Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

I immediately felt guilty, while at the same time determined not to have something stolen from me. These two feelings, always coming in a pair, the better to incapacitate and handcuff me – I have been troubled by them right from the beginning, when Justine arrived on this earth and seemed to want to stand in the same spot that I stood in, only I was there first. I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t! At that time Justine had just finished college and gone off to Berlin to work for an organisation there, but she often came back to visit seeming faintly unsettled, with a transitory air of immediate need, like a person in a busy station looking around for somewhere to sit while they wait for their train. No matter how nice a seat I found for her, she always preferred the look of the one I was sitting in.