‘Well, I don’t mean now, obviously.’
‘I’ve seen everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Pretty much. I work in a cinema.’
‘A drink then?’
‘Okay.’
‘Why not?’
‘I said okay.’
‘Oh, all right. Great.’
I was out of practice. She smiled and I was so astonished by the openness of her face, the sheer accessibility of her nature, that it was impossible not to smile back. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror wall and I was grinning like I’d won first prize in a Live For Ever competition.
That evening I picked her up from the flat she shared with her sister in Archway. She left me standing in the hallway, a damp smell rising from the worn carpet, while she went to get her coat and handbag. There was a picture on the wall of a coast seemingly hunkered down beneath a squall. Wallpaper tongues lolled at me. When she returned, I saw she had put a little colour on her lips. I thought that was a good sign. I drove her up to Alexandra Palace, where we bought drinks at the Phoenix Bar and took them outside. It was a little chilly but we were both wearing plenty of clothing and the dribble of sunlight soaking into the horizon bore enough warmth for ten minutes’ staring out over north London. We wandered around the funfair by the boating lake and then I suggested we head back to town, maybe get a bite to eat before I dropped her off. I don’t really remember us talking about a great deal, but I felt comfortable and she made me feel good. I suppose that’s about as much as anybody can hope for.
‘I had a good time,’ she said, at her door. Darkness had sucked the colour from her face, but she still looked good, like something sculpted from marble. Her skin was flawless. Her eyes gleamed, soaking me up.
‘Me too,’ I said. She was what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Her youth came off in waves from her like the perfume from flowers that makes bees dizzy. When she smiled, a little crease dug in right above her lip. I tell you, I’ve never fainted in my life, but when she smiled…it was like some Pavlovian response: drooling almost, I smiled back.
She leaned in and pressed her mouth against mine. A beat. Then away. Her mouth maybe was like all the other mouths that have landed on mine over the years, but it was so different right at the same time. I don’t remember the journey home, but I’m certain it was the best drive of my life.
I do remember my dream, though.
I was running across a terrible landscape of detonated buildings and acres of bloodied soil scarred with twists of barbed wire. Some of the barbs sported medallions of flesh. I was running as fast as I could, but the squeak of wheels behind me was unswerving in its determination. It didn’t matter to me what I was sprinting through - thick mud, glass and concrete, the liquefied shell of a human body - as long as it meant it got me further away from the monster that was tracking me. That rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak … it followed me out of sleep with the certainty of my heartbeat. I was so scared, I didn’t have the energy to cry out.
‘Too bad it won’t last,’ he said.
‘What?’
I was a million miles away, my lips tingling at the remembered thrill of another’s touch. Horseferry Road was nose-to-tail. Taxi drivers shouted at lorry drivers, ‘Wind your neck in and do one, wanker!’
He was in his wheelchair, in a recess of an abandoned sandwich shop called Sloppy Joe’s. A hand followed the curve of a wheel as though deriving succour from its touch. Or perhaps in order to calm the steel, I thought crazily, remembering my dreams.
‘Your girlfriend. Your new woman. It’s over, whether it lasts two years or ten. Like me, your relationship with her doesn’t have legs.’
‘How do you know? What are you talking about?’ I started walking away, eager to be away from the snarl of traffic and this wheelchair freak, but he slithered after me, his twisted feet in his slippers scuffing on the pavement.
‘I used to have a sweetheart, like you,’ he said. I didn’t look at him. His words were accompanied by an awful scuffing as he strove to keep up with me. One of the wheels, I noticed, squeaked rhythmically, like some strange, mechanical heartbeat. ‘It’s not time that destroys us, you know. It’s circumstance. Things change, just a little, on that rocky path of life, and the pebbles we dislodge cause landslides.’
I hurried across a road, knowing the kerbs would hinder him.
Imogen, one of the Reception girls, was approaching work from my left. I hailed her and she smiled, came over to walk with me, but she had noticed the old man, and eyed him nervously as he heckled me.
‘What’s your dad doing out today?’ she asked.
‘Funny,’ I said. ‘I thought he was the person you slept with last night. I don’t know. He’s giving me grief for some reason. Maybe because I helped him yesterday.’
‘Helped him how?’
‘Just got him over the road.’
‘I think he’s pissed.’
I looked back at him. There was indeed a bottle protruding from the blanket across his knees. ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ I said. ‘I thought he was plain nuts.’
The old man shouted, ‘Even if you get to stick your pee-pee inside her, even then, it’s just a matter of time before it’s finished.’
‘Who’s he talking about?’ Imogen asked.
I shrugged. ‘My mother,’ I said, and hurried her, shrieking, inside.
He was still there at lunchtime. I had called Natalie mid-morning to ask her if she wanted to share a sandwich in St James’s Park. On my way out, I saw him huddled beneath an awning, the empty bottle hanging from his fingers. He had wet himself. I looked at my watch. I was impatient; I didn’t need to be at the park for another twenty minutes. I stood there for a while, grinding my teeth, wishing I had never clapped eyes on the old bastard, and then I went over and shook him awake.
‘Where do you live?’ I said.
He looked up at me with pained curiosity, like a child who has just been distracted from his rattle. He dropped his bottle and mumbled something.
‘Elverton Street?’ I knew Elverton Street, it was a matter of minutes away. ‘Which number?’
I dragged the brake off with my toe and trundled him over the road. He was protesting, trying to jam his hands down on the wheels, but I was whipping him along at a fair lick and his palms just skidded off the arches. Once outside his house, I felt in his pockets for his keys and let us in. A high smell of polish hit me as I struggled to get the wheelchair over the threshold. On the walls flanking the hallway hung maybe two dozen black and white photographs, old pictures of men in uniform, standing in harbours, faces white and gaunt, hungry lean men with their collars up, lips pinched thin around cigarettes, eyes dark with forgotten knowledge. The weather in all of the pictures looked oppressive, bitter.
‘Friends of the family?’ I asked, and received a mouthful of German, none of which sounded like an offer to make myself at home.
I parked him next to the fire - there were a pair of grooves well worn into the carpet, so it looked like his favourite position - and made to go, impressed by the cleanliness and order of his flat. Clearly he wasn’t in as bad a situation as I had anticipated.
‘Wait!’ he said, very clearly, and I turned around.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said, pretty calm, all things considered. Bang went my lunch hour with Natalie. ‘At least let me make a phone call,’ I said. And then I said, ‘What kind of gun is that?’
It was a Mauser, apparently. A Mauser HSC. Standard issue, according to Korff, for all German naval officers. He waggled and waved it in my direction as he talked and the sweat in the crook of my knees gathered and dribbled down my calves as I sat on the sofa, listening to him, staring at the snub-nosed muzzle. I thought of Natalie checking her watch, sighing, making her way out of the park, scribbling 666 and bastard next to my name in her Filofax.
Focus was gradually coming back into his eyes. He started to gain control over the spit that was leaking out of his mouth. He said, ‘I met Günther Meikle once, in the May of 1944
, just a month before he died. He told me that he would not survive the war. He knew he would die, but that was all right. I think he spoke to me because I had served under a great friend of his, the Kapitänleutnant on the Edelweissboot. You know, Werner Rathke. Meikle shook my hand and a month later he was dead. Shot while trying to escape the interrogation centre at Fort Worth, Virginia. He was my idol. He sank twenty-five ships.’
I said, ‘Are you going to shoot me?’
He looked at me as if surprised to see me in his living room. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, finally, the words coming out of him in a long sigh. ‘The gun is not loaded. It hasn’t been loaded since the end of the war.’ He stared into his lap, his head hanging so low on his neck that it seemed it must snap off. He said, ‘You can go.’
I stood up, never taking my eyes off the gun in his hand. I edged out of the living room and into the hall, past the photographs on the wall. The door catch in my hand felt ice cold. ‘Shit,’ I said. And then I said it again, loud.
Back in the living room, Korff had dropped the pistol and was crying tearlessly. His mouth was open, but no noise was coming out of it. I picked up the pistol and set it on the table out of his reach. Then I sat down again.
‘Is there something I can do?’ I said. ‘Something to help you? Do you have any family? I could get in touch with them for you.’
‘I left the German navy feeling like a dead man,’ he said. ‘I had spent five years fighting for my country, and for most of those years I was stuck in a steel tube in the water. Unterseeboot, we called them. The U-boat. Most of my friends were lost. Most of them are still in the Atlantic, sunk to the bottom, swaying like weed in the currents. You know … do you know … the first things the fish take are your eyes. I imagine the chances are high of eating a fish from the Atlantic that has feasted on the eyes of a man …’
I sat back in the sofa. My hands felt clammy against each other: I had been grinding the palms against each other for minutes. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know—’ but he was moving on. I gained the impression that what he was saying, or gearing up to say, had been on his mind a long time. It sounded rehearsed, as if he had said it many times with only this immaculate, empty room for an audience. But at the same time I knew that I was the first to hear this. Every shred of me strained to leave, to get out before it was too late, but he had started and I was finished.
‘Are you all right?’
I smiled back at her, but my mouth must have looked like the edge of a piece of corrugated cardboard. ‘I’m fine. Anyway, it’s you who I should be asking after. I’m sorry about lunch.’
‘Forget it.’ And she showed me how a smile ought to happen. She could have been playing with dog dirt or telling me how she agreed with everything Pol Pot ever did and I wouldn’t have cared less as long as I could have been left alone to stare at her mouth for a while.
We finished our drinks and walked back to the Tube. Heft her at Camden and she kissed me, gave me a hug, said she’d talk to me the following day - all the kinds of things you want to happen with a girl you’re so deeply into you could burn up. I wandered back down the High Road, happy that she was happy with me and that things could go along as slow as she liked because I was enjoying the pace of things too. I thought I might catch a night bus home, but the prospect of walking to Tufnell Park was also attractive. It was pretty late now; the pubs had long emptied and the traffic was thinning, the number of figures on the pavements bleeding away into the sidestreets, back to their homes. I reached the end of the road and felt my legs give way. I put out my hand and it was grazed badly by the brick wall as I went down. I sat amongst the empty KFC boxes and Prêt à Manger coffee cups, breathing hard and feeling the cold concrete seep through my jeans. The things he’d said. The fucking things he’d said.
I got home somehow, falling through the door at around 3.00 am. My face in the mirror was the colour of drying cement. I ignored Toby and Roz, two of my flatmates, who were smoking weed around a table littered with wine glasses and a pack of cards, and went upstairs. Penny was in bed.
‘Can I borrow your iMac?’ I asked.
She moaned and pointed at her desk. It wasn’t a yes or a no, but I went over, unplugged the machine and lugged the computer by the handle back to my room. Once everything was arranged on my desk, I booted up the iMac, plugged in the phoneline and logged on. I called up Google and, for want of a better, fed in the word ‘unterseeboot’. I trawled around the first few pages of search results and then returned to the search engine where I tried ‘Jens Korff’. Nil. Then I tried ‘U-boat strategy’, ‘U-boat defence against depth-charge attack’, ‘U-boat unorthodox crew duties’.
I tried: Who was responsible for removing the bodies from battlefields?
No joy, beyond a couple of ghoulish sites that delighted in presenting pictures of dead bodies.
Then I remembered something Korff had said about his superior. What was his name? Something Rathke? And his boat. The name of his boat. Something to do with Christopher Plummer, I had thought at the time.
I went downstairs and made some coffee, endured Toby’s dope-fuelled recounting of that night’s card-playing in excruciating hand-by-hand detail and finally escaped, wishing that I’d never stopped to help
Jens Korff on the pavement. Wishing I’d left him at the kerb to grow older and die. Wishing I’d pushed him in front of a fucking delivery van.
Back upstairs I typed in Edelweiss with, for good measure, Rathke. There was one reference. One was enough.
At work the next day, I read through the list of names - German naval recruits who had served under Werner Rathke on the Edelweissboot -that I had printed off Penny’s iMac. There was no Jens Korff. But there was a Jens Müller. And a Marcus Korff. And many other names besides. All of them were accompanied by birthdates that fell more often than not between the years 1915 and 1925. It wasn’t so far-fetched an idea that he had made up his name. Old men now, those that had survived. Those that had died during the war would have been frighteningly young, too young. I imagined how they might have felt, sinking beneath the freezing, black waters of the Atlantic as they set off to attack Allied Forces ships. I tried to imagine Jens as one of those wolfish young men in the photographs, eyes dark with a knowledge that no young adult should ever be allowed. When I looked back at the list of names, I had screwed it into a ball beneath my fist.
Shortly before lunchtime I saw Korff dragging himself past the window on the main street, excruciatingly intent on reaching his usual destination, his blankets bunched on his lap like a disfigured pet. I watched him go, and grabbed my jacket.
Elverton Street was quiet but for a man in a paint-spattered track-suit trying to get impacted insects off the windscreen of his car with a dish scourer. He paid me no attention as I walked past him and stopped in front of Korff’s door. It was locked, as was the front window. I strolled around to the back street, resisting the urge to run and draw attention to myself. Korff was going to be a while.
Korff was not as fastidious about security at the rear of his flat. A flaking wooden gate collapsed in on a back yard strewn with rubble, swollen bin-bags, nests of takeaway cartons and empty bottles of Bell’s whisky. Bastard cabbage pushed through the cracks in the paving stones; a raft of nettles was anchored to the foot of a garden shed that looked as solid as drenched cardboard. Inside, on top of an ancient chest freezer mottled with rust, I found a claw hammer that I used on the back door to the kitchen and ground my teeth against the noise of splitting wood. I shut the door quickly behind me and peered out, but nobody had watched me break in. I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest, trying to calm the thud of my heart. No sounds inside the flat. I almost wished there were.
I returned to the hallway and checked the photographs on the wall: men shaking hands in the bitter cold, stiff in uniform, whitened by the brittle weather. They stood before the dark hulks of U-boats in black harbours. Some of the men were made indistinct by the primitive photographic equipment, or drizzle, a caul that
would not improve the fortunes of these sailors. One picture showed a pair of men laughing in the foreground while another two, blurred by lack of focus, were caught in the act of transporting a crate onto the U-boat. Even distance could not conceal the skull that had been stencilled on to the wooden slats.
Three feet from me, through the frosted window of Korff’s front door, an arm reached up and its shadow fell through the glass, snaking across the carpet to cling to my shoes. I backed away and was in the kitchen by the time Korff was able to manoeuvre himself across the threshold. He pushed a cloud of booze before him. I was about to ghost out of the back door when I heard him weeping. He was heading my way. I moved behind the edge of wall that contained an ironing board and held my breath, noticing too late that my footprints on the lino betrayed my passage through Korff’s flat.
I needn’t have worried; he was interested only in loading up on more liquor. His trembling hands tore at the screw-top of the botde. I almost said something. I almost did. But I have to admit that I wanted him to drink long and hard. I wanted him to find oblivion one way or another, because I knew that I wasn’t too far away from finding it for him. I don’t suppose I realised how close to the edge of my own reason I had ventured.
And while we spent those seconds together in the kitchen, me watching the back of his head and him watching the end of his bottle as it tilted towards and away from him, I thought of his hands scrabbling on the frost-scarred earth, his breath coming in fast rounds, like the machine-guns that had destroyed the silence a few hours before …
He keeps his breath coming quickly because it mists before his eyes, and that makes what he’s looking at more manageable, the detail milky, ill-formed; to focus on this is to know what madness means. And it’s not the clay in the soil turning the ground this colour. And these things he’s picking up and putting in a hessian sack, they aren‘t branches torn down from trees by stormy weather. He removes the rings and puts them in his pockets. He has to use a knife to separate these intestines from the body they’ve spilled from. He doesn‘t look up, he refuses to look up, as the dying owner of the guts feebly protests. It all goes in his bag, as much as he can carry. Did he volunteer for this job? He doesn’t think so but he can’t remember. Does he love the Reich enough to converse with what ought to be unspeakable? Arbeit macht fiei, he thinks as he lifts a detached face up by the eye sockets. Into the bag. Arbeit macht frei.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 36