There were seven printouts from the Internet, each one a photograph with comments. A drawing of a red heart with a razor blade in the middle. They don’t understand anything in here. A girl sitting on a white-tiled bathroom floor, looking as buried in thought as someone giving themselves a shot of heroin, and slitting her lower arm. You could kill yourself here and nobody would give a fuck. Two close-ups of the cuts. The core of existence. A kind of heaven. Two sentences written on the wall in blood: I’m dying and Fucking Furth. The girl lying on her back in a pool of blood, her eyes closed and arms stretched out. Something for Raimund to jerk off to, the nerd with the ponytail who always gets a hard-on when I cut myself.
Sanguine, sanguine, Horn thought, and he also thought of Irene – it was a safe bet that the image of blood dripping from a girl’s forearm never crossed her mind as she played her Bruckner. He put the file back and stood up. “Can I talk to Raimund?” he asked.
“Christina sent him home. He’d totally lost the plot,” Karin said.
“What about Sabrina?”
“In a deep sleep. Hrachovec sedated her.”
Male solidarity, Horn thought. She humiliates her primary nurse and the duty doctor pumps her full of drugs. He probably wouldn’t have done any different. Sometimes all you could do was show who’s boss, even if it didn’t look especially pretty on the outside.
He decided against calling Hrachovec and left the ward. As passed the day room he saw that Fehring had fallen asleep in his chair. The television was still on with the sound turned down. Something unpleasant scratched at the furthest corner of his consciousness. He could not identify what it was.
*
Four people were there. Frau Kirschner and the Reintalers were chatting at a table in the waiting area, Kurt Frühwald sat apart from them, and the grey-haired man who had first turned up a fortnight ago was leaning against a wall, tapping at his Palmtop with a stylus. Horn could not remember the man’s name; this had been happening to him rather a lot lately.
A strange collection of people, he thought. Mothers, fathers, husbands, all of them looking as if they were straight out of a photograph, their faces flat, shoulders a little too low. Why am I here? he thought. Why don’t I sit and watch the hawk? Or enjoy the rhododendron flowers? Or imagine my wife playing the cello, with glowing ears and the tip of her tongue between her teeth?
The light in the day room was flickering slightly. This annoyed Horn. He had forgotten to report it to the in-house electrician. In a few minutes’ time someone would say: The light’s still flickering. It was inevitable. It was not just one light, but all of them, he was glad he had noticed that. Someone’s tapping into us, he thought, I’ll say that someone’s siphoning off electricity from the hospital and we can’t work out who or where. He chose to wait.
More men than women, he said as he opened the session – we’ve never had that in a relatives’ session before; generally, men are not so involved. Maria Reintaler laughed. Involved, what a joke, she said, and anyway it was a draw, two-all, because her husband was nothing more than an accessory. He only came along because he didn’t know what to do with himself at home on his own. Now Sophie Kirschner was laughing, too, and Max Reintaler said, “True.” He was one of those men who, if he spoke at all, tended to speak in one word-sentences: Yes. No. Cheers. Pissoff. True. Running a small firm that installed electrical items, he had become something of a specialist in photovoltaics, and could be confident that his customers did not have the faintest idea what he was up to. His wife had managed the office for him until about a year ago, when her mother was first afflicted with a rapidly advancing form of dementia, so now she devoted all her time to looking after her. Horn asked the other men whether they, too, felt like accessories. Maria Reintaler said she didn’t care about the others, but her bloke definitely was one, here and even more so at home, she was at the end of her tether, nobody could imagine what it was like, and it didn’t seem to affect her dear husband in the slightest. She was coming to this group in the hope that somebody, finally, might read him the riot act, it was not on for her to have to shoulder the entire burden of caring for her mother, not to mention the housework and the bookkeeping she still did for the company. Max Reintaler was wearing light-brown corduroy trousers, a checked shirt and a chunky chain around his neck. As Reintaler gazed into the distance, Horn was sure that he was thinking about condensators, cable cross-sections or solar panels, and that everything his wife was saying was going in one ear and out the other like a spring breeze. In a way I can understand him, Horn thought, she’d drive you up the wall. She had dominated the last two sessions with her lament, and he had no intention of letting it happen again. “What sort of care allowance does your mother get?” he asked. Maria Reintaler raised an eyebrow and gasped. “Why?” she asked. “What’s that got to do with it?” There were times when Raffael Horn could feel duplicity and hypocrisy swell up inside him like a soft, sweet mass, and he was incapable of doing anything to stop it. He had just wondered, he said, whether she might not be getting enough allowance for her mother, and therefore couldn’t hire professional help. There was now a broad range of mobile nursing available, he added, particularly in the psychiatric sector. No, she didn’t want that, Maria Reintaler said, getting agitated. Nobody knew her mother as well as she did, and anyway, each time she came into contact with strangers she’d get more and more panicky. Frau Reintaler was now sitting bolt upright, prodding the air with her index finger as she spoke.
“Obviously all you care about is the money!” Kurt Frühwald said very quietly, almost incidentally.
“I beg your pardon?” she spluttered.
“Level seven, isn’t it?” Frühwald said. “The maximum plus a supplement for increased medical costs.”
“And? She’s entitled to it!”
“No-one’s disputing that.”
“Exactly. So what are you after?”
“Justice,” Kurt Frühwald said, “just sometimes I’d like a little bit of justice, that’s all.”
“Justice? – Nobody’s to blame for what happened to your wife!” Any moment now, Horn thought, she’s going to leap up and go for his throat. Maria Reintaler’s face was puce, her hands clutched the seat of her chair. Kurt Frühwald looked completely relaxed. He’s smiling, Horn thought, he’s actually smiling. Frühwald was a bald-headed man of medium height who swam across the lake and back again several times a week, from the boat jetty at the wildlife observation centre to the point where the stream at Fürstenau flowed into a waterfall, a distance of more than three kilometres. He didn’t need to do it for his ego, he would say if somebody asked him, he was doing it for his wife. She weighed seventy-five kilograms, was as strong as an ox, and completely unpredictable. Eleven years ago, Frühwald’s wife had suffered a serious injury to her skull. As a result she was unable to walk and her personality had completely changed. Her husband had taken her away from hospital at the earliest possible opportunity, taught her how to use a wheelchair, and then looked after her predominantly on his own. To begin with he had taken unpaid leave; later he gave up his job as a bank employee and set himself up as a freelance insurance broker. That gave him the flexibility he needed to care for his wife. Immediately after the accident he had given his son, five at the time, and their two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters to his wife’s mother. They still lived with her.
“‘Nobody’ isn’t right,” Frühwald said.
“What do you mean?” Horn asked, even though he knew the answer.
“That little brat my wife chased after – he’s entirely to blame.”
“Not again,” Frau Kirschner sighed.
“I’m sorry,” Frühwald said, “but I’m not going to change my opinion.”
“He was only a little boy!”
“So what?”
Margot Frühwald had been playing a game of “We are jungle animals” with her group of children on the strip of lawn behind the kindergarten. Everything had gone according to plan until Moritz Leitkamp took his
role as a leopard one stage too far. The five-year-old had fixed on Nina Rohrer, who was a gazelle, as his victim, and had pounced with his claws at the ready. Nina fled, Moritz pursued her, and Margot Frühwald had chased after him to prevent any greater mischief. She did not see the rim of the inflatable paddling pool, caught her foot, stumbled, and hit her head against the edge of the concrete plant trough. She spent several weeks in a coma, and her life was only saved when an intracranial pressure probe was applied just in time. “What’s your wife’s level of paralysis?” the grey-haired man asked bluntly. Frühwald spun round towards him. “Her what?” he asked.
“Her level. Cervical spine, thoracic spine, C five, C seven, T something. You know.”
“She doesn’t have a level,” Frühwald said. “My wife doesn’t have your average paralysis.” In her case it had been an epidural haematoma, bleeding between the skull and the brain which had put such pressure on the cerebral cortex that part of it had been destroyed. “The Gyrus precentralis,” the man said. How did he know that? Frühwald asked, it wasn’t the sort of thing you just came out with – if he was a doctor then he should tell them all, not keep it a secret. No, the man said, he wasn’t a doctor, but he couldn’t help having an interest in medical matters, especially those to do with the central nervous system. I don’t like him, Horn thought, even if he says he couldn’t help it. I don’t like the way he taps at his Palmtop, and I don’t like the way he says Gyrus precentralis, medical matters, and central nervous system – with the arrogance of someone who’s half educated, and with a slight north-German accent.
What did he mean he couldn’t help it, Frühwald asked somewhat uncertainly, what did that have to do with his being in this relatives’ group? He had a mentally ill wife and a difficult daughter. The man looked around the room. Nobody said a word. Why did he say mentally ill, Horn wondered, he’s attention-seeking, and I still don’t like him. I’m sorry, Frühwald said at last. “No reason to be,” the man said. “Your wife is paralysed and mine has paranoid schizophrenia. We’ve both been dealt our fair share.”
“Where’s she being treated?” Frühwald asked.
“In Graz,” the man said. “Someone was recommended to us.”
They’ve found each other, Horn thought – men who are suffering on account of their wives. The group is fulfilling its function. Graz is a beautiful city, Elfriede Kirschner said, nice people, the Schloßberg with its beautiful view, and good doctors. It wasn’t surprising his daughter was being difficult, she said, having a paranoid schizophrenic must be a terrible burden on the whole family, especially the children.
Foster daughter, the man said, strictly speaking she was a foster daughter, from a province in south-west India, which threw up problems of its own, of course. For instance, her younger sister hadn’t been able to cope with it in the end – the reorientation, the social dislocation and the latent xenophobia which still existed here. She’d gone into decline, both mentally and physically, and when his wife became ill they’d had to send her back. The older one was still here and doing almost nothing else but indulging in oppositional behaviour. She wasn’t speaking to him or his wife any more, went to school as and when she fancied, and spent entire days shut away in her room. He was part of this “pray and work” society like most of the rest of them, and having to put up with trying circumstances was water off a duck’s back to him. But right now he no longer had a clue what to do. He’s beginning to let his guard down now, Horn thought, when he feels helpless he casts off his arrogance.
“How old is she?” Elfriede Kirschner said.
“Thirteen,” the man said. “And two months.”
After this they spoke briefly about the difficulties of being an adolescent, a little more about the difficulties of being the parents of adolescents, but they spent most of the time recalling how it had been when they themselves, aged thirteen, had shut themselves off in their rooms all day long, not communicating at all with the adult world, not even with obscene gestures. Kurt Frühwald spoke of his grandfather’s powerful status and Maria Reintaler of how unbearably conservative her mother had been in some things, hairstyles for instance. In the middle of all this Elfriede Kirschner suddenly said she felt awful but she’d forgotten the name of the man, the foster father, and she hoped this wasn’t the first sign of dementia. “Possner,” the man said, “Armin Possner.” His wife was called Erika and his daughter Fanni, in case anybody was interested. The mood had relaxed, Horn was happy with the level of communication and mutual burden-sharing from the group, and at the end of the session he remarked how surprised he was that nobody had complained about the flickering light. “We’re discreet and well mannered,” Max Reintaler said. The others laughed.
*
When Horn turned on his mobile again it showed two missed calls. Tobias and an unknown number. Tobias never called. All of a sudden Horn was worried. The words epidural haematoma and Gyrus precentralis flashed through his mind.
“Is there anything wrong with Irene?” he asked.
“What makes you say that?” Tobias’s voice was faint.
“Why are you mumbling? Have you been asleep again?”
“Just shut up. It’s Mimi.” Horn felt hot again.
“What’s wrong with Mimi? Has she been run over?”
“Christ, you’ve got disaster on the brain. She looks weird and sometimes she makes these movements like she’s stoned.”
“Stoned?”
Her leg keeps on giving way, Tobias explained, it was just her right hind one, he’d been watching. You noticed it particularly when she was trying to negotiate obstacles. The thing with her eyes was even stranger. When he looked at her he could tell something was wrong, but he didn’t know what. “She’s squinting,” Horn said.
“What makes you say that?”
“It was the impression I got. She’s also irritable.”
“True. So what does that tell us?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“You’re the doctor. Expert in all kinds of nutters and drunks.”
There are fundamental physiological differences between cats and human beings, Horn said, we need a vet here. As it didn’t sound life-threatening he should wait until he got back. Tobias grunted and hung up, just like that. Moron, Horn thought.
He walked home via Gaiswinkler Straße and Achenallee. The sky above the town was flecked with orange fleecy clouds. To the south-west the rim of the Kammwand mountain was shining white. Seats had been set out in the gardens of the housing development and the first lanterns lit. I’m desperate for Irene, Horn thought, for her voice, the noises she makes as she moves through the house. I want her to be there when I get home. I’d like to share a glass of wine with her and put my nose in her hair. She’s my wife. It makes me nervous when there are tenors around her.
He had just turned off the main road when his mobile rang. “Has she bitten you? Or is her leg giving way again?” he said. The voice at the other end did not belong to Tobias. Nobody had bitten her, thank God, the woman said, and she hadn’t recently come across anyone whose leg was giving way either. Her name was Eleonore Bitterle, she was a policewoman, and if she wasn’t mistaken, he was a psychiatrist who understood children. If that was what she thought then there must be some truth to it, he said. “What do you think about this?” she asked. “A child gets beaten, on his face, on his back, on his arms, and when he’s asked who did it, he says: Something black.” Horn said nothing. “Any ideas?” she said after a while. “Something black beats up a child,” he said. Nothing else came into his mind. The boy was seven years old and due to be questioned the next day. Might he be able to come along to police headquarters? “In the afternoon,” he said. “Three o’clock.”
The sun had now vanished. It was difficult to make out the terrain, so Raffael Horn decided against the shortcut. Who would go around beating up seven-year-olds? Stupid question, he thought. Then he thought of Tobias, lying asleep on his bed, the blob of saliva at his lips, and how he had called be
cause he was worried about Mimi. Tobias had been tired, he thought, and even more facetious than usual. Again something niggled at the back of his mind. It was connected with what his son had said about the cat. All of a sudden he knew what it was. He quickened his pace.
THREE
It was many years since he had needed an alarm clock. No matter what time he had gone to bed the night before, the following morning he would watch the dawn creep into his bedroom, through the gap beneath the door, through the tiny holes in the roller blind at the window. He knew that trying to go back to sleep again was pointless, so he had trained himself not to even think about it. He lay on his back, stretched his legs and thought about all kinds of things, about the mood in his team, about what was happening on the drug scene in Furth, and about whether the Weghaupt boy had been pushed from the scaffolding or not. Charlotte, his daughter, had been in touch, too. She had been away for a year and a half and had not given a reason for wanting to come and see him. Like all sixteen-year-olds she probably needed money.
Kovacs reached his arm out to the right and felt around the empty side of the bed. Marlene wasn’t there. Sometimes there were things you knew, but still you had to make sure. That’s what children did, and nobody thought anything of it. She spends at least every other night here, he thought, she cooks for me, she plans our holidays, and I need to try summoning her to cope when she’s not here; that’s what it’s come to. After his wife had left him for a dapper-looking chap from Upper Austria he had sworn he would never let himself get into another relationship. He started drinking, beer mainly, eating rubbish, and in the end he was chucking his guts up on a daily basis. A walrus-faced internist pushed a tube down his throat, said “gastritis”, and strongly urged him to find a psychotherapist and change his life. He went to Szarah and Lefti’s, ate red lentil soup and yoghurt with fresh coriander, and changed his tipple to peppermint tea. Psychotherapy could go hang as far as he was concerned. Nine months later while investigating a burglary he met Marlene Hanke, the owner of the only secondhand shop in Furth. Even though she had been extremely cautious following the end of her own marriage, she eventually allowed herself to enter a businesslike relationship for the purpose of mutual sexual gratification. It worked pretty well; sex once or twice a week with the usual ups and downs. Without noticing it, he had become quite fond of her, and one day it was no longer her breasts and smooth incisors which were the chief objects of his desire, but the rolls of fat on her hips, the way she clenched her fists when she was angry, and her wonderfully tinny laugh. Or after we’ve made love, the way she rolls onto her side and pushes her back towards me invitingly when she sees that I’m lying here wide awake at night, Kovacs thought, and I can snuggle up to her for a more appealing type of insomnia. This was precisely what he was missing at that moment. I’ll give her a call, he thought, and he felt like a small child that wants its mother immediately. He pulled back the blanket. If there was one thing he did not need in life right now it was a mother.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 3
