S. Watson: Second Life

‘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 what 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.

‘No. They’re yours.’

I hesitate.

‘Keep them. This, too.’

She hands me a box that was on the floor next to Kate’s bed. It’s a biscuit tin. On the lid are the words Huile d’Olive , a picture of a woman in a red dress.

‘It’s for you.’