Free Sister: A Novel by Rosamund Lupton

love has died.’
    I wonder if he’ll follow this up. I feel the inequality of our respective situations. He’s had my feelings stripped naked for the last five hours. There’s a silence between us and I half-think about asking him to strip off too.
    ‘My wife died two years ago, a car crash.’
    Our eyes meet and there’s comradeship between us; two veterans of the same war, battle-weary and emotionally bloody. Dylan Thomas was wrong; death does have dominion. Death wins the war and the collateral damage is grief. I never thought when I was an English literature student that I’d be arguing with poets, rather than learning their words.
    Mr Wright escorts me down a corridor towards the lift. A cleaner is vacuuming; other offices are in darkness. He presses the lift button and waits with me for it to arrive. Alone, I get inside.
    As the lift goes down, I taste the bile in my throat. My body has been playing a physical memory alongside the spoken one and I have again felt the rising nausea as if I were physically trying to expel what I knew. Again, my heart has been pummelling my ribs, sucking the breath from my lungs. I leave the lift, my head still viciously painful as it was the day you were found. Then the fact of your death detonated inside my brain, exploding again and again and again. As I talked to Mr Wright, I was again blindfolded in a minefield. Your death will never be disarmed to a memory, but I have learned on some days, good days, how to edge around it. But not today.
    I leave the building and the evening is warm, but I am still shivering and the hairs on my arms are standing upright trying to conserve body heat. I don’t know if it was the bitter cold or the shock that made me shiver so violently that day.
    Unlike yesterday, I don’t feel a menacing presence behind me, maybe because after describing the day you were found I have no emotional energy left for fear. I decide to walk rather than take the tube. My body needs to take cues from the real outside world, not the climate of memory. My shift at the Coyote starts in just over an hour, so I should have time to walk it.
    You’re astonished, and yes, I am a hypocrite. I can still remember my patronising tone.

    ‘But barmaiding? Couldn’t you find something just a little less . . . ?’ I trailed off but you knew what to fill in: ‘brain-numbing’; ‘beneath you’, ‘dead end’.
    ‘It’s just to pay the bills, it’s not a career choice.’
    ‘But why not find a day job that may lead on to something?’
    ‘It’s not a day job, it’s an evening job.’
    There was something brittle behind your humour. You had seen the hidden jibe; my lack of faith in your future as an artist.

    Well it’s more than a day or evening job for me, it’s the only job I have. After three weeks of compassionate leave my boss’s sympathy ran out. I had to tell him one way or the other, Beatrice what I was going to do, so by staying in London I resigned. That makes it sound like I’m an easy-going person who can respond to situations in a flexible way, trading in senior manager of a corporate identity design company for part-time barmaid with barely a break in my stride. But you know that I am nothing like that. And my New York job with its regular salary and pension scheme and orderly hours was my last foothold on a life that was predictable and safe. Surprisingly, I enjoy working at the Coyote.
    The walking helps and after forty minutes my breathing slows; my heartbeat returns to a recognisable rhythm. I finally take notice of you telling me I should at least have phoned Dad. But I thought his new bride would comfort him far better than me. Yes, they’d been married eight years, but I still thought of her as a new bride - fresh and white and sparkling with her youth and fake diamond tiara, untainted by loss. Little wonder Dad chose her over us.
    I reach the Coyote and see Bettina has put up the green awning and is laying the old wooden tables outside. She