How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  ADAM APPEARS, CARRYING a thick plastic tray, which looks like it has been in use since the 1950s. Eva makes to get up and help him offload its contents, but is once more thwarted by the fact that the table and chairs are a single unit, solidly welded to the floor: it’s almost impossible to get back up once you have sat down. He puts down two uninspiring mugs and an enormous fruit scone before conscientiously returning the tray to the entrance. He moves so comfortably in this world of pale, aseptic surfaces, all blues and lime greens and dirty whites, and it strikes Eva that of course this is his world: the old man with the drip drinking tea at the next table, the hush of suffering, the inconsiderate laughter of a group of medical students stuffing down sandwiches. And out there, Carmen.

  Adam expertly manoeuvres himself into the tight space between the chair and the table.

  ‘How can you stand working in this kind of place?’

  ‘Says the frontline reporter.’

  ‘I’m not a frontline reporter.’

  ‘These scones are the best in the country, by the way.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We have the same caterers. I’d rather work in an NHS hospital than on the streets of Basra.’

  ‘I wasn’t sent to Basra. I just – it’s so lifeless here. It’s as though fighting disease means you have to fight life itself.’

  ‘Well. Sometimes that is exactly what you have to do.’

  ‘…’

  ‘They’re just knocking her out for now. They have to bring her down.’

  ‘But she’ll get better?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I mean, it’s not my field, obviously – Oh. Here’s Henry.’

  Eva turns round. Henry is walking towards them through the plastic cafeteria. He stares at them but doesn’t see them, his eyes guiding him to his goal while his mind stays behind, in that room. When she and Adam left, Henry had just taken Carmen’s hand, and was gently stroking her forearm. It made Eva realize how little physical contact the two of them normally had: compulsory kisses and hugs in greeting, and even those were avoided wherever possible. Now Henry’s movements were so tender, and Carmen seemed, through her chemical fug, to find comfort in them. Eva knows that that is what is on his mind now: his hand touching hers. The picture is so strong that everyone else in the cafeteria seems to be able to sense it. The infirm, the dying, they sneak glances at Henry as he goes past them.

  He is walking incredibly slowly. His imposing frame seems to have shrunk, become brittle somehow, in the space of the last twenty-four hours. Adam and Eva watch him dumbly as he makes his way towards them, tries to squeeze himself on to the bench next to Eva, gets wedged awkwardly underneath the table, buttocks still in mid-air, then, with considerable effort, disengages himself from the demonic thing. Eva can think of few circumstances in which this bout of slapstick would not send the three of them off into howls of laughter; but how could anyone laugh at the sight of Henry’s grief? Even the medical students across the room have had the delicacy to shut up. Adam slides a chair over from another table.

  ‘Thanks, Ad.’

  ‘Let me go fetch you something, Henry – what do you want? Tea? A cake or something? A scone?’

  ‘I don’t think I can eat anything right now.’

  ‘Tea, then?’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Tea. I’ll get you some tea.’

  And Adam is off again. Henry has his eyes fixed somewhere in the centre of the table, most probably on the smudge of butter left on it by its previous occupants; then he raises his gaze slowly until it meets Eva’s.

  ‘What the hell is going on, Eva?’

  ‘I don’t know, Henry – I … I don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s happening to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Henry’s eyes wander back to the smudge.

  ‘Did anything – did anything happen just now – after we left you alone with her?’

  Henry shakes his head, still in slow motion, as though it is a huge weight he is carrying on his shoulders. Carmen’s head – what a weight it must be to her right now.

  ‘No. I think she’s going to be out for a while, with all those drugs they’ve given her. But – but … I felt like she knew I was there, somehow. Do you think I’m being ridiculous?’

  ‘God – Henry. No. Of course not. And I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure she knew you were there.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t go back to normal, Eva? What if we’ve lost her?’

  ‘We haven’t lost her. I’m sure …’

  ‘We can’t know that.’

  ‘No. You’re right.’

  ‘We actually can’t be sure. We really can’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  Adam is back with a mug of brown, milky tea. It has stains running down one side of it, which might be from this brew, or from some more ancient one, or from the accumulation of generations. How many teabags has that mug held, how many cancerous, HIV-positive, heart-attacked hands have sought solace by wrapping around its warmth? Poor Henry. Poor Carmen. Poor all of them.

  Adam gives Henry’s shoulder a consoling grip before sitting down next to him. Nobody speaks. Eva thinks of Carmen. The first time they met, over mugs of tea not unlike the one Henry is holding now, at the freshers’ welcome thing in the library common room. That time they went to have lunch at the tapas place near Carmen’s flat, and emerged again twelve hours and five bottles of rioja later, filled with the glory of friendship, and wine, and conversation. That time they went travelling around Italy together, no boys allowed, because the boys in question, who are now sitting opposite Eva in this dreary hospital canteen, had, each in their own way, trampled on their hearts. It was a trip of magnificent ruins, the paintings of Fra Angelico, succulent food, and ceaseless analysis of Henry and Adam. Does Henry know how much they have discussed him? He must know.

  ‘I just – I just don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t know if there is anything to understand, Henry. This kind of stuff just – happens sometimes.’

  ‘But – Carmen? She’s, like, one of the strongest personalities I’ve ever met. She’s fucking fearless.’

  ‘I think weirdly it’s often people like that who end up developing this sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing, though? What’s wrong with her, Ad?’

  ‘I mean – I don’t really know. Some of what you’ve been describing, it sounds a bit like a schizophrenic episode, or bipolar disorder or something like that.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘But, I mean, it’s really not a field I know very much about.’

  ‘…’

  ‘But, I mean – based on what you were saying. Well. I don’t know.’

  ‘It was crazy, guys. Really crazy. I’ve never heard someone come out with such crazy stuff before.’

  Poor Henry. Getting that phone call. Carmen in a panic, telling him she’s in danger, terrified, and he rushes off, terrified as well because of course he believes it must be true, something about a gang and they almost trapped her on London Bridge, and now she’s hiding down on the bank of the Thames, she’s managed to clamber down, but they’re still after her, she thinks they might be closing in, how the hell did she even get down there, and Henry rushes over, ploughs his way through the maddening throng of commuters, terrified because for all he knows he’s about to jump into a mass of knife-wielding youths and he’s never been a particularly brave guy, but for Carmen, of course, he’ll do it. He’ll risk his life for Carmen, Eva thinks, and it hits her what an extraordinary thing that is, how rare.

  ‘It was awful, guys. Awful.’

  And then to find that there are no enemies without – that, worse, Carmen is in danger from her own self. To have to listen to her senseless explanation, to witness the madness and start to doubt that you are the one who is sane, so convinced is she of her self-constructed hell, to have to be the person who calls the ambulance, who gets those people to come
and get her, who gets those people to pump her full of the drugs that are keeping her a flicker of consciousness away from a coma. Henry, who is still clutching his tea but has not yet drunk a sip of it, looks about him wildly. Looks without seeing. What are his eyes taking away from these faded monochromes, the lime-green trays, the yellowing tables? What would Carmen see in them? Messages scrawled into the plastic, threatening signs, hidden cameras monitoring her from behind a drinks dispenser. People who are not what they seem. The world is a blank screen, and on to it we project our fears, hopes, expectations.

  ‘It was – it was all so real to her, you know? She was so convinced of what she was saying, and I didn’t want to disagree with her in case it made her stop talking to me, but then I didn’t want to encourage her, either …’

  ‘Tell us again what she was saying, Henry.’

  Tell us again. How many times have they said those words to each other, and to Carmen, over the years? Tell us again about that time you put on the swimming costume you hadn’t tried on before buying it, remind us what his exact words were, remember when we were in that dive bar on Greek Street and … The cues to hilarious uproar, fond memories, gentle mockery; a litany of old friendship. And now Adam’s ‘tell us again’, asking Henry for an altogether more sombre memory; asking not so they can join in laughing reminiscence, but so Henry can get it off his chest, so they can try, the three of them, to understand. So that maybe, in the retelling, Henry will mention a detail he missed the previous time round, and which will suddenly make everything clear. How Carmen cupped her hand around his ear and whispered into it, because she was worried they might be being listened to, that her phone was bugged, or maybe the walls around them, or something. So she and Henry sat down on a low wall overlooking the Thames and, as the suits continued to march into the City above them, she whispered her fears into him.

  ‘So it started with that weird Russian oligarch man she works for – what’s his name again?’

  ‘Maïakowski. Yes.’

  ‘And that was what she’d spoken to you about on the phone as well, right?’

  ‘Yes – well, she implied it. She wouldn’t actually say his name because she was worried someone might be listening in. But when I saw her, she said that the people who were after her had been sent by him.’

  ‘I thought she’d never met Maïakowski?’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too.’

  ‘No, she did, quite recently though. I mean, I don’t think anything major happened – the partner introduced her to him soon after they made her an associate. She thought he was a creep.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘But I don’t think it’s really Maïakowski that’s bothering her. She seemed more to think that he was some kind of stooge, putting his wealth at the service of whoever wants to harm her. She didn’t really seem to know who it is who’s actually behind it all – it was all just “they” want to do this or that, “they’ve” been watching me. And when I asked her who “they” were, she just shook her head. I didn’t know what to do. I – I mean, I was worried if I said outright how crazy she sounded, she’d start thinking I was one of “them”. And …’

  ‘…’

  ‘And, this is hard to explain, but it was so real to her, I started to wonder if I was the one who was crazy. She was so convinced of what she was saying, it was like we were these two realities facing each other, and I wasn’t sure mine was more persuasive than hers.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘And – what was the poetry stuff? When I was in there, she started reciting all these T. S. Eliot lines to me …’

  ‘Yes. So then she starts going on about how that idiot she was going out with last year, you know …’

  ‘Russ.’

  Henry knows he’s called Russ. Whatever.

  ‘Russ, yeah. How Russ gave her this poetry anthology, and she read it the other day and realized it contained loads of messages for her, which only she could understand.’

  ‘So, this is the bit that I don’t get: they were all really famous poems. Surely Carmen can’t think that Wordsworth is sending her messages from beyond the grave?’

  ‘I mean, given the rest of what she was saying, that wouldn’t be impossible. But no – the point is that Russ selected the poems, it was an anthology he’d put together for her. So she thinks he’s sending her messages through which poems he’s chosen.’

  ‘So “they” is Russ?’

  ‘No, again, he seemed to be part of a wider plan. And then the rest was less specific: I can’t take the Tube because the people on it are all hired extras who are watching me; there are people out to kill me, even the guy in the local cornershop has started to behave really weirdly towards me … Kind of classic paranoid stuff. I mean there were moments when I thought she was having me on, what she was saying sounded like it was taken straight out of some crappy Hollywood film.’

  Henry’s mobile starts ringing.

  ‘Oh. It’s Georgie. I’d better take this. She’s tried to ring me several times this morning already.’

  Henry has splashed tea all over the table putting his mug down, and pushes his chair away a little too sharply as he gets up.

  ‘Sorry, guys. Hi, darling. Sorry I couldn’t ring you back earlier …’

  They can hear Georgie shouting angrily at the other end of the line. Henry walks away from them, his big frame stooped as though he is himself one of the maimed and diseased that haunt this cafeteria. It’s unlikely that there’s much room in Georgie’s world for the clinically insane, even though – or perhaps because – she comes from a family where respectable in-breeding has produced several crackpots per generation. But you probably don’t talk about it; and you almost certainly don’t go and spend the day in hospital for the sake of a crackpot who is neither kith nor kin, a mere friend.

  Henry comes back towards them.

  ‘Hold on, darling, I’m just picking up my briefcase.’

  Mobile crooked on his shoulder, he makes a dumb show of gestures and facial expressions: I have to go, we’ll talk soon. Adam and Eva nod a mute goodbye, and watch their friend walk away from them, from Carmen, back to his wife – back to the life he has inexplicably chosen for himself.

  SHE LOVED THAT sound, the announcement of company: the key in the lock, the front door clicking open. The muffle of Ulrich taking his shoes off in the corridor. He knocked on her door.

  ‘Eva?’

  ‘Yes? Come in.’

  ‘You are not busy?’

  His body filled the doorframe.

  ‘No, not particularly – what’s up?’

  ‘So. I want to show you something.’

  He walked over to her. He was holding an envelope of photos in his hand, slightly outstretched in front of him, like an offering.

  ‘I just went to get these, they are from an old film I still had in my camera. There are photos of Adam here.’

  Eva’s heart starts pounding – she feels afraid, as though something is about to be revealed. She stands, takes the envelope out of Ulrich’s hand, opens it. He shifts so that he is standing next to her, bending his head down over her shoulder to look at the photos too. She can feel the warmth coming off his body so close to hers, or at least she imagines she can feel it.

  There are lines and lines of windows in a concrete façade. There is the angular top of a tower block against a vibrant blue sky. There are Adam and Ulrich smiling at the camera, their arms around each other’s shoulders, in front of the entrance to a building. There is Ulrich on his own, serious this time, in front of the same entrance.

  ‘Where is this?’

  ‘Marzahn, where I grew up. Adam wanted to go there. Maybe you know, it was the biggest of the Neubausiedlungen in the GDR – where they built all these Plattenbauten, these big buildings that were built by the Communists.’

  Concrete slabs everywhere. A vast esplanade with a few stunted trees, but mainly pavement, gravel, a wet sandpit. A bright-green structure that looks
like a giant spider web: hooked legs digging into the ground, a thick black net stretched between them. In the next photos, Adam is standing in the centre of the net, arms raised, roaring.

  Then he falls, and the camera captures him in mid-air, his look of surprise, the wince as he hits the net, the tangle of arms and legs. Eva laughs, and Ulrich does too, and then they look at each other and they laugh harder, and at some point both of their gulps of laughter turn into sobs, until Eva is just weeping gently, and Ulrich is choking his tears up, his body doubled over, spasming, as though he is trying to throw up his grief.

  At first Eva holds the photos out in front of her to avoid them getting wet, then she puts them down, Adam’s grinning face beaming up at her from the spider net, and extends a tentative hand to Ulrich’s arm. Her fingers meet the stone-hard line of his biceps and rest on it gently in an awkward and quintessentially English gesture. She is like a starch-collared butler being presented with a crying child, petting it nervously while murmuring ‘There, there.’

  Eva sniffs away her own tears and picks up the photos again. Ulrich’s tears are silent now, and he pulls a tissue out of his pocket to wipe them away.

  ‘And so – this is where you grew up?’

  He nods.

  Eva looks at the angular, boxy buildings, the mournful bursts of brown bushes or grass trying to make a place for themselves in between these slabs of cement.

  ‘It’s funny, you know – to look at these photos and think I could have grown up somewhere like this too. If my mother had stayed in Berlin, I mean. It’s so different from the place I grew up.’

  ‘What was it like? The place you grew up?’

  ‘Oh, sort of – so provincial. Small town. Neither countryside nor big city, and therefore also with neither the advantages of one nor the other.’

  ‘Then maybe it is not so different from growing up in Marzahn. It was like a village – everything was there: my school, the shop, the Sportshalle – most of the time we did not leave these few buildings. Every day, walk to school, and on the way back we played in the playground.’