Outside, it had warmed up a little. Norah had planned to go and get Austrian number plates for her car and, if that didn’t take all day, to look for some furniture afterwards. She unbuttoned the grey winter coat she was wearing over a black woollen dress. It was mild, almost springlike; the sun shone in a deep blue sky. All was brightness in this city. No shadows anywhere. She paused for a moment to watch the crowds of people ploughing their way down the pedestrian precinct, lured out by the glorious weather.
Norah soaked it all in: shoppers, tourists, police, neon signs, pigeons, cigarette ends, paper cups, the smell of deep-frying, the clatter of heels. A man touting roses, the distant clip-clop of hoofs from the tourist carriages, fountains, balloon-sellers, ice-cream cones and popcorn, smartphone zombies and con artists. She could feel herself being swallowed up and tried to get along more quickly, but it was useless; an enormous tour group even pushed her back a little. Norah abandoned all politeness and began to elbow her way through, holding the bag with the vehicle papers close to her body. She dodged a rickshaw cyclist who, for reasons best known to himself, seemed to think it a good idea to chauffeur his passengers through this mayhem. Then she realised that her phone was ringing. She fished it out of her bag and gave a start when she saw the screen. Alex. They hadn’t spoken since Norah had moved out—she’d stayed in a hotel for a few weeks before coming to Vienna, and neither of them had made any attempt to get in touch. Norah stared at the screen, feeling cold. Should she pick up or wait for her voicemail to kick in? Then it was too late; Alex had given up. Norah slid her phone into her coat pocket and raised her eyes.
The old woman she had seen begging earlier was standing right in front of her, so tall that Norah had to look up at her. She reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet to put a few euros in her dish.
‘You bring death,’ the woman said, her husky voice calm.
Norah frowned. ‘What did you say?’
The woman seemed not to hear.
‘Flowers wither,’ she said. ‘Clocks stop. Birds fall dead from the sky.’
Her grave stare was still fixed on Norah. Her hair was darker, her eyes brighter and her wrinkles deeper than Norah had realised. The pale turquoise of her irises was flecked with specks of red, like the tiny particles of blood in the yolk of an egg.
It suddenly occurred to Norah that the woman was mentally ill.
‘On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm in the Prater,’ the woman continued. ‘With good reason. And of your own free will.’
Norah didn’t know what to say. She had just opened her mouth to speak when someone or something rammed into her from behind, making her stumble and drop the papers she was carrying. A few loose sheets slipped to the ground and she stooped to pick them up.
By the time she had straightened back up, the woman had vanished. Norah looked about her in bewilderment. A group of Chinese tourists shoved past her, then a young couple with a pram. Where had she gone? Desperately scanning the street, Norah pushed her way between two football fans in Rapid Vienna scarves. The woman was so tall she ought to have stood out above the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen; it was as if the earth had swallowed her up. Shame, thought Norah, she looked like a woman with a tale to tell.
But it had been slightly unnerving.
4
A supermarket, a bookshop, a university building, a drugstore, restaurants, antique shops, a dolls’ hospital, a shop selling guns. On a house wall, a row of posters, each printed with a single huge letter, spelt out the words: ARE YOU SURE? Norah tried to fix everything in her memory. This was her neighbourhood now—this was home. But it would be a while before she stopped feeling like a tourist.
She looked up. The tram wires cut through the blue of the sky, making beautiful geometric patterns, like shattered glass. The houses were grand and imposing, just like all over the city. What was going on up there, behind those windows? Were people arguing? Watching TV? Cooking? Watering their flowers, committing adultery, committing murder?
As a child, she had often wished for x-ray eyes so that she could see through walls and find out what was happening on the other side—what kind of people lived there and what they got up to. These days she was sometimes glad not to have to know the distressing details—to see only the gleaming facades.
•
Her new flat was big and empty. No Alex, no dog—only echoes and shadows and bare walls. She’d tried to call Alex back, but hadn’t got through. Part of her was glad. She clapped shut her laptop, unable to concentrate on the notes she’d been trying to make. An old, dark thought had been stirring in her all day, and now there was no ignoring it.
She decided to ring her friend Sandra. Back in Berlin, Norah would simply have dropped in on her; she’d lived only a few streets away. And in the years before Berlin, Norah would have numbed the thought with drugs. But all that was a thing of the past; she’d been clean for ages.
Sandra didn’t pick up. Norah let her eyes wander over the moulded ceiling, the spotless parquet, the cardboard boxes, her few belongings—and all of a sudden she noticed a buzzing sound. She felt it rather than heard it, somewhere between her diaphragm and her breastbone, and it was a moment before she could put a name to it. These last few years she’d been alone so little she’d almost forgotten the feeling. It was loneliness—deafening loneliness.
She had to get out. Out into life. That always helped when gloom threatened to descend. Norah glanced at her phone and wondered who else she could ring. In Berlin it would have been easy to find someone who’d go out for a drink with her, but it was different in Vienna, where there was really only her best friend Max and his husband Paul—and her old mate Tanja, of course, but she was in Hamburg just now. Max had been thrilled when Norah had told him she was moving to ‘his’ city. She tried his number. Voicemail.
She thought of going out by herself, but didn’t have the nerves to face the comments and pick-up lines that a woman alone in a bar would be bound to attract. Her chest felt as if it were about to burst. She sat down, checked Facebook and Twitter, and tweeted.
Anyone else out there who can’t sleep?
#sleepless in Vienna
She waited for a few minutes, but no one replied.
Then she gave up and zapped her way through the TV channels until she found a documentary about indigenous foxes that she liked the look of.
Norah sat up with a start. She couldn’t have slept for long—the same documentary was still showing on TV—but she felt that vague confusion that comes over you when you wake from a deep dream. Dazed, she sat up, wiping sweat from her forehead. Floorboards creaked overhead; her upstairs neighbour was still awake. What was her name again? That’s right, Theresa.
How strange life was. Norah had left everything behind to start over in another country, and the past had caught up with her on her very first day in the new city.
Rubbish! It was only a stupid coincidence that her new neighbour looked the way she did. Didn’t people say that everyone has a doppelgänger somewhere? And how often in the past years had Norah thought she’d seen her, in a passing train, an airport lounge, a pavement cafe?
But it wasn’t only the similarity between Theresa and her that had made Norah think of her on and off all day. It was also the words spoken by the woman with the begging bowl.
On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm in the Prater. With good reason. And of your own free will.
On February 11, of all days…
Norah went over to the window, thinking hard, and looked down onto the street. On the other side of the road, someone was trying to squeeze a black station wagon into a ridiculously small parking space. Norah heard the muted laughter of a passing couple through the double-glazed windows.
Given what the woman had said, it seemed only sensible to conclude that she was mentally ill. Norah didn’t know anyone called Arthur Grimm. And she certainly wasn’t intending to do anyone in. But the date. That fucking date. It had to be a coincidenc
e.
Norah decided it was the discrepancy between the woman’s appearance and her words that was troubling her. She hadn’t seemed mentally ill, she’d seemed lucid and controlled. Norah had never come across anyone quite like her before; her interest was piqued. There might be something exciting behind it. She resolved to go in search of the strange fortune teller the next day—to find out who she was and what her story was. Norah was good at that kind of thing; it was her metier. In the meantime she could google the name the woman had mentioned.
Arthur Grimm. Norah screwed up her eyes, trying to think. No, she didn’t know anyone by that name. And yet it rang a bell. Or was she imagining things?
A fraction of a second later, the search engine spat out images of a face so handsome and yet so unnerving that Norah gasped.
5
Norah had dreamt she was alone in an empty world where there was no sign of life—only the occasional bird flying past, far away, out of reach.
Then the birds fell down.
Norah woke on her back in the dank cold of her flat. She was breathing heavily and when she opened her eyes, she had the impression that the ceiling had dropped to no more than a couple of feet above her face. It had rained in the night, staining the road dark and covering the city in a grey haze. Everything looked blurred at the edges, as if the cold and wet had attacked the very substance of things, watering them down to produce grubby pen and ink washes. Inside, Norah felt the same.
Somehow or other she managed to get up and make her way, shivering, into the shower, where she washed off the uneasy feeling with hot water.
Out on the stairs, she was met once more by the smell of mouldy carpet. At the letterboxes, she bumped into the ground-floor neighbour, a small, thin man with suspicious eyes and a crumpled face. She said good morning, but got no reply.
By the time she entered the corner bistro to fortify herself with a cappuccino, she was beginning to feel better.
Three elderly ladies were sitting at the window table over the first coffee and cigarettes of the day. There was a blonde, a redhead and a brunette, like in a bad joke, and they had worn heels, mangy fur coats and broad Viennese accents. Norah sipped her cappuccino, licking the froth from her lips, and stared out at the street, listening to the women’s scathing remarks as they bemoaned the state of the world, the decline of moral standards, the appalling dress taste of passers-by, and the smoking ban—not that they seemed to heed it. Norah was about to ask for the bill when her eye was caught by a young woman walking past the bistro. She was staring at the ground, as if she thought she might just get through life unscathed if she didn’t look at anything or anyone. Her dark blonde hair was tied in a ponytail and she was wearing tight jeans and a pink puffer jacket that accentuated her enormous girth. She looked oddly beautiful and heartrendingly sad, and if Norah had been any good at painting, she’d have liked to paint her portrait—oils on canvas, something classic.
‘It’s Marie!’ one of the old ladies cried. ‘Haven’t seen her for a long time!’ The other two nodded silently.
The couple at the table behind Norah had also noticed the young woman.
‘It’s a wonder she can still fit through her front door!’ the man said, and his girlfriend giggled. Norah glared at them, but they took no notice. Norah’s friend Coco popped into her head. Not that Coco looked anything like the young woman, but she, too, made people turn and look. Thinking of Coco made Norah think of Berlin and the disaster, and soon her good mood had evaporated.
When she left the bistro, it had begun to rain again. The houses seemed to be bracing themselves against the wind and weather, and the street, with its shuttered shops, closed grilles and darkly clad figures carrying umbrellas, looked almost hostile. Norah stopped, fished her phone out of her bag and opened Instagram. She took a photo, tagged it #winter-in vienna and #melancholia, and posted it. She’d been so caught up in events these last months that she’d neglected her social media channels and her blog. No wonder no one had replied last night. She’d better start posting more regularly; this beautiful, lonely city certainly offered enough material.
The underground station smelt of sadness and cement. Norah heard snatches of a melancholy eastern European air, the fruity cough of a homeless man, the ghostly echo of heels. She got on a train and stood wedged between strangers—headphones, lowered gazes, steamed-up windows, the dull noise of a throat being cleared. People’s bodies were pressed up close to hers, but the distance between them was unbridgeable. Berlin had been the same—cold and bleak and unwelcoming, though in a different way. The train stopped, the doors opened and people poured out, carrying Norah with them.
The old fortune teller she had come in search of was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the cold, damp weather seemed to have driven the beggars from the streets altogether. Maybe Norah would have better luck later in the day. She was determined to talk to the old woman again. The date was probably pure coincidence. Norah was probably just imagining that the name Arthur Grimm rang a bell. But probably had never been enough for her.
In the magazine offices Norah felt like a ghost, almost entirely ignored. Although her job didn’t officially start for two weeks, she’d already moved into one of the shared offices overlooking Kärntner Strasse. Berger had shown her around and introduced her to everyone, and she had found her new colleagues polite but aloof. That was fine by her; she’d always tended to keep her social life separate from work, and apart from Werner, she had no journalist friends. Norah knew Werner from her Hamburg days. He was an excellent reporter, but he and Norah had something else in common, too; there had been a time when he’d taken even more drugs than she had. Hard to believe that they’d both been clean for ten years; it was as if they’d been given a second chance. Norah certainly had no intention of straying from the straight and narrow again.
She shared her Vienna office with Aylin, a taciturn, wiry woman in her mid-forties who had positive slogans and photos of palm beaches pinned above her desk and took herself off to yoga in her lunch breaks. She was the anti-Werner.
Norah desperately needed caffeine, or nicotine, or both. She had persuaded Berger to let her write a series of features on Vienna’s homeless scene, and was wondering what tack to take. As usual, she decided to follow her gut instinct and focus on her own interests—though without stretching the remit of the magazine. Thanks to an old press contact in Berlin, she had another job lined up, too: in a few days she would be interviewing a film star. Berger had been thrilled—little sold as well as a real live Hollywood star—and Norah herself was looking forward to the interview, though she knew she would have to be well prepared; the actor had a reputation as a tough nut. Norah was an excellent interviewer. She had a sixth sense for knowing how to make people open up to her—whether to provoke or flatter or take the offensive. Most importantly, though, she had understood very early in her career that an interview, like everything in life, was based on reciprocity. If she wanted to get something out of her interviewees, she knew she had first to offer them something, and so she never interviewed anyone without revealing some small secret about herself. She had amused an American pop star in the Kempinski Hotel by showing him the unsuccessful tattoo on her hip. She had softened a neurotic French film director by telling him about one of her recurring nightmares. And she knew exactly how she would get this actor to identify with her and trust her. She was smiling to herself as she entered the office kitchen.
Mario and Anita turned round when they heard her. Anita, a boyish woman from southern Austria with short bleached hair, whom Norah had immediately taken to, was complaining to Mario (who reminded Norah vaguely of her friend Sandra’s brother) that just because she happened to be friends with the niece of the new Burg Theatre director, the boss had charged her with getting an exclusive interview with him. As if it made any difference; everyone knew the man refused to give interviews. Norah just nodded to her colleagues, not wanting to intrude, and returned to her own thoughts as she busied herself with the espresso machi
ne. It was a shame she hadn’t been able to get hold of Sandra, when she was such a fan of this actor she was interviewing. But she knew what she’d say to win him over. It was easy. Everyone knew he’d been pursued by a stalker for years, so if she could manage to work it into the conversation, she’d tell him about her own stalker, a man who’d followed her everywhere until she’d managed to shake him off by moving to Berlin. That was good common ground. Norah would start the conversation with innocent questions about his latest film which he’d come to Europe to promote, and then gradually—
‘Arthur Grimm,’ she heard Anita say. ‘But as far as I know, nobody’s really aware of it.’
Norah stopped in her tracks. Had she heard right? Slowly she turned around. She saw Anita fish a teabag out of a mug and drop it in the bin.
Norah must have made a mistake. It would be too much of a coincidence.
‘Do you need any help?’ Mario asked, and Norah realised that she had frozen mid-movement next to the coffee machine.
She cleared her throat, flicked down the On button and the machine sprang to life, gurgling and hissing like a mythical beast stirring from sleep.
A thought flashed into her mind. Was this whole fortune-telling thing an elaborate joke on the part of her colleagues? Rubbish, she told herself. Who’d do a thing like that?
‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I can manage.’
THE WOMAN
My happiest childhood memory isn’t celebrating Christmas or going camping in the summer, but watching a boxing match. I went with my father, although in those days it was unusual for children to be taken along. We sat right at the front, by the ring, and I could hear the sound of flesh slapping against flesh. The place smelt of blood and adrenaline, and whenever a boxing glove smashed against bone, I saw a spray of sweat and saliva dancing in the air like dust motes in a beam of light. It wasn’t a championship or anything, and I couldn’t even say for sure what weight class the boxers were. They were both giants to me, and they went at each other like wild beasts.
The Shadow Page 2