“Okay, it’s a deal! Big sister, huh?” and she smiled back.
“Everyone I know calls me “Shari”, you could make a start by calling me that too,” she grinned, and I grinned back.
“Okay, “Shari” it is, and welcome to the family!”
She smiled at me, and I had to ask.
“So, really, you’re older than me? How much?”
Shereen twinkled at me.
“Oh, a few months, Bobby, enough to make you my “little” brother, anyway; Yaz is nineteen going on twenty, so she’s about a year younger than Ricky, so I guess that makes me the oldest, so you better get used to taking orders!”
She smiled as she said it, to show she was joking, and I couldn’t help but smile back; she had such a beautiful smile, too!
“Right, Bobby, let’s go and make a nice cup of tea, I could do with something hot right about now.”
We came back downstairs to find Rick and Yaz sitting in the kitchen drinking mugs of coffee. The scent of the fresh coffee nearly made me swoon; I hate tea, and coffee was so expensive I’d given up on ever buying any ever again on my severely limited budget. Yaz saw my expression and silently handed me her mug with a shy smile. I took it gratefully, sipping slowly while savouring the rich bitterness and caffeine bite. I sat at the table while Shari busied herself making tea for herself and another coffee for Yaz. Rick seemed uncomfortable, until I grinned at him.
“That’s a sweet left hook you’ve got there, Ricky!”
He grinned back, the tension draining out of him when he realised I wasn’t going to return the favour and bop him one. Yaz gently turned my head to look at the right side of my jaw.
“There’s a bruise coming up, Bobby; would you like some ice on that?” she asked me softly, and I shook my head.
“Thank you, no, it’ll be okay in a couple of days.” I replied, still processing the fact of these girls, the horrifying story they’d told me, the truths revealed about my mother and what my father had done to her, their mother and what he’d done to her, what he’d done to us, and uppermost in my mind, what he’d done to our big brother.
Yaz saw my eyes filling as I thought about how I’d treated Barbara, about how she must have felt for her sons to so utterly reject her for no reason, and most of all how she must have felt the loss of Nicky, the only one of us who’d loved and honoured her; she wasn’t even his mother, she was mine; she was my mother and I’d done nothing, said nothing, felt nothing when my father had brutalised and finally destroyed her. The tears ran down my cheeks as they finally spilled from me, and suddenly Yaz was there, holding me as I cried for her at last, for never knowing her, for letting her go so easily, and for Nicky, for being the one thing she’d been allowed to keep and love in this entire family, and for how easily I’d let him go.
Yaz led me away from the table, and sat me on the couch in the sitting room, sitting next to me so she could hold me, much as she’d held Rick earlier. She never said a word; what could she say that wouldn’t sound false, and trite, and banal? Instead she held me close, giving me comfort with her presence while I cried, probably for the first time in my life.
At last I stopped crying; the guilt and sorrow had passed for now, leaving me feeling empty and depressed; what did we do now? This house was a mausoleum, we could all live here, but it was almost completely unfurnished; I couldn’t even work out where the girls were going to sleep; most of the beds had been taken away long ago to be sold at auction, and those that were left had been unused for nearly two years now; damp and rot would have claimed them by now, and there were precious few bedclothes and linens left, barely enough for my ramshackle single bed. I didn’t have an iron or an ironing table, any pillows or cushions, nothing.
Rick obviously knew what I was thinking, as he tipped his coffee at me.
“Don’t worry, Bobby, we’ve sorted out sleeping arrangements. We did some exploring while you were conked-out and found some single mattresses in the attic; they’re old, but clean; someone wrapped and stored them properly, so they’re nice and dry. We moved a couple of the single-bed frames into the master bedroom, the girls will stay there. As for bedding, why don’t you help me bring it in?”
I looked confused.
“Bring it from where?”
Nick smiled at me
“From the car, Bobby. We stopped off on the way here and bought sleeping bags and pillows, because I knew the girls would need them; come on, they need to get some sleep.”
I could only stare stupidly.
“You have a car?” I asked, and Rick grinned.
“Well of course we have one; how did you think we got all the way here from London, hitchhiking?”
He drained his mug and stood up, nodding at me to follow him. Their car, a grey Mitsubishi Shogun I’d noticed but not really registered when I first came in, was parked just a little way away, the luggage compartment and most of the back seat crammed with bags and boxes. Rick told me to wait while he got in and reversed the car into the driveway so we didn’t have to traipse back and forth while we unloaded it.
The girls came to help as we emptied the car, and with all four of us working it was just a couple of minutes before all the stuff from the car was piled up in the sitting room, with Rick and Yaz sorting through it all.
I noticed that Yaz seemed to be more than usually attached to Rick; at first I assumed it was because they were the younger ones, seeking support from their peers, but then I began to understand it was a lot more complex than that; they were obviously connecting at some deeper level as well, and, strangely, I was glad about it; Rick and I had never had any friends growing up; dad had seen to that. Nicky had gone to school when he was younger, but then dad had decided that we should all be home-schooled, so we never had the opportunity to mix and mingle with other people when we were young, and after Nick was sent to secondary school, Rick and I remained at home with our tutor.
When I’d started work, I had no real idea how to communicate or relate to the people around me; I think my colleagues thought I had some kind of mental impairment, as I never spoke to any of them, but the truth was I had nothing in common with them, no shared background, interests, experiences, nothing; when they’d laugh and talk about girls, I just used to stare blankly; I really had no idea what they were talking about, but I did eventually come to understand that revealing to them that I was still a virgin at almost twety-two was probably not a smart move.
I’d not met any girls yet; pushing a street-sweeper and smelling like a midden are not the most aphrodisiac combination, so meeting girls on the job just never happened, as a result of which, I really had few insights and little to no intuition when it came to understanding the fairer sex. I knew about the mechanics of sex, of course; I could read, and I had the usual collection of girlie mags any single man my age could be depended-on to possess, but no actual experience, not even anything that could be called a conversation with a member of the opposite sex.
As I watched Rick and Yaz unpack, exchanging light touches, pats on arm, or shoulder, or knee, and glances I couldn’t understand, smoothing errant strands of hair from each other’s eyes, or a lightly touching fingertip to the tips of noses, or chins, gentle horseplay, Shari slid next to me, her arm around mine as she pressed herself against me, resting her head against my shoulder.
“They’re such good friends, and good for each other; look at them! Ricky and Yasmin hit it off from Day One; they’ve hardly spent a minute apart since Ricky first came to us. I think it’s a good thing; they both needed someone, she found Ricky, and he found her. Mummy was pleased; she trusted Ricky to take care of his little sister, and Yaz needed a protector, someone to look up to and feel safe with after being frightened for so long of what our father said he was going to do with her.”
As Shari leaned against me, the scent of her hair teased and tickled my nostrils, and underneath that the smell of her; soap, clean and astringent, and even more subtly, the scent of her skin; I began to harden; it was purely involuntary; I had no thoughts or intentions towards her, good or bad, it was just her femininity, her warmth and humanity, and the fact that she wasn’t shying away from me, as girls tended to do.
I knew what arousal was, and most aspects of sex, or I thought I did, but only from reading the girlie mags under my bed; I’d never even talked to a girl before today, and now I was stirring as my newly-discovered ‘older’ sister hugged herself close to me.
We continued to watch as Rick and Yaz pulled four bundles out of the pile of stuff we’d brought indoors, four sleeping bags still in their wrappers, and a pile of pillows. We carried them up to the master bedroom where the twin beds had been pushed together to make one large bed. We’d also brought some sheets from the pile of things they’d bought, and we quickly made up the bed for the two girls, sleeping bags laid onto the clean sheets, brand new pillows and pillowcases all ready for them. Rick had reclaimed his old room, so he dumped his sleeping bag and pillows on the little single bed in there, even though the frame was in as bad a shape as mine.
“Tomorrow, Bobby, we need to do something about the bedrooms; Shari wants you to go and do some shopping with her, we need more bedding, crockery, silverware, everything really; four people can’t live properly on what we have here, so as you two are the oldest, you get the short straws!”
More bedding made sense to me; I had few spare blankets, not even enough for me, really; winter was always a tough time, and in the past I’d had to resort to covering my feet with old coats on top of the thin blankets I had, and in the depths of Winter I’d had to resort to the old vagrant’s trick, interleaving sheets of newsprint between my blankets to try and stave off the brutal Borderlands winter chill; the house was freezing and I couldn’t afford to turn the central heating on; it was either heating, or hot water, and not much of either at that.