by Nuala Casey
So as 2005 drew to a close she began battening down the hatches – putting a big cross through every potential source of danger – trains, tubes, aeroplanes. By the New Year, she had shut out the world, shut out every risk, every unknowable element. There had been no Christmas visit to Cologne that year.
She stands up and puts the book back onto the shelf; her father’s words locked inside their envelope where they cannot be heard. She looks around the room and her eyes meet the Bruegel print. She walks towards it and presses her nose up against the glass frame. The tiny figures blur in front of her eyes until they disappear and all she can see in front of her is a great black shadow.
‘You will never leave me, will you?’ she mutters under her breath in German. ‘You are everywhere, wherever I go you’re there.’
She pulls her face away and, as her focus reshifts, sees that her breath has left a smudge on the glass. She rubs at it frantically with the back of her sleeve, until the glass is clear. As she steps away, she feels the familiar sensation of taintedness. She will have to wash her blouse immediately; she will have to remove the stain of that picture from her clothes and her face.
She walks to the bathroom and turns on the shower, making sure the water is hot, steaming hot. Then she steps out of her trousers and hangs them carefully on the square wicker laundry basket. The blouse must not touch the trousers, the blouse must go somewhere else. She shrugs herself out of the delicate fabric then wraps it in a large white bath towel. They can be washed together, the blouse must not touch anything else, it must not come into contact with the floor or any other item of clothing. She removes her underwear, steps into the hot shower and begins to scrub her face, every bit of it must be clean, the taint from the glass must be washed away, otherwise something truly terrible will happen. She reaches up to the shelf and takes an unopened box of soap. Sliding her finger along the seal she removes the white oval bar and continues to pummel at her face. Her skin feels sore and tight but she must carry on until there is no trace left, no residue of whatever darkness lies behind the glass.
13
Mark sits in a small café off Leicester Square, piling cubes of sugar into a pyramid. His large mug of tea sits by his elbow, steam seeps out of it into the air that is thick with the sound of plates clattering, orders being shouted, coffee machines whistling and the clunky footsteps of waitresses, diners and delivery men as they weave in and out of the tiny space.
He still can’t quite believe that he has spoken to her, been near her, stood on the threshold of the restaurant. Standing next to her was the strangest experience, like being close to a famous landmark or statue. He knows almost everything there is to know about this woman and her life – her date of birth (10 October 1976), her Moroccan ancestry (father, Solly, born in Tangier, deceased), her career path (sous chef in Colette, Waterloo via The Green Room, Lavender Hill then Aquitane, Mayfair, before teaming up with Henry Walker to launch The Rose Garden), her wedding anniversary (21 December 2005), the birth date of her daughter, Cosima Rose Bailey (14 August 2006) … The data had flashed up before him like a great list as he stood there.
She was shorter than he imagined but prettier than in the photographs he had seen, and she smelled amazing – a musky, evening scent like violets. It reminded him of something he had liked as a child, powdery purple sweets his dad used to bring home from trips to Germany. Her voice was pure London, not plummy as he imagined Seb’s to be, and it was husky and quiet, her words direct and clear. She had folded her arms across her chest as she spoke to him. Protectively? Defiantly? Mark wasn’t sure but she was certainly confident despite her small stature.
He hadn’t planned the encounter. He had actually seen today as a day of research, walking in and around Frith Street, finding his bearings, checking the back of the restaurant for fire exits, seeing what route he should take when he makes his entrance tomorrow night. But then curiosity had got the better of him when he saw her standing in the doorway taking delivery of some boxes of fruit. He watched her for a few moments from the other side of the street, watched as she signed the delivery note then bent down to lift up the large box. By the time she stood up he was there in front of her, a dark shadow in the glaring sunlight that shone so brightly in her eyes she had to squint.
She had gasped and almost dropped the boxes but Mark did nothing to reassure her, keeping his voice hard and direct as he enquired after her husband. But then, possibly without realising it, she had given him what he wanted – a piece of information that meant he had something solid to prepare for, could spend the next twenty-four hours making sure he got it just right.
‘He’ll be here tomorrow morning,’ she had said. ‘He’s going to be hanging pictures from around ten so you’ll probably catch him then. Can I pass on a message?’
Mark had smiled; ecstatic to finally have a time and a date for his confrontation with the man who had ruined his life, but he had managed to keep his excitement contained as he shook his head at the attractive woman in front of him and told her there was no message. He had left her then, left her dragging the box of fruit into the restaurant, the precious restaurant built on the wreckage of dreams and lives, in this shithole wasteland where young girls can disappear like stray dogs or discarded potato peelings thrown out to rot in the putrid air.
He drains his cup of tea and throws a handful of change onto the table. Picking up his heavy black bag, he pulls it onto his back like a piece of armour and heads for the door. There is one more place to visit before he returns to his room.
*
Stella and Paula walk out of the clinic in silence, neither knowing quite what to say. Eventually, after they have crossed three intersections, wordlessly navigating the late-afternoon shoppers, Stella breaks the impasse.
‘Well, that seemed to go okay,’ she says, her voice half-drowned out by the shrill beeping of a reversing delivery van.
Paula smiles but her shoulders are raised like a cat about to pounce and they carry on in a daze through the back streets, pretending to look in shop windows, going through the motions but something is wrong. Something is very wrong.
The scan had only taken a few minutes then she and Paula were led back to the consultancy room where Sarah discussed the results – ‘all looks healthy and normal’ – and they were told that the most appropriate treatment plan for them would be donor insemination or IUI: INTRAUTRINE INSEMINATION as it read on the front of the booklet she handed them.
After the consultation they were taken to yet another room to meet a specialist fertility nurse who talked them through their treatment plan. Yet through it all, Paula looked like she was only half-present, like she was floating above the scene looking down onto the square room; at Stella sitting in the chair nodding her head and asking intermittent questions; at the nurse gesticulating with her flabby white arm and ticking boxes on the sheet of paper in front of her. When they finally emerged into the cool air of the street, Stella had touched Paula’s hand and it was like ice; it was as though the happy, excited woman who had entered the clinic had been left behind; sucked into a strange portal, a land of probes and forms and smiling babies.
They head onto Bond Street and a sleek black Bentley pulls up outside a gold shuttered store. Stella shakes her head as the black-hatted driver gets out and opens the back door of the car. Some things never change, she thinks, as they cross the road towards Green Park. Leaders come and go, fashions change, great people live and die, the world turns and still there are Bentleys on Bond Street. And very likely when the end comes, when these streets are swallowed up, release their secrets, their jewels and sparkle, and revert back to marshy bogland, there will still be Bentleys on Bond Street.
‘Shall we go and get something to eat?’ Stella’s voice trails across the noise of the traffic as they stand on Piccadilly waiting to cross. ‘It would just be nice to sit down and have a chat, go through all this.’ She waves the thick wedge of forms and booklets in front of her.
Paula looks at her watch. ‘
It’s almost three,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t realised it was so late.’
‘Almost rush hour,’ says Stella, as a wave of people come towards them. ‘So, where shall we go?’
‘Anywhere,’ says Paula, pulling her hands through her hair, as she always does when she is apprehensive.
Stella looks up the street: Hyde Park to the right, Soho to the left. She is not ready to go back to Soho, not yet, and not with Paula in this strange mood.
‘I know,’ she says, trying to sound bright and jolly. ‘We’ll go to the café in St James’s Park. It will be nice, we can watch the herons.’
She takes Paula’s arm and as they cross the road a great gust of wind whipped up by the traffic blows into their faces. It feels so good after the stale heat of the clinic and as Stella looks up the street she catches a glimpse of the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus flashing on and off and a flutter of excitement catches in her stomach as they reach the other side and head for St James’s.
*
Mark clutches a limp bunch of lilies in his hand as he stands waiting to cross the northern end of Oxford Street. He clears his throat but his chest remains tight, the fumes from the traffic are making him wheeze but his inhaler is in the front of the rucksack and he can’t get to it easily with his arms full of flowers and the dead weight of his black bag.
The lights change and he steps out into the road. It is all so ordinary, so blank, with its McDonalds over there on the corner, its Caffè Nero, its cheap sportswear shops, somehow he was imagining a much darker place but he knows there is still a little way to go. A few metres, one foot in front of the other and he will be there, he will see what she saw.
He turns onto Hanway Street, a narrow little lane that curves into a crescent as he walks along. It’s little more than an alley-way, a short-cut, he thinks as he walks past a Spanish bar and a tatty-looking shop selling second-hand records. The street is claustrophobic and cramped and the crumbling Georgian buildings lean inwards, like they are bearing down on him, imploring him to listen to their secrets.
What was she doing here, he asks himself as he follows the road toward its final destination. His little sister, the baby of the family, the one he promised his dad he would look after, had spent her final moments in this rotten place, this forgotten sorry excuse for a street and he had not been there to save her. Why hadn’t she phoned him, earlier in the night, after the party? If she had phoned him he would have helped, he would have told her what to do. His feet feel as heavy as his lungs as the street curves to the left; the air suddenly feels thin and icy cold despite the warmth of the day.
Hanway Place. Such a pretty name, it sounds like the home of an Edwardian novelist. He feels like there should be window boxes full of flowers and a horse-drawn carriage making its way down the road but instead there is just an empty side street dotted with black bollards and a glass-fronted restaurant whose name Mark can’t read. He walks a couple of steps past the restaurant and there it is: a tiny deserted strip of concrete and brick, dark, airless and piled with boxes of food waste and bulging black bags.
He puts his own black bag down at his feet and takes the rucksack from his back, and as he does so his heart begins to pound inside his chest, the familiar pulse-like sensation rises in his throat as he tries to get his breath. He gulps at the stale air like a drowning man. The inhaler, he needs the inhaler, but the attack is so strong he can’t bend down to retrieve it from his bag. His body feels like it’s breaking down as he drops the lilies to the floor and clutches at his chest, trying to massage his lungs back to life. But inside his head, his voice is screaming out at him, trying to make itself heard above the desperate gasps for breath. The inhaler, get the inhaler. He falls to his knees and wrestles the bag with one arm, ripping through canvas and metal until he feels the reassuring hard plastic between his fingers. With shaking hands he brings the inhaler to his mouth. He sucks a huge mouthful but it’s not enough, another, still no relief, a third and he feels his lungs loosen, a fourth and he slumps down onto the hard cobbled ground and feels himself coming back. In and out, in and out, his breathing slowly returns to normal.
After a couple of moments, he stands up and goes to pick up his bags, his eyes stinging with tears and grit, and he sees that his hands are stained with the pollen from the lilies that he had been clutching so tightly. He sees the discarded bunch of flowers lying among the bin bags and he lets out a howl, a cry so raw it seems to come from somewhere outside of his body.
‘Zoe,’ he screams, and his voice echoes against the grimy brick walls of the alley. The shout seems to open up his lungs and he launches himself at the bags and starts kicking them, smashing them open with his feet until there is just a mulch of tins and cardboard and rotten food spread out along the ground. He keeps kicking and kicking until every bag is split, until every ounce of anger and grief and bitterness oozes out from him like the slime seeping from the decaying rubbish.
Scraping his shoes against the ground, he picks up his bags and takes one last look at this bleak, filthy place. The rubbish is piled up against the wall and in the dim light it looks like a mound of earth atop a grave, with empty crisp packets and congealed Chinese spare-ribs in place of soil. As he turns to leave, he notices movement among the mess. A rat scurries across the top of it and begins to feast on a piece of food, pulling and pulling to release it from the sticky waste until it loosens and brings with it a sodden, grey lily petal.
14
Kerstin turns the dial on the washing machine to sixty and with a thud the machine stammers into life. She watches as the grey blouse spins round and round behind the thick clear glass.
This is the second wash. Five more to go. Seven washes will be enough to satisfy Kerstin that nothing of the picture will remain on the blouse; not a trace of its oily residue; not an atom or a speck. The washing powder will expunge the stains, the rank breath that has seeped from the print and worked its way into the fibres of her top.
The laundry room is silent but for the gentle clicking of the machine as it kneads the blouse into a sopping, soapy dough. There are three washing machines lined up in a row underneath a long, bare window. One of the machines is unused, the second, by the door, is Clarissa’s. She has the machine open and Kerstin can see a flash of pink inside: a crumpled cotton handkerchief? A pair of old woman’s knickers? Who knows, and Kerstin will not be investigating. On the shelf above the machine is a large oilcloth bag decorated in a red-and-gold print. Bottles of laundry detergent and fabric softener poke out of the top of the bag and Kerstin notices that the lid of one container is congealed with old crusted blue liquid. It makes her feel uneasy just looking at it, knowing it is there, so she turns away and starts preparing a batch of detergent for the third wash.
Kerstin’s washing paraphernalia is lined up in a neat row on the shelf above her washing machine – hers is by the wall, far enough away from Clarissa’s to remain untainted by the forgotten pink underwear and the congealed blue liquid.
She leans across the machine and picks up a large metal measuring jug from the shelf. Then, opening up the industrial-size box, she dips the jug into the snowy white powder. As she does so she thinks of the experiment that had ignited global interest in her father’s thesis: the Avalanche game. Back in the eighties, a group of theoretical physicists had conducted an experiment – or played a game, as they liked to describe it – where they sprinkled grains of sand onto a table one at a time and monitored how the grains piled up. As the pile grew it became steeper and the sand started to slide downwards, sparking little avalanches. As more sand was added the pile rose and fell; instead of growing in a linear movement, it fluctuated. She had read about this experiment during her time at the University of Cologne where she was studying for a degree in Pure Mathematics and was about to embark on a career in finance. It fascinated her, the avalanche; the grains of sand seemed to represent the fluctuations of the money market, rising and falling, plateauing and collapsing, with more money being added somewhere in the worl
d every second of the day, piling up and falling down.
Into this maelstrom her mathematical reason would introduce some element, no matter how small, of order, she had told herself as she sat outside the Cologne office of Sircher Capital waiting to go in to be interviewed for a job as a junior research analyst. She would highlight patterns, rip through financial forecasts, compute profits and losses, reconcile and assimilate until out of a chaotic flurry of information, order and reason would emerge. It was what she had loved as a child, sitting on the floor separating her building blocks into neat piles in order of colour, size and shape; from building blocks to equations to numerical theory, all the way to the heady world of corporate finance where she would come into her own.
Detailed reports were presented each week; meetings were attended in New York and London, Tokyo and Paris. She was regarded as a high achiever, a financial whizz with a computer-fast brain, the perfect candidate to take on the role of Research Analyst at the newly opened London office of Sircher Capital and for a year she was just that.
She places the jug of powder onto the top of the machine and watches as the gentle vibrations cause the powder to ripple ever so slightly; the tiniest fraction of movement. Like the grain of sand, it takes just one tiny, microscopic element to be added to an unsteady structure and the whole thing will come tumbling down.
