Sister

16

Preoccupied after my visit to Chrom-Med, I walked much of the way to the café opposite the art college. So many of your friends had come to your funeral, but I was unsure if any of them would turn out for me.

When I went inside the café, it was packed full of students, all of them waiting for me. I was completely at a loss, tongue-tied. I’ve never liked hosting anything, even a lunch party, let alone a group meeting with strangers. And I felt so staid compared to them, with their arty clothes and attitude hair and piercings. One of them with Rasta hair and almond eyes introduced himself as Benjamin. He put his arm around me and led me to a table.

Thinking I wanted to hear more about your life, they told me stories illustrating your talent, your kindness, your humor. And as they told their lovely stories about you, I looked at their faces and wondered if one of them could have killed you. Was Annette with her copper bright hair and slender arms strong enough and vicious enough to kill? When Benjamin’s beautiful almond eyes shed tears, were they real or was he just aware of the attractive picture he made?

“Tess’s friends all described her in different ways,” I tell Mr. Wright. “But there was one phrase that everyone used. Every single person spoke of her joie de vivre.”

Joy and life together. It’s such an ironically perfect description of you.

“She had a great many friends?” asks Mr. Wright, and I am touched by the question because he doesn’t need to ask it. “Yes. She valued friendships very highly.”

It’s true, isn’t it? You’ve always made friends easily, but you don’t discard them easily. At your twenty-first birthday party you had friends from primary school. You move people from your past along with you into your present. Can you be eco about friendships? They are too valuable to be junked when they stop being immediately convenient.

“Did you ask them about the drugs?” asks Mr. Wright, bringing my thoughts back into focus.

“Yes. Like Simon, they were adamant that she never touched them. I asked them about Emilio Codi, but didn’t find out anything useful. Just that he was an ‘arrogant shit,’ and too preoccupied with his own art to be a decent tutor. They all knew about the affair and the pregnancy. Then I asked them about Simon and his relationship with Tess.”

The feeling in the café changed, the atmosphere heavier, loaded with something I didn’t understand. “You all knew Simon wanted a relationship with her?” I asked. People nodded, but no information was volunteered.

“Emilio Codi said he was jealous?” I asked, trying to provoke a conversation.

A girl with jet-black hair and ruby-red lips, like a storybook witch, spoke up. “Simon was jealous of anyone Tess loved.”

I wondered briefly if that included me.

“But she didn’t love Emilio Codi?” I said.

“No. With Emilio Codi it was more like a competitive thing for Simon,” replied the Pretty Witch. “It was Tess’s baby he was jealous of. He couldn’t bear it that she was going to love someone who hadn’t even been born yet, when she didn’t love him.”

I remembered his montage picture of a prison, made of babies’ faces.

“Was he at their funeral?” I asked.

I saw hesitation on the Pretty Witch’s face before she spoke. “We waited for him at the station, but he never showed. I phoned him, asked him what the fuck he was playing at. He said he’d changed his mind and wasn’t coming. Because he wouldn’t have a ‘special place’ and his feelings for Tess would be—let me get this right—‘ignored’ and he ‘couldn’t tolerate that.’”

Was that why I’d sensed the heavier atmosphere when I’d asked about Simon?

“Emilio Codi said he was obsessed by her…?” I said.

“Yeah, he was,” said the Pretty Witch. “When he had that project going, The Female of the Species or some such crap, he used to follow her around like her fucking shadow.”

I saw Benjamin give the Pretty Witch a warning look, but she took no notice. “For fuck’s sake, he was practically stalking her.”

“With his camera as an excuse?” I asked, remembering the photos of you on his bedroom wall.

“Yeah,” said the Pretty Witch. “He wasn’t man enough to look at her directly, had to do it through a lens. Some of them were really long, like he was a fucking paparazzi.”

“Do you know why she tolerated him?” I asked.

A shy-faced boy who’d been quiet up to now spoke up. “She was kind and I think she felt sorry for him. He didn’t have other friends.”

I turned to the Pretty Witch. “Did the project stop, you seemed to imply…?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Barden, his tutor, told him he had to stop. She knew it was just an excuse to follow Tess around. Told him he’d be expelled if he carried on.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“The beginning of the course year,” said Annette. “So it must have been last September, the first week. Tess was relieved about it.”

But his photographs documented you through all of autumn and winter.

“He was still doing it,” I said. “Did none of you know that?”

“He must have got more subtle about it,” said Benjamin.

“That wouldn’t have been hard,” said the Pretty Witch. “But we didn’t see so much of Tess after she went on that ‘sabbatical.’”

I remembered Emilio saying “It’s that boy you should be questioning, always following her around with that bloody camera of his.”

“Emilio Codi knew it hadn’t stopped,” I said. “And he’s a tutor at the college. So why didn’t he get Simon expelled?”

“Because Simon knew about Emilio Codi’s affair with Tess,” replied the Pretty Witch. “They probably each kept the other one quiet.”

I couldn’t put off my question any longer.

“Do you think either of them could have killed her?”

The group was silent, but I sensed embarrassment and awkwardness more than shock. Even the Pretty Witch didn’t meet my eye.

Finally Benjamin spoke up, to be kind to me I think. “Simon told us that she had postpartum psychosis. And because of the postpartum psychosis she committed suicide. He said that’s what the coroner’s verdict was and that the police are sure about it.”

“We didn’t know whether he was telling the truth,” said the shy-faced boy. “But it was in the local paper too.”

“Simon said you weren’t here at the time,” ventured Annette. “But he said that he saw her and she was…” She trailed off, but I could imagine what Simon had told them about your mental state.

So the press and Simon had convinced them of your suicide. The girl they knew and had described to me would never have killed herself, but you’d been the victim of possession by the modern-day devil of puerperal psychosis, a devil that made a girl with joie de vivre hate life enough to end it. You had been killed by something that has a scientific name rather than a human face.

“Yes. The police do believe she committed suicide,” I said. “Because they think she was suffering from puerperal psychosis. But I am certain that they are wrong.”

I saw compassion on some faces as they looked at me, and its poorer cousin pity on others. And then it was “already past one-thirty” and “classes start in ten minutes” and they were leaving.

I thought that Simon must have manipulated them against me before they’d even met me. He’d no doubt told them about the unstable older sister with her loopy theories, which explained why they had been more embarrassed than shocked when I’d asked them about murder, and their awkwardness toward me. But I didn’t blame them for wanting to believe Simon rather than me, for wanting to choose a non-murderous death for you.

Benjamin and the Pretty Witch were the last to go. They asked me to come to the art show in a week’s time, were touchingly insistent, and I said I would. It would give me another opportunity to question Simon and Emilio.

Alone in the café, I thought that Simon had not only lied to me about his “project,” he had even embellished it: “They’re for my final year portfolio…. My tutor thinks it’s the most original and exciting project of the year’s group.” I wondered what else were lies. Had you really spoken to him on the phone the day you died and arranged to meet? Or had he followed you that day, as he so often followed you, and everything else was a construct so I wouldn’t suspect him? He was clearly highly manipulative. Had there really been a man in the bushes that day, or had Simon invented him—or more cleverly, your paranoia, which had conjured him up—to take the focus off himself? How many times did he sit on your doorstep with a huge bouquet, hoping he’d be found and appear innocently waiting for you, even though you were dead?

Thinking about Simon and Emilio, I wondered, as I still do now, if all very beautiful young women have men in their lives who appear sinister. If I had been found dead, there would be no one suspicious in my life, so the focus would have had to go outside my circle of friends and former fiancé. I don’t believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.

“And then you went back to the flat?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes.”

But I feel too tired to tell him about returning to the flat that day, to have to remember what I heard there. My words are slower, my body slumping.

Mr. Wright looks at me, with concern. “Let’s end it there.”

He offers to get me a taxi but I say that a walk will do me good.

He accompanies me to the lift and I realize how much I appreciate his old-fashioned courtesy. I think Amias would have been a little like Mr. Wright as a young man. He smiles good-bye and I think that maybe the little sparkles of romance haven’t been doused after all. Romantic thoughts pep me up a little, more sweetly than caffeine, and I don’t think there’s any harm in entertaining them. So I shall think about Mr. Wright, allow myself that small luxury, and walk across St. James’s Park rather than be squashed in a crowded tube.

The fresh spring air does make me feel better and inconsequential thoughts make me a little braver. When I reach the end of St. James’s Park, I wonder whether I should continue my walk across Hyde Park. Surely it’s about time that I found the courage to confront my demons and finally lay to rest my ghosts.

Heart pumping faster, I go in through the Queen Elizabeth gates. But like its neighbor, Hyde Park too is a riot of color and noise and smells. I can’t find any demons at all in all this greenery, no whispering ghost amidst the ball games.

I walk through the rose garden and then past the bandstand, which looks like a pop-up from a children’s storybook, with its pastel pink surround and sugar-white top held up by licorice sticks. Then I remember the bomb exploding into a crowd, the nails packed around it, the carnage, and I feel someone watching me.

I feel his breath behind me, cold in the warm air. I walk quickly, not turning round. He tracks me, his breath coming faster, lifting the hairs on the nape of my neck. My muscles tense to a spasm. In the distance I can see the Lido with people. I run toward it, adrenaline and fear making my legs shake.

I reach the Lido and sit down, legs still jittery and my chest hurting every time I take a breath. I watch children splashing in the paddling pool and two middle-aged executives paddling with their suit trousers rolled up. Only now do I dare turn around. I think I see a shadow, among the trees. I wait until the shadow is no more than the dappled shade of branches.

I skirt round the copse of trees, making sure I keep close to people and noise. I reach the other side and see a stretch of bright-green new grass with polka-dot crocuses. A girl walks barefoot across it, her shoes in her hand, enjoying sun-warmed grass, and I think of you. I watch her till she’s at the end of the polka-dot grass and only then see the toilets building, a hard dark wound amidst the soft bright colors of spring.

I hurry after the girl and reach the toilets building. She’s at the far side now, with a boy’s arm around her. Laughing together, they’re leaving the park. I leave too, my legs still a little wobbly, my breathing still labored. I try to make myself feel ridiculous. There is nothing to be scared of, Beatrice; it’s what comes of having an overly active imagination—your mind can play all sorts of tricks. Reassurances pilfered from a childhood world of certainty: there’s no monster in the wardrobe. But you and I know he’s real.