The Second Wife

by Fleet, Rebecca

  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 paralysed – 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 flat 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 go down tonight: causing drug-fuelled trouble out on the streets in the early hours, or ending up at some weirdo’s flat and crisis-calling her to come and get her out, 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 grew and 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 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 are gradually drawn to her, fond with approval and indulgence, so that by the time Rachel actually collects 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 spreading 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 – and again, she can’t give it a name. They even look quite similar, similar enough to be acknowledged 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 colour of their eyes, the mouldings of their bones. Similar, but not the same.

  When she thinks about the single incident 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 feel of 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 a complex pattern.

  When the thought strikes her, it feels calm and mellow. Nothing sinister. She moves on her hands and knees towards 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, held between her fingers, and snips. It falls to the ground silently, a whisper of colour. 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 for ever, 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.

  She 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 misjudgement, 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 mutilate 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 crisps and biscuits they’ve patiently built up over months of covert swiping from the store 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 tightly provocative curves, her face carefully made-up to suggest wanton sophistication. She starts bringing home boyfriends, randomly selec
ted strangers who share little except a certain rough diamond quality 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 herself is no laughable swot. She’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 the 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; crossing the room to turn off the television with a snap, frequently announcing that she’s so fucking bored here she could die, stinking the place out with cheap hairspray 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 translating 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 … The odd precious time 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 and watch films that they’re ten years too old for, and 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 agree on, 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 this 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 she’s away at 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 now, they do seem to get on better. So when, after she’s graduated and Martine has temporarily gifted her the Covent Garden flat, 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 spiralling 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 carer. 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.

  Rachel settles down in the armchair by the window, 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 flat 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 in 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.

  She clears her throat and shifts uncomfortably in the chair, glossing over in her mind what had followed. The sudden movement behind her, the sharp, piercing realization that she was no longer alone. What the fuck are you doing, Rachel? A strange look on her sister’s face, as if she were trying to decide whether to swing in the direction of horror or amusement, before she dissolved into drunken laughter. Tossing herself down on the bed, her arms stretched behind her head. Just put it back when you’ve finished. And Rachel already scrambling out of the dress, her cheeks hot, not caring if her sister saw her naked, because even that was preferable to this.

  She gets up and crosses the room swiftly, turning the lamp off with a snap. She’s going to bed.

  Sadie

  1999

  IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT or Saturday morning, some indistinguishable time between the two. Sadie took the wrong night bus and she’s walked in the dark for what feels like hours in her four-inch heels, her tight silver skirt and a heavy black jacket that she thinks may belong to a man she was dancing with and which smells of cigarettes and sweat. It’s taken so long to get home that she’s wishing she hadn’t bothered and that she’d crashed at the man’s place, although he would have wanted sex and she isn’t in the mood. It’s never easy to tell what effect the random cocktail of booze and drugs she downs on these nights out will have on her; sometimes she’s horny and insatiable, wanting to fuck anyone who comes within a hair’s breadth of her, and other times the whole business seems sordid and pointless and her body feels like an old coat that’s been left out in the rain for too long.

  She staggers the final few yards towards the tall building where the flat is, stares up at the first floor. It’s only when she sees the unfriendly dark square of window that she realizes she’s forgotten her keys again. She pulls her mobile from her bag but it’s dead.

  ‘Rachel,’ she croons, softly at first, then louder. ‘Rachel!’ She picks up a handful of gravel from the little artificial flower bed that sits at the base of one of the elegant lime trees flanking the road, and throws it in the direction of the window, but her aim is indiscriminate and she’s shocked and amused by the way in which it scatters. ‘Rachel!’ she yells again. Her voice sounds surprisingly loud, shattering the silence of the street. She sees a couple of lights switch on in neighbouring buildings, a couple of shadows angrily flickering behind curtains; a window banging shut with a muffled curse. But she’s got what she wanted – the front door of the building is swinging open and Rachel is standing there in her pyjamas, rubbing her eyes and gesturing her over the threshold.

  ‘Shhhh,’ she hisses, pulling Sadie by the arm and closing the front door behind them. ‘Get upstairs. For Christ’s sake, do you know what time it is?’

  Time to get that stick out of your arse, Sadie thinks, but instead she makes some vague noise of apology and stumbles up the stairs in the dark,
falling through the door and heading straight for her bedroom. She sinks down on the bed, fumbling with the straps of her shoes. Something isn’t right; they snarl up in her fingers like barbed wire, resisting detangling. In the end she gives up and simply throws the jacket off her shoulders and lies down, rolling on to her side and seeing that Rachel is still watching her, standing in the doorway with her arms folded.

  ‘This has got to stop,’ Rachel says. ‘If you must go out, can’t you at least remember your keys? Or stay somewhere else?’

  Sadie tries to think of an intelligent response but instead she starts giggling. It’s something about the ‘if you must go out’ – as if going out is the sort of thing that you’d only do if you had a gun held to your head and you couldn’t see any way out of it. ‘It’s the weekend,’ she finally manages to say. ‘This is what people do, Rach. You should try it some time.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m all right,’ Rachel snaps, and with that she’s gone, flouncing back to her own bedroom and shutting the door with a bang.

  ‘Night night,’ Sadie calls in a saccharine falsetto, wanting to have the last word even if it doesn’t mean much. For an instant, the idea flits through her head that she is hungry. She wanders back into the open-plan living room cum kitchen, boils the kettle and chucks a handful of pasta into a pan, then some tomato sauce she finds in the cupboard into another. But somewhere along the line she must fall asleep, because some time later she wakes to the smell of burning and sees that the pans have boiled dry and that there are oxblood-red splatters all across the hob, dark and volcanic. She stumbles across and switches it off, then wanders back into the bedroom and throws herself down on the bed.