Chapter 2A

Chapter 2: Fictitious Sisters and Disturbing Dreams

Zoë, Saturday 6th March, early afternoon
I wake up around lunchtime with my head pounding like a pneumatic hammer, drink a litre of water and swallow some ibuprofen and go back to bed with reassuring Bob Marley songs on the stereo. Inside my head it doesn't feel at all as if every little thing's going to be all right.
An hour or so later I get up again to drink another litre of water (we have a handy litre jug – somehow a litre seems better for hangovers than a mere pint) and begin to feel a little more human. There still seems to be a second, larger head stuffed inside my normal one and struggling to get out.
I can't remember how we got home, or if we went to see Glen's rubbish band. Then it suddenly comes back to me that Richard's dead, that I saw his blood sprayed all over the white wall of his office-study-thing and it made me both cry and laugh.
That was why I got so drunk. God my head – and that reminds me of Richard's head again and before I know it I'm curling up in a ball crying in my nice warm bed where oblivion is and the cold light of day isn't.
After a while another part of yesterday comes back to me – I'm supposed to go and talk to the police. It no longer seems exciting, and I can't imagine how I could have been so stupidly naïve as to think it was. They might even suspect me of something... not sure what. Maybe I'm being paranoid.
Eventually my raging thirst and nagging anxiety about the police drive me out of bed. I swallow another litre of water and some more headache pills and eat tablespoons of instant coffee – it's fairly disgusting but turning it into a liquid form seems like too much hassle – and then set about trying to make myself look vaguely human.
Jasmine seems to be out, so at least there's no competition for the bathroom. I've got makeup smeared wildly around my face – I use a lot of black and dark red, and now it looks like some kind of grotesque parody of tribal war paint. I scrub pathetically at it – I'm not bothered if the police think I look cool or sexy, just not stark raving bonkers would do fine. It doesn't seem to want to come off, and after a while I decide it'll have to do, and set off to face the music.
The police station, when I eventually find it, seems a bit forbidding in my present state of mind and has some decidedly dodgy characters hanging around it. As I go in I pass a man I vaguely recognise who's on his way out – aged about forty I'd guess, with dark curly hair and dressed in what I think of as a landed-gentry style – where've I seen him before? He's muttering to himself, and I could swear he says “fucking gun.” Maybe I imagined it. I'm still seriously dehydrated despite the metric-sized water quaffing.
When I get inside I'm treated like an accident victim and almost literally handled with kid gloves (maybe rubber ones would be more appropriate actually, considering the state of me). They gently usher me into a room which seems to be meant for much more threatening uses, apologise for leaving me alone and then do just that, and I'm left to nurse my head and contemplate the white-painted breeze-block walls until a woman in her mid twenties with mousy hair comes in and quietly introduces herself as Detective Constable Jenny Green.
DC Green is very kind, a little slow on the uptake and not at all inclined to accuse me of anything, I'm glad to realise. She offers me a cup of tea and my mind lights up – the idea of a hot drink with caffeine in it is like a torch in the darkness, a lifebelt to rescue me from the grey sludge filling my head.
“Have you got any extra-strong coffee?” I try my luck. “Like a triple espresso?”
“Sorry, just Nes.”
“I'll stick with the tea then. Lots of sugar.” They say it's good for shock.
DC Green slowly gets to the point and is annoyingly insistent that Richard (whose death they have to officially treat as suspicious according to some rules or other, but apparently think of as a probable suicide) was somehow abusing me. This annoys me a bit – if I'm the woman, and younger as well, then I must be the victim. What if I was abusing him?
After a while my patience begins to fail and I catch myself shouting “I just wanted a shag!” and shut up suddenly, wondering how I got to this situation – the situation of shouting at a policewoman about shagging – from the last one I remember... how embarrassing to start behaving like a lunatic in a police station.
DC Green looks sympathetic. She keeps telling me to call her Jenny but a secret little-girly part of my mind insists on those titles they have on the telly.
“Sorry.”
“Don't be, dear. I honestly know what you're going through, I'm not just saying that. How about another cup of tea and you tell me what you know about him, if it won't upset you too much.” Although she's quite young she keeps calling me “dear” like my nan used to.
I drink more tea and give her a sanitised summary of how I know him and how I found his dead body, and then she says “right then” in a decisive voice and hands me an envelope. It's addressed to me, and my hands start shaking so badly I can't open it and eventually I have to ask DC Green to do it for me. She's careful not to look at the letter before I do. I stare at the few lines of text with a mounting feeling of confusion.
Dear Zoë
I'm very sorry, I had to know the answer to a question that has been bugging me. My timing is, as usual, awful – I'm afraid I didn't have much choice about it. You just happened to draw the short straw – it's nothing personal, just be happy for your sister who won.
With love,
Richard.
What?
What's that all about? What fucking sister? Is that all? Won what? What question? Is it meant for someone else? What the fuck did he mean, nothing personal? I realise I'm nearly crying again. What fucking sister?
“What fucking sister?” I manage to say at last, handing the letter to DC Green.
DC Green reads the letter.
“Tell me about your sister.”
“I haven't got a sister.”
“Oh? A half-sister or something like that?”
“No.” I realise I'm shouting but make no effort to stop it. “I've got a half-brother. He's five years older than me and he lives in Huddersfield and he's got fuck all to do with this! I haven't got a fucking sister!”
I lose the details of the next bit – I think I've been swearing a lot and DC “Please call me Jenny” Green has been trying to comfort me – until my memory snaps back with her saying “you really haven't any idea what all this is about?”
“Of course I fucking haven't. Sorry, I keep swearing.” I suddenly feel sober and embarrassed.
“That's a perfectly normal reaction. We all do that.”
My consciousness picks up a kind of shaky continuity again. What the hell is all this supposed to mean? Suicide notes, as far as I've gathered from movies and the like, usually begin “by the time you read this I will be dead” and tend not to involve non-existent sisters. Don't they?
I can't quite believe he wrote that. Quite apart from the business about the sister and the fact that I don't have a clue what he's talking about, the tone's all wrong – it seems weirdly casual. Like he was going to buy some unusual vegetables or something, not shoot himself in the head.