Sister

park, she asked me if she could stay at my flat. Said she needed to be with someone twenty-four/seven.” He paused, angry. “She said I’m the only person at the college who doesn’t have a part-time job.”

“ ‘Twenty-four/seven’?”

“Round the clock. I can’t remember her exact expression. Jesus, does it matter?” It did matter because it authenticated what he was telling me. “She was frightened and she asked for my help, because I was convenient for her.”

“So why did you leave her?”

He seemed jolted by the question. “What?”

“You said she wanted to stay with you, so why didn’t you let her?”

He finally managed to light the joint and took a drag. “Okay, I told her what I felt for her. How much I loved her. Everything.”

“You came on to her?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“And she rejected you?”

“Straight out. No wrapping the bullet. She said this time she didn’t think she could offer ‘with credibility’ to be friends.”

His monstrous ego had sucked any pity for you, for your grief, into turning himself into the victim. But my anger was bigger than his ego.

“She turned to you and you tried to exploit her need for protection.”

“She wanted to exploit me—it was that way round.”

“So she still wanted to stay with you?”

He didn’t answer, but I could guess the next bit. “But with no strings attached?”

Still he was silent.

“But you wouldn’t allow that, would you?” I asked.

“And be emasculated?”

For a moment I think I just stared at him, too astonished by his gross selfishness to respond. He thought I didn’t understand.

“The only reason she wanted to be with me was because she was terrified witless. How do you think that made me feel?”

“Terrified witless?”

“I exaggerated, I meant—”

“You said ‘frightened’ before, now it’s ‘terrified witless’?”

“Okay. She said she thought a man had followed her into the park.”

I forced my voice into neutral. “Did she tell you who the man was?”

“No. I searched for him. Even went scrapping around in the bushes, getting covered in snow and frozen dog turds. No one.”

“You have to go to the police. Talk to an officer called DS Finborough. He’s at the Notting Hill police station—I’ll give you the number.”

“There’s no point. She committed suicide. It was on the local news.”

“But you were there. You know more than the TV, don’t you?” I was talking as I would to a child, trying to coax, trying to hide my desperation. “She told you about the man following her. You know she was frightened.”

“He was probably just a paranoid delusion. They said postpartum psychosis makes women go completely crazy.”

“Who said that?”

“Must have been the TV.”

He heard how lame that sounded. He met my eye, casually unconcerned. “Okay. Dad found out for me. I hardly ever ask anything of him, so when I do …”

He trailed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to complete the sentence. He took a step closer toward me and I smelled his aftershave, pungent in the overly warm flat. It brought into sharp, sensory focus the first sight I’d had of him, sitting in the snow outside your flat, holding a bouquet, smelling of the same aftershave despite the cold air. I hadn’t taken it in then, but why the flowers and the aftershave when you’d only offered him the consolation prize of friendship? And now, when I knew you’d turned him down outright?

“You had a bouquet when I found you waiting for her. You smelled of aftershave.”

“So?”

“You thought you’d try it again, didn’t you? Maybe she’d be desperate enough by then to accept your conditions.”

He shrugged, not finding fault with himself. Spoiled since the time he was born; spoiling him so that he’d turned into this man rather than the person he might once have had the potential to become.

I turned away from him, to see his enormous collage of babies’ faces making up a picture of a prison.