My twin sister di3d ten years ago — then a dental practice rang and asked me to come and collect her
My twin sister died ten years ago — then a dental practice rang and asked me to come and collect her.
The ninth of November, 2015.
Clara's car went over the embankment on the Vellmore road at about half nine at night and caught fire.
We were told there was almost nothing to recover. We buried her on the eighteenth of December in a closed casket.
She was twenty-eight. So was I.
It took me about four years and a woman called Sunniva Bell on Tuesdays before I could work, and six before I could move out of Thornmere.
And then on Monday the sixth of October this year, at about twenty to twelve, a local number rang me while I was at the kitchen island.
"Hi — is that Tabitha? I'm calling from the dental practice on Corran Street. I've got your sister Clara here. She's just had a procedure, she's a bit groggy, and her phone's dead. She asked if you'd come and get her."
I said: "My sister?"
"Yes. Clara. She's sitting right here."
I told that girl my sister had been dead for ten years.
And there was a silence of about four seconds and then she said, very carefully, "Would you like to speak to her?"
And then a different voice.
"Tabs. Please come and get me."
It was not somebody who sounded like her.
It was the voice, and the speed of it, and the way that word comes out — Tabs, with the s barely there — which is a thing nobody else has ever done.
I do not remember the drive.
I had about four explanations going and all of them were better than the real one.
And I pushed open that waiting room door and stopped.
There was a woman in the third chair along in a green coat with a gauze pad in her cheek.
And she looked up.
And she tapped twice on her collarbone.
Two taps, with two fingers, on the left side.
We started doing that when we were about seven.
It meant: I'm here, I'm all right, don't say anything yet. It was for use in front of adults and it was in constant operation between about 1994 and 1999 and I have not seen it since we were teenagers.
And I went down on my knees on the carpet of a dental practice in Arden Cross in front of eleven people.
What actually happened on the ninth of November, 2015.
The car hit a deer on that road and went over.
And Clara was out of it before it burned.
She does not remember any of it. What is known is what was reconstructed later: she got herself clear, she went up the wrong side of the embankment, and she walked.
She had no bag, no phone and no coat.
She was picked up at about seven the next morning eleven miles away, on the Ardleigh road, by a man delivering bread.
She had a serious head injury and she did not know her own name.
And this is where it goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a completely ordinary way.
She was admitted to a hospital forty miles from the crash as an unidentified adult.
And by the time anybody was looking for a missing woman, nobody was looking for a missing woman.
They were looking at a burnt car with a registration on it and a handbag in the footwell.
There was a coroner's inquest. There was a registered keeper, personal effects, a phone, a jacket, and no trace of that woman anywhere in the country in the following months.
And there was a small quantity of material recovered from the vehicle which was recorded as human remains and which was never DNA tested.
Because in 2015, with all of that, nobody asked for one.
That was not negligence by any one person and I have stopped looking for somebody to be angry with about it. It was a series of entirely reasonable assumptions stacked on top of each other.
She was in hospital for four months.
Physically she came back. Her memory came back in pieces — she can cook, she can drive, she knew immediately that she did not like dogs — but her name did not come back and nor did anybody attached to it.
And in the March of 2016 a social worker gave her a name for the paperwork.
Mara Ellis.
You have to be somebody to be discharged. You need a name for a tenancy and a bank account and a National Insurance number.
And she has lived as Mara Ellis for ten years.
And that is not a tragic blank. That is the part I have had to get straight in my own head.
She has a flat in Arden Cross. She has worked at the same garden centre since 2017 and she runs the ordering.
She has a partner called Fenn.
And she has a son called Sol who is seven.
I have been an aunt since 2018 and nobody told me.
How it came back.
A surgical extraction under sedation, on the sixth of October, at about half eleven in the morning.
Coming out of sedation loosens things. Everybody who has dealt with this since has said some version of "yes, that happens," and none of them can tell me exactly why.
She came round saying "Tabs."
And then a mobile number. Eleven digits, twice, clearly, in a chair.
The number I have had since 2009.
So Bex on reception did the ordinary thing, which is that she rang the number the patient had given her.
And the thing that identified her was in that building already.
Clara had two crowns done in Thornmere in 2013. Her records were still with that practice.
Mr Quinn requested them on the seventh of October and they matched.
My sister was identified by her teeth, at a dentist, by a man who was only trying to work out who to send a bill to.
DNA with our mother confirmed it on the eleventh of December.
The grave.
It was opened on the fourth of February with a coroner's authority.
The material in that casket was not human.
It was deer.
We buried a deer in Thornmere cemetery on the eighteenth of December, 2015, under a stone with my sister's name on it, and thirty-one people came.
Our father carried the front left corner.
He died in 2021.
Five years and four months of that man believing it, and he was in the ground before any of this, and there is nothing anybody can do about that and I have to put it down about once a week.
Un-dying somebody.
You cannot simply be alive again.
There is a death registered. There is a certificate. There is an estate that was distributed in 2016.
It took eleven months — an application, a hearing, and about two hundred pages — before the register was corrected in the September.
Until then my sister was, on paper, a dead woman with a different name walking around Arden Cross.
The insurance money — forty-one thousand dollars, paid to my mother in 2016 — was repaid in instalments and the insurer was decent about it.
My mother.
Sixty-six. She has been extraordinary and she is not all right.
She met Sol on the nineteenth of December. He was six. He called her "the other nan" for about four months and now calls her Nanna Wendy.
And she has said one thing to me about all of it, in the April, in her kitchen, and she has never said it again:
"I'd got used to it."
And then she cried about having said it, and I told her it was the most honest sentence anybody in this family has produced in a year.
And me.
Here is the part nobody wants and it is the truest thing I have got.
The woman in that waiting room is not my sister.
She has my sister's face and my sister's voice and twenty-eight years of my sister's memories, which came back in about the first six weeks, most of them.
And she has ten years that I was not in.
She has a partner I have never heard of. She has a child. She has a job and a doctor and a route to work and four close friends and a way of saying "right, then" that she did not have in 2015.
She is not Clara coming back. She is a thirty-eight-year-old woman who has had a whole other decade.
And I had built my entire adult life on a gap in the shape of her.
Everything I have done since 2016 — moving, the job, the flat, the work I did on Tuesdays for four years — was built around that gap.
And you cannot put somebody back into a gap that you have spent ten years filling in.
She has said it better than I can. She said: "You didn't get your sister back. You got a stranger with the receipts."
And the name, which is the hardest bit.
She kept it.
Deed poll, in the March. She is legally Mara Ellis and she intends to stay Mara Ellis.
I was so angry about that I did not speak to her for eleven days in the April.
Because Clara Hale is the person I buried. I carried that name for ten years. It is on a stone that is still standing in Thornmere because nobody can decide what to do with it.
And she chose not to be her.
And in the July she explained it and it took her about four goes and then she got it out in one sentence:
"You spent ten years learning how to live without Clara. If I take that name back, you have to undo all of it. Mara's only ten years old. Mara's easier on everybody."
She is protecting me from the thing I spent a decade building.
Which is exactly the sort of infuriating, high-handed, entirely correct thing my sister has done since we were about eleven, and the fact that she did it under a different name does not make it less her.
Where things are.
I see her about once a fortnight. It is awkward about a third of the time and I have stopped apologising for that.
Sol is seven and he has decided I am funny, which I am not, and which I intend to exploit for as long as it holds.
Fenn is forty-one and he has been, without exception, the most reasonable person in this entire business, and he has had a harder year than anybody and nobody has once asked him about it.
And our mother goes on a Sunday and stays for three hours and does the ironing, and nobody can stop her.
And the last thing.
In the August I was in their kitchen and Sol wanted something and his mother was on the phone.
And he stood at the door and waited, and when she looked over at him —
He tapped twice on his collarbone.
Two fingers. Left side.
He does not know where it comes from. She does not know she taught him.
I asked her afterwards and she looked at me completely blankly and said, "Does he?"
She has no memory of doing it and no memory of us doing it, and it is not in the twenty-eight years that came back to her.
It is just in her hands.
Something that two seven-year-olds made up in a bedroom in Thornmere in about 1994 came out of a woman with no name in a hospital in 2016, and went into a child born in 2018, and is now in use, daily, by a boy who has never heard of Clara Hale.
May you like
It survived the crash, ten years of amnesia, a funeral, a grave and a change of name.
It is the only thing that did.
