Septembers

by Christopher Prendergast

He tilted his head. ‘Well, I have mixed feelings. I mean, my boss back then was a wanker. Plus, I ended up here and I like this job. I think you’ve seen why.’ He grinned again. ‘I can get all my sleep here and there’s plenty of time for poker later in the day.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ I said, hoping the conversation was winding down.

  ‘Of course, I play it online,’ he added.

  5

  I WENT TO the nearest police station and pressed the intercom on the outer wall. It rang like a phone. I had been put through to an emergency call centre. They told me the station I was at wasn’t in use and piped me through to another one. I was put on hold for a few minutes. When it finally went through I told them I had to report an assault. After several hesitations she agreed to send out a patrol car. When the officers arrived they radioed me in as a timewaster at first, seeing as I wasn’t hurt.

  I walked down from the station ramp and spoke to them on a mound of grass beside the building. It was about midday and a few people on their lunch breaks looked at me and the police, wondering what was going on. I sat down and ran my hand through the grass. A few cars turned off from the roundabout, passing us, and I saw a kid staring out, who should have been in school. In the interview room I had to tell them so many times what had happened.

  ‘So you assaulted a young man, about fifteen or sixteen, skinny build, fair hair, blue or green eyes, missing teeth, grubby face, wielding a stick as a weapon, and this young man was involved in a prior attack on your friend?’

  He had written it down all wrong. He was trying to look for causality that wasn’t there. We kept going until he had all but blacked out the bigger picture. I asked for a drink and the other officer told me to wait outside. The hall was lined with noticeboards displaying maps and leaflets on civilian vigilance. The sergeant brought me a cup of water. She said they wanted to take me out to the site, so I could tell them again what happened and exactly where.

  They made me stay in the car. My eyes settled on patches of dried dirt in the footwell. I looked up now and then to see what they were doing. Instead of pulling up alongside the warehouses, we were on the far side, by a fence and in view of the flat expanse where the body should have been. From there I had pointed out two piles of crates he had meandered through.

  I watched the officers walk cautiously, checking the mud for any evidence. Occasionally they would stop and look at their shoes. The sergeant put an arm out to steady herself as she skipped down into a ditch. A third officer asked me questions in the squad car. All the same questions. Over and over. Finally he said, ‘Are you sure you haven’t done anything like this before?’

  The two officers were trudging back towards the car. They took separate routes and one clambered through a hole in the fencing, further up.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t hit him as hard as you thought.’

  I looked to the two outside.

  The sergeant came close and answered her radio. When she finished she clicked the passenger door open and looked down at me. She asked if I had ever worked at the City College, not far up the road. When I said yes she explained that they were running background checks and had some concerns. She got back into the car and checked the mirrors. ‘A Mrs Munroe seems pretty anxious to make a statement. Do you have any idea why?’ She waited for me to answer. ‘Well, it sounds like you’re not going to be forthcoming about these allegations.’ She turned the key in the ignition. ‘I’ve got a feeling there might be a bit more substance to them.’

  ‘What about the boy?’ I asked.

  ‘He turns up or he doesn’t turn up. Either way, we’ve got some more questions for you.’

  The door opened quietly and a concierge in white gloves beckoned me through.

  There were several men, in military uniform, sat at an oval dining table. Over the large fireplace was a picture of Hindenburg. The picture and everything else in the room had a throbbing red light thrown over it. Hindenburg himself was sitting at the table with a serviette tucked loosely into his collar. He looked to the window where the red light burned from a distant street. A man with a moustache and a bow-tie turned towards me in his chair. It was Franz von Papen.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  The concierge pushed me forward. ‘Tell him.’

  I leant down to speak in Franz’s ear. He stopped cutting his potato and slammed the knife down.

  ‘The Reichstag is on fire, Herr von Papen.’

  Hindenburg started laughing. Suddenly all the club servants around the table joined him.

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ Franz scoffed.

  I pointed to the window. The smoke was billowing out into the night sky, lit red by the flames. Several columns at the entrance had begun to blacken. The shattering of windows and exchanges of shouting filled the room. The club servants began to panic. Two of them ran into each other and a plate hit the floor and smashed.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Hindenburg said, standing up. He marched to the window, smashed it with his shoulder and threw his wine glass into the night. ‘We’ll put it out ourselves,’ he said.

  A beeping started faintly.

  ‘That will be the fire alarm,’ someone said, sniggering.

  ‘Who left their phone on?’

  My pocket vibrated. I put my tray down next to Papen. The ringing got louder and I pulled my phone out. I saw Annabel’s name on the screen. I answered it as everyone around the table sighed.

  ‘What’s the fucking point?’ Hindenburg said.

  They began arguing about the likelihood of Hindenburg smashing the window. Annabel greeted me warmly. She was due to drive down from Sheffield in the next few days. I wanted to speed it up. Annabel asked about Jaroslaw. She wanted to meet him. I told her he was a busy guy with lots of commitments. It bought me some time. In fact, having Annabel out of the way had been a blessing in disguise. Now I was just looking forward to seeing her free of all this. I hung up on a good note.

  I was trying not to think of the boy. The police had scant evidence against me and, of course, no victim. Munroe’s statement had amounted to little more than suspicious and irresponsible behaviour during the exam period. She didn’t see, or couldn’t quite make, a connection with the bomb threat. It seemed like the dice had fallen in my favour. I guess it depends how you look at it. I placed the phone onto the table and gazed out of the window. I watched the Reichstag fire until one of the concierges went and turned off the projector. Papen put his arm around me and said, ‘Great footage. How do you think it all went?’

  At some of the seminal moments of German political life in the twentieth century, Franz seemed to be just about to sit down to dinner. Firstly there was his dinner with the Russian military attaché in August 1914, under the invitation of the American general, Funston. The two men were barely past the hotel lounge, let alone choosing an entrée, when Funston came bounding down the stairs. He told the two men Germany had declared war on Russia. The Russian Goleyevsky then politely refused to sit down. Papen protested, to little effect, that the pair ‘had not personally declared war on each other’.

  He would have worse meals, particularly whilst under arrest in the run-up to the Nuremberg trials. One Nuremburg meal saw another defendant, Schacht, throw coffee in an American photographer’s face. Papen seemed to enjoy the solidarity of this incident. In the end he did throw in his lot with the others on trial. Though Papen would be acquitted, his reputation as schemer and fool remained intact, especially given his prolonged involvement with Hitler’s Government. Ultimately, the thing that seemed to condemn Papen’s fundamental guilt, if not a lawful one, was the fact he was still alive at the end. He had survived and people wanted to know why.

  6

  IT WAS ALL greyed over outside and some small birds kept flitting past, on their way to the flat roof and back. I was picking up scattered newspapers and emptying the ashtrays. I found Franz’s memoirs under the coffee table a
nd put them to one side. I wanted the place to look pleasant when Annabel arrived. After all the pans had been left to soak I came back into the living room and deleted the voicemails from the phone. I gave each one a final listen.

  Once the messages were gone I sat down. The carpet looked so nice I wanted to get down on it, to lie on it and do some sit-ups or maybe just lie there. I would have done but I was out of time. I put the memoirs on the kitchen counter so I would remember them. I would post them to David. He would understand. I pulled the window shut because rain was rattling against the back of the television. I prepared everything before I went to bed and I lay there, on top of the sheets, thinking of Annabel.

  I was sellotaping the jiffy bag when she knocked on the door. She waltzed in, eagerly kissed me and stood grinning, looking around the flat. It was the tidiest it had been in weeks. Even the cushions on the sofa were plump and upright. When I went to fetch my duffel bag she found the parcel for David on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘I need to stop off at a post office on the way.’

  We drove to a line of shops bordering a triangle of bleached grass. An old man in a short-sleeved shirt sat on a bench staring into the middle-distance. The car crawled down the road and Annabel pointed out a newsagent’s with a Post Office sign. She pulled up. I said I’d be a few minutes and kissed her twice, barely letting her catch a breath.

  We had agreed that we were going to leave. We had ruled out all the places we already knew. It had to be off the map for us, which meant a kind of road trip and, with that, a kind of pact. I walked through the doorway of the newsagent’s thinking of a dozen hotel rooms all at once, both of us wrapped in towels, Annabel uncorking a bottle of red wine.

  I circled some shelves before finding the Post Office counter. The woman behind the screen asked me to put the package on the scales. I borrowed her pen to write David’s name on it and I pulled a scrap of paper, with his address on, from my pocket.

  ‘How long will it take to get there?’ I said.

  She gave me a number of options and charged me seven pounds sixty. The shop was fringed with St George bunting. It was match day. England had a European qualifier. The papers were making a lot of noise in the build-up. Eventually she called me back to give me a receipt.

  I walked out the door and looked around. The last of the leaves were falling and they were being crunched under the wheels of passing cars. Two or three cafes were spread amongst the shops and they looked fairly busy. A man was walking down the road in an England shirt, in sunglasses.

  A lorry drove past, on the same side as the England fan and, on seeing him, issued a volley of horn blasts. The lorry barrelled onwards, up towards a roundabout, and its hydraulic gasps started to fade. The rhythm of those blasts carried on, though, spreading through the streets. The old man even appeared to be tapping it out on the bench with the palm of his hand.

  I was shaking. I turned and headed towards the Peugeot where I could see Annabel leaning across, pushing the passenger door open for me. The door swung out, then back a little.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Annabel said.

  She kept apologising about the mess in her car. She’d had no chance to clean it.

  ‘Matt, are you OK?’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m just not feeling great.’

  She said we’d go and get some petrol. And she asked me if I wanted aspirin or painkillers whilst she was in the shop. I watched her go in. I was rubbing my hand over the car seat fabric and trying not to think. I decided to make myself useful. I undid my seatbelt and opened the glovebox. I could do the map-reading whilst she drifted down country lanes. I pulled out some plastic bags and looked for the A-Z. There wasn’t one in there but there were six mini shampoo bottles buried right at the back. I pulled one out so I had something to do with my hands.

  I rolled it back and forth across my palm and clicked the glovebox shut. I looked at the label. It wasn’t shampoo. At the bottom it said, ‘Light Silky Lube’. I checked the others and they were the same. Light Silky Lube. There was also a paper bag of condoms. I looked up at Annabel. She was at the petrol station counter. I couldn’t see her face for the reflected light in the glass.

  There was something else. The car seat was too far back. She hadn’t had time to tidy the car. I groped under the seat for the lever, felt the cold plastic and pulled it up. I moved forward about a foot before I was level with the driver’s seat. Her mum was a big lady. Maybe she had been driving her around a lot. Maybe the lever was faulty. Maybe it always slid back.

  Annabel was just getting her change and putting it in her purse. I closed the glovebox again, slipped a bottle of lube in my pocket and got out of the car. I got into the back seat. The car smelt musty and cool, nice and metallic. I lay down and stared into the footwell. When Annabel got in she didn’t seem to notice me at first. She put a plastic bag down on the passenger seat. She put the keys in the ignition.

  ‘What’s up, Matt? Are you feeling sick?’

  ‘You don’t have a map,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘I looked all through the glovebox. It’s not there.’

  Annabel hesitated. She checked her mirrors and started the car.

  ‘Always snooping around, Matt,’ she said. ‘So snoopy.’

  She touched the wheel, was about to pull out, then stopped. I looked up at her profile. The bottle of lube rested on my thigh. She seemed expectant. I thought about asking: Who? How recently? How many? It didn’t matter. Not now. There was something else. It was following me around, tapping a beat on thick rubber, swearing, laughing, spitting in tyre tracks. That’s what I would ask her. She’d know. She knew that sort of thing.

  ‘Do gypsies talk to the police?’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Do they get on with them?’

  ‘Probably not. But are we talking Romany or Irish?’

  She said it was best not to lump them all together. That they probably wouldn’t talk to the police. They’d resolve things internally.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You’re right.’

  She started the car and we pulled out. We drove in silence at first. Eventually she asked why. I was surprised at how long she had taken. Like she didn’t want to ask. Perhaps she already knew. Not in any mystical, clairvoyant way. And not like she’d seen it in the news. Maybe she had an outline in her head of what people were capable of. She sensed things about people that they would go on to corroborate. And long ago, she sensed this about me.