Katherine Carlyle (2 page)

The station concourse smells of ground coffee beans and scalded milk. I stare up at the Departures board.
Firenze, Milano. Parigi
. None of the names stand out, none of them speak to me. Voices swarm beneath the high sweep of the roof, footsteps echo on the polished marble, and then a feeling, sudden yet familiar — the feeling that I’m not there. It’s not that I’m dead. I’m simply gone. I never was. Panic opens inside me, slow and stealthy, like a flower that only blooms at night. The eight years are still with me, eight years in the dark, the cold. Waiting. Not knowing.

I deliberately collide with someone who happens to be passing. He’s in his early thirties. Black hair, brown leather jacket. He drops his bag. An apple rolls away across the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“No, no,” he says. “My fault.”

The moment he looks at me, my existence comes flooding back. It’s as if I’m a pencil sketch, and he’s coloring me in. I go and fetch the apple. When I pick it up it fits my palm perfectly. The shape of it, the weight, makes everything that follows feel natural.

I hold it out to him. “I think it might be bruised.”

He looks at the apple, then smiles. “This is like a fairy tale. Are you a witch?”

“I just didn’t see you,” I say. “I should be more careful.” I’m breathless with exhilaration. I’m
alive
.

“Are you waiting for someone? Or perhaps you’re going somewhere —” He glances at the Departures board.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “Not yet.”

Something in him seems to align itself with what I’m feeling. We’re like two people running side by side and he has fallen into step with me. Nothing needs to be explained, or even said. It’s understood. His eyes are dark and calm.

“Come with me,” he says. “Do you have time?”

“Yes.”

His fingers curl round mine.

We walk to a small hotel on Via Palermo. They have a room on the second floor, at the front of the building. I hear the muted roar of a vacuum cleaner. There’s a coolness about the place, a feeling of suspension. A hush. It’s that hidden moment in the day, the gap between checking out and checking in.

On the stairs he’s behind me, watching me. My hips, my calves. The small of my back. I can feel my edges, the space I occupy. We
reach the door. He steps past me with the key. He smells of wood and pepper. As soon as we’re inside he kisses me.

The room has a high ceiling and surprising lilac walls. From the window I can look down into the street. He pushes me back onto the bed. I tell him to wait. Lifting my hips, I pull the apple from my pocket. He smiles again.

We take each other’s clothes off carefully. We’re not in any hurry. One button, then another. A catch. A zip. The TV watches us from the top corner of the room. The curtains shift.

When he’s about to enter me I hand him a condom from my bag.

“You’ve done this before,” he says.

“No, never,” I say.

He looks down at me. He thinks I’m lying but it doesn’t bother him.

“I carry them to stop it happening,” I say. “It’s the opposite of tempting fate.”

“You’re superstitious?”

I don’t answer.

The noise of the traffic shrinks until it’s no louder than the buzz of a fly trapped in a jar. There is only the rustle of the sheets and the sound of our breathing, his and mine, and I think of that place in Brazil where the rivers join, two different kinds of water meeting, two different colors. I think of white clouds colliding in a sky of blue.

I cry out when I come. He comes moments later, quietly. When I turn over, onto my side, he adjusts his body to mine. He lies behind me, fitting himself against me as closely as he can, like a shadow. I feel him soften and then slip out of me. This too is part of the coloring-in.

Afterwards, I follow him downstairs. Out on the street I’m worried he will tell me his name and ask if he can see me again but all he does is put one hand against my cheek and look at me.

“Mia piccola strega.”
My little witch.

He kisses me and walks away.

Later, I think of the apple we left in the hotel room. Lying among the crumpled bedclothes, its red skin glowing.

/

The next day I go to an outdoor screening of
The Passenger
, which is one of my father’s favorite movies. I’ve seen it before, at least twice, and it has become a favorite of mine as well. A warm evening, not a breath of wind. Stars glinting weakly in a dull black sky. I’m slumped low in my seat waiting for the movie to begin when I become aware of an English couple sitting in the row in front of me. I can’t see their faces, only the backs of their heads. The man is wearing a raspberry-colored shirt, and his bald spot gleams. The woman has nondescript brown hair. They’re talking about a friend of theirs who lives in Berlin. His name is Klaus Frinks. Klaus is upset, the woman says in a high-pitched voice. Terribly, terribly upset.

“Upset?” the man says. “Why?”

“That girl he was in love with. She left him.”

“I never liked that girl.”

“Didn’t you?” The woman turns to look at her companion. Long nose, receding chin.

“I didn’t trust her,” the man says.

“She was beautiful.”

The man shrugs but says nothing.

“Poor Klaus.” The woman sounds oddly gratified. “He really thought she was the one.”

I sit up straighter in my seat.

Klaus
, I think, and then I think,
Berlin
.

If Klaus is German, and his surname is pronounced “Frinks,” it’s probably spelled with a
g
, as in “Frings.” If I hadn’t studied the language at school I wouldn’t have known that. My brain cracks open, floods with light.

Klaus Frings
.

The man with the bald spot looks round, curious to see if anyone is listening. He’s one of those people who talks loudly in public places because he thinks he’s interesting. Well, for once in his life he’s right: he
is
interesting — to me, at least. When he notices me, he tugs at his shirt collar as if to loosen it, then looks beyond me, pretending to be checking on the whereabouts of the projectionist.
Tell me more
, I whisper inside my head.

Facing the screen again, the man is silent for a few seconds, then he says, “Is Klaus still living in the same apartment?”

The woman nods. “Walter-Benjamin-Platz.”

“Penthouse, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. Amazing place. You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

“Once. There was that party —”

The lights dim.

The Passenger
intrigues me, as always, but I find that I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about Klaus Frings and his apartment in Berlin. The inexplicable shock of recognition when I heard his name. The sense of being summoned, singled out. The sudden disappearance of my heart, as if it had been sucked into a black hole at the center of my body. There have been so many dry runs
and dress rehearsals, but I always knew that sooner or later one of the messages would feel right. And now, finally, it does.

When the film is over, I linger in the courtyard outside the cinema. The English couple are standing by the gate. In the same loud self-important voices they are discussing the famous scene in which the director, Antonioni, moves the camera out through the bars on Jack Nicholson’s hotel window — how Nicholson is alive when the camera leaves, and dead by the time it returns. The woman is taller than the man. Older too, despite her girlish voice.

She catches me staring at her. “I’m sorry. Do we know you?”

I laugh. “No, you don’t. I’m grateful to you, though.”

“Grateful?”

“It’s all right. You’ve played your part.”

The woman flushes.

“You can go now,” I say.

The man fixes me with small hard eyes, and I remember something my aunt Lottie told me.
Some men are horrid when they meet you but you shouldn’t worry. It’s just because they fancy you. It’s actually a kind of compliment
. She paused, then said,
I wouldn’t get involved, though
—
not with one of them
. I wonder if the man in the raspberry-colored shirt is “one of them.” I wonder if he was horrid to Klaus’s girlfriend too.

I set off through Trastevere, making for the Ponte Sisto. I have plans for the evening — a late dinner, then a new club on the outskirts of the city — but I decide not to go. I feel too elated, too giddy. As I cross the river I replay the conversation I overheard. Certain phrases have stayed with me.
Penthouse, wasn’t it? She left him
. They’re clues to a future I can’t as yet imagine, fragments of a narrative in which I’m about to feature as a character.

/

September 3. Alone in our rooftop apartment on Via Giulia I stretch out on the sofa with the French windows open. My father’s away, as usual. The dome of St. Peter’s floats above a jumble of palm trees, sloping tiles, and TV aerials. It’s nearly six o’clock. I yawn, then close my eyes. I hear my mother asking if I would like to go somewhere at the weekend.
We could drive to that forest — the one with the yew trees, remember?
She’s dressed in a green T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her arms are slender, tanned. This would have been in England, at a time when she was well … It’s dark when I wake up. The snarl of a passing
motorino
, the clatter of plates in the restaurant downstairs. Rome again.

I reach for my phone. I have messages from Massimo and Luca, moody boys with private incomes and slim brown ankles. They want me to come out. There are openings, they say. There are drinks at a film director’s house in Parioli. There’s a party. I think about my friend Daniela. I wish I could tell her about the man I slept with. How he took my hand beneath the Departures board, and how he came without a sound. How he kissed me on the street, then disappeared.
You didn’t!
Dani, sitting at a table outside the Bar San Calisto, a cigarette between her fingers, her nails a cool chalk-blue. I would tell her what the man said.
My little witch
. We’d look at each other, wide-eyed, expressionless, then burst out laughing. But Dani’s in Puglia with hardly any coverage and she won’t be back for days.

I shower, then stand in front of the bathroom mirror, brown all over except for a single blinding strip of white. Tilting my head one way then the other, I run a brush through my wet hair. The ends come to level with my hip bones. I really ought to have it cut
but I can’t be bothered to make an appointment, let alone sit in a chair for hours and listen to all the gossip. I remember the time I wound my hair round Adefemi’s wrists.
You’re my prisoner
, I said. He always liked me to keep it long.

My phone rings in the living room. I put the brush down and lean close to the mirror. My face stares at me, unblinking. I look like someone who’s about to meet her fate.
Are you superstitious?
I smile, then lower my eyes. The good thing about September is you still have a tan. Lipstick and perfume: that’s all you need.

Once dressed — short skirt, leather jacket, sandals — I check my phone. Four missed calls, three of them from Massimo.
Kit? Kit! Where are you? Call me!
By midnight my arms are round his waist as we race through the warm brown streets, the throaty roar of his Ducati bouncing off the facades of buildings. I rest my chin on his left shoulder and watch the city rush towards me. Massimo’s a prince. Rome’s full of princes. We cut through the Jewish quarter. A man in a white vest sits on a wooden chair. A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he’s peeling an orange. The smoke unwinds into the air. The opal glitter of a fountain.

Massimo pulls up outside a club in Testaccio. Two revs of the engine, then he switches it off. Deep bass notes take over. I can already see the dance floor, a crush of sweat-soaked bodies, jittery strobe lighting. Massimo watches me remove my helmet and shake out my hair. “You seem different.”

A cigarette arcs down from the terrace and lands on the cobbles in a shower of red sparks.

Later, in the club, we run into people we know, or half-know — Maurizio, Livia, Salvatore. None of us can quite believe the summer’s over; there’s a sense of nostalgia, an undercurrent of despair.
Livia thinks we should spend a few days at her mother’s house on Stromboli. Salvatore says Morocco would be warmer. Massimo is already complaining about Milan, where he will soon be studying.
Imagine what the weather will be like up there
. I tell him he won’t even notice. He’ll be too busy going out with models.

“It’s you I want,” he mutters.

“I’ve only just split up with Adefemi,” I say. “And anyway, we’re supposed to be friends, aren’t we?”

“Adefemi.”
Massimo treads on a transparent plastic cup, which cracks loudly beneath his boot.

“I’ll be off as well before too long,” I say.

He nods. “Oxford.”

I’ve won a scholarship to Worcester College, to study Italian and French, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

“No,” I say, “not Oxford.”

“Where, then?”

I don’t answer.

“You’re impossible.” He lights a cigarette and blows out a thin blade of smoke that blunts itself against the night.

I move to the railing at the far end of the terrace. The air smells of spinach and wet fur. In June a group of us went dancing not far from here. I remember stone steps vanishing into the river, and a boat moored against the bank, and the water, green and milky. Nineties techno, dry ice. Ketamine. Then I remember a place Adefemi showed me, on a bridge that links Testaccio and Trastevere. If you stop halfway across and lean over the parapet, a draft reaches up to cool your face, even on a stifling August day. I think about all the people in bars and clubs and restaurants, and how I will soon be gone, and how none of it will change. That’s
the thing about Rome. Nothing changes. When you’re somewhere else you can always imagine exactly what’s happening.

Later still, Massimo takes me back to his apartment, which occupies one entire floor of a palazzo near Piazza Venezia. Massimo has a Thai manservant who wears immaculate white gloves. Every morning he wakes Massimo with a cappuccino and a copy of
La Repubblica
. Massimo’s living room is the size of a tennis court, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a brown-and-white marble floor. He used to have a brown-and-white fox terrier. Whenever the dog lay down, it disappeared.