Extract from Sam Burnside’s new novel ‘My Name is Rebecca’

It is always with me, that image, frozen, unchanging and unchangeable: as I turned, the view before me was as one in a painted scene, partially glimpsed hanging in a stairway or in an old photograph exposed, and carelessly glanced over in passing, in a half-open drawer – a moment caught then lost, leaving behind only a fleeting remembrance. As I turned, I became aware of a handful of people immediately behind me, positioned between my sister and me. Then there was a movement, like the wind’s sudden brush across a field of corn, followed by a sudden hiatus in the crowd, leaving a gap with Ruth alone at its empty heart. She has stopped to peer, in that short-sighted way she has – had – at something, some displayed goods on sale in a shop window, and I remember catching a glimpse of something white and thinking it was probably a wedding dress... but, of course, I was in such a panic…

She looked so vulnerable, alone in that empty space, and I could only think to say impatiently, ‘Can’t you hurry, please!’ Then I become aware of people in the far background, behind her, they were mingling about, some had stopped, frozen, a few were caught in the process of turning away. Ruth alone remained peering in at the shop window, oblivious to all that was around her.

As I turned and took in the scene, time, or something like time, did indeed appear to stop. I became aware of an all-pervading, profound and powerful silence – it was like a great weight, pressing down. Then, the day emitted a sigh. A sigh: a comma breaking apart a sentence, a slow-falling pause. Then a great sound imploded upon the scene and an unknown force shifted me physically, lifted me off my feet and hurled me backwards. Noise wrapped around me. I saw Ruth rise up in the air. She was taken from me. She hung there; it seemed for ever and ever and ever, like a puppet presented against a backdrop of make-believe smoke and red pantomime fire. Then her body descended… or rather, that’s too firm, too purposeful… no, it floated… towards the earth, from which it came.

And in its descent, her clothes were taken, plucked from her body. I think ‘plucked’ because I remembered, when thinking about it later in the night, when I fought against and then for sleep, of how, when I was a child, I saw once or twice a chicken’s feathers being plucked and cast aside: a hand rising and falling, casting billows of white and brown feathers. And this was the same, this careless separation of body and the body’s covering.

The fabric remained, or at least the threads remained, hanging there, in mid-air, stationary for a time, before floating earthwards, light as eiderdown, easy as dandelion fluff, soft and silent as feathers… As they fell they scattered, pieces of unnatural plumage, light and yielding as snowflakes, they descended, descended so condescendingly, so waywardly towards the earth. And through it all, the bright shards of shattered, burst glass flew upon the day, upon my sight, spreading, hard and shining in the sunlight. As they fell, they glittered and sparkled, like diamonds. Through the curtain of dust they cast their sparkle.

And then it was over: this economy of destruction and all was changed and the world inside my head was overflowing with far-off voices and sirens and blue lights and white tiles and more and many and brighter, blinding lights…

And that is how my sister Ruth’s life here, on earth, ended.