1 – Beth:
***CRACK***
My sister – Patsy - died in a ditch on a Tuesday.
That’s when I first became aware something was wrong with my family, although I know now it started a long time before then.
Mum’s always maintained there’s a day out there, waiting, like a predator, our expiry date scrawled in some crevice of our skin in invisible ink. And there might be something in that in Patsy’s case, so many things went wrong for her so quickly.
The rain, the booze, the branch, the broken neck…
And no, it wasn’t the broken neck that did for her. It was the rain and, as the coroner put it; “other complicating factors.”
The alcohol, for example, because it changed the police’s attitude quickly and meant they didn’t look much beyond their own assumptions, it was also the reason Patsy didn’t see the branch in the first place. Perhaps if she had or the police had looked deeper, I could have saved Granddad, Mum and Grandma before it was too late.
Innocent girl falls in woods and breaks her neck; became, in a flicker of a police car’s emergency globe; Tearaway teenager runs off into the woods with a bottle of Vodka, falls and breaks her neck….
A chain of unintended consequences, no more, no less, but it’s the rain I think about, for without it, Patsy and the deer that skittered and slid into the same muddy trap with her might still be alive today.