The Uninvited (9 page)
Afterwards, she suggests we have dinner together, but I decline.
‘Sorry. In other circumstances I would, but tonight I have to work.’
‘I could come by later when you’ve finished. Stay the night.’ Perhaps she wants another orgasm.
‘No, that’s not possible.’ Here I switch to English because I lack the vocabulary I need. ‘I have RLS. That’s an acronym for Restless Leg Syndrome. It means I kick women. In bed. By accident, of course.’ I switch back to German. ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassure her, as she finishes dressing. ‘We don’t need to see each other again.’
Her mood must have shifted because her smile vanishes. I’ve observed this before with women, post-sex. They want to linger, but they can’t spell out why.
‘Do you make a habit of this?’
‘No, but I’d like to,’ I tell her. ‘It’s just that I’m not good at being with other people for long. I know I don’t have—’ Once again I can’t find the German term I need, which annoys me. So I say it in English. ‘People skills.’
She switches to English. ‘I noticed.’ She is fiddling with a silver bangle on her wrist, decorated with a pattern of feathers. Indian, at a guess. I realise I have probably hit the wrong note again, but I don’t know how to remedy it. I haven’t memorised the phrases for it in any language. ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘isn’t a problem with social interaction quite a handicap in your field? Didn’t you say you were an anthropologist?’ Her English is far superior to my German. I must take the time to study harder.
‘When it comes to gauging human behaviour, it’s an asset. It’s like colour-blind people being deployed by the military to detect camouflage,’ I reply. ‘They look for the shapes rather than the colours.’ This line is tried and tested.
Her features relax into a more forgiving configuration. All of a sudden, she seems to understand. Usually they do. I reach for my laptop and fire it up. She stands in the doorway watching me for a long time, just as Kaitlin used to.
At some point she gives up on me and leaves the room.
Kaitlin did that too. It was always a relief.
It’s only later on, when I’m setting my phone alarm, that I see the text that interrupted sex with the demographer.
You have left Freddy very confused. He’s not your son and you are out of his life now. If you want the best for him, then please leave him in peace and let’s all move on.
Kaitlin Kalifakidis is a lawyer: we met on a case. I was instantly attracted to her. I liked her Greek surname, but it was her wild hair that struck me most. It seemed messy and a little unprofessional, given her sober job. Even tied up, there was – and is – a huge amount of it. So that’s what I registered first: that confusion of Burnt Cedar hair piled high. I liked her mouth. The full lips, lipsticked a good, forceful red. Wide-set, animated eyes, a small neat body. There are certain colours I dislike intensely, so it suited me that she was largely a monochrome dresser. Blacks, whites and shades of cream or beige: she wore nothing that shouted. Everything was discreet and suited her. The only bright colour was on her lips: the rest of her make-up was a variation of her own hair colour and skin tones. ‘Easier to make decisions,’ she explained once. ‘Anyway clothes should showcase you. Not the other way round.’ I liked that in her: the choice to limit her wardrobe to what worked, and ignore fashion. Her practicality.
When the case was over she told me she found me very attractive and invited me out to dinner. Over this meal I learned she’d been brought up bilingual, so I tried out some Greek phrases on her. This made her smile, and led to her questioning me more, and what she heard seemed to excite her. She already knew all about Phipps & Wexman and she’d heard of Professor Whybray’s work on mass hysteria. She was impressed that I’d worked so closely with him, and that he’d been my mentor. When she invited me back to her home after dinner I didn’t need to draw a mental flow chart to know what this would mean. She had already told me about Freddy: he was five at the time. She described him as ‘born fatherless’, but changed the subject when I asked how that was technically possible. She did not have many taboos, but I quickly learned that Freddy Kalifakidis’ paternity was one of them.
Kaitlin employed a live-in au-pair girl who had already fed the boy and put him to bed when we got in. This young woman then melted discreetly into her room. Kaitlin and I had sex that night and again the next morning. She had warned me we had to do it very quietly because of Freddy and the au pair, but silence is always fine by me. I find that women often make distracting noises during sex, right in one’s ear, necessitating the deployment of various coping mechanisms. I liked grabbing her Greek hair in my hands. If the lack of eye contact bothered her, she didn’t mention it.
I discovered that Kaitlin was very straightforward and businesslike about what she wanted, in and out of bed. After a few dates, I grasped that I was being interviewed for a job I had not considered applying for. She told me she wanted a man in her life who could be a role model for her son, who respected her lifestyle and her work, who was compatible with her sexually and whom she could grow to love.
‘Is that how it works?’ I asked. It was not what I had gleaned from popular culture and empirical observation, or from anything Professor Whybray told me when his wife Helena was dying. When I expressed my doubts, she suggested a trial run of three months. I didn’t ask how many other men she had considered or why she wanted me. But she did. The trial period worked: Kaitlin liked the way Freddy and I fitted together mentally. I did too. I felt at ease around him from the start. And he felt the same. He liked watching me make origami models. He liked the folk tales I told him, and he enjoyed pulling at the hairs on my arm, and being swung high in the air, and testing his strength against me. We had arm-wrestling matches and developed a game involving the hurling of cushions which Kaitlin called ‘daily violence’. He had been starved of male company.
I put up some shelving for my things, folded Kaitlin a Hot Crimson Kawasaki rose with a Jungle Khaki stalk and leaves and moved in.
There is a popular theory that when a woman falls in love with a man, she falls in love with two men: the man he is, and the man she wants him to be.
It soon became apparent that I could not become that man.
By now I have studied Sverige Banken’s financial documents closely enough to have established that Jonas Svensson’s costly act of sabotage required him to make only five keystrokes on his computer. In or out of a dissociative state, it was the work of no more than eight seconds. More likely three. Tomorrow I will seek confirmation of this, and interview him accordingly. Pleased to have made progress, I allow myself the relaxation of watching the final part of a documentary on BBC World about Napoleon’s pyrrhic victory over Moscow in 1812. It’s followed by the late-night news. A disturbing murder has rocked France. A boy of ten shot his two uncles at point-blank range, in a forest. One died, the other survived with severe injuries. He used his father’s rifle. They were out hunting wild boar. It was not an accident: eight witnesses – including the boy’s father and some cousins – saw him do it. There was no obvious motive. Unsurprisingly, it’s being linked to the case of the Harrogate child now known to the public as Pyjama Girl.
But to me she’s Child One. And the French boy is now Child Two.
All night I kick.
When Ashok skypes me in the morning the image is unclear. It gives him a cubist look which suits him. Whenever I think of the cubist movement, I think in particular of Georges Braque, because of all its adherents, he strikes me as the most mathematically aware.
‘How’s Sweden?’ Ashok wants to know. My screen tells me it’s 9.12 local time. It’s Thursday 20th September. This was my mother’s birthday. Had she lived she would now be seventy-one.
‘See for yourself.’ I angle my laptop to show him the view of the waterfront from my window, where ships, ferries and boats gleam dully under a low sun. ‘The forecast says it’ll be cloudy with light rain showers and a high of twelve.’
‘Neat,’ he says. ‘Must go there sometime. What are you up to then, Maestro?’
‘I had sex with a demographer.’ That wakes him up.
‘Well they don’t call you the Pussy Magnet for nothing. She Swedish? I hear they’re hot.’
‘Swiss–German. Attending a UN conference on the population crisis. What are you supposed to do when someone cries?’
‘You made her
cry
? You big, crazy heartbreaker!’
‘No. I’m talking about Jonas Svensson’s boss. Lars Axel. He cried when I interviewed him.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much. He cried. So what do you do, when it’s a man?’
‘Jeez, Hesketh. Same as a woman. You pat them on the arm or squeeze their shoulder or their hand or you might give them a hug. You tell them you understand this is a difficult situation and suggest you talk another time. Did you do any of that?’
‘No. But I think his colleagues did. He left the room crying, so I made him a lotus flower. Then later his PA called to apologise.’
‘OK. Well I just talked to the wife. Annika. Very dignified lady. She says you can visit Jonas in hospital this morning. She’ll be there. But she says she won’t guarantee you’ll get any sense out of him. He’s been in a confused state since he came out of the coma. Mental breakdown, whatever. But get what you can. By the way. Lotus flower: nice touch.’
After he has said goodbye, this remark puzzles me. The lotus is a perennial plant that grows from a thick rhizome in altitudes up to 1,600 metres. It is almost entirely edible, and is seen in some Eastern cultures as a symbol of purity, or the movement of the human spirit towards a state of enlightenment. Was this symbolism what Ashok was referring to, when he said, ‘nice touch’? If so, he would be wrong. I constructed a lotus flower for Lars Axel because apart from
ozuru
, I work through my repertoire of twelve basic models on a rota system, and it was the turn of Model 8.
Outside, altocumulus and cirrocumulus clouds drape the sky. At ten o’clock, I take the fourteen-and-a-half-minute walk from my hotel to the hospital. It’s an eight-storey modern structure with polished floors. There’s a huge courtyard with a bronze sculpture of a lion, surrounded by glass-sided lifts. It doesn’t have the sickly, claustrophobic smell of the British hospitals I visited during the years of my parents’ physical decline, or later, when Mrs Helena Whybray was dying and I accompanied the professor to help him ‘keep a grip’. This is an environment in which one can imagine people getting well at speed, where broken bodies are repaired and serviced by high-quality machines. At Reception I’m told that Jonas Svensson has been placed on the psychiatric ward where he is still being assessed. If he is deemed to be a danger to himself and others he will be moved to another unit. If not, he’ll be allowed home.
Svensson has a room to himself, which I am directed to by a black male nurse with tribal markings on his cheeks. There’s a woman sitting outside it, angled oddly on a chair, like a perched
ozuru.
Annika Svensson is probably in her mid-fifties, and quite wrinkled. She is wearing a jacket in a green I particularly like: Bamboo Classic. When she sees me she rises, all long limbs and hinge-like joints. My height is often a useful barrier to eye contact. Not on this occasion: she is exceptionally tall, so I focus on her earring and greet her in Swedish. People are always glad when you address them in their own language, I have found, even though your knowledge may not extend further than what you have memorised from a dictionary or phrase book. Annika Svensson has very clearly been crying, and her left cheek is bright red. She must see me noticing, because she puts her hand to it. Her fingers are very long.
‘How is your husband doing?’ I ask. ‘I hope you don’t mind speaking English.’
‘I went in there a minute ago and he hit me in the face. He’s never done anything like that before.’
Abruptly, through the door, we hear a man shouting something and a woman’s voice trying to calm him.
‘What’s he saying?’ I ask. I caught only one word:
fan
, or ‘devil’. Scandinavian swearing is very tame compared to its Anglo-Saxon equivalent, which is why they import words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ into their vocabulary. They use them liberally and with far less inhibition than native English speakers.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ she answers. ‘It’s like he’s gone back to childhood. He says kids forced him into it.’ She shrugs. ‘This is not the Jonas I know. He was never violent. Never. He’s become another person.’
‘Can I go in?’
‘Ask Dr Aziz. She’s in there with him. But keep away from him, he’s very strong.’
I knock. No one answers, so I go in.
A young black-haired woman whom I take to be Dr Aziz is standing by the far window, speaking rapidly into a phone. She looks distressed and I can see why: Jonas Svensson, who is seated on the bed, is wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses. When I saw his photo at the bank, he was not stark naked. He was clad in a quiet grey suit. And you could see his eyes: blue, like his wife’s. The glasses are a ski-style wrap-around design with mirror lenses. I am not cut out for this kind of encounter. His bare skin is almost translucent, in the same way as a maggot’s, and mapped with blue veins. The pale hair on his limbs and genital area catches the sunlight. His penis rests on his thigh, flaccid. He has a small pot belly. A hospital nightgown lies on the floor. He has apparently just removed it. Dr Aziz shakes her head and again points at the door, indicating I should leave. But just then Jonas Svensson turns his attention to me, shouting something in Swedish and motioning angrily at the chair. He wants me to sit. I hesitate. I don’t mind not having eye contact with him. But his mirror sunglasses are distracting. I have no wish to see my own alarmed face. I look at the floor and say, ‘I came to see you from London. I’m investigating what happened at the bank.’