The Other Me (24 page)

Otto has applied to the Waffen SS. It is common knowledge that getting into the SS requires one hundred and fifty years of documentation as proof of ancestry. But Otto thinks he’s a special case. That he’s the only person in the Fatherland who can prove his Aryan blood just by being himself. I had actually begun to believe that they might make an exception for him.

On the day he gets his response, I find him alone behind the stables. I know better than to question him. He has his dagger in his hand and he throws it straight at the wooden planks. He goes to the knife and pulls it out, returns to his position and throws again. Even as I walk away, I hear the whistle of the blade, all his anger sounding inside the judder of steel on wood as it finds its target, over and over again.

KLAUDIA

1996, London

Dear Meg,
 

I haven’t heard a word from you. I can’t bear to think how hurt you must be. Your silence hurts me too. I find myself talking to you, telling you things. I can’t believe that we won’t see each other again. You’re my best friend. I thought we’d know each other all our lives, be old ladies together, laughing about our days in Leeds with Voronkov, reminiscing about how we danced on different stages round the world. I thought we’d boast about our children, our grandchildren. Have I really destroyed all that?
 

I miss Mum. People think you should get over it in a month or two. But I miss her every day. I always will. And it’s worse because I feel guilty. I let her down. I’ll never forgive myself for it.
 

I wish I could talk to you about so many things. Remember Cosmo? The crazy thing is that he’s here in London. I’m working for his friend in a burlesque bar of all places. The people there are lovely. Except, they think I’m Eliza.
 

Cosmo has no idea who I really am. So he doesn’t understand why I’m holding myself back. I’m afraid I’ve lost him because of it. But I can’t let myself get involved again, not while he thinks I’m Eliza, can I? I know you’d tell me to be honest, tell the truth and get it over with. But I can’t. I’m afraid. You haven’t been able to forgive me. I don’t want him to hate me – to despise me, cut me out of his life. And the other thing is, his grandmother is Jewish. She was in a concentration camp. How can I tell him that my father is German – what he did in the war? I haven’t told anyone. Not even you.
 

Dearest Meg. I love you and I’m so sorry about lying to you…
 

I stop because I’m crying. My tears fall onto the paper, blurring the ink. I wipe my eyes with the edge of my T-shirt. I can’t send this. It wouldn’t be fair to Meg. She’s made it clear that our friendship is over.

I begin to rip it up. Then I stop. My fingers are trembling. I have to try one more time. I can’t let her go yet. I smooth out the paper and scrawl my name.

The heat in the street is worse. There’s a clogged smell in the air, tar melting on the roads. The pavement is streaked with dog shit. I drop the letter into the post box on the corner. I don’t hear it fall. It simply disappears, swallowed up, and I’m suddenly afraid Meg will never open it.

In the Guptas’ store, the bell clangs above me. It’s stuffy and dim. An electric fan whirrs in the corner. I rummage through the clutter on the shelves, picking out a packet of teabags, just to give me an excuse to talk to Mrs Gupta.

At the till, she takes my purchase from me with methodical care, ringing it up, and placing it in a brown paper bag.

‘I’d just like to say,’ I begin awkwardly, my voice sounding thin, ‘that I’m sorry if you think my father is avoiding you or anything like that…’ I force myself to speak up. ‘He doesn’t mean to be rude. He’s taken my mother’s death very badly.’

She shakes her head gently. ‘I can understand his problem.’ She counts out my money as she slips it inside the till. ‘Our shop is an unpleasant reminder.’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that. He’s just… he’s just keeping himself to himself at the moment.’

‘But there is no denying that I myself will remind him of that unfortunate day.’ She crumples the top of the bag with nimble fingers, folding it closed.

I open my mouth to ask her what she means, but the bell clangs as a couple of people come into the shop, and a telephone begins to ring, loud and insistent behind the plastic strands hanging at the door, the noise coming out of the mysterious, unseen spaces of the Guptas’ house. Mrs Gupta turns away from me, distracted by the phone, which stops suddenly, as an elderly woman leans against the counter, repeating a question. ‘I said, do you have prunes, love?’ The woman speaks loudly, as if her hearing isn’t good. Her thin hands fidget over a stack of newspapers. ‘Tinned prunes?’

I wait, clutching my bag, while Mrs Gupta points the woman in the right direction, and rings up a can of lager for a man in a tracksuit, his bullet head shaved like Shane’s.

‘You saw Mum the day she died?’

Mrs Gupta nods. ‘I thought you knew.’

I want to ask her if my mother had said anything on the day she died, if she’d seemed happy or sad, but a wavering voice comes from behind cans of baked beans. ‘Can’t find them.’ And Mrs Gupta hurries away, her fleeting look of exasperation quickly erased.

It’s just half an hour before opening time. Josh has switched on the sound system and Frank Sinatra is crooning into the empty room. The bar stands polished and ready, and all the lamps are lit, shedding small pink moons onto each table. I’m in the office standing behind Scarlett, helping her into her corset. She is damp with sweat. My fingers slip as I tug at ribbons, heaving her waist into its hourglass shape.

‘Did you hear about Cosmo?’ she pants, her hands on her hips.

I stop pulling; the ribbons slacken and coil around my hands.

‘Cosmo?’ There’s no moisture in my throat.

‘Yeah. He’s got a job in Rome. Lucky thing.’

‘Rome?’

Scarlett’s mass of red hair, her white shoulders, and the office with its clutter of costumes and paperwork, hurtle away from me. Air rushes through my lungs. My fingers scrabble at my chest, expecting to grasp a sword. I feel skewered through.

She’s nodding, red curls bouncing and tumbling. ‘He’s gone already. Won’t be back for weeks, months even. It’s a new mural job – something big.’

She’s still talking. Her words blur into nonsense. I can’t concentrate on anything. I’m in the room with her, but it all seems magnified and unreal; I stare at her spine, at the individual shafts of hair that stick to her skin; a freckle floats towards me like an island on a pale map. I bite the inside of my lip and try to focus on doing her up. I yank and squeeze, fumbling around the shapes of knots with shaking fingers. Her skin spills from the top of the corset. I smell men’s cologne and nicotine.

Rome. He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t even say goodbye.

‘Eighty-five degrees!’ my father tells me, tapping the barometer.

I used to sit under the apple tree for hours when I was a child, with a book in my hands. The pleasure of outdoor reading was one of the best things about the summer. I loved romantic classics like
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
. Then I discovered Austen and fell in love with Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, along with the rest of the world. Except Mum. She sometimes sat on the lawn with me, slumped in a green deckchair. She always wore a hat to protect her skin. And in her lap would be some simmering modern love story.

The radio is full of the latest facts about the heatwave. It’s all anyone talks about. The newscaster reported delays on trains due to speed restrictions for fear of buckling lines. Fires are breaking out in forests around the country. There are constant reminders about the hosepipe ban.

My father takes no notice of the ban. Every evening he is out there aiming a jet of water into the flowerbeds. ‘It rained all spring. And now they have no water!’

I watch drops of moisture shivering on leaves and hot soil. The earth has split and torn apart into fissures. Ants surge out of one crevice in a seamless ebony trickle. The wet earth releases a stench of fox. I know the Perkinses will be peering from behind their curtains and I’m certain that they will report us. I keep expecting a formal knock on our door. A man in a suit handing over an envelope. A fine to pay.

‘Maybe you should use a watering can instead,’ I suggest. But my voice is dull. It lacks conviction.

Cosmo left without saying goodbye. He’s far away in Italy, and I feel as crushed as the brittle seedpods on the ground.

My father shrugs off the suggestion. ‘I won’t have Gwyn’s flowers dying because other people didn’t do their job.’

I think he wants an argument. Hopes for one, even. He sits and broods for most of the day. He looks through the photo albums. He’s put more pictures of Mum inside frames he’s made in the shed. He props them up on the mantelpiece among the figures of Jesus and the wooden crosses. He keeps a vase there full of fresh flowers. Mum’s half-finished knitting is arranged on the coffee table with her reading glasses. Our sitting room looks like a shrine. Anyone would think we were Catholics. Mum never really approved of my father’s carvings. It didn’t sit with her beliefs. But she knew it made him happy. Her mute face shines out at me from behind squares of polished glass, and I know she wouldn’t like any of this.

It’s impossible to sleep. The nights are hot and sticky. I leave my window wide open, letting in soupy air and the smell of melting tarmac. I lie in tangled, sweaty sheets listening to the distant roar of traffic coming from the main road, and think of Cosmo. I wasn’t brave enough. I keep reliving the moment he stepped away from me in the restaurant, the way his voice sounded. Closed off. Resigned. I feel a quickening inside, and my lungs can’t get enough air into them. He’s gone.

I hate Eliza. Hate myself for what I’ve done. I can’t erase it, can’t change all the mistakes, can’t take back the untruths and the hurt I’ve caused. The heat is suffocating; it closes around me. I wish I were on a beach far away with cool sand between my toes, nothing but the undulating ocean before me. When I was a child I used to think that ice-creams at the beach would taste different from those bought from the van at the end of the street: impossible not to lick up the thick fumes that belched out of the van’s exhaust, swallowing them along with a melting 99 or speckled Fab.

In my head I saw translucent water, white spume, the ticklish tumble of tiny fish, and longed for the sensation of waves, the playful roll and splash of them as they slapped against my knees. I couldn’t swim. But in my dreams I found myself walking in fearlessly, floating out towards the horizon, swimming with ease through sinuous ribbons of seawater.

We didn’t have the money to go on holiday. We never went to a beach. Not even for a day.

I’m awake when the electric milk-float rattles down the street. I listen to the stop-start whine of its engine and the jingle of glass as the milkman sets pints down on doorsteps. There are a few hours of almost complete quiet just before dawn. But now I can hear the sounds of the city waking up: cars and motorbikes. A distant siren. A dog barking. Birds’ voices. The mutter and hum of unseen machines, the rumble of trains. An aeroplane passing.

I stumble into the bathroom and splash my face, leaning under the cold tap, letting it gush into my mouth, tasting the metallic tang. The house is silent. My father must still be asleep. It’s early, even for him. I pull on my clothes and go quietly down the stairs into the kitchen. I fill the kettle and switch it on. Set out a cup, dropping a tea bag inside. I get a teaspoon out of the drawer and place it next to the cup. The comfort of ordinary actions. Padding across the floor, I unlock the back door and push it open, letting in summery smells and the early-morning air.

There is a pile of earth under the apple tree. It looks a bit like a molehill. We’ve never had moles before. I wander out over the dewy grass and my heart judders. An animal has been digging between the roots of the apple tree. Scrape marks gouge out the ground. Fresh earth thrown up and scattered over the damaged lawn. I peer into the raw wound at my feet. At the bottom, something glints: a small square of white, about the size of a stamp.

I don’t know what to do. A fox must have unearthed what should have stayed hidden; but now that it’s visible, I feel a need to see inside.

Kneeling on the wet ground, I begin to scrape at the earth with a trowel, working carefully around the curve of china. I thrust the sharp point deeper. The soil is wetter, darker. It smells rich and musty. Fine shreds of roots interlace the earth, making my job harder. A writhing worm, vulnerable and naked, burrows away from the light.

Now I can push my hands underneath the urn and lift it clear. I slump sideways, cradling it on my lap, staring at the long-tailed birds and the boughs heavy with pink blossom. I run my filthy fingers across the delicate lines of them, trace the gold encircling the lid.

It feels heavy. But it’s so small. How can she be stored inside a container this size? I brush away clinging mud. My fingers move to the lid, twisting, and it gives, scraping as it turns. My heart is beating hard. I close my eyes for a second. Not knowing if I can look. I’ve never seen human ashes before. I don’t know what to expect. Taking a deep breath, I open my eyes.

Grey matter fills it to the brim. It seems natural to dip my fingers into the ashes. They are silky fine as the ashes from a fire. It could almost be water lapping against me. I scoop up a handful, holding that tiny weight in my palm. ‘Mum,’ I whisper, curling my fingers and shutting my eyes. Something inside me shuts too: an end to any hope that she will return, whole and alive to me.

I replace the urn back in the hole, because I don’t know what else to do, and push the earth back on top. I kneel, my filthy hands pressing the ground, my head bowed, and all the tears that I’d been holding back rush to my eyes. My face is wet. A bird stirs in the branches over my head. I hear the fluted trilling of a thrush.