She feels the panic rise. It is so familiar now, the way her stomach twists and turns and the saliva builds in her mouth. Her visual focus narrows, and her armpits prick with sweat. She should not be here. She needs to get out. She cannot get out; there is no way out. She will have to die. She cannot commit suicide. She does not want to die. She is pregnant. She cannot be pregnant. She does not want to leave Andi. What the fuck is wrong with her?
‘What the fuck is wrong with me?’ She tries the words out aloud. They drift away, unanswered. She leans her head on the glass. The ground is five storeys below. It could be one; it could be twenty. She cannot get out.
‘I belong here.’
She wants someone to argue with her, but they don’t.
‘He cannot live without me.’
No response. She looks down at her pale legs, lined with scars.
‘No one will recognise me.’
She walks down the hallway to the front door, touches it, turns and walks back to the window of the living room and touches it. She repeats this over and over, as though she is swimming laps in a pool. She feels increasingly faint, and this is what she wants. To fall over and have it all disappear. Finally, she stops at the front door. It swims up before her, white in the gloom of the unlit hallway. She twists the handle, pulls the door and it opens.
Clare stands with her hand on the door knob looking into the hallway. The safe sits, as she imagined, by the wall. The rest is dark, just a gleam from the varnished banister. She steps onto the landing. The concrete floor is cold beneath her feet. She does not take her hand from the door. It is instinct, to not let a door slam, to not be locked out.
When was the last time she tried the door? She cannot remember. In the beginning she would try it many times a day. As Andi left and then throughout the afternoon, waiting for him to come home. And then she stopped trying; it seemed such a futile gesture. But how could she have ever considered it so, when now the door is open? She feels cheated. How long has he been leaving the deadbolt unlocked?
She must leave. She cannot leave dressed like this. She steps back into the apartment, goes to close the door. She does not trust it so she props the door against her foot, reaches into the hallway and picks up the safe from the landing. She goes back into the apartment, carefully placing the safe between the door and the jamb, preventing the door from closing fully. She must hurry: he will be home soon.
She runs into the bedroom, tugs her backpack from the wardrobe. It looks so ridiculously bulky. She leaves it and pulls on a pair of jeans. Next to her backpack are her boots; it has been such a long time since she wore them, they feel like they belong to someone else.
She keeps stopping what she is doing to look at the door, checking it is still propped open. In the living room, she picks up her camera bag, slings it over her shoulder. Then she puts it down again. She moves the chair over to the wall of Polaroids, climbs up and, without hesitation, pulls one from the wall. Behind it is a folded piece of paper, and she lets it fall to the floor. It is the letter from Andi’s mother. She should have given it to him days ago. Sometimes you have to leave in order to love. She had translated it with the aid of Andi’s dictionary, shuffling the words about to decipher Ingrid’s intention. She thought it was such a terrible thing for a mother to write to her son that she could not bear to pass it on. She wanted to save him from the pain, because she knew that she could. She unfolds the letter and leaves it on the floor and puts the Polaroid in her jacket pocket. The television tower blinks at her. Hurry, hurry. She grabs her camera bag and runs down the hallway.
She pulls the door wide open, still amazed that it has become a moving object, and steps through. She is out. She goes to move the safe aside to let the door slam shut, but she has a moment of fear that she will be locked on this other side, and she lets the door rest ajar. The stairwell is inky. She runs her hand along the wall, feeling for the light switch. Nothing. She waves her hand up and down, broad sweeps on the cool concrete. Nothing. Hurry, hurry. She skitters down the stairs in the dark, stumbling, catching herself on the banister. At the bottom, daylight leaks in through the outer door, and she wrenches it open, throws herself into the courtyard. The linden greets her, a glorious technicolour green, and she is across the yard, through the other door, the passageway and into the street. She turns left. There are people. She is outside. She begins to run, her bag banging awkwardly against her as she sidesteps the people who have no urgency. At the intersection she looks to her left, and there, the television tower. It blinks at her, a friend. Its red and white lights switch on and off — nothing changes their rhythm — and she heads towards it gratefully.
Her ankles threaten to give way on the cobbled streets. She keeps looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic; she is afraid her instinct will lead her in front of a vehicle. She wants to slow down but she cannot, and she knows people are looking at her strangely, but she is running and she is getting away and she cannot stop. Her breath is short, and she keeps staring at people, expecting them to be Andi, surprised when they are not.
When she finally makes it to Alexanderplatz, her lungs are burning, her legs shaking. The square is filled with people, their hands grasping shopping bags, lifting takeaway coffees to their mouths, holding mobile phones. They are oblivious to her, and she wants to be one of them. She slows to a walk; she is breathing heavily. She skirts around the department store and sees the S-Bahn sign. Inside, the shopping mall is cool yet the air is close. She joins the crowds jostling down the stairs to the platform and lets herself get sucked up by them and ferried along.
He won’t know where she is. He will worry; she should have left a note. And then she catches herself, realises what she is thinking. She is free. She will not see him again. She knows what she must do. She is away.
Ingrid’s steps slow as she reaches the top of the landing. Each tread feels familiar, the import of her previous visit having committed this stairwell to her memory. She had asked Andreas’s father about Clare. Who was this girlfriend of their son? He had said little. He had not met Clare, and Ingrid suspects that until then he had not even heard of her. She has received no response to her note and has spent over a week distractedly wandering the streets of Berlin, trying to evoke memories as often as she tries to discourage them. She did not want to pressure Andreas, did not want to force herself upon him, but tired of waiting, she has returned to his apartment, decided once more to surprise her son, and do more than talk to a haunted voice through his front door.
She arrives on the top landing and lifts her hand to knock before realising the door is propped open.
‘Andreas?’
No sound comes from the apartment.
‘Clare?’
She wants now to put a face to the voice, wants so desperately to hear soft footsteps coming towards her. Has Clare left the door open for her? An invitation? Is she circumnavigating Andreas’s refusal to see her?
She knocks on the door, calls out the names again. Nothing. She pushes open the door and goes into the apartment. It appears to be a safe that is holding the door open, the kind used by small businesses for petty cash and kept in a desk drawer. Resting the door back against the safe, Ingrid calls out again.
‘Hallo?’
But she is alone in the apartment. Sound bumps off the hard surfaces and sinks into her body. It is a reception she knows well. She walks down the hallway, passing the bathroom and the bedroom. She cannot resist looking into the bedroom, though she feels there is something sordid about a mother seeing where her grown son sleeps. The bed is unmade: white sheets cascade to a floor of sea-grass matting. The curtains are closed, but she can make out a backpack staggering out of the cupboard — it looks like a person slumped there.
At the end of the hallway, she turns into the living room. Summer light floods through large windows framed by white curtains. There is a mural painted across one wall: aeropla
nes and parachutes, the kind of thing you paint to amuse a little boy. Does Andreas have a child? Does she have a grandchild? She looks for further clues, wants to know what sort of person he has become. She expected his apartment to be dark and enclosed — the light and the IKEA furniture surprise her. She had wanted him to be miserable. Bright cushions recline on the couch and armchair, records are scattered on a coffee table. She can smell cigarettes in the air, and she hopes that Andreas or Clare will return soon, that they have just walked to the shops or a nearby park.
She crosses the room to the window. Looking at the view seems the only legitimate activity for a stranger waiting alone. She is reminded of her own apartment in Berlin so many years ago. The windows were much smaller, and the television tower further away. But it was the same, in its way, and she is glad that she and Andreas have shared this at least.
She hears a thud. Is it the downstairs door closing? Her heart lurches, and she turns from the window to face the living-room doorway. Where should she stand? How will he react to seeing her? And then she sees the wall.
From skirting board to ceiling, the wall is covered in a grid of Polaroid photographs. It looks like an art installation, each photograph pinned in strict formation with its neighbours. They are all the same image — no — they are all of the same girl, and she knows instinctively who it must be. She moves towards the gallery, aware that footsteps on the stairs are mimicking her own. There are so many photos, perhaps two or three hundred, and in each one Clare regards her. She smiles and she grimaces; she looks into the distance; she looks at the floor; and she looks through the window to the television tower as though greeting a familiar friend. But no matter where her gaze falls, in every single photo she has been captured. Towards the top of the wall, one Polaroid is missing, and Ingrid stands on a chair to look at the ones on either side, urging them to give a clue to Clare’s absence.
The footsteps arrive on the landing, and then she sees. The photo to the left of the gap shows Clare with long hair. In the photo to the right she has a fringe, and an angry line is carved across her forehead.
‘Clare?’ he calls out as he closes the front door.
As she climbs down from the chair, Ingrid hears him turn the key in the lock.
‘Clare, are you in there?’ His footsteps follow his voice down the hallway.
She turns to meet her son.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way with this book. To my parents, Annette and John, who have always been supportive, as have my sisters and brothers, Stephanie, Alexander, Hannah, Bridget and Nicholas. To my friends for giving me permission to retreat. Particular thanks to Anna Egan, Naomi Saligari and Emma Wakeling, who read early drafts and gave honest and helpful feedback. Thanks to Franka Tuchelt, Damian Lentini and Tobias Titz for their help with all things German. And many thanks to Alanna Egan for the hours spent discussing this book, and for reminding me why we write.
With thanks to everyone at Scribe, who are absolutely delightful, in particular to Nicola Redhouse and Ian See. And the most particular and heartfelt thanks of all to Aviva Tuffield, whose intelligence and astute questioning made this a much better book — and me a much better writer.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
I
II
Acknowledgements
Berlin Syndrome Page 22
