by Helen Grant
‘What’s this crap?’ he said.
‘You’re … ’ I struggled for words, still wondering if I could recover the situation. ‘You’re going too fast for me.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Kai’s voice was insolent. His hand moved to my hair, snagged it painfully. ‘You think?’
‘Don’t.’ I could hear the tremor in my own voice. I was feeling behind me for the door handle, but I couldn’t find it. In the cramped space I had no room for manoeuvre.
‘Come on, Steffi. You want it.’ Kai easily pushed aside the hand I had wedged between us, and reached for my breast.
Outraged, I tried to slap his hand away. I felt a painful yank on my hair and then we were actually grappling with each other. My head snapped back and thumped painfully against the window.
‘Stop it! Stop it!’
‘Tease.’ Kai was holding both my hands by the wrists now and the words which came spewing out of those perfectly moulded lips were as savage as knives slashing at me. ‘You asked for it,’ he kept saying in between pitiless epithets that pelted me like hailstones. ‘You wanted it.’
He’s completely insane, I thought, panicking. Since I’d left school Kai had only ever seen me in the bakery, dressed up like Snow White, it was true, but generally wilting like an unwatered plant behind the rows of sesame rolls and slices of cheesecake. I had hardly spoken a word to him other than to thank him for his purchases and yet somehow he seemed to think I had been leading him on.
I did my best to close my ears, but it was impossible to shut out the terrible things Kai was saying. He sounded as though he was quoting from some Devil’s list of depravity, under the impression that I had offered him everything on it. There was no time to think how this could be. He was batting at me like an enraged tiger balked of its prey. If we had not been in a confined space with the gearstick between us he would have been actually on top of me. Now he had a hand bunched in the fabric of my shirt, but at least he was no longer holding both my wrists.
Twisting frantically, I managed to reach the door handle and yank it. With my full weight on it, the door opened and I spilt backwards out of it with a savage ripping sound as my shirt tore in Kai’s grasp. He still had the sleeve of my jacket in his other hand, but I twisted like a landed fish and somehow slipped out of the garment altogether, hitting the ground with a jarring thud that sent a jolt of pain through my hip.
I staggered to my feet. I was not sure whether Kai would get out of the car after me, but I dared not wait to find out. I abandoned the jacket but made a grab for my bag, which was lying in the dust by the car’s front wheel. Then I turned and ran for it.
As I pelted up the track, putting as much distance as I could between myself and Kai, I heard the car engine start again. I realized with a thrill of horror that Kai would have to follow me until he came to a space wide enough to turn the car. I didn’t know whether he was angry enough to try to run me down, but I wasn’t prepared to risk it. I flung myself at the overgrown bank to the side of the track and scrambled up it on hands and knees, heedless of the brambles which scratched and tore my skin.
I heard an angry roar as the car went past, throwing up a little shower of dried mud and gravel; in his fury Kai had forgotten about the bodywork. Then I was tearing uphill through the trees, my heart pounding in my chest and my arms flailing. I had no sense of where I was going, no aim but to put as much space as possible between myself and Kai.
I ran until my chest was heaving and every breath seemed to scour hotly up my throat. When I could no longer run at full tilt I continued to walk, stumbling on through the knotted undergrowth, shivering in the cooling evening air. As panic subsided I began to take stock of my situation. The shirt I had selected with such care was ruined, ripped from the shoulder to the hem. My exposed skin was already covered in goosebumps. My hip was throbbing from the impact with the ground and my hair was hanging over my face in great clotted hanks. I looked at my outspread hands, which were bleeding from a dozen tiny scratches and streaked with dirt. None of this seemed very important. My physical appearance was just a shell, a hole in a stone for the wind to shriek through. Inside I felt a deadening numbness. I’m in shock, acknowledged a distant voice in the back of my mind. There was some comfort in this. If I started to feel again I would be overwhelmed. I dreaded to examine the things that Kai had said to me; it was easier not to think about them.
I looked around me, thinking that I should try to find my way back to the track. I was shivering and as night came on it would get colder. I would have a long walk back to the town.
Where am I? I thought, but the next second I knew. I recognized this part of the forest. Perhaps ten metres away from me, a little uphill, was a fat tree trunk covered with spongy-looking green moss. I had sat on it one night drinking Kleiner Feigling from a miniature bottle, while Max and Jochen horsed around in the dark and Max’s plan hung over us with dark foreboding.
I had only to go a little way further and I would be at Rote Gertrud’s. The witch’s house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I wish I could say that as I pushed my way through the undergrowth towards Gertrud’s house I was impelled by terror, or desperation, or righteous anger, that I could not help myself. Instead I felt as though something inside me, some vital human part, had turned to ice. My feet carried me onwards, my hands swept the overhanging branches aside, my eyes scanned the uneven ground, but I might just as well have been a robot for all I felt, marching mindlessly on metal claws over the surface of some unknown planet.
I reached the house quickly, rounded the blank wall with its corroded-looking covering of lichen and stepped through the hole in the facade. Every other time I had been here, I had been with someone else; now I was completely alone, and night was coming. There was still enough light to see the scratches and scrawls which clustered on the stone walls like the muffled clamour of the long-dead. I moved among them, the only living thing.
Where was the box? I found it nestling in a cluster of rotting beech leaves and picked it up. I was not surprised when I opened it to find that my slip of paper had gone, the one with the wish for Kai von Jülich on it. Once again, the other five remained. At some point I would think about that, about why it was only my wishes which were granted, why everyone else’s lay ignored in the box. For now it was enough that the method worked.
I put the open box on top of a chunk of fallen masonry. Then I fumbled for my bag. I had a pen, a cheap one with the bakery’s name on it. Finding something to write on was a little more difficult, but eventually I discovered a handwritten receipt from the bookshop in the town stuffed into my purse. The back of the receipt was blank and there was enough space to write the dooms of half a dozen people on it.
I picked up the box and sat down on the chunk of stone. I smoothed out the paper carefully on the lid of the box. I pressed the button at the end of the pen, so that the ballpoint sprang out. I felt perfect, icy calm as I did all this, and it was not until the point of the pen touched the paper and danced across it that I realized I was shaking too badly to write. Hot tears were leaking from the corners of my eyes. My hand and arm shuddered with the effort of trying to control the pen. A sob forced its way up from my throat.
Rote Gertrud, do this one thing for me, I thought. If you hated the men who dragged you out of your house and burned you – help me. It was irrational, but at that moment I was beyond reason.
The first time I tried to write anything the pen tore right through the paper. By then I was crying loudly and tears were running down my face. It took me a long time to control the pen well enough to write legibly, but in the end I managed it.
Kai von Jülich, die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When I finally emerged from the edge of the forest on to the track, it was getting dark and I was so cold that my teeth were chattering. There was no sign of Kai and his ostentatious car apart from a curving mark in the rough surface of the track and a little spray of gravel. I stood and listened before I stepped ri
ght out from under the trees, but there was no sound of an engine idling, no human voice or footsteps audible. I found my jacket lying on the ground, one sleeve turned completely inside out, from where Kai had tried to hang on to me, and the shoulder seam parting. There was a dusty tyre mark right across the front of it. I brushed it down as best I could with bloodless fingers and shrugged it on. It was better than nothing but I was still freezing. I shoved my hands into the pockets and began to walk towards the town.
As I walked, I tried not to think about what had happened. In fact I tried not to think at all. I switched off and drifted away from the aching cold and the pain in my limbs and the weary trek ahead. I let the world shrink to the sound of my feet stumbling over the rough surface of the track and the sound of my breathing.
It took some time to reach the place where the track led on to a tarmacked road surface and then to walk the rest of the way into the town. I thought that if I stayed off the main road and kept to the footpath which ran parallel to the railway line, I might avoid meeting anyone. What an observer would make of my tangled hair and torn shirt didn’t bear thinking about. I thought I had a fat lip too; at some point during the struggle with Kai I must have bitten it.
My luck held all the way to the Werther Tor. As I limped through it, I could see that the pavement cafe was still open. Rather than parade myself right past anyone who was enjoying a last drink at one of the outdoor tables, I elected to turn right, along the narrow street running along the inside of the town wall. I thought I might walk down the backstreets unnoticed and slip into the bakery without being seen at all. But at that point my luck ran out.
‘Steffi Nett,’ said a voice I knew and loathed, a voice which positively suppurated disapproval.
Now I thought my legs would give way beneath me. No, howled a voice in the back of my mind. Not her. Why does it have to be her? Not Frau Kessel. Please. Caught in compromising circumstances, twice in one day – it had to be some sort of record.
‘Hi,’ I muttered under my breath, keeping my head down, avoiding her eye in the hope that she would not look closely at me. I tried to push past her but she was too quick for me. For someone in her eighties, she was surprisingly nimble. She grasped me by the upper arm, her wiry old fingers digging into the flesh. It was like having a very large bird of prey land on my shoulder, talons outspread for purchase.
‘You could have run me over, you two,’ she hissed as I tried to pull away. ‘Driving like that. There’s a speed limit in the town, you know.’
There were any number of replies to that, such as I wasn’t the one driving and What business is it of yours?, but as usual I was unable to articulate a single one. My tongue was as useless as a stone. I shook back my hair and did my best to give Frau Kessel a defiant look, but I knew I had made a mistake the moment I saw her expression change.
Her eyes narrowed behind her spectacles as she took in the rumpled hair, the puffy lip and – horrors! – the rent in the front of my shirt, through which a glimpse of bra was no doubt visible. I grabbed at my jacket and pulled it shut, but it was too late. Those beady old eyes had taken everything in.
‘Where is he?’ she asked me in glacial tones.
I didn’t bother to pretend innocence, to ask whom she meant. Instead I did my best to extricate my arm from her pincer-like grasp.
‘I have to go,’ I said, cursing my own feebleness. I was up to my neck in it anyway. I might just as well have given her an earful – it couldn’t have made things any worse.
‘Didn’t bother to run you home, then?’ said that relentless voice. Frau Kessel leaned closer and I caught a whiff of her scent, sickly sweet and powdery, an old-lady smell. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said in a venomous undertone. ‘I know it’s the modern way. But nobody respects a girl like that.’
She didn’t have to spell it out. I wrenched my arm out of her bony grasp and scurried away down the street, clinging to the shadows, the jacket pulled tight around my body. I didn’t meet anyone else on the way to the bakery. The backstreets were deserted. It was just evil luck that the one person I had run into was the last person I wanted to meet.
When I came into the flat, my parents were in the living room, watching television. I could see the ghostly blue light dancing on the wall and hear the unmistakable sound of Klara Klein’s singing drifting through the air. I guessed they were watching a memorial programme.
‘I’m home,’ I shouted, but I didn’t go into the room. Nor did I wait to see whether they would come out. I scuttled into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I felt filthy, cold and so weary that I could have lain down on the fluffy peach bathmat and gone to sleep.
With an effort I made myself turn on the shower and while I was waiting for the water to run hot I went over to the mirror to inspect the damage.
I looked as though I had been in a fight, which I supposed I had. The bitten lip had a bee-stung appearance, I had a streak of mascara under my right eye and my hair looked as though I had just got up after a particularly bad night, all of which had no doubt fuelled Frau Kessel’s prurient imaginings. I shuddered to contemplate the monstrous thoughts which must have slithered and bumped their way through the cloacal tunnels of her mind.
The shirt was ruined beyond all hope of repair, of course, and even if it hadn’t been, I would never want to wear either that or the jacket again. I dragged them off and left them in a ball on the bathroom floor; they would be going straight into the dustbin. Then I stepped into the shower.
I stood there, letting the scalding water soak my hair and cascade over my skin. The water was as hot as I could stand it, but still I was shivering.
I stayed under the shower for as long as I could, but eventually my father banged on the door.
‘Are you going to be in there forever?’ he bellowed.
I turned off the water. ‘Five minutes,’ I called back.
I suppose I spent four and a half of those minutes staring at myself in the mirror, in the porthole I had rubbed out of the steamed-up surface. My hair was dripping wet but clean. My lip was still swollen, but now that the smudged mascara was gone, my face didn’t look as bad as it had before. What gave me away were my eyes: they looked enormous in my face, bleak and haunted.
I tried a smile but it was a vain attempt. My parents would see at a glance that there was something wrong; there was no hiding it. In the end I spent the last thirty seconds tucking myself into a thick fluffy towel and snatching up my clothes from the floor. Then I opened the door and bolted for my bedroom.
‘Bathroom’s free!’ I shouted, and slammed the door shut. Explanations could wait for another time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
On Saturday morning Hanna called at the bakery. My mother, who was hurrying between tables carrying a tray laden with coffee cups, directed her upstairs to the flat. I was skulking in the kitchen, having waited until both my parents were down in the bakery before coming out of my room. My lip looked better this morning but I still didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Hanna had been knocking for a full minute before I gave in and opened the door.
‘Steffi, you look terrible,’ was the first thing she said as she walked past me into the flat. ‘What happened?’
I didn’t say anything. I just walked back to the kitchen, sat down at the table and picked up my mug. The fruit tea I had made myself was cold. It hadn’t tasted that good in the beginning; now it was undrinkable. I put the mug down again.
‘What’s up?’ said Hanna. She sat down opposite me and put her elbows on the table.
‘Nothing.’
‘Come off it, Steffi.’
Kai had uttered those very words. I couldn’t help it; a little sound escaped, more a squeak than a gasp. I hugged myself, huddling inside my dressing-gown.
‘What?’ said Hanna. She put out a hand and touched my arm. ‘What is it? Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’
Miserably, I nodded.
‘Did you have a row with your parents?’
�
��No. It was … ’ I thought. ‘It was Gertrud’s house. You know.’
‘Your wish? It came true again?’
‘Yes,’ I said in a tiny voice.
Hanna whistled. ‘That’s amazing. But what’s the problem? You must have wished for something you wanted, didn’t you?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘What did you wish for?’ persisted Hanna. She shook my arm gently, as though trying to wake me from a dream. How I wished that were possible. I would have given anything for the whole episode to have been nothing but a nightmare. ‘Come on, what was it?’
‘I wanted … ’ I sighed. Everyone would know, sooner or later. If I didn’t tell them, Frau Kessel would. ‘I wanted a date with Kai von Jülich.’
‘No!’ Hanna was impressed. ‘And did he? Ask you out, I mean?’
I looked down at the tablecloth. ‘Yes.’
Hanna whistled. ‘He did? Steffi, that’s – it’s unbelievable. When are you going?’
‘Last night,’ I said. ‘We went last night.’
‘Wow.’ Hanna sat back and stared at me. ‘You’re not … you’re not kidding me, are you?’
I shook my head.
‘That’s … incredible,’ she said. ‘He just came up and asked you out? Did he come here, to the bakery?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, how was it? Are you going to go out again? This is amazing,’ she added, more to herself than to me. She seemed to have forgotten that I was sitting there, looking more like a guest at a wake than someone in the grip of a new romance.
‘No,’ I said, rather more emphatically than I had intended.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s a pig,’ I blurted out, and promptly burst into tears.
‘Oh … ’ For once, Hanna seemed lost for words.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, scrubbing furiously at my eyes with the back of my fist. ‘It’s just … he was horrible, Hanna.’ I let out a juddering sigh. ‘Julius said he wasn’t a nice guy, and he was right.’
