‘But from one day to the next,’ said Leana, narrowing her eyes in a way that rendered her gaze still more intense, ‘about a month before his reassessment, he underwent a sudden change. He asked for fruit juice and vitamin pills, went jogging in the grounds under supervision – even took to reading the Bible.’
‘The Bible?’
That really did sound unlike his kid brother.
‘I’m not sure if it means anything,’ she went on, ‘but Benny’s behaviour changed the day after he had an MRI scan.’
An MRI scan? Was Benny’s mental disorder physical in origin?
‘And here’s another strange thing. We normally scan the brain for anomalies, but they only scanned the lower part of his body although he’d never complained that anything was wrong. I got hold of the pictures.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. He’s perfectly fit.’
‘You aren’t a doctor, Leana.’
‘But I’ve got a pair of eyes in my head. Several times after that scan I caught him trying to spit out his medication. When I spoke to him about it he said he didn’t want his body absorbing any more poison.’
Marc turned and took a step towards her. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘I think he put on an act for the board of examiners.’
‘Why would he do that? He knew I was withdrawing my statement.’
Marc had ceased to care about anything after his life was rent apart by tragedy and the accident robbed him of what he loved most. Constantin had found it easy enough to persuade him to withdraw the false allegation that had consigned his brother to a mental institution, even though he himself would now be facing a charge of perjury.
‘Get your brother out of there,’ his father-in-law had urged him. ‘You need him. He’s the only family you’ve got left.’
Although he had thought and worried about his unstable brother every day until Sandra’s death, nothing had mattered to him afterwards. He no longer wondered whether Benny was better off in a secure unit than on the street; his own mental state had robbed him of the ability to distinguish between right decisions and wrong. Especially tonight, after a day on which he’d had to dissuade a girl from committing suicide and undergone a marathon of a medical examination shortly afterwards.
Marc experienced a surge of anger. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you surely didn’t ambush me just because Benny has suddenly discovered he’s got a health-conscious streak?’
‘No.’
‘So why?’
‘I’m very worried, as I said. You really ought to keep an eye on him. I don’t think he’s capable of surviving out here on his own.’
No need to tell me that. After all, I found him in the bath that time.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘This.’
Putting her bag down, she reached into the inside pocket of her coat and took out a bulging envelope.
‘I found it in his room when I was changing the sheets an hour after he was discharged.’
She opened the envelope. Marc was at a loss for words.
‘Fifteen thousand euros. The notes are genuine,’ she said, sounding rather hesitant and helpless for the first time. ‘I don’t know what they mean, and I’ve no idea how your brother came by them in a secure unit.’
13
Marc had somehow managed to shake off the worried nurse by promising to keep an eye on his brother and clear up the mystery of the money. They’d agreed that she wouldn’t touch the cash until he got in touch with her again – though when he would summon up the energy to do that, he couldn’t imagine. For the moment, even climbing the stairs seemed an almost insurmountable obstacle.
Laboriously, he trudged upstairs, past the mounds of shoes outside each door, whose condition, size and smell were as informative about his fellow tenants as the stickers on their doors or the blare of the TV programmes that filled the passages. Although Marc had seldom come face to face with anyone in the short time he’d lived there, he had a very clear idea of the lives led by his new neighbours: the single mother who couldn’t afford shoe repairs, the alcoholic who preferred to spend the mornings watching wrestling rather than taking his empties to the bottle bank, or the joker whose doormat said ‘No Admittance’.
Marc reached the third floor at last and felt in his jeans for his keys, which he’d pocketed again while talking to Leana. In doing so he came across the application form for the memory experiment, which he’d naturally left unsigned at the end of his examinations.
I need a bit more time to consider, he’d lied to Bleibtreu when taking his leave. Theirs was an acquaintanceship that would never be renewed, that much was certain.
It was tempting, the thought of being able to forget the accident by swallowing a single pill, but not at the expense of his identity. He might just as well have contemplated living in a permanent, drug-induced stupor.
He fished out the bunch of keys, which the Bleibtreu Clinic’s security guard had returned, together with his small change and mobile phone, when he left the building. The display had registered no calls in his absence.
A moth had somehow got beneath the plastic cover over the light above his door and was fluttering around inside it. With a sigh, Marc inserted the key in the lock.
What on earth. . .
He looked up to check that he hadn’t made a mistake in his fatigue. No, there it was in black numerals on the green plaster: 317. His flat all right, but the key wouldn’t turn so much as a millimetre.
Damn it, that’s all I needed.
He withdrew the serrated security key from the lock and held it up to the light.
All in order. No nicks, no dents.
The moth emitted a menacing hum as he tried the key again. This time he jiggled it more violently. He even threw his weight against the door, but in vain. He was about to make a third attempt when he caught sight of the name on the card in the holder beside the bell.
He stopped short, dumbfounded.
Who the hell did this?
The bunch of keys in his hand started to tremble. He stared incredulously at the name. Someone had replaced his own card with another. Instead of Lucas, it read Senner. His dead wife’s maiden name.
It took only a moment for his shock and horror to be succeeded by boundless anger at this cruel joke. He reinserted the key in the lock, rattled the door, even kicked it. Then he froze.
Is someone in there?
Yes, beyond a doubt. Clamping his ear to the door, he heard them loud and clear: footsteps coming straight for him. Inside his flat.
Rage gave way to stark fear.
He shrank back as the door opened. Only a crack – only as far as the brass security chain permitted. And then, just as he saw the sad-eyed, pale-faced, dishevelled figure staring out at him from inside his own flat, time stood still.
Marc blinked, unable to get a word out. He shut his eyes and opened them again to make sure, but he didn’t need a second look. He had already recognized those arched eyebrows, that air of disbelief. It was as if he’d just told her how lovely she was.
She was standing there in front of him, close enough to touch.
Sandra.
The love of his life.
His heavily pregnant wife.
14
‘W-what. . . You can’t be. . . You’re. . .’
Marc was incapable of thinking clearly. His stammer grew worse with every unfinished sentence.
‘Yes?’ said the woman in the doorway. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes, the honey scent of the French shampoo Sandra had liked so much instantly bombarding him with countless memories.
It’s her. . .
‘You’re. . . here?’ he said. His right leg started to tremble as if he’d just done the 400-metre hurdles. He reached through the crack, eager to satisfy himself that he wasn’t talking to a ghost. The woman recoiled in alarm.
‘What do you want?’
Instead of all the questions he’d meant to ask, he managed to articulate a
single word. ‘Sandra?’
‘Do I know you?’ The woman in the doorway stepped forwards again and raised her left eyebrow.
‘Hah. . .’ It was more an expulsion of breath than a laugh. ‘Why are you. . .? I thought. . . How can you be. . .?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something on the stove.’ She tried to shut the door, but Marc jammed his foot in the crack just in time. He felt the door squash his toes and welcomed the sensation because the pain told him he wasn’t dreaming.
‘I thought you were dead,’ he blurted out, and the woman’s features blurred. The blonde who looked like his wife, spoke in her melodious tone of voice and was wearing the white tanktop he’d bought her at the maternity shop only a few weeks ago threw all her weight against the door and called for help.
‘Please stop this!’
Marc pushed back. ‘But it’s me, Marc.’
‘Please go.’
‘Marc Lucas, your husband.’
‘I don’t know you.’
‘What? Baby, you can’t just reappear like this and then—’
‘Go away!’
‘But—’
‘At once, or I’ll call the police!’
She was shouting now, and Marc backed away – away from the cold expression in her eyes and the bitter realization that she meant it. His wife, who had been dead six weeks, had no idea who he was. She thought he was a stranger. Worse still, she was looking at him as if he were a stranger to be afraid of.
‘Sandra, please tell me what. . .’
Marc failed to complete the sentence. He was addressing a closed door.
15
Non-acceptance. Suppression. Denial.
Tottering feebly down the stairs, he wondered whether hallucinations were yet another typical concomitant of the early phase of the grieving process. Then he remembered reading an article which stated that this phase was identical, surprisingly enough, to the process of dying. For the first few weeks, a terminally ill person resembles someone recently bereaved in refusing to accept the awful truth.
Suppression. Denial. Oblivion. . .?
Marc clung to the banisters. Not just because he felt faint, but because he wanted to feel the cool wood beneath his fingers. It felt damp at first, damp and rather unpleasant, like the touch of something dead, but at least he was feeling something.
I’m alive. I may be losing my mind, but I’m alive.
The pain in his side was another sure sign. He’d developed a stitch after only a few steps. But it didn’t hurt half as much as the mental agony inflicted on him by Sandra’s cold, apprehensive expression.
She didn’t recognize me.
If it was her.
Still holding on to the banisters, Marc dragged himself further down the stairs. He wondered if his brain was playing tricks on him. Was he having a dream, from which he had only to wake up? If so, what did this dream signify? Why was there a different name on the door and why couldn’t he get into his own flat? Why did his damned toes still hurt where Sandra had squashed them in the door?
He paused somewhere between the second and first floors. His eye had lighted on a pair of children’s boots that looked as if they’d been left out for Santa Claus to fill. They belonged to the only person apart from the caretaker with whom he’d exchanged a few words since moving in. At weekends, whenever it wasn’t raining, Emily would set up her little flea market in the yard and sell objects that had value only in the eyes of a six-year-old girl. Although Marc never needed any of them, he had quickly become her best customer. He simply couldn’t walk past her stall without buying a marble, a Jungle Book pencil sharpener or a bunch of dried flowers. For a moment he wondered whether to ring her mother’s doorbell.
‘Sorry to trouble you. I know it sounds weird and you don’t know me, but please could you wake Emily up? I’d like her to reassure my late wife that I really do live here, so she’ll let me into my flat.’
He gave a wry laugh, realizing for the first time why so many people sit on park benches talking to themselves. Then his wristwatch buzzed another reminder to take his pills. Pills that were waiting for him in his bathroom cabinet, in a flat to which he was denied admission because the wife he’d thought dead had failed to recognize him and wouldn’t let him in.
For the moment, he decided to make for his car. Since crashing Sandra’s car he’d driven the silver Mini only once, when going to have his dressing changed. His grief that day had been so overwhelming, he had been afraid of breaking down in the Underground. After that he’d kept a spare packet of pills in the glove compartment.
‘That’s what I’ll do,’ Marc said aloud, still talking to himself. As soon as he’d cured his headache he would make a plan. Perhaps he really was in the process of losing his mind. Perhaps grief had driven him mad. But as long as he could put one foot before the other, and as long as he was capable of reflecting on the absurdity of the situation, he wouldn’t do anything rash.
His resolution was short-lived. It expired the moment he emerged from his block of flats into the rain-laden November wind and saw at a glance that his silver Mini was no longer in the parking bay. Nor were any of the other cars that were usually parked there. Flapping in the wind in their place were several rusty ‘No Parking’ signs he’d failed to notice earlier on, when talking to the nurse.
He sucked in lungfuls of cold air. It smelt of damp leaves and the rubbish regurgitated by flooded sewers. To calm his trembling fingers, he knelt beside the kerb and tied his shoelaces. At that moment a police van turned the corner and drove slowly along the cobbled street. Its uniformed occupants eyed him suspiciously as they crawled past at walking pace.
Marc rose to his feet. He wondered briefly whether to flag them down but missed his chance. The polive van was already turning the corner.
He sprinted after it to the next intersection, running faster and faster. Having made one circuit of the block, although he knew for certain he hadn’t parked his car in any of the side streets, he finally came to a breathless halt outside the entrance to the flats and looked up. On the third floor – where the room with all the boxes he still hadn’t unpacked was situated, where his pictures were stacked on the laminated floor and his empty aquarium served as a rubbish bin – a figure dodged back behind the curtain. Someone with long fair hair.
Okay, enough of this nonsense.
Marc felt in his pocket and extracted his mobile from between the application form and an empty strip of pills. He hadn’t often had to ask for help in his life, but he definitely couldn’t cope on his own, not now.
I’ll call my flat first, to see if Sandra picks up. Then Constantin. Even the police, perhaps. . .
‘Shit, what’s this?’ Marc was talking to himself again. He shut the mobile and reopened it. He heard the familiar beep, ran his thumb over the familiar scratch on the display and saw his screensaver, with its familiar cloudy background. But the mobile felt odd for all that.
Nothing.
Not a single entry. He couldn’t call a soul. His address book had been entirely deleted.
16
‘No, Lucas is my surname. Lucas with a “c”. Yes, both names with a “c”, Marc and Lucas. Have you checked?’
He cupped his hand over the mobile and leant forward to speak to the driver of the Mercedes taxi he’d just hailed.
‘Karl Marx Strasse, Höhe Hasenheide, please.’
The cabby’s sole response to this statement of their destination was to snort and turn up the volume on the radio. Sitar music blared from the loudspeaker.
‘Nothing? The licence number is B – YG 12. Okay, okay. So it wasn’t towed away? Thanks.’
He hung up on the police pound he’d been put through to by his mobile-phone provider’s helpline. The next moment he was flung back against the seat, which was covered in protective plastic sheeting, as the diesel cab accelerated away surprisingly fast. He groped for the seat-belt, but it had slipped down behind the folding rear seat.
‘Problem?’ aske
d the bald-headed cabby, glancing suspiciously in his rear-view mirror, which had a pair of felt poker dice dangling from it. He draped a steroid-enhanced arm over the headrest of the passenger seat. Stick a pipe in his mouth, and he’d have made an excellent Popeye impressionist.
You can say that again. I’ve just seen my wife and I’d like to put my seatbelt on so as not to have to share her fate. She’s dead, you see.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Marc replied. He would have preferred to sit on the other side, but Popeye looked as if he wouldn’t like a passenger breathing down his neck. So he stayed where he was and stared out of the window sans seatbelt.
He had never, even when his grief was at its most intense, felt as alone as he did right now.
It was only five minutes since he had first stared at his mobile’s blank display. Five minutes since he had become aware how utterly disconnected, in the truest sense of the word, he was from his life. In the past he had often debated with friends how far the world would come unstuck if all forms of power supply were cut off overnight. It had never occurred to him that the loss of his phone would constitute as drastic a turning point. In a society where the mobile phone was not only a means of communication but a computer with which people ran their entire social life, pinching someone’s SIM card was the surest way of isolating him from the outside world.
He had never dialled a number in recent years, just clicked on the name of the person he wanted to call in his digital address book. For Sandra, Constantin, his colleague Roswitha, his old university friend Thomas and his other intimates, all he’d needed to do was press a speed-dial key. The only phone number he still knew by heart was the one he now used the least: his own mobile number. He’d stored all the rest under their owners’ names and forgotten them.
Learn to forget.
Marc ran another check on all his sub-menus: contacts, selected phone numbers, calls received in his absence, SMS and MMS. Nothing. Someone at the clinic must have changed his phone back to its default settings. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, the result was the same: he was cut off from the outside world. There was always directory enquiries, of course, but that was no use either – they wouldn’t give him Constantin Senner’s ex-directory number. If anyone could help him now, it was his father-in-law. For one thing, he was in the same boat, being as grief-stricken as himself; for another, he was a doctor. If he was in a delusional state, Constantin would know what to do. It was asking too much of his friend Thomas, who would shrug his shoulders and give him useless pieces of advice he’d already thought of himself: Check the clinic you visited today, speak to the police, call a locksmith.