How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  Then they all get into the car, Adam on the back seat next to several stacks and bundles of Labour flyers, posters, leaflets.

  ‘Wow. That’s a lot of election material you’ve got here, Mr Bard.’

  ‘We’ve got to give it our all, Adam. This really could be our chance to beat the Tories at last.’

  ‘I thought that was already a foregone conclusion?’

  ‘Oh, Blair will win the Commons, of course. I’m talking about the local elections here – this is an old Tory stronghold, but it’s just about possible we might manage to change that this time round.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You interested in politics, Adam?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so. I mean – my older brother is quite active in the Labour Party, so, you know, I hear a lot about what’s going on from him.’

  ‘Really! Whereabouts is he based?’

  ‘Oh, he’s in London – but he’ll be standing in South Shropshire.’

  ‘An actual candidate? My, my. Safe Tory seat, though, isn’t that? I guess they’re giving him a test run to see how it goes?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly it. He’s really passionate about it all. Personally, I read the papers and all that, of course, but I find the international news more interesting than the domestic stuff, you know? But I’m looking forward to voting. It’ll be my first time.’

  ‘The first vote I ever cast was for Harold Wilson, back in 1970. Ha! We all thought Labour would sail through … But I know what you mean about the allure of international news: I certainly cared a lot more about Vietnam than about stuffy old Edward Heath. Then, as you grow older, you realize that local politics are just as important as national or even international events: it’s all part of the same fight. Here, for example, us Labour councillors have been trying to get more affordable housing built in the area we’re driving through right now: this is something that would have a real impact on people’s lives; just as real as one country declaring war on another. It’s just not as sexy as warfare.’

  ‘Well, but – people die during a war.’

  ‘You think people don’t die from not being able to afford a roof over their head?’

  ‘OK, yes. I see your point.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate the power of the local, Adam.’

  ‘He says that, like, all the time. It’s one of his pet phrases.’

  They are sprawled out on the narrow single bed in Eva’s bedroom – the room she grew up in, its walls still plastered with posters of horses and Kurt Cobain.

  ‘Well, I mean, he’s right though, isn’t he? Most people’s lives are influenced by decisions that are made at a local level, not by these big international conferences or negotiations or whatever.’

  ‘Tell that to the people of Bosnia.’

  ‘Well yes, but – what if you’re not in Bosnia? What if you’re a Bosnian who’s fled to the UK and can’t afford to pay for a flat here? What if you end up on the street and die of hypothermia – OK, you haven’t been bombed or shot or whatever, but you’re still dead.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, no, I mean I’ve heard this argument a thousand times before …’

  ‘I think it’s really cool your dad is into all this stuff.’

  ‘It’s just – it seems so parochial, most of the time. Like, he’ll get so worked up about some detail in a planning permission and go on and on about that for weeks on end, and really then you have to be, like, hey, there are more important things going on in the world than, like, whether the fence is here or fifty centimetres further to the side.’

  ‘Well, I mean, maybe in Bosnia a fence fifty centimetres further to the side is the difference between getting a bullet through your head or not.’

  ‘But that doesn’t contradict my point! What I’m saying is, there’ve got to be ways of having an impact on the world that are – I don’t know. More spectacular than what my dad does.’

  ‘But – why does it need to be spectacular?’

  ‘OK, maybe spectacular is the wrong word. More – I don’t know. More intense, or something. More alive. I don’t feel like my dad is very alive.’

  ‘He seemed pretty alive to me. And, you know – engaged. Trying to make the world a better place, in his own way. We can’t all be Tony Blair.’

  ‘But maybe we should all at least be trying to be Tony Blair?’

  ‘Well, what would Tony Blair do then, though? Without people like your dad to make sure the fences are in the right place?’

  ‘There’ll always be people like my dad.’

  Downstairs, the front door clicks open.

  ‘Oh. There’s my mum.’

  ‘Huh? How do you know?’

  ‘I just heard the front door.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t hear a thing.’

  These sounds that are so familiar, that have been the rhythm to her childhood and adolescence: she knows each door, its breaks and creaks, she knows how the sounds of footsteps change when they pass from the corridor floorboards to the living-room carpet. She feels like they are all she knows. Adam, at least, grew up within striking distance of Central London, and has that big-city nous about him, that street wisdom. Eva feels sleepy and cossetted, like this room around her: small, reassuring. In lieu of teenage rebellion, she had music magazines and books and those tapes lined up on the shelf, compilations carefully recorded from the radio, with the beginning of the song missing because of the lag before you pressed Record, and the end because they would fade out before they were finished. She picks up one of the tapes: it’s covered in bright stickers that she’d had left over from her Panini-collecting days, and, in tag-like lettering: EVA’S BEST SONGS EVA. Adam takes the tape out of her hand and giggles.

  ‘Hey, you need to get together with my mum, you guys have pretty similar taste in music …’

  ‘Shut up. That’s from when I was, like, twelve or something.’

  ‘Before you’d discovered Nirvana.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What were you doing on the day Kurt Cobain died?’

  ‘Crying, mainly. I flunked a maths test because of it.’

  ‘Just think. Maybe you could have been a great mathematician if Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself.’

  ‘I think it would be very unfair on Kurt Cobain to blame my mathematical failings on him.’

  ‘…’

  ‘At least he did something spectacular.’

  ‘Why are you so concerned with everything needing to be spectacular today?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess it’s being back here, and being hit by how unspectacular my family is …’

  ‘Your mum has one of the most spectacular stories I’ve ever heard!’

  ‘Well – she did initially. She hasn’t exactly done anything spectacular with the rest of her life, though.’

  ‘I’m starting to get worried by how much spectacularity you seem to want in people. Spectacularity? Spectacularousness?’

  ‘You are spectacular. You are spectacularly handsome, and clever and funny.’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t got your beer goggles on?’

  ‘Quite sure. I wouldn’t mind putting some on though, shall we go downstairs and get a drink?’

  ‘Great, I can meet your unspectacular mum.’

  Eva’s mum is in the kitchen, chopping tomatoes. She briefly acknowledges them when they come in, runs her hands under water, dries them, extends one to Adam.

  ‘Hello, Adam.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Bard. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, too. Hallo, mein Schatz.’

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  Eva always wishes her mother wouldn’t be so cool – as in, not cool cool, but chilly cool – when she brings people home. Though at least she isn’t as try-hard as her dad. What would be ideal would be something in between both their attitudes, like an average of them.

  Though Adam, who is always affable when he meets new people, is undeterred.

  ‘So! Can we help with anything?’

  ‘Oh – yes.
Maybe you can chop these?’

  She pushes a bag of onions towards Adam. He scans the kitchen, locates a knife and chopping board, and sets to work as though he owns the place. Eva watches their silent backs, and feels half panicky because no one is saying anything, half left out of this quiet culinary companionship.

  ‘So, you have had a good journey here?’

  ‘Oh, yes thanks, Mrs Bard. The train was pretty crowded, but then that’s only to be expected.’

  ‘Please. Call me Hanna.’

  ‘Right, yes. Hanna. What should I do next?’

  ‘That is enough, thank you. Maybe you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ll make it, Mum.’

  ‘You’re sure you don’t need any more help?’

  ‘No, I’m fine, thank you. I am just frying these, now.’

  Adam sits down at the kitchen table, red circles puffing around his beautiful blue eyes from chopping the onions. Eva laces an arm around him from behind, squeezes him; her mother looks at them and smiles briefly, looks away.

  Eva watches her, the familiar profile bent over a frying pan, except then her features become strange, like when you stare at a word on a page for so long that it loses its meaning. She sees only an assemblage of surfaces and lines that do not cohere to form a face, quivering lightly in the heat of the cooking oil. Her mother seems foreign to her, unreachable, while she can feel the warmth of Adam’s body in her arms, as known to her as her own flesh.

  ‘So Adam, you are studying medicine, Eva says?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And you are enjoying it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s great. Really fascinating – you know, finding out about the human body, how it works. It’s all just mechanics and plumbing, really.’

  No further questions. Why does her mum have to be so – dry? After all these years in England, you would have thought she could have learnt a few basics of small talk – just throw in a couple more questions, for God’s sake, make him feel you’re interested in him. But no, she just keeps on frying onions, and she doesn’t even seem bothered by it, the silence that is filling out into the room like a toxic cloud. Eva can’t think of anything to say. She can see Adam’s face furrow as he searches for a line of conversation.

  ‘So, um, Mrs Bard …’

  ‘Hanna, please.’

  ‘Right, yes, sorry. Hanna. You – Eva was saying you grew up in Berlin?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘Whereabouts, exactly?’

  ‘In Pankow.’

  ‘That’s funny, I stayed there the first time I went to Berlin – I’ve been to the city a few times, actually, I really love it.’

  ‘Yes, it seems a lot of young people want to go there now.’

  ‘Yeah – it must be strange for you, I guess …’

  Eva’s mum shrugs her shoulders.

  ‘Those days are over now, thankfully.’

  That cloud of silence again. Eva can see her mother’s shoulders tense under the burden of history, and feels a sudden, absurd surge of resentment: why do I have to suffer under this burden too, why can’t you just make conversation with my wonderful boyfriend, why do you have to clam up every time this subject is raised? It’s in the past now – get over it.

  ‘So yeah, Pankow – I was staying at this guy’s flat – it’s quite an amazing story actually, I was interrailing with this friend and we met this guy on the night train from Vienna to Berlin and he was, like, oh well I’m going away for a few days so why don’t I just give you my keys? – and he actually did, this complete stranger! But yeah, er – anyway. It was a flat near Florastraße, is that anywhere near where you used to live?’

  ‘No, I was more north than this. Further out.’

  ‘Oh. Did you spend any time around Florastraße?’

  ‘Not really. Why?’

  ‘Oh, I was just wondering how much the area I was in had changed since the GDR days – there were a few shops there that looked like they could have been left over from that time …’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t remember much about Pankow. It was a long time ago. A different world.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘OK, so. I think we are ready soon. Eva, maybe you can lay the table?’

  ‘Yep, sure.’

  They are back in her bedroom, lying squashed up against each other under the duvet that used to conceal the imaginary worlds she would escape to as a child, the feverish investigations of her puberty – this duvet that has seen her body grow from infancy to adulthood. Her parents are still downstairs finishing the clearing-up, and it makes the home Eva grew up in feel so flimsy; how clearly you can hear the clinking of crockery and the rushing of water through partitions and floorboards. What must Adam think of it, having grown up in a huge, beautiful house?

  ‘I really like your parents.’

  ‘Really? I’ve been feeling so embarrassed by them all day …’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know – they’re just so – lame …’

  ‘No they’re not! Your dad’s really funny. And I like your mum. She’s got this no-bullshit, straight-upness about her, it’s really cool.’

  ‘I was worried you might think she was rude. She doesn’t always get the whole making-conversation thing.’

  ‘No, I like it! Plus, you can be like that too sometimes, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘What’s that, by the way?’

  Adam is looking up at her mum’s samizdat. Eva stands up on the bed, shivering as cold air rushes over her skin – God, why can’t her parents learn to turn the heating on now and again? – and unhooks the frame from the wall.

  ‘Here you go.’

  ‘Disputatio. Wow. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a samizdat – they were these underground pamphlets in East Germany – well, all over the Soviet zone, really. People would print and distribute them illegally. This one circulated within the community around my grandparents’ church. My mother wrote that article there.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty cool, huh?’

  ‘“Was wir nicht wissen sollen.”’

  ‘…’

  She snuggles up to Adam, watching him mouth the German words to himself as she tries to glue as much of herself as possible to him, to draw as much heat as possible off him.

  ‘It’s one of the only things she was able to take with her. She gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘…’

  ‘God, I’m so embarrassed. I feel like I really put my foot in it, asking about Berlin and being like, oh it was so cool, this guy gave me the key to his flat – I mean, being like “Berlin is such a great place to party” when your mum was on the receiving end of its history …’

  ‘Don’t worry, I don’t think you offended her – she just isn’t that forthcoming on the subject generally.’

  ‘Still. What a goofbag.’

  ‘Honestly, you weren’t a goofbag. I mean, you are a goofbag, generally, but you weren’t particularly worse than usual in this specific situation.’

  ‘Ha! How dare you …’

  They tussle, and Eva can feel the tweak of an erection starting against her leg, and rubs closer to Adam, and then he heaves on top of her, eyes blazing, and she suppresses a giggle because she has just heard the squeak of the stairs as her parents make their way up them, and they both stay like that, Adam and Eva, frozen, eye to eye, as her parents walk past her bedroom door and into the bathroom. There is the sound of brushing of teeth outside, and inside there is muted laughter and gasps, and they’re opening up a new chapter in the history of her room and its narrow bed, struggling under the weight of these two almost grown-ups.

  YOU THOUGHT HE was your anchor. You thought he would be that firm, still point, whatever howling winds rose up, whatever vicious waves.

  You trusted Ada
m not to die.

  But he has cast you adrift, and when you walk the ground seems to slip and duck beneath your feet, and when you sit the whole room tanks like a storm-whipped ferry, and when you talk to people it is as though you are doing it from inside a sound-proof chamber, inches of glass dulling the words coming out of your mouth, and all the time your head feels light, as though it might float off your shoulders and leave your body to crumple into itself. Nothing is certain any more. The trees, the clouds, the cars, the sun, your heart, your lungs, the green fields rustling in the wind, the children howling in playgrounds, the men in sharp dark suits pressing into the Tube, your head, your brain, your mother, your father, Carmen, Henry, the newspapers neatly folded next to cups of frothy coffee, the government, the aeroplanes, the police, the fire brigade, they all might disappear, or break, or collapse under the weight of their own improbable existence. Sometimes, at night, you panic so much that you want to climb out of yourself, and sometimes in the day too, and the only person who could take you in his arms and make you feel better is him, but of course this is not possible, and so you feel worse.

  And you drift on and on, a fragile raft in open water, buffeted any which way by a senseless world.

  EVA LOOKED OVER at Adam’s desk: the majestic computer, the piles of papers, the drawers, the files. The archive of his life.

  The time since he had gone had been so busy, such a busy and empty time, full of worried people, and planning the funeral, and the endless wait for the post-mortem, with nothing to do but grieve and organize things. With nothing but his absence, the feeling that she could not reach him, however far she stretched out her hand.

  Now he was here, in front of her, in that desk, and she wondered: how much do you want to know?

  She wasn’t sure. They would never have looked through each other’s papers when they were alive. Did death give you the right to intrude on someone’s privacy? What was the greater betrayal: prying into the parts of Adam’s life that he had kept for himself, or destroying without a glance those last traces of his individuality? Those piles of papers might be hiding the paper trail of an ingenious fraud, a love letter he had left for her in case of his death, the keys to a hidden treasure. What if there was something there that Adam would have absolutely wanted her to see? What if there was something there that he would have absolutely wanted to hide from her?