The Watcher

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  She flushed with the desire to sneak up on him, surprise him, like a lover might. Her worry was how best to do it. Sneak up behind him and slam her hands onto his shoulders? Flop down next to him on the bench, perhaps, with a hand slapped on his knee? Although she still savoured the protective sensation of his rough hands around hers from the other night as she wept about Rodrick in the living room, both these options seemed a little over-familiar for a housekeeper and her employer, so she opted for standing in front of him, between his face and the sun, casting a shadow which would cause him to open his eyes in irritation, only to be, she fantasised, pleasantly surprised to see her mischievously smiling down at him.

  She took her position on the towpath before him. Cast her shadow. His head twitched irritably, just as she’d hoped.

  He is back in the office in Gegesha, having been dragged out of his bunk in the early hours by two guards as Edgar shouted after them, ‘Where are you taking him? What are you doing, you bastards!’ He is choking on the floor from the way they’ve used his shirt as a leash and a Lieutenant is firing questions at him about his father-in-law, a Captain of the Border Guard. Then Volkov’s hands are round his neck and Max’s blood boils at the filthy touch of the man that murdered his brother Horst. He tries to resist, but the sergeant brings his knee up into Max’s face. Max shrieks with the pain and collapses to the floor. There’s a jangling and scraping above as a huge bunch of keys on the desk is grabbed and brought down on his head.

  ‘Tell us the truth!’

  Ch-mp.

  ‘Tell us the truth!’

  Ch-mp.

  ‘Tell us!’

  Ch-mp, ‘Tell us!’ Ch-mp, ch-mp. The keys bite into the ball of human on the ground.

  Max puts his hands over his head until they curl up, bruised and bleeding. Then only his skull is left to protect him from death as the keys thump into him again and again. The barracks key, the office key, the solitary key, the kitchen key, the key to the storerooms, the key to the locksmith’s workshop, the key to the armoured car, the key to the main gate, the key to freedom – that’s what each and every one of them is. Where once he thought the guards brandished them to keep him captive, now he knows that all together and wielded like a multi-headed mace, rapped over his head until his skull caves in, they are in fact the keys to freedom, because death is the only road to freedom now.

  Max gasps as he tries to break the surface of his nightmare, but the shadow of Volkov passes into his narrowing field of view, cloudy and blurred from all the blows, darkened with blood. He lashes out at the sergeant in one last desperate attempt to free himself.

  Punches him square in the face.

  And finds the strength to run from the office, up a wooded bank, which he swears was never there before. The flat barren parade ground is what he expects to find between the office and the barracks, but he is just relieved to be free, so he keeps on running, whilst Karin falls back from the force of his blow, unconscious before she hits the murky water of the canal.

  ‘I hit her,’ Max spoke with more volume, more conviction. ‘I couldn’t see it until now. But it was me.’

  Edgar deflated, a little disappointed but not surprised by his friend’s lack of lucidity. ‘You’ll see a lot now that you’ve never seen before,’ he laughed, remembering to present his jovial self. ‘We’ll try and reduce the morphine later, then things will be clearer.’

  ‘Ed! Ed! I am seeing clearly now. I hit her. It was me.’

  ‘How many times, Max! No one else was hurt in the accident.’

  ‘Not the accident, Ed. Not the accident. Karin. I hit Karin. Our housekeeper. I was on the towpath,’ he groaned, ‘by the canal. But then I wasn’t. I was back in Gegesha. I thought it was Volkov. And I lashed out. I think it’s my fault she’s dead.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Edgar scoffed unconvincingly. ‘I love you, Max, but you’re the biggest softy I know. As if you are capable of hitting anyone!’

  ‘But I have. I’ve done it before. Since we got back. I’ve done it in my sleep. I didn’t mean to, but I have.’

  ‘Need a hand?’ Erika said, peering round the bedroom door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Bertel said over Martha’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s Erika. Need some help?’ she smiled.

  ‘Wouldn’t say no,’ Martha huffed.

  ‘Of course,’ Erika cooed, crossing the room and holding up Bertel as Martha finished rearranging the pillows.

  ‘Bertel has just been telling me how apparently she hears punches being thrown up in your room,’ Martha sighed, rolling her eyes at Erika.

  ‘Really?’ Erika laughed. ‘Well, I know this old house makes some eerie sounds in the middle of the night. Perhaps you’re mistaking that for—’

  ‘Mistake! It’s no mistake,’ Bertel squawked, brushing Erika’s fussing hands from her nightdress. ‘Don’t try and paint me as a fool, as a dotty old bag.’

  ‘Bertel!’

  The phone started ringing downstairs.

  ‘You’re both as bad as one another.’

  ‘I’ll get that,’ Martha said quickly, relieved by the opportunity to escape, and rushed from the room.

  ‘My mind is sharp enough,’ Bertel continued, ‘my ears are sharp enough. Sharp enough to hear when he gives you a wallop in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Erika reddened. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Max. Beating you. I can hear little Netta snoring in her bed up there, so do you think I can’t hear the sound of someone being punched?’

  ‘I don’t… Bertel… he’s never.’

  ‘That’s what the make-up’s for. Or are this silly old goat’s eyes not as sharp as they used to be too? He gives you a black eye, you cover it up with make-up and we all go on as if nothing has happened. He stands out there,’ she nodded towards the tall, square windows; nowhere near as pretty as the Tiffany window in Erika’s room above, but much more transparent, much more revealing, ‘and just stares at the house, like a zombie, like he’s disgusted by it, by us, by you. And then he wanders off down the canal. I can see it all from here. All of it. I even saw…’ Bertel’s eyes glazed over for a moment, then she snapped her head back to face Erika. ‘He can’t even bear to be in here, but we all carry on like nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘He’s getting better, Bertel. He is. He doesn’t do it on purpose. He never laid a finger on me before.’

  ‘I know that, you silly girl! I know it’s the war that changed him. Of course it’s that blasted war that changed him. But the question is, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You’re the doctor, Erika!’ Bertel cried in a confluence of anger and entreaty. ‘Heal him! Can’t you heal my nephew, for God’s sake?’

  Erika was speechless, but the excruciating silence that followed was promptly pierced by Martha rushing back into the room crying, ‘Max has been in an accident!’

  Edgar looked around the ward to see if anyone else had heard his friend’s mumbled delirium, though he knew his friend well enough to know in fact he was anything but delirious.

  ‘I think it was me. I’m sure it was me,’ Max wept.

  ‘Shh, shh!’ Edgar said as soothingly as his shocked and panicked body would allow him to. ‘Shh, shh! Now, Max, you have to listen to me, OK? You are not a killer. You are not a violent man. You did nothing to hurt anyone.’ Edgar winced at his own words and his eyes filled with tears for Karin, for Max, for himself. ‘I know I’m not Horst, but I love you just the same, Max. I love you, brother, and I cannot lose you. I won’t lose you. You’re my family,’ he said, leaning in close to Max’s bandaged ears. ‘It’s not like I’m ever going to get one of my own, is it?’

  He stood upright, straightened his white coat and with a gentle squeeze of Max’s shoulder he left the ward.

  ‘And I’m not going to lose another friend,’ he muttered to himself as he went to find a vial of a sedative and a needle with which to administer it – to bo
th Max and, when no one was looking, to himself – a wonder of modern medicine that could keep their demons at bay, at least until the medicine ran out, or their bodies got used to the drug.

  But as he started down the corridor he saw something that he realised would make an even better tranquiliser for his friend’s turbulent mind, if not his.

  ‘Hey, Netta. There’s someone here who would love to see you.’

  Netta, who had been numbing herself with the hypnotising sight of her feet dangling above the shiny floor where she sat, snapped out of her reverie and hurried towards her funny Uncle. He showed her into the small ward where a man dressed as a mummy from an Egyptian tomb was half sitting in bed, both arms hanging up from hooks in the ceiling.

  ‘Go and say hello to your papa,’ Uncle Edgar said.

  ‘Is that my papa?’ Netta whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Edgar laughed. ‘He’s there under all those bandages which are helping him get better as quickly as possible. Helping him get better,’ he said loudly for Max’s benefit, ‘so he can come home where he belongs and look after you again. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  Netta nodded then stepped carefully across to the bed and met the moist, red, but unmistakable eyes of her father.

  ‘Sorry, Netta,’ he cried.

  Netta didn’t know what to do or say. She tried to remember what the adults said to her when she was hurt, what they did, but she had never been hurt as badly as this, never been covered in bandages like this. Where could she put her hands to comfort him? She couldn’t remember what he said to her when she broke her nose on the ice, but she could remember seeing her mama on the beach with his head in her lap. She could remember the words she said to him then as he trembled and cried in his sleep.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ Netta said stroking his head with trembling fingers and all the tenderness she could muster. ‘You’re safe. You’re safe here. You’re safe with me. There’s no war here. It’s over. Shh, shh.’ She imitated the sea. ‘There’s no more war. Shh, shh.’

  Erika rushed into the ward at that moment and was arrested not only by the terrible sight of her bandaged husband but also by the sight of her daughter gently stroking Max’s head and whispering the very words Erika had whispered to him on so many restless nights. It was at once the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and the most terrible, not just because of Max’s injuries, but the realisation that her little girl had quietly witnessed and absorbed all those awful exchanges between her parents, and she, Erika, had spent so much time focusing on the impact Max’s condition was having on herself, she hadn’t given a thought to how it might be affecting Netta. Children should be seen and not heard, her own father had always professed, and Erika had vowed when she was a little girl, staring out through the locked gates of his villa, that she would never treat her own children that way; that she would always remember how children, seen and not heard, still saw things and heard things, especially the things expressed inches above their heads, which adults somehow believed were inaudible and forgettable to something as absorbent as a child. And yet, here she was, an adult herself making exactly the same mistakes as her parents. Netta shared a bedroom with her and Max, a bedroom where the air was thick with nightmares and disillusion; she tinkered away on the piano in the living room where the adults played their games of emotional chess; and yet Erika had convinced herself, like all the other amnesiac ex-children in that house, that Netta should be seen and not heard, was unseeing and unhearing.

  She sat carefully next to the bed. She sat Netta on her knee.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ she said, gently stroking both her husband’s bandaged head and her daughter’s golden locks. ‘You’re safe. You’re safe here. It’s over. Shh, shh,’ she whispered, imitating the sea.

  ****

  Copyright

  Published by Clink Street Publishing 2017

  Copyright © 2017

  First edition.

  The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that with which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN:s

  978-1-912262-02-1 paperback

  978-1-912262-03-8 ebook