Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Parlabane gave her a slightly chiding look.

  Mairi shrugged, unabashed.

  ‘Serendipity is often a one-way illusion that takes a hell of a lot of work and planning behind the scenes.’

  ‘And people say I’m cynical.’

  The Brauereihallen was busier than Parlabane would have expected for late afternoon, a very mixed crowd thronging its central concourse, a courtyard once open to the elements that was now enclosed by a glass ceiling. Scruffy student-looking types lustily drank beer from steins at long tables, while a middle-aged arty clientele quaffed white wine outside a small salon housing an exhibition of paintings.

  Parlabane tried not to hate all of them, but it was a big ask. He felt like one lot represented his irretrievable past and the other his unavoidable future.

  Mairi led him to a place away from both constituencies, into an enticingly gloomy cavern from which he could hear Foals thumping from the sound system. It was the kind of retreat where the ambience, the lighting and the music would make it difficult to discern whether the hands on the clock indicated ten past four in the afternoon or the morning.

  Parlabane got the drinks in while Mairi went to the ladies. He carried them to a table bolted to a wall covered in a panoply of overlapping flyers that looked six layers deep in places. There were ads for forthcoming gigs, albums, art shows, poetry readings and club nights layering over posters for events past like a fresh fall of leaves. He scanned the names and logos as he took a first sip of his beer, almost choking on it when his eye alighted on a recently pinned-up sheet of A5.

  At just that moment Mairi came hurrying towards the table, clutching a copy of the same notice that she must have found in the toilets. It showed a black-and-white photograph of Heike, a classic shot of her with the curly blonde crop and white denim jacket. Underneath were three lines of text, the top of which consisted of a single word in a large, bold font: ‘VERMISST’.

  The text meant little to either of them, apart from the name ‘Heike Gunn’ and the word ‘Kontakt’ next to a mobile phone number.

  Mairi leaned over and snagged the attention of a waitress with a peace-sign tattoo on her neck, who was clearing glasses from an adjacent table.

  ‘Can you tell me what this means?’ she asked, pointing to the top line.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she answered. ‘It means “missing”.’

  Stolen Glances

  Damien was right about touring. We played six dates in France, and from as much as I saw of it we could have been anywhere. The only sights we got to take in were through the bus windows, the only flavour of being somewhere different coming literally in the food.

  And your day off will be in Gdansk, he had said, but so far there had been no days off. However, sometimes the schedule threw us a bone. We were playing two nights in Barcelona because the first one sold out so fast (technically it was the second one, the extra show being added to what would have been a free date after Bordeaux). There was no night off, but it meant a day without travelling, so we got some time to see the place.

  A trip to the Nou Camp had been a big draw for most of the guys, even the ones who didn’t like football. Heike and I opted for more cultural pursuits, taking a walk through the old town to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Heike talked knowledgeably and sometimes passionately about the exhibits, making comparisons to other artists I hadn’t heard of. She wasn’t just firing off references or spouting her manifesto: the way she discussed certain painters, it was like she was talking about family friends. Then I realised that she probably was. Her father was sometimes described as a reclusive individual, but he had been really well known in European art circles.

  Whenever I thought I was getting to know Heike, something like this would make me realise I was kidding myself. She had grown up on a small Scottish island, like I had, but she came from another world. Sometimes when I looked at her it was as though she was a work of art herself: intriguing, provocative, beautiful, but closed off, protected by a wall of glass, something you could only glimpse or visit. She was something you could never have to yourself, something precious that would never truly be yours.

  Just to underline this, as we browsed one of the exhibitions I noticed that one of our fellow visitors was spending more time looking at Heike than at the paintings. I was pretty sure I had seen her near the front at the show last night. She was about my age, her hair dyed a cream-porcelain blonde and styled to match Heike’s before the start of the tour. Her denim jacket was a lot like the one Heike wore in the video for ‘Dark Station’. Needy little clone, I thought. Why would you be trying so hard to be somebody else, somebody specific? Heike didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she had become used to dealing with it by pretending not to notice.

  ‘How did your TV thing go yesterday, by the way?’ I asked her, as we sat down for a much-needed caffeine hit in a café along the road from the museum. I had avoided the subject up until now, still feeling awkward and embarrassed about sleeping in and standing her up.

  ‘It didn’t,’ she replied. ‘I had no sooner arrived at the station than I got a text from Jan saying sorry, but the producer had called to tell him it wasn’t happening any more. I got a nice train ride out of it, I suppose, but I would have preferred the extra couple of hours in my bed.’

  I wished I hadn’t drunk so much in Bordeaux. I could have had her all to myself on that train, nothing to do but watch the countryside go by and talk for hours with no one there to interrupt.

  ‘How was your journey?’’ she asked.

  I thought about saying it was uneventful, but couldn’t be sure she didn’t already know something. That knowing look in her eye could have been still in reference to my hangover, but it could have been more than that.

  I told her about the extra passengers, and my suspicion about Heike’s hastily arranged TV interview, especially with it having been just as quickly cancelled.

  ‘Hmm.’ Heike sounded non-committal, like she was giving it some thought and trying not to jump to conclusions.

  ‘These things do sometimes happen like that. Surely I’m not so scary that Jan feels he has to get me out of the way in case I object to him giving some girls a lift.’

  ‘The deal was that they would be wearing those Savage Earth Heart T-shirts at the Serpent gig. Maybe he didn’t think you’d be delighted about going down the T&A route of advertising.’

  ‘No, I’m bloody not,’ Heike said.

  I took a nibble of my pastry, which was when I noticed that the girl from the gallery was sitting a few tables away, close to the door. She looked nervous, pulling at the sleeves of her jacket like she was cold.

  ‘Don’t stare,’ I told her, ‘but I think you’ve got a stalker.’

  I gestured with my eyes at Heike’s out-of-date doppelgänger.

  Heike didn’t turn her head; didn’t even look.

  ‘Yes, I spotted her. She was at the museum too.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d noticed.’

  ‘I was actually trying as hard as she was to steal glimpses without getting caught. I spotted her down the front last night. She seems familiar and it’s doing my head in that I can’t think from where.’

  ‘The mirror, maybe?’ I asked, unsure if Heike was winding me up.

  ‘No, it’s not that: it’s her face. I can picture it with different hair. I’ve definitely seen her before.’

  It bothered me that she was intrigued by this wannabe. Surely there were dozens just like her, nothing unique or even interesting about any of them.

  Heike glanced across more noticeably.

  ‘Maybe we should invite her to join us,’ she suggested. ‘Let her get a photo together, talk for a few minutes.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  Heike smiled and stood up. As soon as she got to her feet, the girl by the door grabbed her bag and scurried away, looking spooked.

  ‘Smart girl,’ I said. ‘Knows her mythology: it never works out well when the mortals get too close to the gods.’
/>   Heike sat down again, staring through the window as the girl disappeared into the flow of pedestrians.

  I wondered aloud whether we’d see her again tonight, but Heike wasn’t listening.

  I had seen her do this before. She had zoned out, her mind elsewhere; not having drifted, but instantly transported beyond the here and now. Back to her home planet, maybe.

  ‘Gods and mortals,’ she suddenly said, alert again, giving me an insistent look, as though I was holding back some answer she needed.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘For a song. It fits with something I’ve been knocking around in my head, lyrically and musically. I have to work on it now. I need to play you what I’ve got, see where it goes when you bring in the fiddle.’

  ‘All our stuff is at the venue,’ I said.

  ‘Where better? That place had great acoustics.’

  And like that we were on our way, Heike dropping thirty euros on the table without bothering to ask for the bill.

  Time could melt when we were playing like this. It was hypnotic, a strange state between meditation and intense concentration as we went over and over the same bars, reinforcing certain phrases, gradually evolving others. It was as though we were willing something into existence, but neither of us quite knew what it sounded like yet: we would only recognise it when we heard it.

  We were alone in an empty theatre, the space around us making us feel weirdly enclosed, cocooned in this precious act, this coming-together. I had never felt so close to Heike, not even when I held her that night in London. Unlike then, I felt no anxiety, no tension. We both knew what we were about, drawing upon each other’s sounds, pushing each other to reach connections we could not have happened upon alone.

  It was better than playing to a crowd, because I didn’t have to worry about how it sounded to anyone else, only to Heike. I didn’t have to share her either: no other instrumentation, nobody else leading the beat, just two people who couldn’t have this without each other.

  After all of it, though, we still only had a rough sketch of what we were trying to achieve; a short, half-heard preview of a song.

  It wound down naturally: there’s a point where you just know that if you keep going, you will only be grinding gears. It was also the point where I became aware that I must have been ignoring my bladder for an hour.

  I headed backstage to use the loo, but found the dressing-room door locked. As I went further down the corridor in search of another, I became aware of voices but no words. I heard low rumblings combined with giggly approval, and something else, emotionally heightened but weirdly muted.

  I turned a corner and found myself at the open door to a cluttered office. I only saw what was inside for a moment, but it was more than enough: enough for the image to be imprinted in my mind, and enough to be seen myself.

  I saw a young girl bent over a desk, naked, being screwed from behind by Dean the roadie, his horrible blotchy-white beer belly wobbling as he thrust. Standing at the other end of the table was the venue manager, a balding middle-aged guy whose name I never bothered catching. His dick was in the girl’s mouth, her hand holding it at the base.

  The guy had a beer in his hand. So did Dean. I’m pretty sure there was coke on the table as well. The venue manager had his back to me, but I was unable to avoid meeting the eyes of both Dean and the girl.

  He winked at me. He actually winked at me. He was loving the fact that I had seen this, enjoying my discomfort. It was like he was drawing power from it. Everything I read in his expression made me sick, but none of it made me feel so bad as what I saw in the girl’s.

  I recalled Heike’s look of affront by the hotel lift after Brixton: like I had walked in on her naked, at best intruding; at worst worming my way in.

  This girl’s eyes showed something simpler, bleaker, colder: she hated me for seeing this. She wasn’t angry or upset. This was not just about embarrassment, about being seen naked or caught in the act. I had witnessed something she had a far deeper desire to conceal.

  I had seen her shame.

  Heike knew something was wrong as soon as she looked at me. I had taken some time in the toilets to compose myself, but it was going to take more than splashing some water on my face to hide what I felt.

  I told her what I had seen, and as I did I couldn’t help thinking this was exactly what Dean wanted.

  Heike’s reacted with distaste, but not surprise.

  ‘You don’t seem taken aback,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a first, safe to say. And I’m trying not to overreact or jump to conclusions. Not saying I’ll manage, but I’m giving it a shot.’

  She shrugged, though she was obviously disgusted.

  ‘Unfortunately it’s not unknown for silly wee girls to blow the crew in order to get tickets or a backstage pass. Can’t see the groupie types putting out for access to us, though. I mean, I could understand if it was for Serpent…’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what was going on here,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, I’m no expert, but I’d have thought the type you just described would be a bit more, I don’t know, shameless. This didn’t look like someone using sex to get where she wanted.’

  Heike gave it some thought, then looked hard at me.

  ‘Was she one of the girls from the bus?’

  ‘I honestly couldn’t say,’ I told her, which was the truth. ‘I only saw her for a second, and I didn’t really see enough of the girls yesterday. I was sitting behind them most of the time. I wasn’t at my sharpest either,’ I admitted.

  ‘Plus it must be hard to get a positive ID from a face that is largely obscured by cock,’ she said acidly.

  As we were making our way out of the theatre a little while later, we heard footsteps behind us in the corridor and saw the girl walking quickly towards the exit, head down. She tried to ignore us, avoiding my eye as she attempted to hurry past.

  ‘Hey,’ Heike said, waving an arm in a way that was impossible to miss. The girl did her best to pretend she had seen nothing. She had a look of alarm on her face like someone minding her own business who thought she was about to be mugged.

  It was probably a long time since anybody had ignored Heike, and she was having none of it. She skipped ahead and barred the doorway, standing with her palms up.

  The girl stood there helplessly, eyes darting left and right as though looking for options.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Heike asked. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘It’s cool,’ she replied, flashing an empty smile.

  ‘What was going on back there?’ Heike enquired, not in a disapproving way, more just interested.

  The girl gave a coy shrug.

  ‘Nothing. Just having a little fun. It’s cool, okay?’

  The words sounded rehearsed, like stock phrases. They came across almost as natural as the smile and shrug.

  Heike stepped aside and let her out. She all but ran across the pavement to the road and jumped in a taxi.

  ‘Well, you got a better look at her there,’ she said expectantly.

  ‘I still couldn’t say. There were seven of them, and they were heavily made up. She did look Eastern European, though.’

  ‘But you heard her, right?’

  ‘I couldn’t place her accent. I didn’t hear them speak English yesterday.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean you heard how she sounded.’

  ‘Like she was acting,’ I said.

  Heike nodded severely.

  ‘Like she was a fucking robot.’

  Contact Lens

  Parlabane stepped out from the noise of the bar into the covered thoroughfare at the hub of the Brauereihallen, where he called the number on the flyer.

  He spoke briefly and guardedly to the woman who answered. They politely established that she spoke English, whereupon Parlabane told her he was ringing with regard to the missing girl, Heike Gunn.

  ‘Do you have information about her?’ the
woman asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you for calling. Please tell me what it is you know. It is very important.’

  ‘I’d rather tell you in person,’ he said.

  Truth was, he wanted to know who else was looking for Heike, and it would be a lot easier to find out if the other party couldn’t suddenly terminate the conversation by pressing a button on a handset.

  ‘You do not live in Berlin?’ she had deduced. ‘You are a visitor?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Okay. We can meet somewhere that is easy for you to find.’

  ‘Now I feel like I’m in a Cold War movie,’ Parlabane told Mairi, about ninety minutes later.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I’m standing in Alexanderplatz beneath the World Clock, awaiting the arrival of an anonymous contact who will have to identify herself to me, but who doesn’t know what I look like either, and our meeting is intended to facilitate a cagey exchange of information in which at least one party is seriously disguising his intentions.’

  Admittedly, it wasn’t quite swapping briefcases at a park bench in the Tiergarten, but it was enough to turn his thoughts to an era that was only a quarter-century gone and yet felt like it had taken place in a parallel world.

  It had seemed a time of absolute political rigidity, an age in which activism felt like a religious observance: morally obliged, dutifully undertaken, but done so despite a constant nagging concern that it was ultimately futile, because nothing was going to change. Thatcher would be in power for ever; Nelson Mandela would never be freed; the Wall was never coming down.

  Mairi underlined just how pleasingly wrong he had been.

  ‘I’ve not seen many Cold War movies,’ she observed, ‘but I’m guessing their version of Alexanderplatz tends not to feature a host of Japanese teenagers spilling out of KFC toting Captain America plushies they’ve just bought at the Galeria Kaufhof.’

  Parlabane strained to look through the crowd, past them, over them, scanning the faces streaming through the concourse and trying to picture what his contact would look like.