Summer Lies Bleeding

by Nuala Casey

  The machine builds to its frenetic spin cycle and Kerstin crouches poised by the machine door, ready to open it at the first click, to grab the blouse and start all over again. She starts to count: one, two, three, four … the machine whines agonisingly as though pushing itself to its limits … five, six, seven, eight … Kerstin hears a creak, a tapping from behind, it might be rain, who knows, she carries on counting … nine, ten, elev—

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’

  The voice is unexpected, it slices through Kerstin’s counting like a blade through skin and she loses her balance and tumbles backwards, landing with her arms stretched out behind her. The machine clatters to its climax with a whirr of grinding noise as she picks herself up and sees a familiar figure standing in the doorway.

  ‘Clarissa,’ she half-whispers. ‘What are you doing here? You gave me a shock.’

  ‘I could ask you the same question, my dear,’ says the old lady, edging further into the strip-lit gloom. ‘I heard noises down here. Thought it was an intruder. Why are you washing at this time of day? Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘I came home early,’ says Kerstin, picking herself up. ‘Thought I’d get some washing done.’ She counts to seven and back in her head; warding off whatever dirt may have contaminated her hands from the floor.

  ‘It’s a travesty, a cultured, clever girl like you having to do her own washing as well as a job.’

  Clarissa leans across the machines and her arm touches the edge of Kerstin’s metal jug.

  ‘Of course, in my day we had servants to attend to that sort of thing, laundry maids we called them. Red-faced creatures sent down from the North or the West Country, oh they were ghastly. We had a particularly rough one, Hattie they called her, well us children had lots of fun with that name … Fatty Hattie we called her. “Has Fatty Hattie ironed the sheets yet?” Mother would scold us but she must have had a quiet giggle to herself all the same. My mother never washed a sheet in her life – she had the most beautiful hands, pale and soft as butter. You see back then the world knew where it was, people knew their place, people like Fatty Hattie and Edie the cook, Bruton the butler, they knew what they were sent to this earth to do and they didn’t question it. They wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning it. Now you see, it all started with the unions, that’s when this country started on the path to destruction, giving the labouring classes a voice, a vote, preposterous. And now you have these dark-skinned thugs rioting, I saw it on the television, great mobs of them smashing windows and grabbing clothes and shoes. Monstrous, but that’s where the unions have got us to … in my mother’s day it was simple. She campaigned for votes for women, ladies, daughters of educated men. Labour tried to convince the suffs that they should support them in their crazy bill for Universal Suffrage and I remember Mummy and Daddy saying – down that road is the way to ruination, giving the great unwashed the vote is tantamount to legislating anarchy. That’s why you have these coloured chaps rampaging down the street and why clever young ladies like you have been reduced to blistering their hands with soap suds … it’s all down to the unions, Daddy was right. It was the road to ruination.’

  Kerstin bends down and opens the machine door, trying to ignore the tirade that is emanating from Clarissa’s mouth. She must have been in the flat by herself all day, thinking, reminiscing about the good old days of bullied servants and mothers with butter-soft hands, and now out it all comes, like a torrent pouring into the room, washing away Kerstin’s counting, crashing over the walls, sending everything into disarray. If I don’t say anything, thinks Kerstin, then maybe she will go. She pulls out the blouse, but aware of Clarissa above her, she only half inspects it before putting it back into the drum and closing the door.

  ‘What are you putting it back in for?’ Clarissa’s voice drills into the side of her head as she pours the jug of powder into the drawer. ‘You’ll find, dear, that it’s perfectly clean. You’ll wear out the fabric with over-washing, you know. See I do know a little about washing. Once I got married, a wife was expected to do her bit, what with the war and what have you. And unfortunately, my husband was rather a tight-fisted old so-and-so and wouldn’t shell out for staff. Said I’d been a pampered brat and I’d have to learn to cook and clean with the rest of them. Can you imagine? Still, in the end I got rather good at it, particularly after the baby was born, all those nappies, yes, got rather good at it…’

  Kerstin can feel herself getting hotter, her face burning with rage. She turns the machine on again and stands staring at the clear glass-fronted drum. She will not respond, she will not engage, she will just stand here like a statue until the old biddy gives up and goes back to her flat.

  But as the cycle starts up, Clarissa leaps across and bangs her fist on the top of the machine. ‘Trust me, my dear, that blouse was clean. You’re going to ruin a perfectly good garment with all this washing. Now let me switch this thing off for you and we’ll recover it.’

  ‘No!’ The word screams out of Kerstin’s mouth almost of its own volition. She has to get this woman out of here, she is obstructing her on this, one of the most serious of procedures. Her father is dying, her blouse has been tainted and this bigoted old wretch is going to make everything worse, she will bring the bad thing down upon her, she will make death triumph, make the darkness claim her father and Kerstin has to stop her.

  She grabs the old woman’s shoulder, it feels as hard and brittle as a branch of a tree.

  ‘Clarissa, you must stop. I know what I am doing. Please will you leave me to attend to my washing in peace.’ Kerstin hollers the last of this sentence in German and Clarissa freezes then turns gingerly.

  ‘I know that language,’ she hisses. ‘Hun language. My brother-in-law, God rest his sainted bones, was in the RAF. He fought for this country against the purveyors of that devil language. They burned babies in ovens … the Nazis … they killed millions of innocent Jews. I will not listen to that language in my home. This is my home, no matter what they say, and I will be wherever I want to be. I will walk these corridors, I will do as I please. I am Clarissa Burton-Lane. You are a German! A Hun in our midst and I never realised it. You talk like an English woman but your anger has let it slip. Ha, they will let anybody in here now … a German … a madwoman washing her clothes to smithereens. My brother-in-law was in the RAF you know … dropped the bombs on Dresden …’

  For a second, as Kerstin stands watching this onslaught unfold, she feels weightless, as though she is floating on the ceiling looking down on this emaciated old lady, her face contorted with hatred shaking her fists at a pale haired young woman with blistered hands. Then suddenly she is back in her body, her heart pulsating against her chest, aware that if she leaves now, if she does not complete the task then God help her, she will be ruined, darkness will claim her. There is one obstacle between her and the machine and as she reaches out and smashes it with the metal jug, time seems to slow down, like the waning spin cycle on the machine. There is a crack as metal meets skull and the old lady flies in a blur across the room, her head scraping against the edge of the skirting board, her body rolling and twisting until it stops and lands in a crumpled heap by the door.

  Silence. A deep, empty silence fills the room and it is thick, like gloopy liquid has been poured in from the ceiling. The silence fills Kerstin’s lungs, choking her from within. She goes to speak but no words come; her brain and body are frozen to the small patch of linoleum where she stands staring at a lifeless body.

  She should go to her; check her pulse, call an ambulance, do the things that any fully functioning human being would do. It was an accident, nobody would suspect her, they would think the old woman had tumbled, like she had on the way to the post office.

  Kerstin looks at the washing machine. She has to finish the wash, she has to ward off the darkness, otherwise her father will die. She goes to move but then she sees it; deep red blood stuck to the floor in patches. It is seeping from Clarissa’s head, leaking out like a thin river coursing through
a map. She cannot step across the blood; she cannot get to her clothes. Soon the blood will have reached the machine and that will be it. She has to get out of here.

  She places the metal jug on the top of Clarissa’s washing machine; still reticent, even amid this mayhem, to taint her washing with blood. Then she tiptoes towards the door, counting to seven and back before opening. Taking one last look at the room, she sees the silver machines neatly lined up; the packets of washing powder stacked onto the shelf and the pale, white lump lying in the middle, eyes open as if asking ‘why?’

  Closing the door behind her, she makes her way to the narrow lift and presses the silver button. No one will know, she tells herself as she steps inside. She will go back to the flat, and work out what to do. She has an overwhelming compulsion to clean, to scrub and rinse from top to bottom, to remove the stain of death from her. She can smell it now, a clammy, sweaty smell clinging to her nostrils. She must wash it away immediately.

  The lift reaches the ground floor and Kerstin waits for the jolt; the rackety noise before the doors open. It seems to take longer than usual, and Kerstin starts to panic. Please do not stick, not this lift, this narrow airless space. She has to get out. She closes her eyes and starts to count but before she gets to three, the doors slide open and a man and woman stand in front of her.

  It feels like her heart is going to explode and for a moment she thinks about standing her ground, not letting them into the lift. Then the man smiles at her, he is holding a clipboard.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he says brightly. ‘I didn’t think anyone would be at home. I’m from Elizabeth Charles Estate Agency. You must be the lady from Flat 2?’

  He holds out his hand but Kerstin doesn’t respond. Instead, she steps out of the lift. The man looks at her quizzically and Kerstin looks down at her white top and black skirt, fearing for a moment that she has blood on her. There is nothing.

  ‘Well,’ says the man. ‘Nice to meet you.’ He turns to the woman by his side. ‘Now, if you want to come this way, Mrs Farthing, I’ll show you the laundry room.’ She is in her mid-forties by the look of it and she smells of lemons. The scent sticks in Kerstin’s throat as she squeezes past her.

  She watches as they get into the lift; the man smiles, the woman stares straight ahead. As the doors close Kerstin starts to run, she has no idea where she is going and there is no time to return to the flat and collect her things. She must go now, this minute, before they find her.

  *

  Seb stands in his studio adding the final touches to The Lake: his gift to Yasmine, an oil painting of the lake in Battersea Park that they sat beside after getting married almost seven years ago. Tomorrow he will hang it in the restaurant and maybe it will be a lucky charm, who knows. Not that he believes in all that. Someone once told him that there was no such thing as luck and he agrees to a certain extent; you make your own luck in this life, by working hard and being kind, by opening your heart and loving.

  The light in the studio is starting to fade; in the mornings it is filled with bright sunshine, it is one of the reasons he took it, that and the fact that it is pretty much equidistant between home, Maggie’s flat and the gallery.

  He dabs a silvery dot of paint along the outline of the lake, then stands back and puts his head to one side, squints his eyes and walks towards it again, checking to see if the ripple effect he was aiming for has worked. As he walks back and forth, the painting stands on the easel like a child waiting to be dressed. To anybody else, it would look complete but Seb is exacting when it comes to his work and nothing less than the best is allowed to leave the studio.

  Almost six months of work has gone into this piece; snatched moments here and there between his paid commissioned work and the day-to-day demands of the gallery. He hopes she likes it. He thinks she will but he can never be sure. He knows when she really loves something and when she’s just pretending, something about the tone of her voice and the presence of a gleam in her eye tells him when it is right. He and Yasmine, though deeply in love, have very different tastes. There are films he adores that she doesn’t just ‘not like’ but downright despises, same with music – he loves Primal Scream, she says they make her cringe, and writers – she loves Isabella Allende, he can’t get past the first page of her novels.

  Yet they come together for the important things, the fundamental beliefs that need to be in sync for any partnership to survive – they have the same values, the same moral compass and they have Cosima, the little ball of flesh and giggles that binds them for ever. Oh, and then there is the physical side: Seb has never felt as connected to someone as he is to Yasmine and, even after all these years, he is still drawn to her body like a thirst that can never be fully quenched. The air in the room changes when she walks into it, becomes fuller and more vital, he can tell she is there without looking up. And despite their punishing work schedules, the exhaustion of parenthood and the pressures of London life, he still has to start and end each day holding her in his arms, he can’t ever imagine not being with her, can’t imagine a world without her in it.

  The music changes as he dabs the paint with the lightest of touches, he’s not aware that Rachmaninov has seagued into David Bowie’s Heroes, but then he is not really aware of anything but the picture. When he is painting he forgets himself; his body is just a vessel, a machine, his arm an extension of the paintbrush. He feels in perfect sync with the work of art unfolding before him, and yet despite his success, the hours he can dedicate to painting are few and far between; which is why these two hours, from three to five on a late August afternoon as the sun begins to wane in the grey London sky, are so precious.

  He is getting better; he can see his line get stronger, more confident as each year passes, he can see maturity seeping into the spaces between canvas and oil. Seven years ago he painted a huge piece that went on to sell to an anonymous US dealer for the astonishing sum of £100,000. It depicted him and Sophie, the married woman, his long-dead love, on the beach at Rotherhithe; he curled up on the sand holding a gas mask to his face; she standing above him draped in a long scarlet dress and carrying a bundle of rags in her arms. He finished it in the early hours of what would go on to be referred to as 7/7, that strange moonless night when he left Zoe standing in Soho Square and ran like a madman to his office on Shaftesbury Avenue to say goodbye to his dead lover. For months after her death, he had tried to paint her face but it would not come, it was like there was a great blockage standing between him and his memory. Every attempt he made looked wrong. That night as he stood in the office, he had felt a burning sensation, felt her spirit leave him as he painted each delicate feature onto the canvas. By morning she was complete and Zoe was gone.

  When he met Yasmine, he didn’t want to have the painting around the flat. It seemed wrong, inappropriate somehow, to hold on to it so he let Henry sell it to a business contact in the States and, as always, Henry got the best price. The money allowed him to put down a deposit on the flat in Battersea and gave a significant boost to the fledgling gallery that he had named Asphodel, after the flowers that grow in the Ancient Greek resting place that lies between heaven and earth. That’s where he imagined Sophie had gone, and now he could get on with his life, unencumbered by the past while the painting hangs in a mock-Venetian chapel high in the Hollywood Hills, on the grounds of the vast estate owned by the multi-millionaire record producer who bought it.

  Seb knows that if he saw that painting again he would cringe, he would pick it apart and find fault everywhere. He would wince at the clumsy use of colour, the position of the figures, the shading of the sea. He will never be satisfied with his work and that is how it should be. He wants to go on perfecting it until he is so old he can no longer hold the paintbrush. Wasn’t it Matisse who said, propped up in his bed as he neared the end of his life, that rather than reaching the end of his painting career, he was only just beginning to see.

  Seb stands back and looks at the finished painting. It’s okay, he thinks. Everything is as it sho
uld be: the evening light glimmers across the water like a swarm of muted fireflies, like it did on the night of their wedding. Seb liked that, it felt like affirmation, as though nature had somehow acknowledged the two of them standing entwined by the lake, it felt like they had become part of the landscape and when they walked away they would leave a part of themselves embedded in the scene. That’s what it’s all about, thinks Seb, as he runs his hands along the outline of the painted sky, we all hope to leave something behind, some evidence that we were here, that we made an impact. Will his paintings endure after his death? Will they hang alongside his heroes in the great galleries of the world or will they be bundled up and left to gather dust in some forgotten, airless attic? Is it arrogant, this quest for immortality or is it just human nature? Paintings, books, music, children, ideas, pockets full of lucky charms and rusty trinkets scattered across the earth as you swallow dust and dream of soft meadows.

  His phone beeps on the desk. He picks it up and switches off the alarm. It’s five p.m.: time to go and collect Cosima from her guinea pig-fest at Gracie Marshall’s. Time to step out of this portal and return to real time, to people and cars and food and sugary kisses.

  He takes his jacket from the back of the chair and takes one last look at the painting. ‘Yes,’ he thinks. ‘It will do.’

  15

  ‘Are we going to talk about it?’

  Stella stands in the doorway of the tiny bathroom in the apartment as Paula lies back in a very hot, bubbly bath. They had eaten ham sandwiches and crisps in the little café in St James’s; sitting side by side they had talked about Paula’s brother’s wife’s broken ankle, about whether Carole at the Chelsea Physic Garden had received Paula’s email asking if they could visit tomorrow, about the restaurant launch tomorrow night and whether or not the woman sitting three tables along was the one who had married Noel Gallagher. They talked about everything except what they had just experienced in the clinic. After months of incessant baby talk, Paula had suddenly gone quiet.