Sister

by Rosamund Lupton

  I remember the sound of the doorbell and running to get it; having “Tess” in my mouth, almost out, as I opened the door and the taste of your name. I remember my resentment when I saw Kasia standing on your doorstep with her high-heeled cheap shoes and the raised veins of pregnancy over goose-bumped white legs. I shudder at my remembered snobbishness but am glad my memory is still acute.

  “She told you that she was in the same clinic as Tess?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she say at which clinic?”

  I shake my head and don’t tell him that I was too keen to get rid of her to take any interest, let alone ask any questions. He looks down at his notes again.

  “She said she’d been single too but now her boyfriend had returned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you meet Mitch Flanagan?”

  “No, he stayed in the car. He blared the horn and I remember she seemed nervous about him.”

  “And the next time you saw her was just after you’d been to Simon Greenly’s flat?” he asks.

  “Yes. I took some baby clothes round.”

  But that’s a little disingenuous. I was using my visit to Kasia as an excuse to avoid Todd and the argument I knew would end our relationship.

  Despite the snow and slippery pavements, it took me only ten minutes to walk to Kasia’s flat. She’s since told me that she always came to yours, and I guess that was to avoid Mitch. Her flat is in Trafalgar Crescent, an ugly concrete impostor among the crisp symmetrical garden squares and properly shaped crescents of the rest of W11. Alongside and above her street, as if you could reach it as easily as reaching a book on a tall bookshelf, is the Westway, the roar of traffic thundering down the street. In the stairwells, graffiti artists (maybe they’re called painters now) have left their tags, like dogs peeing, marking out their patch. Kasia opened the door, keeping it on the chain. “Yes?”

  “I’m Tess Hemming’s sister.”

  She unhooked the chain and I heard a bolt being pulled back. Even on her own (let alone the fact that it was snowing outside and she was pregnant), she was wearing a tight cropped top and high-heeled black patent boots with Diamanté studs up the sides. For a moment I worried that she was a prostitute and was expecting a client. I can hear you laughing. Stop.

  “Beatrice.” I was taken aback that she remembered my name. “Come. Please.”

  It had been just over two weeks since I’d last seen her—when she came round to the flat asking for you—and her bump had got noticeably bigger. I guessed she must be around seven months pregnant now.

  I went into the flat, which smelled of cheap perfume and air freshener that didn’t mask the natural smells of mold and damp evident on the walls and carpet. An Indian throw like the one on your sofa (had you given her one of yours?) had been nailed up at the window. I’d thought that I wouldn’t try to put down Kasia’s exact words or try to get across her accent, but in this meeting her lack of fluency made what she said more striking.

  “I’m sorry. You must be… How can I say?” She struggled for the word, then, giving up, shrugged apologetically. “Sad, but ‘sad’ not big enough.”

  For some reason her imperfect English sounded more sincere than a perfectly phrased letter of condolence.

  “You love her very much, Beatrice.” Love in the present tense because Kasia had yet to learn the past tense, or because she was more sensitive than anyone else to my bereavement?

  “Yes, I do.”

  She looked at me, her face warm and compassionate, and she baffled me. Straight off, she had hopped out of the box I’d so neatly stuck her into. She was being kind to me and it was meant to be the other way around. I gave her the small suitcase I’d brought with me. “I’ve brought some baby things.” She didn’t look nearly as pleased as I’d expected. I thought it must be because the clothes were intended for Xavier, that they were stained with sadness.

  “Tess… funeral?” she asked.

  “Oh yes, of course. It’s in Little Hadston, near Cambridge, on Thursday, the fifteenth of February at eleven o’clock.”

  “Can you write…?”

  I wrote down the details for her, and then I virtually pushed the suitcase of baby clothes into her hands.

  “Tess would want you to have them.”

  “Our priest, he says Mass for her on Sunday.” I wondered why she was changing the subject. She hadn’t even opened the suitcase. “That was okay?”

  I nodded. I’m not sure what you’ll make of it though.

  “Father John. He’s very nice man. He’s very…” She absentmindedly moved her hand onto her bump.

  “Very Christian?” I asked.

  She smiled, getting the joke. “For priest. Yes.”

  Was she joking too? Yes, straight back. She was much sharper than I’d thought.

  “The Mass. Does Tess mind?” she asked. Again I wondered if the present tense was intentional. Maybe it was—if a Mass is all it’s cracked up to be, then you’re up there in heaven, or in the waiting room of purgatory, present tense. You’re in the now, if not in the here and now—and maybe Kasia’s Mass reached you and you’re now feeling a little foolish about your earthly atheism.

  “Would you like to look in the case and decide what you want?”

  I’m not sure if I was being kind or trying to get back into a place where I felt superior. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable being the recipient of kindness from someone like Kasia. Yes, I was still snobby enough to think “someone like.”

  “I make tea first?”

  I followed her into the dingy kitchen. The linoleum on the floor was torn, exposing concrete underneath. But everything was as clean as it could be given the handicap it started with. White chipped china gleamed, old saucepans shone around their rust spots. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove top. I didn’t think she’d be able to tell me anything useful but decided to try anyway. “Do you know if anyone had tried to give Tess drugs?”

  She looked aghast. “Tess never take drugs. With baby, nothing bad. No tea, no coffee.”

  “Do you know who Tess was afraid of?”

  Kasia shook her head. “Tess not afraid.”

  “But after she had the baby?”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away from me, struggling to regain her composure. Of course she’d been away with Mitch in Majorca when you had Xavier. She hadn’t come back till after you’d died, when she’d come knocking on your door and found me instead. I felt guilty for upsetting her, for questioning her when she clearly couldn’t help me at all. She was now making me tea, so I could hardly leave, but I had no idea what to say to her. “So do you work?” I asked, a rather unsubtle variation on the standard cocktail party query, “So what do you do?”

  “Yes. Cleaning… sometime supermarket shelves, but night work, horrible. Sometime I work for magazines.”

  I immediately thought of porn mags. My prejudices, based on her wardrobe choices, were too stubbornly entrenched to be shifted without some effort. Though to be a little bit fair to myself, I had started to worry about her being in the sex trade rather than simply being judgmental. She was astute enough to sense I had reservations about her “magazine work.”

  “The free ones,” she continued. “I put them in the letter boxes. The house that have ‘No Junk Mail’ I put in too. I can’t read English.”

  I smiled at her. She seemed pleased by the first genuine smile I’d given her.

  “All the doors in the rich places not want free papers. But we not go to the poor places. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” I searched for another opening conversational gambit. “So where did you meet Tess?”

  “Oh. I not tell you?”

  Of course she had, but I’d forgotten, which isn’t surprising when you remember how little interest I took in her.

  “The clinic. My baby ill too,” she said.

  “Your baby has cystic fibrosis?”

  “Cystic fibrosis, yes. But now…” She touched
her stomach. “Better now. A miracle.” She made a sign of the cross, a gesture as natural to her as pushing her hair away from her face. “Tess called it the Mummies with Disasters Clinic. First time I met her she made me laugh. She asked me to flat.” Her words caught in her throat. She turned away from me. I couldn’t see her face but I knew she was trying not to cry. I reached out my hand to put on her shoulder but just couldn’t do it. I find being tactile toward a person I don’t know as hard as touching a spider if you’re arachnophobic. You may find it funny, but it really isn’t. It’s almost a handicap.

  Kasia finished making the tea and put it all on a tray. I noticed how proper she was, with cups and saucers, a small pitcher for milk, a strainer for the tea leaves, the cheap teapot warmed first.

  As we went through to the sitting room, I saw a picture on the opposite wall that hadn’t been visible to me before. It was a charcoal drawing of Kasia’s face. It was beautiful. And it made me see that Kasia was beautiful too. I knew you’d done it.

  “Tess’s?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Our eyes met and for a moment something was communicated between us that didn’t need language and therefore there was no barrier. If I had to translate that “something” into words, it would be that you and she were clearly close enough for you to want to draw her, that you saw beauty in people that others didn’t see. But it wasn’t as verbose as that, no language clunked between us; it was a more subtle thing. The sound of a door slamming startled me.

  I turned to see a man coming into the room. Large and muscular, about twenty years old, he looked absurdly big in the tiny flat. He was wearing laborers’ overalls, no T-shirt underneath, his muscular arms tattooed like sleeves. His hair was matted with plaster dust. His voice was surprisingly quiet for such a large man, but it had the timbre of threat. “Kash? Why the fuck haven’t you bolted the door? I told you—” He stopped as he saw me. “Health visitor?”

  “No,” I replied.

  He ignored me, directing his question to Kasia. “So who the fuck is this then?”

  Kasia was nervous and embarrassed. “Mitch…”

  He sat down, stating his claim to the room and by implication my lack of one.

  Kasia was nervous of him, the same expression I’d seen that day outside your flat when he’d blared the horn. “This is Beatrice.”

  “And what does ‘Beatrice’ want with us?” he asked, mocking.

  I suddenly felt conscious of my designer jeans and gray cashmere sweater, de rigueur weekend wardrobe in New York but hardly the kind of outfit to blend in on a Monday morning in Trafalgar Crescent.

  “Mitch doing nights. Very hard,” said Kasia, “He gets very…” She struggled to find the word, but you need to have a mother tongue phrase book in your brain to find a euphemism for Mitch’s behavior. “Out of sorts” was the one that sprang to my mind most quickly; I almost wanted to write it down for her.

  “You don’t need to fucking apologize for me.”

  “My sister, Tess, was a friend of Kasia’s,” I said, but my voice had become Mum’s; anxiety always accentuates my upper-class accent.

  He looked angrily at Kasia. “The one you were always running off to?” I didn’t know whether Kasia’s English was good enough for her to understand he was bullying her. I wondered if he was a physical bully too.

  Kasia’s voice was quiet. “Tess my friend.”

  It was something I hadn’t heard since primary school, standing up for someone simply by saying “She’s my friend.” I was touched by the powerful simplicity of it. I stood up, not wanting to make things more awkward for her. “I’d better be going.”

  Mitch was sprawled in an armchair; I had to step over his legs to get to the door. Kasia came with me. “Thank you for the clothes. Very kind.”

  Mitch looked at her. “What clothes?”

  “I brought some baby things round. That’s all.”

  “You like playing Lady Bountiful then?”

  Kasia didn’t understand what he was saying, but could sense it was hostile. I turned to her. “They’re just such lovely things and I didn’t want to throw them away or give them to a charity shop where they might have been bought by anybody.”

  Mitch leaped in, a pugnacious man intent on a fight, and enjoying it. “So it’s us or a charity shop?”

  “When do you get off from your macho posturing?”

  Confrontation, which used to seem so alien to me, now felt familiar territory.

  “We’ve got our own fucking baby clothes,” he said, going into a bedroom. Moments later he came out with a box and dumped it at my feet. I looked inside. It was filled with expensive baby clothes. Kasia seemed very embarrassed. “Tess and me, shopping. Together. We…”

  “But how did you have the money?” I asked. Before Mitch could explode, I hurriedly continued, “Tess had no money either, and I just want to know who gave it to her.”

  “The people doing the trial,” said Kasia. “Three hundred pounds.”

  “What trial? The cystic fibrosis trial?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I wondered if it could be a bribe. I’d got into the mental habit of suspecting everyone and everything connected to you, and this trial, which I’d had misgivings about from the very start, was already a soil rich with anxiety for seeds of distrust to take root.

  “Can you remember the person’s name?”

  Kasia shook her head. “It was in envelope. Just with leaflets, no letter. A surprise.”

  Mitch cut across her. “And you spent the whole fucking lot on baby clothes, which it’ll be out of in weeks and Christ knows there’s enough else we need.”

  Kasia looked away from him. I sensed this argument was old and much worn and had broken any joy she had once felt in buying the clothes.

  She accompanied me out of the flat. As we walked down the concrete steps in the graffiti-decorated stairwell, she guessed what I would say if we were fluent in each other’s languages and said, “He is father. Nothing change that now.”

  “I’m staying in Tess’s flat. Will you come round?”

  I was surprised by how much I hoped she would.

  Mitch yelled from the top of the stairwell. “You forgot this.” He threw the suitcase of clothes down the stairwell. As the case hit the concrete landing, it opened; tiny cardigans, a hat and baby blanket lay strewn across the damp concrete. Kasia helped me to pick them up.

  “Don’t come to the funeral, Kasia. Please.”

  Yes, because of Xavier. It would have been too hard for her.

  I walked home, the sharp wind cutting across my face. With my coat collar pulled up and a scarf around my head, trying to protect myself from the cold, I didn’t hear my mobile, so it went through to message. It was Mum saying Dad wanted to talk to me and giving me his number. But I knew I wouldn’t call him. Instead, I became the insecure adolescent who felt her growing body was the wrong shape to fit into his completely formed new life. I felt again the smothering rejection as he blanked me out. Oh, I knew he’d remembered our birthdays, sending us extravagant presents that were too old for us, as if trying to accelerate us into adulthood and away from his responsibility. And the two weeks with him in the summer holidays, when we tarnished the Provence sunshine with our reproachful English faces, bringing our microclimate of sadness. And when we left, it was as if we’d never been. I once saw the trunks where “our” bedroom things were kept—stowed away in the attic for the rest of the year. Even you, in your optimism for life and capacity to see the best in people, felt that too.

  As I think about Dad, I suddenly understand why you didn’t ask Emilio to take any responsibility for Xavier. Your baby was too precious, too loved, for anyone to turn him into a blemish on their lives. He should never feel unvalued or unwanted. You weren’t protecting Emilio but your child.

  I haven’t told Mr. Wright about my non–phone call with Dad, just the money that you and Kasia received for being on the trial.

  “The payments weren’t large,”
I continue. “But I thought they could have been an inducement to Tess and to Kasia to take part.”

  “Tess hadn’t told you about the payment?”

  “No. She always saw the best in people, but she knew I was more skeptical. She probably wanted to avoid the lecture.”

  You’d have guessed my bumper-sticker warnings: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”; “Corporate altruism is a contradiction in terms.”

  “Did you think it was the money that persuaded her?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “No. She believed the trial was her baby’s only chance for a cure. She’d have paid them to be on the trial. But I thought that maybe whoever had given her money didn’t know that. Like Kasia, Tess looked in need of cash.” I pause while Mr. Wright makes a note, then continue. “I’d researched the medical side of the trial thoroughly when Tess first told me about it, but I’d never looked at the finances. So I started doing that. On the Net, I discovered that people are legitimately paid in drug trials. There are even dedicated websites that advertise for volunteers, promising the money will ‘pay for your next holiday.’”

  “And the volunteers on the Chrom-Med trial?”

  “There was absolutely nothing about their being paid. Chrom-Med’s own website, which had a lot of detail about the trial, had nothing about any payments. I knew that the development of the genetic cure would have cost a fortune, and three hundred pounds was a tiny amount of money in comparison, but it still seemed strange. Chrom-Med’s website had e-mail addresses for every member of the company—presumably, to look open and approachable—so I e-mailed Professor Rosen. I was pretty sure it would go to a minion but thought it was worth a try.”

  Mr. Wright has a copy of my e-mail in front of him.

  From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  To: professor.rosen@chrom-med.com

  Dear Professor Rosen:

  Could you tell me why the mothers on your cystic fibrosis trial are being paid £300 to participate? Or perhaps you would prefer me to couch it in the correct language, “compensated for their time.”

  Beatrice Hemming

  As I’d predicted, I didn’t hear back from Professor Rosen. But I carried on searching on the Net, still wearing my coat from when I’d got in from visiting Kasia, my bag just dumped at my feet. I hadn’t switched the light on and now it was dark. I hardly noticed Todd coming in. I didn’t even wonder, let alone ask, where he’d been all day, barely glancing up from the screen.