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Sport 8: Autumn 1992

[section]

page 54

The table was clear except for the vase of dried Botanical Gardens roses. I had turned on the gas, all four elements, but for their blue light rather than heat; I was no longer cold at all. I lit a candle and put it carefully in the centre of the floor, then sat down at the table and pressed my hands firmly together. I was shaking all over. Mary Wollstonecraft was already patting at the roses; she looked at me now and miaowed, and we settled in to wait for Kate.

But Kate was already there.

'A death,' I said firmly to the surrounding darkness.

The flame of the candle burned high and clear.

I let myself sink into Kate. It is always a strange sensation, something like what sex is for a straight man I imagine but far more intimate; I felt simultaneously her mind close around me, shift slightly and be still, and her body in her bed in Brougham Street turn as she moved to accommodate the weight of mine, which was not there. These physical twitches are involuntary, like the ghostly itch of the toes of amputees.

A death.

It would need to be a tragic death, which not all deaths are. No one wept at the death of the man who raped Lexa, especially not me. I had to do that one without Kate—all her energy was with Lexa. I was able to because my rage was already so great (kneeling on the concrete vomiting into the open mouth of the toilet, screaming at Boy and Christian to Get out, get out, get out). They haven't found him yet.

That was my first death. This would be my second.

A tragic death. The death of someone young, then: not a child, because children are not yet fully formed, and the grief is at least partly for a lost promise, for all the things the child might have grown into, for the roads and forks never trodden, and that wasn't right for us at this time. Not an adolescent, either—adolescents are too crazy, they're hard because they're so unreliable chemically. Someone just come into adulthood. Not a woman: enough happens to women. A young man, then. A man to die just as his life was opening up, just as the line had been found. And someone precious— someone brilliant, someone charismatic, someone to whom others clustered. This death had to have meaning.

Kate, I said without speaking.

I'm here, said Kate.

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