Goodbye Lucille

by Segun Afolabi

  ‘You were at the Atlantic the other night, weren’t you?’ I exclaimed.

  She smiled and made a slight purring noise as if she were searching for the appropriate words. She turned to Tunde, her shoulders hunched.

  ‘Izzi doesn’t speak English, do you baby?’ Tunde was also on his way to being very drunk. No one else had been allowed to touch their champagne.

  I tried again in German, but she shook her head helplessly. ‘Little, little,’ she apologized. ‘Brasilien.’ She let out a giggle.

  I wondered how they had been communicating as there was no way she could comprehend Yoruba. Tunde knew no other languages, apart from German and English.

  ‘Everything is all right?’ the waiter asked.

  ‘Very good,’ Angelika replied. ‘Very good. Seven and a half out of ten.’ She turned and began to relate an article she had read in the previous day’s newspaper. ‘It was all about this actor – I forget his name – and a hammer that had become stuck. He had to be taken to the hospital. To have it removed,’ she said mysteriously.

  ‘What do you mean, “removed”?’ Lucille asked. ‘“Stuck”?’

  ‘It needed to be removed,’ Angelika repeated. ‘Removed!’ She fluttered her hands by way of explanation.

  ‘Oh, up his rear end?’ I said. ‘What kind of newspaper was this?’

  She turned away from me. ‘There was a picture of the doctor holding a hammer in the air. Very big,’ she continued, illustrating the size of it with the span of her hands. ‘He was wearing gloves, of course. The doctor.’ There was a humorous headline suggesting the patient had got carried away with his DIY. ‘But you’ll know all about that,’ Angelika said. ‘That must be your kind of scoop.’

  ‘Scoop?’ I said. I wondered about Angelika’s reading habits. She had it that I was a member of the paparazzi, that I was constantly popping up in other people’s homes when they were engaged in unspeakable acts. I’d had enough of Angelika and her allusions to painting, her obvious disapproval of me.

  She was still pontificating about photographers and the ways in which they ruin people’s lives. ‘You don’t see ladies running around, being intrusive like that,’ she said, appealing to Lucille.

  ‘Cartier-Bresson would be so proud,’ I smiled wearily at Tunde, ‘that it’s come to this.’

  ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’ Angelika echoed.

  I said, ‘The lens is a window to the soul.’

  Angelika peered at me and shook a stray thought from her head. ‘But he’s a drunkard,’ she whispered, quite loudly to B, puckering her face as if fending off a bad smell.

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Lucille said. ‘He’s just had too much.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ I protested. ‘I haven’t had as much as those two.’ I pointed to Tunde and Isabel.

  Isabel glanced at Tunde for an explanation, but he only blew her a kiss.

  ‘I don’t know how you can mix with these people,’ Angelika cried, getting to her feet.

  ‘Darling, where are you going?’ B stood up. ‘He doesn’t mean anything. Sit down, please.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ she said. ‘Lucille, the pleasure was too brief. I must depart.’ And she was off, with B in tow.

  ‘Man, what a bitch,’ Tunde chuckled. ‘What a mad mess that man’s in.’

  Isabel swayed in her chair with her eyes closed, her long black hair swishing from side to side. She was probably on a dance floor somewhere, her legs wrapped round the hips of another man. Not Tunde’s. She seemed wild even by his standards. I watched her breasts swing away and then draw back towards me.

  7

  ‘BERLINERS TOGETHER,’ Henkelmann’s poster campaign had declared, his face a composed stare of compassion. One of his appeals had been his concern for integration, for including new arrivals: Turks, Greeks, Africans, Kurds, East Europeans. Social issues. Frau Bowker was not impressed.

  ‘Why does he want to go and spoil everything?’ she rasped, squinting at the politician on Frau Lieser’s television screen.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I replied.

  Frau Bowker glanced at me. Schnapps studied her, then turned to me and growled.

  I waited for Frau Lieser to return with the tea, wishing the ordeal were over. She always entertained when it came time to receive the rent. It put her at ease, she claimed; she was awkward with money and wanted to conduct affairs properly. Rather than simply have her tenants push an envelope under her door, she insisted on receiving us individually, prolonging the agony for her and for everyone else.

  Henkelmann brayed from the television set in a retrospective documentary. He was claiming that the children of today would be responsible for tomorrow’s Berlin, extolling the virtues of a well-funded education system.

  ‘Leave the children alone!’ Frau Bowker barked. ‘What is he doing, meddling with the little ones?’ She gathered her bony body together like a sack of old sticks, clutching at the buttons of her cardigan. She hated summer and always dressed for the depths of winter. ‘Why is he involving the children?’ she muttered furiously. ‘Silly little man!’ And then she said something I didn’t understand. She craned her head towards me; I realized she had asked a question.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’ I said. Frau Bowker came from a tiny village outside Cologne; sometimes I had difficulty with her accent.

  ‘What’s that, young man?’ she growled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eh?’

  We got confused as to what the confusion was all about. I could feel my anxiety mounting. I could have asked her to repeat herself, knowing she had probably forgotten her question, or simply made some comment concerning Henkelmann. She would have been none the wiser. Instead, I sought to placate her and stoke her anger in the same breath.

  ‘Sorry Frau Bowker, I didn’t quite catch what you said. Are your sinuses giving you trouble again?’ I knew her sinuses weren’t blocked, although she constantly complained about them. She seemed perfectly mucus-free today.

  She gazed at me wild-eyed. I feared she might become bellicose. Schnapps rose from her haunches and assumed the attack position.

  ‘Sit!’ Frau Bowker screamed, still focusing on the television screen. Schnapps did not need a reminder.

  Frau Lieser bumbled in from the kitchen carrying a tray.

  ‘Tea anyone?’ she sang.

  ‘Please!’ Frau Bowker snapped with exaggerated relief. ‘This man,’ she exclaimed, flicking her fingers at the television set, ‘is irritating me!’

  My heart jumped.

  ‘I need to turn it off,’ she scowled, still pointing accusingly at the television. She writhed in her chair like a creature possessed, as if that would have the desired effect. ‘Is there no labour-saving instrument?’ she complained after she had grown tired of her performance.

  ‘Elsa,’ Frau Lieser chuckled. ‘You are impossible. You know there’s no remote control.’ And then she wobbled quite nimbly among the bric-a-brac of her front room – around the over-stuffed chairs, the laden tables, the dainty porcelain of her life – to switch off the television set. She bustled back and poured the tea while Frau Bowker scrutinized her with a look of horror and absolute hatred. It was the way Frau Bowker was put together – she couldn’t help it – so I thought nothing of it. I couldn’t imagine how the pair of them had ended up best friends.

  ‘Tea’s too hot!’ Frau Bowker announced.

  ‘Just the way you like it,’ her friend put in without missing a beat.

  Frau Bowker swung her head towards Frau Lieser. She glared hotly at her for a moment. ‘True!’ she said. Then she went quiet. Her craggy old face fractured and she started to make an odd choking noise, a kind of hiccupping. In a moment I realized she was laughing.

  Frau Lieser’s bosom bounced up and down and she touched the side of her head where her scarf dipped behind her ear. I watched the pair of them cackling, one hand clutching my tea cup, the other gripping the envelope in my pocket.

  Schnapps glanced nervously at her mistres
s, then back to Frau Lieser. She let out a yelp, which put an end to the laughter. She was a young dog, Schnapps, who preferred to act old, like her mistress and her mistress’s friend. She couldn’t abide children or revelry of any kind. She would have been a menace were her appearance not so ridiculous – a little snow puff and the explosion of white hair around the bewitching black marbles of her eyes. I once asked Frau Bowker what type of dog Schnapps was and she barked, ‘Bichon! Bichon Frisé!’ as if I were a halfwit, then turned away and sniffed.

  ‘Don’t like your tea, young man?’ Frau Bowker swung round. ‘Don’t stare at Schnapps! It will make her cross!’

  ‘It’s a bit hot,’ I replied, knowing the tea was all that lay between this awfulness and my departure.

  ‘Just the way I like it,’ Frau Bowker repeated and her face split up again, a scattered jigsaw puzzle. She sighed into her cup, apparently content now, and leaned back against a soiled antimacassar. ‘I remember once,’ she continued, to no one in particular, ‘in Düsseldorf, with my daughter. We had tea in an old Viennese café. Very civilized. Those were splendid days.’ She hummed a random tune.

  Frau Lieser leaned forward for the next instalment. I blew harshly on the surface of my tea, spilling a little into the saucer, not really caring.

  ‘Yes,’ Frau Bowker continued. ‘Such refined clientele. And the interior … without comparison. You can’t imagine, Marianne. The tea was not so good, though. Not hot and scented like this, the way you make it, my dear.’

  Frau Lieser perched on the edge of her chair, eager for another compliment.

  ‘This was before she married,’ Frau Bowker went on, absently patting her flat bosom. ‘Or it could have been after …’ She seemed to lose her thread. She paused, thought about it for a while, then appeared ready to launch into something else. Instead she raised her cup to her meagre lips, and said nothing. It was obvious she had forgotten what she was talking about.

  ‘Oh?’ Frau Lieser uttered, surprised. But that was all. She got up and left to fuss in the kitchen again.

  I looked at Frau Bowker and forced a smile. She shot a glance at me, turned away and muttered, ‘Humph!’ before falling silent again. We sipped our tea.

  Frau Bowker’s silences were terrifying; they were wells, deep and unfathomable. You never knew how to fill them.

  ‘You’ve lived in Düsseldorf?’ I ventured.

  ‘Düsseldorf?’ she cried. ‘Düsseldorf? Whoever heard of such a thing? Who said I lived in Düsseldorf?’ she half-screamed looking round for Frau Lieser. ‘It’s not true, it’s not true.’ Schnapps stood and skittered towards me. ‘Sit!’ Frau Bowker shrieked. The dog winced and scampered back beside her mistress.

  ‘Your daughter,’ I tried again. ‘Does she live there?’

  ‘My daughter?’ she asked, as if she didn’t have one. ‘Monika?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Monika? In Argentina?’ she said. Her face was a picture of incredulousness.

  ‘No … no, Düsseldorf,’ I tried.

  She got confused, exasperated to an extent that I thought I had misunderstood everything she had said.

  ‘What are you talking about, young man? Monika … Monika lives in Argentina.’

  I sipped my tea again and thought I should leave it at that. I tried gingerly to remove the envelope from my pocket. It was grubby from where I had been clutching it. When I thought Frau Bowker wasn’t looking, I slipped it onto the table. Schnapps yelped.

  ‘What’s that?’ Frau Bowker said, alert again.

  ‘What’s what?’ Frau Lieser sang, bustling into the front room.

  ‘There!’ she panted urgently. ‘The young man! There! He’s put something on your table.’ She pointed, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘Just there! Look! Good girl! Schnapps caught him. Look!’ she squealed.

  ‘Oh?’ Frau Lieser said, glancing at the envelope. She went crimson, as if a switch had been flicked and she had instantly changed colour.

  ‘I have to go now,’ I mumbled, getting up, fleeing the dainty sitting room.

  I examined the negatives on the counter top until I found the ones I would print for Lucille. She wanted to know what Henkelmann had looked like, and I thought I would show her exactly how he had appeared before he died. I printed out the images from the rally. It was like reliving the day all over again through the sequence of photographs: the Turkish women, the butcher and his petrified grimace, Marie pushing her way through the crowd, the little Turkish boy in Henkelmann’s arms, the comatose café. They were all there, frozen in time, but in a way that told a kind of fluid story: rooms and street scenes, the expressions on people’s faces. It wasn’t really static; there was a life to it. Marie in her white linen blouse and the too-tight skirt. Her reach on tiptoe to read the café menu, the way her calf muscles bulged.

  It was hot, a little noxious in that narrow room, so I came out for a while, leaving the door ajar for ventilation. The day was already warm and the aroma of brewed coffee hung in the air. Lucille must have brought it from London as I didn’t keep any in the apartment. She would have woken earlier, made a pot and returned to bed while I was working. I poured myself a cup of the now tepid coffee and ate bread without butter or conserve, standing up, looking out of the kitchen at the buildings at the back. Two girls were leaping up and down on a bed near a wide-open window. Both were wearing pigtails. I could see one of them misjudging a jump and crashing to street level in my mind’s eye. I could hear the sirens, the mother’s hysterics. I sipped my coffee and turned away.

  Lucille was knotted up in a cotton sheet. I lay on the bed beside her, watching her sleeping face react to my presence. Her nose twitched and she turned her head away, but she slowly returned to her original position. The breathing settled again. I traced my fingers along her bare arm, from the elbow to the hollow of her neck, then up across her chin to her lips. She moved her head again and when she stopped, I brushed the back of my hand against her cheek.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m looking at you,’ I whispered back. I didn’t know when she had woken.

  She sighed, from sleep, and seemed to drift into unconsciousness again.

  ‘You’re beautiful like this,’ I said.

  She inhaled deeply and sighed again, and I thought I would lie there and stare at her until I fell asleep.

  ‘What do you mean, “like this”?’ She opened one eye. She seemed far from sleep now. ‘The rest of the time I’m an old bag, am I?’

  I smiled and kissed her. ‘My old bag,’ I whispered and found an entrance among the nest of sheets and her T-shirt, to the heat of her stomach and breasts. I eased off her shirt and she moaned as I kneaded her nipples in my mouth. I reached up to kiss her, then worked my tongue against her stomach, her belly button, easing my way downwards.

  ‘No, not that,’ she said, feebly. ‘Just come inside me. I need you inside me.’ In a moment we were moving together, unhurried, trying to prolong the intensity.

  When it was over, I lay back, exhausted by the morning heat and the exertion of pacing myself. There were tears running down her face, disappearing into the pillow. She had been crying and I hadn’t noticed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, reaching out to her. ‘Luce, what’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Really, it’s nothing. Just hold me.’

  And I held her as the sunlight expanded from a corner of the room, occupying more and more space until the warmth made us drowsy and we drifted into a new sleep.

  I was eight and I was at home, sitting at the dining table, waiting for the food to arrive. Aunt Ama sat opposite me, my brother Matty beside me, my cousins around the table. We were all waiting for something to begin. This was home and yet it was not home. I tried not to fidget in my chair, but I couldn’t help it. I was aware of everyone as they sat still as pieces on a chessboard. I felt the disapproving eyes. I was hungry and uncomfortable and there was nothing to do but wait. At one point Aunt Ama
laughed, but no one had spoken. I couldn’t understand what had prompted her. It seemed a long time before anything happened. I wanted to turn to whisper to Matty, but I could not. I was afraid of the disapproving looks.

  Then Uncle Raymond was at the head of the table. He stood as he handed out plates of food. He looked at me once and I knew it was my turn to be fed. The plate was passed slowly, to my cousin Roli and then to Matty. Somehow it bypassed me because my aunt was holding it next, then Kayode and Bunmi and Uncle Raymond again. I watched as the scene was played out repeatedly. Each time I determined to seize the plate, it mysteriously escaped from me. Uncle Raymond sat down and nodded, so I knew we could commence. I looked down and there were my mother and father, their heads staring up at me, without expression. I couldn’t understand why they were on my plate. I glanced at Matty for an explanation, but he was eating, oblivious. I looked back at the heads on the plate and screamed, but no sound emerged. Then a white light washed over everything.

  Sunlight had inched across to the head of the bed. I looked across at Lucille, who was still sleeping, her face puffy from rest and crying. Her breaths were short, but regular. She seemed to stop for a long while, before she inhaled deeply and the cycle began again. I got up and drew the curtains, allowing a gap for the breeze. The window with the jumping girls was shut now, the bedroom empty. I returned to the darkroom to work on the prints. While they were still drying I took them into the kitchen. I could smell frankfurters and eggs, recently fried, and a fresh pot of coffee. Lucille was sitting at the table in her underwear. She looked up at me and smiled but didn’t say anything. I lay the photographs in sequence on the table in front of her so she could observe for herself the narrative of Henkelmann’s last day.

  8

  WE CAUGHT THE S-Bahn from Zoo on Saturday. It was almost eleven and already the faint cool of the morning had lifted. Lucille held our swimming things, which she had packed neatly into a holdall. I carried two plastic bags filled with fruit, sandwiches, chicken drumsticks and bottles of beer and lemonade. There was pandemonium at the station with people racing to find seats. My heart sank. Everybody, it seemed, had had the same idea and now we were all heading in one direction. When the train finally jolted into motion around a dozen passengers were forced to stand in our compartment. All the windows had been pushed open as far as possible, but people fanned themselves with magazines and paperbacks, some even using their hands. As the train pulled away from the station, a warm current swirled through the carriage and there was a collective sigh. I thought it was all exaggerated, this reaction to uncommon heat, but I savoured it nonetheless.