Chapter 3

You think you know where this is going.

Introverted, shy, retiring girl loses popular older sister in horrible, tragic accident. Spends rest of story on a voyage of self-discovery until finding 'herself' in the final chapter.

You are wrong.

In my story, nobody dies, least of all my sister. If I wanted, I could reach a hand out now to the black and white plastic telephone sitting on the desk beside me. I could lift the receiver, punch in a few numbers and in less than a minute I would be having a conversation. With Anna.

I just wanted you to understand me a bit better. Or understand the me that was at the beginning. She doesn't exist anymore but she was there for a very long time and I miss her terribly. Everything was so much simpler then. I knew who I was and where I came from. Life was a series of non-events, of day after day of the same things, same people, same circumstances. Now it's much more complicated.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want you to know the ending, even though you haven't even seen the true beginning yet. I want you to know the truth. I want everybody to know the truth, even though it's painful to sit here and write it. It makes it even more real and as hard as stone.

It started with a phone call. On my black and white plastic telephone, on a Sunday afternoon in late April. It was a beautiful day, not yet warm enough to leave your coat at home but the sun was bright, and there were no clouds in the clear blue sky. I shouldn't have been at home. I should have been out enjoying the first day in weeks that wasn't overcast with a thick grey blanket and relentless drizzle. To this day, I wonder what would've happened if I'd decided to spend my Sunday doing something else. I don't think I could have avoided what followed, it would've found it's way eventually, but it might have been put off for a while and the girl that was would have lived a little longer.

I was in the kitchen, making a coffee. I had filled my cup with a spoonful of brown powder and was waiting for the kettle to finish boiling. When the ringing started, I thought for a moment about ignoring it completely. I then thought that if it was my mother, I had better get the conversation out of the way with. She used to call every Sunday and we would struggle through five minutes of having nothing to say to each other before our goodbyes. It was only out of duty to our blood ties that we spoke at all. A small part of me knew that she felt bad, somewhere deep down buried in the granite, she knew she had failed to be the mother that her children deserved. The weekly call was by way of an apology. She would never say she was sorry, but it was her way of showing that she did care and by picking up the receiver I was showing that I accepted her attempt at rebuilding the broken bridges.

I hurried through into the lounge, not wanting to have to call her back, and picked up the ringing beast.

"Hello." I waited for my mother's voice to reply. There was a long silence.

"They're coming" said a quiet, strange, almost strangled whisper that I did not recognise. I felt an icy finger run all the way down my spine and for an instant, the whole world stopped spinning on it's axis as I tried desperately to comprehend what on earth this could mean.

The phone started beeping angrily at me and I realised my caller had rung off. Gently, I returned the handset to it's cradle and walked slowly back into the kitchen to finish making my coffee.