‘In town?’
‘Yes. That strange tour of Hamburg.’
A crooked smile appears on Philip’s face. ‘Exactly that,’ he says. ‘I went on a tour of Hamburg.’
‘Hmm,’ I say.
We’re silent for a while.
‘What was it like?’ I ask.
‘What was what like?’
‘Walking around your native town. After all those years.’
Philip smiles. ‘What got me most were the little things,’ he says. ‘I had a lot of time to think in captivity. I used to go on long walks around Hamburg in my head, trying to imagine everything precisely, to conjure every detail.’ For a moment he seems caught up in his memories. ‘I managed to remember a lot,’ he says. ‘But there were dozens or even hundreds of small details missing—what colour were the chairs the Italian put outside his corner restaurant in the summer? Black or dark green? How many steps were there going up to our neighbours’ houses? What kind of trees grew on our street? There were limes, I knew that—limes that made the windscreens of the parked cars all sticky in the summer. But weren’t there also some beeches among them? Or was that only in the street that ran parallel to ours? And what colour were the litter bins? I must have thrown things into them millions of times, but I couldn’t remember—maybe orange, maybe blue, maybe metallic grey, I didn’t know.’
He looks at me.
‘I checked yesterday,’ he says. ‘They’re red.’
We’re silent. Outside, a car drives past with booming bass.
‘And the man?’ I ask.
‘What man?’
‘The man at the vending machine. I saw him slip you something.’
‘There wasn’t a man.’
I’m immediately alarmed—how can he deny it? Is he still lying to me?
‘Oh, hang on. The man in the football shirt? He asked me if I could give him change for a note.’
So banal, so simple.
‘Hmm. And the anonymous calls? The hate campaign on the internet?’
‘What?’ Philip frowns. ‘Hate campaign?’ he repeats.
It’s suddenly clear to me that I miscalculated.
I think of Mirko and realise it’s possible that he was responsible for all the calls from the withheld number—and, yes, all the awful online comments. It wasn’t a conspiracy, wasn’t a campaign—only an aggrieved man whom I shared my bed with for a while and then cast out of my life somewhat ungraciously. I realise what a lot of damage I’ve caused, how much is going to need salvaging and patching up over the next weeks and months.
‘Forget it,’ I say. ‘It’s not important.’ I suddenly realise how incredibly tired I am. All I want right now is to sleep.
‘I’m dog tired,’ I say. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘I have to tell you something,’ Philip says quickly.
I look at him. ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’
‘No,’ he says, ‘it can’t.’ He stands up.
I’m too exhausted to contradict him. I get up and follow him, only stopping when I realise he wants to leave the house. ‘You want to go out? Now?’
He nods. ‘We have to.’
Outside, the shadows under Philip’s eyes are so dark they almost shimmer purple. But while I stagger along, hardly able to stay on my feet, he moves with the same control and efficiency as ever. He has something of a soldier about him, I think. As if he’s been in training.
It’s still dark, but dawn isn’t far off. Philip gets behind the wheel of my car and I sit in the passenger seat beside him. He starts up the engine—it stalls at first and he curses under his breath, but the second time he gets it to fire and we roll slowly down the road. I know at once where we’re going, and I wish we could turn back—wish we could stop and sit in the car in silence until the sun rises and drives away the shadows. Philip gives me a sidelong glance. He probably guesses my thoughts, but he says nothing.
The streets are deserted—only half an hour later we are leaving the town behind us. Silence. Only the noise of the engine as it devours the road in front of us, the asphalt gleaming black as licorice. I’m driving right to the heart of my nightmares.
As Philip steers the car out of Hamburg and onto a remote country road, my thoughts begin to stray.
One night, many years ago. The stuff my nightmares are made of.
We’re on the way home from the house on the lake. Something’s up with Leo.
We get in the car immediately.
And of course, we argue.
I look at Philip—his self-righteous face—and I shout something and Philip shouts back and then he cries, ‘Look at the road, for God’s sake!’ and there’s a strange rumbling and I brake instinctively and come to an abrupt halt. The car stops with a jolt and then it is suddenly very, very quiet.
I’ve hit something, I think, glancing across at Philip, who is staring at me, his eyes wide with horror.
‘Was that a deer?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see.’
I swallow heavily. I look in the rear-view mirror, but can’t see anything behind us. I get out of the car and hear Philip do the same. I walk round the car. Then, in the red glow of the brakelights, I see it.
A person. A man? A woman? I don’t know. But I know at once that whoever it is is dead.
‘Oh God,’ says Philip. ‘Oh God, God, God.’ And then, ‘Is he dead?’
So it’s a man. I summon up all my courage and walk towards the body on the road. I can only vaguely make out the man’s face—his eyes are closed. He’s lying on his side, dressed in dark clothes. I almost expect him to reach for me, but he doesn’t stir, and when I feel his pulse there is nothing. Nothing. It’s only when I withdraw my hand that I notice it’s covered in blood. I stare at it, then wipe it off on my trousers. I hear a whimper, look at Philip and realise that the sound came from me.
I back away from the dark bundle on the road.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘he’s dead.’
I ran him down.
‘Where did he come from so suddenly?’ asks Philip. He sounds frantic.
‘I don’t know. He was just suddenly there.’
I peer left and right into the woods and see a path that the man must have emerged from. Why was I driving so fast?
‘We have to call the police,’ I say, noticing that my voice sounds tinny.
Philip digs out his phone.
‘We’ve both been drinking,’ he says, anxious.
I hesitate. The man’s dead anyway, I think.
‘Call them,’ I say.
Philip taps around on his phone for what seems like forever. He holds it to his ear, looks at the screen again.
‘No reception,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Dead.’
‘You idiot! Do you think that’s funny?’
‘Sorry, I—’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘We’ll drive home. We can call the police and an ambulance from there.’
We get back in the car and I carefully avoid looking in the rear-view mirror as we drive away from the site of the accident. Hit-and-run—the words hammer in my skull. Fatal accident. Drink-driving. Hit-and-run. Not a single car passes us on the country road. It’s only as we approach town that the roads grow busier.
When we get home, Leo is already better. False alarm. I rock him to sleep in my arms. Then I sit down on the sofa. I stare at the phone, look at my sleeping son, look at the phone. I get up, still carrying Leo.
‘Please don’t,’ says Philip.
I turn round.
‘He’s dead. You can’t change that,’ he says.
I leave the room without a word and put Leo in his cot. I sense Philip behind me, feel his hand between my shoulder blades. I have a strong urge to shake it off. What’s the point? Is that supposed to comfort me? If he hadn’t distracted me, then none of this—
‘That fucking lakeside house,’ I say. ‘Such a stupid idea. I had a bad feeling about leaving Leo right from the start!’
‘Oh,
so it’s my fault now, is it?’ Philip fires back at me. ‘I didn’t force you to drink so much!’
‘I was a damn sight more sober than you,’ I yell. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have offered to drive.’
‘But you did offer to drive! And of course I thought that meant you were fit to drive!’
‘I was fit to drive! But you can’t pay attention to the road when the person next to you is hurling abuse at you—nobody can! It’s so typical of you to try and shift all the blame onto me—you’re such a fucking coward!’
So it goes on until dawn. We argue. Leo screams.
When morning comes, we carry on. Philip repeats what he’d said in the car—that he’s convinced his mother was right, that I don’t love him—never did love him. And I say he’s quite right—if I ever had loved him, it was all over now and I’d rather die than have to look at his face any longer. We hurl all kinds of impossible insults at each other, but one thing we don’t do—we don’t give ourselves up to the police.
Nothing is the same after that night. Everything around me seems to come to life, conspiring against me to make my life hard, to punish me—the woman who has so far escaped just punishment. I’m not to forget for a moment what I’ve done or that I’m now living in a hostile world. Drawers fall on my feet, roots grow out of the ground in front of me and trip me up, conkers pelt down on my head without warning.
In the bathroom I slip in a little puddle of shower oil that was waiting for me to come along and break my neck. I cut my calf shaving my legs and finally stub my toe on the corner of the shower cubicle, which is suddenly sticking out just a little further into the room than it used to. Somehow I make it out of the bathroom alive. I run into Philip—close to tears, that lifeless bundle always before me—and he looks at me and asks what’s wrong and I say, ‘Nothing.’
After we have made it up—for Leo’s sake, we tell each other—and realised that we’re not going to call the police now, so long after the accident, I tell Philip I never want to talk about that night again. He protests—he wants to keep talking about it, thinks anything else unhealthy. He’s sick of my reticence, my taciturnity—sometimes he asks himself whether he married a woman or an oyster.
‘You’re like a man.’ He says that too, half-jokingly, but I don’t do him the favour of laughing.
I insist on not saying another word about that fucking night and that stupid wood and that damn rumbling, and Philip gives in. I keep silent and he keeps silent with me.
That goes on for weeks—until one evening when I’m feeding Leo, and Philip comes into the kitchen.
‘I know we’d agreed not to talk about it anymore,’ he begins, without even saying hello to me, ‘but—’
I give a start and glare at him, gather Leo in my arms and leave the room.
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I call back over my shoulder.
‘You have to listen to me!’ Philip says.
But I can’t. I won’t. I can’t stand him anymore.
He makes two further attempts to bring it up again—I have no idea why. Because there’s something important I need to know, he says. Because he wants to torment me, I suspect. Either way, I don’t listen.
He is furious. I don’t care.
When he tells me soon afterwards that he’s going to South America for almost a week, I’m glad.
Suddenly I’m snapped back to the present. Philip slows the car to a crawl and then stops altogether. We’re on a secluded country road in the middle of the woods. There’s no one in sight—we’re all alone. I turn my head. Beside me is a stranger. Adrenaline shoots into my bloodstream and I suddenly realise that I’ve made a fatal mistake. Nobody knows I’m here. No one will find me. I’m unarmed—no pistol, no knife, no pepper spray is going to save me.
The stranger turns his head.
Philip sees the terror on my face. ‘Are you okay?’
I take a deep breath. It’s going to take me a long time to conflate the stranger—the man who’s spent the last few days scaring me half to death—with my husband. It is surreal to have him sitting next to me just like that. It will be a while before I’m used to having him back.
I look about me. Yes, I think, this was the spot. Why is he so cruel as to bring me here? Is he going to keep making me pay for what I did?
Philip gets out of the car. I do the same. The slamming doors echo in my head like pistol shots. My stomach seizes up. I look about me. The moon bathes the edge of the woods in a wan light barely strong enough to coax the blurred contours out of the darkness. The woods whisper. Philip walks towards the forest path and is swallowed by the blackness after only a few metres. I hurry after him.
A rustle and crack beside me make me jump. My head swivels to the right and I almost scream when I see two big shining eyes staring at me. I freeze, just like the deer standing there on its slender legs. It looks at me sadly before disappearing into the undergrowth. The rushing of the wind in the trees, the cries of the owls, the rustle of little birds in the undergrowth—these sounds are ominous, dark, far too close. The blood is roaring in my ears, soaking the night wood a deep red. The trees are murmuring—murmuring to me—and I want to clap my hands over my ears like a frightened child. I almost bump into Philip, who has suddenly stopped in front of me.
‘It was here,’ he says. ‘The forest path. We thought he must have come from here, the man you ran over. Do you remember?’
Yes, I think, and nod. That must have been what happened.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask.
‘This is where it began,’ says Philip. ‘This is where we lost each other.’
I nod again, but at the same time I ask myself whether it’s true. I’ve often wondered when our troubles began. After the wedding or before? When Constanze really took against me? When we moved into that far too big, far too expensive house that I never liked—or earlier? After the first miscarriage? Or the second? When Leo was born? Or not until long afterwards? Or long before? Or was it here, in the woods? I don’t know.
‘What are we doing here, Philip?’
‘I’ve been very lonely over the past years,’ he says. He doesn’t look at me. ‘Sometimes I cursed you. Sometimes I longed for you. For us. For the way things used to be. Sometimes I thought we might be able to recover what we’d lost.’
Is that why he’s brought me here?
‘I envy the past—the people we used to be.’
Does he think we can start over?
‘But it’s not that easy,’ he says. ‘I see that now.’
‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’ I ask.
Philip shakes his head. He takes a deep breath. ‘How clearly do you remember that night?’ he asks.
Too clearly, I think.
‘Do you remember seeing the man suddenly appear in front of us?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say. ‘How could I? I wasn’t watching the road. Because we were arguing, as usual!’ I’m close to tears.
‘I didn’t see him coming either,’ says Philip.
So? What is this? I can’t stand this place. I want to get away from here.
‘I didn’t see him either. We thought we hadn’t seen him because he came from this forest path. But that isn’t what happened. He didn’t come striding out of the woods and in front of our car. He didn’t come along the road towards us either. He was already lying there.’
I frown. ‘What?’
‘He was already dead when we ran him over.’
My knees turn to jelly. ‘You’re lying.’
Philip shakes his head. ‘Norman K., forty-one years old, single, recently unemployed. The same evening we went to the house by the lake, he left his flat and walked along this road—almost certainly intending to commit suicide. He was hit by a car and died. The driver didn’t stop.’
‘Yes, that was me!’
‘No!’ says Philip. ‘It wasn’t you. I tell you, he was already dead! You ran over a dead man!’
‘How do you know?’
‘
I couldn’t get over the fact that we hadn’t called for help that night. The way we drove off and left that poor man lying there—I couldn’t cope with that. I kept scouring the papers for any reference to a fatality that night, and I came across an article about a driver involved in a hit-and-run who’d subsequently reported himself to the police. When I realised the man he’d hit must be our victim, I made inquiries. It turned out that the driver who knocked down Norman K. and abandoned him had passed the site of the accident a good half-hour before us. He turned himself in a few days later, but he wasn’t sentenced—among other things, because there were indications that Norman K. was run over by several cars…’
The facts rain down on me like stones. I don’t move for a long time after Philip has stopped talking. I am stunned. I cry.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I ask in the end.
Philip sighs. ‘I tried.’ He makes a helpless gesture. ‘I tried two or three times, but you didn’t want to hear anything more about that night. I was furious. Well, all right then, I thought. Live another few days in the belief that you’ve killed someone. I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to punish you. I wanted to punish myself. It wasn’t right to keep driving. It wasn’t right not to call the police.’
I close my eyes.
‘Then there was the trip to South America,’ Philip continues.
In the woods something snaps.
‘I was going to tell you.’ Philip lowers his eyes. ‘When I got back.’
My body feels numb. We’re in the car going home.
We drive in silence. Philip’s at the wheel. I’m staring at the road in a daze.
The beam of the headlights. The grey woods. The engine’s thrum. Drooping eyelids. Dawn.
‘Who’s Vincent?’ I ask.
‘A friend,’ says Philip. ‘My best friend in the camp.’
I nod.
We drive in silence.
I wonder whether Vincent is dead, but say nothing. Vincent is a topic for another night.
‘Why were you so keen to stop me going to the police?’ I ask. ‘I’d only have made a fool of myself.’
‘I had no idea what you were going to tell them. And I wanted to avoid a media circus. I wanted to be left in peace. That most of all. And then, what if you’d reported the hit-and-run after all these years? Can you imagine what would have happened then?’
The Stranger Upstairs Page 24
