Free The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant Page A

whiteness: it’s grey. A grey motorway stretches out on the screen above our heads. As it soars upwards, making us, the audience, like tiny creatures at the side of the road, my eyelids bisect it and come down halfway over my eyes – and through my lashes, which are trembling slightly with the effort of staying in that position, the first flickering blobs of colour begin to appear.
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    My mother was in the kitchen. The kitchen door led straight out onto the hill: there was no yard, just the grass that was always wet, either with rain or heavy dew: it went up in furrows to the line of Douglas firs planted as a windbreak by the grandfather of the laird; it was humped, long bolsters of grass which seemed to move on the steep hill when the rain swept into the valley from the west. On the grass were small white mushrooms, exhumed every morning from the deep, stony land, and sheep, fleece yellowing with rain and faces oddly patterned as if with their markings they could signal something to each other. Beyond the line of firs and the half-broken stone wall grew the scratchy heather. I went up the cleuch sometimes, to search for cloudberries, those strange fruit which look like a drawing in a medical student’s textbook, of internal organs stitched together: their taste is acrid and they grow only above the cloud line, tinges of red on their pink fleshy surface suggesting a faint scorch from the few moments when the clouds part and the sun comes down on them. But my mother used to like to make cloudberry jelly. I took a basket and I would pick blaeberries too, but sometimes the laird and his party were on the hill above our cottage, shooting from the holes in the ground burrowed out for them, or collecting the dusty purple blaeberries, and then I would have to slide back down the hill over bumps of heather and harebells to the grass and the kitchen back door.
    What had my mother done? When the laird poked hishead round the back – he always tried the front door first, forgetting that cottagers keep their front doors locked and the front rooms like small mausoleums behind them – she would go crimson, as if he had caught her stealing some of his property while he looked on. He had given her the cottage. He often referred to this as I stood at the door between the kitchen and the escape to the hill behind. She always thanked him, but went on looking guilty. Why was she so uneasy, fingering the old black skirt she wore, gazing past me at the hill as if she was longing to run for it and disappear into the white mist that came down the cleuch at midday every day and stayed there until rain and dark cloud brought on night. She had been his mistress, of course: some part of me understood that even when I was very young. I was his daughter. That was why she was allowed to live in the cottage. The way he looked at me was furtive and eager, like the stare of a man searching for evidence of disease on his own body. He never touched me if he could help it. Yet he and my mother often looked vaguely at me and through me at the same time, as parents do when discussing ordinary matters in front of their children. Sometimes I felt I belonged to both of them, and then the cottage and the kitchen seemed to grow – and I did too, suddenly seeing into some bright space where there would be infinite possibilities. Soon, though, my mother would catch herself out in this relaxed attitude, and so would he – and Meg would be seen, walking up from the Burn Wood in her long skirts – and they would return to a combination of embarrassment and resentment, and the gloom, the stone floors, the stone-sided sink, the thin wooden table with the gay plastic cloth seemed more oppressive than before. When there was sun, it was all right to go out the back: the light blue sky over the hills looked as if it could be reached in a minute, peewits and larks were everywhere, the gurgle of burn sounded loud as it slipped down out of