Games People Play

by Voss, Louise

  ‘I never understood before what it means when people talk about the “notes” in the taste of a wine,’ I say. ‘But I can taste all sorts of things in this one. Blackberry, for example.’

  Karl exaggeratedly swooshes wine around inside his mouth and pretends to think. ‘Let’s see now …a hint of peppercorn.’

  I laugh. ‘No way!’

  ‘Yes way. It doesn’t matter that you can’t taste pepper, because I am only describing what I can taste. It is funny that people often think wine tasting is so difficult and mysterious, when it is really just describing what you personally taste. Nobody would laugh if you said “that motorbike sounds like a chainsaw”, would they? It’s just your comparison of the sound to something else.’

  I am impressed. There is something about Karl which is refreshingly sophisticated, at least to my impressionable eyes. For the first time, I am making a mental comparison between Mark and somebody else which reflects unfavourably on Mark. Mark knew sod all about wine. He’d never have the brass neck to hitch a lift on someone else’s boat. He only ever ordered chicken in restaurants (and then only if they didn’t serve burgers). I get the feeling that Karl’s tastes are a lot more mature.

  Suddenly, two things occur to me: the first, that perhaps at last I’m getting over Mark, and the second, that I would really like to go out to dinner with Karl some time. I wonder how serious Mum is about him…

  ‘Liquorice,’ says Karl thoughtfully.

  My turn. Another big mouthful. ‘Um …Tobacco!’

  ‘Interesting one. Plums.’

  I can’t think of anything else, but my cup is empty again, and once more Karl fills it.

  A young Japanese boy comes out on the rear deck of the boat. He is trendy, with thick-rimmed black oblong glasses, floppy black hair and baggy Evisu jeans. He has a Polaroid camera around his neck and another digital camera in his hands. He nods and smiles, and points towards the sky behind us. We look around to see a huge black cloud lowering over the horizon, but it’s lit up by the weak winter sun, and it makes the sky seem alive, almost fizzing with dark energy. A full rainbow is curving over the river, its colours clear and sharp against the darkness.

  ‘That’s a big storm,’ I say in awe. ‘Hope it doesn’t come this way.’

  The boy leans on the rail next to us and raises his digital camera to his eye. There is a sudden flurry of movement from the trees on the riverbank to our left and a large flock of bright green birds flies across the river, their feathers almost fluorescent in the sun against the black cloud. They shriek joyously as they cross exactly beneath the rainbow.

  ‘It’s the green parrots!’ I exclaim with delight.

  ‘But I didn’t think England had wild parrots?’ Karl looks mystified. ‘Germany does not.’

  ‘No, we don’t, generally. But for some reason, there are loads of them in this area. Nobody knows where they came from originally; there are all sorts of theories, like they escaped off a film set in the seventies, and bred in the wild. They’re a bit of a nuisance in people’s gardens, but they look nice.’

  The Japanese boy is overjoyed. He shows us the photo he’s just taken, on the screen of his camera. It’s beautiful: parrots, sunlight, cloud, rainbow.

  ‘That’s perfect,’ I say, smiling back at him. ‘What a lovely souvenir.’

  On impulse, the boy lifts his Polaroid and gestures for Karl and me to move closer together. Karl puts his arm around me and for a moment my breath stops. We lift our cups and beam at the camera. A square of plastic shoots out of the boxy contraption, and the boy hands it to Karl.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Karl says in that formal way of his. ‘Would you like to join us for a drink? You could perhaps get another glass from the bar.’

  He gestures to the wine bottle. The boy clearly doesn’t speak any English, but he smiles and shakes his head and nods, all at the same time, before retreating back inside to join the rest of the group.

  After that, we are undisturbed. People pop in and out to take photos, but they don’t approach us. We peel the plastic covering off the Polaroid and laugh at our grinning heads framed in the photograph. The first bottle of wine is finished, so Karl braves the bar inside to buy another. I surreptitiously examine the photograph while he’s queuing, and it makes me smile. I tuck it safely in my jacket pocket, feeling happier than I have for ages. I was a little concerned that the large amounts of lunchtime alcohol might render me over-emotional, possibly even tearful – which would be mortifying – but instead I feel a weird euphoric freedom, as if being on the river with Karl grants me a sort of diplomatic immunity to all the year’s worries. The parrots are still swooping back and forth across the water, wheeling and banking in perfect synchronicity. It’s magical to watch.

  ‘I don’t think this wine will be quite so nice,’ Karl says, coming back with an open bottle and two proper wine glasses, ‘but never mind.’

  It doesn’t taste much different to the first one, to my untrained palate. We finish our picnic, and Karl packs away the empty salad containers and crisp packets. He looks up and smiles at me, and my belly does something strange. I am tempted to ask how long he’s over here for, but am worried that he might think I’m being too forward. I am also tempted to text my mother and tell her that I really like Karl …I mean, she’s talking about going back to Lawrence soon, so surely she and Karl would be a non-starter? Mind you, he doesn’t even live in England, so the same might go for us …and maybe he doesn’t even remotely fancy me. I’m not very good at picking up signals. Perhaps that’s because he hasn’t given me any? Aargh. I don’t know. I feel totally at sea.

  ‘So where do you stay when you’re in London?’ I ask him as the reddish brown chimney stacks of Hampton Court Palace appear in the distance, to the right-hand-side of the boat. The starboard side? I’m never sure.

  ‘I have good friends who live in Hammersmith. They are from my home town of Stuttgart – I went to school with Pieter. He married an English girl and moved over here ten years ago. They have a spare room which they call “Karl’s room”. I stay there often.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say drowsily. The wine has really gone to my head now. I am fighting an urge to sink down against Karl’s broad shoulder and have a snooze.

  I wonder what on earth we’re going to do once we get to our destination. Get a cab back, I suppose. I realize that I’m really disappointed that the boat trip is about to end.

  ‘Thank you for this, Karl, I’ve really enjoyed it.’ I force myself to wake up a bit, and smile at him. ‘Everything’s been so grim lately, with…’ Again, I wonder how much he knows about our family, ‘…all the various traumas which’ve been going on. It’s so nice to get away from it all and not think about anything.’

  ‘I have enjoyed it too, very much. It’s a pity your knee is injured, otherwise perhaps we could go for a walk along the river now.’

  ‘Nice idea, but if my knee weren’t injured, I wouldn’t have time to walk anywhere. I’d be on court, or in the gym, training.’

  ‘How do you feel, since you cannot train or play for these past months?’

  I consider the question for a minute. ‘Well. It’s awful being this immobile, obviously, and it’s a drag having to be doing physio all the time. But….’ I hesitate. This is something I haven’t been able to admit to anyone else, and I say it in a rush. ‘Actually, I’m not missing the tournaments. I’m not missing the airports, or the waiting around, or the being knocked out, and all the endless drills and matches and fitness regimes, Dad shouting at me, being knackered all the time …I feel like I’m really having a rest. And I’ve done a lot of stuff I wouldn’t normally have done.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well …er …sketching, I suppose. And some watercolour things, nothing special, just little crappy pictures. But I really enjoy it.’ Why do I feel so defensive admitting it, as if it’s a vice?

  ‘Don’t put yourself down. I am sure they are very good. I would like to see them.’

  I
laugh. ‘Come up and see my sketches some time…’ Good grief, am I flirting?

  I think I must be. Karl leans towards me and looks in my face. He has the most amazing hazel eyes. ‘I would love to,’ he says slowly, and his hand comes up to cup the side of my face. My skin is cold, but his hand is warm. Just as the boat chugs alongside a little wooden jetty by the magnificent palace, he leans further in and kisses me, so gently that at first his lips and mine just brush together. It’s so sensual that the shock reverberates through my body, making my bad knee jump.

  I wince with pain and put my hand protectively on my knee. He puts his on top of mine. And kisses me again, this time more firmly, pressing me back against the boat rail. My head is spinning from the wine and the pleasure of it. As far as things that hurt my knee go, this is a whole lot more fun than physio…I close my eyes and sink into the kiss.

  When I open them again, the Japanese tour party is filing past us off the back of the boat, politely averting their eyes. Karl laughs and hugs me.

  ‘I have wanted to do that ever since I met you in Italy,’ he says.

  I am astonished. ‘Italy? Really? But …I thought…Mum…’

  Karl looks a little embarrassed. ‘I think Susie is a wonderful woman also,’ he says. ‘I like her very much. But not in the way I like you. I did want to see her again, and I would like to have her as a friend. I hope she won’t be offended, but, most of all, I wanted to see her so that I could meet you again. I really like you, Rachel.’

  ‘How old are you?’ I blurt drunkenly, too nonplussed properly to acknowledge what he’s just said.

  My cheeks have gone from freezing to flaming in the cold river air.

  ‘I am thirty-two,’ he says solemnly. ‘Single, mature, loving, sensible, solvent. All my own hair and teeth.’

  ‘But you live in Germany. Or Italy. Or both.’

  ‘Ja. But I am still single, mature, and so on. And in fact I am thinking of settling down in one place soon. I am tired of not having a real home.’

  ‘And which place might that be?’

  We are alone on the boat now, apart from the bar staff and boat crew. Karl stands up and hands me my crutches, then he picks up the bag of our lunch remains. He puts a proprietorial hand gently on my back as I hop towards the gangplank.

  ‘I think English crisps are so good,’ he says, giving me a sideways glance. ‘I would like to live somewhere which had good crisps.’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, limping slowly back on to dry land, feeling the earth rock slightly beneath my feet in an echo of the boat’s motion. The palace looms next to us, huge and imposing under suddenly blue skies.

  ‘English crisps are excellent.’

  Chapter 49

  Susie

  After I dropped Ivan home, I went back to the restaurant where Karl and I had initially planned to meet. It was only an hour later, but to my surprise he and Rachel weren’t there, and the waitress insisted that nobody on crutches had been in. There didn’t seem to be any other restaurants nearby, and when I tried Rach’s phone, it went straight to voicemail.

  I felt a little hurt, in one respect, but relieved in another. I wasn’t really in any fit state for a date, and it would do Rachel good to get out and have some fun.

  Karl was a gentleman; he’d look after her. Who knows, I thought idly as I got back in Gordana’s car, perhaps he’ll be her stepfather someday – but the thought seemed so preposterous that I stamped on it immediately. I didn’t want to marry anybody else. I just wanted Billy.

  Oh, snap out of it, Susie, I told myself. It wouldn’t do me any harm to play a little hard to get. Let Karl ring me if he wanted to reschedule our date. I don’t have to marry the man. It was just nice to have the attention.

  Gordana had her car radio tuned to a talk radio station and, as I was driving in the direction of Corinna’s house, an item caught my attention. A man was discussing how he and his family were trying to rebuild their lives after he’d spent three months in jail for viewing images of child pornography, and explaining why he thought the Internet industry should take more responsibility for this crime.

  I sat up straighter at the wheel and listened carefully. From the UK alone, he said, there had been seven thousand customers downloading stuff from just one illegal site in Texas, all traced by their credit cards. More than three thousand people arrested, seventeen hundred charged, and thirteen hundred investigations still ongoing …Wow. I wasn’t sure if it made it better or worse to think that Ivan was not alone in his charges. But I was sure by now that Ivan hadn’t done this. I believed him when he’d said he was innocent – although I wondered if all three thousand people arrested were saying the same: ‘It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it’.’

  I was distracted by a grey squirrel running into the road right under the wheels of the car in front. I saw the car jog slightly as it extinguished the animal’s life in an explosion of guts, and I felt sick at the sudden, unintentional brutality of the death. The injustice of life sometimes felt almost unbearable.

  Then the interviewer asked something interesting, and I forced myself to concentrate on the radio again: ‘How can the police prove that someone else didn’t download the material with your credit card?’

  I’d been wondering about that, too.

  ‘Well, of course it does happen. People are often reluctant to use their own cards, in case it gets traced back to them. Most people are aware that it can be ….’

  Not Ivan, I thought. Ivan couldn’t even do his grocery shopping online, from what Rachel said. ‘…so they use a stolen card or, more commonly, a borrowed one.’

  ‘But surely the police can tell which computer the material has been downloaded on to?’

  ‘Yes, of course, and when the same person owns the computer and the credit card, it’s pretty conclusive, but it takes the police months to sift through all the files on all the computers they’ve impounded, which is why the cases often take so long to come to trial.’

  Huh, I thought. That explained a lot. I had a mental image of a huge warehouse piled to the rafters with a jumble of impounded computer equipment and a team of weary-looking investigators standing in the doorway looking at it all in despair. Two words caught my attention: ‘time stamp’. I listened more closely.

  ‘Anything you do on a computer creates a “time stamp” which can be easily checked – it’s one of the first things the analysis team would look for. If the suspect is denying it, it’s his chance to come up with an alibi.’

  Prickles ran down my back and in my excitement I mounted a pavement when turning the corner into Corinna’s road. If someone really had set Ivan up, they’d have to have broken into the house to do it, when neither he nor Anthea were there. He and Rachel travelled so frequently, and from what I understood, Anthea didn’t like being in the house on her own when he was away, so once the investigators got the time stamp sorted out, surely there was a good chance Ivan could prove his innocence, since he could well have been away when the crime was committed?

  Parking badly over Corinna’s neighbour’s driveway, I was rushing inside to call Ivan – but I hadn’t even reached the front door before doubts began to assail me again. Surely this was the first thing Ivan’s solicitor would have suggested? Ivan hadn’t mentioned it as a possible get-out clause, though. Was it possible the solicitor wouldn’t know about time stamps? Also, there had been no evidence of a breakin at the house.

  Unless – and this was more likely – someone could have done it from the office at the tennis club? Perhaps the police had just seized the wrong computer? After all, all they had to go on was the evidence of payment on Ivan’s credit card …oh. That hadn’t been reported as stolen either. And presumably there’d be a date and time recorded on the credit card transaction too.

  My head was still whirling when I let myself into Corinna’s house with the spare key she’d lent me. As I stood in her small, silent front room, surrounded by her tasteful vases and arty prints, with the smell of her perfume faintly hanging in the a
ir, I wondered how long I’d be staying in other people’s houses, feeling like an intruder amongst their possessions and taste in decor. Maybe not for much longer – Corinna had been hospitable, but I knew she wouldn’t want me there longterm, and I didn’t feel comfortable at Gordana’s, not with everything that was happening.

  As I reached for the phone, I felt a sudden pang of yearning for Lawrence, and for my own things in my own house. My house – our house, as it was – wasn’t immaculate and shiny and minimalist like Corinna’s. Our house had cat hair in the sugar bowl, a blow-up armchair mended with Band-Aids (I was amazed Billy hadn’t popped it altogether by dropping lit joints on it), and an unfortunately swirly bedroom carpet we’d never got around to changing. There was no art on the walls, just a few dreamcatchers and some old film posters in clipframes, which I’d never stand for if I lived in England, but which in Lawrence was perfectly fine.

  In just a few months, it would be spring again; in Lawrence, the stabbing cold and bleakness of winter would be melting into something green and fresh, skies swept clean and blue by warmer winds, trees budding and people shedding their overcoats and mufflers like a rebirth. Newport and Pavonia would stop pretending they didn’t know how to operate the cat-flap and would be frisking in the garden again, chasing birds and beetles. It was too early for mosquitoes and chiggers, so I could be outside in the grass all day and evening without first having to poison myself with insect repellent, and I could be in the sun without getting burned to a crisp. It was my favourite time of year.

  I want to go home, I thought. Surely I’d be back in time for spring. But how could I leave Rachel with all this going on around her? I still felt responsible for her knee injury.

  Besides, I still wasn’t sure if I could face going back to my house without Billy in it. At least, not before Christmas. Christmas without Billy was far too depressing to contemplate.

  I didn’t call Ivan. Not straight away. On impulse, I dialled Billy’s number at the garage instead. He always started work early, so I thought he ought to be there. I hadn’t spoken to him since he’d come round to take more of his stuff to Eva’s, about a week after I discovered them holding hands in the deli.