An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  I turned the book over on my mother’s side table to see what she was reading. It was a very thumbed copy of The Ambassadors, the orange spine curved and pale with linear cracks. My mother was always buying books, but forever rereading the same old classics she’d read at university.

  ‘Is this any good?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pulling on a pair of white shorts. ‘You’ve caught the sun a bit.’ She flicked my nose with her forefinger.

  ‘We were sitting outside at the pool. I should’ve put suncream on.’

  ‘I bet Maike covered herself up. To keep up that unearthly white glow.’ She took out her earrings and put them in a blue and white Japanese bowl on her dressing table that Martin and I liked to empty out when we were children.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  She looked at me in the mirror, behind her on the bed. ‘I meant it as a compliment.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m the pale one. Thanks to all this English skin. Why didn’t I get any of the French?’

  ‘The skin’s Scottish,’ she said. ‘Your great-grandparents were from Lewis.’

  I picked up a watch from the floor. The face was large and white, the hands and the casing brass, the strap fake brown leather. Above the hands, I read ‘Ruhla’ and ‘15 jewels’. I wrapped it around my wrist and wondered if I should ask for a watch for Christmas.

  ‘I’m sure Beate knows some gay Turkish people. We’ll ask her tonight.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said, putting the watch on the bedside table. ‘She’ll have a worse story than you – orgies or something.’

  ‘Beate doesn’t have orgies,’ she said, frowning. She put her hands on her hips. ‘Did you get your offer confirmation from Durham?’

  ‘They don’t confirm it until my results arrive. Anyway, I’m going to UCL and it’s the same offer, so if I get enough for Durham I’ll be going to UCL anyway.’

  ‘I’m still not sure about London.’

  ‘It’s my degree. And what’s wrong with London? Auntie Linda lives there.’

  Mum stalked out of the room. I followed her to the kitchen, where she took a head of iceberg lettuce from the fridge and washed it under the tap. I opened the windows, though it was hotter outside than inside, and sat at the kitchen table, lying across it with my eyes closed, the sticky plastic tablecloth pleasantly cool beneath my cheek. I could hear Tobias’s viola trembling in Frau von Hildendorf’s apartment. The air smelt of hot plaster and green leaves.

  ‘Your Auntie Linda doesn’t do anything naughty in London. You will.’

  ‘Isn’t Auntie Linda meant to be a lesbian?’

  ‘Rumour has it. Though if she is, she’s not the naughty kind.’

  I often had small spats with my brother, and my mum sometimes shouted at my dad, but otherwise this conversation represented the high peak of family disagreements; real arguments were had by families who weren’t happy, like Petra’s, or the Drombusches on telly.

  ‘Maybe I could change back to Berlin,’ I said, voicing a thought that struck me now and again when I felt frightened about leaving Maike.

  ‘Being bilingual is a gift, Ralf. It would be crazy not to study abroad when it’s so easy for you and so hard for everyone else.’ My mother aggressively spun the salad.

  ‘I thought you hated moving abroad all the time.’

  ‘That was different,’ she said, releasing the spinner and letting it shudder to a halt. ‘We moved every two years until Berlin. Every time we got settled, every time we’d made any friends, we’d set off again.’

  I made a sympathetic face, though these sorts of stories always left me cold. My parents’ lives before I was born were as emotionally real to me as the Tudors’.

  The door opened and Dad shouted, ‘We’re home!’ I heard Martin drop his football things on the floor and crash into the bathroom. My father came into the kitchen and gave my mother a kiss, looking like a model West German pharmacist, orderly and trustworthy. His neatly trimmed hair, otherwise unstyled, was the same pale grey as his neatly ironed trousers, his watch and his glasses. He had a thick white moustache that was so neatly bushy that it looked as if it might come away from his face when he removed his spectacles. The only other colour on his person was a striped burgundy tie that matched his socks. I found it hard to imagine that he’d had many expressive same-sex experiences as a young man in rural Hessen.

  ‘What are you making, Schatz?’ my father said in German, stealing a lettuce leaf and pinching her bottom. This physicality was much commented on by friends, whose parents rarely touched each other in front of them.

  ‘It’s chicken salad. I was going to make something with lentils, but I’ve got a patient having a crisis that I need to see at seven-thirty, so I thought this’d be easier.’

  ‘I like chicken salad,’ I said, my cheek still pressed to the table. ‘But Stefan can’t eat the chicken.’

  ‘He can eat the lettuce.’

  ‘I’m sure we can keep ourselves entertained for half an hour,’ Dad said jovially. He brushed my hair with the tips of his fingers. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘He’s having an attack of teenage ennui,’ Mum said.

  My father put down his jacket and Filofax and picked up my limp arm, pushing two fingers into my wrist. ‘It’s fatal I’m afraid, Pat.’ He smelt of cigarettes and Persil.

  ‘Dead?’ Mum said.

  Dad nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Can I have his dinner, if he’s dead?’ said Martin, coming into the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of shiny white football shorts. Back then, I couldn’t have told you whether I liked Martin or not. He was my brother and he was four years younger than me, which was close enough that we’d had to spend a lot of time together as kids, but too far apart for us to be friends once I’d started going through puberty and wanted to be in my room reading, cleaning up fossils and masturbating.

  Martin had an easy confidence that made me jealous. He seemed completely untroubled by himself. There were a few things he liked doing – football, cycling, playing computer games – and he did each in turn until he was stopped. He would lie sprawled across the sofa watching Bundesliga, then the Sportschau, then tennis for hours until Mum or Dad turned off the set and said, ‘You can’t lie around watching telly all day.’ He wouldn’t complain, just sloped off and played The Legend of Zelda on his NES until that was switched off. Then he left the flat and took his skateboard to the Tiergarten until he got hungry and came home again.

  ‘It’s chicken salad,’ I said to Martin, taking my wrist back and sitting up properly. My father kissed me on the crown of my head.

  ‘I hate chicken salad,’ Martin said. ‘Please don’t put grapes in it.’

  ‘It’s in the recipe,’ said Mum.

  ‘You can pick them out,’ said Dad. ‘I’m going to change.’

  The doorbell rang. ‘That’ll be Beate and Stefan downstairs.’

  ‘Martin can get it,’ I said, leaving the room, wanting to have a moment alone to contemplate Oz, feeling a growing excitement at having someone new to fall briefly and fictionally in love with. ‘I have work to do.’

  ‘You can’t have work to do!’ Martin shouted in English. ‘You just left school. You’ve literally never had less work to do!’

  Six

  I sat at my desk looking at Oz’s card, thrilled by it as if it was a second-class relic religiously charged with some trace of him. I tried to imagine how my bedroom would look to Oz. Childish, I thought. It was a high square box, the white ceiling lined with overpainted plaster cornicing and a central rose, from which a lamp had been badly attached, so that blue and red wires were visible between the grubby cord and the black hole. I had my parents’ old bedroom curtains, rough cotton heavy with muddy green flowers. The walls were painted a dirty yellow that I’d picked with Dad when I was eight. My pillowcases and bed sheets were mismatched family cast-offs in ancient shades of brown, burnt orange and olive green, napped by thousands of rounds in the washing machine.r />
  I’d hung up two large posters: one of Wendy James from Transvision Vamp in ripped jeans, one of an exhibition called Art of Germany 1945–1985 that I’d bought on a school trip because I liked the colours. These posters were orbited by hundreds of pictures of avalanches, exploding volcanoes and giant beetles cut from the National Geographics that were stacked up beside our toilet. The mirrors of my large wardrobe were pocked with childish stickers: rainbows, puffy Smurfs, Muppets, Hannibal from the A-Team, Star Wars characters and mulleted German and English footballers. The odd furry paper silhouette revealed sporadic, unsuccessful attempts at removing them. A dusty AT-AT stared longingly down at the room from the top of the wardrobe like a stray dog. I imagined Oz’s house looked like those white marble-floored interiors in Miami Vice, with three pastel-coloured sofas, a mirrored coffee table and a potted fern.

  I heard Beate and Stefan talking to my mother, shoved Oz’s card into my pocket and began going through a battered box of old cassettes, so that I looked busy when Stefan came in. He knocked at the open door and said, ‘Ralfi, Ralfi.’

  We gave each other the Vulcan salute.

  ‘How was the film?’

  He shrugged. ‘Pretty cool. Pretty dark.’

  I could hear Beate’s screaming laugh in the kitchen above my mum’s high giggle and the pop of the first Sekt cork.

  ‘Is Mum drinking?’ I said. ‘She’s got a late client coming.’

  Stefan shrugged and pointed to my box of cassettes. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I bought a load of old cassettes at the flea market. I’m taping them up to record onto them. There’s an Elvis Costello special on Radio 100 at nine.’ I threw down the taped-up cassette and opened another.

  Stefan flicked me hard on the ear, lay down on my bed and put his white-socked feet on my red plastic desk chair.

  ‘Was the film any good in the end?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Stefan said unconvincingly. ‘It was pretty creepy. There was this woman who got knocked off and then came back as a ghost. The music was very powerful and it had this kind of fuzzy chiaroscuro, you know?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not really.’

  Stefan shrugged and picked up a thumbed National Geographic from my bedside table. ‘Fuck,’ he said, turning the open page to me, a spread of red-eyed seabirds slick with oil from the Exxon Valdez.

  I nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Hey, listen to this,’ I said, and told him about Tobias coming down the staircase and lying about it.

  Stefan frowned and smiled. ‘Fuck. Ralf. That’s genuinely quite weird, right?’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ I said.

  Excited, he dropped the magazine and leapt off my bed. I grabbed the binoculars and we ran into Martin’s room and turned the lights off. Martin was on the bed reading a comic and shouted in protest.

  ‘Hey, shut up, Spasti,’ Stefan said. ‘It’s the traitor.’

  Martin had long since been brought in on the spying game, because, other than the kitchen – where our parents usually were – his was the only room that looked out onto the courtyard. Grudgingly, he climbed off the bed and joined us a half-metre from the open window, so that in the thickening dusk our faces were still shaded. ‘I thought we weren’t doing this any more,’ he whispered as Stefan lifted the binoculars to his face.

  ‘He’s been seen in the vicinity,’ said Stefan. ‘Oh shit!’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’ I said. He handed me the binoculars. I looked at Tobias’s living room, but it was empty.

  ‘What am I looking at? There’s nothing there.’

  ‘The bedroom.’

  I shifted the binoculars, but saw only his orangey curtains.

  ‘The gap,’ Stefan said.

  There was a split between the curtains, a long triangle through which I could see Tobias pulling the sheets off his bed. He left the room and my dipping, rounded gaze followed him into his kitchen, where he nervously searched the top of his fridge and then the floor. He stood and put both hands to his mouth.

  ‘What is it?’ said Martin.

  I handed him the binoculars. ‘Oh,’ Martin said, following Tobias to the living room, where he was turning over his sofa cushions. ‘So he’s lost something.’

  ‘He’s casing the joint,’ Stefan said, taking the binoculars back. ‘Probably looking for wires. Or maybe prepping something for this guy,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ I reached for the binoculars again.

  Stefan kept hold of them and pointed into the courtyard. A tall man with white hair had just entered from the side entrance to Schiller Straße. He was moving thoughtfully but purposefully past the horse chestnut tree towards the front building.

  ‘Mum’s patient,’ I said.

  ‘Looks pretty miserable,’ said Martin. He did look very sad; like the world had abandoned him.

  ‘Military,’ said Stefan.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look at that haircut. It’s so tight.’

  ‘It’s so sad.’

  ‘What?’ said Martin. ‘His hair?’

  ‘No. Someone that powerful, some general in charge of a nuclear arsenal, with sex problems.’

  ‘They’ve all got sex problems,’ Stefan said. ‘That’s why they have to kill people. To compensate.’

  ‘What?’ said Martin. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Does,’ was the best retort Stefan had to offer. He stalked out of the room. I followed. Distantly we heard the doorbell to Mum’s practice ringing and saw Mum doing up the buttons of her work blouse again, disappearing through the door in the kitchen.

  *

  Mum returned as promised after half an hour, and from that moment on our Friday night ran its usual course. We ate at the big table in the kitchen, filled with red wine and my mother’s tasteless chicken salad. We talked about our weeks, Martin, Stefan and I brief and businesslike, my father too. I didn’t talk about Maike, because my mother would make faces, and we didn’t talk about what Beate and my mother called ‘Nature Club’, because we were tired of the teasing. My mother would tell stories about patients, using nicknames to hide their identity – The Cryer, The Shit, The Affair – always laced with jokes, always aimed at making Beate laugh.

  The only good part of the meal was the dessert, which Beate brought: something simple and delicious, some idea she had picked up from her latest lover or another homeless artist lodging on her living-room floor. Stewed red fruit with mascarpone, baked figs, a lemon tart, clafoutis, a paper bag of ripe peaches.

  Martin picked up Donkey Kong and was forced by my mother to abandon it until the adults had finished their coffee. Deprived of distractions, he chatted and made jokes that made even me laugh. Once the first bottle of wine had been drunk, my mother and Beate held court as we picked at the remnants of the meal and our parents smoked.

  Beate was a warm, wild woman. She was also my godmother, and I knew as a child that it would be her that adopted us if my parents died. Although I loved my parents, whenever Stefan and I sat with her – watching her working on her sculptures in the studio by her flat, drinking nettle tea and eating some supermarket-own-brand version of Hanuta, her straw-like blonde hair tied up in a topknot, her faded dungarees and forearms spattered with white plaster – I would wish that my mum and dad could be simultaneously dead and not dead, like Schrödinger’s cat, so that I could have both them and Beate as my parents.

  Mum had met my father and Beate at the same medical conference in West Berlin in the Sixties. They were both working at the bar. Beate was from East Berlin, but on the night of the 13th of August 1961 she had been in bed with a trumpet player from West Berlin. She woke to find the border closed and the Wall going up and that she was trapped on the right side. This would have been a triumphant story had her mother not got cancer ten years later, forcing her to reemigrate to the East to nurse her. She escaped again after her mother died and lived with us until I was two. This traversing of the Wall back and forth earned her the nickname Die Gämse – the cha
mois – in West Berlin’s artistic circles, as if she sprang over the Wall at will like a mountain goat.

  Beate was more wrinkled and heavier than my mother, but had a wide expressive beauty, embodied by her large mouth, always red-lipsticked, with wicked turned-up edges, like the Joker. It was a face that, despite what I then considered her advanced age – forty-five – kept a regular stream of bohemian men in tow, one of whom was sitting with us at the table. He sported an unfashionably long beard and wore a hand-crocheted waistcoat over a yellowing cotton shirt. He was tall and he stooped when he walked, as if he were afraid of banging his head on the ceiling. I could see, beneath the greasy hair and the smell of patchouli, that his smile were very beautiful, his teeth strong and straight, and that his eyes were glacially blue. He failed to impress anyone else though; as my mother sat down with the coffee jug, she whispered, ‘Ask Charles Manson if he wants cheese.’

  I don’t remember the man’s name, because these men were never around for more than a month or two. One Irish folk singer had lasted a year, a bald masseur from Hamburg had managed only one visit. They were never formally introduced as her partners, they just appeared, joining in with varying degrees of success.

  Stefan didn’t see any of these men as father figures; he had made that mistake once with the folk singer. He taught Stefan to play the Irish flute and Stefan had sketched out a complex itinerary for a planned trip to Ireland they were going to take together. At Der Gammler, the bar we frequented, Stefan had even drunkenly wondered if the man could be his real father, because their hair was the same colour and the man had called him ‘son’. Stefan didn’t know that, in English, this could fondly refer to anyone, and I didn’t enlighten him.

  A week later the man was gone. Stefan never witnessed his mother splitting up with any of them. It always seemed fine, he said, until he came home to find a specific kind of silence reigning in the house. His mother would emerge from her bedroom, taking slow, cautious steps, dressed in an old silk kimono she’d bought at a flea market, emblazoned with a huge red dragon. She would be fully made up, drinking wine from a tumbler, a cigarette between her fingers. ‘I’m going to learn Arabic,’ she said after the Irishman. It was always that that put the final stamp on it: the announcement of a new project. ‘I’m going to go to Paraguay,’ ‘I’m going to start meditating.’ Books would be borrowed from the library, brochures collected from the travel agent’s, but within a few weeks there would be a new man and the projects would be forgotten.