Postcards From Berlin

by Margaret Leroy

  He’s looking at me with those steady gray eyes. There’s something in his look that I can’t work out: sex, or something else, more obscure, more troubling.

  “I know you,” he says suddenly. “Don’t I?”

  I laugh politely. “I don’t think so.”

  Someone is leaving. The door opens; the cold and the night come in.

  “I do,” he says. “I’m sure I know you; I recognize your face.”

  He’s staring at me, trying to work it out. It sounds like a come-on, but his look is puzzled, serious. The fear that is never far from me lays its cold hand on my skin.

  “Well, I don’t know where you could have seen me.” My voice is casual, light. “Perhaps the school gate at Saint Mark’s? Daisy goes there.” But I know this isn’t right, I know I’d have noticed him. “Nicky says that’s where your little boy goes,” I add, trying to drag the conversation away to somewhere safe.

  He shakes his head. “Jamie doesn’t start till after Christmas.”

  “You’ll like it,” I tell him. “Daisy’s eight, she’s in year three, she has the nicest teacher.…”

  But he won’t let it rest. “Where d’you work?” he asks.

  “I don’t.” Then, biting back the urge to apologize for my life, that must sound so passive — “I mean, not outside the home. I used to work in a nursery school. But that’s ages ago now.”

  “It wasn’t there. Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

  But I’m upset and he knows it. He tries to carry on. He tells me a bit about his work: He’s a journalist, he says. And he asks what I’m painting now and where my ideas come from. But the mood is spoiled, it can’t be restored or recovered. As soon as he decently can, he leaves me. All evening I feel troubled: even when the singers have gone, calling out their thanks and Christmas wishes, setting off into the snow, which is falling more thickly now, casting its nets over everything under the chill, thin light of the moon of beginnings.

  ______________

  We stand there in the suddenly quiet room. It looks banal now: There are cake crumbs on the carpet, and every glass has a purplish, spicy sediment.

  “I’ll do the washing up,” says Richard.

  Normally I’d say, No, let me, you sit down, but tonight I give in gratefully. Sinead goes to help him.

  I turn off the light again, and the firelight plays on every shiny surface: My living room seems like a room from another time. I stretch out on the sofa. Daisy comes and folds herself into me. Her limbs are loose, heavy, her skin is hot and dry; I feel her tiredness seeping into me.

  “Did you enjoy it?” I ask her.

  To my surprise, she shakes her head. In the red erratic firelight, her face looks sharper, thinner. Little bright flames glitter in her eyes. Suddenly, without warning, she starts crying.

  I hug her. “It’s ever so late,” I tell her. “You’ll be fine in the morning.” She rubs her damp face against me.

  I don’t want her to go to sleep unhappy. I can never bear it when she’s sad — which is silly, really, I know that, because children often cry. I always rush in to smooth things over, want to keep everything perfect. So I try to distract her with shadow shapes, the animal patterns I learned how to make from a booklet I bought at the toy shop in Covent Garden. I move my hands in the beam of light from the open door to the hall, casting shadows across the wall by the fireplace. I make the seagull, flapping my hands together; and the crab, my fingers hunched so it sidles along the mantelpiece; and the alligator, snapping at the board games on the bookshelf. Daisy wipes her face and starts to smile.

  I make the shape of the weasel; we wait and wait, Daisy holding her breath: This is her favorite. And just when you’ve stopped expecting it, it comes, the weasel’s pounce, down into some poor defenseless thing behind the skirting board.

  She lets out a brief thrilled scream, and even I start a little. Yet these animals, these teeth, this predatoriness: these are only the shadows of my hands.

  Chapter 2

  SINEAD COMES INTO OUR BEDROOM in her dressing gown, her face and hair rumpled with sleep.

  “Cat. Dad. Daisy’s ill.”

  I’m reluctant to leave the easy warmth of bed, and Richard, still asleep, curving into me. It’s one of those quiet days after Christmas, the turn of the year, when all the energy seems withdrawn from the world. A little light leaks round the edges of the curtains. I turn back the duvet, gently, so as not to wake Richard, and pull down my nightdress, which is long and loose, like a T-shirt: the kind of thing I started to wear when Daisy needed feeding in the night, and then got rather attached to.

  I go to Daisy’s room. The stars glimmer on her ceiling in the glow from the lamp I leave on all night. I push back the curtain. Thin gilded light falls across the floor, where her Nintendo and various Beanies and yesterday’s clothes are scattered. Her favorite cuddly sheep, Hannibal, is flung to the foot of her bed. He owes his name to Sinead, who once saw The Silence of the Lambs illicitly at a friend’s house, having promised they were borrowing Hideous Kinky. Daisy is still in bed but awake. She has a strained, stretched look on her face, and her eyes are huge, dilated by the dark.

  “I feel sick,” she says.

  “What a shame, sweetheart.” I put my hand on her forehead, but she feels quite cool. “Especially today.”

  “What day is it?” she asks.

  A little ill-formed anxiety worms its way into my mind.

  “It’s the pantomime. Granny and Granddad are taking us.”

  “I don’t want to go,” she says.

  “But you were so looking forward to it.” Inside I’m cursing a little, anticipating Richard’s reaction. “Snow White. It’s sure to be fun.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t, Mum. I feel sick and my legs hurt.”

  Daisy always gets nauseous when she gets ill. Each of the girls has her own fingerprint of symptoms. Sinead, when she was younger, would produce dazzling high temperatures, epic fevers when she’d suddenly sit up straight in bed and pronounce in a clear, bright, shiny voice, the things she said as random and meaningless as sleep talk, yet sounding full of significance. Daisy gets sickness and stomachaches: She’s been like that from a baby, when she used to get colic in the middle of the night, and I’d walk her up and down the living room with the TV on, watching old black-and-white films, or in desperation take her into the kitchen, where the soft, thick rush of the cooker hood might soothe her at last into sleep.

  I go downstairs to make coffee; I’ll take a cup to Richard before I tell him. It’s a blue icy day, the ground hard and white, a lavish sky; but the fat, glittery icicles that hang from the corner of the shed are irridescent, starting to drip: Soon the thaw will set in. It’s very still, no traffic noise: the sunk sap of the year. With huge gratitude, I feel the day’s first caffeine sliding into my veins.

  When I go back upstairs with the coffee, Sinead has drifted off to her bedroom and her Walkman.

  Richard opens one eye.

  “Daisy’s ill,” I tell him.

  “Christ. That’s just what we needed. What’s wrong?”

  “Some sort of virus. I’m not sure she can come.”

  “For goodness’ sake, she’s only got to sit through a pantomime.”

  “She’s not well, Richard.”

  “They were really looking forward to it.”

  “So was she. I mean, she’s not doing this deliberately.”

  He sits up, sprawls back on the pillow, and yawns, disordered by sleep, his face lined by the creases in the pillow slip. He looks older first thing in the morning, and without the neat symmetries of his work clothes.

  “Give her some Calpol,” he says. “She’ll probably be fine.”

  “She feels too sick,” I tell him.

  “You’re so soft with those children.” There’s an edge of irritation to his voice.

  I feel I should at least try. I get the Calpol from the bathroom cabinet, take it to her room, and pour it into the spoon, making a little comedy act
of it. Normally, she likes to see this, the sticky, recalcitrant liquid that won’t go where you want it to, that glops and lurches away from you. Now she watches me with a slightly desperate look.

  “I can’t, Mum. I feel too sick.”

  I take the spoon to the bathroom and tip the medicine down the sink.

  Richard has heard it all.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, let me do it,” he says.

  He gets up, pulls on his dressing gown, goes to get the Calpol. But when he sees her pallor, he softens a little.

  “Dad, I’m not going to,” she says. “Please don’t make me.”

  He ruffles her hair. “Just try for me, OK, munchkin?”

  I watch from the door as she parts her lips a little: She’s more willing to try for him; she’s always so hungry to please him. He eases the spoon into her mouth. She half swallows the liquid, then noisily retches it up.

  He steps smartly back.

  “Sorry, sweetheart. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.”

  He wipes her mouth and kisses the top of her head, penitent. He follows me back to the bathroom.

  “OK,” he says. “You stay. It’s a damn shame, though, when they’ve paid for the tickets and everything. Especially when Mother hasn’t been well.”

  I think of them: Adrian, his affable father; and Gina, his mother, who favors a country casual look, although they live in chic urbanity in Putney, who reads horticultural magazines and cultivates an esoteric window box, who reminisces at some length about her former job as an orthodontist’s receptionist. There’s something about Gina I find difficult: I feel colorless, passive, near her. It’s not anything she says; she’s always nice to me, says, You and Richard are so good together. Sometimes I feel there’s a subtext that I’m so much more satisfactory than Sara, Richard’s highly assertive first wife. But it’s almost as though it’s hard to breathe around Gina, like she uses up all the air.

  “Daisy can write them a letter when she’s well,” I say.

  “It’s not the same,” he says, frowning.

  Richard’s intense involvement with his parents fascinates me. I know that’s how it must be for most people, to have your parents there and on your side, to worry about them and care what they think about you; yet to me this is another country.

  Sinead comes down when I’m making breakfast, still in her dressing gown but fully made up, with her Walkman. She takes one earpiece out to talk to me.

  “Cat, I really need your opinion. D’you think I look like a transvestite?”

  “You look gorgeous.” I put an arm around her.

  It’s part of my role with her, to be a big sister, a confidante, to be soft when Richard is stern.

  “Are you sure my mascara looks all right?” she asks. “I’m worried my left eyelashes look curlier than my right ones.”

  “You’re a total babe. Look, I’ve made you some toast.”

  “How is she?” she asks then.

  “I don’t think she can come.”

  She sits heavily down at the table, a frown like Richard’s stitched into her forehead.

  “Do I have to go, then?” she asks.

  She’s cross. She’s too old to go to the pantomime without her little sister. Daisy was the heart of today’s outing, its reason and justification: Without her, it doesn’t make sense.

  I put my arm round her. “Just do it, my love. To please Granny and Granddad.”

  “Snow fucking White,” she says. “Jesus.”

  I overlook this. “You never know, you might enjoy bits of it.”

  “Oh, yeah? You know what it’ll be like. There’ll be a man in drag whose boobs keep falling down and lots of EastEnders jokes, and at the end they’ll throw Milky Ways at us and we’re meant to be, like, grateful.”

  She puts her earpiece back in without waiting for my response.

  They leave at twelve, Sinead, now fully dressed in jeans, leather jacket, and her expensive Christmas trainers with air bubbles in the soles, resigned. I go to Daisy’s room. She’s sitting up, writing something, and I briefly wonder if Richard was right and I was too soft and I should have made her go. But she still has that stretched look.

  She waves her clipboard at me. She’s made a list of breeds of cats she likes, in order of preference.

  “I still want one,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “When can we, Mum?”

  “One day,” I tell her.

  “You always say maybe or one day,” she says. “I want to really know. I want you to tell me exactly.”

  “Well, you know Dad isn’t too keen. But maybe — if you can feed it and everything.”

  “You said it again,” she says, “Maybe. I hate maybe.”

  I rearrange her pillows so she can lie down, and I read to her for a while, from a book of fairy tales I bought her for Christmas. There’s a story about a princess who’s meant to marry a prince, but she falls in love with the gardener, and he shows her secret things, the apricots warm on the wall, the clutch of eggs, blue as the sky, hidden in a pear tree. I read it softly, willing her to sleep, but she just lies there listening. She’s pale, her skin almost translucent, with shadows like bruises under her eyes. Maybe it’s my attention that’s keeping her awake. Eventually, I tell her I’m going to make a coffee.

  When I look in on her ten minutes later, she’s finally drifted off, arms and legs flung out. There’s a randomness to it, as though she was turning over and was suddenly snared by sleep. I put my hand on her forehead, and she stirs but doesn’t wake. I feel a deep sense of relief, knowing the sleep will heal her.

  This is an unexpected gift: an afternoon with nothing to do, with no one needing anything; a gift of time to be slowly unwrapped and relished. I stand there for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house, which seems strange so soon after Christmas, when these rooms have so recently been full of noise and people; it’s almost as though the house is alive and gently breathing. Then I go up to the attic, moving slowly through the silence.

  I push open the door. The scents of my studio welcome me: turps, paint, the musty, oversweet smell of dying flowers. From one of the little arched windows I can see across the roofs toward the park. I lean there for a moment, looking out. There’s a velvet bloom of dust on the sill; I rarely clean up here. I can see the tall bare trees and their many colors, pink, apricot, purple, where the buds are forming at the ends of their branches, and the dazzling sky with a slow, silent airplane lumbering toward Heathrow.

  I put on the shirt I always wear up here. Richard doesn’t like to see me in it; he hates me in baggy clothes. But I welcome its scruffiness and sexlessness, the way it says, Now I am painting, the way it defines me as someone who is engaged in this one thing.

  Here is everything I need: thick, expensive paper, and 4B pencils that make soft, smudgy lines, and acrylic paints, and watercolors with those baroque names that I love — cadmium yellow and Prussian blue and crimson alizarin. And there are things I’ve collected, postcards and pictures torn from magazines, a print I cut from a calendar — a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of an orchid, very sexualized; I laughed when Sinead stared at it and raised one eyebrow and said, “She might as well have called it ‘Come on in, boys.’” And there are pebbles from the beach at Brighton, and bits of wood from the park, and a vase of lilies I brought up here when the petals started to fall.

  I feel a kind of certainty. There’s a clear, dark purpose at the heart of me, a seriousness; today I will be able to work well.

  I pick up a piece of bark and see, in the thin golden light, that its soft dull brownness is made of many colors. I take out the pastel crayons and start to draw, using the blues and reds I see there, melding them together. I love this — how you can look intently at the quiet surfaces of things and see such vividness.

  There’s a part of my mind that is focused, intent, and part that is floating free. Images drift through my mind, faces: Sinead in her new Christmas makeup, pretty and troubled; Richard, thin-lipped,
annoyed with me and with Daisy. They’ll be at the pantomime by now. Snow White will be a soap star in a blond, extravagant wig, and the Queen perhaps a man in taffeta and corsets, playing it for laughs. Yet she can be so scary, this Queen, like in the Disney film of Snow White I saw when I was a child: I remember her shadow, sharp as though cut with a blade, looming and filling the screen. And I see Nicky at the carol singing, her eager face and her dancing reindeer earrings, and thinking of Nicky, I think too of Fergal O’Connor. And as I think of him, immediately I’m touching him, putting out my hands and moving them over his face, his head, feeling the precise texture of his skin. He is quite still, watching me. I feel the warmth of him through the palms of my hands. This shocks me, the precision of this picture, when I wasn’t sure I even liked him.

  I draw on, in the suspended stillness. The drawing takes shape, but I don’t know yet if it pleases me. For the moment, I’m not judging it or wondering whether it’s any good or whether people will like it, just moving my hand on the page. There’s a compulsion to it, as though I don’t have a choice. Soon the light will dim: Already pools of shadow are collecting in the corners. I draw quickly, with rapid little strokes in many colors, wanting to get it finished before dark.

  When the doorbell rings, I jump, I’m so lost in my own world, and the crayon makes a random jagged mark across the page. My first impulse is not to go: It’s such a long way down. But then it rings again, and I worry that Daisy will wake, requiring drinks and comfort, so I run down the two flights of stairs, through the gathering dark of the house.

  It’s Monica, our neighbor.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” she says.

  She’s wearing a tracksuit and running shoes: She’s off for a jog in the park. Her two red setters are with her, milling around at the foot of the steps. She’s bright-eyed and virtuous, and the cold has already brought a flush to her cheeks.

  “That’s OK,” I tell her. “I was up in the attic.”