Sister: A Novel Part 3

I remembered you telling me about Kasia, your Polish friend, but your description didn't tally with the reality on the doorstep. You'd been flattering to the point of distortion, lending her a gloss that she simply didn't have. Standing there in her absurd miniskirt, her legs textured by gooseb.u.mps and the raised veins of pregnancy, I thought her far from a 'Donatello drawing'.

'Me and Tess met at clinic. No boyfriend too.'

I noted her poor English rather than what she was saying. She looked up at a Ford Escort, parked by the top of the steps, 'He came back. Three weeks.'

I hoped my face showed its complete lack of interest in the state of her personal life.

'When will Tess home?'

'I don't know. n.o.body knows where she is.' My voice started to wobble, but I'd be d.a.m.ned if I'd show emotion to this girl. The sn.o.b in Mum has been healthily pa.s.sed on to me. I continued briskly, 'She hasn't been seen since last Thursday. Do you know where she might be?'

Kasia shook her head. 'We've been holiday. Majorca. Making up.'

The man in the Ford Escort was leaning on the horn. Kasia waved up at him and I saw she looked nervous. She asked me to tell you she'd been, in her broken fractured English, and then hurried up the steps.

Yes, Miss Freud, I was angry she wasn't you. Not her fault.

I went up the bas.e.m.e.nt steps and rang on Amias's doorbell. He answered it, fiddling with the chain.

'Do you know how Tess got all those expensive baby clothes?' I asked.

'She had a spree in the Brompton Road,' he replied. 'She was really chuffed with-'

I impatiently interrupted him, 'I meant how did she afford it?'

'I didn't like to ask.'

It was a reprimand; he had good manners, but I did not.

'Why did you report her missing?' I asked.

'She didn't come and have supper with me. She'd promised she would and she never broke her promise, even to an old man like me.'

He unhooked the chain. Despite his age he was still tall and un-stooped, a good few inches taller than me.

'Maybe you should give the baby things away,' he said.

I was repelled by him and furious. 'It's a little premature to give up on her, isn't it?'

I turned away from him and walked hurriedly down the steps. He called something after me, but I couldn't be bothered to try and make it out. I went into your flat.

'Just another ten minutes, and we'll call it a day,' Mr Wright says and I'm grateful. I hadn't known how physically draining this would be.

'Did you go into her bathroom?' he asks.

'Yes.'

'Did you look in her bathroom cabinet?'

I shake my head.

'So you didn't see anything untoward?'

'Yes, I did.'

I felt exhausted, grimy and bone cold. I longed for a hot shower. It was still two hours till the reconstruction was on TV, so I had plenty of time but I was worried that I wouldn't hear you if you phoned. So that made me think it was a good idea - following that logic which says your crush is bound to turn up on the doorstep the minute you've put on a face mask and your grungiest pyjamas. OK, I agree, logic is hardly the name for it but I hoped having a shower would make you phone. Besides, I also knew my mobile took messages.

I went into your bathroom. Of course, there wasn't a shower just your bath with its chipped enamel and mould around the taps. I was struck by the contrast to my bathroom in New York - a homage to modernist chic in chrome and limestone. I wondered how you could possibly feel clean after being in here. I had a familiar moment of feeling superior and then I saw it: a shelf with your toothbrush, toothpaste, contact lens solutions and a hairbrush with long hairs trapped among the bristles.

I realised I'd been harbouring the hope that you'd done something silly and student-like and gone off to whatever festival or protest was on at the moment; that you'd been your usual irresponsible self and hang the consequences of being over eight-months pregnant and camping in a snowy field. I'd fantasised about lecturing you for your cra.s.s thoughtlessness. Your shelf of toiletries crashed my fantasy. There was no harbour for hope. Wherever you were, you didn't intend to go there.

Mr Wright switches off the tape machine. 'Let's end it there.' I nod, trying to blink away the image of your long hairs in the bristles of your hairbrush.

A matronly secretary comes in and tells us that the press outside your flat has become alarming in number. Mr Wright is solicitous, asking me if I'd like him to find me somewhere else to stay.

'No. Thank you. I want to be at home.'

I call your flat home now, if that's OK with you. I have been living there for two months now and it feels that way.

'Would you like me to give you a lift?' he asks. He must see my surprise because he smiles. 'It's no trouble. And I'm sure today has been an ordeal.'

The printed polyester tie was a present. He is a nice man.

I politely turn down his offer and he escorts me to the lift. 'Your statement will take several days. I hope that's all right?'

'Yes. Of course.'

'It's because you were the princ.i.p.al investigator as well as being our princ.i.p.al witness.'

'Investigator' sounds too professional for what I did. The lift arrives and Mr Wright holds the door open for me, making sure I get safely inside.

'Your testimony is going to seal our case,' he tells me, and as I go down in the crowded lift, I imagine my words being like tar, coating the hull of the prosecution boat, making it watertight.

Outside, the spring suns.h.i.+ne has warmed the early evening air and by cafes white mushroom parasols sprout from hard grey pavements. The CPS offices are only a couple of streets away from St James's Park and I think that I will walk some of the way home.

I try to take a short cut towards the park but my hoped-for cut-through is a dead end. I retrace my footsteps and hear footsteps behind me, not the rea.s.suring click-clack of high heels, but the quietly threatening tread of a man. Even as I feel afraid, I am aware of the cliche of the woman being stalked by evil and try to banish it, but the footsteps continue, closer now, their heavy tread louder. Surely he will overtake me, walking on the other side, showing he means no harm. Instead he comes closer. I can feel the chill of his breath on the back of my neck. I run, my movements jerky with fear. I reach the end of the cul-de-sac and see people walking along a crowded pavement. I join them and head for the tube, not looking round.

I tell myself that it is just not possible. He's on remand, locked up in prison, refused bail. After the trial he's going to go to prison for the rest of his life. I must have imagined it.

I get into a tube and risk a look around the carriage. Immediately I see a photo of you. It's on the front page of the Evening Standard, the one I took in Vermont when you visited two summers ago, the wind whirling your hair out behind you like a s.h.i.+ning sail, your face glowing. You are arrestingly beautiful. No wonder they chose it for their front page. Inside there's the one I took when you were six, hugging Leo. I know you had just been crying but there's no sign of it. Your face had pinged back to normal as soon as you smiled for me. Next to your picture is one of me that they took yesterday. My face doesn't ping back. Fortunately I no longer mind what I look like in photographs.

I get out at Ladbroke Grove tube station, noticing how deftly Londoners move - up stairways and through ticket barriers - without touching another person. As I reach the exit I again feel someone too close behind me, his cold breath on my neck, the p.r.i.c.kle of menace. I hurry away, b.u.mping into other people in my haste, trying to tell myself that it was a draught made by the trains below.

Maybe terror and dread, once experienced, embed themselves into you even when the cause has gone, leaving behind a sleeping horror, which is too easily awakened.

I reach Chepstow Road, and am stunned by the ma.s.s of people and vehicles. There are news crews from every UK station and from the looks of it from most of the ones abroad too. Yesterday's collection of press now seems a village fete that's morphed into a frenetic adventure theme park.

I am ten doors away from your flat when the chrysanthemums technician spots me. I brace myself, but he turns away; again his kindness takes me aback. Two doors later a reporter sees me. He starts to come towards me and then they all do. I run down the steps, make it inside, and slam the door.

Outside, sound booms fill the s.p.a.ce like triffids; lenses of obscene length are shoved up to the gla.s.s. I pull the curtains across, but their lights are still blinding through the flimsy material. Like yesterday I retreat to the kitchen, but there's no sanctuary in here. Someone is hammering on the back door and the front doorbell is buzzing. The phone stops for a second at most, then rings again. My mobile joins in the cacophony. How did they get that number? The sounds are insistent and hectoring, demanding a response. I think back to the first evening I spent in your flat. I thought then that there was nothing as lonely as a phone that didn't ring.

At 10.20 p.m. I watched the TV reconstruction on your sofa, pulling your Indian throw over me in a futile effort to keep warm. From a distance, I really was quite a convincing you. At the end there was an appeal for information and a number to ring.

At 11.30 p.m. I picked up the phone to check it was working. Then I panicked that in that moment of checking someone had been trying to ring: you, or the police to tell me you'd been found.

12.30 a.m. Nothing.

1.00 a.m. I felt the surrounding quietness suffocating me.

1.30 a.m. I heard myself shout your name. Or was your name buried in the silence?

2.00 a.m. I heard something by the door. I hurried to open it but it was just a cat, the stray you'd adopted months before. The milk in the fridge was over a week old and sour. I had nothing to stop its cries.

At 4.30 a.m. I went into your bedroom, squeezing past your easel and stacks of canva.s.ses. I cut my foot and bent down to find shards of gla.s.s. I drew back the bedroom curtains and saw a sheet of polythene taped over the broken windowpane. No wonder it was freezing in the flat.

I got into your bed. The polythene was flapping in the icy wind, the irregular inhuman noise as disturbing as the cold. Under your pillow were your pyjamas. They had the same smell as your dress. I hugged them, too cold and anxious to sleep. Somehow I must have done.

I dreamed of the colour red: pantone numbers PMS 1788 to PMS 1807; the colour of cardinals and harlots; of pa.s.sion and pomp; cochineal dye from the crushed bodies of insects; crimson; scarlet; the colour of life; the colour of blood.

The doorbell woke me.

Tuesday I arrive at the CPS office where spring has officially arrived. The faint scent of freshly mown gra.s.s from the park wafts in with each turn of the revolving door; the receptionists on the front desk are in summer dresses with brown faces and limbs that must have been self-tanned last night. Despite the warm weather I am in thick clothes, overdressed and pale, a winter leftover.

As I go towards Mr Wright's office, I want to confide in him about my imagined stalker of yesterday. I just need to hear, again, that he is locked away in prison and after the trial will stay there for life. But when I go in, the spring suns.h.i.+ne floods the room, the electric light glares down, and in their brightness my ghost of fear left over from yesterday is blanched into nothing.

Mr Wright turns on the tape recorder and we begin.

'I'd like to start today with Tess's pregnancy,' he says and I feel subtly reprimanded. Yesterday he asked me to start when I first 'realised something was wrong' and I began with Mum's phone call during our lunch party. But I know now that wasn't the real beginning. And I also know that if I had taken more time to be with you, if I had been less preoccupied with myself and listened harder, I might have realised something was very wrong months earlier.

'Tess became pregnant six weeks into her affair with Emilio Codi,' I say, editing out all the emotion that went with that piece of news.

'How did she feel about that?' he asks.

'She said she'd discovered that her body was a miracle.'

I think back to our phone call.

'Almost seven billion miracles walking around on this earth, Bee, and we don't even believe in them.'

'Did she tell Emilio Codi?' asks Mr Wright.

'Yes.'

'How did he react?'

'He wanted her to have the pregnancy terminated. Tess told him the baby wasn't a train.'

Mr Wright smiles and quickly tries to hide it, but I like him for the smile.

'When she wouldn't, he told her she'd have to leave the college before the pregnancy started to show.'

'And did she?'

'Yes. Emilio told the authorities she'd been offered a sabbatical somewhere. I think he even came up with an actual college.'

'So who knew about it?'

'Her close friends, including other art students. But Tess asked them not to tell the college.'

I just couldn't understand why you protected Emilio. He hadn't earned that from you. He'd done nothing to deserve it.

'Did he offer Tess any help?' asks Mr Wright.

'No. He accused her of tricking him into pregnancy and said that he wouldn't be pressurised into helping her or the baby in any way.'

'Had she "tricked" him?' asks Mr Wright.

I'm surprised at the amount of detail he wants from me, but then remember that he wants me to tell him everything and let him decide later what is relevant.

'No. The pregnancy wasn't intentional.'

I remember the rest of our phone call. I was in my office overseeing a new corporate ident.i.ty for a restaurant chain, mult.i.tasking with my job as older sister.

'But how can it possibly be an accident, Tess?'

The design team had chosen Bernard MT condensed typeface, which looked old-fas.h.i.+oned rather than the retro look I'd briefed.

'Accident sounds a little negative, Bee. Surprise is better.'

'OK, how can you get a "surprise" when there's a Boots in every high street selling condoms?'

You laughed affectionately, teasing me as I chastised you. 'Some people just get carried away in the moment.'

I felt the implied criticism. 'But what are you going to do?'

'Get larger and larger and then have a baby.'

You sounded so childish; you were acting so childishly, how could you possibly become a mother?

'It's happy news, don't be cross.'

'Did she ever consider an abortion?' Mr Wright asks.

'No.'

'You were brought up as Catholics?'

'Yes, but that wasn't why she wouldn't have an abortion. The only Catholic sacrament Tess ever believed in is the sacrament of the present moment.'