Second Life

by S. J. Watson

  ‘How’s Connor?’ she asks. She seems genuinely concerned; I can’t believe it had once crossed my mind that it’d been her trying to help my sister to get him back.

  ‘He’s all right. I suppose . . .’

  Our coffees arrive. Two espressos, sachets of sugar in each saucer, a single foil-wrapped chocolate.

  ‘Actually, I’m not sure he is. All right, I mean. He seems angry all the time, slamming doors for no reason, and I know he’s crying a lot. I hear him, but he denies it.’

  She doesn’t respond. Part of me wants to tell her I’m worried I’m losing my son. For so many years we’ve been so close, more like friends than mother and child. I’ve encouraged him in his art, taken him out sketching. He’s always turned to me when he’s been upset, as much as he has to Hugh. He’s always told me everything. So why does he now feel that he has to suffer alone?

  ‘He keeps asking if they’ve caught anyone yet.’

  ‘It’s understandable,’ she says. ‘He’s young. He’s lost an aunt.’

  I hesitate. She’d known, surely?

  ‘You know Kate was Connor’s mother?’

  She nods.

  ‘How much did she tell you?’

  ‘Everything, I think. I know you took Connor when he was a baby.’

  There’s a tightening in my throat, a defensiveness. It’s that word. ‘Took’. I feel the same familiar spasm of irritation – the rewritten story, the buried truth – and I try to swallow it down.

  ‘We didn’t take him, exactly. Back then, Kate wanted us to have him.’

  Even if she didn’t later, I think. I wonder what Kate’s version of the story became. I imagine she told her friends that we’d swooped in, that we snatched Connor when she was managing perfectly well, that we only wanted her baby because we couldn’t have one of our own.

  Again the tiny part of me that’s relieved she’s gone bubbles up. I can’t help it, even though it makes me feel wretched. Connor is mine.

  ‘It was complicated. I loved her. But Kate could have a very distorted sense of how well she was coping.’

  Anna smiles, as if to reassure me. I go on. ‘I know it wasn’t easy for her. Giving him up, I mean. She was very young, when he was born. Just a child herself, really. Sixteen. Only a little bit older than Connor is now.’

  I look down at my coffee cup. I remember the day Connor was born. It had only been a few months since I got back from Berlin, and I’d been at a meeting. I was back in the programme, and I was glad. Things were going well. When I got home Hugh had packed an overnight bag. ‘Where are we going?’ I said, and he told me. Kate was in hospital. In labour. ‘I’ve called your father,’ he added. ‘But he isn’t answering.’

  I couldn’t process what I was hearing, yet at the same time part of me knew it was true.

  ‘In labour?’ I said. ‘But—?’

  ‘That’s what they said.’

  But she’s sixteen, I wanted to say. She has no job. She’s living at home, our father is supposed to be looking after her.

  ‘She can’t be.’

  ‘Well, apparently she is. We need to go.’

  By the time we arrived Connor had been born. ‘Don’t be angry,’ said Hugh, before we went in. ‘She needs our support.’

  She was sitting in bed, holding him. She passed him to me as soon as I walked in, and the love I felt for him was instant and shocking in its intensity. I couldn’t have been angry with her, even if I’d wanted to.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ I said. Kate closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted, then looked away.

  Later, we talked about what had happened. She claimed she hadn’t even known she was pregnant. Hugh said it wasn’t that uncommon. ‘Particularly with teenage girls,’ he said. ‘Their hormones might not have stabilized, so their periods can be irregular anyway. It’s surprising, perhaps, but it does happen.’ I tried to imagine it. It was possible, I suppose; Kate was a plump child, faced with a body that was now unfamiliar. She might have missed the fact she was carrying a baby.

  ‘She tried to manage,’ I say to Anna now. ‘For a couple of years. But . . .’

  I shrug. She had nothing. By the time Connor was three she’d taken him to Bristol – without telling anyone why – and was living in a tiny bedsit with a shared bathroom and no kitchen. She had an electric hob plugged in next to the sink and there was a travel kettle balanced on an upturned washing-up bowl. The only time I visited, the place smelt of urine and soiled nappies, and Kate was in bed while her son sat strapped into a car seat on the floor, naked and hungry.

  I look up at Anna. ‘She asked me to take him. Just for a few months. Until she got on her feet. She loved Connor but couldn’t look after him. Mum wasn’t around, of course, and Dad had no interest. Six months turned into a year, and then two. You know how it is. Connor needed some stability. When he was about five we decided – all of us – that it’d be better if we formally adopted him.’

  She nods. ‘You didn’t try to contact the father?’

  ‘It was all a bit of a mess. Kate never told us who he was.’ There’s a pause. I feel a sense of great shame, on Kate’s behalf, plus sadness for Connor. ‘I don’t think she really knew.’

  ‘Or maybe he wasn’t someone whose help she wanted . . .’

  ‘No.’ I look out of the window at the traffic, the taxis, the bikes wheeling by. The atmosphere is heavy. I want to brighten it. ‘But he has Hugh, now. They’re incredibly close. They’re actually very similar.’

  I say it in a kind of rush. It’s ironic, I think. Hugh is the one person that Connor has no blood relationship to, yet it’s Hugh who Connor looks up to.

  ‘You know,’ says Anna, ‘Kate always told me that although it was very painful she was relieved when you offered to look after Connor. She said that, in a way, you saved her life.’

  I wonder if she’s just trying to make me feel better. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes. She said if it hadn’t been for you and Hugh she’d have had to move back in with your father . . .’

  She rolls her eyes, she thinks it’s a joke. I keep quiet. I’m not sure I’m ready to let her into the family story. Not that far, not yet. She senses my discomfort and reaches across the table to take my hand.

  ‘Kate loved you, you know?’

  I feel a flush of relief, but then it’s replaced with a sadness so profound it’s physical, a beat within me. I look at my hand, in Anna’s, and think of the way I’d held Kate’s in mine. When she was a baby I’d take each tiny finger and marvel at its delicacy, its perfection. She was born early, so fragile, and yet so full of energy and desire for life. I wasn’t yet seven, but already my love for my sister was fierce.

  And yet it wasn’t enough to save her.

  ‘She said that?’

  Anna nods. ‘Often.’

  ‘I wish she’d told me that when she was alive. But then I guess she wouldn’t, would she?’

  She smiles. ‘Nope . . .’ she says, laughing. ‘Never. That wouldn’t have been her style.’

  We finish our drinks then take the Métro as far as Rue Saint-Maur. We walk to Anna�
��s apartment. She lives in a mansion block, above a laundrette. There’s a communal door and Anna tries the handle before punching the code into the entry lock. ‘It’s broken, half the time,’ she says. We go up to the first floor. There’s a writing desk on the landing, littered with post, and she pulls out one of its drawers and feels underneath it. ‘There’s a spare key here,’ she says. ‘It was Kate’s idea. She was always forgetting her keys. It’s handy for my boyfriend, too, if he gets here before me.’

  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 w
hat 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.