I went inside. I don’t need to describe to you what it looked like. Whatever state you were in, you’d have noticed your surroundings in detail. Your eyes are an artist’s eyes and I wish that the last place you’d seen hadn’t been stained and vile and ugly. I went into a cubicle and saw bloodstains on the concrete floor and splatters of blood on the peeling walls. I vomited into a basin, before realizing it wasn’t attached to any drain. I knew that no one would willingly choose to go into that place. No one would choose to die there.
I tried not to think of your being there for five nights, all alone. I tried to cling to my Chagall image of your leaving your body, but I couldn’t be sure of the time frame. Did you leave your body, as I so fervently hoped, the moment you died? Or maybe it was later, when you were found, when your body was seen by someone other than your murderer. Or was it in the morgue when the police sergeant pulled back the blanket and I identified you—did grief release you?
I walked out of the foul-smelling, vile building and breathed in the cold till it hurt my lungs, grateful for the white iced air. The bouquets made sense to me now. Decent people were trying to fight evil with flowers, the good fighting under the pennants of bouquets. I remembered the road to Dunblane lined with soft toys. I had not understood before why anyone would think a family whose child had been shot would want a teddy. But now I did; against the sound of gunshots, a thousand compassionate soft toys muffled a little their reverberating horror. “Mankind isn’t like this,” the offerings say, “we are not like this. The world isn’t only this way.”
I started reading the cards. Some of them were illegible, soaked with snow, the ink melting into the sodden paper. I recognized Kasia’s name—she’d left a teddy with “Xavier” in large childish writing, the dot of the
I gathered up the legible cards to take away with me—no one else would want to read them but Mum and me. As I put them into my pockets, I saw a middle-aged man with a Labrador a little distance away, his dog on a tight leash. He was carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums. I remembered him from the afternoon you were found, watching the police activity; the dog was straining to get away then too. He was hesitating, maybe waiting for me to go before he laid his flowers. I went up to him. He was wearing a tweed hat and a Barbour jacket, a country squire who should be out on his estate not in a London park.
“Were you a friend of Tess’s?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t even know her name till it was on the television,” he replied. “We just used to wave, that’s all. When you pass someone quite frequently, you start to form some kind of connection. Just a small one of course, more like recognition.” He blew his nose. “I’ve really no right to be upset, absurd I know. How about you, did you know her?”
“Yes.”
No matter what DS Finborough said, I knew you. The Country Squire hesitated, unsure of the etiquette of keeping up a conversation by floral tributes. “That policeman’s gone then? He said the cordon will be going down soon, now that it’s not a crime scene.”
Of course it wasn’t a crime scene, not when the police had decided you’d committed suicide. The Country Squire seemed to be hoping for a reaction; he prodded a little further.
“Well you knew her, so you probably know what’s going on better than I do.”
Perhaps he was enjoying having a chat about this. The sensation of tears pricking isn’t unpleasant. Terror and tragedy at enough removes are titillating, exciting even, to have a little connection to grief and tragedy that isn’t yours. He could tell people, and no doubt did, that he was involved a little in all this, a bit player in the drama.
“I am her sister.”
Yes, I used the present tense. You being dead didn’t stop me being your sister; our relationship didn’t go into the past—otherwise I wouldn’t be grieving now, present tense. The squire looked appalled. I think he hoped I was at a decent emotional remove too.
I walked away.
The snow, which had been falling randomly in soft flakes, became denser and angrier. I saw that the children’s snowman was disappearing, engorged with new snow. I decided to go out of a different park exit, the memory of how I felt leaving the previous time too raw to be walked over again.
