Sister

As I hung up your clothes, I saw a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled it out. Inside were your baby things. Everything in your flat was just so shabby: your clothes were from charity shops, your furniture third hand, and these baby clothes were brand-new and expensive. I took out a pale-blue cashmere baby blanket and a tiny hat, so soft my hands felt coarse. They were beautiful. It was like finding an Eames chair in a bus stop. You couldn’t possibly have afforded them, so who’d given you the money? I thought Emilio Codi had tried to force you to have an abortion. What was going on, Tess?

The doorbell rang and I ran to answer it. I had “Tess” in my mouth, almost out, as I opened the door. A young woman was on the doorstep. I swallowed “Tess.” Some words have a taste. I realized I was shaking from the adrenaline rush.

She was more than six months pregnant but despite the cold, her Lycra top was cropped, showing her distended belly and pierced tummy button. I found her overt pregnancy as cheap as her yellow hair color.

“Is Tess here?” she asked.

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“Yes. Friend. I am Kasia.”

I remembered you telling me about Kasia, your Polish friend, but your description didn’t tally with the reality on the doorstep. You’d been flattering to the point of distortion, lending her a gloss that she simply didn’t have. Standing there in her absurd miniskirt, her legs textured by goose bumps and the raised veins of pregnancy, I thought her far from a “Donatello drawing.”

“Me and Tess met at clinic. No boyfriend too.”

I noted her poor English rather than what she was saying. She looked up at a Ford Escort, parked by the top of the steps. “He came back. Three weeks.”

I hoped my face showed its complete lack of interest in the state of her personal life.

“When will Tess home?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows where she is.” My voice started to wobble, but I’d be damned if I’d show emotion to this girl. The snob in Mum has been healthily passed on to me. I continued briskly, “She hasn’t been seen since last Thursday. Do you know where she might be?”

Kasia shook her head. “We’ve been holiday. Majorca. Making up.”

The man in the Ford Escort was leaning on the horn. Kasia waved up at him and I saw she looked nervous. She asked me to tell you she’d been to see you, in her fractured English, and then hurried up the steps.

Yes, Miss Freud, I was angry she wasn’t you. Not her fault.

I went up the basement steps and rang Amias’s doorbell. He answered it, fiddling with the chain.

“Do you know how Tess got all those expensive baby clothes?” I asked.

“She had a spree in the Brompton Road,” he replied. “She was really chuffed with—”

I impatiently interrupted him, “I meant how did she afford it?”

“I didn’t like to ask.”

It was a reprimand; he had good manners, but I did not.

“Why did you report her missing?” I asked.

“She didn’t come and have supper with me. She’d promised she would and she never broke her promise, even to an old man like me.”

He unhooked the chain. Despite his age, he was still tall and un-stooped, a good few inches taller than I am.

“Maybe you should give the baby things away,” he said.

I was repelled by him and furious. “It’s a little premature to give up on her, isn’t it?”

I turned away from him and walked hurriedly down the steps. He called something after me, but I couldn’t be bothered to try to make it out. I went into your flat.

“Just another ten minutes, and we’ll call it a day,” Mr. Wright says, and I’m grateful. I hadn’t known how physically draining this would be.

“Did you go into her bathroom?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Did you look in her bathroom cabinet?”

I shake my head.

“So you didn’t see anything untoward?”

“Yes, I did.”

I felt exhausted, grimy and bone cold. I longed for a hot shower. It was still two hours till the reconstruction was on TV, so I had plenty of time but I was worried that I wouldn’t hear you if you phoned. So that made me think it was a good idea—following that logic which says your crush is bound to turn up on the doorstep the minute you’ve put on a face mask and your grungiest pajamas. Okay, I agree: logic is hardly the name for it, but I hoped having a shower would make you phone. Besides, I also knew my mobile took messages.

I went into your bathroom. Of course there wasn’t a shower—just your bath with its chipped enamel and mold around the taps. I was struck by the contrast to my bathroom in New York, an homage to modernist chic in chrome and limestone. I wondered how you could possibly feel clean after being in there. I had a familiar moment of feeling superior and then I saw it: a shelf with your toothbrush, toothpaste, contact lens solutions and a hairbrush with long hairs trapped among the bristles.