‘It’s not what I’m looking at.’ He came up behind her, ran his finger down her back.
‘It’s kind of like a lonely pervert. Looking into everyone’s living rooms.’ She stepped away from him, leaned a hip against the window frame and began rolling a cigarette. It was as if she didn’t even notice she was naked, yet that was all he could see.
‘Have you been up there?’ she asked.
‘Not since I was little.’ He remembered waiting in the queue, and then the elevator operator standing between him and his father, the material of her dress tickling his face. He had squatted to the floor as the elevator climbed, and his ears felt like they were going to burst.
‘Let’s go now,’ she said.
He didn’t want to leave the apartment. That he had to work tomorrow burrowed at his consciousness. If they went out there, it would take time. Time to go up the tower, to come down again, and to come home. And then once the time was all used up it would be tomorrow, and he would have to leave Clare and go to work. But her enthusiasm was infectious, and soon he found himself at Alexanderplatz, queuing for the lift, tickets in hand.
‘It is only going to disappoint you, Clare.’ Standing beside her, he twisted a lock of her hair around his finger, marvelling at how each strand was a different shade of red or brown. ‘It will be full of tourists and screaming children.’
He was wrong. When they arrived at the top, it was busy but hardly overwhelming. They circled the deck slowly, and he pointed out landmarks. From here, it looked like any city. When he had last visited, the Wall dominated the view, a gash across the city stitched together with guard towers and raked sand. At some places, the gap between the Wall was over a hundred metres wide; at others, it looked as though you could leap across.
‘It could be the end of the world, couldn’t it?’ she said.
The setting sun cast elongated shadows across the city, the twilight emphasised by the observation deck’s tinted glass. At the bar he ordered drinks. A portable radio crackled through top-forty tunes, and he was bewildered that, despite being inside Germany’s biggest aerial, the reception was so bad. Clare must have felt sorry for the barman, who kept trying to tune the radio, and she distracted him by ordering elaborate cocktails in her tourist German.
By midnight he was drunk on Japanese Slippers, and even he could tell his conversation was nearing incoherence. They fell into the lift, and as they plummeted to the ground, he wished there was a gentler way. The train home rattled his insides, and he was relieved to be back on solid ground as they walked the few blocks to the apartment.
Up five flights of stairs, Clare behind him, out of breath as he searched for his keys. Pocket after pocket. They kept eluding him, and he couldn’t remember which pockets he had checked and then he had to start his search again. Clare leaned against the wall, raised her eyebrows, and once more he felt the panic that if he didn’t find them soon she would be down the stairs and on a train. There. He pulled his keys out at last and let them inside.
In the kitchen he filled two glasses of water and swallowed them both down before refilling them and taking them to the bedroom. He could hear the shower running. Kicking off his shoes, he lifted his shirt over his head, tossing it on the floor on the way to the bathroom. He drew back the shower curtain. She was so blank. Immediately, he went hard. Colour flushed her body where the hot water struck.
He had never fucked in the shower before. Pulling her to him, he did not know if he would be able to hold her up. She wrapped her legs around him, he pressed her against the wall. Her skin was hot beneath his hands, against his chest. He pushed. She pushed. He pushed harder. Every move of hers was a challenge to him.
He could feel her resistance and he wanted to reach her there, where she stopped being soft. He grunted and pushed. The water was deceiving; it slid between them, taunting. Just as he felt like he was getting closer to her, he would find himself further away. And then it was over. Clare, her back against the tiles, slid down until her feet hit the ground. He let go of her, his knees shaky. He could not feel the water on his face, only the sweat forming beneath it. He turned the taps off, leaned back on the wall beside her, and they stood there, dripping, not touching.
Catching his breath, he reached for her hand and pulled her to him. ‘I wish this moment never stopped,’ he said. She was warm on his front, the tiles were cool on his back. ‘If I could have one wish, that is what it would be.’
She kissed his neck, and he felt her hot breath creep over his shoulder. ‘I would wish to never want to be anywhere else.’
The words muffled in his ear, confused, and he tightened his grip as though to squeeze their meaning out of her. ‘To never want to be anywhere else,’ he said. ‘So you want to always be here?’
‘No.’ She pulled away from him, kissed him and stepped out of the shower. She seemed so composed, yet he could only just keep standing. Surely she was as drunk as him? ‘Well, in a way. But what I want is to live in the moment. Don’t you think that would be amazing? To never be wondering what will happen next and whether it will be better than this?’ She passed a towel to him, took one for herself. ‘I wish I always wanted to be wherever I am.’ She started vigorously drying her legs, her arms.
He watched, transfixed, her words piled in his mind. He wanted to fuck her again, to have her never stop talking, to keep on drying herself as long as he stood there. The room shook in time with the movement of her towel.
‘But maybe we are always looking forward to something else,’ he said. He followed her out of the shower, concentrated on keeping his balance. ‘I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. Not if there are things to look forward to.’
‘It is impossible to be present in the present.’ Her words floated out from beneath the towel and eventually her face followed. She threw the towel at him, and he caught it.
‘I suppose,’ he replied, shaking his feathery head.
‘Which is exactly why it is the one thing that I always want.’ She grabbed his hand, pulled him into the bedroom. ‘Apart from sleep.’
When she woke she lay still, hoping the throbbing in her head would be alleviated by her inaction. It was. She opened her mouth, stirred her bloated tongue. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. The bedroom window was translucent: it presented a muted swatch of sky, giving only a hint of the weather and the time. She became aware of the weight of the blankets, the sheet twisted around her shoulders, and she pulled back the covers, inviting the cold air of the apartment to clutch at her bare skin. Relief. She did not remember going to bed last night. Sitting up, she swung her feet to the floor. Her hair was matted — she must have slept with it wet. Remembered the shake of the shoulder, the kiss on the cheek, and a promise to be home no later than four.
God, they must have drunk a lot. She recalled scenes like a game of memory, tried to match them with sense. The views from the television tower observation deck, Berlin laid out like a distant galaxy. That barman who kept trying to woo her with lines from songs, his voice sailing above the static of the radio. Andi surveying the barman’s attempts, smiling beatifically. Ugh. No wonder she felt rotten: cocktails.
Head pounding, she walked to the bathroom. The apartment had retired beneath a grey shroud. In the shower, more vague memories of last night returned. She soaped her body all over. She felt tender — they must have been so drunk, gone at it hard. Was the steam from the shower beneficial? Or was it making her feel dizzy? She turned off the water and, as she stepped onto the bathmat, she remembered: they had sex in the shower last night. She grinned. No wonder she was sore.
Feet wet, towel tight around her, she walked back to the bedroom. Aware of every movement of her body, she tried to dodge its demands. She wanted orange juice. An apple. She needed to feel cleansed on the inside. She would go for a walk, get some air. Maybe buy something for dinner. The regular little housewife.
Sh
e dressed and liberated her jacket from last night’s clothes. Without Andi’s presence, the apartment was numbingly impersonal and, considering her current state, she was glad. Being unable to tell what kind of person lived there meant she did not have to make judgements on her own presence. The books and records gave a clue, but most of the surfaces were bare, the recipients here and there of everyday possessions. Used wineglasses. A cigarette lighter. A newspaper. There were no photos, not even free cafe postcards stuck to the fridge. In the bedroom, her own belongings crept out across the floor, attempted to colonise the space.
She swung her camera bag to her shoulder, checked that her wallet was inside. Her phone battery was flat, and she debated whether to leave it charging, but the only people who had her number were on the other side of the world, sleeping. She imagined all the people she knew sharing one enormous bed. Sighing, shifting their weight, searching for the cool creases of untouched sheets, surrounded by the rustling of polite dreams. It was a relief to toss her phone back on the bed. Friends texted occasionally to ask her where she had been, where she was going, but somehow her answers never seemed to match the colour-saturated anecdotes they wanted to hear, and the messages dried up.
In the kitchen, she checked the fridge and hunted out a string bag from the drawer. Cutlery always in the top drawer, kitchen utensils in the next. Tea towels in the third and bags and cling wrap in the fourth. An organisational system as universal as the Dewey decimal.
She was at the front door and reaching for the handle when she realised she did not have a key. Damn. She couldn’t go out; she couldn’t get back in. A rushing in her ears. The silence was — what was it? Not quite encompassing. It was absent. It was almost suffocating, as though the noise had left, taking the air with it. She wondered why she had not noticed before. There — the hum of the fridge. Her heart slowed, she was holding her breath. The creak of the building shifting. Her own shifting weight. Her head hurt. Perhaps she should go back to bed. It was the sort of day when, if she wasn’t forcing herself into the studio, she would usually call a friend, drink a pot of tea and while away the afternoon until the ache subsided.
Fuck, this was really annoying. She took off her jacket: she was sweating. She tried to open a window but could not. In the bedroom she kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the bed. The sheets had already taken on the familiar, sour smell of intimacy. She wanted to be angry with Andi for not thinking of her need for a key. But she expected he felt as hung-over as she did, and he’d had to go to work. Poor thing.
She lay on the bed for a while then moved to the couch. The apartment did not seem so very spacious and light anymore. The ceiling dropped, the walls shuffled in. She closed her eyes and imagined she was far away.
She remembered being in the car when she was young. Waiting with her sister for their mother to come out of the supermarket. Clare’s sister had unbuckled her seatbelt, climbed into the front passenger seat and shut the vents. They weren’t supposed to touch them. Everything on the dashboard was off limits. In fact, being in either of the front seats was off limits without Mum or Dad about. Her sister locked the passenger door then reached across the driver’s seat and did the same on that side. With two hands she pulled on the window handle, winding it up.
‘If we make it airtight, it will be like space,’ she had said. Clare had pictured the dark night sky, constellations she could never identify. ‘Zero gravity. If we have no gaps we will be able to float, like in space.’ Her sister nodded her head gravely.
‘Pass me the tissues.’ Her sister pointed at the tissue box on the parcel rack. Clare did not move. She recalled so desperately not wanting to be involved. Her sister rolled her eyes and climbed over into the back seat where she grabbed the box of tissues. Back in the front seat, she began stuffing the tissues into the air vents.
‘You’ll break them,’ Clare had said, concerned. She hated it when things broke. It was not the being in trouble that she minded. It was seeing the broken thing in front of her, useless.
Her sister ignored her and, taking a gulp of air, lifted her arms from either side of her body. Clare almost expected to see her float up to the roof, to bounce lightly off the windows. She didn’t.
‘It doesn’t work.’ Clare felt it was her duty to pronounce this, to allow the experiment to be over before their mother came back.
But her sister just looked at her with annoyance. ‘It will.’ She began stuffing the tissues around the windows.
‘Don’t waste them,’ said Clare. That was what Mum always said when they used too many tissues. Her sister continued to ignore her, determinedly stopping the gaps.
She could not remember how it actually ended. They didn’t float, she reasoned. Mum probably came back and bowled them out for using all the tissues, laid down new rules for being left alone in the car. Always the reassessing of rules.
She wished there were more rules now. A rule that Andi had to be back at a definite time. A rule that if he went out he had to leave a key. Relationships established their rules quickly: the permissible and the unthinkable were soon separated, the latter quarantined until further notice. And when the rules were broken, the relationship was weakened. Snap, snap, snap, until it fell over. So maybe a relationship without rules was not so bad. No rules to break, no way to end. The logic was astounding. She opened her eyes, tried to shake the overly earnest thoughts from her head. She found that her mind always raced when she was hung-over, while her limbs trailed behind. It was no use: she needed to get outside.
Maybe there was a spare key somewhere. She stood up from the couch and began hunting. There weren’t many places to look. She rummaged in the bowl by the bedside lamp. Nothing in the drawer of the bedside table — some papers, two buttons, three condoms, a paperclip, some tweezers. The bathroom held only bathroom things. The kitchen, too, lived up to its name. She walked along one of the floorboards in the hall as if it was a balance beam in gymnastics class. In the bedroom she took four small steps from the door to the end of the bed, where she flopped down again, defeated. The foot of the bed. Why was it hands but not foots? Feet but not hend? What the fuck was she going to do all day?
‘Don’t just lie there.’ As she said it, she could almost hear her mother’s voice. She got off the bed, put her shoes back on, and picked up her jacket and bag. She had not really thought about her mother in years. Not in this way, the memories colliding into one another like dodgem cars. And she didn’t want to think about her mother now; she just wanted to be here, no future, no past. Fuck it, she would just go out. If she stayed out long enough, Andi would be home from work when she got back.
The front door was locked. She twisted the latch and pulled, but the door did not open. Perhaps there was a trick to it. She pulled again, but the door did not open. She was confused: she had no trouble leaving yesterday morning. And then she saw, lower down on the door, the second lock. A deadbolt. Had he locked her in?
She felt slighted, wanted to kick something. She gave the door a half-hearted nudge with the toe of her shoe. It was one thing not to be able to get in. But not get out? How could he have forgotten she was here? How could he have locked her in? She kicked the door again, harder, and a scuff mark appeared like a rebuke.
It was not even one o’clock. At least three hours until Andi came home. She let out a groan of irritation and resigned herself to waiting. He was going to be so embarrassed when he got home. In the kitchen she mixed up a bowl of muesli, made a coffee in the stovetop percolator, oily and dark with use. If it did this to stainless steel, what did it do to her insides? She took her coffee to the living room and tried to concentrate on choosing a record, but all she could think about was Andi. His smile, the way he mooched rather than walked. He haunted her like a pop song: she couldn’t get him out of her mind. How did he forget her long enough to lock the door? It was almost insulting. Annoyed at his oversight, she still smiled when she thought about how mortifie
d he would be when he returned. Sipping her coffee, she turned the pages of the Klimt book. It was just a door, she reminded herself. A simple door, in a regular apartment. It was not Fort Knox. Where was Fort Knox? If Andi had a computer, she would Google it. It sounded American. It must be something to do with the Civil War. A short, strong American name. Square. Democratic. It was a quarter past one. Hours of confinement to go.
Andi watches ribbons of rain flap against the window frame. The bulb of the television tower is lost in fog; the lights announcing its tall presence flash faintly, like hovering UFOs.
‘I’m bored, Clare.’ He looks over to her. She is lying on her back, reading a book he gave her, her feet pressed up against the radiator.
‘Clare?’ He can hear the whine in his voice. He is jealous of her ability to get lost in a book. Whenever he buys her one, he feels like he is giving her permission to ignore him. ‘Clare, what can we do?’
She doesn’t answer him, so he walks over to the stereo, flips idly through the records. The tips of his fingers seem extra sensitive, the record sleeves tickle. He bounces on the balls of his feet. It’s the being cooped up, the closed walls. His father is the same, cannot abide small spaces. They used to head to the country on weekends. Go hiking through woods, across fields. It should have been idyllic, a father-and-son outing in bucolic isolation. But Andi remembers it being so suffocatingly purposeful. They would get off the train at whatever station his father had chosen and begin walking. When they ran out of roads, they would tramp through fields, animals shuffling away from the path. Andi would try to keep up with his father’s long strides by settling into a quick trot. But as the day wore on, he would drop further and further behind as his father disappeared into the distance.
When eventually he caught up, his father would be laying out their packed lunch beneath some shade.
Berlin Syndrome Page 5