Second Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t want to be judged.
    Anna sits opposite me and holds up her glass. ‘To Kate.’
    ‘To Kate,’ I say. I take a sip of juice. I register the briefest wish that my glass
was filled with wine, too, and then, like every other time, I let the thought go.
    ‘Do you want to see her room?’
    I hesitate. I don’t want to, but there’s no avoiding it. It’s one of the things I
came here to do. To confront the reality of her life, and therefore also of her death.
    ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Let’s.’
    It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There’s a window leading on to a little
balcony, a double bed with a cream duvet cover, a CD player on the dressing table
next to the perfumes. It’s tidy; everything is neatly arranged. Not how I imagined
Kate living at all.
    ‘The police have searched the room,’ says Anna. ‘They left things pretty much as
they found them.’
    The police. I picture them dusting for fingerprints, picking up her things, cataloguing
her life. My skin is white-hot, a thousand tiny detonations of shock. It’s the first
time I’ve connected the place I stand with my sister’s death.
    I inhale deeply, as if I can breathe her in, but she’s gone, not even her ghost remains.
The room could be anybody’s. I turn away from Anna and go over to the bed. I sit
down. There’s a book on the dressing table.
    ‘That’s for you.’
    It’s a photo album, the kind with stiff pages and sheets of adhesive plastic to keep
the pictures in place. Even before I open it I sense what’ll be inside.
    ‘Kate used to show these to people,’ says Anna. ‘“That’s my sister,” she’d say. She
was so proud, I swear.’
    My photographs. Anna sits on the bed beside me. ‘Kate told me your father kept these.
She found them when he died.’
    ‘My father?’ I say. I never suspected he was even remotely interested in my work.
    ‘That’s what she said . . .’
    On the first page is that picture. Marcus in the Mirror .
    ‘My God . . .’ I say. I have to swallow my shock. It’s the full picture, unedited,
uncropped. I’m there, standing behind Marcus, the camera raised to my eye. Naked.
    ‘That’s you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And who’s the guy? I see him everywhere at the moment.’
    I feel an unexpected flush of pride. ‘The photo’s been used in an exhibition. It’s
become quite popular.’
    ‘So who is he?’
    I look back at the picture. ‘An ex. Marcus.’ I stumble over his name; I wonder when
I last said it out loud. I carry on. ‘We lived together, for a while. Years ago.
I was . . . what . . . ? Twenty? Maybe not even that. He was an artist. He gave me
my first camera. I took this in our flat. Well, it was a squat, really. In Berlin.
We shared it with a few others. Artists, mostly. They came and went.’
    ‘Berlin?’
    ‘Yes. Marcus wanted to go there. It was the mid-nineties. The Wall was down, the
place felt new. Like it’d been wiped clean. You know?’ She nods. I’m not sure she’s
that interested, but I carry on. ‘We lived in Kreuzberg. Marcus’s choice. I think
it was a Bowie thing.’ She looks puzzled. Maybe she’s too young. ‘David Bowie. He
lived there. Or recorded there, I’m not sure . . .’
    I put my fingers to the photograph. I remember how I used to take my camera with
me everywhere, just as Marcus would take his sketchbook and our friend Johan his
notebook. These objects weren’t just tools, they were part of who we were, they
were how we made sense of the world. I developed an obsession with taking portraits
of people as they got ready, got dressed, put make-up on, checked their hair in the
mirror.
    Anna looks from me to the picture. ‘He looks . . .’ she begins, but then she stops
herself. It’s as if she’s seen something in the picture, something upsetting, that
she can’t quite define. I look at it again. It has this effect on people. It creeps
up on them.
    I finish her sentence. ‘Unhappy? He was. Not all the time, I mean, he was singing
along to some