The Running Club by Ali Lowe

Author:Ali Lowe [Lowe, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529348859
Published: 2023-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Part Two: Revenge

THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lottie

It is eight days since my sister was murdered.

Eight days since she ceased to exist in the world, extinguished by a pair of hands to her neck and abandoned in the muddy earth.

I am in limbo. I am a plane waiting to take off, a refugee in a chaotic borderline, a tightrope walker caught in between two craggy precipices. I am a soul in purgatory, a tortured mind. I am one half of a golden locket, searching for its missing piece. I am a sister without a sister. A twin but a single. She is here, but she is not. She is in the air where the sun streams in through the window, one of a million tiny dust motes that dart about maniacally, performing impossibly light spirals and arabesques when they catch the light. She is in the whistle of the breeze, the wind that moves the trees. She is in the rays of the sun which has returned to Esperance, which streams in through the windows and burns the skin in only minutes. She is birdsong, a jet-stream, a rainbow. She is the glitter that dances on the ocean in the midday sun, a mirrored disco ball, flickering and flashing a million shards of light to every corner of the world.

Eight days is a long time. Time for someone to change, to be reborn. To change an anxious little girl into an angry woman. Time for me to take my dead sister’s chutzpah and swallow it, take her spirit and suck it inside myself.

Eight days is a long time to lie in a bed and watch the cotton curtain flap in the breeze, watch the fabric billow out and in, over and over again.

The morning light streams in lazily, an acute triangle of yellow on my dressing table. It hits my shoulder as I sit in front of the mirror. My make-up is laid out before me, and my black dress hangs from the back of the bedroom door.

We cannot bury Shelby until the autopsy has been performed, so today we will celebrate her life with a wake. Life has run oddly like clockwork since she died: it goes on behind the scenes as I hover like a ghost on the periphery, watching yet not participating.

Carole has cleaned my house for me. She wanted to send Hannah, but Hannah’s mother is sick, so she has stepped up and done it herself. I almost laughed when she turned up with yellow marigolds on, wiping, disinfecting, mopping, plumping pillows. She even cleaned the toilets, scrubbing and bleaching them without question, dusting photos of my sister with care, ignoring the fact she detested Shelby. It is quite possible that Carole is delighted she is dead (despite the obvious trauma of finding her), but even so, she plays the supportive friend with aplomb, which is so dreadfully unlike Carole that it’s perhaps the most unsettling thing of all. It is yet another plane in my world that has shifted inexplicably, seismically.

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