Naked City

by Anthony Cropper

  Ingrid was feeling relaxed and happy. She rubbed at the badge through the coat as if she were polishing it and then took the tissue out of her cuff to wipe her nose that was now feeling sniffly.

  ‘It reminds me. My sister was in a coffee shop near where she works when she sneezed and some stranger offered her his cotton handkerchief. So she took it. The next day he was in the coffee shop again and he came over and gave her a crocodile he had made out of paper and then walked away without saying anything. The following day he gave her an old leather button. She was with her friends and he was always on his own so they never really talked. But he kept giving her these little presents.’

  ‘So what was that all about?’

  ‘Well, the fourth day he brought her an apple and the fifth day a tiny little wooden boat. When she got the wooden boat she asked him out and they started seeing each other. But he still kept giving her something different every day – an old penny, a tin soldier.’

  ‘Where did he get all this stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know. Second-hand shops. That sort of thing. But the point is, she felt there was something behind it that he wouldn’t tell her. He was a journalist as it turned out. A bit of an intellectual. And he liked crime stories – the sort with puzzles and clues in them.’

  ‘So what? This was all part of the plan for the perfect murder?’

  ‘No, not quite, Mister Cynical. When they had been seeing each other for sixty days he gave her a diamond ring.’

  ‘An engagement ring?’

  ‘Yes! He proposed. Do you not get it?’ she asked, and then started counting off the things on her fingers: ‘Cotton, paper, leather, fruit…’

  Mark looked completely baffled so Ingrid put him out of his misery.

  ‘They’re the traditional gifts you give when you’re celebrating the years of your marriage. The first year is cotton, the second is paper, and so on.’

  ‘Oh. And did she accept? After two months?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve been married five years now. She’s just had her first baby. A little boy.’

  ‘So what was all this with the gifts? Just a puzzle to get her interested?’

  ‘He told her later that he knew he wanted to marry her the first time he set eyes on her.’

  ‘Good grief!’

  Ingrid elbowed him in the ribs.

  ‘Don’t sound so disgusted. It’s quite romantic for this day and age. Don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s quite…something.’

  She tried to elbow him again and he manoeuvred out of the way to avoid it. They were approaching the Tyne Bridge and a drizzly wind started buzzing around them. Ingrid shivered audibly and Mark came tight up to her back and wrapped his arms around her.

  ‘D’you like the idea?’

  ‘Of what?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Of having a family?’

  ‘Mmmm. I love visiting my sister and being with her family. And her little boy, Sebastian. He’s such a goofy looking thing. I’d like a boy of my own, I think. I like goofy looking boys!’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ he said without laughing.

  ‘In fact I’ve always had a thing about boys with their front teeth missing. Little boys, I mean. They look so cute.’

  ‘It’s probably why people become dentists. A maternal urge.’

  She dug him in the ribs again and tried to pull away but he held onto her.

  ‘So what do you think this fleece jacket is made out of? Leather, cotton lining with a stainless steel zip? That might count for years one, nine and eighty-six. If you want to keep it.’

  Ingrid turned her head to see what the look was on his face but the glaring street lamp behind him obliterated any detail. Still, the moment seemed comfortable enough. She smiled happily and they kissed. It was like sealing a contract. A pity it all had to change when Mark was suddenly overcome by a peculiar atavism. Modern research might explain it by pinpointing an unusual shaped gene lodged deep in the DNA, a biological mechanism that cranks into action to trigger an ancient piece of human behaviour when the male believes he has made special claim to the female and she has given some provisional show of acceptance. It may or may not require a bridge for the purpose but the prop was used in this instance.

  ‘You know what we used to do when we were kids?’ he asked out of the blue.

  ‘Umm, kids stuff?’ she guessed brightly.

  ‘Right first time. Only, when we were on the bridge…’

  He stopped talking to hoist himself on the wall, placing one foot square in the middle and bringing his knee next to it.

  ‘…we used to try and walk along the wall…!’

  ‘No, Mark. Please!’

  He put his arms out wide like a tightrope walker and stood up shakily.

  ‘It’s not difficult,’ he told her. But his voice was now edged with doubt as the wind buffeted at his shirt and swept the hair across his eyes. The trouble was, now that he had started he felt obliged to go at least a few steps. He inched one leg out and moved forward with the grace of a peg-legged pirate walking the plank. The river below was invisibly black and the wall before him criss-crossed with dark shadow and white light creating an optical illusion consisting of indefinable areas of space and solidity. He decided he would make three quick steps and get down. Best not make a total fool of himself. As well as that he decided that if he slipped, all he had to do was grab hard and hold fast to the wall. He took another step. An ill-intentioned gust caught him and in a fit of aeronautical whimsy began to twist his body into the elegant curves of a propeller. Mark felt himself borne by the convoluted force and flung his arms forwards to grip the wall. The confusion of light and shadows swinging towards his face was a puzzle he had too little time to solve. His forehead hit the wall with a mighty crack while his body twisted and rolled onto the pavement side of the bridge. Mark’s head was swimming with the blow. The one thought in his mind still working was to hold onto the wall and save himself from falling into the river. As his body rolled his fingers found the edge of the kerb and he hugged his body tightly against the paving stones, gripping the kerb with all his might, for in his mind he was dangling a hundred feet up against the side of the bridge on a merciless night.

  Ingrid rushed up to him.

  ‘Oh, Mark! Are you alright?’

  It was a mystery of nature why her voice should be behind him.

  ‘I…must…pull…!’

  He tried dragging his body up to safety but couldn’t find the strength. His eyes were closed as tight as knots and his arms seemed utterly wasted.

  Ingrid tried to help him up and tugged at his waist.

  He gave a yelp as he felt her pulling him off the bridge. When she tried unclasping his fingers from the kerb he began to panic.

  ‘No! No…! Stop. What you doing? I’ll fall!’

  At that point a taxi cruising past slowed to a crawl and pulled up. The driver got out and ran over.

  ‘Need a hand, love?’

  ‘No, that’s alright,’ Ingrid told him, sounding flustered.

  He ignored this and bent down to get a whiff of Mark’s breath. Satisfied that he wasn’t simply inebriated he gave him a fatherly pat on the back.

  ‘Here, love. Get his other arm.’

  The two of them managed to heave him to his feet. He stood up, utterly dazed, his eyes focused on a point somewhere between his nose and four days ago.

  The taxi driver seemed genuinely concerned.

  ‘Looks like he’s got concussion. What happened?’

  Ingrid shook her shoulders.

  ‘He slipped and banged his head.’

  The driver gave a sigh as if this were so terribly sad.

  ‘Let’s get him to the infirmary,’ he told Ingrid. And the two of them led him to the cab in baby steps.

  ‘Where’s me bike?’ Mark asked them. ‘Don’t forget me bike.’

  Ingrid sat in the waiting room for four hours. It was normally her habit to carry a book wherever she went and it made her sulky to be reduced to rea
ding two-page magazine articles that promised to change her life forever. Sitting opposite her was a bleary-eyed young man in a white shirt with a swathe of crimson down the front, swaying in his chair like washing on a line, while next to him was a heavy set girl in an impressively short leather dress who sporadically burst into tears.

  An ambulance took them home. Mark still seemed stunned but was talking normally again though they were really too tired to say anything. Ingrid helped him undress and got him into bed. She had a long bath to warm herself up and by the time she climbed in next to him he was asleep. The room was uncomfortably cold with blasts of rain-flecked air from the open window. She got up and struggled for several minutes to close it, before surrendering and putting on one of Mark’s thick woolly jumpers that smelled of machine oil. Then Mark began snoring. She had never known him to do that. Unable to sleep she got her cigarettes and lighter from under the bed and lit up. Her nose was blocked and her throat feeling sore and the smoke was no comfort.

  ‘I know where this is going,’ she said to herself.

  When he saw her off the next day it was an uncomfortable affair.

  ‘Right. Are you busy next weekend?’ he had asked her.

  ‘Umm, yes. Sorry. I promised my sister I’d go round,’ with enough evasion in the way she had said it to make him drop the subject.

  There was a hug and a kiss of sorts where she blew her nose before and after. The train pulled out and that was the last they saw of each other. The break-up came via a string of telephone calls that were like a drawing of a series of telegraph poles in perspective, gradually diminishing into nothing. Within the year Ingrid had rekindled a relationship with Carla, an Italian language teacher she had lived with at college. This lasted till an argument over the splitting of the bill in a Barcelona tapas bar two years later. The death of her sister the following autumn was the most tragic thing that had ever happened to her, but she had always had a crush on her brother-in-law and married him after a semi-respectable eleven months. Mark bought a bigger bike and kept it until he married a local girl and procreation demanded he swap it for a Volvo estate.

  Mark forgot altogether the incident on the bridge. As far as he was concerned she had been his first real love but when it came to the matter of explaining old photographs dug out of shoeboxes it was: ‘Ingrid. She was smashing. Really good fun. But I’ll tell you what really bugged me about her was the way she made crumpets. She’d let them get cold and put wadges of margarine on them so it was, like, half an inch thick with the stuff, and then eat them in one mouthful!’ And then he would shiver, as if someone were stepping on his grave.

  And Ingrid. You could never really know what Ingrid was thinking. But she had a display case on the wall of the dining room. It was perhaps a printer’s old box for holding type and now each small space held a single item that she had collected to represent each year of her life. In the twenty-fifth compartment was a badge of the Newcastle Bridge. If, as it sometimes happened, a flirtatious dinner guest asked her to list the provenance of the trinkets on display she would explain the year as follows:

  ‘My geordie boyfriend. He was terribly sweet and rode a motorbike and ate his crumpets in a funny way.’

  ‘Funny?’ the guest would ask leering.

  ‘Mmmm. It was all he ever ate, really. I think I would have married him if he had made a better crumpet.’

  All eyes would turn to her husband while the men barracked him.

  ‘Myself,’ he would tell them earnestly, ‘I’m an English muffin man!’ and usually everyone would laugh and they could change the subject to the next item in her history box and on through the years past a silver safety pin and her little boy’s front tooth.

  Muff-Diving Over the Fish Market

  Char March

  I can’t believe I’m allowing myself to orgasm while the clipped fifties accent of the World Service burbles. They are describing the Queen’s outfit as she opened some community hospital in Ghana this week. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to lick a stamp in quite the same way again.

  We make a great porn movie for the old guy I see across the courtyard – oblivious under his battered lampshade with the slightly swaying low-watt bulb. He’s coughing, scratching a bit, making a strong brew of Typhoo, wishing his bladder would let him sleep right through for once. A stooped silhouette against his peeling seventies bedsit.

  She’s certainly a worker this one. A definite Teutonic efficiency - and prepared to put in long working hours down below. And we have been at it for hours. From Sailing By and The Shipping Forecast right through the World Service to finally collapse just as Prayer for the Day clicks into Farming Today. For she is fixated on British radio, Hoovers up the BBC output 24/7, insists it just isn’t the same listening via broadband back in Berlin.

  Just across Kirkgate, the shutters start clashing up. The fish-trolleys buck over kerbs slewing crushed ice. The fleshily pink men curse-heave the awkward plastic crates. The whizz I had early yesterday evening finally finally finally lets me shut my eyes.

  ***

  And now her eyrie bedroom is drenched with sun. It’s six floors up - an old repository space perched on top of a stack of dank solicitors’ offices and evil-smelling dentists’ with, at street level, a piercing parlour, a Goth clothes shop and a Chinese chippy. Sandwiched between the zeppelin splendour of the Corn Exchange and the ornately spired skyline of the market, this forgotten block quietly crumbles. Trust Ms Audi to spot its potential.

  The sun floods through the massive new Veluxes, makes the huge expanse of wooden floor glow - look lit from inside. The whole flat is suffused with the scent of pine resin. The creamy-yellow dust from her recent frenzy of sanding is everywhere – a fine downy layer over the few strategically-placed pieces of furniture, over each gleamingly expensive appliance. I can taste its woody bite right back into my throat. It is smeared into our hair, dried into our sweat, has been ground into sandy ripples over her sheets. It gives this high place a strangely beach feel. And the briny scents rising from the fish market add that certain seaside something. The calls of the Big Issue sellers on Vicar Lane double as seagulls.

  She slips her silk dress on to pad through to the kitchen to get the espresso machine wheezing, then disappears into the shower room. Drifting through the tang of pine and dark coffee, I smell the cinnamon of Ayurvedic toothpaste – is this her one nod towards healthy living? I’ve no idea. I hear the shower blast out, and immediately roll off the bed to the stack system and at last gag Radio Four. I pillage her cds – Goldfrapp, Asian Dub Foundation, Monolake, Zwei Raum Wohnung – how can she possibly prefer the whining dirge of You and Yours to this stuff?!

  I lie back as Monolake takes off, drowning out the shower that is busy robbing her of her cloak of honeyed sweat and sawdust.

  We breakfast on espresso and rank cigarettes she says she got last week on a business trip to St Petersburg. Wow, don’t you get around – I say, pretending to be entirely unimpressed. There is a pause. I prefer it here – she says. Yeah – I say, not even attempting to sound as if I believe her. She looks at me with her cool grey eyes. The colour of Wehrmacht uniform. Well – I say – you wouldn’t be saying that if you’d had to grow up in Seacroft, or Harehills, or Beeston, or Armley.

  I don’t know these places – she says – it is here I like. And she just carries on looking.

  I’ve always been a sucker for endless afternoons of crappy world war two movies. Raus, raus, schnell, Britischer Scheinhund. The stupid German guards always looking the wrong way, the smirking blonde Gestapo agent relishing the torture of the plucky Brit, the one decent German officer who is ashamed of the excesses, the list-making German bureaucrats who tot up the price to be got from the boiled down soap……and from my grandfather’s gold tooth, and from my great aunt’s cardboard suitcase, and from the hair shaved off my five cousins’ heads.

  I look around her new space. The sparkling appliances, the quality of everything, the clean economy of line, the tastefulness, the cla
ss, the sheer ease of it. She reaches over towards me. I jump up, lock myself in the shower room, stare into the mirror to try to find something. Can’t.

  She calls through the door to me that she is going out to buy some fish, fruit, have a wander through the stalls. She waits for an answer. I wait for her to leave. She told me last night that the sheer tackiness of the market utterly delights her. It seems they don’t have our sort of tat in Berlin.

  I stand, her shower pounding steam over me. I am at the parade ground in the Nordhausen KZ where sixteen members of my family were marched, where each were screamed into lines, into lorries, into cattle trucks, each recorded as they set out on their various journeys – to Theresenstadt, to Treblinka, to Bergen Belsen. And there I am, sixty years later, hands trembling around a menthol king-sized, being told by a shame-faced young German attendant – the same one who had helped me find my family name, sixteen times, in the archive lists – that it is forbidden to smoke in the museum vicinity for it is all buildings of wood and there is fire danger.

  ***

  I have opened every drawer and gone through every cupboard. I search methodically, diligently, but I don’t know what it is I want to find…. or not find. I stuff some of her cds into my handbag, and a packet of dope I find in the vast Smeg. As I pull on my clothes (it always feels weird dressing in club gear in broad daylight) I gnaw on a massive wedge of emmental, try a forkful of fresh Krautsalat nach Hausfrauenart, spit it out in the sink. Then I grab up my jacket and turn. She is watching me. The cool grey following my flickering anxiety. Carefully, slowly, she walks over. Presses some switches. Goldfrapp dies, Brain of Britain takes over, with Robert Robinson asking in that inanely intense way if we know who Beethoven dedicated his umpteenth concerto in twang minor to. I want to look away from the cool grey - to walk away. She pulls open the Smeg, starts to unload the two bags she carries. Unwraps a pain au chocolat, still warm, from a monogrammed paper bag – Harvey Nicks. Yeah, she’s really been slumming it down there. She presses it to my lips. I resist, watching, watching the cool grey of her. Then I open my mouth, bite into the buttery flakes. She tears the rest of the pastry off against my teeth and drops it onto the basalt countertop. She pushes her lips against mine, nuzzling with her tongue.