Spotlight: The Good Sister by Gillian McAllister
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An electrifying novel about the unyielding bond between two sisters, which is severely tested when one of them is accused of the worst imaginable crime.
Martha and Becky Blackwater are more than sisters–they’re each other’s lifelines. When Martha finds herself struggling to balance early motherhood and her growing business, Becky steps in to babysit her niece, Layla, without a second thought, bringing the two women closer than ever. But then the unthinkable happens, and Becky is charged with murder.
Nine months later, Becky is on trial and maintains her innocence–and so does Martha. Unable to shake the feeling that her sister couldn’t possibly be guilty, Martha sets out to uncover exactly what happened that night, and how things could have gone so wrong. As the trial progresses, fault lines between the sisters begin to show–revealing cracks deep in their relationship and threatening the family each has worked so hard to build. With incredible empathy and resounding emotional heft, The Good Sister is a powerhouse of a novel that will lead readers to question everything they know about motherhood, family, and the price of forgiveness.
Excerpt
1
Martha
Somebody is lying in this courtroom. I don't know who, yet, but somebody is: the defense or the prosecution. They cannot both be telling the truth.
The legal jargon seems to swirl around me as I listen to expert after expert being examined, cross-examined, and then reexamined by the barristers. Most of the time, I'm following it. Most of the time, I understand what's happening.
But sometimes, like right now, I can't see how we ended up here.
Last August, I gave birth to Layla in the middle of the night. It was dark outside and we were sequestered in a side room at the hospital, Scott sitting on the end of the bed. I don't remember when they finally handed her to me, but I remember her afterward: a warm weight in my arms, her hand curling surprisingly around my own.
I'd texted my sister, Becky, and only Becky, between contractions, though I hardly remember what I said. When she came to visit, she brought the late summer nighttime chill in with her; I could feel her cold cheek against mine as she hugged me. "You did it! Oh, you did it!" she said, celebrating me, and not the baby. It was exactly what I needed at that moment.
My sister.
The woman who used to WhatsApp me first thing, every single day, without fail. The woman whose eyebrows I plucked on the eve of her wedding, both of us laughing as they became more and more uneven. The woman who painted my living room with me one Easter weekend. We didn't stop chatting for the entire four days.
My sister. My best friend, Becky.
And now: Here we are.
Cot death, the defense says-unexplained.
Murder, the prosecution says.
I look across at my sister in the dock.
The woman accused of murdering my child.
2
Becky
Eleven months earlier
Thursday, September 28
I can't resist them. My hands shake as I open my handbag and find the packet of cigarettes, their shiny, inviting inner foil unbroken and beautiful.
My breathing has already slowed as I bring the cigarette to my mouth for the first drag in weeks. I blow the clouds of smoke out into the night air and look at the sky above Dalston. I close my eyes in relief as the smoke hits my lungs. Sweet. Jesus. Poisonous joy.
There are no stars, but the moon is slung low and sepia-toned. I stare at it for a few minutes as I smoke and try not to cry. I'm not very good at not crying-classic drama queen-so my cheeks are wet with tears within seconds.
The television people I dress sets for would like a Dalmatian-print chesterfield armchair, and they want it by 9:00 a.m. This is the fourth time this has happened this week: a last-minute request, to be sorted out by me, and only me.
This wasn't how it was supposed to end up. I was going to be an interior designer. My obsession started with Changing Rooms-God bless those leopard-print walls-but it endured beyond that. I dropped out of design school when I had Xander, my nine-year-old, and spent my twenties languishing on Pinterest, staring at copper lamps and furry throws. I thought set dressing would give me an in, but instead it's just a dead end, like everything. One day, I tell myself.
My manager, Sandra, pokes her head out of the side door of the studio I am standing next to. "On it?" she says. She is tall and slim and believes-very seriously, and very vociferously-in angels.
"Well, yes," I say. "But there aren't any. I've tried Craigslist, eBay, and Etsy."
"No chairs at all?"
"No."
She sighs, her thin hand tightening on the metal door-handle. As I take my last puff and exhale, the smoke blurs her. "How's it going to look if we don't have that chair, Bex?"
Bex. I hate Bex. "Bad," I say petulantly.
"Have you exhausted every avenue?"
"I thought so."
"Have another think," she says, then goes back inside. The door sticks, and she doesn't pull it to like you're supposed to. I inch it shut with the toe of my shoe. I look back up at the old paper moon, and find my sister Martha's number in my phone: She will know what to do.
"Get a chair and some print, then," she says immediately. She has always been this way: clear-sighted and firm. "It'll be easy," she adds nicely. This must be the tenth work problem in a row that I have called her about this week. Inflatable furniture, paddling pools, pug-printed duvet sets. Anything. Everything. She always helps, willingly and immediately.
"What-and cover it?" I say.
"Yes." I can hear Layla crying in the background. Martha has her plate full, too, failing to take any maternity leave at all from her job-a charity that she set up herself-but here she is, answering my calls over a Dalmatian-print chair.
"Never mind," I say. "God. Don't worry about this stuff."
"It's fine, Beck," she says. "Honestly."
"A chair and print," I repeat. "I'll report back."
We hang up, and I take to Google again. I ring four haberdasheries to see if they can help me, but they don't answer; they're closed.
Luckily, there is extortionate Dalmatian-print fabric on eBay, sold for mad people. I send one of the sellers a desperate message, and she responds almost immediately, the app ringing in my hand as I light up my second cigarette. I can get it from Islington before eleven tonight. Great, I think sullenly.
I get the Tube straight there, using the excellent new Tube WiFi to search for a chair on the way. There is an armchair in Balham on Gumtree. The seller's username is ILoveHarryStyles and I think: Well, don't we all? I arrange to get it at 11:30 p.m.
The fabric is easy. The woman-short, plump, with a Bristolian accent-hands it to me wordlessly outside the front door of her ground-floor flat. I thank her profusely, and pay her on the eBay app while she watches over my shoulder. She doesn't move as I put my Verified by Visa account details in-no doubt I will get robbed soon-and then I send a photograph of it to Martha, captioned: One down! She sends a string of applauding hands back, and my mood lifts.
The chair lives ten minutes from Balham Tube station, at 193a Ravenslea Road. I gather the roll of fabric as the Tube pulls in. On the way up the escalator, a man complains at me for blocking the way-calls me a "silly bint"-and I stand the roll of fabric on the stair in front of me and move out of his way. "Don't bother to thank me," I say to his back as he strides upward. He turns to look at me.
"I'm sorry," he says in a broad Essex accent. "I was in a hurry."
I walk past him in the foyer as he calls for a taxi. He comes out after me, and I let the door slam on his arm on my way out. He shouts something, but I march onward. Jerk.
A woman wearing an actual negligee answers the door in Balham. I blink as I take in the black fabric, the thin straps across her shoulders, then follow her in anyway. The chair is faded and green, standing in the corner of the room underneath a reading lamp. Behind it are leather-bound classics. It looks like the set of a Victorian murder novel. Well, at least I will die doing what I love. Oh, wait.
I pay her fifty pounds for the chair, the rolled notes dry and papery in my fingers as I part with them. Her brown eyes linger over the fabric I'm holding, but I don't explain. She doesn't help me with the chair, and it thuds clumsily against my leg, squeaking along the wood, as I half lift, half drag it across her hallway and down the steps. She stands just inside her living room, arms wrapped around her body, silently watching me, then closes the door.
I'm already out of breath, having moved both items only a few feet, and I stop and survey the dark street. Two men are walking on the other side of the road toward me, and I stare at them as they move past. I could ask for help. But this is London.
I have a small rest instead, thinking about interior design school, and where I might be by now if I'd finished. I think about bloody perfect Martha, juggling being CEO of a charity, having a newborn, and dealing with her errant sister's search for Dalmatian-print fabric.
At least I have a seat. I perch on it for a few moments, watching the world go by: a madwoman in a green chair on the street in Balham.
I hail a black cab and the chair sits next to me inside it like an obedient, silent animal. I donÕt look at it as I try to recall where I last stored my fabric stapler at the house.
As the taxi departs London at just after midnight, I text Martha and ask if she is up.
Of course I am-providing a round-the-clock service to a constantly crying baby, she replies immediately.
I call her and say, "I can't do this anymore," as soon as she picks up. My voice sounds thick and self-pitying. I stare at the taxi driver. He's also working late. Think about it: He's got to drive you to Brighton, then drive back to London, Martha would admonish me. There is always somebody worse off, so she says. She is nice like this. I am not. I have always wanted to be more like her, though not enough to actually try, of course.
"You can," Martha says. "Staple-gun the fabric. It'll only take twenty minutes. Then bed."
"And up at six. For another insane request," I say.
"Is Xander with Marc? After school?"
"Yes. It won't be long. This job is only a week," I say.
Martha makes her sympathy noise. A low mmhmmm. "It's rubbish, Beck," she says. "It's so rubbish." She means it. She must mean it. But I think of her life, caring for always-crying Layla, and juggling work, too, and wonder how she can mean it.
"How's your To Do list looking, anyway?" I say.
"Oh-it's just impossible. The phone's ringing off the hook."
Martha set up a charity the previous year, and hasn't quite relinquished control. She never does.
"Layla's crying all the time while I'm trying to bloody hire people."
"Oh, oh no," I say.
"I interviewed two childminders but they were rubbish. One didn't know what baby-led weaning was."
"You should just get a nanny," I say. "You need staff, not help."
"I don't even have time to hire anybody. That's how bad it is."
"I see."
We don't say anything for a few seconds.
Until I say, "I want to quit."
To her credit, she doesn't sigh.
"I don't even like dressing sets," I add.
"Quit, if you want to," she says. "Life's too short to staple dead Dalmatians to chairs forever."
We laugh at that, for a long time, on the way home. The next day, she makes a proposition, and I hand my notice in on the spot.
monday
Prosecution
3
Martha
My hair has been falling out since it happened. Long, wet strands in the shower. I don't mind, really. There is more to life than hair.
I stare out into the public gallery. Mum; Dad; my husband, Scott; my brother, Ethan.
Ethan, a lawyer, looks relaxed among the wigs and the robes. I remember when he used to shake with laughter at juvenile jokes around the dining-room table. Becky used to say he changed, that he let life and its mundane struggles overcome him.
"You're like a grumpy old man," she once hissed at him. It was at the meet and greet at my and Scott's wedding, and Becky hung back, downing her prosecco. I didn't say anything to either of them, fussing instead with my gown. She was tipsy. Ethan was reserved, preferring one on ones instead. It was a microcosm of our family dynamic, my wedding. I don't remember it fondly. Becky had accused me of being a bridezilla the night before. "She's just organized," Mum had said kindly.
Since Becky was charged, Ethan has been stoic: uncompromisingly uninvolved, refusing to speculate, to answer questions on procedure. "Not my area of law," he has said, interrupting us mid-question.
Scott catches my eye and nods, just once, his eyebrows raised ever so slightly, an encouraging expression on his face. "You can do it," he said to me last night, the night before the first day of the trial. "You can, you can. We can."
Becky is led into the courtroom.
I swallow. I haven't seen her for months and months. She has become thin. Her ribs are a birdcage, her hands oversize compared to her arms. I want to reach out and hold those bony shoulders of hers. She was always tall, and broad, which she hated but I loved; I thought she seemed somehow full of life. But today she is diminished.
She has the same walk. I shouldn't be pleased to see it, but I am. You expect people will change utterly since the night of, but they don't. It has been nine and a half months since it happened, and nine months since we last saw each other. We were prohibited from speaking from the moment she was charged. We became opposing witnesses. Me for the prosecution and she for the defense. Two sisters, carved in two by the justice system.
But here it is, months on: her beautiful walk, in the flesh, as if no time has passed at all. You can't change a walk like that. She has always bounded, like an overly friendly Labrador, and she is no different today, standing at the door to the dock, somehow, in an extroverted manner. Loud, without being so.
Becky always worked hard at being cool. It was important to her. The right sort of bands and nail varnish and movies-"No, Marth, the rips must be across the knees," she said last year when I tried on a pair of incorrectly torn jeans-and always the thick layer of liquid eyeliner, the pink blusher. But her walk gave her away; her eager walk that I once loved so much. Still do, I suppose.
I am sworn in and take the secular oath. My voice is clear and loud in the courtroom, which surprises me. I was a geography teacher for years, though. I was used to performing through winter colds and extreme end-of-term fatigue. I pretend the public gallery is a classroom of bright-eyed children, for a moment, and it helps.
Excerpted from The Good Sister by Gillian McAllister. Copyright © 2019 by Gillian McAllister. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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About the Author
Gillian McAllister graduated with a degree in English from the University of Birmingham. She lives in Birmingham where she worked as a lawyer and now writes full time. She is the author of Everything But the Truth and Anything You Do Say, both Sunday Times bestsellers in the UK. The Good Sister is her US debut.
