Read My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece for Free Online Page B

better singer and I told her so when we were in the car. Wasn’t hard. We were squashed up in the back. Rose had the front seat. Dad even put a seatbelt around the urn but forgot to tell me about mine.
    We came off the motorway and went down a hill and all of a sudden there was the sea, a line of blue all straight and sparkly as though someone had drawn it with a glitter pen and ruler. The line got thicker and thicker as we got closer and closer and Dad’s seatbelt must have been too tight ’cos he started pulling it away from his chest as if it was stopping him from breathing. When we pulled into the car park, Dad tugged at his collar and a button pinged off and hit the exact middle of the steering wheel. I shouted Bull’s eye but no one laughed. The tap of Dad’s fingers on the dashboard sounded like a horse galloping.
    I was just wondering if there’d be any donkeys on the beach, when Jas opened the car door. Dad jumped. She walked to the ticket machine and pushed in some coins. By the time the ticket appeared, Dad was standing in the car park, the urn hugged against his chest. Hurry up he said and I undid my seat belt and climbed out of the door. St. Bees smelled like fish and chips and my tummy rumbled.
    When we walked over the pebbles to the sea, I saw five good skimmers. Skimmers are flat stones that bounce on water if you throw them in the right way. Jas taught me how to do it once. I wanted to pick up the skimmers and play but I was scared of making Dad mad. He slipped on some seaweed and the urn almost ended up on the beach, which would have been bad. Rose’s ashes are as small as sand particles so they would have got all mixed up. I shouldn’t really know this but I had a look inside the urn when I was eight. Wasn’t that exciting. I’d imagined the ashes to be all multi-coloured, beige ones for skin and white ones for bones. I didn’t expect them to look so boring.
    It was windy so the waves hit the beach hard and disappeared into froth, like shaken-up Coke. I wanted to take my shoes off and paddle but it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Dad started to say goodbye. He said the same things he said last year, and the year before that. Stuff about never forgetting her. Stuff about setting her free. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something orange and green swoop through the air. I looked up, squinting into the sun, to see a kite whiz past clouds, turning all the wind into something beautiful.
    Say something Jas said and I lowered my head. Dad was staring at me. I didn’t know how long he had been waiting for me to speak. I put my hand on the urn and made my face go all serious and said Goodbye Rose and You have been a good sister , which is a lie, and I will miss you , which is an even bigger lie. I couldn’t wait to get rid of her.
    Dad actually opened the urn. In all the anniversaries that I can remember, we had never got this far before. Jas swallowed hard. I stopped breathing. Everything disappeared except Dad’s fingers, Rose’s ashes and a perfect diamond shape, darting through the sky. I noticed a deep cut on Dad’s middle finger, and I wondered how he’d done it and if it hurt. He tried to push his fingers into the top of the urn but they were too big. He blinked a few times and clenched his jaw. His palm trembled as he held it out. It looked dry, like the hand of an old man. He tilted the urn, then changed his mind. He tilted it a second time, further than before. The top of the urn almost touched his palm. A few grey specks dropped out. He snapped the urn straight back up, breathing hard. I stared at the ashes on his hand, wondering which bit of Rose they were. Skull. Toe. Ribs. They could have been anything. With his thumb, Dad touched them gently, whispering things that I couldn’t hear.
    Dad’s fingers curled around the ashes. His knuckles turned white as he squeezed. He looked up at the sky. He looked down at the beach. He turned his head towards me and then stared at Jas.