Second Life (4 page)

So, there’s a boyfriend, I think, but I don’t ask questions. As with any new friendship,
these are the details I’ll discover gradually. We go in, and she takes my bag, dropping
it by the door. ‘You’re sure you won’t stay here?’ she says, but I tell her it’s
fine, I’ll stay at the hotel I’ve booked, a few streets away. We’ve talked about
it; I’d be in Kate’s room, surrounded by her things. It’s too early. ‘We’ll have
a drink, then you can check in on the way to dinner. I know a great place. Anyway,
come through . . .’

It’s a nice flat, big, with high ceilings and windows to the floor. The furniture
in the living room is tasteful, if bland. There are framed posters on the walls,
the Folies Bergère, the Chat Noir; the prints anyone might pick in a hurry. It hasn’t
been decorated with love.

‘You rent this place?’ She nods. ‘It’s very nice.’

‘It’ll do for a while. Would you like a drink? Some wine? Or I might have beer.’

So there are some things Kate hasn’t told her. ‘Do you have any juice? Or some water?’

‘Sure.’ I follow her into the kitchen. It’s at the back of the flat, neat and clean
– unlike mine when I left this morning – but still Anna apologizes. She quickly puts
away a loaf of bread that’s been left out, a jar of peanut butter. I laugh and go
over to the window. ‘I live with a teenager. This is nothing.’

I think of my family. I wonder how Hugh’s coping with Connor. He said he’d take him
out tonight – to the cinema – or maybe they’d play chess. They’ll get a takeaway,
or maybe
eat out. I know that I ought to give them a call, but right now it’s a relief
to have only myself to think about.

Anna grins and hands me a glass of apple juice. ‘You sure that’s all you want?’

‘Yes, thanks.’ She takes a bottle of wine out of the fridge. ‘I can’t tempt you?
Last chance!’

I smile, tell her again that I’m fine. I could tell her I don’t drink, but I don’t
want to. She might have questions, and it’s not something I want to talk about. Not
right now. I don’t want to be judged.

Anna sits opposite me and holds up her glass. ‘To Kate.’

‘To Kate,’ I say. I take a sip of juice. I register the briefest wish that my glass
was filled with wine, too, and then, like every other time, I let the thought go.

‘Do you want to see her room?’

I hesitate. I don’t want to, but there’s no avoiding it. It’s one of the things I
came here to do. To confront the reality of her life, and therefore also of her death.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Let’s.’

It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There’s a window leading on to a little
balcony, a double bed with a cream duvet cover, a CD player on the dressing table
next to the perfumes. It’s tidy; everything is neatly arranged. Not how I imagined
Kate living at all.

‘The police have searched the room,’ says Anna. ‘They left things pretty much as
they found them.’

The police. I picture them dusting for fingerprints, picking up her things, cataloguing
her life. My skin is white-hot, a thousand tiny detonations of shock. It’s the first
time I’ve connected the place I stand with my sister’s death.

I inhale deeply, as if I can breathe her in, but she’s gone, not even her ghost remains.
The room could be anybody’s. I
turn away from Anna and go over to the bed. I sit
down. There’s a book on the dressing table.

‘That’s for you.’

It’s a photo album, the kind with stiff pages and sheets of adhesive plastic to keep
the pictures in place. Even before I open it I sense what’ll be inside.

‘Kate used to show these to people,’ says Anna. ‘“That’s my sister,” she’d say. She
was so proud, I swear.’

My photographs. Anna sits on the bed beside me. ‘Kate told me your father kept these.
She found them when he died.’

‘My father?’ I say. I never suspected he was even remotely interested in my work.

‘That’s what she said . . .’

On the first page is that picture.
Marcus in the Mirror
.

‘My God . . .’ I say. I have to swallow my shock. It’s the full picture, unedited,
uncropped. I’m there, standing behind Marcus, the camera raised to my eye. Naked.

‘That’s you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And who’s the guy? I see him everywhere at the moment.’

I feel an unexpected flush of pride. ‘The photo’s been used in an exhibition. It’s
become quite popular.’

‘So who is he?’

I look back at the picture. ‘An ex. Marcus.’ I stumble over his name; I wonder when
I last said it out loud. I carry on. ‘We lived together, for a while. Years ago.
I was . . . what . . . ? Twenty? Maybe not even that. He was an artist. He gave me
my first camera. I took this in our flat. Well, it was a squat, really. In Berlin.
We shared it with a few others. Artists, mostly. They came and went.’

‘Berlin?’

‘Yes. Marcus wanted to go there. It was the mid-nineties.
The Wall was down, the
place felt new. Like it’d been wiped clean. You know?’ She nods. I’m not sure she’s
that interested, but I carry on. ‘We lived in Kreuzberg. Marcus’s choice. I think
it was a Bowie thing.’ She looks puzzled. Maybe she’s too young. ‘David Bowie. He
lived there. Or recorded there, I’m not sure . . .’

I put my fingers to the photograph. I remember how I used to take my camera with
me everywhere, just as Marcus would take his sketchbook and our friend Johan his
notebook. These objects weren’t just tools, they were part of who we were, they
were how we made sense of the world. I developed an obsession with taking portraits
of people as they got ready, got dressed, put make-up on, checked their hair in the
mirror.

Anna looks from me to the picture. ‘He looks . . .’ she begins, but then she stops
herself. It’s as if she’s seen something in the picture, something upsetting, that
she can’t quite define. I look at it again. It has this effect on people. It creeps
up on them.

I finish her sentence. ‘Unhappy? He was. Not all the time, I mean, he was singing
along to some song on the radio just after this picture was taken, but yes. Yes,
he was sometimes.’

‘Why?’

I don’t want to tell her the truth. Not all of it.

‘He was just . . . he was a little bit lost, I think, by this point.’

‘Didn’t he have family?’

‘Yes. They were very close, but . . . you know? Drugs make things like that difficult.’

She looks up at me. ‘Drugs?’

I nod. Surely she can see it?

‘Did you love him?’

‘I loved him very much.’ I find myself willing her with a
fierce hope not to ask
what happened, just like I hope that she won’t ask how we met.

She must sense my reluctance. ‘It’s an amazing photo,’ she says. She puts her hand
on my arm. ‘They all are. You’re very talented. Shall we look at some more?’

I turn to the first page. Here Kate has pasted a picture taken much earlier; black
and white and deliberately bleeding at the edges. Frosty, made-up, but not wearing
her wig, putting her heels on. She was sitting on our couch, an overflowing ashtray
at her feet, next to a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. It was always one of my
favourite photographs.

‘Who’s that?’

‘That’s Frosty. A friend.’

‘Frosty?’

‘I can’t remember her real name. She hated having to use it, anyway.’

‘She?’ Anna looks shocked, and I understand why, I suppose. In the picture Frosty’s
hair is cropped short; even with the make-up she looks more male than female.

‘Yes. She was a woman.’ I laugh. ‘Actually, she was sort of neither, but she always
called herself she. She used to say, “You gotta decide, in this world. There’s only
two bathrooms in the bars. There’s only two boxes on the forms. Male or female.”
She decided she was a woman.’

Anna looks again at the picture. I don’t expect her to understand. People like Frosty
– or even people like Marcus – aren’t part of her world. They aren’t even part of
mine any more.

‘What happened to her?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘None of us thought Frosty would last long. She was too fragile
for this world . . . But that might have just been our own melodramatic nonsense.
The truth is, I left Berlin in a hurry. I left them behind. I have no idea what happened
after I’d gone.’

‘You didn’t look back?’

It’s an odd phrase. I think of Lot’s wife, the pillar of salt. ‘I couldn’t.’ It was
too painful, I want to say, but I don’t. I close the photo album and pass it back
to her.

‘No. They’re yours.’

I hesitate.

‘Keep them. This, too.’

She hands me a box that was on the floor next to Kate’s bed. It’s a biscuit tin.
On the lid are the words
Huile d’Olive
, a picture of a woman in a red dress.

‘It’s for you.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s just some personal stuff of Kate’s. I thought you should have it.’

So this is what’s left of my sister. This is what I’ve come to take home. Back to
her son.

I’m nervous, as if the tin might contain a trap, a rat or a poisonous spider.

I take off the lid. The box is full of notebooks, photos, paperwork. Her passport
is on the top and I open it to her photograph. It’s recent, one I haven’t seen before.
Her hair is shorter and I can see she’d lost weight. She looks almost like someone
else.

I look at the expiry date. It’s valid for eight more years. Eight years she’ll never
need. I snap it shut and put it back, then close the box.

‘I’ll look at the rest later,’ I say. I realize I’ve begun to cry, for the first
time since she died. I’m exposed, raw. It’s as if I’ve been slit open like one of
Hugh’s patients, neck to groin. I am flayed, my heart a jagged slash.

I put the box down. I want to get away, to find somewhere quiet and warm where I
can stay for ever and not have to think about anything at all.

But isn’t this what I came for? To mine the memory of my sister, to make sure there
is a tiny part of her that survives for Connor? To feel something, to say sorry,
to say goodbye?

Yes, I think. That’s why I’m here. I’m doing the right thing.

So why do I hate myself?

‘It’s okay,’ says Anna. ‘You go ahead and cry. It’s okay.’

Chapter Four

We take a cab to the restaurant. We’re shown to our table, outside on the pavement.
White tablecloth, held down with plastic clips, a basket of bread. The evening is
warm and pleasant, the air still, loaded with promise.

We chat. Once I recovered we told ourselves we must spend the evening celebrating
Kate’s life as well as mourning her death. We laugh, there’s an ease between us;
Anna even takes out her phone and takes a snap of the two of us with the river in
the background. She tells me she likes this area of the city and wants to live here,
one day. ‘It’s very central,’ she says. ‘By the river . . .’ She orders a carafe
of wine. As the waiter begins to pour I put my hand over the top of my glass and
shake my head.

‘You’re not drinking?’

‘No,’ I say. I think of the excuses I’ve made in the past – I’m on antibiotics, I’m
dieting, or driving – but then the inevitable happens. Other excuses begin to crowd
in, the ones that tell me why this time, this one time, I can take a sip. It’s been
a difficult day, I’m stressed, it’s been fifteen years and it won’t do any harm.

My sister has been killed.

‘I’m fine.’

I think back to what I’ve learned. I can’t avoid the temptation to drink, I have
to recognize the urge. I have to
know that it’s normal, and temporary. I have to
challenge it, or ride it out.

‘To be honest, I don’t drink. I haven’t for a while.’ Anna nods and sips her wine
while I ask for some sparkling water. She looks interested but asks no questions,
and I’m relieved. When she puts her glass down I see that she’s distracted, restless.
She shifts in her seat, rearranges her napkin.

‘I wanted to talk to you about something.’

‘Go on.’

She hesitates. I wonder what she’s going to say. I know the police have interviewed
her extensively; the bar Kate was in that evening is one she goes to. I brace myself
for a revelation.

‘It’s about the money . . .’

I smile. Kate’s will must have surprised her, and Hugh warned me she’d probably mention
it.

‘The money Kate left to you?’

‘Yes. It was a shock . . .’ She picks off some bread. ‘I really wasn’t expecting
it. To be honest, I had no idea she had any money to leave, let alone that she’d
leave some of it to me . . . And I didn’t ask her for it. I do want you to know that.’

I nod. I remember it’d been Hugh who had persuaded Kate to write a will in the first
place, and we’d both been relieved when she’d later changed it to include Anna. It
meant she had friends, she was putting down roots.

‘I know. It’s okay.’

‘Were you surprised? That she left money to me?’

‘No. It makes sense. You were her best friend. Kate was a generous person. She must
have wanted you to have it.’

She looks relieved. I wonder whether it’s because of the money, or the fact that
this conversation isn’t proving as awkward as she’d feared.

‘Where did it come from?’

‘Our father. He died a couple of years ago and left his money to Kate. Just what
was in the bank, plus the proceeds from the sale of his house. It came to a lot more
than anyone expected.’

A lot more, I think. Almost a million pounds. But I don’t say it.

‘Did he leave some to you?’

I shake my head. ‘He thought I didn’t need it, I guess.’

Or maybe it was guilt. He knew he’d neglected his younger daughter. He was trying
to make it up to her.

Anna sighs.

‘Oh, it’s okay,’ I say quickly. ‘Hugh has money in the family and Kate was struggling.’

‘But she didn’t spend it.’

‘No. Hugh suggested she put some of it away, save it for a rainy day. But neither
of us thought she would actually listen to him.’

‘I would happily give my share to you. If you want?’