by Ian Hocking
The tears made a shore at her eyes. She looked at her feet. She hated herself for the shame. She did not have to feel this way. The situation was not her fault.
‘Don’t, Danny.’
‘Let me get this straight. You don’t call us in months. When you do, it’s to tell me you’re worried about some new friend.’
‘I love you.’
‘Now I’m worried.’
‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Look… Bye.’
‘I love you, too.’
Jem replaced the receiver and stared at it for a moment. She closed her eyes and listened to the boarding calls, the wailing babies, the laughter, but she did not turn. In the private darkness, one future emerged. Anxiety, guilt and fear were washed out. Her escape from the airport would fix her. She could re-establish a certain version of herself.
Saskia would become a memory, if that.
Escape, then.
She left the airport.
~
At a café near the gate, Saskia Brandt sipped her coffee. She looked, mind stalling, at the great space above the concourse. The roof looked like the inner framework of a Zeppelin. She smiled. Whales of the air. She let her eyes move across the crowd. There was refuge in the mathematics of their movement and form, but her thoughts turned to the coming departure of the flight to Milan and the fact that Jem should surely have come back from the toilet long before now. Saskia looked at the crowd and blinked. There were seven hundred and ninety-one people on the concourse. Jem was not one of them. This understanding, the maths of it, was no antidote to her anger at the realisation that Jem had abandoned her.
I shouldn’t have let her find the gun.
And I should have told her about the other time traveller.
It was absurd that this loss should upset her. They had lived together for a month. Not such a long time. Saskia put her fingers on the ticket in her pocket. There was strength in loneliness, she decided, and she would regain that strength as her loneliness returned, like an appreciation for a cold, mathematical music.
She looked again at her coffee and the reflection of the roof upon it.
End of, as Jem might say.
Chapter Two
Berlin, earlier that morning
There was nothing, thought Jem, like the first flush of trespass. Her stomach bubbled with it. Her body could not decide if the sensation energised or paralysed. She made fists, opened her hands, made fists. She was a gunslinger about to draw. An artist poised to brush the first stroke.
Part of her wanted to return to bed, the better to be discovered by Saskia when she returned from the market with the promised breakfast. Instead she remained on the threshold of the room Saskia had asked her never to enter, and blinked at the muted sunshine that passed through the window. She listened to the lifebloods of the building: water moving through pipes; the tick of warming radiators; the muffled scrape of a faraway chair. And, now, in this room, the unmistakable hum of a computer.
Somewhere in this room was the answer to Saskia Brandt.
‘Arctic, Jem,’ she whispered. ‘Cool as.’
It was larger than the master bedroom where Saskia and Jem slept. She could make out a sofa, sagging in the middle, and an Ikea bookcase, same as the one from the family house in Exeter. Saskia had packed hers with large volumes. Elsewhere, there was a weights bench, a yoga mat, and the desktop computer. The practicality of the room mirrored Saskia. The impression of Saskia’s most private space was that of a nest. Jem recalled Saskia’s expression when she believed nobody was looking: hawkish, alert. Thinking on a distant threat.
She began with the bookcase. It was stacked with texts on neuroanatomy that meant nothing to her and classic computing volumes and journals that Jem half-understood from the computer science degree she had abandoned, ignominiously, two years earlier. She did not touch the books. She had an idea that Saskia would notice their disturbance. She moved to the Tryten Computer Locker. She touched the keyhole, thinking. Power tools would be needed to cut through the steel box that protected this computer. The desk was a long, fine bureau with a glass top. There was a passport (Frau Doktor Saskia Dorfer, born 1974 in Berlin; visa stamps for Turkey and Brazil), a digital camera, one ticket for a West End show in London (The Handmaid’s Tale), and an exercise book entitled Krimskrams with notes in German and occasional English snippets: ‘Forsyth method?’ and ‘Spain—do it!’ and ‘How can I ask David?’.
Jem opened the leftmost drawer.
Game fucking over.
It contained a gun.
The barrel was smaller than Jem would have expected. There was a cylinder attached to one end. A silencer.
Something touched her bare calf. She gasped, imagining Saskia’s premature return, and her sudden anger, but it was only the cat.
‘Shit, Ego.’
The honey-coloured animal corkscrewed into her ankle. His eyes gorged on the room and Jem realised that he had never been allowed in either.
‘You’re curious, too, aren’t you, sunshine?’
Curiosity killed the cat.
She looked again at the gun.
Satisfaction brought him back, baby.
Jem tried to smile at Ego as he strolled towards the weights bench and nosed the stack of discs over and over. Turning back to the desk, her eyes caught the doorway and a chill travelled her spine as she saw Saskia Brandt standing there, silhouetted against the brighter hall and black as the gun. She held bags of shopping in each hand. Her mouth was open.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’ Her voice was hard.
‘It’s OK, really,’ Jem replied with a confidence she didn’t feel. She walked over to Saskia, leaving a metre between them. ‘Just having a look around.’
‘How dare you? I locked the room.’
‘Listen, I’m just wandering about, no harm…’
Jem talked. She had filibustered people before, and with this confidence she dealt word after word. Though Saskia’s expression did not change—only the direction of her gaze as she looked around the room, checking—Jem maintained her verbiage. Covering fire, she told herself, shooting from the hip, but that only returned her thoughts to the weapon. The idea that Saskia kept a firearm in her apartment could not be positively spun. For Jem, the most worrying element was the addition of the silencer. Was Saskia a policewoman? A contract killer? How did that fit with the extraordinary events of the previous evening?
Jem’s spiel dried up.
As though that were her cue, Saskia dropped her shopping and entered the room, shouldering Jem aside. Her footsteps were silent. Jem remembered trying to walk silently across the floor minutes before. She had not been able to. Saskia could. She knew, Jem realised, which floorboards would creak.
Saskia touched the glass top of the desk. Her eyes moved from the contents—passports, tickets, camera—to Jem, then back again. Jem tried to judge her mood. Saskia seemed to be as preoccupied as a person working through a crossword. Her skin was ghostly, like a figure in stained glass, yet she was beautiful in an undeniable, cold way. Beholder’s eye be damned.
Saskia took the gun.
Jem said, ‘Wait.’
She did not know what to do. There was a chance that Saskia could rule against her in some way, and though the consequences of that were dim, shapeless in her mind—eviction? death?—Jem knew that she had to interrupt the process. She walked to her. In the glass of the desk, she saw an upside-down Jem meet an upside-down Saskia. Jem wondered, as she had many times, whether the reflected world could be the more real. The true world might play out in polished door handles, around bathroom taps, in the waltz of ice-cubes spun by a lazy hand.
They stood hip to hip. Both were looking at the gun. Saskia held it backwards, like a club, puzzling over it.
‘Sweetheart,’ said Jem, pushing away a strand of Saskia’s fringe.
‘How did you get in?’ Saskia asked. Her voice was sad. ‘I locked the door.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I just saw you, that’s all. It was this morning. You were st
anding at the window of the bedroom. It was after we… it was afterwards. I was about to call your name when you turned away and left the room.’
‘You followed me?’
‘Only to the living room. I saw you pull out that book halfway. I knew it had to be a lock of some sort.’
‘Clever girl.’
Jem smiled, eager to make a human connection between them. Something beyond this exchange of information. But nothing in Saskia’s countenance altered. She looked at Jem, who searched her eyes for meaning, as well as her posture and the memory of her words. Emptiness. Jem took Saskia’s head in both hands and kissed her, hard. Saskia’s lips were dry and unresponsive. ‘You are not going to do this. Are you listening, baby?’
‘Do?’ Saskia asked coldly. ‘Do what? Baby.’
Jem revved herself, raked the throttle on her resolve, and thought, Game over. Saskia did not resist as Jem took the gun. Jem went to the kitchen with an idea to break the gun apart but she leaned over the sink and instead vomit erupted once, twice, onto the stainless steel. It was mostly spit. She looked at the gun. Now what?
Saskia embraced her from behind. Softness at last.
‘Alles wird gut, Schlümpfchen,’ she whispered, reaching around Jem’s waist. Everything will be fine. ‘Here.’ Jem watched the disembodied hands work. Saskia released the magazine with a twist and it dropped into her palm. She thumbed the bullets from the top. Each fell into the sink, dit, dit, dah.
When she had recovered enough to speak, Jem asked, ‘What does Schlümpfchen mean?’
‘Cute little smurf.’
‘Because of my blue hair?’
‘Because of your blue hair.’
Jem felt that Saskia had closed her eyes, but Jem’s were open still, staring.
So that was death, right there, passing me by.
Chapter Three
Berlin, two weeks before
Saskia Brandt lived in an apartment in a north-western borough of Berlin called Wedding, which had formed half of the French sector, along with Reinickendorf, prior to reunification. The area struck Jem as a dead space that had been overlooked by the booming 1990s. Shops signs were as often Turkish as German. There was a Londonish coolness in the expressions of strangers. The houses and apartment blocks were grey cut-outs. It was, however, tidy. Nobody hung wet clothes from windows. The dooryards, driveways and pavements were scrubbed. Recycling bins were orderly and padlocked. This was Germany. But, equally, the fading aroma of dog shit rose from the roadside trees and the air was dusty, even this deep into autumn. Berlin was a flat city but the area around Saskia’s apartment felt too sheltered; it suffered from the lee of greater boroughs, missed opportunities and the doldrums of the everyday.
After shopping for clothes in Charlottenberg, they had returned to Wedding via the U-Bahn and begun the long walk up Dubliner Strasse towards the apartment. Jem listened to Saskia tell her about the borough and its problems while a second voice inside Jem, equally serious, told her that there was something doubly foreign about Saskia. It went beyond the German habit of treating life as a job, which Jem found both sensible and infuriating. It was a feeling that Saskia operated on many levels and Jem could sense only one.
The monologue had ended by the time they reached the apartment because Jem had been too tired to feign interest in tunnels dug beneath a wall that had fallen before her milk teeth. Saskia had not taken this personally. Indeed, she seemed to take nothing personally in recent days. A smile; then Saskia moved on.
The apartment block was six storeys of concrete surrounded by a car park. There was a school opposite. It was closed. Children went home for lunch in Germany. Jem watched Saskia climb the steps to the front door and open it.
‘Could you collect my post from the box?’ she asked. ‘It’ll lock itself when you close it.’
Jem, carrying one bag of shopping to Saskia’s two, said, ‘Sure.’
~
After a simple dinner, Jem helped Saskia load the dishwasher and tried to convince her that she should style her hair. Saskia agreed and Jem took a pair of scissors from the kitchen and followed her to the balcony.
Until now, there had been no question of a sexual relationship between them. They were friends. The question formed as Saskia’s hair fell on the spread towel like cinders and Jem leaned close. They spoke little. Opposite, across the balcony rail, the school’s windows flickered with the last of the sun.
‘You are not giving me a fringe, correct?’ said Saskia, tilting her head.
‘I could just dye it.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘How about platinum?’
‘No, thank you. And not too short.’
Jem gathered the stiff bristles between her knuckles and snipped. She was thinking about the last person whose hair she had cut. Wolfgang, her boyfriend, who was waiting for her back at their own apartment.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Jem. ‘It’ll be short as.’
‘As what?’
‘As possible. It’s an expression. Like when you say, ‘I’ll be there as soon as’.’
In a blank tone that suggested her true thoughts were elsewhere, Saskia said, ‘English has some nice expressions. I like ‘kick the bucket’. And ‘up the swanny’.’
‘‘Pissed as a rat’.’
‘‘This beer belly is a fuel tank for a love machine’.’
Jem gave a forced laugh, partly to cover the tremor in her voice. This was too much. Saskia didn’t deserve what was in store for her. Not the amateur, first-time sex, which was only the start. There was also Wolfgang’s plan.
Saskia said, ‘A Scottish police officer told me that one. He knew a lot about beer bellies.’
‘It’s more like a chat-up line, anyway. Like, ‘If I said you had a sexy body, would you hold it against me?’’
‘‘Get your coat, petal’,’ said Saskia. ‘‘You’ve pulled’.’
Jem put the scissors and comb on the flower-box and tipped Saskia’s head forward, shooing the hairs. Then she moved in front of her to inspect the arrangement. It was shorter. Well balanced. At the same time, for want of a mirror, Saskia evaluated her expression.
‘And?’
‘Pretty,’ said Jem.
‘‘Pretty as’?’
‘Just pretty.’
Saskia smiled with one side of her mouth.
Question, thought Jem. What’s the answer?
‘I hope you didn’t dye it blue.’
‘As if I would.’
‘Yeah,’ Saskia said, ‘like as if.’
‘You’re beautiful.’
Saskia did not reply. She looked at Jem as though the remark was a bad joke. A real groaner. When she rose and went inside, having still said nothing, Jem did not follow. She looked at the sensible German flower-box and the chair that would fold as neatly as a Japanese fan. An early memory returned: telling her brother Danny that if you folded a piece of paper enough times it would get smaller and smaller until it disappeared and, shit yeah, she was prepared to demonstrate the fact if he found it so funny. Jem put her hands on the rail and leaned into the dusk. She thought of the school children. Her ties to the past had been hopelessly snared—caught in aircraft doors, threaded through trains, tangled in those of strangers. The recovery of her former life? Fucking futile as.
She fastened her wristwatch and wiggled her jade ring into place.
Loneliness followed her inside.
~
In the living room, Jem fell into a chair and fixed her expression on a book spine whose silver letters were still sparkling in the dusk. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. There was a lamp at hand. If she wanted, she could turn it on and thumb through the Grimm’s fairy tales. But she sat there. The plan was not working. What was she going to do about Wolfgang? The noise of the shower filled the apartment. The seduction had not worked. Jem held her temples and said, ‘Shit.’
Jem remained in this position until, a minute later, the shower stopped. She dried her tearful eyes on her sleeve and listened to t
he soft sounds of Saskia’s footsteps. Jem turned her head a fraction and looked in the mirror to the left of the bookcase. At first, the shadows were difficult to interpret. Something grew from the deep blackness. It had hints of human movement. Suddenly, Jem saw that it was Saskia. She was naked. She seemed unaware of the mirror—though Jem did not believe this—and her steps were longer, slower than usual.
A moment later, Saskia’s breath warmed her earlobe.
‘Me again.’
‘I like your perfume, Saskia.’
‘Do you? It was made for me in the south of France.’
Jem did not move.
‘I’m not,’ continued Saskia, ‘a…whatever the word is.’
‘I’m not sure I am either.’
‘But we can try.’
‘Have I chatted you up, then?’
‘Yes. I thought it over.’
‘Well, you had me at ‘Guten Tag.’’
‘Take my hand.’
Saskia’s fingers closed over Jem’s.
Chapter Four
Berlin, three weeks before
It was late evening. Jem and Saskia were sitting at right angles in the glassy bar of the Patzenhofer Hotel on Krumme Strasse. Across the road lay Karl-August Platz and, beyond it, the church where they would meet Wolfgang. Jem’s gaze fell to the espresso cups—Saskia winning two-nil—and she considered the long silences of the evening.
Her new friend sat in an armchair with her legs crossed at the knee. She had not removed her black leather jacket. Beneath it, she wore a loose-fitting T-shirt. No rings. Egyptian-style eyeliner. The cuffs of her boot-cut jeans fell just so. Her black trainers were laced tight. Her foot tapped the air.
At points throughout the evening, Saskia had asked Jem about Wolfgang. Why, of all places, would he want to hand over Jem’s stolen passport in a church? Why the Trinity Church on Karl-August Platz? And why come in person when he could send an intermediary? How had they met, anyway? It was not the first time Saskia had asked these questions. Tonight, instead of being evasive, Jem decided to tell her straight.