“And that’s not all,” Alex says. He doesn’t sound angry, exactly. More frightened, behind that prickly defensive edge. “I found some other stuff. A load of papers about someone called Rachel. You’ve never mentioned her to me either. It feels like there’s all this . . .” He raises his hands helplessly into the air, encircling us for a moment. “All this stuff coming out of the woodwork, and I don’t know what any of it means, or even if it means anything at all, I don’t . . .”
He carries on talking but I’m not truly listening. My mind has snagged on the sound of the name in his mouth. Rachel. I never thought anyone would look me in the eye and say this name ever again. It’s shocking. Exciting, almost. I can’t just pretend this isn’t happening, or try to fob him off. And all of a sudden my head clears and I know what I have to do.
“I’m going to tell you something,” I say abruptly. “Something that I didn’t intend to tell you now, or at all.”
Alex is motionless and watchful. “What? Whatever it is, Natalie, you can tell me. It won’t change how I feel about you. I love you—I know you.” Our faces are close together and his lips are inches away from mine, his breath sweet and cool on my face.
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do,” I say at last.
He pauses, then frowns. “What do you mean?” he says slowly.
I draw in breath and the night air rushes into my lungs. My head spins lightly. Am I really going to do this? “When I was younger,” I say, “I was someone else.”
“Well,” he says automatically, configuring this into something he can understand, “we all change. We all do things that—”
“No,” I say. “I don’t just mean that I behaved differently, or that I did things I wouldn’t do now. I mean I was someone else entirely. I had a different life, a different name. All the things I’ve told you about my past, my childhood—they weren’t real.”
I’ve been speaking with clinical precision, because it seems the easiest way to get through this. The only way. But now I cut myself off and I’m staring at him, waiting for his reaction.
He frowns again, looking puzzled and lost. I can tell he hasn’t fully taken it in.
“Those papers you found,” I say. “They’re mine. I mean, they’re me. About me. Rachel . . .” I shake my head, aware I’m not really making sense. “She’s me,” I say. “I’m her.”
He stares at me. “Rachel?” he repeats. Softly, as if he’s trying it on for size and finding it somehow lacking. “But . . . I don’t understand. Why?”
“I want to explain this to you,” I say, “but I need more time. Like I said, I didn’t think I’d be doing this. It feels so strange.”
“Join the club.” It’s a weak attempt at flippancy; he forces a smile, clearly lost at sea. “Look, you’re landing a lot on me here. This is . . . you’re scaring me. Did you—did something bad happen?” He grimaces, as if he’s just heard how childish the words sound.
I half nod. But no, I’m not ready to go all the way, not yet. “Yes. Something to do with my sister. Sadie.” I glance down at the photograph, which he still holds in his outstretched hands. The painted-on smile, the slanted eyes, the cheekbones that are angled and defined, the same as my own. He follows my gaze, and I know he gets it.
“I didn’t even know you had a sister,” he says flatly.
“I don’t,” I reply, and the conviction that I’m speaking the truth floods through me viciously. “Not really. Not anymore.”
PART TWO
RACHEL
1999
It’s almost eleven at night and she’s alone in the apartment. At times like this, when she’s tidied up and dimmed the lights and is wandering slowly back and forth through the rooms, she likes to shift into make-believe. Part of this fantasy is that the apartment is actually hers. She’s somehow come into enough money to buy it, in this exclusive part of London, just overlooking Covent Garden market. Everything she sees and touches belongs to her, and no one can take it away. In reality the apartment belongs to Martine, a friend from uni who promptly went off traveling after they graduated, her father’s seemingly limitless wallet acting as the wind beneath her wings. But Rachel knows she’s been lucky to be chosen as the friend who gets to look after the apartment and pay a nominal rent, and in truth this isn’t the most important part of the fantasy. The real key to it—the thing that keeps her coming back to this compulsive little ritual—is the idea that she lives here alone.
Now, as ever, it’s an illusion that is difficult to sustain, because everywhere she looks the evidence to the contrary hits her. The black smudge on the wall behind the cooker where Sadie once threw a charcoal-stained frying pan in a drunken temper. The ground-in marks left by cigarette butts that pepper the floor of her bedroom, like ink shaken from a pen. The deeply grooved scratches along the beautiful parquet floorboards in the lounge, which Rachel doesn’t even know the origin of. They weren’t there, and then they were. She’s aware that she should be doing more about all of this. Trying at least to do some damage limitation, scrub and shampoo and paint until things look a little better. But she’s paralyzed—unable to stop picturing Martine’s look of horror when she finally returns to her nest, unable to imagine this not happening, or do anything to stop it.
She completes her slow circle of the apartment and glances at the clock again. Five past eleven. She has no idea when Sadie might be back, or even where she is. She’s probably at a club, mingling mindlessly with people whose names and faces she barely knows, treating them like her best and oldest friends. Rachel thinks briefly about the well-trodden paths that Sadie might take tonight: causing drug-fueled trouble out on the streets in the early hours, or ending up at some weirdo’s apartment and crisis-calling her to come and get her, or having a run-in with the police. She even thinks about some of the darker possibilities, ones that haven’t yet happened. Sadie lying broken and crumpled in the corner of a back alley, raped or mugged or left for dead. And then she lets the idea that her sister might never come home alight and settle, just for an instant, and she feels the familiar, sickening pull between devastation and relief.
* * *
• • •
IT’S NOT POSSIBLE that she really remembers much about when Sadie was a toddler, as she herself is only a couple of years older, but nonetheless there’s a whole host of pictures there, real or imagined, locked away in her head. She remembers, or has been told often enough that it’s become synonymous with memory, her sister following her around everywhere she went. Even dutifully waiting outside the bathroom door while she went to the toilet—a dumb and faithful Labrador awaiting notice and praise.
When they were young Sadie was called her shadow. It was a nickname that stuck for a while, and then gradually people stopped using it. Not just, she thinks in retrospect, because her sister stopped following her around, but also because it started feeling more and more inappropriate as Sadie blossomed and brightened. It soon became blindingly obvious that she was no one’s shadow. In fact, she had a tendency to cast everything else into negative, without even meaning to. Rachel has a vivid memory—and this one is definitely real, has been revisited time and time again like a nervous tic despite its embarrassing lack of relevance to an adult life—of climbing the small wooden steps of the school assembly hall that led to the stage. She’s on her way to collect a trophy at prize day, possibly for swimming or art. And there in the front row is Sadie, beaming and clapping her hands furiously until her palms are red and sore, radiating triumph and praise. And the eyes of the teachers and the parents gradually drawn to her, fond with approval and indulgence, so that by the time Rachel actually receives the trophy no one really seems to be looking at her at all. It’s not Sadie’s fault. Not exactly. But this is the way it is.
As a child, she is conscious of a growing resentment, even if she can’t give it a name. A tightness in her chest when her sister leaps into view, a kind of hot itchiness s
preading inside her when she watches her holding court. She knows that she, Rachel, is superior in many ways. She’s cleverer, more talented, more practical. She can’t quite put her finger on why this neatly assembled little tower of qualities doesn’t seem to count for much in the face of whatever her sister has. They even look quite similar, similar enough to be recognized as siblings at a glance. Sometimes she studies her own oval face in the mirror, half consciously comparing it to her sister’s slightly more heart-shaped one. The color of their eyes, the moldings of their bones. Similar, but not the same.
When she thinks about the single morning when this resentment coalesced into something tangible, it has the quality of a dream. A stifling summer morning, the dawn just breaking through sun-drenched curtains, the air hot and thick. She stretches her limbs in bed, feeling the stickiness of the sheets against her skin. Quietly, she slips out of bed. The carpet warm and soft under her feet, making it easy to move without noise. She and Sadie share a room, in those days. Her sister is sleeping, one arm flung carelessly above her head, her breathing deep and regular, her eyelids moving minutely with dreams. She sits and watches her for a while. Cross-legged on the carpet, her eyes narrowed in the glare of the sun. Her sister’s hair spills like a fountain across the pillow. Shades of pale brown, gold, and something close to red, interwoven into some complex pattern.
When the thought strikes her, it feels calm and mellow. Nothing sinister. She moves on her hands and knees toward the box of arts- and-crafts supplies, rooting through until she finds the scissors. And then she crouches by the side of Sadie’s bed and lifts a strand of hair gently up, held between her fingers, and snips. It falls to the ground silently, a whisper of color. No skies fall, no thunderclaps crash. So she reaches out again and takes another strand, a little thicker this time, and cuts again. And soon there becomes something gently compulsive in this easy rhythm, and the gradually growing pile of softness by her feet, scattering like thread. She is surprised by how deeply her sister sleeps. It feels as if they might stay here forever, lost in this little ritual. So much so that when Sadie stirs and opens her eyes, it takes a moment for her to catch up with reality.
Rachel glances down at the scissors in her hand, looks at the fallen hair on the carpet. There is more of it than she thought, and when she looks back at her sister she realizes with a sense of impending doom that she has made a mess of this. The hair sticks out jagged and uneven, cut in some places almost to the scalp. She opens her mouth to give some kind of explanation, even though she has no idea what that might be, but by this time Sadie is screaming, her eyes round and accusing and terrified, and she can already hear the thump of their mother’s footsteps along the corridor, the bedroom door yawning open and the drawn-in breath before the storm erupts.
After this storm has passed, the incident is covered over—quickly, shamefully. Rachel is excused on account of her youth, although the truth is that at six years old she’s just treading the boundary of accountability, and in her heart she knows that she meant to do what she did, even if in the moment it didn’t feel strictly wrong. Sadie has a professional haircut, a gamine crop that actually makes her look even more striking than she did before. Their parents, with their usual ineffectual misjudgment, eventually turn it into a funny story. Occasionally, Rachel is referred to as “the hairdresser in training”; an indulgent, slightly patronizing dismissal of whatever driving force might have led their daughter to try to ruin her sister’s appearance while she slept. It’s an infrequent but unsettling reminder of something she barely glimpses out of the corner of her eye; the knowledge that no matter what she does, it will have little effect on Sadie’s hard, glancing power. Their roles are set, and she can do nothing about it.
* * *
• • •
DESPITE THESE UNCOMFORTABLE undercurrents, they’re close as children. Exploring in the woods near their home, digging holes in the mud and filling them with water, making sculptures out of bits of wood and leaves. Drawing pictures of each other, elaborately signed and dated. Holding midnight feasts in their shared bedroom, giggling over the stash of chips and cookies they’ve patiently built up over months of covert swiping from the cupboard. But these things can only take them so far, and by the time they are in their teens this closeness has begun to feel precarious and difficult to sustain, a needle jolting on a record.
Sadie at thirteen looks years older—her body already taking on provocative curves, her face carefully made up to suggest wanton sophistication. She starts bringing home boyfriends: randomly selected strangers who share little except a certain brutish charisma and an apparent devotion to her. She makes friends with the kinds of girls who Rachel dreads passing in corridors. The sort who whisper and roll their eyes and smoke cigarettes at the back of the school playing fields. She realizes, with a kind of dawning dread, that her sister is one of them—more than that, she’s the queen. Rachel’s clever but she’s pretty, too; she should be able to hold her head up high and walk without embarrassment. She shouldn’t have to train her gaze straight ahead and ignore the piercing glares of her sister and her friends as they stand lolling against school lockers with their skirts hitched up, a ridiculous mean-girls parody. And it’s true that they don’t really come near her, those girls, but there’s a sense of sharks circling, ready to swoop if they sense blood.
At home Sadie increasingly acts as if she owns the place; haughtily jabbing the remote to turn off whatever television program her family are watching frequently announcing that she’s so fucking bored here she could die, stinking the place out with cheap hair spray and perfume. Their parents steal looks over the dinner table at their changeling daughter with the rainbow-streaked hair and the long glittering nails, and bewilderment is written all over their faces. They have no idea how she got here. Even less how to bring her back into the fold. It is Rachel’s role to act as the intermediary, interpreting her sister’s moods and mumbles and haughty stares, and to translate them into something their parents can understand. It’s a tiring role, and for the most part a thankless one.
And yet there are moments, even in those days, when the distance between them unaccountably drops away and they’re conspirators again. She remembers a movie afternoon, soon after Christmas when the weather is too cold and wet for Sadie to want to venture out. They huddle under blankets together and light the fire; they watch films that they’re ten years too old for. There’s a kind of fuzzy nostalgia binding them together and briefly lighting a spark of intimacy. One evening, they go to a concert together to watch one of the few bands they both love, and they dance wildly in the crush of people, laughing breathlessly with the effort.
And then of course there are the times when Sadie’s mask slips and she shows a kind of helpless vulnerability that Rachel can’t help but respond to, no matter how calculated she fears it might be. The vanishingly rare occasions when a boyfriend dumps her, rather than the other way around, and Rachel is called into her room to witness her face wet with tears, her eyes sending a mute appeal. She grows used to the painful tug of emotions that wrestles inside her at these times: the desire to push her sister away and snap that it serves her right to be the one who is hurt for a change, combined with the need to cuddle and comfort and take the hurt away. Somehow it always seems to be the gentler impulse that wins, even though she knows that this closeness won’t last. Her sister might not love her, or even like her very much, but she needs her. Of that she’s sure.
When Rachel is away at the university, those three years unencumbered by anything but her own purpose and her own desires, she starts to think that things may change. The uncomfortable tightness of the threads between herself and Sadie seems to loosen. She no longer feels the same sense of duty or responsibility, and she’s free to be herself. She has boyfriends, makes new friends, goes to parties. And when she sees her sister less often, they do seem to get on better. So when, after she’s graduated and Martine has temporarily gifted her the Covent Garden apart
ment, Sadie asks casually if she can stay for a short while, it feels easy to be gracious. Churlish to be otherwise.
It takes her longer than it should to realize that Sadie’s assurance that she’ll be out within a fortnight, three weeks at the most, is completely empty. Her nineteen-year-old sister has nowhere to go; no job to speak of, no money, and she’s spinning further and further off the rails. Their parents are hundreds of miles away, and in any case are as distant emotionally as they are physically. It dawns on her gradually that she is now Sadie’s sole caretaker. The person in charge of her and her well-being, in charge of keeping her in line. And she’s totally unequipped for the task.
She settles down in the armchair by the window now, looking once more at the clock and seeing that it is almost midnight. She’s been lost in her thoughts for a long while. She stares out at the street, and at the shadowy outline of her own reflection in the mirrored glass. She’s thinking about what happened last night. She was alone in the apartment again, and driven by something she can’t now define—perhaps a mix of boredom, defiance, and curiosity—she had gone to Sadie’s wardrobe and started rifling through her clothes. She had pulled out a tight red dress, the sort of thing she would never dare to pick up in a shop, and before she knew it she was sliding out of her own clothes and pulling it over her head, feeling the fabric stretch and cling to her body. She looked into the mirror, and the woman she saw looking back wasn’t quite her, and not quite Sadie either, but some bizarre mixture of the two. She was attractive. Sexy, even. She examined herself more carefully, feeling the rush of power and confidence settle over her like mist, and she thought, So this is what it feels like to be her.
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