My Sister Milly Page 2

  Mum films Milly saxing ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’, while I sing. Milly’s face is serious: she’s sight-reading these two. It’s a bit more relaxed when she plays one of her favourites,’ Fever’, with Lovely Granny and Mum providing the sexy syncopated grunts. We’re being ridiculous, as usual.

  Another frame, and Milly comes dancing into the living room. Instantly she owns the camera’s gaze. In seconds she’s correcting Dad on his dance moves for Britney Spears’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’. At Easter, our school was to stage a home-grown version of Stars In Their Eyes, a talent show in which the contestants impersonate a singer performing one of their hits. ‘Hit Me’ was my song, but Milly was always the better dancer. She was doing ‘Never Ever’ by the All Saints, with a couple of her friends. We’re already deep in rehearsals.

  That Christmas, the video-cam was packed in Mum’s suitcase and came with us to Cuba and Mexico. So did Lovely Granny.

  You see it in all the videos – Milly was a scene stealer. In the films, she barely walks. She glides, dances and sashays everywhere. While I look down, smiling shyly when the video grazes over me, Milly stares straight into the camera, raising her arms like a sunflower, giving the royal wave. Milly talks to the camera without blinking or flinching. That’s her.

  Sometimes Milly gives the camera a purely impudent look. Sometimes she is mastering a non-smile. About a year before she died, Milly reached a policy decision: she was now simply too cool to smile. Of course, underneath, Milly had her insecurities, her friendship issues, her hormones, some bullying from other girls. And occasionally she lost it. You don’t see her cry very often; a peal of giggles is her usual lapse in cool. But Milly is disciplined. Milly knows who she wants to be. Her personal style is already sorted. So most of the time Milly is mistress of the poker-face, which, of course, has everyone else in stitches.

  The camera – and the giggles, the smiles and the teasing – arrive in Mexico. We’re having breakfast on a terrace looking over a glinting harbour. Then Milly, Dad and I are in a big blue inflatable, hurtling down a water slide. Looking at it now, it’s hard not to see a metaphor of what would so soon happen to us. After the ride, Milly walks right up to the video-cam, her blue eye winking until her long lashes disappear into the aperture. Another metaphor.

  The camera zooms in on Milly and me dawdling on some swings in proper adolescent slouches, talking about our recent swim with dolphins. Then we’re suddenly little children again, tearing around the beach, throwing sand at one another in front of the turquoise waves. At that age, you can be as jaded as a thirty-five-year-old one moment (a Milly speciality) and squealing like a toddler the next. And it’s all OK. It’s all OK.

  A little later Milly the Drama Queen is seen walking moodily along the beach dragging a dark cloud behind her by the sheer force of her personality. She’s rehearsing being a sullen teenager, I guess. Being a bit of a bad girl. You can see her future as one of those teens who’s always in trouble for acting out, yet always forgiven because of her ability to charm a laugh out of you even when you’re furious with her. Milly struts along that Mexican beach as if she’s walking towards the horizon. On her horizon, no doubt, were secret cider sessions in the park, unsuitable boyfriends, body piercings, regrettable tattoos, all-nighters on beaches. Nothing worse than that.

  Mum caught that moment, of Milly on the cusp, on camera. I’m sure Milly didn’t know she was being filmed.

  December 2001. Christmas morning in Cancún. It’s raining relentlessly. That’s OK. We Dowlers make our own fun. There’s Milly in yellow daisy pyjamas (mine are the same, except turquoise). She’s explaining the contents of our Christmas stockings – knickers, body lotion, hairbrushes and, in Dad’s stocking, aftershave.

  Milly takes the camera, announcing, ‘Characters include Gemma Dowler, Lovely Granny, Bob Dowler and Sally Dowler. Sound effects by Amanda Dowler.’

  Milly interviews Mum about her Christmas. Mum’s incoherent with giggles. The weather is awful. The food is awful. We’re reduced to eating wine-gums for Christmas breakfast. Dad holds them up as the evidence of our tragic situation. We tell our stories; our silliness is contagious. Belly laughs break out yet again. When it’s my turn, I can’t talk for hysterics.

  ‘This is a real no-hoper,’ growls Milly, behind the camera, including us all in her mock-disdain.

  Then Mum wrests the camera back and she’s filming Milly and me in our hotel bedroom, sporting cornrows fastened with bits of silver foil at the ends. Taily Ted, my childhood toy, sits on my bed. Even though I’m sixteen, he still comes everywhere with me. Everyone accepts that. No one judges. Milly has brought ‘Blanky’, a toy now so shredded that he is just a rather disgusting bit of fabric. He was once a pig, the first toy she ever owned. He was never pretty, but Milly loved to stroke his silky label and the insides of his ears. The more stained and ragged he got, the more she defended Blanky from Mum, Dad and the washing machine. She had another, more respectable, teddy bear, dressed in an Aran sweater, who stayed at home. Mum recorded a message and planted it in a microphone inside him. When you press his tummy, Mum’s voice still says, ‘Night, night, Milly. I love you.’

  Disaster befalls Blanky in Cuba. A hotel maid, quite understandably, throws him away when she’s cleaning our room. Milly’s distraught. The whole family hunts for Blanky. Milly insists on having the hotel laundry searched. It’s too late. Mum consoles Milly by reminding her that there’s another scrap of Blanky still at home in Walton. That scrap will eventually be put inside Milly’s coffin.

  But now the video records only happiness. Milly shows off her cornrows to the camera. She gloats, ‘Look, my hair is well good. Look at the back.’ For Milly, everything is ‘epic’, ‘well good’, ‘cool’, ‘well bad’, ‘uncool’ or ‘rank’.

  The camera records the back of Milly’s head. Watching her in the round – that vulnerable neck, the knobbles of her skull, the pale skin between the hair – that’s difficult now.

  Milly recounts our experiences in acquiring those cornrows. It was illegal for hotel staff to offer such services so we ended up in a backroom somewhere, with two gay guys plucking their eyebrows. Two naked women came in – ‘being naked’, as Milly says, deadpan – and go to the toilet. We’re nice girls from Walton-on-Thames. We’ve never seen anything like it.

  Well, actually we had. Once, on a coastal walk in Dorset, we spotted an ice-cream van in the distance. Only when it was too late did we realize it was parked in the middle of a nudist beach. Milly stopped, her mouth open in shock. We bought some ice creams. This, unfortunately, attracted a wasp that stung Uncle Pete on his lip. He’s not the quietest of people. Hearing his yell, a man jumped up and dashed over with some antihistamine cream, which he kindly applied to Uncle Pete’s lip. The memory of that naked man running towards us on the beach was emblazoned for ever on Milly’s mind. From that moment on, she decided that nakedness was hilarious.

  And nakedness kept happening to us. In Lanzarote we stayed by a surfing beach that turned out to be in the middle of a naturist reserve. We discovered this when, driving down a coastal track, we came across a middle-aged man barbecuing sausages by the side of the road. He was naked, even in what Milly usually called ‘the lower reeegions’ in her fake ‘deep and meaningful’ voice. The rest of us collapsed in giggles, but Milly had the wit to shout, ‘Be free!’ to him out of the car window.

  It was something Milly used to do: take normal words and make them sound hilariously seedy. And it would all be done with her poker-face. While everyone else was dissolving in hysterics, Milly could play the straight man with amazing self-control.

  In Gozo we visited the salt baths where folklore says the nuns used to bathe naked. After that, Milly would go on and on about naked nuns. She loved to say, ‘Naked nuns, naked nuns.’ One of her favourite groups was the Barenaked Ladies, actually four guys. Obviously the name was a draw, but she also loved their rollicking song, ‘If I Had A Million Dollars’, about outrag
eous amounts of retail therapy: a house, a chesterfield or an ottoman, a car, a tree-fort with a tiny little fridge inside, pre-wrapped sausages, a fur coat (‘But not a real fur coat – that’s cruel’), a llama, an emu, expensive ketchup, a green dress (‘But not a real green dress – that’s cruel’), a Picasso, a monkey (‘Haven’t you always wanted a monkey?’). All four of us knew every word. We’d sing them at the top of our voices when driving in the car or cycling.

  Milly could be funny about nakedness. Yet she was as shy about her own growing body as any young girl. At most, she would bare her perfect torso in her jeans or bikini.

  Back to the hotel lobby in Cuba. Milly’s in charge of the camera again. She homes in on ‘the lovely old people’ – our parents and Lovely Granny. Milly interviews Lovely Granny about the Latin American Spanish phrasebook she’s been studying conscientiously. Listening to her new vocabulary, Milly works out that Lovely Granny is inadvertently learning how to be a heroin addict and how to pick up men.

  Milly and I interview a pair of handsome Canadian boys. The flirting is shameless. The boys don’t stand a chance because they don’t understand that we’re just joking. We do become friends with them and we’re sad when we have to say goodbye. Milly tells them, ‘If you want to remember me, look at the sky. We will be seeing the same stars.’

  It was a mixed bag of a trip. We all suffered different injuries. But then it was funny. In the somewhat grim gardens of the Hotel Nacional, Mum decided to record a recital of our various war wounds. Milly shows a slim calf studded with mosquito bites. Mum, too, has squads of welts. I have a volleyball bruise on my wrist. Dad can offer a tiny cut on his leg. Lovely Granny wins with a jellyfish sting on her wrist and a burn on her finger.

  Looking at these videos again, I see our family as we always were: fully engaged with one another. Milly and I are not fiddling with our mobile phones. We’re three generations, yet there are no barriers between us. We’re all in on the same joke. No one is on the outside. We are all each other’s favourite people in the world. Later, when you’re reading about us at the trial that was so cruelly choreographed by Milly’s killer, please remember that. Remember that we were not dysfunctional. If anything, as a family, we were hyper-functional, hyper-joyful. Remember that Milly did not have a secret life. She lived among us as one of us. If anything, Milly was in your face, her Milly-ness demanding attention.

  Lovely Granny recalls that at the trial, in his summing-up, the judge said that when Bellfield had been long forgotten, Milly’s name would be remembered.

  Not just her name.

  2.

  The newspapers would reduce Milly to a beautiful face, a mystery and a terrible crime.

  But no one word can describe my sister. It takes a paragraph to get anywhere near her. Charismatic Milly of the superfast metabolism, willowy, size eight, always dancing, singing, chatting and back-chatting. Milly was a practical joker, a creative type who designed her own phone-case but never had any credit on her phone. Huggy Milly, happy Milly, naughty Milly. Your heart just went out to Milly.

  Everybody’s did.

  As she got older, Milly just grew more watchable, more sweetly eccentric, more attractive, more her truly original self. She was growing into that rare and lovely thing: a girl who was super-cool and warm at the same time. In that spring of 2002, Milly was just coming into flower.

  Now it’s time to draw the tree Milly grew on.

  Our father is Robert, usually known as Bob. He’s tall and slim, with a comforting presence. Dad’s a wonderful man to hug. It’s like an encounter with a friendly bear. It’s no coincidence that many photos of him and Milly show them hugging.

  We sometimes call Dad ‘Catalogue Man’ because you can buy him anything off the page and it will fit perfectly. He eats what he likes and his body never fills out any further than the ideal dimensions for his height. Like Milly, he’s just naturally elegant. Unlike Milly, he can appear quite reserved. He’s also an old-fashioned gentleman, opening car doors, using your name, looking you in the eye and apologizing sincerely if he ever interrupts you.

  He was born in 1951 in Hillingdon. When he was six months old the family emigrated to Adelaide under the Assisted Passage scheme. Homesickness drove them back to Britain. They lived in Hayes, west London. He enjoyed a happy childhood and was unusually close to his parents. He was a grammar-school boy, leaving at eighteen to take a job in an engineering company.

  Music is Dad’s guiding light. He doesn’t read it – he learns by listening. He just has that knack, perhaps built from the musicality that runs deep through our whole family. He would sometimes do the discos for our birthday parties. But pretty much any day of the week, our whole house was a disco. He loved it that Milly and I were enthusiastic singers and dancers. When he turned fifty in 2001, we had a fifties and sixties fancy-dress party. Mum, Milly and I performed ‘Bobby’s Girl’ for him, wearing matching black-and-white dresses Mum had made. We had practised the routine in secret while he was at work. Dad dressed as a Beatle with a pudding-basin wig. He thought he looked like Paul McCartney.

  ‘Dream on, Dad,’ said Milly. Her birthday card to him said, ‘Now you are officially an OLD fogie.’

  For some time, I think, music was the only consistent thing in Dad’s life. He changed jobs every couple of years. In 1975 he was at Penguin Books, as a computer analyst and programmer.

  He met Mum while he and she were working at a specialist recruitment consultancy based in Fleet Street. They married in 1984. The change to recruitment and to life with our mother clearly suited him. It seems she gave him the certainty and stability he’d been seeking. After they married, Dad settled down properly, both at home and in work. I was born two years later, Milly two and a half years after that.

  Dad was devastated by the loss of his own father in 1995, followed by that of his mother in 2000. The old close family had been cut down, and it would take him a long time to recover. We were all he had, and he cherished us, bringing our mother’s mum, Lovely Granny, into the fold, especially after Grandad died in 1997.

  Lovely Granny is shortish, shorter than Milly and me. She has a wickedly contagious laugh. Lovely Granny was the perpetrator of most of the ‘lovelys’ in our conversations. Family videos show that Lovely Granny was often with us, both home and away. We particularly loved our holidays together, at first camping in the UK, progressing to Europe, then travelling further afield to Florida, Cuba and Mexico, the last big trip we made with Milly.

  Dad did the discipline, but he can’t have scared us much because Milly and I didn’t hesitate to play practical jokes on him. It’s easy to prank the straight man, which was the role Dad played in the household comedy. He even kept spreadsheets of his colds and flu. He was very particular about the weather: he always needed to know what it was doing so he could dress appropriately. Once Mum asked him what he wanted for his birthday. His answer was ‘galoshes’ – the kind he could wear over his work shoes so that he could arrive at the office in pristine condition, even when it was raining.

  Mum never found them, thank God. Milly and I would have been mortified if she had.

  Our mother is Sally, a further education teacher, born in 1959 in Middlesex, where she spent all her young years. She did her degree in maths and statistics at Exeter, graduating in 1980. She was living in Hampton when she met Dad. They had a love of music in common.

  Mum’s special domain is the garden. Our parents still live in the same 1930s house in Walton Park we occupied when Milly was taken. So Mum’s had more than twenty years to perfect her garden. French windows open on to it and it feels like part of the house, the most beautiful part. It is a story garden: there are gardens within gardens. The seashore’s represented with planks from an old pier; there’s a lyrical cottage garden; there are walks under flowered pergolas, including one Grandad built just before he died.

  Grandad also built a tree-house for Milly and me. That was where we kept an old Morse code machine. Milly loved to send distress messages. Fo
xes and squirrels slept up there at night. The tree-house was where we used to prepare imaginary meals, especially boeuf bourguignon, one of our worst culinary fears. But we so loved saying the words. We even had a nickname for it – ‘Beef Boginura’. Our version was made out of used teabags, mud, leaves and water. When we were pretending to taste it, we’d describe the gourmet experience with exaggerated French accents.

  Mum let Milly decide which flower would climb over Grandad’s pergola. She chose a yellow Banksia rose. Mum can still remember Milly tending it with her toy watering-can. The year Milly was taken, Mum acquired a new memory about that pergola. When she looked out of the kitchen window, she’d be forced to watch the police taking their cigarette breaks or nervously pacing up and down under it while waiting to be allowed to tell us that yet another body had been found.

  Now, a section of the garden is devoted to Milly: a ceramic circle with a beautiful pot, both handmade by the lovely Mr Evans at the Columbia Road Flower Market. Around the rim of the pot are the words ‘Forever in our hearts our darling Milly’ followed by three kisses. Mum changes the flowers in Milly’s pot according to the season.

  Mum’s petite and blonde, with big blue eyes and a quick giggle. At least, she used to be like that. She’s still small and blonde, but the last fifteen years have honed her into a tighter, more watchful version of herself. Tiny as she is, Mum’s the strong one, the one who has kept us all together. Mum is the proper definition of a fitness fanatic. She swims, runs, spins. Before Milly disappeared, exercise was just a pleasure for her. After Milly went, it became the way that she worked out her nervous energy.

  Then there’s me, Gemma. I was born on 16 January 1986 at St Peter’s Hospital after an agonizing drawn-out labour. Mum still reminds me of this now, when I’m being difficult. I was christened ‘Gemma Louise’ – ‘Gemsie’ to our family. From my earliest childhood, I was a home-lover, a bubbly chatterbox, sensitive and very emotional. I’ve always been the one who gets up at the crack of dawn and the last to go to bed. I loved looking after everyone, making the tea, baking the birthday cakes. Like Mum, I’ve been changed out of sight by the trauma of the last fifteen years – into something harder yet more vulnerable. But at last I’m coming back to myself.