Her voice has drawn him across the room to the couch where he squats in front of her. Her mustiness huddles around them both, daring him to touch her. He reaches out a hand and places it on her knee, which twitches in response. Is she trying to pull away? Her leg is cool. It begins to jerk up and down beneath his hand. She is shaking — her whole body is blurry. Tears begin to run down her nose, trailing into her mouth; it is a watercourse they know well.
‘Don’t cry, Clare.’ He can feel the tears pricking his own eyes; it pains him to have upset her. He can feel something rising in his throat. Can a weight rise? Would it not sink? He can feel it aching there. He swallows. Why won’t everything just be normal?
‘Don’t cry, sweetie. There’s nothing to cry about. I’m here. I’ll look after you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ He lifts his hand from her knee and puts it on her shoulder. It feels improbably large, and he raises it a little — he does not want to be holding her down. He understands the clichés now: a burden is a terrible thing to bear.
She looks at him. What does she see? He squeezes her shoulder. Her eyes are large and growing as though they will suck him whole into her gaze. She needs him, and her desperation pulls him forward. He wraps his arms around her, dispelling her stale smell. She is tiny, so easy to break. ‘It will be alright. It will be okay.’
Beneath the unwashed body, she is the girl from the bookstore. His throat aches as her body folds into his own. The record on the stereo comes to its end; he hears its futile spinning as the needle swoops away. Her shaking has stopped — or is he simply holding her too tight? He loosens his grip, registers the ache in his knees. His neck is craned too far forward to be comfortable, but her arms are clasped around him.
‘Come on, Clare, let’s clean you up, shall we? You will feel better, I promise.’ He disentangles himself and pulls her to her feet by her good hand. The stereo speakers hiss static at them as they pass. In the bathroom he makes to release her hand, but she holds his firmly. With his free hand he unwraps her bandage, and as it spirals to the floor, he sees the bruising has disappeared. He lets go of Clare’s hand to help her take off her clothes, but she clutches at his arm, trying not to lose her balance when she steps out of her jeans. He moves around her, reaches in and turns on the shower. Only when she is underneath the water does she completely let him go.
She places both hands on the tiled wall as he rubs her body with soap. Her legs seem shorter than he remembered. Her torso is longer. He has forgotten her body, and yet it feels so familiar. Her skin has a yellow tinge to it. Waxy, like potato but softer. He washes her all over. He squirts shampoo into his hands and massages it into her hair. Still fully dressed, he feels his wet sleeves cling to his arms. A trickle of cooling water runs down his side. The foam slides out of her hair, along her body and swirls about her feet. She brings her hands up to her face, rubs away the soap, combs fingers through her hair.
‘Hold me,’ she says.
And he steps into the shower, his black socks alien next to her sea-shell toes, his head at rest upon her shoulder.
She pulls on a woollen jumper that has been discarded on the floor by the couch. The apartments on either side, above and below, are empty. Unheated, they don’t act as very good insulation, and in the mornings it takes the apartment time to warm up.
When she was thirteen, her science teacher told the class that if you had enough cups of hot coffee you could heat a room. That the steam they gave off would be enough to keep you warm. At the time she wondered why the teacher didn’t simply use hot water as an example; she had been too young to know the great significance of coffee in adults’ lives. Even now she never can tell what is good coffee and what is not. She just agrees with whomever she is drinking with.
She takes a cup of coffee now and wraps her hands around it. It is too hot to sip. She puts it on the floor then pours a second cup. She puts this one by her feet as well. She is careful not to spill. They have seven cups in the apartment — it should be enough. She places the percolator back on the range and feels the steam from the two cups on the floor kiss at her ankles. She wonders how many it would take to warm the apartment and where the cups could be stored during summer. She is glad she drinks her coffee black now. If she had to add milk, it would cool them down considerably. Though maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the milk would act as an insulating layer, keeping the heat of the coffee in. Who can say?
She places a third and a fourth cup of coffee on the floor, but notices the first two cups are looking cool. She crouches down and puts her hand over them; she cannot discern any heat. She feels like a paramedic looking for signs of life. If she had a small mirror she would hold it to the cup, as to a dying person’s mouth to see if there is any breath to steam up the mirror. No mist; the coffee has passed. She tips it down the sink and pours from the pot again. It might well be a fruitless task, but she will persevere. There is a pub near her old house in Melbourne called The Perseverance. Right across the road from The Labor in Vain. She remembers long afternoons spent on The Labor’s rooftop garden, dodging the sun from beneath canvas umbrellas and hoping against reason that Monday would fail to roll around. She wonders whether she shall ever go back there.
After two hours and twenty minutes of trying many combinations (half filling all the mugs, arranging a newly filled mug by an older mug, and so on and so forth), she gives up. She is a little warmer than before, probably from all of the bending and crouching. And at least she is closer to the end of the day. She could spend her whole life doing this; she could measure out her life in coffee spoons. Her hands pouring the coffee down the sink are so pale: the freckles have faded; she is losing her detail. When she stands on tiptoe to put the percolator back on the shelf, her feet wobble with the effort. She clenches her knees, tries to keep steady, but her muscles waver and let go. Perhaps her body will just give up — so little is required of it here.
She continues with her exploration of the apartment. She has taken it upon herself to investigate every single thing in the space, to look in every cupboard, open every jar. She has completed the circuit twice now and while so far she has found nothing unusual, she continues unperturbed. The explanation will be hiding somewhere. Beneath the kitchen sink, she finds a bag of tealight candles from IKEA. Holding the bag’s slack weight in her hand, she contemplates how, at the beginning of the year, she was holding an identical item. The two bags would have come from the same factory, one ending up in her house in Melbourne, the other stowed beneath Andi’s sink. If only she could be sealed up in a bag and delivered without ceremony back into her own life. It seems unfair that these inanimate objects can travel the world while she is so confined.
She rips open the bag and takes a handful of candles. She puts them in a row along the bookshelf, another along the windowsill. As she lights each one, the flames rise up towards the ceiling. She thinks of her old house. It featured similar high ceilings, except the walls were broken about a foot from the top by picture rails, and she had spent many rainy weekends trawling op shops for prints to hang from them.
The walls of Andi’s apartment are bare. When she asked him why, he laughed. ‘I’ve got you to look at. Anything else would be a distraction.’
His open admiration of her is unnerving. But it also brings her comfort: it means she is safe, he does not want to hurt her. His arrival home each day seems to afford him great relief, which she comes to share. His reluctance to leave each morning is painful to witness. His Lost Boy eyes make her feel guilty for putting him through this. She has to wait until he is busy, tiptoe down the hallway to the front door and attempt to open it, reminding herself that she is the one in danger, that he holds all of the cards. Yet every time she touches the door, panic sets in, eased only by consoling herself with how much Andi needs her and that surely he will not hurt her.
She watches, mesmerised, as the flames flicker, cheered by movement that is not her own. She lays out more candles
, creates dashed lines of fire through the apartment, relieving the dark of the winter afternoon. The candles look cheesy, like strewing rose petals all over a marital bed, but there is no doubt that they are beautiful. Andi will like them; she hopes he returns soon. She stretches her arms to the ceiling, watching her shadow grow taller, her hands waving like foliage. In the candlelight her belly button is a bruise of shadow across her stomach. In the window glass she sees her charcoal snowman eyes.
He leaves his father in the kitchen drying each utensil and piece of crockery with a tea towel, scorning Andi’s suggestion to just place them in the rack. It has been snowing all evening, and despite having run out of things to say, he does not yet want to face the icy trek to the station and home. Clare is speaking to him again, but things are still not right. Sometimes he asks her a question, and she stares at him blankly — his words don’t always register. Late at night she crawls into his bed and curls there, not touching him. He finds he cannot sleep without her there, stays alert until she leaves her nest of blankets on the couch; sometimes daylight is already nudging at the window. In the morning he lets his arm rest across her back, so awake he feels he will never need to sleep again. He comes to his father’s to escape his own anxiety, until the pervasive loneliness pushes him back home.
On the pretext of looking for some cherished childhood treasure, Andi heads to the spare room, a city of cardboard-box towers that wait for attention, unlabelled and unpacked.
It is only after he has opened a few of the boxes that he realises: they are his mother’s belongings. He had always thought the room was full of his childhood possessions and the excess of his father’s library. Seeing all of the boxes there makes him furious. His mother didn’t want these things — why does his father keep them? And if she was so willing to be rid of her husband and her son, why didn’t she just fold them up, squeeze them into one of the cardboard receptacles, and tape down the flaps?
He picks at the tape of another box, and it comes away with barely a whisper. Inside are paperback books — their pages yellowed — and records, which he pulls out, flicking through each one. The Puhdys. Karat. City. Silly. The names haul him straight back to his childhood. They were bands that seemed to disappear as soon as the Wall came down, or hung around as overnight has-beens. And despite his anger, he laughs to think of his own mother once listening to these records. He pictures her playing air guitar in the kitchen, letting loose, her black hair flying about her face. He will take the records home to show Clare; she will have never heard anything like it.
Looking through another box he comes across a camera. Its clunky body is surprisingly light, the button making a satisfying click when he presses it down. Somewhere in the boxes will be its spawn, the albums full of Polaroids, stuck down and captioned. His father would dutifully bring the camera out at every birthday and Christmas, Andi’s smile frozen throughout the years. The only time his father appeared was in the occasional shot taken at an awkward arm’s length on one of their hikes, his father’s mouth caught in the top of the frame, level with Andi’s curly hair.
Without telling his father, Andi takes the camera back with him to his apartment. Now every day before leaving for work he takes a Polaroid of Clare, which he stows in his work diary. He stands close enough to her so that the frame is filled with her face; he is amazed by how different she looks each day. He finds himself glancing at the photograph throughout the day, flipping through his diary in class, using her image to mark the page of the book he does not read on the train. He has come to rely on the Polaroids more than he presumed he would, liking how he can stare into her grey eyes and she cannot look away, cannot blink. He inspects every one of her features, guesses at the way they pull together to give her each of her expressions. He wonders who else has hoarded photographs of her and whether they realise what they have given up. There is so much to find out, always more to discover.
He knows that what he is doing is wrong. And he knows that she is displeased. No, more than that. She does not respect him. But she does not understand him either, and this gives him hope because one day she will — people can learn. He is doing this out of love. The joy he feels when he comes home to her is so immense as to be terrifying. He can no longer remember what it was like to be alone in his apartment, cannot recall any reasons he would like to be so. Everything in his life is tied up with Clare. Each day he tries to show her who he really is, and he knows that one day, not too far away, she will see him properly.
Clare feels like she is not existing. But the toothpaste tube is getting flatter, the bin in the kitchen slowly filling up, her hair is getting longer, and all of these things remind her that she is. It comforts her to think that at some point someone will come looking for her. It frightens her to wonder how long this might take and who it might be. She supposes it will be her mother. Clare had been carefree with her correspondence home while travelling. At the time it felt blithe, but now it seems foolish. She has sent only two postcards to her mother since leaving Australia, one just days before she arrived in Berlin. She imagines her mother receiving each one, absent-mindedly reading the back and attaching the card to the fridge, where it gets covered by takeaway menus and bills. It will be months before her mother realises she has not heard from Clare, longer before she thinks to do anything about it. If her father was still alive he would come to look for her — that’s what fathers do.
‘My mother will be looking for me, Andi.’ She watches him for a reaction, but he gives nothing away. If she was describing the situation to someone else, she would suggest that his body stiffened at her words, but this is conjecture.
‘She’ll be wondering why I haven’t been in contact with her.’
‘No, she won’t.’
‘Yes, she will. She will be expecting to have heard from me by now.’
‘She has heard from you.’ He does not look at her. ‘You emailed her.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ she retorts, but even as she says it she feels like she must be lying. He is so certain, and her voice is whiny. Don’t be so pathetic, she tells herself. Don’t be so useless.
‘Yes, you did. I sent her an email on your behalf.’
‘How did you get her address?’
‘It was in your phone.’
Dismay engulfs her. He has thought about this more than she gives him credit for. She thought she had him figured out. She had made the decision to keep quiet, to not aggravate the situation, to let him come to the realisation that she is not going to flee. But even as she enacted this plan (it doesn’t even deserve the name, she is aware of that) she knew it was naive, for she cannot escape. Having searched every aspect of the apartment, having worked at the door lock with every implement she can find, and having scrutinised every step of Andi’s routine, she knows that there is no way out — not within her control. She has been marking the passing days by turning down corners of Anna Karenina. It is a long book. Yet she still harbours hope that something will happen, that her mother will arrive to fetch her. Mothers do not leave their young unattended. But this knowledge worries her more than it comforts her.
‘But won’t Mum think it was strange that you emailed her? She doesn’t know you.’
In the prison of the apartment, the familial moniker sounds rude, like swearing in a church. And that one intimate word, ‘Mum’, brings it all crashing back for Clare. This is actually happening to her.
‘I set up a new email account for you, and I emailed from that.’
She takes a slow breath. She holds it in her lungs and releases it as quietly as possible. And then she takes another. She tries to ignore the saliva pooling in her mouth, the way her shoulders attempt to hunch together as if to protect her heart. She will not feel the fear her body is trying to feed her. She breathes again.
He is not going to let her go. This is not an accident. He has thought of everything. No one is coming to save her.
‘Yo
u emailed her?’
He nods. ‘I wanted your mother to know that you are okay.’
Okay. But is she? The only thing about this situation that felt okay was that she would eventually be leaving. But now she knows — she knows — that this is bigger than just her and him. He has thought of everything.
‘But I’m not okay.’
He crosses the room to stand in front of her. She watches his nostrils enlarge; his chest rises as he draws in a large breath, taking in her careful silence and keeping the air from her. Her heart begins its drum roll, and she clenches her teeth, tries not to let any more words escape.
‘I thought you would be grateful, Clare. I did it for you.’
‘This has nothing to do with me.’ The words are out before she can check them, and they leap into a scream. ‘This is your own sick fantasy, you fuck! I’m just a prop, a doll.’
His open hand smacks across her left cheek, and her head drops in surprise. Before she has even lifted her hand to her face, he slaps her again, his other hand coming down across her right cheek and throwing her off balance. She stumbles backwards against a chair and reaches for it blindly. But it evades her, and she falls to the floor, the chair’s wooden legs kicking at her own.
‘Don’t you ever speak like that.’
Her teeth are overly large in her mouth, her eyelids swim pink currents across her eyes, and she waits for something else, something much worse. He lifts the chair from beside her, her foot coming free and dropping to the floor.
‘It’s all about you.’ He puts the chair back on the floor; its feet whine in protest as he pushes it into the table.
‘What about your mother?’ She will not let this one go. ‘Your father? What do they think of you?’ The words fight for space in her mouth, and pain sprouts from her body. She is on her hands and knees on the floor but she will not retreat. How bad can he make this? She wants to taunt him until he snaps; she wants for this to be over. ‘Do they know you’re not okay? Do they know what kind of person you’ve become?’
Berlin Syndrome Page 13