Claire Kendal - The Second Sister

What has changed his feelings towards me so drastically? Has he finally decided that a decade is long enough to be patient? Is it work ambition? Some top secret new knowledge about you that he doesn’t trust himself not to share? His pure fury that I won’t take his advice and give up the idea of visiting Thorne?

A split second before I see him, a trickle of sweat runs down my back and my skin prickles and I think I am going to panic. Something in me, some sense somewhere, knows before I really know. A change in the air carried by his voice or scent. A glimpse in my peripheral vision. Simply his material presence in the building. My heart freezes. My stomach goes hollow.

Liar . I want to scream the word at him. But I don’t. I swallow it back and feel as if it will choke me.

Ted is sitting at a small corner table with a woman whose face I cannot see, though the back of her head – her dark silky hair – is visible. That hair is so like my own my stomach seems to lurch up to my throat and there is a flame at the top of my head that rushes down my spine to my toes.

Is it you? I grab the arm of the stranger standing next to me to steady myself before he looks down and asks if I am okay, which shakes away my crazy split-second thought that you are actually here. I mumble that I am fine, I stumbled, I am so sorry.

The two of them haven’t changed position since the photograph was taken. Ted is facing the room with his back to the wall of draughty glass, so he can keep watch. But he isn’t watching. He doesn’t notice me, and not because of all the bodies between us. He doesn’t notice me because he is looking at her with such deep interest.

I think of Sadie a year ago, when she and I ran into her latest ex-boyfriend. He was holding hands in a restaurant with his new girlfriend. Sadie marched right up to them. Her performance was received in stunned silence. There is no doubt it was memorable. I certainly have not forgotten it, and I doubt her audience ever will.

Hi. I’m the ex-girlfriend. Has he moved his mother in yet to give you lessons on how to clean and cook for him? You know, until I met Donald I thought it was a myth that all men wanted anal. If you haven’t yet, you’re about to learn from him that it’s no myth. Do you enjoy it when that nasty brat of his wipes his snot all over you and screams until he gets his way? I hope the two of you get all the happiness you deserve.

I am not Sadie. I do not want to be anything like her. I do not want to go anywhere near Ted and this woman. I can taste bile, coming up from my stomach and into my throat. Did Sadie take the photo and send the anonymous email, following it up with her silent phone call to gloat? Who else could have done it?

I consider Ted’s ex-wife. I have never properly met her. I haven’t searched for her on the internet. I feared that even a glimpse of her face would be like staring down Medusa and I would be turned to stone. More than anything, I feared that once I started to look at her I wouldn’t be able to stop.

Maybe his ex-wife suspects me of luring Ted away from her, of sleeping with him while they were still together. Maybe she blames me for their failed marriage. She is a photographer. It is perfectly possible to imagine her sending me a carefully selected image.

I am faint and jumbled to the core as I continue to watch the woman sitting across from Ted. Her shoulders are slim and her back is straight. The fabric of whatever dress or blouse she is wearing is navy blue with black stripes, a kind of zebra print. I cannot help but be certain that her face is as lovely and interesting as her waterfall hair, and this is why Ted is staring at her so closely. This is why I am doubly and triply safe from him noticing me as I peek through the gaps between these coffee addicts’ arms, over their damp handbags. Their closed umbrellas drip onto my boots and rub against my jumper so that the wet seeps through and into my skin – I hadn’t bothered to grab my coat when I rushed from my illegally parked car.

Ted isn’t on duty. He is wearing a Christmas jumper of all things. I bought it for him five years ago. Fair Isle, with small reindeer parading across its variously toned charcoal stripes. Why would Ted wear something I gave him if he were on a date? This thought makes my stomach unclench a tiny bit.

In that way I have of letting my mind open up to find out what it knows before I am conscious of it, I think of Ruby, from my personal safety class. She didn’t come to class on Monday and hasn’t returned the concerned message I left her the next day. In a rush of certainty, I know who the woman is, and my jealousy is complicated by worry. The worry grows bigger when she turns her head to look off to the side and I see that there are tears on her cheek. Has Ted made her cry? Or is he supporting her while she cries about something else? Six months ago, she was raped by a fake meter-reading man who tricked his way into her house. Ted reaches out and touches her hand, lightly and quickly, but doesn’t keep it on top of hers. He frowns.

What is he doing with her? Could he have known her before last month’s self-defence class? Could he be meeting her as part of the investigation into her assault? No – he wouldn’t do that in a café.

Whatever the reason, what should disturb me most? That Ted is here with a woman when he swore to me he wasn’t seeing anyone? That Ruby is vulnerable and he may hurt her? Or that somebody cared enough to clock their meeting and photograph them?

Whoever that somebody is, they know who I am, and who Ted is. They know what Ted and I are to each other. And they knew how to find me through the charity’s website. Whether they are for me or against me remains to be seen, though if it is Sadie or Ted’s ex-wife it is all too clear which group she is a member of.

Whoever sent it, whatever their reason, I am actually glad they did it. They gave me a gift even if they didn’t mean to. I would rather know than not know. Always. My stance on everything. Because the information – the fact that Ted is in this café with Ruby – is louder than everything else. It is so loud it is drowning out the context. Even if my brain is asking the right questions about the circumstances which got that photograph to me, my emotions are engaged only by what it shows.

It is after seven by the time I have finished my daily run, followed by my usual sit-ups and presses and pull-ups and stretches. I have barely stepped out of the shower before I hear Luke’s keys in the locks, then the front door of my little Victorian house crashing open and his shout, ‘Stay out of the way, Auntie Ella. Back in a minute.’

I shrug off the oversized towelling bathrobe that Ted left with me shortly before you disappeared. It is navy blue. It is so big I used to wrap me and Luke in it together when he was a baby and I wandered through the house late at night, trying to lull him out of crying and into sleep. There are holes and loose threads from uncountable washes, but this old thing of Ted’s is an object of comfort to me still.

I shimmy into a jumper and jeans, tie my wet hair into a ponytail, and fly down the stairs to the sight of Luke and our father, lurching sideways into the hall. They are each clutching one side of the doll’s house, which is shaped like a medium-sized chest of drawers. Ted is rear and centre, taking most of the weight. Above Ted’s head, in the clear black night that followed the afternoon storm, there is an explosion of silver stars. They fall from the sky as if to announce him.