Except, I didn’t. We had to sell the flat we’d bought together. Then a significant translation project came through. In a stroke of luck, I managed to rent the newly converted loft above the artist’s place where I’d lived before. Now eighty-seven, she was as inspirational as ever. But though for a time my guilt about Sabine subsided, I still somehow couldn’t find the energy to truly change my life.

44

Last January, I enrolled in a creative writing course called “Release Your Creativity.” Classes were held in a local church crypt and the tutor was enthusiastically dippy. Since I hadn’t ever released a sentence that wasn’t a modification of someone else’s, I reckoned there was nothing to lose.

At the fourth or fifth class, we were given newspapers to scan. The idea was to tear out anything that snagged us without bothering to question why. We were supposed to do the exercise through the eyes of a character we’d invented. Determined to keep things impersonal, my character was a cyborg sex worker called Capucine’s mechanical cat called Tom. But what stopped me halfway through my stack had nothing to do with either of them.

It was a short article about a woman found dead in her home in Peckham. Police estimated that she had been dead for seven months. She was only discovered because new neighbors wanted to ask about an adjoining roof leak. The woman was believed to have been forty-four at the time of her death. Given the body’s state of decomposition, it was impossible to determine what had killed her. The condition of the house indicated that she might have been a hoarder. Originally from Belgium, she’d lived in London since the late nineties. The online retailer thought to have been her last employer was unavailable for comment. A colleague from a previous place she’d worked at, Denton Ink Cartridges, said of her, “She was a smashing girl. Pretty, funny, caring, popular. She remembered our birthdays. She made us these great cards. I can’t believe this happened to her.”

I excused myself to go to the toilet. In the cubicle, I looked up the story on my phone. It had broken a week ago and was repeated in several online sources. One showed a photograph of the staff at Denton Ink with a circle around a pale woman with short black hair. Another had an obituary-type last line: She is survived by her brother, Xavier Dubreil.

Sabine was dead. Her brother was not. Never had been.

As I left the church the afternoon turned dark, blustery, and cold. Bare trees lined the pavement like bony hands grasping for the sky. Segueing off into the privacy of an empty common, I listened to the swish of damp grass.