‘But this is. . . this is. . .’ He blinked nervously. Then he laughed despite himself. The situation was just too absurd. He had definitely seen the name ‘Senner’, Sandra’s maiden name, beside the doorbell. Who on earth would have taken the trouble to substitute a second, even less appropriate surname?
‘Was that the name of the previous tenant?’ Constantin hazarded.
‘No, and my eyes didn’t deceive me the first time.’ Marc extinguished the match, he spat out the words so fiercely. ‘There’s something fishy going on, and I’ll prove it to you.’
He produced the serrated security key from the pocket of his jeans. His hand was trembling so much he had to pause for a moment before he could insert it in the lock.
‘Shall I?’ Constantin asked solicitously.
‘No, no problem.’ Marc’s tone was almost curt. And then, to his utter consternation, not the slightest problem presented itself. The key slid into the lock with a faint click, and he turned it with his thumb and forefinger as easily as if the mechanism had just been oiled.
30
Once, when Marc was twelve years old, he had staggered his mother by announcing that tidying his room would be contrary to the laws of nature. A Michael Crichton thriller had just, for the first time, confronted him with the phenomenon of entropy, a thermodynamicist’s term from which it can be deduced, inter alia, that everything in nature tends towards a state of the utmost disorder. Just as a car tyre loses its pressure and tread, or a T-shirt fades in the wash and becomes frayed, or roof tiles sometimes need replacing, so human beings eventually disintegrate into their component parts and lose the energy that binds their extremely complex anatomy together. They become old and ill and die. So why waste a brief human lifetime tidying things when all your efforts are bound to be nullified by a force of nature?
His mother’s response to this lecture had been to plant her hands – which in Marc’s recollection were usually encased in yellow rubber washing-up gloves – on her ample hips. Then she threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘in that case I won’t give you any more pocket money because you’ll only spend it.’
Today, more than two decades later, one might have gained the impression that Marc had gone along with that deal. His flat still looked like a chaos theorist’s ideal object of study.
‘Good God!’ As he walked in, Constantin gave a noisy sniff as if he expected such a pigsty to give off an awful stench as well. In fact, the place was redolent only of freshly sanded floorboards, freshly applied emulsion paint, and the other smells typical of redecoration that had been lingering in the air since Marc moved in.
‘What happened here?’ Constantin asked, doing his best not to tread on any of the numerous objects strewn across the floor of the little hallway.
‘Nothing.’ Marc shoved a stack of CDs aside with his foot. ‘I dropped a box, that’s all.’
‘Only one?’
Lying on the floor surrounded by remote controls, income tax files, two multiple sockets, an overturned lamp, three photo albums and numerous books were several overturned pot plants. All had dried out, even the cactuses.
Marc stepped over the box whose contents lay strewn across the lobby. He’d left it out in the rain for too long, and the cardboard bottom had become so sodden it couldn’t support the higgledy-piggledy contents and gave way. It was the very last box, which he’d meant to leave out for the dustmen in any case. He was so furious with himself he’d deliberately hurled the box full of house plants at the front door.
Sudden rages. . .
Another new trait laid bare by the scalpel of grief.
‘What on earth has happened to me?’ he muttered to himself as he went into the living room to turn on the standard lamp, which doubled as a DVD rack.
This, the largest room in his two-room flat, made a better impression, although the numerous unopened boxes littering the floor resembled aid packages jettisoned from a helicopter. There were no shelves or cupboards that could accommodate Marc’s few possessions, so he lived out of a suitcase like a commercial traveller. He took anything he needed straight from the box – if he could find it. Sandra had always been the practical one of the two. She would have neatly labelled the boxes with their contents.
Marc heard a cupboard door being opened in the adjoining room. He slowly subsided on to a black leather sofa which the removals men had deposited in the middle of the room facing the window. The raindrops that were lashing the panes at irregular intervals created an inappropriately snug atmosphere in the gloomy, rather overheated living room.
‘Nobody here.’
Marc swung round. Constantin had somehow contrived to enter the room silently in spite of his leather soles.
‘I’ve checked the kitchen and the bathroom. I even looked under the bed. There’s nobody here.’
31
‘There must be,’ Marc said wearily, although he knew his father-in-law was telling the truth. He’d known it the moment his key fitted and the door swung open. Just as it did here in the living room, everything looked exactly the way he’d left it that morning.
Sandra had never been fussy, that was for sure. She was quite as capable as he was of turning a tidy room into a shambles in no time at all. But her love of plants was so great that she would never have carelessly uprooted her favourite bonsai and left it lying beside its own potting compost. And that fact allowed of only one conclusion.
Sandra wasn’t here – never had been.
Marc felt Constantin sit down beside him. ‘I’m losing my mind,’ he whispered with his eyes shut.
‘No, you aren’t.’
‘I am.’ Marc kneaded his temples. The soothing pressure did nothing to relieve the nausea constantly simmering away inside him. ‘I saw her. I could have put out my hand and touched her.’
‘Here, take this.’
He looked up. His father-in-law must have found a plastic mug in the kitchen and was holding it out. He himself had appropriated a cut-glass tumbler with a slightly chipped rim.
‘Drink up, it’s only water. You need plenty of fluid when you’re in shock.’
The white mug’s thin, fluted sides made a crackling sound as Marc grasped it. Its contents gleamed like the surface of a dark lake in the dim light. He raised it to his lips but stopped short.
‘Just water?’
‘What else?’
Constantin deposited his glass on the coffee table. Then he took Marc’s plastic mug and drained it in one. ‘Satisfied?’
He looked down at Marc with a paternal expression.
‘I’m sorry.’
Constantin nodded and picked up his glass again. It left a ring of moisture behind on the coffee table. ‘But I ought to give you something to relax you soon. I’m genuinely worried about you, Marc.’
‘That makes two of us.’
I feel like someone who’s swallowed a magnet that attracts insanity, not metal, and I’m very much afraid its effects are getting stronger by the minute.
‘Come on, it’s getting late. Let’s go to the clinic.’ Constantin put his empty glass down, plumb on the wet ring. He held out his hand, but Marc had shut his eyes again. He had learnt, even as a boy, that he could think better when not all his senses were activated. When he opened them again his father-in-law was standing at the window, tracing the course of a raindrop trickling down the pane like a teardrop.
‘How often do you think of that day in May? How long ago was it exactly?’ Constantin’s voice had gone husky all of a sudden.
That day in May.
They had never referred to it as anything else. In their conversations it had never been ‘the day Sandra was attacked’ or ‘the day they gagged her and tied her to the kitchen stove with a wire noose’. Nor was it ‘the day Sandra should really have accompanied him to a lecture but stayed behind at her father’s house because of morning sickness’.
‘Christian would be three now,’ Marc replied.
‘Exactly. It was thre
e years ago.’
Constantin sighed, as if an eternity had gone by since then. And it had, in a sense. Sandra had been pregnant once before. The burglars came just as she had settled down with a family pack of crème brûlée ice cream on her lap to watch an old King of Queens DVD. It was six hours before Constantin came home. By then the two thugs in ski masks had forced the safe, stripped the walls of valuable originals and gone off with cash, a collection of antique clocks, all the family silver and an old laptop.
Six hours.
The bleeding had started three-quarters of an hour before.
‘Is that why you didn’t want to choose a name for your second baby?’
Marc nodded. ‘Yes. That day destroyed so many things. We thought she could never have another child. When she became pregnant after all, we didn’t want to tempt providence. Pure superstition.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Ironical, isn’t it?’
Constantin turned round. He looked infinitely old all of a sudden. ‘You’re wrong, you know.’
Marc stared at him. ‘What do you mean?
‘You said that day destroyed a lot of things. It’s true, of course. Cruel as it may sound, though, it granted you another three years of happiness together.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Sandra was going to leave you, Marc.’
‘What?’
Marc shivered, hunching his shoulders like someone expecting an ice cube to land on the back of his neck at any moment.
‘I’m not sure, but I think that was why she was staying with us out at Sakrow. She wanted a word with me as soon as I came home from the clinic.’ Constantin was breathing heavily now. ‘She called me – said it was about your relationship and another man she’d met recently.’
‘That can’t be so,’ said Marc, although he had every reason to believe his father-in-law. Dismal old memories elbowed their way into the forefront of his mind. He had tried to suppress them back then, attributing Sandra’s behaviour to hormonally governed mood swings during pregnancy. At first she had simply been distrait and silent, but she became steadily more withdrawn until it seemed that her self-absorption had given way to depression. He offered to cancel all his commitments and stay at home with her until the birth, but Sandra wouldn’t have it. She went walking by herself for hours, even in neighbourhoods she normally steered clear of. One day, when he had been visiting the parents of a notorious truant in Neukölln, he caught sight of her emerging from a seedy café and getting into a taxi, lost in thought. When he raised the subject that evening she flew off the handle and ‘refused to testify, Counsellor’.
‘Who was the other man?’ Marc asked. It was the question that had tormented him at the time.
Constantin shrugged. ‘I really have no idea. We never got a chance to clear the air. When she came round after the emergency op she wouldn’t say another word on the subject. All she wanted was to see you.’
Marc felt a touch of cramp in his calf and struggled to his feet. For some strange reason he was involuntarily reminded, at this of all times, of a tired old joke his father had told him: You can always recognize men of fifty or over by the way they groan whenever they sit down or get to their feet. By that measure he himself had aged eighteen years in a single day.
‘Why tell me this now?’ Marc demanded. He picked up the empty plastic mug Constantin had drained and deposited on the coffee table. He had to go to the bathroom, dunk his head in the basin and take some medication at last.
Constantin didn’t reply until he’d already shut the bathroom door behind him. ‘Because you asked me just now why I still regard you as my son. A tragedy can form a tremendous bond between people who love each other.’
‘Fine, then let me know when you can’t stand me any more and I’ll kill someone else. . .’
Marc propped both forearms on the washbasin, staring at the place on the wall that should really have been occupied by a mirror. He was glad he hadn’t bothered to put one up. It spared him the sight of his own haggard face.
‘Stop hiding behind your sense of humour,’ Constantin called, his voice muffled by the door between them. ‘It’s just self-pity.’
‘That’s the second time in twenty-four hours I’ve been told something of the kind,’ Marc muttered, reaching for the tap. He was about to turn it on and run cold water over the inside of his wrists when his eye lighted on the crack between the plug and the plughole.
What on earth. . .?
He bent down and extracted the chrome-plated plug. It came away with a faint plop.
It can’t be. . .
Dangling from the black rubber gasket was a single human hair. It was about fifteen centimetres long and curly at the lower end like a treble clef. Involuntarily, he clutched the back of his head, which he hadn’t shaved for four days.
‘Constantin,’ he called hoarsely. No answer, so he called again, louder this time.
So I was right after all.
He stared as if mesmerized at the blonde hair draped over his forefinger, which certainly wasn’t his. His hand trembled as he put it to his nose. He couldn’t smell anything, of course, but he was quite sure.
Sandra. . .
The flat had been renovated before he took it over. The washbasin was brand-new and he’d no guests.
This proves it. She was here.
He shut his eyes, clasped one trembling hand with the other and drew a deep breath. Then, clutching the hair in his fist like a child clutching a coin en route for a sweet shop, he hurried out of the bathroom.
‘Constantin? I haven’t gone mad, this proves it!’ he called. On his way back to the living room he barked his shin on the leg of a metal stool protruding from a half-open packing case, but the pain was blotted out by sheer consternation when he came hobbling in. The window was wide open.
The living room in which he’d just been sitting on the sofa with his father-in-law was deserted. Constantin had vanished. So had the tumbler and the ring of moisture on the coffee table.
32
‘Hello?’
Marc had lost all sense of time. He didn’t know how long he’d stood staring out into the dark, rainy night. Up here on the third floor there was no fire escape or ledge, no scaffolding or window cleaner’s cradle anyone could have used to leave the flat by.
‘Constantin?’
His father-in-law had disappeared into thin air.
He shut the window, tottered out into the hallway and tried to turn the overhead light on, but nothing happened. He saw, when he looked again, that the bulb was missing.
‘Hey, where are you?’
His voice re-echoed from the pictureless walls of the small hallway.
Please let me wake up. Please let this all be just a dream.
Turning to look at the front door, he flinched when he saw that the safety chain was on.
‘Where have you got to?’ he whispered to himself, as if he already guessed what he would find in the bedroom after checking the kitchen: nothing.
Nothing apart from a double mattress and another box with a cheap bedside light standing on it. He left this on every morning so he didn’t have to fumble around in the pitch black for the little switch when he came home at night.
But he was wrong – so wrong that it redoubled his doubts about his sanity: the bedside light had disappeared.
Like Constantin. Like Sandra. Like my life.
Yet the room wasn’t dark, because faint rays of pale-blue light were seeping through the cracks in the box.
This is impossible.
He went over to the mattress, suddenly overcome by an almost irresistible urge to flop down on it, pull the bedclothes over his head and sink into an everlasting, dreamless sleep. But the dim light exerted a hypnotic attraction on him. At the same time, he remembered a conversation he’d had with Sandra years ago.
‘Hey, what’s the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Promise me. . .’
‘What?’
‘Promise you’ll alw
ays leave a light on?’
He opened the box, parted the flaps with trembling hands. . . and found his surreal vision confirmed.
‘What do you think?’
‘Hm. . . I’d call it, well. . . an acquired taste?’
‘Utterly hideous, more like.’
He shut his eyes, but the memories refused to fade.
‘What is it? Are you crying?’
‘Look, I know it sounds a bit weird, but I’d like us to make a deal.’
‘Okay.’
‘If one of us dies – no, please hear me out – the first of us to go must give the other one a sign.’
When he opened his eyes the hideous, battery-powered, baby-blue dolphin bedside light was still in the box.
And it was on for the first time in its existence.
I’m coming to find you if it takes me all night
Can’t stand here like this any more
For always and ever is always for you
I want it to be perfect like before.
Ohohoho... I want to change it all.
‘A Night Like This’, The Cure
Nothing sounds as good as I remember that
‘I Remember That’, Prefab Sprout
33
A distracting noise that ultimately unnerved him even more than the self-illuminated dolphin lamp, it resembled the menacing hum of a hornet trapped between a blind and a window pane and becoming steadily more aggressive in its desperate attempts to escape. Except that the sound was coming from the hallway, where there were no windows, and was far too rhythmical to be made by a maddened, struggling insect.
Marc turned towards the bedroom door and the humming in his ears abruptly ceased. The sudden silence was so complete that he could hear the faint click of the electricity meter and the liquid gurgle of the central heating.
‘Anyone there?’ he called, dry-throated, only to flinch in alarm the instant he crossed the threshold of the darkened hallway.