Nest of Sorrows by Ruth Hamilton

‘He was a nice man, my grandad.’
    ‘Yes, he was. Now get to bed.’
    Katherine rose to her feet and stared down at the still shape of her grandfather. ‘I’m staying to pray for him,’ she said. ‘Judith can sleep enough for both of us.’
    ‘Judith’s got sense.’
    Katherine looked her mother straight in the eye. ‘I know that. I do know that. You don’t have to keep telling me about Judith’s sense. Grandad says I’m not like Judith, and that I don’t have to be like her, or like anyone else. I am me. He told me that.’ She waved a hand towards the bed. ‘And he’s always right. He was right about my dad, wasn’t he?’
    ‘Yes, I suppose he was.’
    Rachel Murray looked into the dark tunnel of the life that lay before her, a life she could do little to alter. Not liking what she saw in the blackness, she busied herself about the room, tidying and hanging up her father’s clothes. But the pictures would not leave her mind. The love she had used to have for her husband was dead, as dead as the man in the bed. Peter Murray had killed that love just as surely as if he’d taken a knife or a gun to some living creature. All because of Katie. And now there would be no Dad here to take the edge off things, no grand old man to keep the peace between herself and Peter.
    Rachel turned then and saw her daughter sobbing alone in a corner. That was the trouble, thought the mother as she held out her arms. No-one ever noticed Katherine weeping in a corner. Not until it was too late.
    Judith was just about sick to death of their Katherine. For a start, she was a show-off. Everybody at Mount St Joseph’s said that Katherine Murray was a show-off right from the first day and Judith, as a second-year, had to bear the brunt of all the jibes. ‘Who’s got a little sister who doesn’t know her place?’ they all asked when Katherine took first prize for art. And she didn’t just take the prize for her own year, oh, no, Miss Clever Clogs had to walk off with the Missal for the whole lower school, beating everybody up to and including third years.
    Then there was Katherine’s fixation with Michael Wray, which was becoming a terrible pain both at home and at school. The whole assembly seemed to know about Katherine’s assignations in Queens Park. Notes were passed around classes, ‘Katherine Murray = Michael Wray’, with love hearts drawn all over them in pink and purple. The fact that Michael Wray was a third-year at Thornleigh didn’t help either. Many sixteen-year-olds at the Mount didn’t have boyfriends, so for an eleven-year-old upstart sister to flaunt one in the park every weekend was a source of desperate shame.
    Judith decided to tackle Mam about it. ‘She’s round the duck pond with him every Saturday.’
    ‘Oh, I see.’ Rachel pushed a lock of hair from her face. ‘Pass me the Brasso, will you? She’s not doing anything wrong, is she?’
    ‘She’s showing me up.’
    ‘It’s just her way, love. She likes Michael, that’s all. It’s only like you and Joan Atherton. How would you feel if somebody tried to separate you from Joan?’
    ‘It’s not the same! Everybody’s laughing at me, saying my little sister’s fast. How do you think I feel? She breezes in and takes all the art prizes, never does a stroke of work and comes in the top three of the class. She makes me sick. I wish she’d never passed!’
    Rachel glanced briefly at Judith. This was not like her at all. She usually didn’t notice what went on around her. ‘I’ll talk to her.’
    ‘Yes. But will she listen? Does she ever listen?’
    ‘Just don’t tell your dad about it.’
    ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’ Judith knew that the situation between Katherine and Peter was on a knife edge these days. For some reason beyond Judith’s comprehension, Dad had got it into his head that their Katherine was ‘unusually gifted’. This meant that he put a lot of pressure on the child, and even in anger, Judith would not set him on her