The Other Me

by Saskia Sarginson

  I can’t keep the disappointment from my expression. I’d wanted to treat her. I’d wanted her to experience some luxury, something extravagant. She whispers later in the kitchen, “Don’t feel bad. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself in a restaurant. It wouldn’t feel right to have someone else wait on me.”

  Otto is working on my last afternoon. I want to shout as soon as the door closes behind him. But Gwyn is washing clothes in a big tub in the outhouse. As I slip in through the door, waiting like a schoolboy behind her, she doesn’t acknowledge my presence, just keeps scrubbing and soaping.

  “Do you have to do that now? I thought maybe … I could take you out for a cup of tea.”

  She raises her hands, raw and red from the water. “You didn’t really have a business trip to London, did you?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve thought about you.” I stop, swallowing the other words I’m longing to say. I’ve missed you. Come away with me. Marry me.

  Her cheeks flame as if she’s heard them anyway. “I’m married, Ernst.” Her lips hardly move. “To your brother.”

  It’s like a slap. I move backwards, fumbling for the doorway. “I made a mistake. It was stupid…”

  She nods. But the edges of her mouth waver.

  “Please tell me though…” I falter, hating my weakness, “just tell me this one time that you feel the same…”

  “What I feel doesn’t matter.” She puts a wet hand to her throat. “It’s what I do that counts, it’s how I behave. Feelings are there to tempt us.”

  I hang my head. I can’t speak.

  Her face softens and she steps towards me. She is close now. She’s so much smaller than me. Her head barely reaches my chest. There are soap suds in the dark coils of her hair.

  “I know these feelings are wrong,” I murmur. “But I can’t be sorry about them.” I want to touch her cheek, brush my fingers across the nape of her neck. “I can’t be sorry about loving you, even though I know … I know we’ll never be together.”

  “Ernst.” Her voice is a whisper.

  “When I was in the prison camp in Russia, the only thing that kept me from death was remembering that I used to have feelings, that my numb heart had once danced, and broken, and wept, and that perhaps it could again one day.”

  She’s put her finger to my lips. My stomach contracts with the shock of her touch. She’s tipping her mouth towards me, leaning closer, and I take her face between my palms and we are kissing, leaning up against the big tub, the smell of detergent in my nose, the smell of her.

  We stop and I manage to step away. Our breath is harsh. It’s the only sound.

  “I’ll go,” I tell her, choking on the words. “I’ll leave now.”

  Her face is terrible, desperate. Her eyes are blazing. She takes my hand in hers, and I let her lead me across the garden into the house, up the narrow stairs into my bedroom.

  She pulls the orange curtains across the window. She doesn’t speak, taking off her sweater in one impatient unpeeling; she does a strange little wriggle as she pushes her skirt and slip over her hips with rough tugs, letting them drop around her ankles and kicking them away. Her breathing quickens, and she gasps in frustration when her stocking twists and catches over her foot. I kneel below her and try to help, my stumpy fingers fumbling about her heel, yanking at slippery, taut fabric. And then we are naked, with no space between us.

  PART THREE

  THE TELLING

  KLAUDIA

  1996, London

  WHEN THE LETTER COMES FROM the Laban Center, I grab the envelope from the mat almost before it has had time to waft down from the letterbox. I’m unable to stop my fingers shaking as I rip it open.

  Words repeat in my head. They are inviting me to come for an audition. Relief makes me tremble. In the kitchen, I stand by the window and look out at the garden. It’s been battered by rain. Patches of bruised dirt show through the lawn. My audition is after Christmas, in January next year, so I’ll have plenty of time to prepare. I’ve already sent Josh a note apologizing, explaining that I won’t embarrass everyone by coming back to work. I’ll have to look for a new job. Find a place to live. Rehearse. One day at a time, I tell myself. I feel like an invalid. But this is something to keep going for.

  My father moves behind me, his heavy tread making the floorboards creak. I clutch the letter and turn to face him.

  “I have an audition. For the dance school.”

  He doesn’t appear to hear. He’s boiling the kettle, bending to take out a cup and saucer.

  “If I get in, I won’t turn the opportunity down. I can’t,” I say loudly, watching for his reaction.

  He drops a tea bag into his cup. I hover by the window, waiting.

  “I’m sorry if you don’t think I’m doing the right thing,” I blurt out. “I’m sorry if you’re disappointed.”

  He pours the boiling water and turns his head, raising his pale eyes slowly. “I don’t agree with this dancing nonsense, Klaudia. But I’ve changed my mind. You can stay.” He stirs his cup. “I was too hasty. You’re … you’re my last link with your mother.”

  I unstick my lips, holding my breath.

  “Sometimes, I look at you and suddenly there she is.” He stares at me, his expression brightening. “My Gwyn. Her smile shining out of your face.”

  “I … I didn’t think I looked anything like … her. Like Mum.”

  A strange warmth seeps through my limbs: the child in me squirming inside his unexpected approval.

  “Not your coloring, no.” He waves a hand as if conducting a jerky piece of music. “And you don’t have her spirit. Her goodness. But I see her features in you, even the way you laugh, sometimes you sound like her.”

  I take a step closer, wanting to touch him. “I know how much you miss her…” My voice breaks. “I do too.”

  He clears his throat, and his cup and saucer clatter together, spilling tea. He puts the saucer back on the counter and rips off a piece of kitchen roll. His hand is trembling.

  * * *

  I sit in the hall, cross-legged on the carpet, hugging the phone to me, twirling the cable round and round my hand, as if I can pull Meg closer, reel her in. Within moments, the easy banter that we shared at university comes back; and I hunch over the mouthpiece with her voice in my ear.

  We have so much to catch up on. It’s a relief to tell the truth. Not to watch my words, make sure I don’t slip up. I tell her everything that has happened since we left each other at the airport up until the moment I danced at the burlesque club. “And Cosmo was there to see you dance?” She laughs. “Wish I’d seen you too, strutting your stuff. And I bet his face would have been a picture … what happened? Did you sort it out?”

  “No,” I admit. “I put off telling him the truth, and then he found out in the worst way possible. Someone from my past showed up straight after I came off stage. He told Cosmo that I wasn’t Eliza.” I lean over my legs. “And so now he despises me.”

  “How do you know he despises you?” Her voice comes down the line. And I hear the cynicism in it, Meg preparing to argue.

  “You didn’t see the way he looked at me,” I say quickly. “Anyway, he’s in Rome now. He only came back for a couple of days.” I change the subject, because there is nothing to be gained in going over it. It hurts too much. Instead, I tell her about my plans to switch degrees. The audition at the Laban Center. Meg is supportive, interested.

  “And what was all that about your father?” she asks.

  I am silent, squeezing the receiver. I’d forgotten that I’d mentioned him in the letter.

  “You said you thought he was a Nazi or something?”

  I am aware of my father moving around upstairs. His slow steps cross the landing and the bathroom door shuts.

  “Not a Nazi,” I whisper. “He’s German. It’s complicated. I’ll explain when we meet.”

  We keep talking, slipping easily into other subjects, reminiscing, laughing. The objects around me melt away: the rise of sta
irs, banisters, side-table legs, coats hanging on pegs and the front door with its oblong of frosted glass. I am lying on my bed in my room with Meg flopped next to me, a half-drunk bottle of wine on the floor; we’re sitting across a table in Café Flo bleary-eyed with our cups of coffee, sharing a Kit-Kat, or looking into the Seine with the frosty air making clouds between us.

  When I put the phone down, my hand is cramped and aching. My ear sweaty where I’d pinned the receiver to it. I get up off the floor stiffly, aware that my one-sided conversation would have sounded loud in the silent house.

  My father comes out of the bathroom, switching the light off behind him with a sharp tug on the dangling cord.

  “My friend from Leeds,” I explain. “She’s a dancer too.”

  I hope he’ll ask me about her. I would like to share it with him. But he just grunts, and disappears into his room. I realize that he hasn’t done his morning exercises recently. He looks shrunken. He moves carefully, as if his joints hurt. And he is always alone. He manages chapel once a week, but he hasn’t gone to prayer meetings since Mum died. If only he had some friends. I remember the old Caribbean men that sat around tables in the Atlantic pub in Brixton with their games of dominoes. How they laughed and slapped each other on the back, their glasses of rum by their elbows. The easy curl of their talk, the banter slipping and sliding between them as they slumped over the table.

  The house is a shrine to my mother. Both of us seem to be stuck, and I have no idea what to do about it. I go to bed wishing for something to happen, some unexpected event that will shake us free of each other and the past. I’ve been investing my hopes in my audition, imagining the kind of life I could have if I got a place at Laban and moved out of here. But that was before my father said that I reminded him of Mum, before I saw that he was vulnerable too.

  * * *

  I kneel on the floor in front of the under-sink cupboards and root around for cloths, disinfectants and polish.

  After I left home, my ingrained habits of cleanliness were hard to break. When I moved in with Meg and Lucy, I couldn’t stop myself from tidying up their dirty dishes and mess. They never made their beds or cleaned the bath.

  One of Lucy’s sisters, visiting from Manchester, a Greenham Common badge on her sweater, began to lecture me when I rolled up my sleeves to wash the kitchen floor. “It’s only dirt.” Her mouth turned down. “Do you think women starved themselves to death and threw themselves under horses to get the vote so that you can play into the male perception of the little woman?”

  It shocked me to realize that I hadn’t really escaped my upbringing. It was ingrained. It hadn’t occurred to me to be interested in politics. I’d been too busy trying to fit in, trying not to draw attention to myself. Politics reminded me of Shane, his leaflets and his hard fists. I was ashamed that I was so narrow-minded and conventional. The endless round of domestic tasks that I’d been brought up with at home seemed trivial and useless.

  But here I am with a scrubbing brush in my hand, because I can’t think what else to give my father as a peace offering. I balance precariously on a stool in the bathroom and rub at the limescale on the showerhead, breaking a nail. I use vinegar and newspaper on the windows, the way Mum always used to. In my parents’ room, I drag the bed and chest of drawers to one side so that I can vacuum properly, going underneath things, sucking the clumps of grime that have gathered in the gloom. I push thoughts of Cosmo back into the shadows, concentrating on bringing a shine to furniture, purging the place of dust and cobwebs, scrubbing at surfaces as if I could wipe everything clean.

  It’s as I move the small table on my mother’s side of the bed that I notice the writing on the wall. The furniture had been covering it. Letters scratched into the paper. I lean close. Help me.

  I catch my breath and re-read the words, my finger touching torn paper, the jagged meaning rough under my skin. Help me. The uneven letters look as though they’ve been made with the point of a pair of nail scissors. I reel back, my heart thumping, and clamp my hand over my mouth. Reading those words brings Mrs. Perkins’s sour face close, her lips opening and closing. “Your mother,” she’s saying. “Screaming at night.” And Mum’s coat hangs in the hall, when of course it shouldn’t be there at all, because she would have worn it when she left the house. Her stepping out in front of a car, as if she was ever careless of traffic. None of it made sense. It has never made sense.

  I don’t know where my father is. I clench and unclench my fists. What did he do? My hands feel clammy. I wipe them on my jeans, staring around the bedroom. Think. Think. I abandon the vacuum cleaner, still plugged in, leave the bundle of cloths and bottles on the floor; I don’t bother to push the bedside table back against the wall. The scratched words stare out at me, the last thing I see before I turn and leave the room and go quickly down the stairs and out into the wet afternoon. Hurrying away from the house, I run along the pavement, head bowed into the rain.

  * * *

  Mr. Gupta looks up when he hears the bell.

  “Is your wife here?”

  He looks behind him warily, then angles his head so that he can call out through the plastic curtain while still keeping his eyes on me as if I’m mad. Perhaps I am.

  When Mrs. Gupta pushes her way through the colored ribbons, I want to seize her hand. She looks calm and wise, her eyes fixing me with a deep stare.

  “You said you saw Mum, the day she died,” I begin, tripping over my words, unable to go slowly. “When she came into the shop, did she say anything? Did she look worried or upset?”

  Mrs. Gupta adjusts the swathe of fabric over her shoulder and moves her head. “You don’t know?”

  “What?” My pulse hammers in my ears.

  “You don’t know what state she was in?”

  “State?” I repeat. “What do you mean? State?”

  “Child.” She folds her chin into her neck. “Your mother wasn’t well at all. She was … quite unlike herself.”

  “I don’t understand.” My mouth is dry. My tongue fumbles around my teeth.

  “It was terrible … she was crying and wailing. She had bare feet. No coat on. She rushed away before we could help her.”

  The shop lists to one side. The floor at an angle. I think all the packets and tins will come crashing down. I put my hand over my mouth, clutching at the counter to stop myself from falling.

  Mrs. Gupta is guiding me into a chair and talking quickly in Hindi to her husband. They place a glass of water in my hand.

  “Your mother was not herself, Klaudia. And this is why she was run over. She was behaving in a strange way. As if she was very sick. Mentally unbalanced.”

  I sip the water automatically. It is tepid. I taste London pipes. I shake my head, and struggle to my feet. “I have to go.”

  * * *

  Wet grass moves under my feet, soft and muddy; rotten apples roll beneath me; above my head, dead leaves shift and sigh. The shed door is shut. I push it open without knocking. My father looks up, startled. He’s sitting at his workbench, a piece of wood in his hands, sawdust speckling his knees and scattered over the floor. The raw, sweet smell of it. Behind him I see the glint of silver, the edges and handles of his saw and hammers. All his tools lined up in the dark.

  “What happened to Mum? What did you do?”

  He puts the wood down. Places a lathe next to it, his eyebrows shooting up.

  “The day she died.” I can hardly speak. “She ran into the Guptas’ crying. Without her shoes. And Mrs. Perkins. She said she’d heard Mum screaming.” I take a step closer. “What did you do to her?”

  He’s staring at me and I feel a slippage of something, certainty crumbling away over an edge. I don’t know who he is. I don’t recognize him. He’s that man in the mirror, his reflection saluting out of cold glass, the Sieg heil etched in flickering light and dark. I snatch at oxygen as if I’m being strangled, struggling to stay upright. He will grab my neck with his big hands and squeeze. Fear runs through me, cold and clean, wiping
everything away, emptying me of myself. It’s as if I can feel his fingers pressing the air from my windpipe.

  He looks down into his lap. “I failed her,” he says.

  The hair on my neck prickles. I’m closed in, choking among shelves lined with bottles of white spirit and castor oil. Clorox. Pesticide. Brooms and rakes hanging from hooks. I put my hand to my throat.

  Another person had materialized through his skin, pressing a stranger’s face towards me. I didn’t know who that man was, or what he would be capable of. But as quickly as he’d flashed into my father’s features, he’d disappeared, and another stranger sits before me. Someone with crumpled shoulders and drooping mouth.

  He balls his hands into fists. “She changed. She didn’t recognize me. I was scared.” His voice wavers. “I didn’t want them to take her away. I didn’t want them to lock her up. I thought she’d get better if I could just keep her at home, keep her safe. But she got worse.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “She was confused. She screamed. Terrible things.” He rubs his forehead. “It started after she was poorly,” he says in a dull voice. “Nothing too serious. A bit of a temperature. She thought it was just a cold. But a few days later she began to act strangely. She had funny turns. She thought I was trying to hurt her.”

  I want to put my hands over my ears. I can’t imagine Mum behaving like that. I can’t imagine what she must have been feeling.

  “I found her going out barefoot. Or with her dress half unbuttoned.” He takes a deep breath. “I kept the doors locked. But she was crafty. She got all the way to the Guptas before I realized. She was on the pavement, confused and scared. She had no boots on, and it was so cold.” His eyes glaze over, as if he’s seeing her poor naked feet again. He twitches his mouth and looks up at me. “She seemed to relax. I thought she was coming out of it. I held out my hand. But … she ran across the road.”

  “But … why? What was wrong with her?”

  “When I explained her symptoms at the hospital … afterwards … they told me she probably had delirium.”