A 25-year parental relationship already not immune from turbulence pushed into fierce magnification by inevitable, fast-paced illness. My sister took it all on herself, and got engaged into the bargain; organised reams and teams of women, old friends, new friends, unknown friends, to visit our mother in her loneliest days, when her depression grew in clouds darker than thunder, darker than the clouds falling from her head as her puff-like brown hair fell down the drain. (It is growing back, quickly, slowly, all in patches like allotments on the dirty edge of a town). She did too much, sailed through, cried and felt and dealt. I was selfishly ensconced in the fierce determination living (who knew it was such a chore?). I wrapped myself into an unknown version of me, of half-moving to city, falling out with friends and making much more honest ones, proving I was no longer heart broken and feeling lonelier than I had ever felt, so focused in on myself, my image, my control, my biggest fears, that my body expended all its energy on just keeping myself alive. I knew it was all I had. It was killing me. My father grew bags under his eyes and ignored his own limp, sat in hospital appointments and looked away during blood tests, felt ripples of my mother’s delusional hatred, adoration, manic highs and screaming-into-the-open-fridge lows. Took away her car keys when she swore she was going to leave. Calmed her down, the way he does to me. Silently. He reaches more regularly for the bottle of wine, now. 

I have put teaspoons in the freezer to soothe her eyes in the morning. We are crying, each in our own individual rooms, some crying more physically than others – crying out. Totally mismatched, speaking different langues like in the Tower of Babel. We love each other. It is our bind and our curse, our cooling waters and the boiling-over heat of a cafetiére which singes the hob. (I see dark brown liquid, burning bubbles and coffee stains. I see charred halloumi, and chicken breasts on sticks). We love each other. She loves him. She is marrying him tomorrow. (If nothing else, they provide me with inspiration). 

I put the Bridesmaids in my Polo and turned the windscreen wipers on; we wound down the windows to shout at the Ushers, and gathered up her skirts as she ran down the road. Two minutes past doesn’t count as late. But I can hear the bells – bells – bells – like those round cat collar’s and cow’s necks. Bells – bells – bells. I take my father’s arm as she is about to do, and run up the road with a posy of sweet peas.

My sister got married yesterday. I feel the weight of it in my body and the fizz of it in my head. My bones ache but my skin feels light, like dancing, like champagne, like cream on top of coffee.

My sister got married yesterday; and now I am hot on a train to London. My sister is now somebody’s wife. (Wife? I capitalise it in my head). It went off without a hitch. Two people got hitched. But that was the plan all along. 

Sisters don’t take wedding vows. But she will be, forever, mine.