by Helen Grant
Shall I deny receiving it? That thought remained, nagging at the back of my mind. Suppose the others asked me whether my wish had been granted and I said no? If they were really behind the delivery of the money, they would have to admit it, or else lose their money altogether. Of course, I thought, I had no idea what anyone else had wished for, or whether any of them had got it. On the whole I thought this was unlikely; rather, someone had picked me out as the most gullible, the most likely to fall into the trap.
A feeling of hot resentment was brewing up inside me, a bubbling cauldron of poison. I imagined the five of them sitting in the snack bar, talking about what they had done, laughing at me. Max slapping the table, slopping everyone’s drinks, guffawing.
Steffi’s the only one dim enough to believe it. That was what they would say. Steffi the mouse.
Won’t she be mad when she finds out?
What’s she gonna do, Max?
Nothing, same as always.
I slid my hand into my jeans pocket and drew out the roll of notes. I could tell them I asked for fifty and that fifty was what I got. I fingered the notes, thinking. It could work. If the rest of them were in it together, if this was their idea of a joke, they’d soon stop laughing when they realized that four hundred and fifty euros of their money had vanished. I would watch their faces very carefully when I told them. I would watch to see who flinched, who blanched at it.
And if this was more than some stupid trick, if by some unimaginable and miraculous coincidence everyone’s wishes had come true, well, I would still have my story to contribute. I had asked for money and I had got it. The amount was immaterial.
I shivered, hugging myself. It was a bitter thought, that my friends might be ganging up on me, plotting behind my back to make me look a fool. I knew that I was never going to be the most popular girl in town, the one everyone swarmed around, wanting to be friends with her, wanting her on their arm. I was too shy for that. But it was quite another thing to consider that the friends I did have were laughing at me. I looked down at the crumpled banknotes and felt my mouth tightening into a hard line. I would watch their faces when I told them about the money; I would watch them well.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On Friday evening I usually went out with Timo, but when I stumbled back into the bakery, weary from roaming through the woods and sickened by the dark and suspicious thoughts that were running incessantly through my brain, my mother greeted me with the news that he had telephoned to cancel. I patted my pocket; no mobile phone. I must have left it in my room.
‘Did he want me to ring back?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t say so,’ said my mother.
She had been bagging up the leftover rolls and buns but she stopped what she was doing to look at me. I could see the question that was coming: Is everything all right?
What would she say, I wondered, if I said, Here’s five hundred euros. Now you can buy the new coffee machine you wanted. I was almost tempted to do it.
Instead I simply said, ‘OK,’ as breezily as I could, and escaped before she had time to quiz me. As I ran up the stairs, I wondered idly what would happen if I tried to call Izabela. Would she know anything about Timo’s sudden lack of interest in me? At any rate, I decided, it was for the best. If I met Timo this evening he would be bound to ask me about my wish, and I didn’t want to talk about it to any of them until we were all together. I wanted to make sure that nobody was forewarned.
The issue of what to do with the five hundred euros was eating at me. When I came to think about it, there were half a dozen other things my parents could have used as well as a new coffee machine; the bakery did well enough but we were hardly rich. I longed to hand the money over – but how to do it, that was the question. Could I add it to the till at the end of the week? Or put it in a new envelope and deliver it anonymously to my mother? I thought of going to the bank and simply paying it into the bakery’s account, but if my mother noticed the unexpected deposit she would ask questions, and if anyone at the bank remembered me paying the money in I would have some explaining to do. The one thing I didn’t consider was telling the truth; it was simply too bizarre. So I carried the money around in my pocket and tried desperately to think what to do with it.
On Saturday we met at Max’s house on the Ashford Strasse. It was one of the smartest streets in Bad Münstereifel, running directly up the side of the hill at such a steep angle that climbing it on foot felt like mountaineering. There was something apt about this, as though in scaling it you attained a rarefied atmosphere not felt elsewhere in the town. The houses were all enormous; the Müllers’ was so large that you could have fitted two of the bakery inside it. It had four garages, housing Herr Müller’s gleaming top-of-the-range cars. This evening one of them was empty because he and his wife had gone off somewhere in the BMW.
I rang the bell and heard it echoing in the cavernous interior. As I waited, I stared about me, taking in the polished perfection of the white-painted front door (Max’s mother employed an army of cleaners, although she didn’t work herself) and the carefully manicured shrubs which stood in enormous ceramic pots on either side of it. Everything about Max’s house screamed money.
It could be Max, I thought. However stingy Herr Müller was with his cash, anyone who lived in a place like this had to have access to greater funds than the rest of us could dream of. Five hundred euros was nothing to the Müllers. They probably had that much lying around the house in cash, just in case Frau Müller needed to tip her manicurist or something.
The door opened. Hanna was standing there, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt as usual, her dark hair falling untidily over her eyes. Was it my imagination, or was there a question in the way she looked at me? I did my best to look nonchalant. The five hundred euros were still in my jeans pocket, since I dared not leave them lying around at home. When I moved I could feel them, like a knot in the fabric, pressing against the top of my leg.
‘Hi,’ I said, stepping into the house.
When I went into the living room the others were there already, lounging around on Frau Müller’s white leather sofas in a way that would have made her bleached-blonde hair stand on end, had she been there to see it. Timo was sitting next to Izabela, I noticed. They all looked up as Hanna and I came in. The sensation of all those eyes on me was daunting. I wondered whether they had been talking about me before I arrived. Eight o’clock, we had said, but I had arrived exactly on the hour and yet they were here already. Had they been sniggering together over the trick they had played on me? Deliberately I kept my expression neutral. I caught Timo’s eye and thought that he made the very faintest movement with his shoulders, as though shrugging.
‘Steffi, at last,’ said Max.
‘It’s only just eight,’ I said.
‘Well, we said seven thirty,’ said Max.
No, you didn’t, I thought, but I simply shrugged. ‘I’m here now.’ I went and perched on the padded arm of one of the white leather chairs. Somehow I felt reluctant to sit on the chair itself, to sink into the yielding comfort of the cushions. I felt I would be putting myself at a disadvantage.
As usual it was Max who took the lead. He didn’t waste any time either. He stretched his arms out along the back of the sofa and tilted his head, then said in an ironic voice, ‘So, anyone’s wish come true?’
I waited for them to turn to look at me, but nobody did. I said nothing, waiting.
‘Nope,’ said Jochen.
‘Told you so,’ said Timo. ‘There was no way Heidi Klum was ever going to come to Bad Münstereifel anyway.’
‘Izabela?’ said Max.
Izabela shook her head.
‘Hanna?’
I was watching them narrowly, studying each of their faces as they replied. I saw the same expression every time – a mixture of faint disappointment, boredom and expectancy as they looked at each other. There were no meaningful sidelong glances, no knowing smirks. Either they were all brilliant actors or there was nothing going on bet
ween them.
Eventually Max turned to me. ‘Steffi?’
There was a perfunctory tone in his voice; by this time he wasn’t expecting to hear anything surprising. In another moment, when I had told him that nothing had happened, he would lose interest in the whole thing. It would be yesterday’s news, totally uninteresting, buried as deep as last year’s rubbish, while he would be free to pursue some new hare-brained scheme. I paused and licked my lips. Max wasn’t even really looking at me; he was waiting for me to rubber-stamp the failure of the plan so that he could move on. The moment stretched out. Hanna’s face turned towards me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes?’ repeated Max stupidly.
‘Yes, it worked,’ I said quietly.
‘What? No … ’ said Max.
His face was slack, his eyes wide. I was watching him very carefully and I saw no hint of amusement, no sign of dissemblance. He appeared to be genuinely shocked. I glanced at the others. Timo had missed the exchange altogether; he was looking at Izabela. Everyone else looked stunned.
‘What did you wish for?’ asked Jochen.
I looked down at my hands. ‘Fifty euros.’
‘Fifty euros … ? And you got them … ?’ Max sounded dazed. ‘You should have asked for a thousand. Ten thousand.’
‘How did you get them?’ asked Hanna.
I guessed that she was thinking what had not yet occurred to Max, which was that this might have nothing to do with Rote Gertrud’s house at all, this might be nothing more than coincidence. Fifty euros was a not insignificant amount for us – you wouldn’t want to lose it, to have it drop out of your pocket in the street – but it wasn’t a fortune. It wasn’t an impossible sum of money to come by all of a sudden. A generous relative might send you that much for your birthday, you might get it for working an extra day.
I shrugged. ‘The money arrived in the post. Well, it was in the postbox anyway. There was no stamp on it. Just an envelope addressed to me.’
Silence. The others pondered this.
‘You’re joking, right?’ said Max.
I shook my head. ‘I’ve still got the envelope at home. But the address was typed. There’s no return address or anything.’
As I looked at the ring of astonished faces I began to feel an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach, a restless seething like maggots in a carcass. I thought they were all genuinely astounded by what I had told them – which meant that none of them had sent the money. But if none of them had sent it …
‘It has to be a joke,’ said Izabela nervously. ‘One of you did it, right?’
There was a clamour of denials.
‘Someone else, then,’ said Max. ‘Someone found the pieces of paper at Gertrud’s house. It has to be that. Someone’s playing tricks on us.’
‘Who?’ asked Hanna. ‘We didn’t see a soul up there, Max. You know we didn’t.’
I said nothing. They were simply rehashing things that had already gone round my head a hundred times. I still had that horrible feeling, the crawling, slithering feeling inside me. Max wasn’t play-acting. I knew he wasn’t. He looked as shocked as the rest of them.
‘Why her?’ he said suddenly, turning to look at me. ‘Why Steffi’s wish and not anyone else’s?’
‘Maybe she’s making it up,’ said Jochen, talking about me as though I wasn’t sitting within a metre of him.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
‘Show us the fifty euros, then.’
I pushed my hand into my jeans pocket and was fishing for the money before I realized that if I drew the whole wad out, everyone would see that it was much more than fifty euros. I hesitated, suddenly feeling my face burning. I guessed that I was blushing and knew that this would make me look guilty. The realization made things worse; now I felt as though my cheeks were on fire. I plucked at the rolled-up notes with my fingers, praying that I could fish out the right amount. Eventually I succeeded in withdrawing a little clutch of notes. I held them out.
Max took them from my outstretched hand and quickly riffled through them. ‘There’s only forty here.’ He sounded accusatory.
‘Hang on.’ I dug into my pocket again and managed to separate one note from the others, praying that it was a ten. As I drew it out, I saw to my relief that it was.
‘Fifty,’ I said. I dared anyone to contradict me.
Jochen whistled. For a moment everyone simply stared at the cash in Max’s hand.
‘No,’ said Timo eventually. He shook his head.
‘Yes,’ said Max. He looked at me.
I nodded slowly.
‘You know what this means?’ said Max, and he sounded almost ecstatic. ‘We have to go back up there. To Rote Gertrud’s house. We have to go up there and try it again.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘No, Max,’ Izabela was saying, and I could hear a catch in her voice, as though she were about to start crying, actually crying.
It was Sunday afternoon and we were crammed into Max’s car again, all six of us. Max was driving us up the bumpy track through the Eschweiler Tal, on the way to Rote Gertrud’s house. It had not rained for some days and the mud had hardened into ruts which made the car lurch and bounce unpleasantly.
‘I really don’t want to go back there,’ Izabela continued in a pleading voice.
Timo had an arm around her and was making a show of comforting her, but he wasn’t trying to talk Max out of going. I suspected he was as intrigued as the rest of us. In truth I felt sorry for her. I guessed it was not just the thought of the witch’s house that was upsetting her; it was being railroaded by Max again. It irritated me too, but I was not sorry to be going to Gertrud’s house. After what had happened, I knew I would have had to go there again anyway, to try it out once more. To wish for something I really wanted.
And I would rather go up there with the others than by myself. It had been bad enough the first time, when it had been pitch dark and we had all been rather drunk, but the second visit had chilled me. Standing inside those four walls with all those messages of hate and desperation scrawled upon them had been like standing at the epicentre of an electrical storm: you could almost feel their bleak power crackling in the cold air. No, I didn’t want to be there on my own.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Timo’s head was close to Izabela’s. I wondered whether he would dare kiss her while I was sitting next to them. Perhaps it should have upset me, the fact that he had moved on without bothering to talk to me about it, but actually I was glad. I had plans of my own, something I wanted to wish for which did not include Timo. This just made it easier.
Max braked with unnecessary abruptness and pulled the car over to the side of the track. I was the first out of the car, and while the others were extracting themselves from the cramped space, I went to look at the gap in the bushes which led to Gertrud’s house. I was no tracker, but I wondered whether there might be any clue as to whether someone else had been up to the house – an obviously broken branch or recent footprints. But I could see nothing to indicate that anyone ever went into the woods this way.
The next moment Max was pushing past me, taking the lead as usual, Jochen at his heels like an eager lieutenant. Timo and Izabela followed. Izabela was still protesting in a plaintive voice. Timo murmured something to her and then took her hand in his.
As Hanna followed them she turned to look at me, a sympathetic question in her dark eyes. I smiled at her, deliberately not understanding, then looked away. I put my head down and started up the hill, looking at the ground rather than at Hanna or the others. Through the shrivelled remains of last autumn’s leaves, green shoots were springing up like tiny hands supplicating the sky. By summer the whole area would be a tangle of overgrown bushes and weeds and it would be more difficult to reach the ruined house. Assuming, I thought, we were still visiting it by then. The next experiment might fail and then perhaps the whole thing would peter out. I listened to my own breath rasping in and out as the gradient steepened, and
wondered whether I would be relieved or disappointed if that happened.
As the crumbling grey shape that was Gertrud’s house came into sight, I felt a strange lurch in the pit of my stomach, a rolling sensation that was somehow dreadful and pleasurable at once, like the feeling of riding a roller-coaster. There was something about those scarred and lichenous walls, the blank side of the house like an eyeless face, that made me want to turn tail and run back down the hill to the safety of the car. At the same time I felt an almost irresistible compulsion to go inside, a nagging urge that thrummed to the beat of my heart and the blood pumping through my veins. I was curious, yes; I was dying to know whether a further attempt would be successful, whether my next wish would be granted as easily as the first. It was more than curiosity, though; there was a dark pride in the fact that it was my wish that had been granted. I had been chosen, as surely as if the witch herself had materialized in front of us, her flaming hair swirling about her, and laid a slender hand upon my shoulder. Something had distinguished me and I was strangely satisfied by it. Perhaps I had more in common with Max than I thought. I wanted to be the heroine of the story for once and not just a bit part.
Climbing through the gap in the wall, I did my best to focus on the others and not on the inscriptions which screamed silently from every surface. As usual, Max and Jochen seemed to fill the available space with their bulk, all broad shoulders and loud remarks, shoving each other and guffawing.
‘Timo … ’ Izabela was saying, in a reluctant voice, as though she were resisting something.
I pretended not to hear.
‘Max … ’ Hanna had to repeat his name several times before she had his attention. ‘Are we going to get on with this or not?’
‘Right,’ said Max, snapping to attention with mock seriousness. ‘Who’s got the paper?’
