Six Months After Ivy’s Funeral
Dear Gulliver,
I hope this letter finds you well, and you don’t mind the intrusion of me writing to you rather than emailing. I contacted your publisher and asked if they’d pass on your contact details, but they politely declined. I remembered Ivy staying with you at your lighthouse on Anglesey and did a little detective work andvoila! I found your address.
We didn’t get much chance to speak at Ivy’s funeral, mainly because I wasn’t capable of speaking that day, or for many days afterwards. I know you have brothers, so I know you can imagine the pain of losing my sister.
Anyway, I’m not writing this as a form of therapy. I have a box of things of Ivy’s that she would’ve wanted you to have, all writery stuff. Please let me know if this is the right address to send them to and if so, I’ll post them. If not, let me know where is best.
Of course, you might not want them at all, and I can completely understand that. I know you and Ivy were close friends and you were one of her favourite people, and her deathwas unexpected and hard and heart breaking and all of those things we never speak about for fear of crying.
I’ve heard from her agent that you’re working on the bones of a book she had ideas for, the one that you talked about when she stayed with you in the lighthouse. She talked about the lighthouse and Puffin Bay. She mentioned you so much when we spoke on the phone, you and your brothers and the Puffin Inn and the arch on the beach that she was fascinated with.
I didn’t chance to see those places or meet you properly when I came for her funeral. I was too mad at her for dying. Too mad at my parents for not being able to be there or to be who I needed them to be. Too mad at myself for not knowing her better the last few years. Ivy’s
There are reasons and explanations for all of those things and I’m not mad at her or our parents or me most of the time. I understand that this is grief, and grief is a terrible animal that sneaks up on you even on the sunshiny-est of days, never needing to show its sharpened claws because a gentle tap on the shoulder is sometimes all it needs to remind me that my sister isn’t going to answer her phone when I call her, or laugh when I tell her I saw my future husband on the Tube again or send me a selfie of her smiling while she licks an ice cream in an obnoxiously dirty manner.
We’ll never talk at night together again. We’ll never share secrets about the boys we liked. We’ll never help each other get ready for a night out only to say sod it all and stay in wearing our pyjamas with a takeaway and a bottle of prosecco.
I won’t see her get old or get married or have babies or celebrate the release of another book. I won’t see her fall in love or hear her yell at me if I choose a bridesmaid dress for her that makes her look like a meringue – which I totally would.
She won’t ever see me use the greatest gift she ever gave me.
I’m sorry, Gulliver. This letter was meant to be just about sending you some of her things and I’ve made it all about me. I guess putting it down on paper has been therapeutic, even though I said this wasn’t a form of therapy. Sometimes we tell lies without knowing what they are.
I should’ve visited Ivy more while she was staying with you in Puffin Bay. My sister was half-wild and would always take that risk of driving too close to a cliff edge without fear. She’d said to me often enough that if her time was up, her time was up. She’d come back and haunt someone with dreams so they’d write the books she never got around to. She always wrote like she was running out of time, and yes, we both know Hamilton was her favourite musical.
I should’ve spent more time with her.
I keep thinking what would’ve happened if I’d been there on the night she died. Maybe she wouldn’t have taken the bike out when she knew there was a bad storm setting in. Maybe we would’ve been curled up on the sofa watching rom-coms and drinking hot chocolate with Bailey’s in, eating crap and she would’ve stayed in with me. Maybe we’d have already gone out for the night to celebrate her finishing her book. She always preferred writingThe Endrather than publishing day, because that was the day she finally got rid of those characters from her head.
But it doesn’t matter, does it? I wasn’t there and I can’t go back in time to change things.
Neither can you.
Neither of us can and no one is to blame. We just have to live with our loss and recognise that the space she took up will be empty, but I guess both of us will fill it with our memories instead.
I think what I have here are things that will add to your memories.
We both knew a different side of Ivy. You saw her as a rival, in some ways, because you wrote the same genre, you seemed to banter with each other about whose books sold better and I know you both wrote victims in your books that were each other, or based characters on caricatures of yourselves. I know you were Detective Pearson’s stupid ex-boyfriend in one of her series, and that she was the mad cat lady in two of your books.
I don’t like crime fiction, but I read my sister’s stories because she was my sister, and I read yours because of my sister.
You saw her at her most mischievous. Her most playful. She sent me photos of the scarecrow she made that looked like you to freak you out and she was almost as proud as when she finished a book. She told me about the secret package she sent you, with one of your books and that she was sure she had you convinced you had a psycho stalking you.
That pleased her. She loved to torment you.
I know she loved you.
I asked her many times why she didn’t start a relationship with you because she talked about you so much. She’d laugh and say that wasn’t how it was.
She never told me how it actually was though.
Did you love her? Did you want more? You saw a part of my sister that I didn’t have access to.
You don’t have to reply to this, Gulliver. I’d be thrilled if you confirmed your address and that you were happy to have this box of tricks sent to you.
But if you ever want to talk about her – or write about her – I’m here.
