I’m here; I have you.
Liese poured the words through every inch of her body that was touching her daughter’s and squeezed the hand curled inside hers. Lottie didn’t respond.
The gates were coming closer now – a dozen or so steps and they would be inside the camp. She could see the women who had already entered marching down the long road between the barrack blocks. There didn’t seem to be as much shouting on that side; there certainly seemed to be fewer guards visible. Other women had noticed the change in mood inside the walls. The rows around Liese began to grow calmer, more obedient.
Perhaps it’s bad out here because it’s so crowded, because we’re all so nervous. Maybe things will be easier once we get through.
Liese shuffled forward. Some of the guards had lowered their whips as the women gradually stopped resisting their orders. Liese squeezed Lottie’s hand.
Another few steps and then I’ll be able to hold you. I’ll be able to make all this right.
Her row inched quietly towards the gates. Three more lines in front of them and then they would be inside and safe.
Liese was about to bend her knees and risk another whisper when she felt her arm wrench. Lottie had frozen. What was she doing? There was a guard standing too close for Liese to speak. She pulled on Lottie’s hand, but the child pulled sharply back and knocked Liese into the woman behind. A ripple ran along the row.
What is she afraid of?
And then Liese caught it. A scent weaving towards them, raw and meaty and hot. Dogs. Liese groaned. The three guards closest to the gates had dogs running beside them, their leads, like at Alexanderplatz, long and loose enough for the animals to get within pawing distance of the women. The dogs’ mouths were open, the scent in the air their foul panting breath. No wonder the prisoners in front of them had entered the camp without a sound: they weren’t calm, they were terrified.
‘Mama. No. Not walk by them.’
A guard turned, her small eyes hunting for the source of the sound.
Liese couldn’t risk even the tiniest whisper. She squeezed Lottie’s hand instead and tried to pull her forward, praying that speed would smooth the dogs’ straining muscles and teeth to a blur. Lottie’s legs had taken root. As Liese yanked again, the girl tumbled and the hand clutching her doll shot open.
‘Dolly!’
Lottie’s cry rose like a bird. She stretched her fingers wide, but the rag doll had already twirled away and landed a pace from where the dogs were pawing. The nearest one pounced, its jaws as wide as if it was grinning. One flick of its bullet nose and the doll went floating back through the air. As it toppled down again, another dog leaped. Dolly’s head was caught up in one slavering mouth, her feet caught up in another.
‘NO!’
All the silences of the last twenty-four hours, of the last twenty-months, gathered themselves into Lottie’s scream. Her pain rang around the lakeshore as pure and piercing as a blade.
‘Shut her up!’
The guard with eyes as black as ebony chips was coming.
Liese tried.
She threw her hands over Lottie’s mouth, but Lottie struggled and bit and thrust them away.
The dogs pulled. The doll burst open in a ragged cloud. Lottie’s scream roared like a tempest.
‘She’s a child. She doesn’t understand.’
But Liese’s plea was no match for the dog’s frantic barking, for the guards’ frenzied shouts; for the searching eyes that had found their target.
The hand that grabbed Lottie and tore her away was the size of a man’s. Flat and broad and scarred in a zigzag line that ran from its middle finger down to the thickset wrist. It circled Lottie’s neck like a collar.
Seconds.
That was all it took. For the snap. For the splash that swallowed the broken body down into the lake. For Liese’s world to fall, hopelessly and forever, apart.
Part Three
Ten
Karen
Aldershot, November 1989
Karen closed the front door, her knees sagging as the night caught up with her.
‘Go home – get some rest. He’s stable; we don’t expect any change for a while.’
Home: was that what she should call this place? It was the shorthand her friends still used to describe the houses they grew up in, no matter how many new families and mortgages stood between then and now. Karen studied the hallway’s non-descript paint and old-fashioned coat stand, the age-spotted mirror with its fine layer of dust. Nothing had changed in the eleven years since she had lived here.
‘Home.’
She tried it. It sat no more comfortably with her now than it had then. She knew she should have booked a hotel, taken a moment to think before she jumped into the car, but the thought he might be dying had terrified her. She could do it now, but a day and a night with no sleep beyond what could be snatched in a hospital chair had left her head fuzzy.
It was only a house. Would it be that difficult to manage a few hours inside it? Enough time at least to regroup and maybe take a bath. Karen’s skin prickled with the anticipation of hot water and vanilla-thick bubbles. Despite the sharp November wind and the threat of snow hanging in the charcoal sky, the upside-down day clung damp and sticky. The early-morning motorway dash, the overheated ward; the shock of seeing her father so helpless, a gaping hospital gown wiping away the familiarity of his collar-and-tie dignity. A bath then, to straighten her out and settle her nerves.
Karen was on the bottom stair before she remembered that the towels would be cardboard-thin and the soap unperfumed carbolic. Her shoulders reknotted.
‘You have to do something; you can’t just stand here.’
Her voice croaked from a night spent whispering. It still cracked like a gunshot down the hallway, stirring memories like dry leaves as it went. Was that why she’d spoken out loud, to stamp herself on the house’s silence? To make the house fit round her for a change? Talking to herself was something she never did, despite living on her own; it was something she had never been remotely temped to do.
Karen shivered and failed to convince herself the chilly air was to blame.
What is it you English like when everything is falling to pieces? Father Kristoff. She hadn’t thought of him for years.
‘And it isn’t odd that you’ve remembered him now you’ve come back here, so don’t overthink it.’
She threw out the words and followed them, imagining her voice carving out a path like a force field. A form of madness no doubt, but at least one of her own choosing.
The kitchen she eased herself into had the sour edge of too-long-left garbage. Karen opened a window and began rooting through the cupboards. Not tea: seven-thirty in the morning or not, she was past that sort of soothing, and surely she’d been up for so long the rules didn’t count. She stretched onto her toes and was rewarded with the bottle of whisky Andrew was never without, whatever his indifference to other home comforts. She poured a generous measure, realised she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten and set about foraging.
The fridge was a forest of Tupperware and carefully parcelled-out portions. Karen located cheese and a jar of pickle; slotted bread under the eye-level grill. The kitchen was, as ever, ordered with military precision: the tea towels smartly lined up on their pegs, the floor brush firmly twinned with its dustpan. Not unlike her own neatly kept kitchen, although she doubted Andrew would ever believe that.
‘There really is no one at home to take care of him?’
‘No, not full-time. I wish there was, but my mother is dead and I’m an only child. Besides, I live in London and he’s very happy here; he would never agree to move from Aldershot. And my job is demanding. I have holiday owing, which, of course, I’ll use, but then I have to get back to it.’
The consultant had shaken his jowls and sighed over modern women’s priorities.
Karen wouldn’t budge – she couldn’t. She struggled to adequately describe her relationship with her father to herself and to t
he people who cared about her; she certainly wasn’t about to expose it to the consultant’s insulated ideas.
The nurse had waited until the great man had moved on and then handed over a list of phone numbers.
‘Assisted living is your best bet. He’ll be here for a few weeks yet; there’s time to get things sorted.’
Assisted living. Andrew would call it ‘going into a home’ and no doubt hate anywhere she suggested, but what choice did they have?
Karen tried to imagine a world in which she played the doting daughter to his grateful father and poured herself another drink to wash away the guilt. A heart attack and a serious one at that, needing something called stents and a long recuperation: it was the last thing she’d expected. Admittedly, her father was seventy-three, but his military training had kept him fit and he had always seemed, physically at least, far younger than his years.
The sun prodded pale and watery through the window. Karen finished the last of her toasted cheese as the light inched in.
The kitchen wasn’t as clean as first appearances suggested. A spider’s web looped from the light fitting; rusty stains spattered the hob.
Karen turned away: they played such tightly defined roles around each other, he would hate her to suspect his high standards were slipping. Well, she could play the good daughter this far at least. She found a bottle of bleach and steeled her tired body to tackle the cleaning. Then the disinfectant smell flew back hospitals and tubes and translucent waxy skin and she found herself sobbing. The kitchen wobbled, expanding and contracting around her as if she was shrinking.
How could the house still unpeel her like this?
It shouldn’t mean a thing anymore. It wasn’t as if she had ever been a regular visitor: the nights she had spent under its roof since she left barely made it into double figures. Karen counted back through them, aware that if she revealed their sparseness to anyone else, they would shame her. A couple of miserable Christmases until she found friends with families big enough to absorb her. A handful of trips back in her university days, usually motivated by lack of money. None at all since she’d joined her London-based architects’ firm. She wasn’t estranged from her father – even in her darkest moments Karen couldn’t imagine anything so final – but they had rules. They met now for lunches in neutral places, stiffly edged restaurants in Kensington or Chelsea, where surviving without a spat until the third course classed as a successful visit.
‘It wasn’t meant to be like that.’
She could hear her teenage self sniffing.
‘You were supposed to do better. You were going to be kinder and calmer, and start building bridges. Don’t you remember? You were going to find your father and let him be the pathway to finding your mother.’
It had been a good plan. It had been the plan the whole way back from Berlin, once Karen accepted that the city had left her with bigger questions than she could tackle alone. Father Kristoff had shaken the pieces of her childhood out of their old slots and Karen had travelled back from Germany as determined as a new-minted evangelist not to stuff them back in.
She had failed at the first hurdle.
Her good intentions had proved themselves to be skin-deep. That realisation might make her squirm now, but it was the truth. She hadn’t tried to mend fences, she had postured. She had carried on doing what she always did: setting her father tests and letting him fail, while she watched in disdain from her precious high ground. Deciding to be hurt when he wasn’t at the school gate to greet the coach, or in the house when she tipped her bags all over the sitting room. Conveniently forgetting that she hadn’t bothered to let him know the day, never mind the time, she would be returning. Deciding to be disappointed at his lack of interest, even though she had retreated to her bedroom long before he came home, and made no effort to get up before he went out again in the morning.
Karen winced, remembering how she had arranged herself on the sofa the next evening, wearing her best I-forgive-you face.
What had been wrong with her? Why hadn’t she run to him when the door opened and surprised him with a hug? Startled them both into the new start they needed? Because she was too proud? Or too angry? Or afraid of what he might tell her, or of what he had failed to? Whatever excuse she had found herself then, or plastered over the past now, it didn’t matter: the outcome wouldn’t change. Instead of moving towards him, she had waited and he had waited and the moment had crumpled into ‘so you didn’t even bother to miss me then’ on one side and a weary headshake on the other. Ten minutes restored to each other’s company and they were thrust back into old ways. A few months later, she had left for Manchester and told herself he was glad of it. She had never once asked him if that was true. Now, with Andrew lying in the hospital, all she could feel was the waste of it.
Karen put down the glass and realised, once again, she was crying.
Tell me what you want – at least give me a chance. Stop trying to end us before we get started.
How many boyfriends had hit her with that line? How many times had ‘I don’t mean to do it’ died on her lips?
‘So you struggle to commit. You haven’t met the one you want to get really close to, that’s all. When you do, everything will be different.’
All her well-meaning friends said it and swept away Karen’s ‘but what if I can’t’ as if the fear buried in the words couldn’t possibly be real.
She had tried. She had let Joe get very close and she hadn’t set him tests, at least not ones he didn’t know about. She had so wanted it to work, for them to win the whole package, but then she would panic and push him away and fall apart when he pressed her on why. It was Joe who had delivered the worst parting shot of all the ones she had gathered, hurled on a blast of confusion and anger when she shied from cementing two years of shared beds into something more permanent.
‘We all have hurt, Karen. You’re not a child anymore. You can’t keep hiding behind your dead mother.’
‘And is that what you do?’
The therapist’s question Karen could never find the right words to answer. The therapy sessions abandoned, like the pills a doctor offered that remained uncollected, in favour of locking the past firmly away in the past. A strategy that, as far as Karen was concerned, worked. That had got her through the bleak and frightening times when Liese’s suicide resurfaced and threatened to engulf her.
I won’t be defined by it; I won’t be damaged.
Which sounded believable, except here she was, alone, hunched up and brooding like a passed-over child.
‘Enough.’
Karen jumped up and put the whisky away before it made her any more maudlin.
The cold in the kitchen was getting under her skin. She needed to take the day back under control, to get back to herself. She headed for the sitting room and the one reasonably reliable fire. Nothing in there had changed any more than it had in the kitchen. The walls still needed a fresh coat of paint. The air still held the dry taste of old newspapers. The mock-coal fire still glowed for too long before the heat broke through.
Karen ran her fingers across the bookcase whose dusty contents hadn’t been touched for years and glanced at the drab landscapes spaced out on the walls. The house would have to be sold if her father’s new life was going to be paid for. All of it would need boxing up, and no doubt Andrew would demand inventories. He had mentioned bringing home files and papers when he finally retired, so he could stay active, running the regiment’s old-boys’ association. They would all have to be sorted. More poking through the past, the one thing she had no more desire to do.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night when sleep decided to evade her, Karen wondered why she had stopped, why she had convinced herself her mother’s history no longer mattered. Then, the confrontations and the silences and the confusions of long-ago discoveries slammed back and the urge to go delving again disappeared.
What was it someone had said, in the first whirlwind weeks of university, after too much cheap wine had m
ade them think they were grown-up and daring? ‘How many people really know their parents? How many could honestly bear to?’ Karen had latched on to that like a life lesson.
She had worked hard; she had made friends and done well. She had set herself goals and she had achieved them. The degree in architecture she wanted, a starting position in a Manchester practice, a move to London and the kind of firm whose designs graced magazine covers. Karen had forged a life pointing forward and kept it steadier than she once thought she could. And if sometimes her life was lonely, lacking the one big love her friends all seemed to be finding, there was enough good in it to paper over that. She was happy enough and that was more than a lot of people could say; more than she had once expected. She wasn’t about to let returning to this house derail her.
‘Which means I can’t stay here. I’ll book a hotel, get some sleep and then I’ll start on the packing.’
That sounded more confident.
She switched on the television, in need of bright-eyed breakfast crews to buoy up her new determination.
‘And just because I found something once, that doesn’t mean it’ll happen again.’
Then she glanced at the television and all thoughts of hotels and packing crates vanished.
‘As the guards look on in bewildered confusion, the crowds keep on coming.’
Karen perched on the arm of the chair as the reporter realised this was his opportunity to make a grab for history and crammed his voice full of meaning.
‘The Iron Curtain lifted in East Berlin tonight.’
The images unfolding across the screen were hypnotising, unbelievable. Bodies swarmed like migrating herds out of the Eastern sector’s impossibly opened gates; crowds massed on the Western side to welcome them, clutching flowers and over-shaken champagne. Cheering couples danced hand in hand round the Brandenburg Gate. Laughing figures scrambled like ants onto the top of the Wall.
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