Wish Me Dead

by Helen Grant

  I stared at her, stunned. ‘You mean … ’

  My mother nodded. ‘She had a termination.’

  My eyes were irresistibly drawn to the wall behind her, to the crucifix which hung there. I could barely conceive of the strain it must have put on the whole family, trying to reconcile what Magdalena had done with the line the Church would inevitably have taken. If the news had got out – which it almost certainly would have done when Magdalena’s pregnancy, reported all over town by Frau Kessel and undenied by our family, had failed to progress – her life would not have been worth living. My sister had had a choice: to continue with a pregnancy she clearly had not wished for or planned, or to terminate it and have everyone in the town know it. In either case she would be torn to shreds by the town gossips, led by Frau Kessel. And my parents, panicking, had not supported her. And so …

  ‘She just couldn’t stay,’ my mother said. ‘She left. Left the town and left us.’

  I looked at her haggard face and I could not find it in my heart to blame her. Whatever my mother’s failings, it was clear she had paid for them tenfold.

  As for Frau Kessel, I felt a hatred so pure that it was almost cold. She had wrought this evil in all our lives. If she had managed to keep her prurient suppositions to herself, Magdalena could have made her own decision in her own time; she need never have been hounded out of the town she had grown up in. My parents need never have suffered the pain of losing a daughter as completely as though they had seen her laid in her grave and I might have had a sister there throughout my lonely childhood.

  Frau Kessel had not just wrecked our past, I thought; she had ruined the present and all our futures too. If it were not for her, Magdalena might still have been here in the bakery, mixing up dough for Bauernbrot and sprinkling poppy seeds on the rolls, while I, like the younger son in a fairy tale, had gone out to seek my fortune in some unnamed place, with nothing much in my pockets but no weight of expectation on my shoulders either, and no fear of letting down the ones I loved. The old witch had cursed us as effectively as if she had really laid a spell on us.

  I suppose my mother finally noticed that I was silent. Perhaps she thought I was shocked, or abashed. Petrified at the power the old lady wielded. At any rate, she reached over and grasped my hand, her expression urgent.

  ‘Steffi … it was wrong, what Frau Kessel did to Magdalena. I won’t ever forgive her. Never,’ she said with bitter emphasis. ‘But … ’ She paused. ‘It wasn’t right to let her hound someone out of the town. We let her win. I’m not doing that again.’

  ‘I can’t just ignore it,’ I said furiously. ‘Not if she’s going round telling people that.’ I was imagining myself in the cafe, clad in the loathed green dirndl, serving coffee with cream and filled rolls. Everyone’s eyes dropping to the front of the dress, as my mother’s had, speculating. Is it true? How far on is she? Did Kai von Jülich really have to leave town over it? Perhaps some particularly prurient soul would lean right over the counter to get a good look.

  ‘I’m not telling you to ignore it,’ said my mother. Her blue eyes were bright, their expression forceful under her knitted brows. ‘We have to fight her. This has gone on long enough. She can’t go around interfering with other people’s lives – ruining them – like this.’

  Why not? I thought bitterly. I supposed Frau Kessel was in her mid-eighties now. If her poisonous career had begun when she was a teenager, that meant it had spanned over six decades. Nothing would stop her except the Grim Reaper, and even then I fully expected that she would be dragged off to the Underworld still spouting stories about her neighbours and preparing to sneak on them to Satan. She ruined my sister’s life, I thought. She made the town Magdalena grew up in too hot to handle. She broke my parents’ hearts. And if she can, she’s going to do it again – only this time it will be worse, because everyone will remember Magdalena and the whole thing will be dragged up again.

  I looked at my mother’s face, at the grief etched into every line, and I wished with all my heart that I could do something to save her from this pain. But I was not sassy like Hanna, nor arrogant like Kai von Jülich. Fight Frau Kessel? How? I simply lacked the weapons for a fight.

  Perhaps it was the very thought of weapons that did it. An image formed in my mind, so sharp and true it had an almost photographic quality. A dark canopy of trees, dripping wet and rotten, and under them the grey and crumbling bulk of a ruined house, its walls blotched and stained with lichen. And through the jagged holes in the walls, something briefly glimpsed, a flash of brilliant colour as vivid as flame. The red-headed witch, flitting about her former home.

  I don’t think my mind was entirely made up then; that didn’t happen until later. But something changed all the same. Now I knew: I did have the weapons.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Over the next few days I thought of almost nothing else but Frau Kessel and the question of whether to curse her. The weather was bad – days on end of rain running down the bakery windows in streams – so there were few customers and plenty of time to ponder the question.

  She was a thoroughly malicious old wretch, that was for certain. In small towns you expect a certain amount of gossip, but Frau Kessel took things to an entirely new level. To compare ordinary street-corner chat to her malevolent interference was like comparing a sniffle to the bubonic plague. I wondered how many other lives she had derailed with her pernicious meddling. I remembered the very first time my friends and I had been up to Gertrud’s house in the woods and Max had hatched his plan to kill off Klara Klein by magic. It’d be a public service, Jochen had said. He had been joking, but now things were deadly serious. I thought that if someone were to make Frau Kessel vanish, it really would be a public service.

  The compulsion to try was as strong as if Rote Gertrud herself had been standing there unseen at my side, whispering her poison into my ear. In folk tales, goodness so often goes with purity and simplicity; evil is as slippery and persuasive as a lawyer. You can’t curse people on someone else’s say-so, ran the argument. They might be lying, or mistaken. They might have some crooked motive of their own. But you know Frau Kessel is a blight on the town and the lives of everyone in it. It has to be done. You know it.

  But the clincher came on Thursday night, when Hanna called. My parents had actually gone out, a relatively rare occurrence since my father was always up so early, and about half an hour after they left, Hanna dropped by.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, as I opened the street door, and I saw her gaze flicker up and down me. She was doing her best not to be obvious, but she couldn’t resist looking, just as my mother hadn’t been able to. It was ludicrous. Even if I had been pregnant there wouldn’t be anything to see yet. I felt like screaming.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, biting my lip. I stood back to let her in.

  She didn’t waste any time. As soon as we were both upstairs in my parents’ stuffy-looking living room, she said, ‘What’s going on with you and Kai?’

  ‘There’s nothing between me and Kai,’ I said, sitting on the arm of the overstuffed sofa. I didn’t feel like sinking back into the soft cushions. I felt safer perched up here; I could make a run for it if necessary.

  Hanna leaned against the wall, staring at me through the untidy dark hair which flopped over her eyes. ‘I came over to warn you,’ she said eventually. ‘People are saying … ’ She hesitated.

  ‘That I’m pregnant and Kai had to leave town because of it?’ I finished wearily.

  Hanna nodded. ‘That and … well, that you … ’ She grimaced, not wanting to come out with it. ‘You threw yourself at him. You did it on purpose.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ I choked out.

  ‘Calm down,’ said Hanna, pushing herself away from the wall and coming towards me slowly, as though I were a dangerous animal. In truth I felt like one: had Frau Kessel been before me at that moment I would have flown at her.

  ‘I’m not calming down. It’s Frau Kessel. I’ll kill her. She’s got away with this for too
long. If it were you, you wouldn’t calm down.’

  The floodgates were open now. It all came pouring out in a tear-soaked tangle of words, half sobbed and half shouted.

  When my rage had almost burned itself out, and I was beginning to sniff and hiccup, Hanna said in a quiet voice, ‘Did you mean what you said? That you wanted to kill Frau Kessel?’

  ‘You mean – hex her, like Klara Klein?’ I said, despising the fake innocence I heard in my own voice – as though the same idea had not already occurred to me.

  Hanna nodded. ‘Why not? She deserves it.’

  ‘If I thought it would really work … ’ I said. But I shook my head. ‘This is nuts.’

  ‘Why is it nuts?’ said Hanna. ‘It’s always worked before – for you, anyway.’

  It hasn’t, I almost said. Kai von Jülich is still wandering around out there, alive and well, after I wished death on him – at least I suppose he is. But Hanna didn’t know that; nobody else did.

  ‘Hanna? If we do it, I don’t want the others to know.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  Because Jochen’s already asked me to hex his stepfather and I said no. I chewed my lip.

  ‘It’ll be a pain getting to Gertrud’s house without Max’s car,’ said Hanna.

  ‘I know, I just … think it would be better if we didn’t tell too many people.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Hanna’s voice was sceptical. ‘Let’s just tell Max, then. Nobody else.’

  ‘He’ll never keep his mouth shut,’ I objected, but I was weakening.

  ‘Oh yes, he will. If he thinks we’re going to try to kill off Frau Kessel, he’ll keep his beak shut. He won’t be able to resist – just to see if it actually works.’

  I thought about it for a little longer, but really it was a foregone conclusion. We were going to the witch’s house once more and I was going to see for myself if the magic would really work again. I wanted Frau Kessel gone – for good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Later that night, long after my parents had come home and taken themselves off to bed, I lay awake in my own room, thinking. I thought about Max and Hanna, and wondered whether they would really keep their mouths shut if we did go back to the ruined house and hex Frau Kessel. I thought about Frau Kessel herself, about that sweet old-ladyish face which concealed such malice within, like a ripe peach with black rot at its heart. But mostly I thought about my sister, Magdalena.

  Something was bothering me about my memories of Magdalena, something which nagged away at the back of my mind like a forgotten appointment. I remembered the day we went to Rote Gertrud’s house together, pushing our way uphill through overgrown vegetation. It must have been summer, then. With everything grown up so high it was not as easy to reach the ruined house as it was during the winter months, especially not if you were accompanied by an unwilling primary school child, who was probably shorter than a lot of the overhanging bushes and also very reluctant to walk so far uphill. Magdalena must really have wanted to go there. Why?

  I racked my brains, trying to squeeze out every nuance from the scant memories. But I could not remember Magdalena saying anything to me. I supposed that she would not have confided in me anyway, given that she had been old enough to vote whereas I was still running around in ankle socks.

  I remembered seeing the witch’s house. Magdalena had been wearing something yellow, something the bright colour of sunflower petals – a long shirt or a light rain jacket, I thought – and it had stood out brilliantly against the dingy grey of the walls. I remembered standing just outside the house, looking in, as my sister moved about inside it. I hadn’t noticed the scrawled writing on the walls then, or if I had it had interested me so little that I had forgotten it.

  What had she been doing? I turned over restlessly in my bed. Trying to pick out anything useful from the memory was like watching a scrap of old film over and over again, hoping to see something new in it in spite of the blurs and the scratches. I had a vague feeling that Magdalena had been in the far corner, the furthest one from the jagged hole which now represented the door of the house. What she had been doing, or why, escaped me.

  Why does anyone go there? I asked myself, and then the answer popped into my head, so simple and obvious that I wondered why I had never seen it before. Why did anyone go up to Gertrud’s house? Magdalena had been making a wish.

  I wondered whether she too had had the idea of taking her revenge on Frau Kessel, or indeed on anyone else – the father of the unwanted baby, perhaps. But now I was speculating; as far as Magdalena’s intentions went, my memory was an utter blank. There was not even the ghost of a recollection.

  I rolled on to my back again and gazed up into the dark, eyes wide open but not seeing, watching instead the memory of a decade ago, of bright yellow and mouldering grey. I’ll look, I told myself. When I go back to Gertrud’s house with Max and Hanna, I’ll go to that corner and look.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  This time I insisted on going to Rote Gertrud’s house in broad daylight, which meant waiting for Sunday afternoon. Max was not happy; being his usual impulsive self, he would have preferred to go as soon as Hanna had called him on Thursday evening, regardless of the oncoming night. Then he argued for Saturday, but Hanna couldn’t come that day, and I wasn’t prepared to go alone with Max. Since the incident with Kai I had been prey to all sorts of morbid suspicions, not helped by the fact that Achim Zimmer’s insinuating manner had been cranked up another notch, until he seemed marinated in his own slime like an octopus in its own ink. I was afraid that someone – and by someone I was thinking chiefly of Frau Kessel – would see me out and about with yet another man and draw their own conclusions.

  I was also afraid of what Kai might have told Max about me. Max and I had met each other when we were both in kindergarten and in theory he should have known me well enough to realize that I was not the femme fatale of Bad Münstereifel. All the same, I remembered that look he had given me the day he saw me feeding the ducks, the broad grin showing all those gleaming white teeth, and I thought that I would not like to stake my peace of mind on it. For once I stuck to my guns and insisted on Sunday afternoon.

  Two days passed between declaring my resolve to Hanna and actually going to Gertrud’s house to put it into action. It was long enough for me to have changed my mind, to let common sense talk me down from the ledge I had climbed on to. But there were forces driving me towards action, as surely as a savage dog nipping at a sheep’s ankles can drive it towards a cliff edge. I would be serving in the cafe and someone would come in, an old woman of Frau Kessel’s age or thereabouts, and while I was serving her coffee and cakes she would be looking me up and down with a speculative eye, wondering. Or I would step outside to clear one of the tables and see a green-clad figure at the end of the street, and whether it was Frau Kessel or not my stomach would lurch horribly. Was she talking about me, even at this very minute, spreading her poison through the town like a terrorist dropping toxins into the water supply? I would glance at my mother, neat in her dirndl, and wonder if it was my imagination that she looked suddenly older, more tired.

  On Saturday night there were only four of us hanging around the snack bar. Izabela and Timo had gone off somewhere together, in a break from our long-established habit. He had never done that with me, I reflected rather sadly. It was not that I envied Izabela her catch, but it was dispiriting to think that in all our three years he had never been that desperate to get me alone.

  That left Max, Hanna, Jochen and me, and since Jochen was the only one excluded from our plans for Sunday, the evening dragged. Max, Hanna and I were unable to talk freely and Jochen was still offhand with me. It was a relief when the evening was over and I was able to go home.

  The following afternoon at three we were struggling uphill through the woods once more. It had not rained again but the ground was still spongy underfoot. I was determined to keep up with Max, although his legs were longer than mine; they scissored across the rough ground with th
e savage speed of a tailor’s shears hacking through cloth. My heart was thumping wildly and I was horribly out of breath, but I forced myself to keep pace with him. I was imagining what would happen if either he or Hanna made it into Gertrud’s house before I did and opened the box first. The inevitable questions. Max’s grin when he discovered my failed attempt to wipe out Kai von Jülich, which he surely would. Kai had left, not died, so I supposed my message would still be there in the box, untouched. I picked up speed.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Max, but I ignored him.

  When I finally stumbled into the ruined house my lungs felt as though they were about to burst, but I didn’t stop to catch my breath. I was already on my knees, fumbling the little carved box open. I thought I would grab the scrap of paper with my last wish scrawled on it and tear it into tiny pieces, or even swallow it if necessary; anything so long as Max didn’t read it. I rifled through the papers, raising my eyebrows as I read Max’s wish, wincing as I read Jochen’s. But my wish had gone. I counted the pieces of paper and there were only five. I looked down, wondering if the sixth had fluttered out, but there was nothing to see. On that brown and mulchy floor a piece of white paper would have stood out like a patch of snow.

  OK, keep calm. I counted the pieces of paper again. Five. I stood up, the box in my hands, and looked all around me. No paper on the floor, not unless you included a chocolate bar wrapper, torn and faded.

  ‘What’s the matter, Steffi?’ asked Max, with that taunting grin on his face.

  Sometimes I almost hated him. I imagined him opening his closed hand to show me that he had had the missing piece of paper all the time. I would have liked to fly at him with my nails, but instead I waited, frowning and chewing my lip. He did nothing. His hands were empty.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Hanna in a more sympathetic voice, nudging my arm.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘My wish has gone, that’s all.’ I shrugged, trying to look unconcerned.