I’d known she would be there, looking up at my window. There was something horribly inevitable about seeing her fifteen-year-old face tilted up to look at me. I rested my hands on the window ledge, my weight on my hands. The photograph album was still open on the side, a shot of Veronica in her pale floral dress caught in the sun. I looked at the girl in the street, back at the girl in the photo album. A shiver danced rung by rung down the ladder of my spine. It was her. The girl in the street was Veronica, the Veronica of twenty years ago, the Veronica I’d grown up with who had somehow stopped growing old, just like Peter Pan, and now here she was, on my doorstep the exact same week that Federico walked back into my life. Coincidence?
I read somewhere that there was no such thing as coincidence, fate, kismet, whatever you want to call it. But did that discount meaningful coincidence? A lover unheard from for twenty years and the sudden sighting of an ex-best friend from high school in the same week? Well, no. But … An ex-best that has somehow arrested the ageing process? Trapped herself in a bubble of 1979?
The rain didn’t seem to be touching her. It had to be a trick of perspective and bad light, but it had the cold hand of fear clutching at my stomach just the same. There she was, standing in the rain, bone dry.
Deuteronomy rubbed himself up against my leg, purring deep in his throat.
I dressed slowly, warmly, in jeans and a baggy blue sweatshirt. Then I took my time lacing my sneakers. I didn’t hurry because I knew she’d still be standing there not getting wet in the rain when I walked out of the door.
I took one last glance at the photographs; saw the photograph of Federico leaning against his blue Volvo that I had put back into the album a few hours before, and walked down the stairs and into the street, trying for the life of me to remember the name of the hill where we had made love that first time.
O O O
I ran out into the middle of the road like a mad woman. Three a.m., Stockholm, an in-between time, where the nightlife is giving way to the newspaper deliverers and the early morning smells of cinnamon hanging warmly in the air. The lights of the all night sandwich bar on the corner were on, a couple of star-crossed lovers eating pastrami on rye and supping cola, prolonging the night and angling towards a bed somewhere in the city, either together or alone.
I stopped walking two feet shy of the curb, close enough to see the lack of lines on Veronica’s sad face. She seemed to be staring right through me as if it was me that was the ghost, not her.
“Ronni?” I whispered, barely above a breath. “Is that you?”
Her eyes came down from looking at the angels and saw me for the first time in twenty years. It was her. I don’t know what I expected, that she would open her mouth to talk and there would be nothing, no words, nothing. That she would suddenly spill the secrets of immortality and young looking skin. That she would turn out to be someone else and this was all some huge paranoid joke I was playing out at my own expense.
“Caroline,” she said, dubiously, almost as if she didn’t recognise me. “You’re all grown up.”
I nearly laughed. It was such an innocuous thing to say, yet it summed everything up neatly. I was all grown up and somehow she was still fifteen and locked in eternal puberty.
It was the strangest sensation, being face to face with my own apparition, my own Ghost of Christmas past come to take me around the city by night. I don’t remember Scrooge being soaked to the skin in his story though. Maybe Dickens was a kinder God than mine, or maybe I was less of a character than old Ebenezer; less rounded, less unique, less worthy of creature comforts. So I cried tears of rain. I had no answer to Veronica’s almost accusation. It was a very simple truth; I was all grown up. That’s what twenty years do to a girl. They wrap her up in a silk cocoon like an ugly caterpillar and give birth to a woman, sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain. The trick is forgetting that first skin that was childhood and all of its growing pains and embracing the wings we need to fly through the rest of our lives.
Oh Jesus, I’m starting to sound like one of those damned self-help novels they sell in airports. You have to fall in love with yourself before you can fall in love with anyone else. Yeah, right. My mother hated every second of every day she spent with the abusive son of a bitch that helped hatch me, hated his kisses as much as she hated his kicks, yet I was surrounded by love while I grew up. How? Simple, there was no trick. All of the hatred he directed at her, she absorbed amplified and gave back to me as love. Overcompensated for the bastard who just happened, by biological defect, to be my daddy. But she believed everything he said about her; I could see it in her eyes. The haunted look of a woman who believes she is worthless. Even when she was dying all she could do was apologise.
“But she loved you,” Ronni said, as if she had found a way inside my head.
“What?”
“You’re mother, she loved you. You must know that. Every time he hit her, it was thinking about you that gave her the strength to get back up again … without you she would have given up a long time before, just laid down and died.”
So, I made it worse? I wanted to say it, but she reached out, placing her thumbs over both of my eyes like some faith healer trying to make me see again. “It is the same with Federico,” She whispered. “Your simply being there gives him the strength to go on.”
I tried to take some kind of comfort from what she said, but I couldn’t because if my simply being there had caused my mother so much more pain what was I doing to Federico?
“I was forty once, like you are now,” she said, suddenly. “And then he came back into my life. Said he’d forgotten nearly everything except me. Said some thief had stolen his past but it was a lie, he is the only thief, feeding himself off everything he never had the guts to experience. Now he is feeding off you … What have you given him? Tell me,” Ronni’s thumbs pressed into my eyes, hard enough to hurt.
I jerked away, trying to break her hold on me but her thumbs kept pressing as if they were trying to squeeze the truth out of me. “Please, you’re hurting me,” I said, holding her wrists and trying to pull my head back. “I haven’t given him anything. We’ve just talked a few times. He hasn’t asked me for anything.” It was a lie, and I knew it as soon as it came off my tongue. A big fat lie that had come to life all by itself. Of course he had asked me for something, he’d asked me to give him his past back, his memories. What had I given him? Nothing really. A few images. The photograph of the blue two door Volvo ’57 Coupe taken on … on … I couldn’t remember the name of the hill, the place where we had made love for the first time, where I had lost my virginity to Freddie … “Oh, Sweet God in heaven,” I whispered, realising it was gone. That there was a little black spot where it had been.
“What have you given him?” Ronni hissed again. “Tell me.”
“I told him how we made love the first time … and now … I can’t remember … it’s gone … like it never happened. I can see the car, it was a blue car …with red leather seats … but I can’t remember the place … I can’t remember where he laid me down … oh God, oh God, help me … help me …”
“Take your time, think about it, try to build the picture … try to remember. Panic is the enemy. Fear will steal more of yourself than you’ve already lost. Just try to relax, let the memories wash over you like water.”
I swallowed a breath, tried to imagine I was a pebble in the river of my dreams, tried to picture memories like swift flowing water, to let them wash over me, roll over me, sweep me away, and they did for a while, from childhood days into school days, faces, people, places, memories, all of them like icy water running through my veins, until the torrent formed a whirlpool around one face, Federico’s face. It was like a dam, the thoughts stopped flowing and instead began to churn and fold in on themselves, frothing up white water and black spots. Things I should have known, had known … had told Freddie over the table in Cafe Muren but couldn’t remember now.
“It’s gone,” I said softly, giving in.
&n
bsp; “Try,” she hissed. “Try.”
“It’s no good,” I said pathetically. “It’s gone.”
“Then I pity you,” Veronica Andersson whispered, her eyes full of the sadness of knowing, understanding. “Because you’ll never get it back, and now he has his hooks in you, you’re just going to lose more and more of yourself, until you’re a child like me, reduced to haunting doorways at night for fear someone from your past might recognise you and soon enough you’ll find yourself wishing for Childhood’s End, not that it can ever come. You’re Peter Pan’s plaything now …”
O O O
The perfect sky was torn by a fork of dry lightning.
I looked at the woman reflected in the window of Cafe Muren. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince myself that there were any visible changes in the face that looked back or not. Not that the glass offered any details, no wrinkles or laughter lines just the wide sweep of features that made up my face. And it was my face, the one I had grown up with, the one I had been wearing a few days before when I’d met Federico tearing out his collection of advertisements and stacking them neatly—or near as damn it the same, a little voice niggled. I had stopped paying attention to the details a long time ago so I couldn’t swear that everything was exactly the same as it had always been. It looked the same to me, maybe a little more haunted around the eyes.
Every journey begins with a single step, right? It doesn’t matter how far you are going, there is always one step at the beginning that sets the whole thing off. I pushed open the Cafe door and took that long step over the threshold into Federico’s world.
He was sitting at what I was already beginning to think of as his table, thumbing through a copy of yesterdays’ Dagens Nyheter, his fingers black with newsprint. An oversized cup of black iced coffee and a wedge of Alabama fudge were off to the side, both untouched. He was waiting for me yet he didn’t look up as I eased myself into the seat opposite his.
“I saw Ronni last night,” I said when he didn’t look up. I wanted to shock him into some kind of reaction. He looked up slowly to the sound of tearing paper, his sky blue eyes overcast, filled with rain.
“No you didn’t,” he said simply. “You saw what she wanted you to see but you didn’t see Veronica.”
“How do you know I didn’t see her?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep the edge out of my voice. “Were you there?” When he didn’t answer I nodded to myself, satisfied. “No, you weren’t were you.”
“I didn’t need to be there this time. I was with her when she died. I held her hand in a cold hospital ward while her husband was off somewhere feeling sorry for himself. Her hand was in mine when the life finally left her eyes. Do you understand now? You couldn’t have seen her because she died five years ago. You saw something, I don’t doubt that, but it wasn’t Veronica.”
That stopped me. “No,” I said, clinging to the image of the young girl standing in the rainy night. “No,” I repeated. “She isn’t dead … I saw her last night … she was … younger …”
In a few days the world had stopped making sense.
“She’s dead, Caro.”
I desperately wanted to believe him, needed to believe that he wasn’t some kind of memory stealing vampire, that he was the same old Freddie he’d always been, but I didn’t know who I could believe anymore. Last night everything Ronni had said had seemed so believable and now, looking at the pain in Federico’s eyes, I couldn’t see how he could be lying. “So who did I see last night? Tell me that much, please Freddie. I want to believe you. I really do.”
He closed his eyes, looking for the strength somewhere inside him to say the words I wanted to hear. When he opened the again the clouds had gone. There was nothing but endless cobalt blue sky. “You met her, the Thief of Time. You met the demon that is killing me and you fell for her lies, didn’t you?”
“No, I—”
“Please don’t lie to me, Caro. She’s persuasive. Believable. She has a way of getting what she wants. I won’t hold it against you.”
“Yes, then … but only because I don’t understand.” I said weakly. It was more the truth than he could know. “Tell me so I can.”
“Her name is Corimera. No, that’s not true, that’s what she told me to call her. Her name is something else. She knew I understood the rules, that names hold power, true names, so she gave me a lie because she knew I wanted to believe her. You see, I loved her. But she doesn’t care about that, about love. She only wants what she can take, not what can be given freely. There is no power in receiving, only in taking. The more she takes from me, the more of my spirit she absorbs, the more about her I understand. It’s like a two-way mirror, I don’t see everything and nothing is very clear, but I do see outlines, ghosts. I’m not the only one she has done this to, I know that now. To one lover she is Hera, to another Helene, Sarah, she is whoever they need her to be, but her real name, her given name, is Death. She touches all of our lives, draws them to a close like one of the Fates cutting the thread of life. She found me in the street and made me love her because I had nothing else in my life left that was worth loving.”
I took his hand in mine, turned it palm up. Both his lifeline and his loveline were broken by an intricate motorway of cracks that had been bled over by newsprint. “Go on,” I coaxed gently.
“It was after my military service, I was working as a cameraman for SVT 1. It was nothing glamorous, mostly news coverage. A fire at a youth club in Göteborg. A prison breakout. Skinheads causing trouble. Bus strikes in Stockholm and a train crash. Point the camera and let the loss of life do the talking. An idiot could have done it but the thing was, it was me doing it. It was me pointing the camera and it began to affect me. If you stare long enough into the abyss, right? After the fire, having to film the faces of dead kids being carried out of the gutted building, I wanted to be as far away from the camera lens as possible … as far away from real life as I could manage … I wrote poetry for a while, and hung around coffee shops pretending I was tres chic, but it was either drivel or haunted by the faces of burn victims.” He looked at me then, and I could feel every ounce of his pain. I’d seen the television coverage of the fire; who hadn’t. Sixty-six kids dead at a Christmas party because of a faulty fire alarm. “So I just dropped out. I started drinking. A lot. Too much too ever have been healthy. I wasn’t looking for answers, I was on a quest for oblivion, and that was harder to find than any answer I might have gone looking for.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said for want of something to say, some comfort to offer. He didn’t seem to hear me.
“Because they were always there, even when I was drunk. Their faces, those dead kids staring up at me. And when I was drunk it was worse because they started talking to me. I just couldn’t cope. I wasn’t strong enough to kill myself. I think I thought that would only bring them closer, a mixed up kind of resurrection, not them brought back from the dead but me brought back to them … so I just drunk myself into a perpetual stupor while my life crashed and burned.”
The red-eyed waiter brought me an unasked for cafe latte and left us alone again.
“That was where she found me, in the gutter. I was living out of bins, sleeping nights beneath the railway arches of the Central Station or in the amusement rides in Gröna Lund. It was off-season so no one was around to chase me off. It was raining. I remember that. She likes the rain … I’d passed out beneath the canopy of the carousel with my arm wrapped around a unicorn’s ankles … She was beautiful, her black hair hanging in wet ringlets down her forehead, her skin like alabaster …” he drifted in his telling of the story, caught up in the memory of meeting the woman he called Death. “I thought my heart was going to burst in my chest just from looking at her. It was like I was looking at a part of myself that had always been missing … I don’t know how else to explain it. With her to fill my eyes there wasn’t enough room for dead kids … Without a word she held her hand out to me and I took it. No thunderbolts. No lightning. We walked benea
th the Ferris Wheel and between the Ghost Train and the Tunnel of Love. I didn’t care where she was taking me. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to be with her.”
“So why do you call her the Thief of Time?” I asked then, sure that there was a rational, reasonable explanation for Veronica still being fifteen and Federico being closer to sixty. He looked at me as if to say: are you stupid?
“Look at me, Caro. What do you see?”
“I see you,” I answered obtusely, I knew what he was getting at but I wasn’t about to give him it, I wanted to hear him say it. No easy get outs, no helpful misunderstandings. His words; his truth; his lies.
“No you don’t,” he said, his lip curling. “You see an old man. That’s why I call her the Thief of Time, because that is what she does. She steals every day, every memory, and leaves behind the husk, all withered and shrivelled like a piece of old fruit. That’s why. Just look at me. Look at me, look me in the eye and tell me I am not wasting away. Not ageing faster than that tangerine in your fruit bowl.”
I met his gaze, and then broke the contact.
“Can’t do it, can you?” he mocked.
“You’re sick, Freddie. I don’t know what is doing it to you, but I find it hard to believe some supernatural entity is bleeding the years out of you …”
His fingers drummed on the tablecloth. He didn’t seem aware of what they were doing, how loud they had become. “I never said she was anything more than a woman, Caro. You said that. I said she was the Thief of Time, Death herself, you said supernatural. You said impossible.” He started coughing; a shallow cough that couldn’t seem to dislodge whatever it was that was filling his throat.
“Freddie? Are you okay?” I asked anxiously. The coughing fit didn’t want to stop. After half a minute, more, he brought up blood. Flecks of the stuff sprayed from his lips to speckle the palms of his hands. “Jesus Freddie, what’s happening?” I was up and around the table but there was nothing I could do except wait it out. I rubbed and patted stupidly on his back. People were beginning to look. Someone shouted: “He’s choking!” but he wasn’t. He hasn’t eaten anything. Then it struck me; I hadn’t seen Federico eat a thing in all of the time we’d spent together since our reunion. He always ordered food and ended up leaving it untouched.
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