She didn’t care. For now she was free. She had been free for two whole days and that was longer than she had been free for years.
Over the scratchy reception of the car’s radio, struggling through the occasional interference of someone talking in German, Bob Dylan was singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’.
They were. They really were! Flecks of sleet struck the windscreen, and the wipers cleared them. It was cold outside and that was good. It was good to make love in the warmth when it was cold outside. And, besides, the cold had plenty of other advantages.
I will never let you go, Trevor had said. Never. Ever. He had told her that for years.
Hans explained to her precisely what he was going to do to her. Exactly how he would make love to her the first time. And he had done so just the way he had described. She liked that Germanic precision. The way he had studied every detail of her photograph. The way he already knew her body when they met. The way he told her he loved her hair, and had buried his face into it. Into all of it.
My name is Hans. I am thirty-seven, divorced, looking to start a new life with a lady of similar age. I am liking brunettes. Slim. Excuse my bad English. I like you. I don’t know you, but I like you.
I like you even more!
She would be forty this year. Hans would be her toyboy, she had teased him. He had laughed and she liked that; he had a big sense of humour. A wicked sense of humour.
Everything about him was totally wicked.
She looked OK, she knew. She’d never been a beauty, but she understood how to make herself look attractive, sexy. Dressed to kill, plenty of men would look at her. She used to keep in shape with her twice-weekly aerobics classes, then, when Trevor had gone through one of his particularly nasty phases, she had turned to binge eating – and then binge drinking – for comfort. Then she enrolled in WeightWatchers, and the fat and the flab and the cellulite had come off again. Her figure was good, her stomach firm – not a distended pouch, like the stomachs of some of her friends who’d had children. And her boobs were still firm, still defying gravity. She’d like to have been a little taller – she’d always wished that – but you couldn’t have everything.
Anyhow, Trevor, who was much taller than her, told her the very first time they had made love that people were all the same size in bed. That had made her smile.
Trevor used to tell her that nothing you do in life is ever wasted. He was always coming up with sayings, and there was a time when Janet had listened to them intently, adored hearing them, filed them away in her memory and loved repeating them back to him.
Loved him so damned much it hurt.
And she hadn’t even minded the pain. Which was a good thing because pain was something Trevor did really, really well. The knots, the handcuffs, the nipple clamps, the leather straps, the spiked dog collar, the whips, the stinging bamboo canes. He liked to hurt her; knew how to cause her pain and where to inflict it. But that had been OK because she loved him. She would have done anything for him.
But that was then.
And sometime between then and now he had changed. They had both changed. His horizons had narrowed; hers had widened.
Every system can be beaten. That was one of his sayings.
He was right.
Now she was a lifetime away. So it seemed. And one thousand, two hundred and twelve kilometres away, driving through spartan December pine forest. Click. One thousand, two hundred and thirteen. And, in a few moments, travelling at one hundred and thirty klicks an hour, with her life in the two large suitcases jammed on the rear seats, one thousand, two hundred and fourteen.
‘Hagen 3.’
The turn-off was coming up. She felt a tightening of her throat, and a prick of excitement deep inside her. How many villages, small towns, big cities had she driven through or passed by in her travels, during her life, and wondered, each time, what would it be like to stop here? What would it be like to drive into this place as a total stranger, knowing no one, then check into a hotel, or rent a small flat, and start a totally new life?
She was about to realize her dream. Hagen. So far it was just images she had found when she had Googled it. Hagen. The thirty-seventh largest town in Germany. She liked that. A population of two hundred thousand. On the edge of the Ruhr. A town few knew about outside of its inhabitants. A once important industrial conurbation that was now reinventing itself as a centre of the arts, the websites had proclaimed. She liked that. She could see herself in a place that was a centre of the arts.
Up until now, she had not had much contact with the arts. Well, there had never been time, really. During the week she was always on the road, driving from place to place as an area sales representative for a company that made industrial brushes. Finishing brushes for the printing trade. Brushes for vacuum cleaners. Brushes for the bottom of elevator doors. For electrical contacts. She would miss her flirting and banter with her clients, the almost exclusively male buyers at the factories, the component wholesalers, the plant hire and hardware stores. She was missing her comfortable, new, company Ford Mondeo, too, but the Passat was OK. It was fine. It was a small price to pay. Tiny.
Then, at the weekends, Trevor wasn’t interested in any area of the arts. He didn’t want to know about theatre, or art galleries or concerts, except for those of Def Leppard – great music if you like that kind of thing, which she didn’t – but they were not art, at least not in her view. He just wanted to watch football, then either go to the pub, or more preferably to a particular S&M club he had discovered in London, where they had become regulars. He liked, most of all, to hurt and humiliate her in front of other people.
Ahead of her and to her left, across the railings on the elevated road, she could see the start of a town. It lay in a valley, surrounded by low, rounded, wintry hills. Everything she could see was mostly grey or brown, the colours bleached out by the gloomy, overcast sky. But to her, it was all intensely beautiful.
Hagen. A place where no one knew her, and she knew no one. Except just one man. And she barely knew him. A place where a stranger she was going to have sex with tonight, for just the second time, lived and worked. She tried to remember what his voice sounded like. What he smelled like. A man so crude he could send her a photo of himself naked and semi-erect, but a man so tender he could send her poetry by Aparna Chatterjee.
Lust is what I speak tonight,
Lust is what I see tonight,
Lust is what I feel tonight,
And I Lust You.
Show me your Body
Inside out . . .
No clothes on,
No holds barred . . .
Bit by bit,
Part by part,
Give me your smells,
And your sweat . . .
Trevor had never read a poem in his life.
The road dipped down suddenly beneath a flyover that seemed, from this angle, as if it went straight through the middle of a row of grimy, pastel-blue townhouses. She halted at a traffic light in the dark shadow beneath the flyover, checked in her mirror for an instant – just checking – then saw a yellow road sign. There was an arrow pointing straight ahead, with the word ‘Zentrum’. Another arrow pointed left, and bore the word ‘Theater’.
She liked that. Liked the fact that the second word she saw on arriving in the town was Theater. This was going to be a good place – she felt it in her bones, in her heart, in her soul. Hagen. She said the word to herself and smiled.
Behind her a car hooted. The lights were green. She drove on past a road sign that read ‘Bergischer Ring’, and realized from the directions she had memorized that she was close to her hotel. But anxious as she was to see Hans, she wanted to get her bearings. She wanted to arrive slowly, absorbing it all, understanding the geography. She had all the time in the world, and she wanted to get it right, from the very beginning. It seemed too sudden that one moment she was on the autobahn, the next she was slap in the centre of the town. She wanted to feel it, explore it slowly, breath
e it in, absorb it.
She turned right at the next road she came to, and drove up a steep, curving hill, lined with tall, terraced townhouses on both sides, then past a grimy church. She made a left turn at random, up an even steeper road, and then suddenly she was in scrubby, tree-lined countryside, winding up a hill, with the town below her.
She pulled over to the kerb, parking in front of a butane gas cylinder that was partially concealed by a threadbare hedge, stopped and climbed out. The central locking had packed up a long time ago, so she went around the car, making sure the doors and the boot were locked. Then she walked over to the hedge and looked down, across the valley, at her new home.
Hagen. A place that boasted, among its tourist attractions, Germany’s first crematorium. Which had a certain convenient ring to it.
The town lay spread out and sprawling in the bowl beneath her. Her eyes swept the grey, urban landscape beyond the gas cylinder, below the murky, sleeting sky. She saw a cluster of industrial buildings, with a white chimney stack rising higher than the distant hills. A small nucleus of utilitarian apartment buildings. A church spire. A Ferris wheel brightly lit, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, reminding her that darkness would start to fall soon. She saw a narrow river bordered by grimy industrial buildings. Houses, some with red roofs, some grey. She wondered who lived in them all, how many of their inhabitants she would get to meet.
It is neither fish nor meat, Hans had said, telling her about Hagen. But she didn’t mind what it was, or was not. It looked huge, vast, far bigger than a town of two hundred thousand. It looked like a vast city. A place where she could get lost, and hide, forever.
She loved it more every second.
She noticed a strange, cylindrical building, all glass, lit in blue, above what looked like an old water tower, and she wondered what it was. Hans would tell her. She would explore every inch of this place with him, in between the times they lay in bed, naked, together. If they could spare any time to explore anything other than each other’s bodies, that was!
She turned away from the view and walked on up the hill, hands dug into the pockets of her black suede jacket, the sleet tickling her face, her scarf tickling her neck, breathing in the scents of the trees and the grass. She followed the road up into a wooded glade, until it became a track, which after a few minutes came out into a knoll of unkempt grass, with a row of trees on the far side and a rectangular stone monument at the highest point.
She climbed up to it, and stopped at a partially collapsed metal fence that was screening it off for some kind of repair work. She knew it was the Bismarck monument, because she recognized it from various websites as one of Hagen’s landmarks. She stared at it silently, then took her little digital camera from her bag and photographed it. Her first photograph of Hagen. Then she stood still, licking the sleet off the air, feeling a moment of intense happiness, and freedom.
I’m here. I made it. I did it!
Her heart was burning for Hans, and yet, strangely, she still felt in no hurry. She wanted to savour these moments of anticipation. To appreciate her freedom. To relish not having to hurry home to make Trevor his evening meal (always a variation on meat and potatoes as he would eat nothing else). To be able to stand for as long as she wanted beneath the statue of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, a man partly responsible for shaping the country that was about to become her adopted home, for however many days of freedom she had remaining. And she did not know how many that might be.
Better to live one day as a lion than one thousand years as a lamb, Trevor was fond of saying, strutting around in his studded leathers and peaked cap.
Of course, he would not have approved of her being here. And particularly not of her standing like an acolyte worshipping at the statue of Bismarck. Trevor had a thing about Germany. It wasn’t the war or anything like that. He said the Germans had no humour – well, Hans had proved him wrong.
He also said the Germans were efficient, as if that were a fault!
Trevor had a thing about all kinds of stuff. He had a particularly big thing about crematoriums. They gave him the creeps, he said. Whereas she found them fascinating. Yet another thing on which they disagreed. And she always found his dislike of crematoriums particularly strange, since he worked in the funeral business.
In fact, thinking back on fifteen years of marriage, what exactly had they agreed on? Rubber underwear? Handcuffs? Masks? Inflicting modest pain on each other? Bringing each other to brutal climaxes that were snatched moments of release, escape from their mutual loathing? Escape from the realities they did not want to face? Such as the fact – thank God for it now – that they could not have children?
Time was when she really had been in love with him. Deeply, truly, crazily, do-anything-for-him, unconditional love. She had always been attracted to death. To people who worked close to death. Trevor was an embalmer with a firm of funeral directors. He had a framed certificate, which was hung in pride of place in the sitting room, declaring him to be ‘A Member of the Independent Association of Embalmers’.
She used to like his hands to touch her. Hands that had been inserting tubes into a cadaver, to pump out the blood and replace it with pink embalming fluid. Hands that had been applying make-up to a cadaver’s face. Brushing a cadaver’s hair.
The closer she was to death, the more alive she felt.
She liked to lie completely naked, and still, and tell Trevor to treat her as if she were a cadaver. She loved to feel his hands on her. Probing her. Slowly bringing her alive.
The best climax – absolutely the best ever, in her entire life – was one night when they had made love in the embalming room at the funeral director’s. With two naked corpses lying, laid out on trolleys, beside them.
Then she had truly felt alive. The way she felt now.
And those same feelings would happen again with Hans, she knew it, she absolutely knew it. She was going to be so happy with Hans.
‘Love doesn’t last,’ Trevor had responded one night when she told him she was not happy. ‘Happiness is an illusion,’ he had said. ‘Only an idiot can be happy twenty-four/seven. The wise man seeks to be content, not happy. Carpe diem.’
‘You have to face reality,’ he had harped on, after she had told him she was leaving him. ‘You can run but you can’t hide.’
She was running now.
Hit someone over the head with a big stick hard enough and for long enough and one day they will hit you back. Even harder.
She could not put a time or a date on when it had all started to go south. Not the exact moment. Could not get a fix on it the way you can pinpoint your position with a set of navigation coordinates. It was more of a gradual erosion.
But once you had made your decision, there was no going back. You just had to keep running. As Trevor used to say, it’s not the fall that gets you, it’s the sudden stop.
And now, of course, Hagen was that sudden stop. It scared her almost as much as it thrilled her. In truth, she had learned a lot from him.
‘I will never let you go, ever,’ he had said, when she once suggested that they might be happier apart.
Then he had punched her in the face so hard for suggesting it, she had not been able to go to work for several days, until the bruises had subsided and the stitches had been removed. As usual, she covered up for him, with a lame excuse about being knocked off her bicycle.
It was his diabetes that caused his mood swings, she had come to learn over many years. Too little sugar and he became edgy and aggressive. Too much and he became sleepy and docile as a lamb.
She retraced her steps from the Bismarck monument to her car, then threaded her way back down the network of roads, noting the pleasant houses, wondering what kind of house Hans had lived in until his marriage break-up. After a few minutes she found herself back on the Bergischer Ring, where she turned right. She drove along, past a market square where the Ferris wheel had been erected at the edge of a small fairground. She saw a row of kerb
side Christmassy tableaux, one after the other, with puppets acting out fairy-tale scenes. One was full of busy bearded goblins with hammers. Two small girls, clutching their mother’s hands, stared at them in wonder.
Janet stared at the girls as she waited at a traffic light, and then, wistfully, at the mother. Forty was not too old. Maybe she and Hans could have children. Two little girls? And one day she would stand here, holding their hands, a contented hausfrau of Hagen, while they looked at the hammering goblins.
Just three weeks to Christmas. She would wake up on Christmas morning, in her new country, in the arms of her new man.
As she drove on she saw, on her left, a brightly lit shop, the windows full of sausages hanging in clumps, like fruit, the name Wursthaus König above the door. She stopped for a moment and checked her map. Then after a short distance she turned left into a side street, past a restaurant, and pulled over outside the front entrance of the hotel she had found on the Internet.
Hans had invited her to stay with him. But after only one date, even if it had finished – or rather climaxed – in a way she had not experienced in years, she wanted to keep her options open. And her independence. Just in case.
She tugged one bag off the rear seat of the car, and wheeled it in through the front door of the hotel. Inside was dark and gloomy, with a small reception desk to her right and a staircase in front of her. A living cadaver of a man stood behind the desk and she gave him her name. The place smelled old and worn. The kind of place travelling sales people would stay in. The kind of dump she had occasionally found herself in during her early years on the road.
He passed her a form to fill in, and asked if she would like help with her luggage. ‘No,’ she told him emphatically. She filled in the form and handed him her passport.