myself remember.
I think of Carla as a little girl, with a mass of curls and scuffed knees, clutching her sister’s hand. I think of her as the young woman in a washed-out Greenpeace T-shirt, too thin, but grinning, full of fire. And then I think of the Carla who lay in Marian’s front room. Gaunt and drawn and fighting the cancer with all she had left.
I shouldn’t paint her that way, as if she looked weak – she was still so Carla, still fiery. Even on Leena’s last visit, just days before she died, Carla would take no nonsense from her big sister.
She was in her special hospital bed, brought into Marian’s living room one evening by a group of gentle NHS staff, who put it up with astonishing efficiency and cleared out before I could make them so much as a cup of tea. Marian and I were standing in the doorway. Leena was beside the bed, in the armchair we’d moved there once and never shifted back. The living room didn’t centre around the television any more, but around that bed, with its magnolia-cream bars on each side of the mattress, and that grey remote control, always lost under the blankets, for adjusting the bed’s height and shifting Carla when she wanted to sit up.
‘You’re incredible,’ Leena was telling her sister, her eyes bright with tears. ‘I think you’re – you’re incredible, and so brave, and …’
Carla reached out, faster than I’d thought she could, now, and poked her sister in the arm.
‘Stop it. You’d never say that sort of thing if I wasn’t dying,’ she said. Even with her voice thin and dry, you could hear the humour. ‘You’re way nicer to me these days. It’s weird. I miss you telling me off for wasting my life away.’
Leena winced. ‘I didn’t …’
‘Leena, it’s fine, I’m teasing.’
Leena shifted uncomfortably in the armchair, and Carla raised her eyes upwards, as if to say, Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’d grown used to her face without eyebrows by then, but I remember how strange it had looked at first – stranger, in some ways, than the loss of her long brown curls.
‘Fine, fine. I’ll be serious,’ she said.
She glanced at me and Marian, and then reached for Leena’s hand, her fingers too pale against Leena’s tanned skin.
‘All right? Serious face on.’ Carla closed her eyes for a moment. ‘There is some stuff I’ve wanted to say, you know. Serious stuff.’ She opened her eyes then, fixing her gaze on Leena. ‘You remember when we went camping together that summer when you were back from uni, and you told me how you thought management consultancy was the way to change the world, and I laughed? And then we argued about capitalism?’
‘I remember,’ Leena said.
‘I shouldn’t have laughed.’ Carla swallowed; pain touched her features, a tightening around the eyes, a quiver of her dry lips. ‘I should have listened and told you I was proud. You’re shaping the world, in a way – you’re making it better, and the world needs people like you. I want you to kick out all the stuffy old men and I want you to run the show. Launch that business. Help people. And promise me you won’t let losing me hold you back.’
Leena was crying, then, her shoulders hunched and shaking. Carla shook her head.
‘Leena, stop it, would you? Jesus, this is what comes of being serious! Do I have to poke you again?’
‘No,’ Leena said, laughing through her tears. ‘No, please don’t. It actually kind of hurt.’
‘Well. Just know that any time you let an opportunity slip, any time you wonder if you can really do it, any time you think about giving up on anything that you want … I’ll be poking you from the afterlife.’
And that was Carla Cotton for you.
She was fierce, and she was silly, and she knew we couldn’t manage without her.
3
Leena
I wake up at six twenty-two, twenty-two minutes after my usual alarm, and sit bolt upright with a gasp. I think the reason I’m freaked out is the strange silence, the absence of my phone alarm’s horrendous cheery beeping. It takes me a while to remember that I’m not late – I do not have to get up and go to the office. I am actually not allowed to go back to the office.
I slump back against the pillow as the horror and the shame resettle. I slept terribly, stuck in a loop of remembering that meeting, never less than