They all knew him at the Right Plaice: Mrs. Ridgewell, the manageress; Jill, the other waitress; and old Herbert, who owned the restaurant but only dropped in when he fancied a free bite. Vernon chose a time when the lunch trade was starting, and walked past the counter toward the toilets. The room — more of a cupboard, really — where the staff left their coats and bags was just opposite the gents. Vernon went in, found Andrea’s bag, took her keys, and came back out flapping his hands as if to say, That whirry old hand dryer never quite does the trick, does it?
He winked at Andrea, walked to the hardware shop, complained about clients who had only one set of keys, strolled around for a bit, picked up the new set, went back to the Right Plaice, prepared a line about the chilly weather playing havoc with his bladder, didn’t need to use it, put her keys back, and ordered a cappuccino.
The first time he went, it was the sort of drizzly afternoon when no one looks at anyone who’s passing. A chap in a raincoat goes up a concrete path to a front door with frosted-glass panels. Inside, he opens another door, sits on a bed, gets up suddenly, smooths out the dent in the bed, turns, sees that the microwave isn’t rubbish, actually, puts his hand under the pillow, feels one of her nightdresses, looks at the clothes hanging from the picture rail, touches a dress she hasn’t worn before, deliberately doesn’t let himself look at the pictures on the little dressing table, sees himself out, locks up behind him. No one did anything wrong, did they?
The second time, he examined the Virgin Mary and the half-dozen pictures. He didn’t pick anything up, just went down on his haunches and looked at the photos in their plastic frames. That must be Mum, he thought, looking at the tight perm and big glasses. And there’s little Andrea, all blond and chubby. And is that a brother or a boyfriend? And here’s somebody’s birthday with so many faces you can’t tell who’s important and who isn’t. He looked again at the six- or seven-year-old Andrea — just a bit older than Melanie — and took the image home in his head.
The third time, he eased open the top drawer; it stuck, and Andrea’s mum toppled over. There was mainly underwear, most of it familiar. Then he went to the bottom drawer, because that’s where secrets are normally kept, and found only sweaters and a couple of scarves. But in the middle drawer, under some shirts, were three items he laid on the bed in the same order, and even the same distance apart, as he found them. On the right was a medal, in the middle a photo framed in metal, on the left a passport. The photo showed four girls in a swimming pool, their arms around one another, a lane divider with cork floats separating one pair from the other.
They were all smiling up at the camera, and had wrinkles in their white rubber caps. He instantly picked out Andrea, second from the left. The medal showed a swimmer diving into a pool, with some lines of German writing on the back and a date, 1986. How old would she have been then — eighteen, twenty? The passport confirmed it: born 1967, which made her forty. It said she’d been born in Halle, so she was German.
And that was that. No diary, no letters, no vibrator. No secrets. He was in love — no, he was thinking about being in love — with a woman who’d once won a swimming medal. Where was the harm in knowing that? Not that she swam anymore. And now he remembered how she’d got all jumpy when Gary and Melanie had tried to make her go to the water’s edge and splash around. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded. Or perhaps it was quite different, swimming in a competition pool versus having a dip in the sea. Like ballet dancers not wanting to do the sort of dancing everyone else did.
That evening, he was deliberately jolly when they met, even a bit silly, but she seemed to notice, so he stopped. After a while, he felt normal again. Almost normal, anyway. When he first started going out with girls, he’d found there were moments when he suddenly thought, I don’t understand anything at all. With his second girlfriend, Karen, for instance: they’d been jogging along nicely, no pressure, having fun, when she’d asked, “So where’s all this leading, then?” As if there were only two choices: up the aisle or up the garden path. Other times, with other women, he’d say something, just something ordinary, and — splash — he’d find himself in deep water.
They were in bed, Andrea’s nightie pulled up around her waist in the fat roll he was quite used to feeling against his belly, and he was going it a bit, when she shifted her legs and crushed him with them, like a nutcracker, he thought.
“Mmm, big strong swimmer’s legs,” he muttered.
She didn’t answer, but he knew she’d heard. He carried on, but could tell from her body that her mind wasn’t on things. Afterward, they lay on their backs, and he said some stuff, but she didn’t pick up on anything. Oh, well, work tomorrow, Vernon thought. He went to sleep.
When he dropped by the Right Plaice to pick her up that evening, Mrs. Ridgewell said Andrea had called in sick. He rang her mobile but she didn’t answer, so he texted her. Then he went around to the house and tried her bell. He left it a couple of hours, phoned again, rang the bell, then let himself in.
Her room was quite neat, and quite empty. No clothes on the picture rail, no photos on the little chest of drawers. Something made him open the microwave and look inside; all he saw was the circular plate. On the bed were two envelopes, one for the landlord, the other for Mrs. Ridgewell. Nothing for him.
Mrs. Ridgewell asked if they’d had a quarrel. No, he said, they never quarrelled.
“She was a nice girl,” the manageress said. “Very reliable.”
“Like a Polish builder.”
“I hope you didn’t say that to her. It’s not a nice remark. And I don’t think she was Polish.”
“No, she wasn’t.” He looked out to sea. “Oorals,” he found himself saying.
“Pardon?”
You went to the station and showed a photograph of the missing woman to the booking clerk, who remembered her face and told you where she’d bought a ticket to. That’s what they did in films. But the nearest station was twelve miles away, and it didn’t have a ticket office, just a machine you put money or plastic into. And he didn’t even have a picture of her. They’d never done that thing couples do, crowding into a booth together, the girl sitting on the man’s lap, both giggly and out of focus. They were probably too old for that, anyway.
At home, he Googled Andrea Morgen and got four hundred and ninety-seven thousand results. Then he put her in quotes and cut it down to three hundred and ninety-three. Did he want to search for “Andrea Morgan”? No, he didn’t want to search for someone else. Most of the results were in German, and he scrolled through them helplessly. He’d never done languages at school, never needed them since. Then he had a thought. He looked up an online dictionary and found the German for “swimmer.” It was a different word if you were a man or a woman. He typed in “Andrea Morgen” and “Schwimmerin.”
Eight results, all in German. Two seemed to be from newspapers, one from an official report. And there was a picture of her. The same one he’d found in the drawer: there she was, second from the left, arms around her teammates, big wrinkles in her white swimming cap. He paused, then hit “Translate this page.” Later, he found links to other pages, this time in English.
How could he have known, he asked himself. He could barely understand the science and wasn’t interested in the politics. But he could understand, and was interested in, things that, even as he looked out at the sea from a window table in the Right Plaice, were already beginning to change his memory of her.
Halle was in what used to be East Germany. There had been a state recruiting scheme. Girls were picked out when they were as young as eleven — only four years older than that chubby little girl in the photograph. Vernon tried to put together her probable life. Her parents signing a consent form, perhaps a secrecy form as well. Andrea enrolled in the Child and Youth Sports School, then in the Dynamo Sports Club in East Berlin. She had some school lessons, but was mostly trained to swim and swim. It was a great honor to be a member of the Dynamo: that was why she’d had to leave home. Blood was
taken from her earlobe to test how fit she was. There were pink pills and blue pills. Vitamins, she was told. Later, there were injections — just more vitamins. Except that they were anabolic steroids and testosterone. It was forbidden to refuse. The training motto was “You eat the pills or you die.” The coaches made sure she swallowed them.
She didn’t die. Other things happened instead. Muscles grew, but tendons didn’t, so tendons snapped. There were sudden bursts of acne, a deepening of the voice, an increase of hair on the face and body; sometimes the pubic hair grew up over the stomach, even above the navel. There was retarded growth and problems with fertility. Vernon had to look up terms like “virilization” and “clitoris hypertrophy,” then wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need to look up heart disease, liver disease, ovarian cysts, deformed children, blind children.
They doped the girls because it worked. East German swimmers won gold medals everywhere, the women especially. Not that Andrea had got to that level. When the Berlin Wall came down and the scandal broke, when they put the trainers, doctors, bureaucrats — the poisoners — on trial, her name wasn’t even mentioned. In spite of the pills, she hadn’t made the national team. The others, the ones who went public about what had been done to their bodies and their minds, at least had gold medals and a few years of fame to show for it. Andrea had come out with nothing more than a relay medal at some forgotten championship in a country that no longer existed.
Vernon looked out at the concrete strip and the shingle beach, at the gray sea and the gray sky beyond. The view was pretending that it had always been the same, for as long as people had sat at this café window. Except that there used to be a row of beach huts blocking the view. Then someone had burned them down.
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