There’s nothing mysterious about my sister. She wasn’t hard to find. It’s just I’d never tried. All I had to do was look up where she works and catch a few buses over there. It turned out it was quite a long way, but still. I didn’t need a passport or anything. It would have been better, I guess, to phone ahead and make sure she was working that day, but we’re not talking about some secret hideout here.

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To be fair to me, she had never tried to find me, either. She didn’t send Christmas cards or any of that stuff because of Dad. Because I was round the corner from Dad all those years, and seeing him every day to take his meals and help him put on his socks, stuff like that, and she didn’t want anything to do with him. I wouldn’t argue with that. She had her reasons.

If someone asked Dad about her, he’d ignore them. If pushed he’d say, she’s nothing to do with me, what are you asking me for? I grew up putting all of that in one corner of my head. She’s nothing to do with him. But then in another corner of my head, I knew it couldn’t be true. I had to go through all his drawers to find the bank books, all that stuff, and there were our birth certificates, Caroline Marie in May 1965, Stephanie Jane in October 1966. Both births registered by their father, Stanley Cartwright.

Mum had been married before, and her first husband died in an accident at work. It was the insurance payout that meant she could keep the house. He died in 1960. She was a widow then, with no children but a house of her own. Some people thought that made her a catch. But most people said there was something the matter with her, they’d never had children even though they were married five years. Either way, there was talk about her. And there was more talk when she took up with Dad. He had a bad reputation, being a fighter, and some said he only wanted to get his feet under the table. I’d heard Nanny Marie say he knew which side his bread was buttered.

What I remember is him telling her she was lucky, he took a chance on someone else’s wife, took a chance on her being able to have kids with him. He said he never did hold with a pair of secondhand shoes. I remember him saying, that Caroline is nothing to do with me. You’re lucky I let her stay in the house. So somewhere in my head was the idea that Caroline was from Mum’s first marriage, even though anyone with basic maths can see that’s nonsense.

These things were said and not said. They were like the background, the color of how things went in the house. They were not something you could argue about, so you couldn’t say it made no sense. It’s hard to explain. Imagine someone suddenly starts saying Tuesday comes straight after Sunday. There’s no such thing as Monday. You learn not to mention Monday. Monday is not a thing in your house. At school you might write Monday on your page, but you’d never make that mistake at home. You think when you write it out, what a stupid thing they do at school, making you write out a word that doesn’t exist. You have to have Tuesday twice in your head every week to catch up, but that’s not hard. You skip it over. We skipped over a lot of things in our house.

I didn’t find it hard to skip over the part where I found where my sister was now and told her Dad had died. I thought of finding her and telling her, and I rubbed out that thought as soon as I had it. It must be something I learned to do long ago, to think of her and then wipe that thought, all in one breath. I skipped over the concept of sister, and I skipped over her having any interest in what had just happened. I did wonder about the will, though. About what it might say. But I needn’t have worried. Firstly, because he hadn’t bothered to make a will, and secondly, there was nothing left to leave either of us. He’d borrowed against his pension all those years, for dogs, for fighting birds, for bets on sure things and bets on long shots, and nights at the dogs, and beer at the club, and there was nothing left. I was going to end up paying for the damn funeral. And if I wanted that demented old dog done away with before it savaged someone and landed me in court, it was going to cost me £138 plus VAT. They cost more to kill the heavier they are.

I’m glad the funeral was not calculated by kilo of the body. Dad was a big, square, heavy man, and sitting around all day once his knees and hips gave up had not made him any lighter. I wondered if they’d had trouble getting him out of that chair, if he’d got wedged in it and set hard. I wondered if they’d managed to get him to lie down flat on the stretcher to take him out to the body wagon. I’d find myself worrying about things like that. Like, did they have to break his legs to get him into the coffin? How did they do that?

Then I worried about what clothes he should wear. I hadn’t been there to put out his clothes or give any to the undertaker. I didn’t want him arriving in the afterlife in his braces and jumper with no proper shirt or collar. I woke up worrying about his feet. He’d been waiting to see the foot person the next week. His nails were in a right mess. Did the nails rip the socks when they put them on? Would he live forever with his toes sticking out? I don’t know why I started worrying about these things when I never go to church, and I didn’t know I believed in the afterlife. But it turns out I did, because I kept going round to the undertakers with a different set of clothes and asking about what he should have on his feet and had they brushed his hair. They were very patient with me. They said, why not go in and see him, put your mind at rest? He’s all decent. We’ve put him in that good shirt you brought, and the V-neck and the jacket. He’s in his best trousers and new black socks. We can’t put shoes on him, because of the furnace. But I wouldn’t go in. I knew I was being a coward. It wasn’t because of seeing him dead. It was because I knew he’d be angry with me for leaving him in the house and going down the road to get drunk, for not being there when they carried him out. I couldn’t look him in the eye, even if they were closed and weighed down with pennies. I had been afraid of him too long to stop now.

Then I started thinking about the pennies on his eyes. I remembered when Nanny Marie died, we gave the undertaker silver coins to put in her pockets to pay the ferryman to cross into heaven. Should I do the same for Dad? He hated to be without cash in his pocket. I was forever stitching the linings of his trousers back together because he carried so much coin in there they ripped. He would not carry a debit card. He said it wasn’t manly. A man had to have cash. But if you’re not allowed shoes because of the furnace, what about coins? Surely they would be hard to burn as well.

The undertaker’s was along the row from work. There’s a row of shops with our dry cleaners at one end, Co-op and barber’s and off-license in the middle, and the Men in Black at the other end before the bus stop. It’s called Morris and Baines, Funeral Directors, but everyone calls it Men in Black, for obvious reasons. I’d come out on a break and go to the Co-op, or hang around the back door with a cigarette, and all the time I was fixed on that door at the end of the row, the image of him in there, waiting for me to get the courage up and go and see him. I’d walk round and round the block, and all the time I was thinking, he’s fuming by now. Get in there and face the music, Stef, you’ve never been a coward before. The thing is, I’d never been allowed to be a coward. Not while he was watching. I was wondering what kind of a person I would be now he wasn’t watching what I was doing. Would I be the kind of person who sent a message to her sister, or not? Did I even have a sister?

Even thinking the word “sister” made me feel a bit odd, like I was allowed to think it now, but in my head I kept looking over my shoulder waiting for the slap. I didn’t know how to swallow that word whole, that it would do me no harm if the word sister lived forever in my belly.

Like now, I come home and Debbie calls round to drop off the dog if she’s been staying with her while I do my shift at the old people’s home, and she might say, “Your sister called,” and my stomach doesn’t even do a flip. But I couldn’t have imagined that. Not for ages. For it to be normal to say the word sister, to say her name out loud and not be frightened.

The last time I saw Caroline before Dad died would be Nanny Marie’s funeral. Everyone else had gone off to get their lifts to the wake, so it was just me and Caroline left at the grave. She was wearing long black boots with very pointy heels, and the heels were sinking into the muddy edge of the hole. She had to stand on tiptoe not to get stuck. She looked like she was nearly falling forward into the grave. She had a long silky scarf that she pulled out from her coat and wrapped over her head when the rain started. I remember thinking, expensive. I know if a scarf is some Accessorise tat that won’t survive the machines, or if it’s the real thing. Hers was the real thing. Plain black, with a scalloped edge. Some sort of silk linen blend, I was thinking. “You were close to Nanny Marie, weren’t you?” I said. She retied the belt on her coat, and kept looking at the ground. Zara, that coat, I thought. Size six or eight. Pure wool. Dry-clean, special handling. Not this year’s though. Maybe she got it in a sale.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, I’d have starved to death without her.” Then she turned and walked away awkwardly on tip-toe till she got to the gravel path, which was not much better, and I noticed there was a big estate car waiting for her by the side gate. I watched her take off her coat then unwind her scarf before stepping into the passenger seat. Her hair was dark brown back then, in a tight bun, no sign of gray around the ears. I didn’t notice who was driving. Whoever it was, they didn’t come on to the wake.

Mum had been dead ages by then, so it was just me standing at the door of the pub shaking hands and saying, “Thank you for coming. She was very fond of you.” Nanny’s friends were giving me the evil eye. They didn’t say, “She’d be proud of you” or “You gave her a good send-off” or any of the things people say at funerals. They had me down as the bad sister. They all knew I’d not long got out of prison. One of them said, “Where’s your sister?” as if it was my fault she hadn’t turned up. I wanted to say, “How the fuck should I know?,” but I didn’t trust my voice. No one asked where my dad was. Everyone knew he wouldn’t show his face at that funeral.

Dad always called Nanny Marie That-Bitch-Your-Mother, if Mum was in the room, or That-Bitch-Her-Mother anytime she was out. I thought it was her name. Like, everyone has different names in a family. Your dad is Stan when he’s at the club, or The Birdman, or Himself if it’s Nanny or Auntie Kathleen. Mum was Auntie Eileen up and down the street, and Our Eilie at her mum’s or her own auntie’s, and Mum or The Missis at home. And Nanny Marie was Mum, or Auntie Maz, or That-Bitch-Her-Mother.

Would Caroline really have starved? My first reaction was, what is she talking about? That’s ridiculous. But then later I thought, why would she say it then? I don’t know. It started me thinking. There was food in our house. I remember Dad coming in late and making corned beef and onion sandwiches, the whole tin of corned beef sliced up onto the bread, the onion rings balanced on top. If there was no corned beef we’d have toast and cocoa.

In my sleep I’d hear the back door open, and I’d stumble down in my nightie, around ten o’clock if he was on earlies, or six in the morning if he was on lates. That would be the time he was watchman at the biscuit factory. He sat me up on the kitchen side in my nightie while he made the food, so my feet wouldn’t get cold on the floor. He would still be in his black work jacket, his boots heavy and loud on the tiles. His donkey jacket had shiny patches on the shoulders where I’d grab on and jump up, and he smelled of the outside, of leather boots and rolling tobacco and wet wool and biscuit crumbs.

My favorite was toast and dripping. No one we knew bought oil to cook with. When you made a roast you collected the fat in a pudding basin and let it set. Anytime you were frying you spooned a bit of fat out of the basin. There would be jelly in the bowl too, and if you had dripping on toast you mixed up the salty jelly and a thick layer of soft fat. I swung my feet against the cupboard doors and watched him flip the hot toast from hand to hand, spread the dripping on with the back of a spoon, stir the cocoa lumps into the mugs with a fork. He liked to use the wrong cutlery for everything, because it made me laugh and it drove my mother nuts. Then he’d put the electric fire on in the kitchen and we’d eat with the news on ITV and he’d tell me not to trust anything they said. “Who?” I’d say. “Who’s telling lies?” And he’d say, “All of them. They’re all bastards. Anytime they tell you anything, ask one question: Where’s the money? Who’s making money out of this?”

I think he took pleasure in emptying the cupboards, making sure there was nothing left for the others to eat. He would press another slice of toast on me, and another, fill the pan with milk for our cocoa, and pour the leftovers down the sink. He would keep going till there was nothing left in the bread bin. He’d keep buttering another slice, all the way to the crust. If I couldn’t swallow another bite he’d throw the leftovers out for the birds. Then he’d leave all the dishes where they were and settle into the front room for a sleep. He had a bed in there when he was on nights. It meant you always had to be quiet because he was right next to the kitchen where we all lived.

*

In the morning my mother would wash up the mugs and plates and pans we’d left in the kitchen and say, all the bread is gone again, and I’d have cornflakes for breakfast instead. She would go next door to Kathleen to borrow milk.

It made me think, maybe Caroline went to Nanny Marie for food. Maybe she went after school, or on the weekend. But where would she get the bus fares? You needed two buses to get there. It took all day, basically, on a Sunday. Where Nanny Marie lived it was traditional to hand out bread and margarine to any children who were playing at the back of the houses, up and down the lanes. It was called a “piece.” If you were lucky you got a “sugar piece” with white sugar sprinkled over the margarine.

When I went there with my mother, on the bus, Nanny Marie would look at me sharply. “His little favorite,” she would say. “That one’s all right. Bursting out of her dress again.” It was true. I had all Caroline’s handed-on clothes, but she couldn’t grow out of them fast enough for me. I was always spilling out of them, breaking the seams, squeezing my arms into too-tight sleeves, ripping the socks apart when I pulled them up too hard over my chubby calves.

On the bus home one time I said to my mother, “Nanny Marie doesn’t like me,” and she said, “She doesn’t need to like you. You’re the lucky one. You don’t need everyone to like you.” I cried and said, “But I don’t want to be the lucky one. I want Nanny Marie to like me.” She said, “I want doesn’t get,” which is the sort of thing people said to children back then. She said I shouldn’t be so greedy. I thought she meant wanting sugar on my piece. I didn’t know she was talking about love.

When the men in the club were talking about those fighting cocks called Dave with a white streak painted on their tail, I started to remember something he said. I was up at the chicken pens with him, and he was putting one of the Daves into a separate coop because the others were going for him, pecking at him till he had bald patches. Dad got a bit of white spirit on a rag and rubbed the last bit of white paint off that Dave’s tail. He said, “I leave them with it on, just for a day or two, because birds cannot abide one of them with something wrong. Anything different, they mob them. And the poor bastards never know when it’s going to be their turn, if they’re going to be the one that’s marked out.

“That’s the thing with breeding fighters,” he said. “They think they’re so clever following me up here and trying to catch me out with this trick or that. But it’s nothing to do with special diets or any of that crap. It’s very simple. You have to sow the seeds of hatred in their hearts.” He stroked the bird’s tail and put him in the side pen. The others flew at the wire, trying to mob him, and he rose up flapping his wings, breast out, ready to kill. Dad banged the lid down on them. “The seeds of hatred,” he said, and he patted the wire with the flat of his hand.

Then he picked up the four eggs we’d got out of the nesting boxes, put two into his jacket pocket, and threw two of them into the far hedge. “I know what we’re having for our tea,” he said, and held out his hand to hold mine all the way home.

It might have been that day, or any other day, I remember something about eggs for tea. There might have been four chairs around the kitchen table at one point, but then I remember there were only two. Mum covered the seats in old red-and-white-checked school summer dresses. I had one chair, Dad had the other. I have no idea when the other chairs disappeared.

*

Maybe they were never there. Mum had taken the boiled eggs out of the pan and she was slicing the top off mine and sprinkling in salt and pepper. She had the top slice on a saucer next to her, just the little top of white with the very edge of yolk scratched across it. She put a dab of butter into my egg, and I saw Dad watching her as she brought it to the table without the top.

He stared at her, and she looked down. He kept staring at her until she went back to the side next to the sink and brought the little top and put it on my plate next to my egg. Then he looked back at the table and started to eat. I didn’t know what to do with the top of my egg. I knew there was something shameful about it, but I couldn’t work out what it was. I felt hot all over. I didn’t know if I should give Mum back the piece of egg. I knew there was something about it I was not supposed to have seen, something bad. I kept watching Mum to try and work out what it was, then Dad said, “Eat your tea, Steffie. All of it. Like a good girl. I like a nice clean plate.” I was always praised for eating everything on my plate. It was years later I wondered if she had been saving the slice of egg for my sister.

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From No Such Thing as Monday by Siân Hughes. Used with permission of the publisher, Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2026 by Siân Hughes. All rights reserved.