My Sister's Secret Diary

Stan Mason

Description

When his sister collapses and is taken to hospital where she lays in a coma, her brother goes to her bedroom to collect some of her items she will need in the hospital. He sees her personal diary and picks it up. He has not seen her for fifteen years and knows nothing about her past. He was fourteen when she ran off with a schoolmaster to marry him in Gretna Green so he was curious to know what had happened to her in that time. The revelations set out in the diary amazed him. In the meantime, he is trying to rewrite his second book but has trouble from his publishers. And there is a married woman who lives close by who engages with him romantically.

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785383106
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
MY SISTER’S SECRET DIARY
Stan Mason



Publisher Information
My Sister’s Secret Diary
Published in 2015 by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Stan Mason to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Copyright © 2015 Stan Mason
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.



Chapter One
It was a New Year which heralded all my aspirations. As the bells rang out on the thirty-first day of December, all my resolutions came into play. I felt the rise of ambition coupled with elements of success and fame supported by a great deal of hope for the future. All it did was to prove how wrong I could be. The resolutions were just like those of most other people at that time of the year which for reasons beyond my understanding fell as flat as an overcooked souffle.
It was by sheer accident that the diary of my sister fell into my hands. I found it on a table in the bedroom of her house after the paramedics had carried her away on a stretcher into the ambulance. They closed the doors of the vehicle and she was gone leaving me behind holding the great tome of her life. Her husband, Matthew, had telephoned me earlier to say that she had suffered some kind of a fit and had collapsed in the kitchen of their house and, as I lived nearby, I leapt into my car and drove there in haste. As I arrived, the paramedics were undertaking their task to save her life and they sedated her before taking her to the local hospital. Naturally Matthew went with her which offered me the opportunity to enter the house and go into my sister’s bedroom. It was in my mind to find a dressing-gown and some nightwear for her as well as a toothbrush and a flannel to ensure her comfort in hospital but my eyes fell on a weighty diary that looked distinctly personal. With great curiosity, I opened the book to discover a wealth of writing, identifying the personal feelings and activities of my sister from her early days. It was my sole intention of pretending that I hadn’t seen it and to make certain it was handed back to her when she returned but, contrary to human decency, I was more than curious to read its contents so I took it away with me. There was every reason for me to do so. As far as I was concerned, her past life was a complete enigma to me and I wanted to know all about it. Let me be clear about this... I loved my sister dearly and I would certainly never do her any harm but one has to recognise that the thoughts of each individual belongs to them and to them alone, so the details in the personal diary would lift the veil of what had happened to her in the past to let me know what had been in her mind at the time. It was something that had always eluded me and I was delighted to be able to learn how Fate had treated her.
My name is Simon Jenkins, born and bred of a Welsh couple who, to my discomfort, sorrow and misery never stopped arguing with each other from morning until night, but that‘s another story. I’m thirty-one years of age and I spend my time as an author writing books during the day and pulling pints at the local inn... the Red Lion... every evening except on Mondays. I wrote my first book two years ago but the quarterly royalties earned hardly cover the cost of two weekly groceries, and I live alone. My publisher, Sid Nelson, told me that I have a remarkable writing talent and he urged me to write another book which I have just finished. I’ve entitled it ‘Doom, Doom!’ and I’m waiting for his response in the hope that I may have scribed a best-seller. It’s about the ending of the world as a result of the rapid depletion of the ozone layer but I’ll come back to that later on.
As soon as I reached the age of fourteen my sister suddenly disappeared from our family life. She left for school one morning and never came back. As far as I was concerned, she simply vanished. I questioned my parents about the reason why she hadn’t come home but they remained complete tight-lipped, refusing to give me any kind of explanation. I sorely missed her for quite a while but time has a means of allowing us to lessen the pain in our minds and eventually she became a past memory, although it always bugged me to know what had happened to her. There was a lapse of over fifteen years before we met again, which delighted me to say the least, but she refused to tell me anything about what had happened to her since her disappearance so many years earlier. I could only presume that her past had been anything but pleasant so I made certain not to press her about it. She now looked completely different to the way I remembered her, being much more mature and grown up, dressed like an adult instead of a schoolgirl. However one thing was certain, I relived the warm feeling of love that emanates from one sibling to another which was instantly resurrected when we next met. Whatever had befallen her, at least I had my sister back again.
In truth, Helena was a normal woman in every sense of the word but, hey what did I know about women? I was thirty-one years of age and unmarried, living on my own, and it was my misfortune to have been dumped by those women who originally favoured me with the prospect of a relationship. There was only one woman who had stayed with me for a time. She was Lila, so beautiful, so lovely, and yet so betraying of me in the end. Her memory will remain with me for the rest of my life even though she rests in the arms of another man. Despite my experiences, or lack of them, in my earlier life concerning love and romance, what I knew about the female sex didn’t amount to a hill of beans but I knew in my bones that Helena had been through the mill in her lifetime. However, we always seem to live in strange times and whatever had happened in the past was gone. Whenever anything serious happens and mistakes are made, it is human nature to tell ourselves that we will learn from the experience so that it doesn’t happen again but we never do. Take wars for example. Mankind never seems to learn and they will continue until the Earth is succumbed by the Sun and no one on the planet is able to survive. I often wondered what was the point of all the conflict that took place. It never brought anything but disaster to mankind.
I caught up with my sister approximately fifteen years after she first vanished. In recent years, she had met Matthew and they had married. I knew very little about him because the subject never came up, although I understood that he was an architect working for a large firm in the City. After that, he was as much an enigma as Helena. I imagined that he had been married before but there was no evidence to prove that it was true. Regardless of her previous record, however good or bad it might have been, my sister was now significantly older and more than capable of maintaining a solid relationship. Within a short time of their marriage, they produced two children and the family seemed to be very happy together.
It was some time later that Monday evening, as I lay back in my bed, with the pillow pressed firmly behind my back, that I opened the book to examine the first page. In my mind, I imagined that I would see a great deal of scribbled notes, some illuminating text, numerous telephone numbers and odd remarks, but I was to be greatly surprised. As I started to read, I felt an element of guilt for not going out of my way to help her in her darkest hours, however bad they might have been, even though she had gone and her life was out of my control. I mean I was her brother, her only brother, who would have been always ready to support and help her if she wanted me to. In truth, I was of no use to her at all. Nonetheless. I was very pleased that she had found her feet and was able to start a new life for herself. It allowed me to let all my inwardly guilt-filled feelings about it to be expunged. As the words on the pages rolled out before me, I became absolutely fascinated with the text. She wrote so beautifully and descriptively that I soon became totally absorbed in the contents.
“I was a feisty fifteen year old schoolgirl with a pretty face, dark hair, and very long legs so that my extra height made me look far older than my age. Like most other young girls, I detested school and had little empathy for the teachers who fought to keep the rowdier element there at bay. There was only one thing that really plagued me to distraction... my home life! I found it to be in an awful mess. To say it was pretty miserable was an understatement mainly because I was a teenager who didn’t want to follow rules and who hated being constantly told what to do. Consequently I was always at loggerheads with my parents. My father was an impossible man, bound by tradition, exceedingly prudish, like a country priest, with definite boundaries identified for his daughter. He never failed to advise me, in his own indelicate way that I was to be in the company of other girls at all times, to be sure that I never walked the streets alone, and most importantly, that I never talked to strangers or approached any man, or men, for any reason whatsoever. I cannot count the times when he threatened me to say that while I was under his roof I was bound to have to follow his rules. My mother confirmed it by telling me to do what my father told me or I would be punished. As far as I was concerned, my father was paranoid