Sister полностью

Then I finished wrapping your paintings. This was just preparing for an exhibition, so I had no problem with it. Finally only four paintings were left. They were the nightmarish canvases in thick gouache of a masked man bending over a woman, her mouth ripping and bleeding as she screamed. The shape in her arms, the only white in the canvas, I’d realized, was a baby. I’d also realized that you’d painted them when you were under the effects of the PCP, that they were a visual record of your tormented trips to hell. I saw the marks my tears had made when I first looked at them, the paint streaking down the canvas. Then, tears were the only response open to me, but now I knew that someone had deliberately tortured you and my tears had dried into hatred. I would find him.

The office is overheated, sunshine pouring in through the window warming it further, making me drowsy. I drain my cup of coffee and try to snap awake.

“And then you went to Simon’s flat?” Mr. Wright asks.

He must be cross-checking what I am telling him with other witness statements, making sure all our time lines coincide.

“Yes.”

“To question him about the drugs?”

“Yes.”

I rang Simon’s bell, and when a cleaning lady answered, I walked in as if I had every right to be there. I was again struck by the opulence of the place. Having lived in your flat for a while, I had become less dulled to material wealth. Simon was in the kitchen, sitting at a breakfast bar. He looked startled when he saw me and then annoyed. His baby face was still unshaved but I thought that, like the piercings, it was an affectation.

“Did you give Tess money to buy baby things?” I asked. I hadn’t even thought of the question until I was inside his flat, but it then seemed so probable.

“What are you doing here, just barging in?”

“Your door was open. I need to ask you some more questions.”

“I didn’t give her money. I tried once but she wouldn’t take it.” He sounded affronted and therefore credible.

“So do you know who did give her the money?”

“No idea.”

“Was she sleepy that day in the park?”

“Jesus. What is this?”

“I just want to know if she was sleepy when you met her?”

“No. If anything, she was jumpy.”

So he’d given you the sedative later, after Simon had left you.

“Was she hallucinating?” I asked.

“I thought you didn’t believe that she had postpartum psychosis?” he taunted.

“Was she?”

“You mean apart from seeing a nonexistent man in the bushes?”

I didn’t reply. His voice was ugly with irony. “No, apart from that she seemed completely normal.”

“They found sedatives and PCP in her blood. It’s also called wack, angel dust—”

He interrupted, his response immediate and with conviction. “No. That’s wrong. Tess was a puritan tight arse about drugs.”

“But you take them, don’t you?”

“So?”

“So maybe you wanted to give her something to feel better, a drink? With something in it that you thought would help?”

“I didn’t spike her drink. I didn’t give her money. And I want you to leave now, before this gets out of hand.” He was trying to imitate a man with more authority, his father maybe.

I went into the hall and passed an open doorway to a bedroom. I caught sight of a photo of you on the wall, your hair loose down your back. I went into the bedroom to look at it. It was clearly Simon’s room, his clothes neatly folded, his jackets on wooden coat hangers, an obsessively tidy room.

There was a banner in meticulous calligraphy along one wall: The Female of the Species. Underneath it were photos of you, scores of them, stuck on the walls with drawing pins. In all of them your back was to the camera. Suddenly Simon was close to me, studying my face.

“You knew I was in love with her.”

But these pictures made me think of Bequia islanders who believe a photograph is the theft of a soul. Simon’s tone was boastful. “They’re for my final year portfolio. I chose reportage photography of a single subject. My tutor thinks it’s the most original and exciting project of the year’s group.”

Why hadn’t he taken any of your face?

He must have guessed my thoughts. “I didn’t want the project to be about a particular person, so I made sure she had no identity. I wanted her to be an everywoman.”

Or was it so he could watch you, follow you, unobserved?

Simon’s tone was still smug. “ ‘The female of the species’ is the opening of a poem. The next line is ‘more deadly than the male.’ ”

My mouth felt tinder dry and my words sparked with anger. “The poem is about mothers protecting their young. That’s why the female is more deadly than the male. She has more courage. It’s men whom Kipling brands as cowards. ‘At war with conscience.’ ”

Simon was taken aback because I knew the Kipling poem, probably any poem, for that matter, and maybe you are too. But I did read English at Cambridge, remember? I was once an arty kind of person. Though being truthful, it was my scientific analysis of structure that got me through rather than insights into meaning.