Young Writers Award 2018 - Unspoken

By Lottie Mills, 16, from Hertfordshire.

When my sister ran away that night, we thought it was an anomaly. Just a silly teenage strop, a drunken impulse, the product of a thoughtless boyfriend and too much vodka. We sat up, blanketed and shaking in the living room; doused by the cold light of police sirens, and we stared at nothing, and we waited. When they found her in the small hours of the morning, tear-drenched and frozen half to death, we simply let her slip past, up the stairs to her bedroom, to feign sleep until her alarm went off and pretend the whole thing had never happened.

We didn’t talk about it.

When she stopped going to school, we thought it was laziness. She was bright, my mother said, tentatively, just struggling to apply herself. My father was harsher, said she was throwing her life away, that she would amount to nothing if she refused to conform. I kept quiet, simply darting my eyes between them, like a spectator at Wimbledon. Upstairs, my sister slept, or else lay down, knotted in duvets with her bedroom door bolted shut, for hours on end. She did leave the house eventually, the spectre of exclusion from Sixth Form looming over her head, and returned home later that day with puffy red eyes and slumped shoulders.

We didn’t talk about it.

When she stopped eating, we thought it was vanity. She was just another body-conscious young woman, we said, just another victim of sexist advertising and a shallow circle of friends. My father thought she should delete all of ‘the social media’ – convinced that Instagram and Facebook must be to blame – ignoring the never ending exams, the perpetual loneliness, the constant judgement from family, teachers and half-friends. They got into a raging fight about the whole thing, and nobody won. She started to eat again after the exams, but you could still count every single one of her ribs.

We didn’t talk about it.

When she got an offer from university, we thought it was an opportunity. She didn’t. She longed for freedom from structure, the ability to forge her own path. But her A-Levels wouldn’t allow for the life she wanted, so, after much emotional upheaval, she went. We dropped her off at halls, abandoning her like a foundling baby, as she stood on the corner, openly sobbing and clutching frantically at the last box of home. That night was the first time I cried for my sister, the first tinge of a fear which is now all-too familiar. We all felt that fear, I think. The fear of a word which none of us dared to speak, a word which forever went unspoken.

We didn’t talk about it.

When she refused to get a job, we thought it was stubbornness. She was distracted by the party life, my parents claimed, but too immature to support it. Feebly, I attempted to imply that something might be hindering her, be making her afraid. But such things didn’t happen, said my parents, not to families like us, not to bright young women like her. So the dreaded word went unspoken still, and they told her that she simply had to get a job and that was the end of it.

That night, she ran away again, arriving at our grandparent’s house on a wave of shuddering nausea and gushing tears. We drove down in a panic, that strange weekend, and I snuck into the bathroom to see her. She was pouring herself into the toilet bowl – vomit, tears, blood, makeup, saliva and dreadful, tragic words. She spoke of a sadness older than time and deeper than hell, and all at once I saw the weight of a thousand worlds teetering on her too-thin shoulders, and I was frightened. The damage was in the open now, blatant for all to see – in the gouged marks which marred her smooth plains of skin, the vomit which matted in her hair, the yawning darkness of her empty eyes. In that moment, I almost dared to say the terrible word out loud. But then she scrubbed away the stains of that awful night, went to bed, and in the morning, she was composed – or some paper thin variant of it. We all knew, now, that something had gone horrifically adrift in the chemistry of her mind, but still nobody dared to spell it out. We stayed with my grandparents for a few more days, playacting at functionality, stubbornly ignoring the quicksand around us even as we began to drown in it. My sister didn’t say anything at all, just sat there, frozen, watching us.

We didn’t talk about it.

When we sent her back to university, we thought it was a good idea. I say ‘we’, but it’s not true, not really, because I heard the desperation that warped her voice as she pleaded with our parents not to make her go, and that terrifying word scrawled itself across my brain once again. But they pushed her, brandishing harsh words about failure and weakness, and so she went. There were no tears when we dropped her off this time, only silence. There were no texts, no phone calls.

Then, the hospital called.

The night which followed is a blur to me. I remember the stench of disinfectant, and the dreadful hum of machines, and then the agonizing silence after the doctors turned them off. I remember the taste of my own tears, and the echoing sobs of my parents, and the useless words I whispered into ears which were connected to nothing, the ears of a corpse. More than anything, though, I remember that word, emblazoned on every piece of paperwork, everywhere I looked, listed under cause of death. Seven letters which I had never, ever heard said out loud, letters which were now branded into my soul forever.

Now, we sit at the dinner table. We stare at nothing. We ignore the empty chair.

We still don’t talk about it.