Page 7 of The Seven Sisters
*
My throat felt parched and dry, and I rolled off the bed and padded into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. I thought about how Pa had hoped that I, armed with my unique skills, would step out confidently into the new dawn he was sure was coming. And back then, I’d thought that was almost certainly what I would do too. Apart from anything else, I’d been desperate to make him proud of me.
But as with so many people, life had happened to me and sent me spinning off my planned trajectory. And instead of providing a launch pad into the wider world, my skill-set had enabled me to hide away in my childhood home.
Whenever my sisters fluttered in from their varying existences across the world, they would tease me about my reclusive life. They told me I was in danger of ending up an old maid, for how was I ever to meet someone if I refused to set foot outside Atlantis?
‘You’re so beautiful, Maia. Everyone who meets you says the same, and yet you sit here alone and waste it,’ Ally had chided me the last time I’d seen her.
And it was probably true that it was my outer packaging that made me stand out in a crowd. Coming from a family of six sisters, we’d all been given our labels when we were younger, the key features that made us special:
Maia,the beauty; Ally, the leader; Star, the peacemaker; CeCe, the pragmatist; Tiggy, the nurturer; and Electra, the fireball.
The question was this: had the gifts we’d each been given brought us success and happiness?
Some of my sisters were still very young and hadn’t lived enough of their lives for them to know, or for me to judge. But for myself, I knew that my ‘gift’ of beauty had helped to bring about the most painful moment of my life, simply because I was too naive at the time to understand the power it wielded. So now, I hid it away, which meant hiding myself.
When Pa had been to visit me in the Pavilion lately, he’d often asked me if I was happy.
‘Of course, Pa.’ I’d always answered in the affirmative. After all, outwardly I had little reasonnotto be. I lived in total comfort, with two pairs of loving arms only a stone’s throw away. And the world, technically,wasmy oyster. I had no ties, no responsibilities . . . yet how I longed for them.
I smiled as I thought of Pa, only a couple of weeks ago, encouraging me to visit my old schoolfriend in London. And because it was Pa who suggested it, and I’d spent my adult life feeling that I’d disappointed him, I agreed. Even if I couldn’t be ‘normal’, I hoped he’d think I was if I went.
And so I’d gone to London . . . and returned to find that he had gone too. Forever.
By now it was four in the morning. I returned to my bedroom and lay down, desperate to drift into sleep. But it wouldn’t come. My heart began to beat against my chest as I realised that with Pa’s passing, I could no longer use him as an excuse to hide here. It might even be that Atlantis would be sold. Pa had certainly never mentioned anything to me about what would happen after his death. And as far as I knew, he’d said nothing to any of my sisters either.
Until a few hours ago, Pa Salt had been omnipotent, omnipresent. A force of nature that had held us all securely aloft.
Pa used to call us his golden apples. Ripe and perfectly rounded, just waiting to be plucked. And now the bough had been shaken, and all of us had been sent tumbling to the ground, with no steady hand to catch us as we fell.
*
I heard someone knocking at my front door and stumbled groggily from the bed to answer it. In desperation a few hours earlier, as dawn was breaking, I’d searched for the sleeping pills I’d been prescribed years ago and taken one. As I glanced at the clock in the hall and saw it was past eleven, I wished that I hadn’t succumbed.
As I opened the door, Marina’s concerned face appeared from behind it. ‘Good morning, Maia. I tried your landline and mobile and there was no answer, so I came to check that you’re all right.’
‘Sorry, I took a pill and it knocked me out. Come in,’ I said, embarrassed.
‘No, I’ll let you wake up properly, then perhaps when you’ve taken a shower and got dressed, you could come over to the house? Tiggy called to let me know she’s arriving at around five tonight. She managed to get in touch with Star, CeCe and Electra, so they’re on their way home too. Any news from Ally?’
‘I’ll check my mobile and if not, I’ll call her again.’
‘Are you all right? You don’t look well at all, Maia.’
‘I’ll be fine, Ma, really. I’ll be over later.’
I closed the front door, and scuttled into the bathroom to throw some cold water on my face to jog me awake. As I looked in the mirror, I could see why Marina had asked if I was all right. Lines had appeared overnight around my eyes and there were huge blueish marks underneath them. My normally shiny, dark brown hair hung lank and greasy around my face. And my skin, usually an unblemished honey-brown that needed little make-up, looked puffy and pale.
‘Hardly the beauty of the family this morning,’ I muttered to my reflection, before searching in the tangled bedclothes for my mobile. Eventually finding it under the duvet, I saw there had been eight missed calls. I listened to my sisters’ voices, with their varying messages of disbelief and shock. The only sister who had still not responded to my SOS was Ally. Yet again I spoke to her voicemail and asked her to call me urgently.
Up at the house, I found both Marina and Claudia changing sheets and airing my sisters’ rooms on the top floor. I could see that Marina, despite her grief, was happy about her flock of girls returning to the roost. It was a rare occurrence these days for us all to be together under one roof. The last time had been in July, eleven months earlier, on Pa’s yacht, cruising round the Greek islands. At Christmas, only four of us were here at home, as Star and CeCe had been travelling in the Far East.
‘I’ve sent Christian off on the boat to collect the food and supplies I’ve ordered,’ said Marina as I followed her downstairs. ‘Your sisters are all so fussy these days, what with Tiggy being a vegan, and goodness knows which faddy diet Electra is on,’ she grumbled, part of her enjoying every second of the sudden chaos, which reminded her, I knew, of the days when we’d all been in her care. ‘Claudia’s been up since dawn in the kitchen but I thought we’d keep it simple tonight and have pasta and salad.’
‘Do you know what time Electra’s arriving?’ I asked her as we reached the kitchen where the mouth-watering smell of Claudia’s baking brought back a wave of childhood memories.
‘Probably not until the early hours. She’s managed to get on a flight from LA which takes her to Paris, and she’ll fly to Geneva from there.’
