The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “Go on, what are you waiting for?” He gave my shoulder an impatient shove. “Say it: ‘My mother . . .’ ”

  The other kids, two girls and four boys, had gathered on the bank. Little People, grinning judges, waiting for the sentence to be carried out. Suddenly I was seized by blind rage.

  “OK.” I took a deep breath and stared the Hulk straight in the face. “Your mother is a filthy cunt.”

  Whatever that might be.

  A snarl of outrage rushed out from behind the chipped tooth. With unexpected speed an arm shot around my neck and clamped against it. A fist sank into my stomach, once, twice. The pain and ensuing nausea were not as bad as the panicky feeling of being unable to breathe. I gasped for air. The Hulk forced me to my knees and as he did he twisted my head round. The world turned upside down—right above me was the glittering water of the river, below me the flickering light in between the blurred dark green of the trees.

  Between the trees stood Dianne.

  She had appeared on the opposite bank of the river, fifteen feet away from where we were. A breeze stirred the leaves in the trees. Dianne stood perfectly motionless, her head slightly raised, facing the wind, as if studying the weather. She had found her arrow. She drew the bowstring taut, the tip of the arrow pointed at the Hulk.

  “Let go of my brother—now!”

  I couldn’t see the Hulk’s face, but I could feel his reply. The stranglehold was tightened even further. I wriggled feebly, a purple mist Bickering across my eyes. I wished Dianne would hurry up. I wished she would kill the Hulk.

  “And why should I let him go?” he screeched.

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot.”

  “And what if you hit your brother?”

  Dianne probably took him, as well as me, by surprise. Maybe she didn’t feel inclined to let herself in for a ping-pong of threatening questions and provocative answers, or maybe she believed that a single warning should be enough to make it plain she was in earnest.

  Something whirred. I heard a frightened groan and felt the headlock loosen from my neck. Air shot whistling into my burning lungs; I staggered to one side, and as the mist cleared from my eyes, my gaze fell on the Hulk. Red drops were dripping from his fingers into the water. He was staring in disbelief at the arrow embedded in the arm now hanging limply, as if he was waiting for a puppeteer to attach a string and set it back in motion.

  Suddenly Dianne was standing beside me, pressing a stone into my hand. It was wet. “Here/’ she said quietly.

  Taking this as the signal to attack, the other kids came at us, screaming. The stone immediately put the first attacker out of action. I saw his astonished face as I struck him on the temple with it, and then the world turned into a whirlwind of screeching and scratching, hitting, boxing, and kicking. I was no longer afraid; on the contrary, I wanted to hurt the kids, and so I lashed out blindly, seized by a feeling of intoxicating, pounding dizziness. Whenever I met with resistance, I let out a triumphant shriek. Dianne did the same; she hissed like a wildcat and struck out left and right with her bow. It was only when my fists had been pounding the empty air several times that I realized our attackers had retreated. After taking a deep breath, I saw why.

  One of the boys, a fellow with razor-cut red hair and green eyes and almost no eyelashes, was suddenly brandishing an open penknife in his hand. I couldn’t believe he really meant to use it, as his entire body language—particularly his expression of alarm at himself, suggesting hesitation and retreat—seemed to deny it. But something inside him had already got him going. Like a machine set into gear and impossible to switch off, he took two swift, tripping steps in Dianne’s direction.

  “No!” I yelled

  The knife flashed. Right beside the strap of Dianne’s dress the glittering blade, about two and a half inches long, dug into her shoulder up to the hilt. There was a short, ugly sound, like a fork digging into an undercooked potato.

  “Shit!” I heard someone gasp. The boy with the razor cut stepped back. He raised both hands helplessly.

  Dianne’s eyes narrowed. An upright furrow appeared on her forehead, as if she was seeking the answer to a particularly difficult question. Her right hand was still holding the bow, the left feeling her shoulder in astonishment. Her fingers closed around the handle of the knife sunk into it.

  “Dianne,” I whispered, for I could see that she was grasping at the wrong angle, but my warning came too late. Her flesh burst open like a fallen pomegranate, spewing out its bright red seeds.

  Dianne opened her hand and let the knife drop into the river. “It doesn’t hurt, Phil,” she said.

  “She’s …”

  “Ohhh …”

  “Beat it!”

  The unexpected wounding of the Hulk had drawn the kids to him like a powerful magnet; Dianne’s bleeding wound had the opposite effect of repelling them. Loud screams rang out, water splashed, and sand and dust flew through the air. Then the kids grabbed the reluctant Hulk, dragging him after them by his good arm back over the ridge. In a matter of seconds the uproar was over, the ghosts seen off.

  Dianne looked up at the hill, at the top of which the dazzling sun had swallowed up our attackers. “I need a new arrow,” she said. “He took mine away. It belongs to me.”

  “You’re bleeding, Dianne! We’ve got to get home.”

  “D’you know what, Phil?”

  “Dianne, we—”

  “Next time I’ll take my knife with me.”

  She spoke softly. She was extremely pale. Her dress looked as if strawberry juice had been poured all down the front. By the time we reached Visible, she could barely walk. I held her up and got myself covered with her blood as I did so. I kept whispering meaningless stuff, meant more for me than her. Dianne stumbled toward the veranda, and on the bottom step she sagged and remained sitting there.

  As we got near, I had already started yelling for Glass. When she came storming out of the house, she took in the situation at a glance.

  I flapped my arms helplessly. “We were—”

  “Tell me later. Dianne, get up, into the car at once, quick, quick—Phil, Phil, come here.” She pulled my T-shirt up over my head. “Press that against the wound and don’t let go until we get to the doctor’s.”

  Glass did her very best to stay calm, but I could sense her suppressed panic; it spread to me like a severe, infectious illness. The car shot through the woods and across the bridge into the town. Although the T-shirt remained dry under my hand, I didn’t dare to lift it .Just because she wanted to help me, I thought, and hoped that it wouldn’t occur to Dianne, who was looking straight ahead impassively, to think of closing her eyes, because then she might die … no, then for sure she would die! Tears were dropping on my naked chest and trickling down my stomach, collecting in my navel.

  As it turned out, the loss of blood was far less than it seemed. The wound was only really deep at the point where the knife had got stuck; the blade had entered at an angle and merely severed muscular tissue.

  “Could have been far worse, missy,” said the doctor. “A vertical stab downward and the left lung would have been damaged.”

  Dianne’s face had at last regained color, but now it was me who was pale—I could feel I was pale, watching together with Glass as the doctor’s steady hand sewed the edges of the wound back together. I could feel every stab of the outsized shiny chrome needle as it entered Dianne’s anesthetized skin, just as if it was going into me.

  Dianne had her shoulder strapped up, Glass exchanged a few words with the doctor, and then we drove back to Visible. She sat us down in the room with the chimney breast, in front of the cold, empty fireplace. Dianne curled herself up in Glass’s lap and closed her eyes; I snuggled up to her side. Glass stroked our hair.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  I told her. She listened quietly, without interrupting me with any reproaches, as I’d actually been expecting. Now and again she just made little sounds of acknowledgment. They sounded like th
e soft suppressed moans that sometimes came from her bedroom when she had a man with her.

  “OK,” she said when I had come to the end. “You were absolutely right to defend yourselves. We’re not obliged to excuse ourselves to anyone. Anyone at all. Understood?”

  I hadn’t understood at all, but I nodded seriously. There was no reply from Dianne; she may have fallen asleep, or she may have simply been too exhausted. I studied her face, her black hair, damp with sweat, plastered to her forehead. Then I remembered a question that had been going through my mind for hours. “Glass,” I said, “what’s a filthy cunt?”

  The events of that day were the starting point, paradoxically, for the lasting love-hate between Glass and the Ones Over There. Late that evening, when Dianne and I had just put on our pajamas, there was a loud knocking at the front door. Glass opened it, and we hid behind her. Outside stood a short wiry woman with untidy hair that hung in wisps over her forehead. Her face was gaunt. She wore a cheap summer dress. “Your daughter wounded my son,” she shouted at Glass angrily. The shrill voice, inherited by the Hulk, trembled. “I’ll report you for this. Someone should have done so long ago, you …”

  “Filthy cunt? asked Glass quietly. “Was it you who taught your son that word? My son was asking me just now what it meant. Would you like to tell him?”

  Without waiting for an answer she motioned Dianne in front of her and pulled her pajama top over her head. Her fingers deftly removed the bandage from her shoulder. The stitched wound looked ghastly, the pale yellow hall light turning it into a black-encrusted hollow.

  “My daughter was wounded too. She could have lost her left lung. Or bled to death, the jugular vein, d’you understand?”

  Carefully she replaced the bandage and pushed Dianne aside. She wasn’t speaking anymore; she was singing, her words bobbing like little boats tossed about on troubled waters, carrying us all along with them.

  “D’you know what I think? I believe the problem isn’t either your son or my daughter or some unpleasant swear word. And it isn’t that you and other people consider your children better than mine either. No, I believe the real problem is that you are deeply unhappy. So unhappy that you feel the need to run other people down and slander them, and you use disgusting words to do so, which your equally unhappy little son then hears, as a result of which my children suffer, and on no account will I put up with that!”

  The Hulk’s mother looked down at the floor in silence. I couldn’t understand why she had come only now, hours after the incident at the Big Eye. Perhaps she was a coward. Perhaps it had taken her time to muster the courage to come and confront Glass. And now she’d had the wind taken out of her sails.

  “I have a suggestion.” In an instant Glass had become calm personified. I had never seen her like this before; it was uncanny. Behind her back I felt for Dianne’s hand. “I’m going to make us a pot of tea, and we’ll sit down in the kitchen and talk.”

  “That’s not what I came for,” said the woman, who, drawn by the siren’s song, had already stepped into the entrance hall.

  “And you”—Glass turned to Dianne and me—“go and brush your teeth and into bed. Lights out! I’ll come and look in on your later.”

  The last I saw of the Hulk’s mother was her narrow back. Just two months later the Hulk stopped coming to school; the woman and her entire family, including her husband, upped and left town. The fact that not long after, the little knife stabber with no eyelashes also disappeared seemed like magic to me; for a long time I believed that Glass had only to strike up her singsong voice to turn the world upside down or change its course around the sun.

  “What d’you think they’re talking about now?” asked Dianne, closing the door to our room behind her. “About us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She placed a hand on the light switch and pointed to her bed, where her crumpled pajamas lay. “D’you want to wear my pajamas?”

  “No.”

  “D’you want to sleep in my bed?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know.

  “As you like. I’ll turn the light out, then.”

  I ran across to my bed in the dark and crawled under the blanket. Although I was dog-tired, I couldn’t sleep—I was too excited. It had been a glorious day for Dianne and me. We had fought and bathed in blood. We had battled like heroes and triumphed over enemies who outnumbered us. Across the river, over the sleepy rooftops of the town, I knew the first silver threads were already falling into children’s dreams that would then weave themselves into the legend of the Battle at the Big Eye. From now on we would be left in peace. We were unassailable. An enormous weight lifted from my chest as the realization spread through me that I would never need to be afraid again.

  “You were fantastic,” I whispered to Dianne across the room. “You really got the Hulk. That was great!”

  “I missed. Just like I did that stupid trout.”

  Something in her voice made the darkness swirl around me. Suddenly I found myself wishing that Dianne wouldn’t say any more, when black bubbles came whizzing through the air and popped.

  “You know, Phil—I was aiming at his heart.”

  I’m packing my bag when I hear the front door shut. Dianne goes to school without me. As a rule, she walks, whereas I go by bike. But today I get the feeling that she quite deliberately wants to keep away from me—and that the door shuts with an unusually loud slam, and that even her footsteps sound unusually loud on the gravel as they recede down the drive. Normally Dianne drifts through the world like a wisp of fog, invisible and as good as weightless, as if reluctant to leave any imprint wherever she happens to tread. Perhaps she’s still mad at me for watching her under the shower.

  At school the most we’re likely to see each other is during recess. There’s only one single class that we take together. Back in elementary school we started off in the same class, but the witch’s offspring in a double dose was just too much for our little classmates, and inattention and panic attacks were the outcome. Finally a few of the teachers approached Glass with the request that Dianne and I be put in separate classes, pointing out politely but fairly unambiguously that this would be best for her own children as well. That’s the way it’s stayed up to the present, and meanwhile it suits the two of us.

  I move to the window just in time to see Dianne’s brown-clad figure disappear between a couple of trees. These are the same trees where, years ago, the day after Kyle left us and Dianne returned from her hunt for an arrow, I found deep angry gashes on some of the branches, with the bark hacked away. At the time I had collected soft moss from the garden and stuffed it haphazardly into the biggest of the gaping holes, as if to bandage them like wounds.

  chapter 5

  red shoe

  lost

  in a

  hole

  The fine scar lines behind my ears act like meteorological sensors. A slight prickling reliably predicts any imminent change in the weather. As I padlock my bicycle in the shelter beside the main school building, I look up at the sky. It is deceptively blue and cloudless. Just a hint of sultriness assures me that my scars are right and that there will be rain or even a mighty thunderstorm this afternoon or maybe not till evening.

  The school is an architectural leftover from the turn of the century, a massive, four-story building, its solidity unimposing yet reassuring. As I child, I imagined its grayish brown walls were rooted hundreds of feet deep in the earth. A few years ago a modern extension was carelessly slapped onto the rear of the building, a flat, elongated construction consisting of a mass of concrete and steel and even more glass. Thanks to this unadorned appendage, erected under the direction of Kat’s father, there are in effect three schoolyards—one in front of the old main building, popular on account of its many shady chestnut trees and the undisputed territory of the older pupils, as well as two more yards to the left and right of the extension, shared by the lower school.
/>   Kat is waiting for me outside the main entrance. She’s not hard to pick out from all the other pupils crowding the yard and flocking into the building, not because she is particularly tall or because her hair is pinned up the way that Glass wears it—for Kat idolizes Glass and imitates her whenever she can—but because the stream of pupils parts in front of her, just as the Red Sea must have parted for Moses. Nothing to do with being considerate, but on account of Kat’s status. Like me, she is not particularly popular or unpopular. She might perhaps be more popular if she didn’t have the headmaster for a father. That’s what puts most people off a bit, even though I’ve never really understood why. Perhaps they think Kat has something like a hotline to God. What I find less surprising is that her directness and her habit of telling people straight out what she thinks of them hardly earn her brownie points.

  “Is it me you’re waiting for, or are you putting on a show for Thomas?”

  She pulls a face, as if she’s just bitten into a lemon. “He’s already gone in. Walked past me looking destroyed. And I’ve already seen Dianne.”

  “She left before me.”

  “She had some girlfriend in tow.”

  “Dianne?” I put my school bag down. “She hasn’t got any friends.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  Kat grins. “Maybe she’s starting an anorexics club. The woman goes about in the same kind of hideous gear as your sister. And she’s just as scrawny.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “No idea. She’s not in our year.” She’s tapping her feet nervously and looks over my shoulder as if she’s afraid of missing someone.

  I turn round but can’t see anyone. “Now are you going to tell me who you’re waiting for?”