Summer Lies Bleeding

by Nuala Casey

  ‘A couple of bottles of sparkling water would be great, thanks Marcy,’ says Seb.

  Marcy knows never to hand Seb the wine list, just as she knows the likes and dislikes, the phobias and foibles of almost every one of the members. Like the fact that Paul Redwood, the former-arts correspondent for the New York Times and now well into his nineties, will arrive at 1 p.m. on the dot each day, will be seated on the far right of the communal table and will order the rib eye with new potatoes and a glass of house red, alternating to the sea bass on Fridays with a glass of house white. He will bring his own newspapers with him, which he will read for the duration of the meal, then leave at 2 p.m. to go and take a nap in the living room of his small garden flat off the Fulham Road. That is his routine and Marcy would never dream of getting in the way of it. Seb smiles as Marcy removes the wine glasses discretely; he likes the fact that he can be a recovering alcoholic in a club renowned for its raucousness and carousing and he knows that if he can abstain from drink here, he can abstain anywhere.

  ‘So what’s this about the Opera House?’ Henry leans across the table, his eyes bright with thoughts of new business, new money.

  ‘It’s a fantastic commission, H,’ says Seb, lowering his voice slightly as two women are seated at the table opposite. ‘They’re putting on Madame Butterfly next year and they want six full-length oils, one for each of the principle singers, to be displayed inside the Opera House and to use on their posters and publicity material. And I want the bulk of this fee to go straight back into Asphodel for the scholarship funds.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you Seb,’ says Henry, leaning back in his chair as Marcy arrives with the water and proceeds to pour it into their glasses. ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’

  Seb nods as he takes a sip of water. ‘I’m positive,’ he says, putting his glass down on the table. ‘I’ve had an amazing few years, done more than I ever imagined I would do in a lifetime. Christ, Henry, look where I was seven years ago, I was on my knees, killing myself with drink. If I can help other young artists achieve what they want to do then I will die a happy man.’

  ‘When you’re a dapper man of ninety, living in luxury in the South of France with a twenty-one year old blonde nymphet,’ laughs Henry.

  Seb shakes his head and smiles. ‘A dapper man of ninety with my beautiful Yasmine next to me. South of France, Battersea or bloody Grimsby, I don’t care, all I need is her beside me.’

  ‘Are you ready to order yet, chaps?’ Marcy is suddenly there beside them.

  ‘Oh yes please,’ says Henry. ‘This conversation is getting far too soppy for my liking. Can’t bear sentimentality, particularly on an empty stomach.’ He picks up the menu and scans the page. ‘I’ll have the Clam Chowder then the Duck Confit if I may?’ He hands the menu to Marcy who tucks it under her arm.

  ‘And for you, Seb?’ She stands with the point of her sharpened pencil poised at the top of her notepad.

  ‘I’ll have the soup then the risotto, please.’

  ‘Excellent,’ says Marcy, removing Seb’s menu with a flourish, and disappearing into the darkness of the inner room.

  ‘Speaking of Yasmine,’ says Henry, squinting a little as a bright shaft of sunlight pours into the room. ‘I sensed a bit of tension last night, particularly over my choice of Lauren to oversee the guest list. You do trust me don’t you, Seb? I mean, we’ll need a good mix of guests; highbrow – yes, of course – but also a little smattering of celebs to get us in the papers, you know? Yasmine realises that doesn’t she?’

  Seb’s mouth tightens. There is always a hint of sexism in Henry’s attitude to Yasmine. Henry can’t really fathom her, this strong successful woman with opinions of her own, who is beautiful but doesn’t use her looks to get on.

  ‘Yes, she gets the whole PR thing, Henry,’ he says, trying to keep his voice light. ‘Of course she does. She’s a professional and she’s been in this business since she was eighteen. Her only concern is that the launch will end up being high-jacked by some bimbo reality star wanting to get her face in the papers. You know this Henry, and you know what the Honey Vision girls are like, they’ll take the whole place over. Even if you just invite a couple, they’ll bring their mates. The Rose Garden is not that kind of restaurant; it’s a warm, genuine, family-oriented place. You see I still like the idea of inviting critics and their families, their kids, to really reinforce the whole Mediterranean family feel.’

  Henry pulls a face. ‘I know you like that idea Seb and we’ve got a couple of, er, children coming but any more and it would descend into chaos, you’d have smashed glasses, screaming kids, utter bedlam …’

  Seb smiles. ‘Children don’t always cause chaos, H. I’ve seen more smashed glasses and bedlam caused by coked up celebrities than by little people. Anyway, let’s just stick to the list Yas compiled yeah, save us all this hassle.’

  Henry shifts uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Well, unfortunately, Seb, Lauren’s already sent out her invites. But she has assured me that it’s not just the Honey Vision girls, she’s also sent it round to her friends in the City – hedge-fund guys, bankers, traders, in other words big money, Seb. You can’t turn that kind of custom away.’

  Seb nods. Henry is right. It would be naïve of him to think otherwise.

  ‘Okay Henry,’ he says, as a waiter puts a bowl of steaming celeriac soup in front of him. ‘I agree, but do make sure that Lauren has invited the people on Yas’s list too. I know Liam Kerr has received his invitation so it looks like she’s done it but if you could check with her and let me know that would be great. I don’t want Yas to have anything to worry about tomorrow.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ says Henry, as he places his napkin on his knee. He raises his spoon towards Seb in a mock toast. ‘Here’s to The Rose Garden, eh? It’s going to be a triumph.’

  ‘To The Rose Garden,’ says Seb, raising his spoon. ‘And my brilliant wife.’

  *

  Kerstin sits on her bed, turning the news over and over. Yesterday morning; it had happened yesterday morning. What did she forget yesterday, what important ritual did she fail to observe? Then she remembers the rip in her purse. It had appeared sometime in the morning yet she had not noticed it until well after lunch, almost four p.m. If she had seen it earlier she could have replaced it immediately; instead it had sat there in her bag, festering like an open wound, inviting bad things in, taunting death. If she had been alert, if she had not been so preoccupied with the report she could have rectified it, she could have saved her father’s life.

  She stands up from the bed and goes to the living room, counting to seven and back before crossing the threshold, warding off whatever darkness might have seeped into the flat while she has been sitting prone on the bed.

  She looks at the green digitalised numbers on the oven door. Two p.m. Somewhere, in a hospital bed in Cologne, the city of her birth, the place she can never return to while this fear grips her heart, her father lies hooked up to wires and tubes, dying but being kept artificially alive for his daughter to come and say goodbye. But she is not there by his side as she should be, she is here in this barren flat in London, the city that is holding her hostage, the city that taunts her with bad things; with dirt and grime and contamination, leaving her with no option but to count, to throw numbers up against the threat and keep it at bay. She is trapped inside her head, trapped by the numbers that must never cease lest the whole thing comes tumbling down. She needs to release them; needs to fill her head with something else, something logical.

  She walks across the room to where a narrow set of shelves stands wedged against the wall. She reaches up to the top shelf and takes down a thick, leather-bound book. The gap that its removal leaves on the shelf troubles her immediately and she starts to reassemble the other books in order of size. She does it once and it still doesn’t look right so she repeats it over and over, until she is satisfied that there are no gaps, no stray pages sticking out and that all the spines are lined up neatly. Thankfully, d
uring her full check of the flat a few minutes ago, she had found nothing amiss, everything was in its place.

  Taking her father’s thesis in her arms she walks across to the sofa, checking first that the cushions are lined up straight, that the seat is not dirty. One, two, three, she counts as she places the cushions into a neat line. Now, with everything in order she opens the book. The book is safe; the book is not contaminated, she gives herself permission to touch it as much as she likes.

  She closes her eyes and smells the faint, dusty scent of the paper, feels the indentation of her father’s name embossed on the front in thick gold lettering. This book was printed in 1954, almost thirty years before she was born; when the war was still fresh in people’s minds and Cologne was putting itself back together after being ripped apart from above.

  She opens her eyes and places the book on her lap, stroking the front of it as though it is a precious piece of silk, a luxury item to be lingered over and admired. As she opens the book, a small pale-blue envelope falls out onto the floor. She picks it up and sees her name written in her father’s small, neat handwriting. He had sent her his PhD seven years ago when she was driving herself mad in the days and weeks following the 7/7 bombings; when she was still living with Matthew.

  Matthew. His name sounds abstract, as cold and ancient as stone; “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on,’ – her mother’s nightly prayer as she folded the linen sheets around Kerstin’s body, kissed her forehead and turned out the light. Matthew: the biblical tax collector; Matthew, her modern-day banker; the man who shared her bed and her life and then disappeared from the face of the earth. Matthew: who only exists in her memory; if he ever existed at all.

  She takes the letter out of the envelope and begins to read:

  4a Leipziger Str

  Weiden

  50858

  KÖLN

  8th August, 2005

  My Dear Kerstin,

  I hope this letter finds you well. Your mother tells me that you are enjoying your new role at Sircher Capital and you are finding much of cultural interest in your newly adopted city. I am well, though age is playing its usual tricks and I wake each day with a new ache or pain to contend with. Still, I am finding much solace in my garden, watching the roses bloom as I sit out there with a coffee and a book.

  I enclose with this letter a copy of my PhD which you requested on the telephone, and though I am flattered you want to read it, I was concerned by the fractiousness in your voice when we spoke and I only hope that reading my scribblings will not set your mind to more worry. I, along with most of the world, watched in horror the events that unfolded in London last month. My first, instinctive thought was for you and your safety, once that was established my mind turned to the events of sixty years ago in the city where I sit now writing this letter. I have never spoken to you about the event of which I will refer but I hope that in doing so I may offer you some comfort, human comfort of which you will not find in the accompanying thesis. All my life I have placed my faith in the laws of Physics, but my work, I can see now as an old man, was simply an act of escape, of running away from the fear and horror I witnessed as a boy. And though the theory I formulated went some way to explaining the pattern behind that night, I am still ignorant as to what it meant for me, my family and the hundreds of other families who were destroyed in the blink of an eye.

  As you know, I grew up in Cologne with my parents Matthias and Gerta Morgen in a modest street, close to the cathedral. I lived in a small apartment with them and my two younger sisters, Julia and Hannelore. My parents met in 1927, they married in 1931 and a year later I was born, their only son. My father worked as a cobbler and my mother was a midwife of sorts, bringing the babies of the district into the world but also laying out the dead. When the war broke out, my father was forty-eight years old, too old to fight and so he was sent to work in a munitions factory just outside Berlin. I was eight when he left and he told me I must be a good boy, learn my lessons and look after my mother and sisters. Already I was showing proficiency in science and mathematics and, like you, would sit for hours reading my text books, trying to drown out the drone of the bombers by reciting quadratic equations.

  The air raids were terrifying – I would curl up in a ball, hold my hands over my ears and recite my times table all the way to the hundreds. And there I would be safe, hidden among the numbers, far away from the sound of airborne giants hurling bombs onto the earth, the screeching and crashing of buildings as they fell onto burning streets; the smell of fire and rubber and fear. But the aftermath was worse. We would emerge from the shelters like wide-eyed rats scurrying up to the light, bracing ourselves for what we would see when we opened the front door. Rubble, bodies strewn along streets, empty spaces where houses and shops once stood. One morning as we walked along the street, stepping over shells of bombs and pieces of burned furniture, we saw Magda, the mother of my best friend Albert, running towards us holding a package in her arms. Her face was black with dirt and dust and she was screaming and sobbing, lifting her eyes to the sky like a woman possessed. As she came closer we saw what she was holding. We gasped as the woman thrust the lifeless body of her boy into my mother’s arms. Little Albert with the red hair and cheeky grin who brought me packets of sweets from his father’s shop and told anyone who would listen how he was to become a great doctor one day, how he was going to cure the world. My mother, the midwife, my mother who tended the sick and laid out the dead seemed, to this woman, a messiah, a Jesus Christ figure who could perform miracles in this desolate wasteland. ‘Make him wake up,’ the woman implored before dropping to her knees and grinding her fists into the battered cobbles. ‘Please can you make him wake up!’

  It seemed endless, the onslaught we lived through those years. And though inhuman atrocities were being committed by the Nazis in the name of our country at that very moment, we knew nothing about them; all that would come out later. All we knew was that we had to live minute by minute and concentrate on staying alive.

  30 May 1942 started well: a beautiful spring day, though the sun’s light only served to expose the decimation and ruin of our beloved city. My mother prepared lunch for us – a treat – she had been given half a pound of bratwurst by a neighbour whose baby she had safely delivered the day before. We sat, my sisters and I, eating the meaty dish, slowly, savouring every mouthful. Later, while my mother sat in her battered leather chair mending our socks, we children played a game of dominoes on the floor. We didn’t know what was happening as we sat listening to our mother singing as we laughed and giggled and rubbed our full bellies, we didn’t know that a thousand airplanes were heading across the channel bound for Hamburg with enough bombs to smash the city into pieces.

  As the bombers approached they saw that Hamburg was covered in thick cloud; Cologne’s skies were clear. At the final moment they altered their target and our fate was sealed by a change in the weather.

  When we heard the sirens, we ran, my mother, my sisters and I, to the shelter at the end of the street. With other raids we had some kind of warning; this one had taken the city by surprise and there was chaos and panic as people fled towards the shelter. I was up ahead and when I got there I threw myself into the mass of bodies that were already huddled inside, thinking that my mother and sisters were behind me. I spent that night with my face squashed up against the wall as one thousand bombers pounded our city and turned it into dust. When morning came, I followed my fellow inmates out of the shelter and as we emerged squinting into the light of the sun, I saw them: my mother, Julia and Hannalore lying on the street, just metres from the shelter. They must have stumbled and fallen as the first bombs dropped; as I ran on ahead to my salvation.

  So you see, my dear one, when I heard the news last month, when I saw the faces of those people who had been killed, those innocent men and women, when I heard your frightened voice on the phone, I knew something of what you must be feeling, what the families of those people must be feeling, of how Lo
ndon must feel. If my thesis offers you any comfort, if the patterns and laws and theories it identifies helps you find some reason, some order to the random outrage that has befallen you, then that is good.

  But I have lived a long life now, I have lived seven times as long as my sisters, I am older than my mother and my father, and I have spent that life trying to find answers, trying to make sense of it all. Have I found it? My answer can only be no. I will never find it. My thesis is but a drop in the ocean of infinite pools that exist in human history, the wars and disasters, the extinctions and diasporas, the revolutions and discoveries, the births and deaths and futile accidents. What I am trying to say is that I wish, more than anything my child, for you to be happy, for you to find peace because I spent my life running away from human touch, from love and family because I thought any kind of intimacy could only bring me pain. Your mother tried to break that down, she tried to warm up the ice in my veins and I loved her, I loved her very much. She has done the most remarkable job in raising you into a fine adult and though you may have inherited my scientific mind, I see so much of your mother’s kindness, her wonder at life, her spirit in you and I would hate to see that extinguished through fear.

  Do not fear life, Kerstin. Let it take you on its journey, let it surprise you and amaze you, for no matter how hard we try we can never know all its secrets.

  With my love,

  Papa

  PS Will you be home for Christmas?

  Kerstin folds the letter up once, twice, three times then returns it to the envelope. Seven Christmases have passed since she received the PhD and the letter. When she had received the package she had taken the letter out and skim-read it, her mind in too much of a frenzy to really focus on the words scattered across the page. She had been impatient to get started on the book, to immerse herself in the mathematical equations that had always brought her such peace as a young girl. But though the thesis was a work of genius, with ideas thirty years ahead of its time, there was nothing in there to persuade Kerstin to loosen her grip, nothing to convince her that the world was not a dangerous place. With its descriptions of bombs dropping onto her home city at a rate of 20 tonnes per minute, it simply reinforced the terror she had felt on 7/7 as she heard the train explode in the tunnel. When she had finished reading it, she felt that her anxiety had been validated, that all it made clear was that life is precarious and full of random acts of violence and destruction.