Free The Last Pier by Roma Tearne

There it was again, that sound. And was that her aunt’s skirt she had just glimpsed? Her Aunt Kitty , thought Cecily in astonishment. But then, in the bluish air, caught in the beam of a torch switched on and then off, was a man with the stub of his cigarette glowing and his trilby covering his eyes. Pinky Wilson, thought Cecily, distracted further. The darkness obscured some of the physical details but she recognised the way he stood with one hand in his trouser pocket, the tilt of his hat, the slowness of him. And she understood that he was watching her watching him. But then, moments later she saw it wasn’t her but Rose he was stalking. Like the cat had stalked its prey. Before something bigger had finished it off, as Selwyn had said. This was how Robert Wilson, aka Pinky, was looking at Rose. Quietly, biding his time. And her sister, coming back into view, sandals off, skirt hitched up, climbing the honeysuckle wall with steady concentration, her back to the man, noticing nothing.
    ‘Where’ve you been?’ Cecily demanded, suddenly afraid.
    She felt in one swift and bewildering transition that she was the older one. Rose must have thought so too because she laughed, softly.
    ‘Never you mind, my girl.’
    Her face was flushed and beautiful, and happy. There was a crumpled, held-close look that gave itself away in small tendrils of hair growing in different directions. It made Cecily feel excluded and sad.
    ‘You should be asleep.’
    ‘I woke, there was a noise…’
    But when she glanced over towards the trees there was no one there. Mist from the river filled the ancient spaces. The trees were thick with leaves.
    ‘Were you followed?’
    There were fine particles of a darker sand clinging to Rose’s leg. In a flash Cecily understood that Rose had actually been walking on the Ness and not the town beach two miles furtheron. But with whom? Turning to her sister, she was about to ask the question again but Rose, huddled under the covers, was fast asleep.
     
    After Rose died Cecily grew beautiful. After Rose died Agnes had the honeysuckle cut down. After she died the man they had called Pinky disappeared and was never referred to again and the orchard where he had once stood was sold off. No one would need orchards like theirs ever again. After Rose died the leaves stayed on the trees for a long time and the war got bloodier and more brutal and Cecily became someone that people stared at from time to time. But then, after Rose died, that time passed too, and things got forgotten and lost and also altered in the way that things do. And Carlo’s special smile and even his voice as he chased her on the beach became not a clear picture but an impression that blurred and receded. And afterwards something inexplicably precious was lost. Like a wellloved object stowed somewhere safe but not there when you looked for it again. That was how things changed after Rose died. Aunty Kitty went from being Aunty Kitty, best beloved aunty, pretty friend and prettier sister, someone who might once have had the world but now never would, to simply Kitty. That too was the way things changed.
     
    Later, other, smaller changes occurred but Cecily noticed them without interest. The typeface on hoardings changed. The street signs changed. Women wore different clothes. The fifties came. And then the sixties. Bomb sites were covered over, Andersen shelters removed, wallpaper changed in design. And the Beatles brought sex Out-Into-The-Open in a way that had not been possible before. These changes though had no power to change Cecily. For the stillness that had always been in her, the watchfulness and the silence, had grown and blossomed into a large flowering tree since Rose’s death. In her head, buried somewhere out of reach, a bell tolled, pulled by thetwin voices, unalterable and here to stay. The bell never, ever stopped. Cecily had no idea what it was announcing, only that she had become sleepless.
    As Cecily grew Aunt Kitty