Free The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant

of the steps: one leg and one arm are flung out into the street, the eyeless face, like the face of a victim of an accident, swathed in white plaster bandages, gazes at the houses across the strip of grey concrete. I feel a sudden fear, as I walk past, that this is someone like me, someone who tried to escape, punished by the world, frozen into a ludicrous figure, not even made of hard substance but ready to melt into shreds of pulp at the first burst of rain. Or is it all that is left of the Snow Queen, this white, artificial, sexless thing, after her splinters of ice had gone out into the world and she had fallen from her cold throne? The rich smell of Sunday dinners cooking, the red meat spitting in this white bottomless world gives me nausea. I have to cling onto a railing, at the end of the street of the arrested, flying figure, before I go on up the hill.
    I know or recognize most of the film critics standing outside the cinema. They have tired, blank eyes from seeing too much of other people’s fantasies, and are annoyed too at having their Sunday morning taken away from them. One or two nod to me. ‘Yes, but did you see that other Fassbinder?’ ‘He comes in at the end of this – the Wenders, you know.’ ‘I know. But I mean, did you see that very early one?’ They seem to be mouthing the words, the door of the cinema is shut, and they are agitated and anxious, longing for the film to be over and for Sunday lunch. What is the film going to show us? Life in contemporary society, it says on the hand-out. The apathetic, passive, alienated life, anOdyssey without any point of return. I would rather watch a pearl grow in an oyster! I stand amongst the velvet trousers in the small crowd, and wonder if Meg will really send me away from all this. She once said, cryptically, that she would show me everything, all that was inside me, and all the different regions that can be reached without taking a step. I believed her. I stand thinking of tomorrow, when we will meet. Already, last night’s journey seems far away, like a flash from a distant meteor. ‘Jane!’ One of the critics, a short man with a frown, comes towards me in the white air. ‘Tell me, what did you think of the Skolimowski? They showed it again the other night. And I wondered if you’d seen it when it first came out …’
    â€˜The best foreign film to be made in England.’ I hear myself offering this stupid remark, but I remember the film well. It is violent, obsessive, surprising: as if a whole layer of England had been peeled off, the whiteness scrubbed away, and the underside, people’s real passions and feelings, pushed up into the light. The critic nods as if I had said something interesting, and we begin to file into the cinema.
    It is as we pass into the first dusk of the foyer that I see the girl. I stand for a moment, clutching my press card, waiting for her to turn and see me. So Meg answers me when I think of her! She has sent me this girl. And yet …
    The girl turns. What is it that is so familiar about her? She has something of mine. We have been bound in an ancient story, of bitterness and revenge. Yet I feel I have never seen her before in my life. I can see that she recognizes me too, for her eyes flicker and the message from her skin is one of familiarity. A small triumphant smile compresses the corners of her mouth. What did she do to me? Or was I the victor and is she, at peace now while I suffer, regarding me with pity and contempt? I move slightly in her direction, with a stumbling movement as if my knees have forgotten how to function while I walk. She stiffens at this, and glides into the cinema, but her stiffness is an invitation. Her head is full of pictures for me. I follow her into the dark red darkness, and sit down behind her, in the second row.
    The film begins. In black and white, it says on the screen. But it’s not the real blackness, nor the real