‘That’s sad,’ Jon said, looking at the bird out there alone on the water. ‘So even if a new male tried to make her feel special she won’t take the risk of letting herself fall in love again?’
‘That’s right. I feel like her right now,’ Kirsten admitted. ‘Like the bird no one else can love.’
Jon didn’t have an answer for that. He wanted to tell her she would find love but even without saying it he knew it would sound trite. It was like telling someone ‘it’s okay, you’ll get over it. Tomorrow it won’t seem half as bad and the day after you won’t worry about it at all.’ It was the kind of meaningless sentimentality that worked on greetings cards but fell flat face to face.
Instead of talking he took her hand and steered her towards the shelter of the bandstand. A young boy was playing a tin whistle. He smiled when he saw them coming and stopped playing to roll himself a cigarette. Jon sat Kirsten down beneath the roof of the bandstand and knelt beside her.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
‘People having fun in the rain. What do you see?’
‘A million things I could never hope to draw. Light and shade. angles and textures that my inks could never duplicate.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘I like to sit here when I feel sad. I look at the faces of strangers falling in and out of love, at children playing with a world full of dreams still to happen, at the couples who have grown old together sitting on the benches watching a world that has become too fast for them pass by all around them, amazing them with its sights and sounds.’
‘It must be lovely to see the world the way you do, Jon. To see the magic in the mundane.’
‘All you have to do is look for it,’ he promised, taking a pebble from the floor of the bandstand and smoothing it between his fingers. ‘This could be a stone, just like any other stone, or it could be a flake of history that has seen kings and queens die, stars fall and castles built in the sand. Just depends how you choose to look at it. I like to think that the pebble somehow holds a few memories of everyone who has ever held it, every foot that has ever kicked it. I like to wonder who they were. What their stories were.’ Jon smiled a little self-consciously as he spread his hands. ‘I guess I am a dreamer.’
‘No, but I think you must be a very wonderful person to know, Jon Sieber. I’m glad you came into my life today.’
‘I’m glad too,’ Jon said honestly.
‘Will you take me home now?’
They walked the mile and a half to her apartment on the waterfront. There wasn’t a beach. It wasn’t that kind of waterfront. Bonded customs warehouses lined the strand, old paintings from the turn of the century advertising China teas and fine Indian silks. Kirsten lived in the top floor of a disused granary that Hoke had converted into an artist’s studio over thirty years ago. It was full of canvasses, most were blank but the few that had been painted on all showed images from Hoke’s books. Jon went over to the window where the fading sun cast a different light on the old man’s paintings. They weren’t the sanitised children’s illustrations of Princess Scapegoat and The Forgetting Wood that he knew so well. They were bleaker visions by far. Jon looked at Kirsten where she lay foetal on the futon. She had fallen asleep almost as soon as they had arrived, the exhaustion and mental stress too much for her to deal with and now she was dreaming whatever dreams this strange assortment of Hoke’s canvasses inspired.
Doing his best not to wake her, Jon brewed himself a coffee and spooned two lumps of fresh cream into the cup. Steam corkscrewed from the coffee as he carried it back to his seat on the windowsill. The room, he noticed, smelled very faintly of vanilla. He smiled to himself. She was beautiful, childlike, a little lost. He sat there on the windowsill, fingers feeling out the grain in the wood, and watched Kirsten sleeping. She was someone who needed protection. Someone he found himself wanting to protect. Someone to grow old with. Almost an hour later he moved to a chair and drifted off to sleep himself, thinking how easy it would be to fall in love with Kirsten Berglund.
The sound of a door closing woke him up a few hours later.
He was alone in the apartment.
Kirsten was gone.
He waited but she didn’t return until morning. He was making himself an omelette when she let herself back into the apartment.
‘I needed to clear my head,’ she said by way of explanation as she dropped her coat on the couch and came over to wrap her arms around his waist. ‘Smells good.’
‘Well, thank you. Omelette ala Sieber, with a garnish of fresh pesto, avocados, pimentos and basil. Just something I threw together,’ he said with a smile. ‘I thought you might be feeling hungry after all that walking...’
‘Ravenous.’
It was a pattern that was repeated for the next four nights; Kirsten would curl up on the couch whilst Jon looked at the miscellany macabre that had somehow been spawned by Hoke Berglund’s mind, piecing them together with his own interpretations of the old man’s last story, Angel Home, then he would watch her sleeping. It was his secret; the time when he felt himself falling more and more in love with her. Then, after he had drifted off the sound of the door closing would wake him. She would return in time for breakfast, insisting on a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice with plenty of pulp swimming in it.
At first he imagined she was sneaking out to meet with someone but she never smelled of cologne, never dressed up or wore makeup when she slipped out at night. She simply kissed him on the forehead and left. It wasn’t the behaviour of someone tangled in a web of clandestine affairs and adulteries.
On the fifth night Jon played possum, faking deep sleep as she leaned over to kiss him. He had counted to twenty-three in his head before he heard the door close. Stuffing his feet into his sneakers he waited for the grumble of the freight elevator and the slamming of the wire cage doors before he followed her. With the groans of the cage straining against the old cables echoing in the stairwell, Jon ran down the stairs, taking them three and four at a time, desperate not to lose her.
Kirsten stood on the street corner, caught in the lemon yellow trap of the streetlight. She had her arms wrapped around her. He could see she was shivering but he stayed back, hiding in the shadows of the old granary’s huge steel doors. Jon resisted the temptation to duck away as Kirsten looked back fretfully before she knelt to put something on the floor, then she disappeared around the corner into the heart of the warehouse district.
He followed cautiously, stopping at the corner to see what she had dropped.
It was a pebble. Simple. Smooth sided. It felt warm in his hand. He put it back down. Jon followed Kirsten around the next corner and found another pebble marking the way. He wasn’t sure what she was doing – all he could think was that Jews used pebbles like this as marks of respect on graves. Was she walking through the city every night just to leave little marks of respect on every street corner? Or was she like a child in a fairy tale leaving breadcrumbs to find her way back home?
The street smelled of freshly baked bread.
He nearly bumped into her as he walked around the next corner.
‘You’re following me?’ she said simply. She looked surprised. No, not surprised, frightened. She looked frightened. It was the last reaction he had expected.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jon said, and meant it. He backed off a step, his hands held up defensively. ‘I just thought –’
She didn’t let him finish. ‘Go home, please. Just go home. You’re not helping. I need to be alone right now. You don’t need to understand.’
‘Okay. Okay,’ he nodded, taking another step back. Jon didn’t understand but he did what she asked. It felt like all he could do, so he went back to the granary and waited for her to come home.
Time alone gave him time to worry, to visualise Kirsten’s frightened face and start constructing the kind of nightmares that might lead to her being
frightened, alone, needing his help and yet afraid to ask… and as the hours passed the idea of Kirsten being in some kind of trouble grew more substantial and began to take on a life of its own. Suddenly the apartment was claustrophobic instead of spacious, the creaks and groans of the old wire caged elevator sinister instead of comforting.
There has to be something here, a hint, somewhere, he reasoned, after an hour of staring out of the window and looking for her coming home. Jon looked around the room at the mismatch of furniture assembled from years of scouring bric-a-brac sales; at the juxtaposition of technology offered by the sleek-lined black stereo, compact disc and mini-disc unit, unlabelled, imported and obviously expensive; at the rows of soft toys that lay on her huge bed; and at the canvasses that lined the entire wall as you came into the apartment. Hoke’s feverish paintings. Had the old man known what was going on? Had he somehow sensed whatever secret Kirsten was so desperate to keep? And then, worse, darker: Had it killed him? The thought, as irrational as it was, sent a chill through Jon Sieber’s body that refused to be ignored.
He began rifling through the pictures, looking for something, some kind of hint or clue that might explain Kirsten’s nocturnal wanderings but there was nothing. Each canvas contained another bleak image from Angel Home, telling a slightly darker version of the story Jon had illustrated.
On one canvas Hoke had sketched the outlines of the scene where the boy learned the secret of Angel Home from a dying angel. The angel on its knees, clutching the boy’s hands, drawing him down to hear its frantic whispers. The angel’s wings had shed their feathers and were little more than a fine filigree of bones beneath sallow skin. Jon remembered the scene from the book as being different, but the image here contained more emotion, more pain, and for it, was more as he imagined it would feel, coming face to face with a dying angel. It was interesting but it didn’t help him in the slightest.
The sound of Kirsten’s key in the door made him turn away guiltily.
‘Are you there?’ she called, closing the door behind her.
‘I was looking at your dad’s paintings.’
‘Daddy used to paint all the time,’ she said, sinking into a chair. She looked exhausted, dark rings beneath her eyes, a slight translucence to her skin.
Haunted, Jon thought. She looks haunted.
Kirsten kicked off her shoes and stretched. ‘Will you make love to me, Jon? I need to feel something, anything, but not this…’ she opened her arms, making a gesture that somehow encompassed the emptiness of the apartment, of her life and her soul all in one.
Five nights they had shared, without so much as a kiss, and now she was inviting him to fill the void in her life, to make love and lose himself in the simple carnal needs of the flesh. He nodded without saying anything and they went over to the unmade bed.
They made love without words, allowing themselves the gift of expression through touch and taste, sight and smell.
‘He was right you know,’ Jon said afterwards, lying in the tangle of sheets. Kirsten had her head on his chest. He could smell the sweet fragrance of vanilla perfume in her hair. ‘Angels do smell of vanilla.’ He ran his fingers through her hair, content to simply enjoy the closeness of the moment.
‘I know.’ Kirsten said, sleepily.
Lying there with the sounds of water drumming in the shower stall and Kirsten singing off-key as she soaped herself, it was almost possible to forget what had happened last night. Almost. But when he rolled onto his side and saw the unfinished portrait of the dying angel that niggle of imagined danger returned.
‘Angels do smell of vanilla,’ he said, staring at the picture.
That night when Kirsten leaned over to kiss him before she slipped out, Jon Sieber moaned slightly and rolled over. He was awake and he knew he was going to break his promise to her.
‘It’s for her own good,’ he muttered as he heard the wire cage elevator start its rickety descent. ‘She needs me. I know she does. She’s just too damned scared to ask. Someone’s got her so scared… Well, I won’t let her down.’ He pulled on a white tee-shirt and a pair of jeans and laced up a pair of sneakers. He waited, then went to the window and watched her disappear around the corner. She knelt to place a stone marker on the kerb, just as he had hoped she would. He didn’t need to race down after her; he could follow the pebbles on the street corners.
Her trail of stones took Jon down streets he’d never seen before even though he had lived in the city all of his life. They took him from street to backstreet in an ever narrowing maze. The night was quiet. No cars, no distant trains, no stray dogs barking. The lack of noise was creepy. It wasn’t natural for a city to be so lacking in reminders of life, even at night. It was as if one of the corners he had turned had taken him out of the city and into some place else, some place without cars or trains or dogs. Still he followed the stones.
Near the heart of the maze he turned a corner and found what he was looking for. Kirsten on her knees with her hands out, being held by the wrists by a rag-clothed man stepped straight from the pages of Hoke Berglund’s first story, Princess Scapegoat. It was Mr. Self Affliction, the rag-wrapped hobo who tormented himself with a thousand and one ills over the course of a single night. Mr. Self Affliction suffered every disease known to his uneducated mind, had gout and scurvy, menstrual cramps and immuno-deficiency, CJD and epilepsy. His hands were twisted into claws with ersatz arthritis, his spine twisted with premature curvature, his face ravaged with the craters of acne. His eyes bled where he had tried to claw them out with his fingers.
Jon Sieber stood silently on the edge of a miracle, watching one of Hoke’s characters whisper feverishly to the woman he had fallen in love with to the point of obsession in a few short days. It took him a full minute to recognise the scene as being the perfect replica of the unfinished canvas back in the apartment, Mr. Self Affliction playing the role of the boy, Kirsten the dying angel. Mr. Self Affliction stooped over Kirsten, leaning down so that she might hear his whispers. His voice carried across the street – or rather, the many voices he was using carried across the street. He was talking, too quickly for all the words to make sense, but in the menagerie of sounds Jon heard his own voice, Kirsten’s answering his, and others he didn’t recognise. He was beginning to make some kind of sense of what he was witnessing: it was as if the freakish Mr. Self Affliction were somehow forcing his words into her, feeding her with them.
Kirsten threw her head back and screamed as Mr. Self Affliction pulled her closer, his manifold voices taking on a desperate urgency, the words rising in pitch, becoming hysterical. He was arguing with himself, Jon realised, hearing his own voice screaming at Kirsten and Kirsten’s pitiful weeping, both coming from the mouth of a character from a children’s fairy tale, both twisted and distorted by the bizarre mimicry.
Then Mr. Self Affliction broke eye contact with Kirsten, pushed her back onto the pavement, and turned to look directly at Jon. The man’s smile was sickening. All the more so because the lips, the eyes, the entire face, belonged to Hoke Berglund.
‘We buried you…’ Jon breathed, unable to believe what he was seeing. Unable to accept it.
‘You can’t bury the boy who remembers the angels,’ Mr. Self Affliction said, backing away and turning. ‘Bury the boy and who will remember all the pretty pretty ones? That’s the secret of Angel Home, Jon. The boy remembers and without the boy the angels will die… God’s forgotten his children.’
‘We buried you,’ Jon repeated stupidly but Mr. Self Affliction was away, skipping down the street as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
‘Why did you follow me?’ Kirsten whispered as he bent over to lift her from the ground. ‘You promised me. Why did you break your promise?’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘Was that…?’
‘My father? Yes… You can’t bury a storyteller as long as his stories are still alive… That’s the magic o
f a storyteller. All you can do is kill their magic. Explain it so much there is nothing left to believe. You make the world grow up.’
‘I don’t understand…’
‘And that’s where Hoke was wrong, he thought you of all people would understand the magic.’
‘Let me take you home.’
‘I am home, Jon. This is my home. I’m just a visitor when I’m with you.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No.’
‘It’s true. Look around, don’t you recognise this place?’
Still holding her, Jon did as she asked. It was true he did recognise where they were – only he hadn’t quite got it right when he’d drawn it. Angel Home was so much more ordinary in real life. Simple bricks and mortar. The magic was someplace else.
Or simply forgotten, Jon thought, looking at the woman he’d come to love so fiercely without ever realising why or how. He realised he was crying.
‘Angels really do smell of vanilla, Jon. He wasn’t making it up.’ Kirsten said, touching the tears that stained his cheeks.
‘If you’re an angel, then I must be –’
‘The boy who has to keep the magic alive. The next one because all boys grow up and die in the end. All I wanted was for you to love me, to remember me, and by remembering, keep me alive when my father had forgotten me. But you had to follow me. You had to break your promise. And now, the magic, well, there’s nothing left. You can see the strings. It’s all illusion.’
‘I don’t understand…’ he said again, shaking his head, refusing to understand.
‘What do you think was happening? What do you think you saw?’
‘Mr. Self Affliction,’ Jon admitted after a moment.
‘And what do you think he was doing,’ Kirsten pressed, struggling to sit up. Her smile had faded, her eyes too.
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