I jump, startled out of my reverie, when I hear a noise behind me. Philip, I think, turning round.
But there is nobody.
When I get home I thank Mrs Theis, who’s been playing at babysitter, see her out and get ready for bed. I’ve just slipped under the quilt when there’s a knock at my door.
I sit up in alarm.
‘Yes?’
At first nothing happens.
‘Hello?’
Then, unbearably slowly, the door opens. It’s Leo.
‘Darling!’ I say, surprised. ‘What’s the matter? Are you having trouble getting to sleep?’
He nods.
‘Come here.’
He avoids catching my eye.
‘What’s wrong, Leo? Do you want to sleep in my bed?’
Headshaking.
‘Where’s the man?’ he asks. ‘Is he coming back?’
‘We’ll talk about everything tomorrow,’ I say. ‘All right?’
He nods.
‘Come on, I’ll take you back to bed.’
After he’s drifted off, I sit a while and watch him sleep. Then I go in the spare room and lie down myself. I take a deep breath.
My chest aches.
I have lost my love.
Maybe there are things that are stronger than love.
Fear. Pain.
Time.
But I have friends, I think. I have my marvellous child. I am healthy. I am alive. I am free. Free of the past, free of all secrets. Everything is illuminated.
And the world does what it always does.
It keeps turning.
Epilogue
The water glitters enticingly. I hear it calling to me the second I get out of the car. The Elbe Beach. Again.
There’s even a new moon.
I linger a while.
I probably ought to stop coming here. I can’t ask Mrs Theis to look after Leo every evening and I can’t get to school dead tired day after day because I spend my nights hanging around the shores of the Elbe.
Apart from anything else, I’m making a fool of myself.
And yet I can’t help it.
I look about me. I’m alone, just like every evening. He’s not going to come. It was idiotic of me to think he would.
This, I tell myself, is the last time.
Then—contrary to my usual habit—I set off in the opposite direction, away from the water, towards asphalt, people, streets. I walk on and on, making for the centre of town. The streets get busier and busier, and I walk this way and that, wondering how I’m ever to find my car again, but I don’t care—I keep walking. With every step, my thoughts become clearer, the heaviness falls away. I work my way through the blackness. Now and then late-night revellers emerge from the darkness and stagger past me—a few lone wolves, some closely entwined couples, the occasional noisy group. And then suddenly a light appears before me in the darkness. I look up. A pub, it’s neon sign guiding me. I must have passed a lot of pubs without feeling the desire to go in. But this one is different. I don’t know why. Maybe I like it because it’s so empty. I walk in.
Behind the bar is a petite woman of about my age, pale skin, bright red dyed hair. She smiles and gives me a nod. I sit down at the counter and order a beer. She puts a bottle down in front of me.
‘Hard night?’ she asks.
I take a swig.
‘I’ve known worse,’ I say, taking another. ‘But, yes, hard night.’
‘A man?’
I shrug. I don’t feel like talking.
‘I sometimes think,’ the woman says, ‘how amazing we’d be if love didn’t always get in the way. If we could take all the energy we put into finding or hanging on to a partner, and put it into other things—projects or art or whatever.’
I look at her more closely. She’s younger than I thought. Maybe a student who’s taken this job to pay for her studies. It’s only her rough voice that makes her seem older. I look at the tattoos covering her arms. Philip hates tattoos. It was because of him that I didn’t get any more done after the little butterfly on my hip.
‘Does it even exist?’ I ask. ‘Love?’
The woman frowns at me.
I take another gulp of beer, savouring the bitterness.
‘When we think we love someone…do we really love that person? Or do we just love the feeling that person gives us?’
She considers.
‘Both, I guess,’ she says.
‘But then how could we ever stop loving? If it’s not the feeling a certain person gives us that we love, but the actual person, how could we ever stop loving him—just because he does something we don’t like, for example?’
The woman shrugs and turns away. People probably rope her into discussions like this every night, and she’s had enough.
I’ve had enough too.
I take the bottle of beer and go and sit at the window. The grimy panes look out onto the night street.
I wonder whether Philip is still out there. I wonder whether it’s true that I still love Philip. Whether love exists.
I wonder where it goes when we stop loving. Does it fizzle out in the cold of the universe? Does it seep into our cells and change our DNA?
I think of Philip and I get that roller-coaster feeling in my stomach, and my eyes fill with tears and I think, Yes, damn it. Even now, after all that’s happened.
I pay for my beer and walk back to the beach. Collapse onto the sand and am amazed at how cool it is. I feel the urge to sink back and lie down, to look up at the stars and think of nothing at all, to rest my eyes a little, here, by the water. I feel like waiting in the dark, on the verge of dawn, until the river has carried away all my emotions, swept them around the next bend, washed all my pain out of sight. I indulge the thought for a moment. I feel as if my body weighs a ton. I can’t get up. I’m too tired, too wounded, too heavy.
But then I tell myself that it isn’t over yet. That the sun’s about to rise. That there’s always something you can do. That things carry on somehow. That that’s what I’m best at—getting up again, no matter what. So I get up. I brush the sand and the pain off my clothes and hands. I avert my eyes from the water, turn my back on it—and find myself looking into Philip’s face.
We gaze at each other in silence.
I think to myself that love is not a state, not a feeling—it is an organism that hungers and thirsts, a living being that can grow and atrophy, fall sick and convalesce, go to sleep and die.
That can be resuscitated.
And at that moment the birds start to sing.
Acknowledgments
As always, I should like to start by thanking my family, especially my mother, father, brother and my wise and beautiful grandma Hilde.
Thanks are also due to the wonderful people at btb—and in particular to Regina Kammerer, who helped me bring The Stranger Upstairs to light. What a blessing to have you as my editor!
Warm thanks too to the fabulous trio Georg Simader, Caterina Kirsten and Lisa Volpp. (Grazie mille! What would I do without you?)
And then, of course, there are all the readers, booksellers, events organisers and lovers of literature who have seen to it that I can keep doing what I like doing best. Thank you!
Very special thanks to my inspirational friends, especially to Jörn. But also to Sonia, Frank, Alex, Lukas, Laura, Maria, Jörn, Heiner, Anne Sasha.
And to Radiohead, for the soundtrack.
PRAISE FOR MELANIE RAABE AND THE TRAP
‘The Trap had me hooked from the start.
Linda’s story unravels so cleverly, and Raabe keeps you questioning what’s fact and what’s not right to the end, ratcheting up the tension at the same time . . . A genuinely gripping debut: I had to keep reading until I’d finished!’
Debbie Howells, author of The Bones of You
‘You won’t be able to resist’
Elle
‘A very clever, mind-bending thriller’
Woman & Home
‘A fast, twisty rea
d for fans of Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn’
Booklist
‘A must-read for thriller lovers’
Essentials
‘Blurs the lines of justice deliciously’
Dead Good Books
‘A page-turner in the very best sense of the word. It’s clever, devious, and driven, and twists the reader inside out until it reaches a terrific ending’
Ian Hamilton
THE STRANGER UPSTAIRS
Melanie Raabe grew up in Thuringia, Germany, and attended the Ruhr University Bochum, where she specialized in media studies and literature. After graduating, she moved to Cologne to work as a journalist by day and secretly write books by night. Her debut novel, The Trap, was an international bestseller. Her second, The Stranger Upstairs, remained on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list for almost six months when it was first published in Germany in 2016.
Imogen Taylor is a literary translator based in Berlin. Her translations include The Trap, Sascha Arango’s The Truth and Other Lies, and Fear and Twins by Dirk Kurbjuweit.
Also by Melanie Raabe
The Trap
First published in English 2017 by The Text Publishing Company Australia
First published in the UK in paperback 2018 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2018 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-8623-4
Copyright © 2016 by btb Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany
Translation copyright © Imogen Taylor 2017
Cover Images © Hilary Walker/Millennium Images, UK
The right of Melanie Raabe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published as Die Wahrheit by Random House Germany, Munich, 2016
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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