Katherine Carlyle (3 page)

Massimo offers me cocaine. I shake my head. He tosses the see-through plastic packet on the coffee table. Some of the white powder spills. He doesn’t care. He pours me a cognac, then puts on
Kind of Blue
by Miles Davis. We lie at ninety degrees to each other, on matching cream sofas. I sip my drink; my stomach glows. It’s a last night of sorts and I’m only sorry I can’t tell him. The sound of the trumpet is clear as glass, some notes so fragile it’s a wonder they don’t shatter.

“Is your father in town?” he says.

“No, he’s away.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Some war zone or other.”

Massimo smiles. He has always liked the idea of my father. He thinks being a reporter is romantic.

Sitting up, he runs a hand through his hair, then changes the music. This time it’s Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” I finish my cognac and slip out of my shoes. We dance back to back on the cool marble floor, our arms lifting dreamily into the air above our heads like a snake charmer’s snakes.

At three in the morning I tell him I’m going home. He starts to cry. “What if I never see you again?”

“Don’t be so dramatic.” I push the hair out of his eyes and kiss him on the forehead. “You’re tired. You should go to bed.”

Outside, as I bend over to unlock my Vespa, a car races down the street, boys leaning from the window, a maroon-and-yellow flag rippling and snapping in their hands. One of them shouts at me. The only word I hear is
culo
. I’m still thinking about the things Massimo said.
You seem different. What if I never see you again?
Sometimes he’s so in tune with me that he can read my thoughts even as they’re forming. Not that I know what lies ahead. All I can say for sure is that a space will open up between us and the temperature will drop. Perhaps he was right to feel sad.

I ride down to Lungotevere then follow the river. As I pass the Isola Tiburina there is the smell of golden syrup. It’s like a memory from another country, a different time. I pull over to the side of the road. The smell’s still there, but I can’t account for it. There’s no factory, no shop. I accelerate away again.

Tonight the city smells like England
.

Though it’s late I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep. It’s almost as if I had the coke he offered me. My body feels wound up like a clockwork toy. I need to be set down, let loose.

Goodbye, I whisper as I turn away from the river.

Goodbye, goodbye.

/

When my father calls on September 6, everything’s in place and it’s only two days until I act. He’s in the Middle East, he says. In
Syria. He’s sorry he’s been elusive recently. I tell him I understand. The line swoops and crackles beneath our words. Sometimes it sounds hollow, as if we’re talking in a cave. Other times, the connection cuts out altogether and there’s an absence that makes me feel queasy, like the numbness you get in your arm when you rest your head on it and fall asleep.

I ask him how he is.

He’s fine, he says. He’s not in any danger. Most of the shells are landing in rebel-held suburbs. I say I’m fine too. Rome is relatively peaceful at the moment, I tell him, despite a night of heavy fighting.

“Have there been demonstrations?” He sounds surprised, annoyed with himself. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s missing out on breaking news.

“Dad,” I say. “It was a joke.”

Silence.

At last he says, “Only a month to go.” Until I start at university, he means. “You must be excited.”

I say I am. It’s easier if I agree.

“You’re so lucky,” he says. “I wish —”

I know what he wishes. He wishes he could be in my position, with everything ahead of him. He has no idea what he’s wishing for. He doesn’t have a clue.

I ask him when he’s coming home.

“In about a week,” he says, then he appears to hesitate. “It’s not confirmed. The situation’s volatile.”

It’s ten years since we moved to Italy but when I hear my father on the phone it always makes me think of London. I see our house in Tufnell Park. The peaked, slightly Gothic roof, the red-brick
walls. The hollyhocks by the front door. Green trees, gray sky. I can almost smell the rain. My father would often be abroad, working on a story. It was just me and my mother, for weeks at a time. She wasn’t ill yet but she wasn’t quite right either. I would come home from school and find her lying on the sofa in the front room with her forearm over her eyes, or sometimes she would be asleep in bed. In our last year in the city she was always tired.

“Kit?”

“I’m still here.”

“You’ll need an umbrella. It’s not like Rome, you know.”

He’s trying to be light and humorous but I sense him turning away, losing interest, even though his mobile’s still pressed against his ear. When filing his reports he tends to stand at an angle to the camera, alert to what is happening behind him, in the unstable darkness of a foreign night.
This is David Carlyle. CNN. Benghazi
.

Or Damascus.

Or Kabul.

When the phone call’s over I realize he didn’t ask me how I was. He never does. He thinks it’s a meaningless convention, a waste of breath. But I always tell him anyway.

Seconds later, oddly, Dani calls from Puglia. It’s a relief to hear her voice, but when I tell her about the man I slept with her response surprises me. She thinks I was reckless. I laugh and say we used a condom but that isn’t what she meant.

“He could have been anyone,” she says. Then she pauses and says, “Sometimes you frighten me.”

“Dani,” I say, “I wouldn’t have chosen
anyone
” — though even as I speak I realize there was something completely arbitrary and
instantaneous about the decision. It was as if I’d been drinking. Not for a moment did it occur to me to think of consequences.

That afternoon I go out and buy an umbrella.

/

Two days later, on September 8, I flag down a taxi on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. I have a suitcase with me, and my new umbrella. Draped over my right arm is the cashmere coat my father gave me when I turned eighteen. I’m carrying my passport, several credit cards, and a printout of my boarding pass. Round my neck is my most valuable possession — a small, silver heart-shaped locket containing two pieces of my mother’s hair, one blond and wavy, the other a glinting dark brown, almost metallic. The blond hair is what fell out when she first had chemotherapy. The brown is what grew back. I have closed my deposit account and withdrawn my savings. The money my mother left me. My inheritance. It’s enough to keep me going for a while.

A few hours earlier, at dawn, I walked to the Ponte Mazzini, my phone in my hand. The city sticky-eyed, hungover. Still half-asleep. I stopped next to a lamppost in the middle of the bridge. White mist drifting above the river, a blurred pink sun. Leaning on the parapet, I held my phone out over the water and then let go. I thought I heard it ringing as it fell. Who would be calling so early? Massimo? Dani? I would never know. In Rome people ring you all the time and mostly it’s not about anything in particular. Back in the apartment I downloaded
Eraser
and cleaned my hard drive, not just deleting my files but overwriting them so as to make
retrieval more or less impossible. I left my laptop under the arch on Via Giulia with a note that said
FREE COMPUTER
. If I’m to pay proper attention, if this is to work, there’s no option but to disconnect, to simplify. From now on, life will register directly, like a tap on the shoulder or a kiss on the lips. It will be
felt
.

Entering the station, I have an image of myself a week ago, standing beneath the Departures board, my presence implausible, unreal, as though my lungs were drained of oxygen and my veins were empty. How things have turned around since then! On the train to the airport everything we pass seems highlighted or in relief. The bleached papyrus grass that grows next to the railway line, the wasteground where Gypsies often camp. The big blue signs on station platforms.
VILLA BONELLI, MAGLIANA, MURATELLA
. Strange how a journey that is only just beginning can feel so final.

At Fiumicino, while queueing for Security, I let out a cry. The old man in front of me turns round and asks if something’s wrong. His face is kind, concerned.

“It’s my umbrella,” I say. “I must have left it on the train.”

“You can buy another one.” He chuckles. “It’s not the last umbrella in the world.”

“But my father gave it to me —”

I look at the floor. Why am I lying?

“Your father will forgive you,” the old man says. “I know he will.”

Rain slants across the window as the plane drops out of the belly of the cloud. Flat wet fields appear below, and rows of trees with yellow leaves. Cars slide along a road that looks silver-plated. Germany. I feel my insides twist, a tightness in my throat. A kind of homesickness. I realize I’m missing my mother and the years when there were three of us. That time’s gone forever, though. My home’s gone too. The past is what I’m homesick for.

The plane shudders when it hits the runway, lurching right then left, as if seeking a way out. Mist gathers behind the wheels. A faint burst of applause from the back, the airy roar of brakes.

Before I flew, I googled “Berlin accommodation” and found several cheap hotels in and around Kluckstrasse. There’s talk online of a red-light area nearby but that doesn’t bother me and Kluckstrasse has the great advantage of being central. Walter-Benjamin-Platz is only four stops away on the U-Bahn.

Outside the terminal I climb into a taxi.

“Kluckstrasse, please,” I say.

The driver gives me a look in the rearview mirror. His glasses have caramel-colored lenses that make his eyes difficult to see.

I say it again. “Kluckstrasse.”

At last, and reluctantly — or so it seems to me — he pulls away. It’s my clothes perhaps. My luggage. He equated me with somewhere more upmarket.

I stare through the window. Berlin is gray — a gritty, grainy gray. There’s no warmth, no beauty; I’ve left all that behind. I wonder if my father has been to Germany. He probably has. His job has taken him all over the world. His absences used to be a mystery to me but I became accustomed to him being gone. It seemed normal, almost comforting. When he reappeared, after weeks away, I would throw myself into his arms and he would have a spicy smoky smell that I always thought of as his “work” — the smell of train stations, airport lounges, rented cars — and he would give me a T-shirt or a key ring, proof of where he’d been.

We pass an Argentinian steak house, then a restaurant called Villa Fellini. The Mercedes smells of deodorant and stale cigarettes. The radio is turned down low. From time to time the driver takes his right hand off the wheel to rub his chin or scratch an ear. With his greased-back hair and his seventies sunglasses he looks as if he might once have been a singer in a seedy cabaret — or on a cruise ship, like Berlusconi.

“This is Kluckstrasse,” he says at last.

There isn’t a hotel in sight so I ask him to keep going. A car behind us honks then overtakes. I tell him to turn right. I’m just guessing but as we round a corner I see a two-story building painted a garish blue. A small sign says
HOTEL
.

“Stop here,” I say.

Once he has pulled over and switched off the meter I hand him the fare. He turns in his seat and looks straight at me for the first time.

“How old are you?” he asks.

I tell him I’m twenty, though actually I’m still nineteen.

He looks away, then murmurs something.

“I’m sorry?” I say. “I didn’t understand.”

As he passes me my change I lean forwards but he keeps his eyes fixed on the windscreen. There’s a thin red line near his ear. He must have cut himself shaving.

I try again. “What did you say?”

He adjusts his glasses, then gets out, opens the boot, and carries my suitcase to the curb. By the time I’m standing on the pavement he’s already back behind the wheel. His indicator flashes and he drives away.

The sky is the color of an oyster and has a clamminess as well, a glossy, slightly swollen quality. I bring my eyes back down. Opposite the hotel is a squat purple building with no windows. Next to the purple building is a pair of wrought-iron gates painted gold and then a green wall with a sticking-out sign that says
AUTO-GLASEREI
. Beyond that is a railway bridge. The gutters are clogged with wet leaves. It’s quiet, just the murmur of traffic and the distant scream of logs or metal being cut.

I move towards the hotel entrance. The lobby is the size of a doctor’s waiting room with a prefab look to it as though, like a film set, it’s only temporary and could be dismantled at a moment’s notice. The woman on reception has a sallow unlined face, her eyebrows plucked into thin black arcs. I can’t tell where she’s from. Iran perhaps. Or Lebanon. A room with a shower will cost me fifty euros. If I share a bathroom it’s only forty. Her voice is casual, musical, and she makes no attempt to sell the place.

I ask if I can see a forty-euro room. She hands me a key attached to an oblong piece of wood by a metal ring. The room is on the ground floor at the end of a narrow passageway. Between the two beds is a night table with an ashtray and a lamp. I move to the window and part the net curtains. On the far side of the alley that runs past the back of the hotel is a streetlight and a wall of blackened bricks. The cool, faintly alcoholic air of Berlin drifts through a crack in the window frame. The smells are all unnatural — creosote, petrol, methylated spirits. I put my face close to the glass. Out there, somewhere, is Klaus Frings, with his penthouse apartment and his wounded heart …

I return to reception.

“Well?” the woman says.

“It’s perfect.”

Her eyebrows lift but she says nothing.

That night, after eating in a pizzeria on Potsdamerstrasse, I lie awake for hours. Though the curtains are closed, the room floods with yellow light from the streetlamp outside the window. When I think of Klaus Frings I see a man who is a few years older than me and only an inch or two taller. I suppose I’m being influenced by the sound of his name. Those two pert monosyllables, which seem to invite a limerick, suggest someone with a brittle distracted air. He might even shiver a little, but like a greyhound this would be a sign of good breeding, not nervousness or feeling cold. His clothes seem anachronistic, as if he belongs to another period in history. A figured waistcoat, a cane with a carved head. He doesn’t resemble anyone I know. He’s like a fictional character, a person I’ve made up. As I turn onto my side rhymes begin to pop into my head:
drinks, winks, stinks, kinks, sphynx
. The limerick’s writing itself.