A Twist of Fate

by Joanna Rees

  She tiptoed out of her cubicle in the dormitory in the dark. Franz, the security guard, was pulling on his boots. He gestured for Romy to wait and she rolled her eyes at him, smiling as he hopped along after her.

  Franz was in his twenties, with dark hair and a thin moustache. He slapped Romy on the back as they walked together into the corridor, past the steam of the shower room, where Lutz was whistling loudly.

  ‘She’s quite something,’ Franz whispered to Romy, conspiratorially, nodding over his shoulder, back in the direction of Ursula’s cubicle.

  ‘I heard,’ Romy said, keeping her voice jovial.

  She’d learnt to put on an act of camaraderie with the boys. But the truth was that the sound of Ursula and Franz’s frenzied panting had made Romy pull the pillow over her head.

  She felt confused – and jealous – of the escapism that Ursula found through sex and of the comfort Franz found in her soft arms.

  Franz chuckled. ‘You should have a go on her yourself. I know you’re distant cousins, but it doesn’t matter. You know she likes you.’

  Romy shook her head, taking one of the smokes Franz offered him. ‘She’s not my type.’

  ‘Believe me, that girl is everyone’s type.’ He leant in closer, his arm around Romy’s shoulder. ‘She told me her mother was once a prostitute. Good fucking is in her blood. She knows how to squeeze,’ he added, elongating the word, as if reliving a delicious sensation. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow for poker?’

  Romy nodded, trying not to show how eager she was. Franz and the other guards could pick up the same radio station where she’d heard that Madonna track ‘Crazy for You’ a couple of times. She couldn’t get it out of her head.

  ‘Sure. You’d better watch out this time,’ Romy called after him, hauling up the grey bag of material samples and taking it into the lift and closing the grille door, as Franz’s laughter echoed down the corridor. Then the lift clanked as it shifted between the floors.

  She knew that Franz had a Sony Walkman – his prized possession – and some tapes for learning English. Whatever it took, Romy was going to win them from him.

  Two hours later the windowless warehouse was starting to fill with the day-shift workers, despite it being a Sunday. Romy studied each one of them. The women with hard, hungry faces who had children at home to feed, who worked in the deafening noise of the machine room, with muted, disciplined devotion. Nobody could afford to lose their job here.

  Despite the spring weather outside, inside it was cold, as if the building couldn’t shake off the winter damp. Occasionally an industrial alarm would sound off and the workers would tip their finished garments into the blue bin, which they took it in turns to push in the narrow strip between the rows of machines.

  ‘You’re late,’ Anna-Maria said, marking a sheet on her clipboard and glaring at Ursula as she slid in next to Romy.

  Ursula poked her tongue out at the prim floor manager as she turned her back.

  ‘Sour-faced cow,’ Ursula said to Romy, tying her curly auburn hair up into one of the regulation grey scarves. She picked up the white material of the vests they were to sew. ‘Relax,’ she read, looking at the large orange letters on the white jersey cloth. ‘If only.’

  Romy smiled. Now that Ursula was here, she felt happy. ‘I saw Franz this morning and I heard you two last night,’ she said, wriggling the material under the foot of the machine and applying the power. The stitches whirred away from her in a straight line.

  ‘Stupid oaf! He thinks he’s God’s gift to women,’ Ursula said, threading her machine, eyeing up the needle with a professional knack. ‘You OK to come out on the bikes this afternoon?’

  ‘Sure.’ Romy smiled. She turned back to her machine, but now the weight of the lies she’d told pressed on Romy’s conscience. How she’d spun yarns about how her family had been taken away and falsely imprisoned, but she’d managed to escape to her aunt’s, and how she’d grown up in a happy home. How she remembered their family Christmases together and sledging with her little cousins. This afternoon alone would require more tall tales.

  But the closer she and Ursula became, the more terrified Romy was of her finding out the truth.

  Stop it, Romy told herself, forcing her fear away. She wouldn’t think about it. Not today. Today was going to be a good day.

  The whirring of the machines soon made it impossible to chat, but when Ursula’s foot reached out for Romy’s, she looked up to see Herr Mulcher, the floor manager, come into the warehouse. He was a fat fifty-year-old with weary, weepy eyes and a bulbous red nose.

  ‘Jorgen?’ he called as he shrugged off his overcoat. ‘I need to see you in my office. Now.’

  Romy stared at Ursula, feeling her heart racing.

  ‘What have you done?’ Ursula mouthed, alarmed.

  Romy shrugged and got up from the bench as if it were no big deal, but inwardly she was cursing herself. She should have taken the money out of the mattress this morning and hidden it in her clothes, just as she’d painstakingly done every day for the first six months here. If she had to run, she’d have no time to get it now.

  Mulcher’s cramped office was filled with material samples, the walls covered in invoices and notices, the window covered by a blind with dusty kinked slats. A broken umbrella was propped up next to a grey filing cabinet, its drawers overflowing with papers. A newspaper – today’s – slid off the top and Romy picked it up to replace it, noticing the headlines about the new Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the picture of him with a distinctive birthmark on his head.

  ‘Sit,’ Mulcher said, pointing to the orange plastic chair opposite his untidy desk as he searched for something. He chewed an unlit cigarette between his lips.

  ‘If I’ve done something wrong, I can explain,’ Romy began, memories of Professor Lemcke looming large in her mind.

  Mulcher looked at her for the first time. He took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘I’m not here to tell you off, but to thank you.’

  Romy gawped at him as he laughed.

  ‘Thank me?’

  ‘Yes, lad. It’s not often in this low-life load of scum that I get someone with something up here.’ He jabbed his temple with his finger. ‘Anna-Maria told me what you did last month. And so now I’m going to promote you to pattern-cutting.’

  ‘You are?’ Romy felt a stab of panic. That would mean being away from Ursula.

  ‘You have no idea, do you? You see, it’s like this . . .’

  Mulcher pulled his chair in beneath him, lowering his considerable bulk into it with a grunt. The air escaping from the leatherette seat made a hiss.

  ‘You changing the design on the pattern for the trousers saved me a hundred yards of material.’ He leaned in across the desk. His breath smelt of garlic. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’ he asked. ‘Man-to-man?’

  Romy nodded. Mulcher’s bulbous eyes bored into Romy’s, as if he were trying to see inside her head, weighing up the consequences of talking to her, of sharing the secret he wanted to.

  ‘If you save me material, I use it to make the same garments, but I ship out those ones to my contact to the West. Pure profit, my boy. Pure profit.’

  Romy felt relief balloon inside her. She already knew about the secret shipments from Franz’s coded chats with the other guards. But Mulcher telling her made her officially in the inner circle. One step closer to the West. To where she wanted to be.

  ‘I can save you more,’ Romy said. ‘More materials. The design patterns – they’re sloppy. Look . . . ’

  She grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil on the desk, clearing a space. She drew the shift-shirt they’d been making all week. ‘Bring it in at the waist here,’ she drew, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated, ‘and take it up by half an inch, which will be more flattering, and you can cut the pattern the other way. See?’

  Mulcher rubbed his hands together greedily. ‘You, my boy, are going to go far.’

  Ursula had laughed when she’d found out
that Romy hadn’t been able to ride a bike, but Romy had soon picked it up, thanks to Ursula’s gentle patience, and in the last few months they’d explored the whole of East Berlin. They’d gone along the river path, to the centre of town, to the boating lake to see the ornate fountains, to the business district with its restaurants and the space-age TV tower, and over the bridges to museum island, where the grand buildings of a bygone era were derelict and covered in weeping ivy.

  That afternoon Romy was still riding high after her meeting with Mulcher as she joined Ursula outside the factory.

  ‘Come on, slowcoach,’ Ursula called, already hitching up her skirt and riding down the potholed road away from the factory, the shadow of her wheels whirring across the piles of debris on the roadside.

  They crossed the overpass of the busy road and soon dropped down into the residential area, where the streets on a Sunday were quiet. They raced now, laughing and weaving past each other, as they rattled towards the city centre, following the line of the huge grey wall that separated them from West Berlin. Here they had to be more cautious.

  ‘Relax, will you,’ Ursula tutted as they spotted two policemen up ahead. She was always scolding Romy for being so jumpy. ‘I’ll handle this.’

  They slowed to a stop.

  ‘Where are you two going?’ one of the policemen asked.

  ‘Just around. We’re exercising,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s been a long week at the factory.’

  And there it was again. That cock of the head, the soft knowing smile, the way she put her hand on her hip, as if promising a caress. Romy watched, amazed, as Ursula lured in the young police officer.

  ‘It’s a nice day for it,’ she said, her voice suggesting so much and yet seeming so innocent at the same time.

  The policeman’s expression softened from suspicion to indulgence.

  ‘Well, then. Have fun,’ he told Ursula, barely looking at Romy, as Ursula flashed their papers from the factory and the officers waved them on their way.

  They cycled on, stopping only once, so that Romy could listen to someone playing a violin through an open window. The sound, mixed with the sunshine and the birdsong, filled Romy with joy.

  Eventually they stopped in Romy’s favourite spot. Across the plaza from the Brandenburg Gate. They leant their bikes up against a tree, its bark stripped off to reveal tan and yellow patches.

  ‘How do you do that . . . thing?’ Romy asked, as Ursula peeled off her sweater and tugged at the front of her vest top. Her ample cleavage shone with perspiration.

  ‘What thing?’ she asked, still out of breath.

  ‘You know. The way you are with men?’

  Ursula shrugged and put the sunglasses down over her eyes. ‘It’s easy. It’s a girl trick. You boys can’t tell if I’m putting it on or not. Why?’ Ursula asked, suddenly lifting the glasses again and cocking her head in a coquettish way at Romy. ‘You jealous?’

  ‘No,’ Romy scoffed, but something about the way Ursula looked at her made her blush.

  ‘Franz gave me this,’ Ursula said, revealing a bar of chocolate in her skirt pocket. ‘You want some?’

  ‘You don’t have to share it with me,’ Romy said, but the chocolate looked so delicious that her mouth was already salivating.

  She wanted to tell her friend so badly about how happy such little treats made her. How hard life had been at the orphanage. How even seeing chocolate made her feel guilty – made her think of the kids she’d left behind. Had any of them survived? she wondered, remembering the faces at the window. Snow and flames. She forced the memories away.

  ‘You’re different from the others, Jorgen. Sweeter. You know that? Sweet like chocolate,’ Ursula said. She broke a bit of chocolate off and slipped it to Romy. Then she licked her lips, her blue eyes widening mischievously as she took the chocolate in her mouth.

  Romy leant back against the tree and gazed up at the columns of the gate and the proud statues on top against the backdrop of clear blue sky. The wall was at its lowest at this point and Romy stared through the gate, as she felt the sweet chocolate soften against her tongue.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Ursula asked, coming to stand next to Romy and mimicking her stance. One foot against the tree.

  ‘The gate and what’s beyond it.’

  ‘It’ll never open and we’ll never find out what’s on the other side. So there’s no point in worrying about it.’

  But Romy continued to stare.

  ‘Poor sweet Jorgen,’ Ursula said, taking Romy by surprise. She rolled around closer now, pinning Romy back against the tree. ‘Why so serious?’

  She smelt of sunshine and chocolate.

  ‘Come on. Let’s stop all this flirting,’ Ursula breathed in her ear. ‘You know I don’t care about that fool, Franz. Let me make a man of you.’ Suddenly she started singing – the Madonna song Romy had thought about earlier, ‘Crazy for You’.

  ‘Don’t. Someone will see us,’ Romy said.

  It was too late. Ursula was still singing as she slid her hand over Romy’s crotch. She giggled, delighting in her power to shock, as she gave Romy a squeeze.

  ‘Don’t!’ Romy said, trying to shove her away, but Ursula’s hand had already stopped. She recoiled as if she’d been burnt.

  ‘Oh my . . . oh my . . .’ she gasped, the song forgotten. Her eyes widened as they met Romy’s. ‘You’re, you’re not – you’re a . . .’

  Romy felt her cheeks burning. ‘It’s not like you think. It’s . . .’

  But Ursula just shook her head, backing away. Her face was drawn with shock. ‘All these months together,’ she gulped.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Romy said, trying to stop her backing away. Trying to stop her from making a scene out here in the open air, where anyone could be looking.

  ‘You’re not . . . I mean, you’re a girl? Why have you lied to me all this time?’ Ursula demanded, her eyes raking over Romy’s face and chest.

  ‘Something happened – I had to run . . . ’

  Romy cursed herself. Cursed herself for lying. Cursed herself for the look of pain on Ursula’s face. Romy pulled Ursula towards her, desperate now not to let her go. Not until she understood.

  ‘You’re that girl, aren’t you?’ Ursula gasped, blocking Romy’s embrace. ‘Franz told me they’re looking for a girl. A girl from Bolkav, the orphanage – she burnt it down to cover up a murder.’

  Romy felt her legs shaking. Lemcke . . . Ulrich . . . the other boys. Of course they’d try to blame her. The photos she’d stolen from Lemcke’s desk – all that evidence of what was going on at the orphanage. Of course they wouldn’t rest until they found her body. Or killed her, if she was still alive. And now that Ursula knew, they’d kill her too.

  But it was too late. Ursula had seen the look of admission in her eyes. And fear.

  ‘Ursula, please,’ Romy begged.

  ‘Get away from me,’ Ursula said, then grabbed her bike.

  ‘Ursula, wait,’ Romy called out, but it was too late. With a sob Ursula was cycling away, back towards the factory, as fast as she could.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  December 1985

  Thea stood in the choir stalls, looking around the stained glass of the softly lit school chapel listening as the choirgirl – Annabelle Atkins, a bully from the sixth form – sung the first verse of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, her clear voice soaring above the hushed congregation of staff and parents. How terribly English, Thea thought, thinking of the snow outside and the reception with mulled wine and mince pies that she’d have to help at when the service was over.

  Her father had chosen St Win’s because Thea’s mom, Alyssa Maddox, had boarded here as a child before she’d moved to America. At first Thea had comforted herself with the thought that it would give her a spiritual connection to her mother. But the only trace of Alyssa McAdams, as she had been then – apart from a glowing eulogy in the ‘Notable Alumni’ section of the school’s prospectus – was a tiny blurred spec in a school photograph. Her
mother wasn’t in any of the school drama-society or sports photos. Most likely because she’d spent most of her free time at home or out riding, learning how to jump. She probably hated the over-traditional hotbed of bitchiness then, just as much as Thea did now.

  Everyone would be going home later tonight with their parents, except Thea, who would be boarding a flight to New York tomorrow alone. She couldn’t help but picture all those girls back in their childhood bedrooms, back with their family pets, surrounded by siblings and friends and warmth. It made her ache for Little Elms and all she had lost.

  Griffin and Storm had been busy finishing the top two storeys of the newly built Maddox Tower in New York since their wedding last year, and Thea guessed that it was where she was expected to join them. Her father had sent a curt letter about Christmas being a time for families and he expected her to come home. But nowhere could ever be home when it contained Storm and Brett. Not for Thea.

  Her home had gone.

  It still seemed unbelievable that her father had sold Little Elms so fast and had moved on without so much as a hint of regret. Or without mentioning once that it was Thea’s inheritance that he’d sold. Much more than that too. Her past. Her memories. Her heritage. Her happy childhood. All of that had been woven into the brickwork and turf of Little Elms. They’d just thrown it away. A fact that had started to rankle more and more.

  But the worst part was losing Michael. The awkward public goodbye with him still made Thea shudder when she remembered it. The way Michael had looked at her standing next to her father. She’d known what he’d been thinking. She’d read it in his face as clearly as if he’d spoken the words out loud. He thought Thea was the same as Griffin and Storm Maddox. That she’d cast him and his mother out of their home, without so much as a second thought. When nothing could have been further from the truth.