Sister: A Novel Part 18

13.

Sunday.

This morning there isn't even one receptionist on the front desk and the large foyer area is deserted. I take the empty lift up to the third floor. It must just be Mr Wright and me here today.

He told me that he wants to 'go through the Kasia Lewski part of the statement this morning', which will be strange when I saw Kasia an hour ago in your flat, wearing your old dressing gown.

I go straight into Mr Wright's office and again he has coffee and water waiting for me. He asks me if I'm OK, and I rea.s.sure him that I'm fine.

'I'll start by recapping what you've told me so far about Kasia Lewski,' he says, looking down at typed notes, which must be a transcript of an earlier part of my statement. He reads out, '"Kasia Lewski came to Tess's flat on the twenty-seventh of January at about four in the afternoon asking to see her."'

I remember the sound of the doorbell and running to get it; having 'Tess' in my mouth, almost out, as I opened the door and the taste of your name. I remember my resentment when I saw Kasia standing on your doorstep with her high-heeled cheap shoes and the raised veins of pregnancy over goose-pimpled white legs. I shudder at my remembered sn.o.bbishness, but am glad my memory is still acute.

'She told you that she was in the same clinic as Tess?' asks Mr Wright.

'Yes.'

'Did she say at which clinic?'

I shake my head and don't tell him that I was too keen to get rid of her to take any interest, let alone ask any questions. He looks down at his notes again.

'She said she'd been single too but now her boyfriend had returned?'

'Yes.'

'Did you meet Michael Flanagan?'

'No, he stayed in the car. He blared the horn and I remember she seemed nervous of him.'

'And the next time you saw her was just after you'd been to Simon Greenly's flat?' he asks.

'Yes. I took some baby clothes round.'

But that's a little disingenuous. I was using my visit to Kasia as an excuse to avoid Todd and the argument I knew would end our relations.h.i.+p.

Despite the snow and slippery pavements, it only took me ten minutes to walk to Kasia's flat. She's since told me that she always came to yours, and I guess that was to avoid Mitch. Her flat is in Trafalgar Crescent - a concrete ugly imposter amongst the crisp symmetrical garden squares and properly shaped crescents of the rest of W11. Alongside and above her street, as if you could reach it as easily as reaching a book on a tall bookshelf, is the Westway, the roar of traffic thundering down the street. In the stairwells, graffiti artists (maybe they're called painters now) have left their tags, like dogs peeing, marking out their patch. Kasia opened the door, keeping it on the chain. 'Yes?'

'I'm Tess Hemming's sister.'

She unhooked the chain and I heard a bolt being pulled back. Even on her own (let alone the fact it was snowing outside and she was pregnant) she was wearing a tight cropped top and high-heeled black patent boots with diamante studs up the sides. For a moment I worried that she was a prost.i.tute and was expecting a client. I can hear you laughing. Stop.

'Beatrice.' I was taken aback that she remembered my name. 'Come. Please.'

It had been just over two weeks since I'd last seen her - when she came round to the flat, asking for you - and her b.u.mp had got noticeably bigger. I guessed she must be around seven months pregnant now.

I went into the flat, which smelled of cheap perfume and air-freshener, which didn't mask the natural smells of mould and damp evident on the walls and carpet. An Indian throw like the one on your sofa (had you given her one of yours?) had been nailed up at the window. I'd thought that I wouldn't try to put down Kasia's exact words or try to get across her accent, but in this meeting her lack of fluency made what she said more striking.

'I'm sorry. You must be . . . How can I say?' She struggled for the word then, giving up, shrugged apologetically. 'Sad, but sad not big enough.'

For some reason her imperfect English sounded more sincere than a perfectly phrased letter of condolence.

'You love her very much Beatrice.' Love in the present tense because Kasia had yet to learn the past tense, or because she was more sensitive than anyone else to my bereavement?

'Yes, I do.'

She looked at me, her face warm and compa.s.sionate, and she baffled me. Straight off, she had hopped out of the box I'd so neatly stuck her into. She was being kind to me and it was meant to be the other way around. I gave her the small suitcase I'd brought with me. 'I've brought some baby things.' She didn't look nearly as pleased as I'd expected. I thought it must be because the clothes were intended for Xavier; that they were stained with sadness.

'Tess . . . funeral?' she asked.

'Oh yes of course. It's in Little Hadston, near Cambridge on Thursday the fifteenth February at eleven o'clock.'

'Can you write . . . ?'

I wrote down the details for her, and then I virtually pushed the suitcase of baby clothes into her hands.

'Tess would want you to have them.'

'Our priest, he says Ma.s.s for her on Sunday.' I wondered why was she changing the subject. She hadn't even opened the suitcase. 'That was OK?'

I nodded. I'm not sure what you'll make of it though.

'Father John. He's very nice man. He's very . . .' She absent-mindedly moved her hand onto her b.u.mp.

'Very Christian?' I asked.

She smiled, getting the joke. 'For priest. Yes.'

Was she joking too? Yes, straight back. She was much sharper than I'd thought.

'The Ma.s.s. Does Tess mind?' she asked. Again I wondered if the present tense was intentional. Maybe it was - if a Ma.s.s is all it's cracked up to be then you're up there in heaven, or in the waiting room of purgatory, present tense. You're in the now, if not in the here and now - and maybe Kasia's Ma.s.s reached you and you're now feeling a little foolish about your earthly atheism.

'Would you like to look in the case and decide what you want?'

I'm not sure if I was being kind or trying to get back into a place where I felt superior. I certainly didn't feel comfortable being the recipient of kindness from someone like Kasia. Yes, I was still sn.o.bby enough to think 'someone like'.

'I make tea first?'

I followed her into the dingy kitchen. The linoleum on the floor was torn, exposing concrete underneath. But everything was as clean as it could be given the handicap it started with. White chipped china gleamed, old saucepans shone around their rust spots. She filled the kettle and put it on to the hob. I didn't think she'd be able to tell me anything useful but decided to try anyway. 'Do you know if anyone had tried to give Tess drugs?'

She looked aghast. 'Tess never take drugs. With baby, nothing bad. No tea, no coffee.'

'Do you know who Tess was afraid of?'

Kasia shook her head. 'Tess not afraid.'

'But after she had the baby?'

Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away from me, struggling to regain her composure. Of course she'd been away with Mitch in Majorca when you had Xavier. She hadn't come back till after you'd died, when she'd come knocking on your door and found me instead. I felt guilty for upsetting her, for questioning her when she clearly couldn't help me at all. She was now making me tea so I could hardly leave, but I had no idea what to say to her. 'So do you work?' I asked, a rather unsubtle variation on the standard c.o.c.ktail party line of 'So what do you do?'

'Yes. Cleaning . . . Sometime supermarket shelves, but night work, horrible. Sometime I work for magazines.'

I immediately thought of p.o.r.n mags. My prejudices, based on her wardrobe choices, were too stubbornly entrenched to be s.h.i.+fted without some effort. Though to be a little bit fair to myself I had started to worry about her in the s.e.x trade rather than simply being judgemental. She was astute enough to sense I had reservations about her 'magazine work'.

'The free ones,' she continued. 'I put them in the letter-boxes. The house that have "No Junk Mail" I put in too. I can't read English.'

I smiled at her. She seemed pleased by the first genuine smile I'd given her.

'All the doors in the rich places not want free papers. But we not go to the poor places. Funny, isn't it?'

'Yes.' I searched for another opening conversational gambit. 'So where did you meet Tess?'

'Oh. I not tell you?'

Of course she had, but I'd forgotten - which isn't surprising when you remember how little interest I took in her.

'The clinic. My baby ill too,' she said.

'Your baby has cystic fibrosis?'

'Cystic fibrosis, yes. But now . . .' She touched her stomach. 'Better now. A miracle.' She made a sign of the cross, a gesture as natural to her as pus.h.i.+ng her hair away from her face. 'Tess called it the "Mummies with disasters clinic". First time I met her she made me laugh. She asked me to flat.' Her words caught in her throat. She turned away from me. I couldn't see her face but I knew she was trying not to cry. I reached out my hand to put on her shoulder, but just couldn't do it. I find being tactile to a person I don't know as hard as touching a spider if you're arachnophobic. You may find it funny, but it really isn't. It's almost a handicap.

Kasia finished making the tea and put it all on a tray. I noticed how proper she was, with cups and saucers, a jug for milk, a strainer for the tea leaves, the cheap teapot warmed first.

As we went through to the sitting room, I saw a picture on the opposite wall, which hadn't been visible to me before. It was a charcoal drawing of Kasia's face. It was beautiful. And it made me see that Kasia was beautiful too. I knew you'd done it.

'Tess's?' I asked.

'Yes.'

Our eyes met and for a moment something was communicated between us that didn't need language and therefore there was no barrier. If I had to translate that 'something' into words it would be that you and she were clearly close enough for you to want to draw her; that you saw beauty in people that others didn't see. But it wasn't as verbose as that, no language clunked between us; it was a more subtle thing. The sound of a door slamming startled me.

I turned to see a man coming into the room. Large and muscular, about twenty years old, he looked absurdly big in the tiny flat. He was wearing labourers' overalls, no T-s.h.i.+rt underneath, his muscular arms tattooed like sleeves. His hair was matted with plaster dust. His voice was surprisingly quiet for such a large man, but it had the timbre of threat. 'Kash? Why the f.u.c.k haven't you bolted the door? I told you-' He stopped as he saw me. 'Health visitor?'

'No,' I replied.

He ignored me, directing his question to Kasia. 'So who the f.u.c.k is this then?'

Kasia was nervous and embarra.s.sed. 'Mitch . . .'

He sat down, stating his claim to the room and by implication my lack of one.

Kasia was nervous of him, the same expression I'd seen that day outside your flat when he'd blared the horn. 'This is Beatrice.'

'And what does "Beatrice" want with us?' he asked, mocking.

I suddenly felt conscious of my designer jeans and grey cashmere sweater, de rigueur weekend wardrobe in New York but hardly the kind of outfit to blend in on a Monday morning in Trafalgar Crescent.

'Mitch doing nights. Very hard,' said Kasia, 'He gets very . . .' She struggled to find the word, but you need to have a mother tongue phrase book in your brain to find a euphemism for Mitch's behaviour. 'Out of sorts' was the one that sprung to my mind most quickly; I almost wanted to write it down for her.

'You don't need to f.u.c.king apologise for me.'

'My sister, Tess, was a friend of Kasia's.' I said, but my voice had become Mum's; anxiety always accentuates my upper-cla.s.s accent.

He looked angrily at Kasia. 'The one you were always running off to?' I didn't know if Kasia's English was good enough for her to understand he was being a bully to her. I wondered if he was a physical bully too.

Kasia's voice was quiet. 'Tess my friend.'

It was something I hadn't heard since primary school, standing up for someone simply by saying 'she's my friend'. I was touched by the powerful simplicity of it. I stood up, not wanting to make things more awkward for her. 'I'd better be going.'

Mitch was sprawled in an armchair; I had to step over his legs to get to the door. Kasia came with me. 'Thank you for the clothes. Very kind.'

Mitch looked at her. 'What clothes?'

'I brought some baby things round. That's all.'

'You like playing Lady Bountiful then?'

Kasia didn't understand what he was saying, but could sense it was hostile. I turned to her. 'They're just such lovely things and I didn't want to throw them away or give them to a charity shop where they might have been bought by anybody.'

Mitch leaped in, a pugnacious man intent on a fight, and enjoying it. 'So it's us or a charity shop?'

'When do you get off from your macho posturing?'

Confrontation, which used to seem so alien to me, now felt familiar territory.

'We've got our own f.u.c.king baby clothes,' he said going into a bedroom. Moments later he came out with a box and dumped it at my feet. I looked inside. It was filled with expensive baby clothes. Kasia seemed very embarra.s.sed. 'Tess and me, shopping. Together. We . . .'

'But how did you have the money?' I asked. Before Mitch could explode I hurriedly continued, 'Tess had no money either, and I just want to know who gave it to her.'

'The people doing the trial,' said Kasia. 'Three hundred pounds.'

'What trial? The cystic fibrosis trial?' I asked.

'Yes.'

I wondered if it could be a bribe. I'd got into the mental habit of suspecting everyone and everything connected to you - and this trial, which I'd had misgivings about at the very start, was already a soil rich with anxiety for seeds of distrust to take root.

'Can you remember the person's name?'

Kasia shook her head. 'It was in envelope. Just with leaflets, no letter. A surprise.'

Mitch cut across her. 'And you spent the whole f.u.c.king lot on baby clothes, which it'll be out of in weeks and Christ knows there's enough else we need.'

Kasia looked away from him. I sensed this argument was old and much worn and had broken any joy she had once felt in buying the clothes.