✅ My Sister's Problem

29. Resistance

"We're going to Castleford," Mum had told me at breakfast. I'd nodded and shrugged. Lindy loved that place, ever since we'd been on a day trip years before, but I really couldn't understand why. It was just a load of old walls with vines growing over them. Like, it might have been some kind of castle in the past, or a folly, but most of it had been demolished years before we were even born. Why would you get so excited wandering around a garden and looking at things that weren't there anymore?

"Have fun," I said. I didn't mind at all, and I knew Lindy would spend most of the evening with her paints after she'd been somewhere like that. I'd be free from 'bullying' today at least.

After returning from camping, Lindy had seemed a little more subdued. But when she sulked about how unfair it was, and how Mum was letting me get away with whatever I wanted, I had pointed out that I was still obeying her commands. I'd been sleeping with just a diaper, nothing covering it, because I wanted my sister to know she wasn't alone. I said I thought that I deserved it after the way I'd treated herI was surprised she even believed me, even though it was true; and after that she'd started teasing me a little when she felt she could get away with it. Asking to look at me in the morning, saying that I needed to prove I wasn't wet. I blushed a lot, and I guessed that counted as bullying; but I didn't object. I'd refused when she'd said I should wet myself; I wouldn't go that far. But somehow, over the last week, it seemed like we had reached some kind of agreement that made both of us feel more secure.

I was always expecting her to pull out some new trick; and I didn't know if I was excited or apprehensive to know what she would think of. But tonight, after a day out that would leave her on top of the world, I knew I would be safe.

Now they had gone, leaving me with a bunch of chores to do in their absence. I knew I would probably be lazy and not manage everything, but it was my first weekend without homework now that school had finished for summer; and I'd promised Mum that I would take some of the weight off her shoulders now I had the chance. It was my chance to show my maturity for once. At least, as many tasks as I could manage in the morning, because I had other plans this afternoon.

I had washed the breakfast dishes already, and divided the laundry hamper up into whites and colours. There would have been a separate bundle of dark stuff, but I guessed none of us had felt like wearing black with the sun beating down so brightly. It didn't leave you in a very gothic mood. I turned the machine on, loaded the whites, and carefully checked the list Mum had left for the settings. This was one chore I'd only done a few times before, and I wanted to be sure I got it right. And with that done, the next task was waiting; which probably gave me time for an experiment of my own.

I wanted to know more about this meditation thing. It had seemed almost magical, having such a profound effect on me. But I was sure I could prove that the magic had all been in my mind. I'd spent so long over the last few months thinking about bedwetting; imagining what Lindy might be dreaming of when I used that trick on her, and trying to imagine how it would feel. The most likely answer, so far as I knew anything about psychology and stuff, was that it was some kind of placebo. The voice in that recording had given me an excuse to imagine that happening to me, I'd been able to imagine it too well, and in the no-man's-land between dreams and waking, my dream had come true for a fraction of a second. Like when you wake from a vivid dream and twitch, just a half-second of sleepwalking. The words weren't magic, it was just because it had been on my mind.

So now I had another experiment to try. To prove that it had only worked because those thoughts had already been on my mind, like some kind of super-placebo thing. It was easy to imagine falling asleep to it when I was somewhere I'd slept before; it was easy to imagine the words infiltrating my dreams and causing that to happen when I was pretty confident that was what had happened to my sister. It made both things easier to imagine. So I was going to listen to it somewhere I couldn't fall asleep; and hopefully I would be able to focus well enough to properly analyse how that thing worked.