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An extract from Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the beautiful (Parthian) by Deborah Kay Davies. Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2009.

Stones

Grace slips out through the back door after the police call around. The sight of her mother is too much. She stays long enough to see the officer put Tamar’s cardigan down on the table. She’d looked at the mound of soft yellow knitting from where she stood half-hidden behind the lounge door. She tried to make sense of the cardigan. She tried to read the signs. She saw some sticky buds stuck to its waist-band. She watched her mother’s blue eyes slip down to rest on it. Everyone, the two policemen, her mother and father, were all motionless in the small kitchen. And on the table, near the sugar-bowl, Tamar’s cardigan, like a discarded skin.

Grace runs through the woods that rear up at the edge of the playing field. She runs along all its little dirt paths. She visits all the places she can think of. The beech canopy above her deepens to a secret green as the summer evening progresses. She runs through the pain of her stitch, through the undergrowth, welcoming its cuts and blows, until she falls down the steep side of a stream and comes back to herself in a luxuriant clump of dead-nettles. The palms of her hands sting; she has lacerated them on the drooping ferns that loll across her running paths. She sits in the silted margin of the stream and dabbles her raw hands in the water. Her gingham skirt sucks up mud. She thinks about her sister’s cardigan and shakes her head like a pony troubled by flies.

Grace pushes open the front door. Her mother sits on the stairs covered in shadows. Her father is leaning against the wall. No one shouts at Grace for being out late. No one notices her injuries. No one asks if she is hungry. Grace pushes past her mother. She sees again the cardigan, now in her mother’s arms. In her room the darkness is soothing. She climbs under the covers fully-clothed, and rests on her side. She looks across at her sister’s empty bed. The room seems different now. Better perhaps. Her own. She’s drifting through sheets of half-sleep, dreaming her little sister is never coming back. Grace thinks she is to be the only one again.

Then the bedroom light snaps on. Grace can hear talking; there is a sense something has happened. The house is full of people. Grace does not move her position in the bed. Her father comes in carrying Tamar. He places her carefully on her bed and tucks her in. Your sister’s back, he says, and goes out. Grace and Tamar stare at each other. What happened? Grace asks. She looks at her sister’s golden head resting on the pillows. Her hair stands out like a fluffy ruff. She’s had a bath. What happened? she says again.