Текст Tindersticks – My Sister

Do you remember my sister?
How many mistakes did she make
With those never blinking eyes?
I couldn’t work it out

I swear she could read your mind
Your life, the depths of your soul at one glance
Maybe she was stripping herself away, saying

Here I am, this is me
I am yours and everything about me
Everything you see if only you look hard enough
I never could

Our life was a pillow fight
We’d stand there on the quilt
Our hands clenched ready
Her with her milky teeth

So late for her age
And a Stanley knife in her hand
She sliced the tires on my bike
And I couldn’t forgive her

She went blind at the age of five
We’d stand at the bedroom window
And she’d get me to tell her what I saw
I’d describe the houses opposite
The little patch of grass next to the path

The gate with its rotten hinges forever wedged
Open that Dad was always going to fix
She’d stand there quiet for a moment
I thought she was trying to develop
The images in her own head, then she’d say

I can see little twinkly stars

I can see huge tiger striped fishes
Chasing tiny blue and yellow dashes
All tails and fins and bubbles
I’d look at the gray house opposite and close the curtains

She burned down the house when she was ten
I was away camping with the scouts
The fireman said she’d been smoking in bed
The old story, I thought

The cat and our mum died in the flames
So Dad took us to stay with our Aunt in the country
He went back to London to find us a new house
We never saw him again

On her thirteenth birthday she fell down
The well in our Aunt’s garden and broke her head
She’d been drinking heavily on her recovery her sight
Returned a fluke of nature everyone said

That’s when she said she’d never blink again
I would tell her when she started at me
With her eyes wide and watery that they reminded
Me of the well she fell into, she liked this, it made her laugh

She moved in with a gym teacher
When she was fifteen all muscles he was
He lost his job when it all came out
And couldn’t get another one

Not in that kind of small town
Everybody knew everyone else’s business
My sister would hold her head high, though
She said she was in love

They were together for five years
Until one day he lost his temper
He hit her over the back of the neck with his bull-worker
She lost the use of the right side of her body

He got three years and was out in fifteen months
We saw him a while later, he was coaching
A non-league football team in a Cornwall seaside town
I don’t think he recognized her

My sister had put on a lot of weight
From being in a chair all the time
She’d get me to stick pins
And stub out cigarettes in her right hand

She’d laugh like mad because it didn’t hurt
Her left hand was pretty good though
We’d have arm wrestling matches
I’d have to use both arms and she’d still beat me

We buried her when she was 32, me and my Aunt
The vicar and the man who dug the hole
She said she didn’t want to be cremated and wanted
A cheap coffin so the worms could get to her quickly
She said she liked the idea of it, though I thought it was
Because of what happened to the cat and our mum