The Rift

by Nina Allan

  So far as I knew, it was still there. I decided Steven Barbershop was more like a pike than a wolf. His mouth was like a pike’s anyway, cold and narrow, with just the edge of a tooth showing when he smiled.

  “We could go for a walk,” I said to him. I thought about saying I’d been to the lake before, with my dad and sister, then decided against it. I thought it might be a bad idea to let him know I even knew where we were. He hesitated. I could see the thoughts going through his mind, ideas being channelled, like the wheels clicking slowly round inside a clock. If he said no, he’d either have to give a reason or not give one. Either way it could be dangerous, because it would mean admitting to both of us that I was in his power. I thought about asking if we could go back now, because it was getting late and I had a barbecue to go to, but that seemed impossible. The barbecue itself seemed impossible, an entertainment for other people but not for me.

  The thought that I might never see Catey again: an idea so strange it was barely graspable, a thought that was full and empty at the same time, like that sculpture of a house that was made from concrete, poured inside a real house and then left to set.

  A ghost house, it had looked like – I’d seen it on the news. The council knocked it down in the end. I imagined running my fingers over the concrete, absorbing the people and the rooms and the time, like peculiar vapours, through the pores of my skin. Steven Barbershop was driving more slowly, looking for somewhere to stop, perhaps. There was no one around, just the odd passing car. I wondered if any of the people in those cars would remember having seen us, later.

  “There’s nowhere to park,” he said. He was pretending to sound pissed off, pretending we had no choice except to keep driving. I could feel my heart speeding up. I found I could picture it: a cherry-coloured, fist-shaped mass at the centre of my chest. Adrenalin being pumped into my bloodstream in a broken, Day-glo line of tiny green arrows.

  “Yes there is,” I said. “Look.” I tried to sound nonchalant, tried to sound like I didn’t give much of a damn either way, either stop or drive on, no big deal. I pointed through the windscreen and it was true, there was a place, he could see that at once. A shallow lay-by, not so much a car park as a place where cars could be parked. As if to prove the point there were a couple of vehicles there already, a beat-to-shit Cortina and a Volkswagen camper van that looked as if it would have trouble making it as far as the local Tesco’s.

  Steven Barbershop began to pull over, and I began thinking about what I might do once I was outside. He would have to let me outside, I realised – we were right on the road here, another vehicle might swoop past at any moment. The thought of being in the open air was making my head spin, but I couldn’t dwell on it, daren’t, not yet. The idea was still mostly an abstraction, still beyond my reach. The van’s tyres made a scraping sound against the dry earth. I knew I couldn’t run, not straight away. Too much of a risk. As Steven Barbershop removed the key from the van’s ignition I tugged down on the door handle. Nothing happened.

  “Steady on,” he said. “The safety locks are still on.” He grinned, pike tooth gleaming, then flicked a switch on the dashboard. The look on his face made me realise what I should have known all along: that I’d been a prisoner from the moment I decided to get into the van. I couldn’t have escaped even if I’d tried.

  I tried the door again and this time it opened. The feel of the ground beneath my feet made me elated, almost high. I knew I mustn’t let it show, not in my face, not in my behaviour, not even a little. I scuffed the earth with the toe of my trainer, rolled a stone around. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see what’s down here.”

  I began walking towards the woods, past the rotting camper van and on to a pathway, half hidden between the trees, scattered with fallen leaves and small drifts of gravel. I knew that even now Steven Barbershop must already be wondering what the hell had happened, how come I was out of the van, with him tagging along behind me like a first-class moron. He must have known he’d blown his chances. Only not quite yet.

  “Where are you going?” He sounded pathetic. The distance between us was increasing gradually but he was still there, still following. He seemed bound to me somehow, I could feel it. As if we were tied together by a piece of elastic and it was down to me to snap it, snap it clean through and without letting myself be bounced right back to him, a dead weight at the end of a bungee rope. I could feel the breath going in and out of my lungs like a visible substance, a silvery dust. I was almost more frightened now than I’d been in the van. It would be so easy to make a mistake.

  “I want to see if we can find the lake,” I said. I glanced back briefly over my shoulder then carried on down the path. Dried leaves crunched under my feet. I could feel him getting angrier, and I understood that I wasn’t real to him, not really, not as a person. I was a thought in the shape of a girl and I belonged to him, the way his other thoughts belonged to him. I should not be getting away, I had no right, I was his secret. He speeded up a little. I could feel him thinking he’d been a prick, such a prick, prick, prick to pull over in the first place, that’s what had done it, what a devious little bitch I’d been, to con him like that.

  I wanted to turn round again, just so I could see how far behind he was, but I didn’t dare risk it. I looked further down the pathway in front of me instead. I could just see where it branched off, on to another, wider track that I hoped would turn out to be the path to the lake. Just as I was wondering what to do, whether it was safe to run yet, I saw two people come into view by the intersection, a man and a woman, their heads bent close together in conversation. The woman was wearing a yellow baseball cap. I’ve never forgotten it. It was like a light going on, a bright blazing ‘go’ sign. I ran. Ran towards them, the man and woman, trying to look normal and not panicked. The man glanced up as I dashed past. I threw him a smile but said nothing. I was afraid they might not believe me, that admitting there was something wrong might somehow end in me being returned to Steven Barbershop.

  Keep them in sight, I thought. That’s all. Just keep them in sight. I slowed my run to a brisk walk. I was about ten yards ahead of the man and woman at that point, close enough to hear their voices. I had no idea where Steven Barbershop was, whether he was still following or not, lurking up the path somewhere, hoping I’d trip or run out of running or be delivered back into his custody some other way. I thought it was unlikely, to be honest. The appearance of the man and woman had changed everything. They had changed the world.

  I came out of the woods by the lake. I felt thirsty and I felt sick. I was crying, just a little bit. I thought that so long as I didn’t completely lose it that wouldn’t look too crazy, people would assume I’d had a row with my boyfriend or something. There were more people around now anyway: a bloke with three kids running ahead of him, fighting over a football, two younger women in sundresses, gabbling like parrots, a guy in a long grey raincoat with two massive wolfhounds. He must be boiling in that, I thought. It was the first normal thought I’d had since getting into the van. I was beginning to wonder about what I was going to do, how I was supposed to get home. I knew Delamere station was around here somewhere, but I was afraid to ask anyone in case it turned out to be miles away. They would know I was lost then, and that could be dangerous. I kept walking. No one looked safe to talk to, not even the plump dad with the oversized football shirt and the Jesus sandals. I knew I wasn’t thinking straight, but my life seemed to have changed in a way I couldn’t explain, not even to myself.

  All I knew was that I shouldn’t tell anyone. Telling would mean admitting I’d got into Barbershop’s van of my own accord, that it was all my fault.

  And all to punish Lucy, for liking Justin.

  That man was going to kill you, Ju, said a voice inside my head. It could be happening right now. In another world, it is happening. His hands are around your neck. You can still see the light through the trees, but soon it will be gone. There are cuts on your knees and on your face. One of your trainers has come off
, and two of the toes on that foot are broken where he stamped on them. You can smell his sweat and his awful breath, stinking of cigarettes. Everything you ever wanted is nearly over. None of it matters. None of it mattered, ever, because it was only ever going to end in this.

  I could taste earth in my mouth, and I could feel her terror, and I knew I’d betrayed her. Somewhere in some other time I’d been unlucky, or simply too frightened to know what to do. Because what were the chances, honestly, of a girl of seventeen being able to outwit a creature like Steven Barbershop? I remembered a story that had terrified me as a child: the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which the Minotaur’s victims had been chosen by drawing lots. A silk bag full of beads, two-dozen white beads and one black.

  I’d drawn a white bead this time, which meant I was safe. But somewhere – next time – another me had drawn the black.

  The young woman opens her fist. The black onyx bead, like a miniature time bomb, glows in her palm. Her hair flops damply against her forehead. She is out of breath. She can go no further.

  I kept following the path around the perimeter of the lake. I saw two guys fishing, the kids still wrangling over their football, a woman with three small orange dogs trotting at her heels. They’re corgis, I thought. Just like the Queen’s.

  ‘Franziska’s Journey’

  by

  JULIE ROUANE

  Life Writing A1/36B teaching supervisor Ms A. Gifford, Priestley College, Warrington, April 1994

  On the night of Tuesday 17th February 1920, a Berlin policeman by the name of Hallmann was coming off duty when he witnessed a young woman throwing herself from a bridge into the freezing waters of the Landwehr Canal. Luckily for the young woman, he was able to pull her from the water before she went under. Hallmann then summoned help, and the woman was taken to the nearby Elisabeth Hospital to recuperate. The doctors who examined her found that aside from some minor symptoms of exposure she had not suffered any permanent physical injury from her attempted suicide. Her body, however, displayed multiple scars from earlier injuries. A Dr Joseph Knapp claimed she had been beaten so severely that her jaw had been fractured, and several of her teeth were missing as a result. The deep scarring behind her right ear suggested a bullet wound. There were numerous smaller scars all over her body.

  The woman consistently refused to give her name, and refused to talk to anyone about what had happened to her. When asked why she had tried to kill herself, her answers were cryptic. “Can you understand what it is, suddenly to know that everything is lost, and that you are left entirely alone? Can you understand then that I did what I did?” The hospital staff referred to her as Miss Unknown.

  She spent most of her time sitting silently on her bed. If a stranger approached she would turn her back, or cover herself with a blanket. In spite of appeals from the hospital, no one came forward to identify her and after six weeks of convalescence she was transferred to Dalldorf, one of the city’s asylums for the mentally infirm. On June 17th 1920 she was interviewed by police officers who were anxious to trace possible relatives, or indeed anyone who might know who she was. The officer who interrogated her noted that she had to be restrained before they could photograph her. It was clear that Miss Unknown was desperate to retain her anonymity. She even made faces at the camera to distort her appearance.

  Everyone seemed to agree that she was not insane. She knew who she was and why she was in the asylum – she simply did not wish to share the information with anyone else. The nurses who had most contact with her all remarked upon her politeness, her fondness for reading, and her fluency in four European languages. It was to one of these nurses, Thea Malinowski, that Miss Unknown finally revealed her identity. Catching sight of a photograph of the murdered Russian Tsar and his family on the cover of a popular Berlin magazine, she told Malinowski she was Anastasia, the youngest of Tsar Nicholas’s daughters. She had survived execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. She was alive.

  The first thing she remembered was waking, bloodstained and half-delirious, under blankets in a peasant’s cart. She had been rescued by an officer in the Tsar’s own army. He had transported her secretly out of Russia and into Romania, using the jewellery sewn into her garments to pay their passage. There was a soldier, a rape, a child she later abandoned on the steps of an orphanage. Her story was the stuff of fairy tales. “We came through such lonely districts, we had to rest in forests, we travelled so many roads.” Eventually she came to Berlin, a lost soul with no identity, no family and no future.

  Even though she swore her nurses to secrecy, it was only a matter of days before the news was leaked to the outside world. Miss Unknown is questioned, prodded, adopted, taken to tea. No one can agree on who she is, who she might be, who she is not.

  [And this is where we turn the record over, play the other side.]

  You were born Franziska Czenstkowska in 1896. Your place of birth was a hamlet called Borowihlas, a rural settlement in what was then Western Prussia. Borowihlas was a farm place, a scattering of homesteads and cattle barns, with a closely knit – you would say incestuous – population of less than two hundred souls. Your father was known to everyone as Anton the Drunkard. Anton married late, almost as an afterthought. His first wife died of complications following pregnancy. His second – your mother, Marianna – was more than twenty years his junior. You cannot imagine what drew them together, and mostly you don’t try because it’s just the way things are. You are not – quite – their eldest child. A brother, Martin, died before you were born. Was it Martin’s death that made Marianna so bitter, so undemonstrative? If you could make yourself believe that it might make things easier, but you cannot. Marianna had her own reasons for being disappointed with life, reasons she never told anyone and especially not you.

  A small place and a plain place. Your brothers and sisters seemed to belong there, but you never could. You found the mud and the need, the scraped, awkward, cramped and paltry nature of life in Borowihlas maddeningly depressing. A life reduced to its bare essentials was scarcely a life, especially for someone with the vision to see beyond it. You looked forward to school because it gave you a respite from mud and cooking. The teacher praised you for your fluent reading and your sure grasp of languages. A slim, very nearly good-looking man who had lived in Berlin. When he praised you, you felt happy, not because you cared for him but because in his words you could feel the breath of places that were not Borowihlas.

  When Anton drove to town he brought you back dresses. Dresses and white socks, neat little patent leather shoes with gleaming buckles. Marianna was furious at what she perceived as the waste of money. If it’s not drink it’s this foolishness – how are we supposed to eat this week, tell me that? You stood silently with your eyes cast downwards, secretly laughing. How you hated this dried-up old woman with her hard mouth and stabbing eyes, eyes that condemned you for crimes you could barely guess the meaning of. How you loved the shoes, the pretty garments, the chocolate walnuts in their cellophane wrapping.

  My Franny was what he called you. He whispered that you were different, better. His hands on your budding breasts, swelling breasts and then in your fanny, Franny. The salivating combination of lechery and horror. Your friends seemed strange to you now, their interests – their needlework, their grandmothers, that sweet boy Julius who smiled so innocently as he filched their handkerchiefs – so far away so lost so utterly madly gone forever never was. The teacher who once praised you seemed so stolid. If he couldn’t guess what Anton was doing, then what did he know? Anton the monster, the drinker, the foul-breathed fucker. How he loved to play cards, to carp crap about his family once being lords, the von Czenstkowskis, if you please, like anyone gave a shit. Anton with his plump, crooked fingers, plucking at the knee socks, the fine white crochet that he himself had bought you on one of his pub crawls. If he can drink, why can’t he whore? At least then he might leave you the devil alone. The truth was, your fat and drunken father was afraid to get his prick dirty.

 
Marianna howled through your nights like a maenad. Maddened by jealousy by grief by guilt by plain old ugly anger. They call her the witch now, in the village, did you know that? It’s her shouting that did it, her pointy-nosed yelling. She had to shout, Marianna, to drown out the gossip, the appalling filth they were spreading, those Borowihlans, lies that couldn’t be true they were so terrible, and even if they were, she had to admit you’d most likely led him on. Those clothes, the hoity-toity manners, the speaking in tongues. What would a place like this be doing with a bitch like that? In any case, she knew you were lying. Fat Anton hadn’t been up to dipping his wick in donkey’s years.

  But whores will be whores. And the look she gives you if you try to speak to her, as if you were hen’s piss. Spare the rod and spoil the child, that’s what your cousins say, and you’s a spoilt little madam, you have to admit that, even if they can’t help feeling sorry for you, at least a little. Hey, Franny, they yell as they pass by. Give a dog a bone, Franny. The mud is deep and treacly, right where you’re walking. The cartwheels whoosh and the dirt flies up. Your prissy white skirts get caught in the crossfire and those cousins of yours, they bust their balls laughing.

  The drunken old goat snuffs it eventually – tuberculosis – and Marianna remarries. You are seventeen, and she can legally disown you, which she does. You come to Berlin as one of thousands, farm girls from the provinces, all of them looking for love, money, soldiers, housing. You find work as a housemaid and then as a waitress, but what is this, the life of a servant, no better than the crap you had to endure at home. You’re damned if you’ll settle for drudgery. The city must have more to offer, even to you.

  The men are gone for soldiers, every one, and the factories are taking in women, churning out weapons. And it can be fun in the factory sometimes. The women are mostly girls your own age, they aren’t so bad, some of them are friendly and even amusing, in spite of their coarsened tongues, their filthy hands. None of them care for books, but they can sometimes be kind.