‘What time do trains leave from here for Berlin?’ Bright has crumpled up the paper, is twisting it in both hands. ‘What time?’
But this is asking too much. If this were a film, the Bakery Girl would blurt out times and platform numbers like a stationmaster. But —
‘How the hell should I know?’ She shrugs. ‘I’ve never been to Berlin.’
Bright turns to Gibby. ‘Do you think —?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ It’s a conversational full-circle — but everything is different.
THEY RUN AS FAST as they can along the river path, arms pumping, gravel flying. The morning is so cold that it hurts their lungs.
Wolfgang’s motorbike is parked outside the bakery. ‘Should have asked him for a ride,’ pants Gibby.
‘You kidding? He didn’t like us.’ Bright feels a stabbing pain in his foot: somehow familiar, but he can’t remember where or when. ‘If she’s gone already, then what do we do?’ He jumps the looped chain around the square.
‘Catch — next — train.’ Gibby’s breath is coming in great gasps. ‘Find her — in — Berlin.’
Sweat is pouring into Bright’s eyes; he closes them for a second and sees her face, blindingly beautiful. Beautiful Lace, fragile, tough, trying not to be lonely. Pillowcase, clasped hands — he trips, nearly falls. ‘Shit.’ Stumbles upright, sees Gibby glance back. ‘I’m okay. Keep going.’
The road to the station is narrow, lined with hedges. They run side by side like training partners, sticking close to the edge on bends, then merging back into the centre. In the corner of Bright’s eye, the recurring flash of Gibby’s white trainers is like a lighthouse signal. Safety or danger? The ambiguity is troubling, jabs him hard under his ribs. ‘Fucking stitch,’ he says to Gibby without slowing down.
‘Me too.’ Gibby is almost sprinting. ‘But we’re nearly there.’
Bright’s never been this way before. What the hell did he expect: a quiet platform, an old wooden sign, plumes of smoke? Instead he sees a cluttered mess of car parks and Plexiglas tunnels, ticket machines and money machines and kiosks. And, everywhere, milling knots of people.
He jumps the low fence into the car park and almost crashes into a line of trolleys. ‘Shit. Where’s the entrance?’
‘I don’t know.’ There are patches of sweat on Gibby’s jacket; he’s blundering beside Bright, bumps into a barrel-chested man and then his wife. ‘Sorry. Entschuldigung.’
No wonder the village square had been deserted! Everybody’s here — getting in the way. ‘Excuse me!’ Bright shoves his way through some school kids. ‘Fucking move!’ People leaving or arriving, slurping coffee, arguing, talking on phones, preventing anyone from going anywhere fast. Barriers. Hurdles. Bright swears, pushes and swears again; finally they’re into the station, and he looks for the nearest flight of stairs. Obstructions. Mazes. He’s never known the meaning of these words until here and now, trying to find Lace.
He pushes a fat man to one side, jumps an abandoned bag, reaches the top of the stairs at last and turns around. ‘Gibby?’
‘Yes, I’m here,’ gasps Gibby, squeezing between the fat man and the bag.
From here they can look down on the platform, scuffed grey concrete, spotted with travellers. ‘Can you see her?’ Bright’s eyes are blurred with sweat.
Gibby scans the board of destinations. ‘We’re on the wrong side! Northbound’s over there.’
Another walkway, glass-roofed, open-sided, arching across the train tracks. But they’re moving against the tide: newly arrived travellers, barrages of wheeled suitcases and computer bags. ‘Shit. Shit.’ Bright weaves through the mess, craning his head to get a clear view of the northbound platform.
And then he sees her, standing beside a pillar, her hands in her pockets. Tawny fur coat with a hood, golden hair nearly reaching her shoulders, straight black legs, feet aligned. ‘Lace!’ He shouts it as loudly as he can, leaning over the side of the walkway. ‘Lace!’
She doesn’t hear him. Her pale face flickers as passengers pass in front of her and move away again. Above her head yellow digits are ticking away the seconds. 20. 19. 18.
‘Seventeen seconds till the train comes in.’ Bright grabs Gibby’s arm, starts pushing ahead again. ‘We’ll never get down in time.’ It’s the feeling of nightmares: slow motion, urgency, despair.
The stairway leading down to the platform is clogged with people. Gibby slips on the edge of a step, clutches at Bright, wrenching his jacket half off his shoulder. ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Bright has his eyes fixed on Lace: her resolute profile, her steadfast straight-ahead gaze. 15. 14. 13.
‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ Gibby half-shouts at the man beside him. ‘Train to Berlin?’
‘Nein, nein!’ The man beams, yellowing teeth in a sweating face. ‘This is schnell train. No stop!’
The panic rushes out of Gibby like air from a balloon, leaving his face limp, out of shape with relief. ‘It’s okay,’ he says to Bright. ‘It’s a fast train! It doesn’t stop at this station.’
The digital numbers have disappeared and the board is blank. ‘Achtung!’ The recorded voice rattles out its warning and people are stepping quickly back behind the black line as the bright eye of the train flies closer, out-dazzling the morning. And now — at last — Bright and Gibby have made it onto the platform.
‘Thank god.’ Bright can hardly believe it. ‘We made it.’ Momentarily he loses sight of Lace (vending machine in the way, backpackers in the way) and then he sees her again: still standing beside the pillar, still facing straight ahead. ‘Lace!’ he shouts. ‘We’re here!’
Gibby’s walking fast beside him, also calling out; their voices battle with the repeated announcement and the growing roar of the train. But somehow she hears them. She’s been standing out in front of all the other people, her shoulders squared like a leader. Now she turns, glances over the shifting mass of heads, and looks directly at Bright and Gibby. A shaft of light shines straight through the glass roof. There she stands, waiting, illuminated by sun.
For a second, her face is completely blank. It’s as if she has never known them — or as if she’s somewhere else entirely. And then, when she sees it’s Bright and Gibby, intense relief sweeps over her face. She’s transformed into a living person again. She calls out — at least, her lips are moving but now the train is a huge white roar, crushing into the mouth of the station, and her words are lost.
Yet Bright has the oddest sensation that he can hear her voice. For a split second the world falls quiet: nothing but the silence of mountain valleys, the soaring shadows of birds and the whisper of the wind. And over or under it all, Lace is saying — just as she did earlier — that she loves him. She loves both him and Gibby. She’ll never forget them.
He stands still and looks at her, a slight golden figure against the blur of the train, thundering towards them, nearly upon them, shaking the world. And then, too late, he understands. ‘Step back!’ he cries. Half-raising her hand, Lace steps forward. The dark bulk of the train annihilates the light. It breathes her in, swallows her whole. She’s gone.
THE KEEPERS
BRIGHT SITS IN HIS room, writing. He and Gibby are taking turns to deal with the press who swarm at the gate, not satisfied with Geoffrey and his calm, detached statements.
Give us the boys! they say. Give us the contemporaries/friends/potential lovers of the girl who annihilated herself before the eyes of the town.
‘You don’t have to go out there,’ says Admin, who shoos away the media at regular intervals. ‘They’ll give up eventually.’
But when will eventually be? It’s not every day that a girl throws herself under a high-speed train, especially not in a small town with a single square and an aging population. Journalists arrive from all over the country, and Bright and Gibby front up to them, their faces neutralised and their eyes blanked, unwilling to be ambushed, determined not to stutter or cry.
Look out the window now and you’ll see Gibby, surrounded by a not
unsympathetic bunch of twenty-something reporters whose thoughts are identical:
Poor sod.
Thank god I’m not him.
I need an opening quote.
Great story, it could kick-start my career.
Bright is also watching from the window: Gibby is down there, tracing circles in the gravel with his white toe, staying behind the closed gate. ‘By giving them a well-rehearsed version,’ he’s told Bright, ‘we can stop them making up bullshit. We can keep her safe. You know what I mean.’ Viewed from above, he looks resolute and defensive: shoulders squared, hands spread, a human firewall.
Team players, that’s what they’ve become; what they were from the moment they sprinted to the station, moving in unison. How ironic that they should achieve exactly what Geoffrey had wanted all along, due to something Geoffrey has tried so hard to prevent! All their lives they’ve been accustomed to the slow snow-burn of solitude. Now they close ranks, and answer as one.
Q: How well did you know Grace McDonald?
A: Her name was Lace. And I loved her.
Whose reply is this? Anonymity is the condition for interviews. It could be either one of them saying this — just as each refutes the inevitable, frequently made suggestion that Lace is a modern-day Anna Karenina.
In spite of their united strength, sometimes it gets all too much. Sometimes, without warning, Bright is catapulted back to the station platform: kneeling, banging his head on the concrete, crying. Then, mid-sentence, he will turn and walk back into The Palace, barricading himself in his room. There he can write himself whole again. Writing is the glue that holds him together.
Online headlines have already appeared:
DID SHE JUMP?
DID SHE FALL?
WAS SHE PUSHED?
Scrawling over the printouts, Bright adds his own headline:
DOES IT MATTER?
He knows the one important fact: Lace has escaped at last.
‘Keep the boys here for the next few days,’ the Chief Detective advises Geoffrey. ‘Don’t let them leave.’
As if they would leave! Bright stares at the bedspread, smoothed flat by Lace before she walked out the door, and he wonders how he will ever make himself go away from here. This is the first, last, and only place he knew her.
He’s doing this — sitting, staring at the bed — when Admin knocks on the door. There’s a young and apologetic sergeant behind her. ‘Sorry. It’s routine. In cases like this, there’s usually a note somewhere. And they told me you were close to her?’ He has a tentative moustache and his hands shake slightly as he searches the room.
Flurries. Carefully, Bright writes down the word, while the sergeant shuffles equally carefully through his belongings. After death, writes Bright, come flurries of activity. Striding, searching, and surmising — all of which distract, for a time, from grief.
‘Just hoping for something, anything at all.’ The sergeant’s eyes water at the sight of the thin red-haired kid pretending to write. ‘To help us close the file.’
Bright shields his notebook with his left arm. Notes and flurries, he writes awkwardly with his right hand. Sheaves of notes. Slurries of leaves. Sheaves. She. Leaves. ‘I hope you’ll find something to satisfy your superiors,’ he says politely over his shoulder.
‘No note.’ The sergeant is half-relieved, half-disappointed. ‘Well, we always hope. But we never expect.’
There are, in fact, several notes. Bright has found one of them, pinned to the wall in the middle of his work, and it’s still there now if the sergeant cares to look.
You changed everything for the better
It was all she’d written, all she could manage. And for Bright, it means all. But he knows it’s irrelevant to a police investigation, so he doesn’t mention it.
The second note? This had been written for Gibby, and pushed under his door. When Gibby had found it he’d started, flushed, and then cried. As part of his Smokescreen Strategy, he’d showed it to the detective: willing offering, red herring. The detective had scanned it, coughed and clapped Gibby on the shoulder. ‘Nothing for us,’ he said gruffly. ‘But thanks for cooperating.’
And now — now a third note has finally been found by the sergeant, who, as a last resort, has peered under the bed and extracted a plate of old toast.
Darling Lace, we’ll be back in five. Sorry, no bananas xx B.
He stares at it. ‘I’d better take this.’ He bears away the note and the plate like an efficient waiter. Later that afternoon both are placed outside Bright’s door, the stack of toast intact and the scrap of paper balanced on top.
Eventually, Bright will glue both notes into his scrapbook. What’s he making? It’s the Book of Lace. During the one night Lace had spent in his arms, she’d told him about her clippings project. ‘Information on my family,’ she explained. ‘But I burnt it all one night, when the missing got too much for me.’ The matter-of-factness of her voice was the only thing that had momentarily revived his anxiety.
Now there’s another knock on the door. It’s Gibby, fresh from his ordeal. ‘“Did she really intend to kill herself?” And “Why?” Always the two same questions.’ His cheeks are a hectic red.
‘Lie down for a while.’ Bright gestures to the bed.
Gibby hesitates. ‘Aren’t you writing?’
‘It’s okay.’ Bright turns back to his desk and moves the pen a couple of millimetres above the paper, waiting for Gibby to settle.
‘How can you concentrate?’ Gibby pummels the pillow and then shoves his head under it.
‘It helps,’ says Bright almost apologetically. ‘Write hard and clear about what hurts.’
‘What… means. Who… said —’ Gibby’s voice is muffled, but his rage and misery are loud enough.
‘Hemingway.’
‘Hemingway’s bullshit!’ Gibby emerges, hair on end. ‘Blowing your brains out isn’t glamorous. Killing yourself isn’t —’ He chokes to a halt.
‘Sorry.’ Bright rubs his eyes. ‘I only quoted the old fucker because — well, writing is the only thing that makes me feel any better.’
‘I’m glad for you!’ bursts out Gibby. ‘I am! But I can’t stand what they’re trying to do to her. Trying to sensationalise it! We know the truth. We both saw —’ He sticks his head back in the pillow. ‘And what she… endured… before.’
‘It’s their job. We can’t do anything to stop them, except what we’re already doing.’
‘Resigning…?’
‘Resigning ourselves. Exactly.’ Bright’s eyes are stinging. Don’t cry, he commands himself. She would rather you created something than cry. He grips his pen tightly, waiting for Gibby’s breathing to become less ragged. ‘They can’t take her from us,’ he says out loud. ‘It’s the three of us, forever.’
GIBBY STANDS IN THE office, talking on the phone. His hands are slippery with sweat. The news has already been broken through official channels. But there’s the official thing, and there’s the decent thing — and after all, he had partly come up with the plan to bring Lace here.
‘Such a terrible shock.’ Chummie’s voice is as flat as ever, but every few seconds he gives a loud sniff. ‘I thought she was feeling better?’
‘She was, for a while. The change of scene helped, for a bit.’ The phone slips from Gibby’s grasp; he wipes it dry on his sleeve.
Chummie’s already saying something else. ‘No sense in bringing any of it home. Can I count on you?’
At this point the connection cuts out, but it seems an appropriate note to end on. Gibby may have changed but his sense of responsibility has remained as strong as ever. After he’s dealt with Chummie’s request, he’ll start thinking about the best way of breaking some different news to his parents. ‘I need a place of my own, but I’ll be back to visit. Often, I promise.’ His mother will weep, his father will look alarmed, but it’s part of the learning curve they all have to go through. Gibby may tell his father to look after his mother. He may remind his mother of the appealing Eve
of bygone days, who would never have been caught on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon watching the Gumball 3000 rally through a gin haze.
After that, it’s up to his parents: the Incredible Essence of Gibby Lux only works to a certain point. After that, he’ll get into a taxi, and soon he’ll be in a clean bright room with no curtains and a large square of sky, and the rest of his life will be rolling out in front of him: regular, calm. His own.
‘ARE YOU SURE?’ DR Mallory frowns, exuding doubt from every lightly tanned pore. ‘Lace’s uncle asked Geoffrey and me to take care of it.’
Gibby has neither the time nor the energy to go into detail. ‘Chummie asked me to do it when we spoke yesterday on the phone.’ He fixes his gaze on the stapler. ‘He — he must be confused by grief.’ Wham! The first argument is stapled into the air with a Martin-Lutherish determination.
‘I suppose he could be.’ Dr Mallory hesitates.
‘Ring him now!’ demands Gibby in a glinting metallic voice. ‘Ring the man right now and ask him if he didn’t ask me, Gibby Lux, to take care of his niece’s possessions.’
Dr Mallory’s fetching mouth opens in surprise. ‘It’s not a competition. You know, it can be distressing going through things belonging to a —’
‘Dead person?’ He’s brutal in his desperation to win. ‘I saw my friend splattered on the railway tracks. I was close enough to see her blood and guts. You really think that sorting through some old clothes will upset me?’ He hurls this across the desk, hard and accurate, although he’s beginning to feel sick with the effort.
‘Oh, Gibby, don’t!’ Suddenly Dr Mallory looks less like a blossoming bride and more like a middle-aged mother. ‘Don’t say such things, dear! Here, take this.’ She opens a drawer with a slightly shaky hand.
He feels terrible. He likes Dr Mallory and regrets having to be so fierce, but he can’t stand the thought of anyone else touching Lace’s stuff. ‘I’ll do it right now. It won’t take long.’ He seizes the master key from her. ‘It won’t take long.’
Suicide Club, The Page 36
