Summer Lies Bleeding (10 page)

‘No worries,' chirps the waiter as he disappears into the darkness of the restaurant.

‘Cheers,' says Stella, raising her glass. ‘Here's to us.'

‘And the baby,' says Paula.

‘Yes,' says Stella, as their glasses clink together and she tries not to meet Paula's eyes. ‘And the baby.'

Kerstin pauses at the edge of the pavement and pulls the keys to her flat out of her coat pocket – another of her rituals. She must hold them for the duration of this, the last part of her journey home.

She turns left off the King's Road and onto Old Church Street clutching them tightly in her hands as she walks. She strides purposefully up the street, making sure not to step on any cracks or drain covers for if she does she will have to go back to the top of the street and start again. But she manages to avoid them and a feeling of deep calm flutters across her chest as she walks past the upmarket charity shop where millionaire Chelsea housewives deposit their cashmere sweaters and silk scarves, past The Pig's Ear pub where dressed-down bankers squish uncomfortably onto shabby-chic leather sofas and pretend to be lads. The road darkens as she walks across a narrow, dimly lit side street, ominously named Justice Walk, where the old courthouse that once held prisoners bound for the colonies
and is now a multi-million pound super-pad, peeks nervously out of the shadows as though hiding its murky history in the half-light.

This little corner of Chelsea that weaves its way down to the Embankment where the statue of Sir Thomas More sits in contemplation outside the church that gave the street its name, has been home to Kerstin for three years now, yet still she feels like a stranger.

She stops outside a thin, rather bland modern building: the apartment block where she rents a tiny one bedroom flat on the top floor for more money per month than she would pay for a three bedroom house in Cologne. But it suits her to live here; it is private, quiet and clean and, most of the time, she can carry out her routines and rituals without disturbance.

She walks up the path tentatively, wondering whether the communal hallway will be empty. As she approaches the glass outer door with its two neat potted bay trees she sees the light is on in the hall and hopes that Clarissa, the elderly, upper-class lady who lives in the ground-floor flat, is not on another of her nightly rounds. An interruption from Clarissa can wipe a good thirty minutes from Kerstin's evening and set her and her rituals back hours.

Kerstin looks through the glass. Clarissa's door is shut; there is no one about. Kerstin smiles with relief but there is still a strip of hallway to pass before she can get to the stairs and freedom. She turns the key in the lock cautiously and pushes
the door open, closing it behind her gently so it doesn't slam. Clarissa listens out for any comings and goings and at the slightest noise, she will materialise in the corridor asking questions; telling stories about her mother, Sybil, who was a suffragette with a beautiful soprano voice: ‘She sang at Wigmore Hall in the twenties you know … she even made a record … and Dame Ethel Smyth said she had a voice like a nightingale.'; about her brother Lawrence who fled to LA to join a commune in 1972 and was never seen again: ‘I think he may have been queer you know and didn't want to tell us but it wouldn't have bothered me a jot. Mummy had tons of female lovers, one did back then because Edwardian men were so damned uptight and prudish. They wouldn't know a female orgasm if it leaped up and bit them on the bottom …' The stories go on and on, seaguing into another and another like a vast map of interconnected tributaries, taking in cul-de-sacs and sweeping avenues, motorways and dead ends like an out of-control car. Clarissa is Kerstin's daily challenge; the obstacle she must overcome as she leaves for work in the morning and returns at night; like the troll under the bridge but with a sunnier demeanour.

Kerstin tiptoes across the hall to the foot of the stairs. She can hear a faint noise coming from behind Clarissa's door: chamber music playing on a vinyl record then a high-pitched, mournful voice singing: ‘If you were the only boy in the world and I was the only girl!' She's listening to her mother singing,
thinks Kerstin. She pictures the old lady draped in fuchsia pink silk reclined on her antique chaise longue with a glass of scotch in her hand, thinking about suffragettes and missing brothers and the glory of the English upper-classes.

As Kerstin climbs the stairs, she feels the tension ease from her shoulders. She is always polite to Clarissa but she wishes she didn't have to deal with the constant threat of disturbance. Yet she pities the old lady; after all, there must be some reason why she grasps hold of people the way she does and off-loads her stories in an incessant stream of consciousness. She talks rapidly, without drawing breath, like she has just been rescued from solitary confinement and must tell her rescuer everything, all at once.

One evening, after a particularly trying day at work, Kerstin had returned home and started to scrub the flat from top to bottom, furiously trying to atone with bottles of bleach and wire wool for whatever mistake she had made that day. She scrubbed so hard, the skin on her hands started to crack and blisters formed on the tips of her fingers, but she didn't care, she had to keep going or everything would fall apart. She was kneeling in the middle of the floor, squirting Flash Multi-Surface Cleaner onto the tiles when there was a knock at the door and there stood Clarissa armed with a bottle of Tanqueray Gin and a thick, white book.

‘Some photos of Mummy and her friends in the WSPU, thought you might like to see,' she trilled.

Kerstin had almost pushed the old lady out of the door, telling her she was very sorry but now wasn't a good time. Clarissa had looked at her quizzically, possibly noting Kerstin's red face and breathlessness; then she had smiled. ‘Oh, you've got a gentleman caller,' she shrieked, clapping her hands together. ‘Well done, darling. Oh, I do miss all that. I'm afraid my days of making love and dancing naked are over. All I have left are my memories.' She had tapped her forehead and winked at Kerstin as she turned to go. ‘Tatty bye, dear,' she had trilled as she walked away. ‘And don't forget to take precautions, there are so many nasty diseases nowadays.'

The phantom boyfriend had provided Kerstin with a good few months of excuses as to why she needed privacy. As she passed Clarissa in the hallway each morning, the old lady would smile knowingly at her and ask after her ‘gentleman friend'. ‘You shall have to come and have tea with me one Sunday afternoon,' she would say. But Kerstin always found an excuse: the boyfriend was away on a business trip; he worked weekends; he had been hospitalised with acute appendicitis. It certainly stopped Clarissa from making any more night time visits to the second floor, though sometimes Kerstin would hear faint footsteps on the landing outside the flat.

Then, six months ago Clarissa had fallen in the street on her way to the post office and broken her ankle. Now reliant on a walking stick, the stairs are strictly out of bounds though she still manages to wedge herself into the desperately narrow
lift to go down to the communal laundry room in the basement. Kerstin wonders if Clarissa should be living on her own; surely she needs extra care now, a nursing home with plenty of people to tell her stories to. But no, Clarissa told her, she would leave Old Church Street in a box and not a moment before, so she remains in her flat ruling the ground floor like some elderly gate-keeper, resplendent in her silk headscarf and jewelled Moroccan Slippers.

Kerstin crosses the first-floor landing, past Flat 2, now empty after being bought a year ago by a Russian businessman for his socialite daughter who decided it was too small. Clarissa is furious that it hasn't been put up for sale yet but Kerstin likes the fact that the first floor is unoccupied – it makes her feel safe.

At last, she reaches the second floor. She is tired and hungry but she must get everything in order, check that everything is in its right place, before she can even think of preparing dinner. She closes her eyes and counts to seven before putting the key in the lock. Then, opening her eyes, she slowly unlocks the door, satisfied that the first of her many nightly rituals has been observed successfully.

The door opens into a small white living room and as Kerstin flicks a switch on the wall the grey marble surfaces of the thin strip of kitchen that runs along the right hand side of the room sparkle under the bright spotlights. The whole flat is illuminated by 100-watt bulbs. Kerstin cannot bear half-light,
for she has learned that monstrous things hide in shadows ready to jump out and take her by surprise. She hangs her handbag on a silver hook on the back of the door then steps gingerly across the pale wood floor.

Now for the inspection.

She opens each of the kitchen cupboards in turn, counting then recounting the packets and tins that are lined up in neat rows like soldiers on a parade ground. There are exactly twenty tins in the cupboard; ten on the top shelf, ten on the bottom. Kerstin knows this because she never cooks; these tins are remnants from another time, a time when she would open a messy tin of tomatoes and throw them carelessly into a pan, and stir and splash juice on the hob before eating it sloppily out of a bowl, and leaving the dirty dishes until the next morning. Now the only foods she allows herself are clean ones; things that won't make a mess, won't upset the order of the kitchen: baked potatoes, steamed vegetables and ready-cooked chicken breasts, eaten with disposable plastic cutlery.

On she goes, opening the fridge then the oven and the grill. All clean, all immaculate and unchanged since this morning. She crosses the living room with its white two-seater sofa and pale wooden coffee table; nothing under the sofa cushions – good. Next she goes into the bathroom, checking the linen cupboard twice, behind the shower screen, even the toilet. Nothing.

As she stands at the door of her bedroom, she closes her eyes
and again counts to seven, muttering to herself in German: ‘
ein, zwei, drei …
' She opens her eyes and steps into the room. The curtains are open and a beautiful moon pours its silver light onto the white bed. Kerstin flicks the light on and the moon is obliterated in the harsh glare. She darts across the room and draws the curtains before pulling back the bedclothes and checking under the bed. All is as it should be. Just the chest of drawers to go.

She approaches the white drawers reverentially, as though approaching an altar, which it is to some extent. Sitting atop the drawers is a small wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary, given to Kerstin as a baby by her grandfather. A set of ruby-red rosary beads are draped around the sculpture's neck and after Kerstin has checked each drawer she stands and runs her fingers gently over the smooth, round beads, offering up a silent prayer of thanks that she has been spared anything horrible happening despite the two ‘incidents'.

She goes over to the small white desk in front of the window and picks up a thin brown notebook. Opening it up, she reads back through the last few entries:

Friday 24 Aug: Statue turned the wrong way. Toilet seat up when I left it down. Discovered during check at 8 p.m
.

Wednesday 22 Aug: Memory stick lost in office – sometime between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m
.

Friday 17 Aug: Books on shelf in wrong order; specifically checked before leaving this morning
.

Monday 13 Aug: Shampoo missing from bathroom cabinet. Discovered during check 8 p.m
.

Ordinary misplaced objects; things that other people would never notice, but Kerstin notices and that is why she began to write them down, to reassure herself that she wasn't completely losing her mind. At first she thought it might be Clarissa, letting herself into the flat while Kerstin was at work and having a snoop, but with a broken ankle she hasn't been able to get up the stairs in months. And what kind of burglar would break in and rearrange books and shampoo? No, it's a test, Kerstin is convinced of this. She knows who is doing this; what is doing this, she should say, and why, and she must keep one step ahead of it at all costs.

She takes a pen and writes in today's entry, makes today's mishaps real.

Monday 27 Aug: Purse ripped. Discovered: 3:56 p.m. Report not saved. Discovered: 5:10 p.m
.

*

She puts the notebook and pen back onto the desk, in the very centre, then walks across the bedroom and out into the living room. Two large pictures hang on opposite sides of the room, dominating the bare white space. One is a print of Whistler's ‘Nocturne in Grey and Silver', a sixteenth birthday present from her mother. It reminds Kerstin of the walk across Cologne from the home she shared with her mother to her progressive school on the other side of the Hohenzollern Bridge. She likes
bridges; she admires their symmetry, their practicality and endurance. In another life she would have liked to have been an engineer.

If the Whistler is a meditative print, a reminder of happy times, then the other picture is a warning of what might happen if Kerstin lets go, if she stops her checking and counting. She had seen the original painting of Bruegel's ‘The Triumph of Death' in the Museo del Prado seven years ago. She had been in Madrid with her boyfriend Matthew. It was the beginning of their relationship, they were living together in a beautiful flat in Bloomsbury, she had just started working for Sircher Capital, Matthew was a hedge-fund manager at Goldman Sachs. Life was wonderful. Weekends were spent on mini-breaks to Venice, Paris and Madrid, or wandering around Borough Market eating and laughing, or curled up in bed, making love.

Yet though she had been happy that day in the gallery, Kerstin had been mesmerised by the painting and its chaos: black, burning skies, bodies scattered all around, armies of skeletons running rampage, cutting people down with scythes. She had been accustomed to all kinds of art growing up with an art-historian mother but none had moved her as much as this one. The painting stayed with her as they left the museum, as they strolled through the city to find a restaurant to eat in and as they curled up to sleep later that evening. It was like an icy chill, a glimpse into pure evil, the darkest heart of humanity.

A few months after that trip, she had woken up on a drizzly July morning and headed to King's Cross tube station to catch her usual Piccadilly line train to Green Park. She had arrived a few minutes after a quarter to nine just as a packed train was closing its doors and pulling out of the station. She had cursed to herself as she stood on the platform watching the train disappear into the tunnel; cursed the train for leaving without her; for making her late. And then the darkness came; pure black nothingness. Like the bomb in Cologne, death had come for her again and she had escaped it by seconds.