A Twist of the Knife (6 page)

‘There’s some good legal retro on tonight,’ the MinuteManager announced. ‘
L.A. Law
,
Kramer vs. Kramer
,
Perry Mason
,
CSI
,
The Firm
,
Lawman
,
Rumpole of the Bailey
. Would you care to watch any in real time or compressed time?’

For some moments Henry Garrick did not answer. He was still wondering why his wife had got up so early. Perhaps there was a problem with one of her modules – maybe he should call an engineer and get her looked at under the maintenance contract, if he could remember who the hell it was with. Then her voice startled him.

‘Goodbye, darling. Have a nice day.’

She was going out! She wasn’t supposed to go out . . . There wasn’t any way she
could
go out. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, where the hell are you going?’

*

It was nearly midnight when Susan came back. She reeked of booze and smoke and had her arms around a man.

‘Where have you been?’ Henry yelled at his wife. ‘And who the hell is this creep?’

To Henry’s chagrin, Susan didn’t even respond. She did not even look at him.

‘I thought I would miss him,’ Susan said quietly to her new boyfriend, Sam. ‘I thought it would be nice to continue having him around the house. The problem is, he’s never realized he’s dead – can you believe it? He thought it was me that died! Poor sod, he was getting terribly muddled towards the end of his life. It’s spooky the way he looks at me sometimes. I mean, he’s just a hologram guided by a few bits of data, but it’s as if he’s still alive, still sentient. And he seems to be getting more and more so every day. He actually got mad at me for going out this morning! I guess it’s time to call a halt.’

‘Yes,’ Sam agreed, staring uneasily at the quivering hologram. ‘There comes a time when you have to let go.’

Susan lifted her arm and pressed the switch.

‘I want you,’ he texted.

‘I want you more!’ she texted back.

Trevor was fond of saying that the past was another country. Well, at this moment for Janet, it was the future that was another country. The future – and another man.

And tonight she was going to have him. Again.

A sharp, erotic sensation coiled in the pit of her stomach at the thought of him. A longing. A craving.

Tonight I am going to have you. Again and again and again!

Her past receded in the rear-view mirror with every kilometre she covered. The forest of pines that lined the autobahn streaked by on both sides, along with road signs, turn-offs and other, slower cars. She was in a hurry to get there. Her heart beat with excitement, with danger. Her pulse raced. She had been running on adrenaline for forty-eight hours, but she wasn’t tired – she was wide, wide awake. Going into the unknown. Going to meet a man who had been a total stranger until just a few weeks ago.

His photograph, which she had printed from the jpeg he had emailed her, lay on the passenger seat of her elderly grey Passat. He was naked. A tall, muscular guy, semi-erect as if teasing her to make him bigger. A tight stomach, nearly a six-pack, and she could already feel it pressing hard against her own. He had brown hairs, thick and downy, on his chest and on his legs, and she liked that. Trevor was white and bony, and his body was almost hairless. This man was tanned, lean, fit.

Hans.

He looked wild, like a young Jack Nicholson, his hair thinning on the top. He looked just the way he had sounded on the Internet chat room when she had first been attracted to him.

Feral.

The background to the photograph was strange. An enclosed, windowless space that might be the engine room of a ship, although she had a pretty good idea what it really was. Like everything about him, it excited her. Shiny, floor-to-ceiling metal casings, beige coloured, with dials, gauges, switches, levers, knobs, winking lights. It could be some kind of control room in a nuclear reactor? Or a mission control centre?

She felt on a mission very much under control!

Who had taken that photograph, she wondered? A lover? Had he taken it himself with a time delay function? She didn’t care, she wanted him. All of him. Wanted that thing that half-dangled, half-rose. Wanted to gather it deep inside her again. Wanted him so badly she was crazed with lust. Mosquitoes got crazed with blood lust. They had to land, take in the blood, even if it killed them. She had to have Hans, take him into her, into her body, into her life, even if that killed her, too.

She didn’t care. For now she was free. She had been free for two whole days and that was longer than she had been free for years.

Over the scratchy reception of the car’s radio, struggling through the occasional interference of someone talking in German, Bob Dylan was singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’
.

They were. They really were! Flecks of sleet struck the windscreen, and the wipers cleared them. It was cold outside and that was good. It was good to make love in the warmth when it was cold outside. And, besides, the cold had plenty of other advantages.

I will never let you go
, Trevor had said.
Never. Ever
. He had told her that for years.

Hans explained to her precisely what he was going to do to her. Exactly how he would make love to her the first time. And he had done so just the way he had described. She liked that Germanic precision. The way he had studied every detail of her photograph. The way he already knew her body when they met. The way he told her he loved her hair, and had buried his face into it. Into all of it.

My name is Hans. I am thirty-seven, divorced, looking to start a new life with a lady of similar age. I am liking brunettes. Slim. Excuse my bad English. I like you. I don’t know you, but I like you.

I like you even more!

She would be forty this year. Hans would be her toyboy, she had teased him. He had laughed and she liked that; he had a big sense of humour. A wicked sense of humour.

Everything about him was totally wicked.

She looked OK, she knew. She’d never been a beauty, but she understood how to make herself look attractive, sexy. Dressed to kill, plenty of men would look at her. She used to keep in shape with her twice-weekly aerobics classes, then, when Trevor had gone through one of his particularly nasty phases, she had turned to binge eating – and then binge drinking – for comfort. Then she enrolled in WeightWatchers, and the fat and the flab and the cellulite had come off again. Her figure was good, her stomach firm – not a distended pouch, like the stomachs of some of her friends who’d had children. And her boobs were still firm, still defying gravity. She’d like to have been a little taller – she’d always wished that – but you couldn’t have everything.

Anyhow, Trevor, who was much taller than her, told her the very first time they had made love that people were all the same size in bed. That had made her smile.

Trevor used to tell her that nothing you do in life is ever wasted. He was always coming up with sayings, and there was a time when Janet had listened to them intently, adored hearing them, filed them away in her memory and loved repeating them back to him.

Loved him so damned much it hurt.

And she hadn’t even minded the pain. Which was a good thing because pain was something Trevor did really, really well. The knots, the handcuffs, the nipple clamps, the leather straps, the spiked dog collar, the whips, the stinging bamboo canes. He liked to hurt her; knew how to cause her pain and where to inflict it. But that had been OK because she loved him. She would have done anything for him.

But that was then.

And sometime between
then
and
now
he had changed. They had both changed. His horizons had narrowed; hers had widened.

Every system can be beaten.
That was one of his sayings.

He was right.

Now she was a lifetime away. So it seemed. And one thousand, two hundred and twelve kilometres away, driving through spartan December pine forest. Click. One thousand, two hundred and thirteen. And, in a few moments, travelling at one hundred and thirty klicks an hour, with her life in the two large suitcases jammed on the rear seats, one thousand, two hundred and fourteen.

‘Hagen 3
.
’

The turn-off was coming up. She felt a tightening of her throat, and a prick of excitement deep inside her. How many villages, small towns, big cities had she driven through or passed by in her travels, during her life, and wondered, each time,
what would it be like to stop here
?
What would it be like to drive into this place as a total stranger, knowing no one, then check into a hotel, or rent a small flat, and start a totally new life
?

She was about to realize her dream.
Hagen.
So far it was just images she had found when she had Googled it.
Hagen.
The thirty-seventh largest town in Germany. She liked that. A population of two hundred thousand. On the edge of the Ruhr. A town few knew about outside of its inhabitants. A once important industrial conurbation that was now reinventing itself as a centre of the arts, the websites had proclaimed. She liked that. She could see herself in a place that was a centre of the arts.

Up until now, she had not had much contact with the arts. Well, there had never been time, really. During the week she was always on the road, driving from place to place as an area sales representative for a company that made industrial brushes. Finishing brushes for the printing trade. Brushes for vacuum cleaners. Brushes for the bottom of elevator doors. For electrical contacts. She would miss her flirting and banter with her clients, the almost exclusively male buyers at the factories, the component wholesalers, the plant hire and hardware stores. She was missing her comfortable, new, company Ford Mondeo, too, but the Passat was OK. It was fine. It was a small price to pay. Tiny.

Then, at the weekends, Trevor wasn’t interested in any area of the arts. He didn’t want to know about theatre, or art galleries or concerts, except for those of Def Leppard – great music if you like that kind of thing, which she didn’t – but they were not
art
, at least not in her view. He just wanted to watch football, then either go to the pub, or more preferably to a particular S&M club he had discovered in London, where they had become regulars. He liked, most of all, to hurt and humiliate her in front of other people.

Ahead of her and to her left, across the railings on the elevated road, she could see the start of a town. It lay in a valley, surrounded by low, rounded, wintry hills. Everything she could see was mostly grey or brown, the colours bleached out by the gloomy, overcast sky. But to her, it was all intensely beautiful.

Hagen. A place where no one knew her, and she knew no one. Except just one man. And she
barely
knew him. A place where a stranger she was going to have sex with tonight, for just the second time, lived and worked. She tried to remember what his voice sounded like. What he smelled like. A man so crude he could send her a photo of himself naked and semi-erect, but a man so tender he could send her poetry by Aparna Chatterjee.

Trevor had never read a poem in his life.

The road dipped down suddenly beneath a flyover that seemed, from this angle, as if it went straight through the middle of a row of grimy, pastel-blue townhouses. She halted at a traffic light in the dark shadow beneath the flyover, checked in her mirror for an instant – just checking – then saw a yellow road sign. There was an arrow pointing straight ahead, with the word ‘Zentrum’
.
Another arrow pointed left, and bore the word ‘Theater’
.

She liked that. Liked the fact that the second word she saw on arriving in the town was
Theater.
This was going to be a good place – she felt it in her bones, in her heart, in her soul.
Hagen.
She said the word to herself and smiled.

Behind her a car hooted. The lights were green. She drove on past a road sign that read ‘Bergischer Ring’
,
and realized from the directions she had memorized that she was close to her hotel. But anxious as she was to see Hans, she wanted to get her bearings. She wanted to arrive slowly, absorbing it all, understanding the geography. She had all the time in the world, and she wanted to get it right, from the very beginning. It seemed too sudden that one moment she was on the autobahn, the next she was slap in the centre of the town. She wanted to feel it, explore it slowly, breathe it in, absorb it.

She turned right at the next road she came to, and drove up a steep, curving hill, lined with tall, terraced townhouses on both sides, then past a grimy church. She made a left turn at random, up an even steeper road, and then suddenly she was in scrubby, tree-lined countryside, winding up a hill, with the town below her.

She pulled over to the kerb, parking in front of a butane gas cylinder that was partially concealed by a threadbare hedge, stopped and climbed out. The central locking had packed up a long time ago, so she went around the car, making sure the doors and the boot were locked. Then she walked over to the hedge and looked down, across the valley, at her new home.

Hagen. A place that boasted, among its tourist attractions, Germany’s first crematorium. Which had a certain convenient ring to it.

The town lay spread out and sprawling in the bowl beneath her. Her eyes swept the grey, urban landscape beyond the gas cylinder, below the murky, sleeting sky. She saw a cluster of industrial buildings, with a white chimney stack rising higher than the distant hills. A small nucleus of utilitarian apartment buildings. A church spire. A Ferris wheel brightly lit, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, reminding her that darkness would start to fall soon. She saw a narrow river bordered by grimy industrial buildings. Houses, some with red roofs, some grey. She wondered who lived in them all, how many of their inhabitants she would get to meet.