The Other Me (37 page)

Our house is the only one in the street without lights, dark as a rotten tooth in the row. All four windows gape black and empty. Amoya has gone for the night. I come into the hall, kicking the snow from my trainers, brushing it from my face.

He is dozing. I stand by the window and pull back the curtains to look out into the falling snow. I listen to the slow wheeze and drag of air entering and leaving his body. Somehow his heart is still beating. To stop that will be murder. But it’s what I must do.

How do you kill someone? I don’t know how to think about it, plan it. Then I remember the dead cat, my father’s handgun in the top left-hand drawer of the portmanteau. I found the key once and opened it. Stared at the pistol, too scared to pick it up. My eyes followed the heavy lines of the barrel and worn grip. This time I’d feel the weight of it in my palm, slotting bullets into the snug nest of the cylinder. But I’ve seen the films; I know what happens when a bullet tears through a skull: blood, an explosion of it, and scraps of shattered bone, the gloopy insides coming out. Anyway, I’ve never fired a gun. I could end up maiming him instead.

I can’t believe that I’m even considering this.

The garden is covered in a thick, dampening carpet of snow. Neat flowerbeds have become small white graves. The naked apple tree holds up silvery branches. The hushed world is transformed. Beyond our garden fence, streetlights gleam, catching snowflakes in illuminated fans. A car rolls past slowly, wheels crunching. The street is oddly deserted.

It has to be pills. It’s the safest way, surely? I’ll have to acquire them in furtive visits to different chemists. No. That won’t work, because I don’t have weeks, not even days. It has to be now. I need another kind of drug, something immediate and powerful enough to let his dreams drag him under, so that he drowns silently, invisibly, within his own body. I think of his lungs, his heart, his muscles, the secret core of him, unclenching, letting go at last.

I turn around and Ernst stirs, opens his eyes. He looks at me in silence. His eyes are dull and flat. But as he gazes at me, his one good eye gleams. He doesn’t need to ask the question.

‘I don’t know how,’ I say quietly. ‘I don’t know how to do it.’

He indicates with his fingers for me to sit, and I lower myself carefully next to him. ‘Morphine.’ He forces the word out through his wheezing. ‘Amoya has it in her bag. All you have to do is take some extra vials.’ He stops. Spittle shines on his lips. ‘It should be enough. I would go to sleep… hopefully, not wake.’

‘I’d have to steal it?’

He grimaces as if a knife has sliced into his ribs. ‘She knows,’ he manages to say. ‘But… not ethical… I can’t put her in that position. She’ll never say anything. Nobody will question the… death of an old man riddled with cancer.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

His eye brightens. His face relaxes.

‘I need to know something first.’ I stare into his ravaged features. ‘I might have got this completely wrong. But I’ve been thinking it for a while now.’

I look at him, my heart thundering. There is no way to do this except with the plain question. ‘Did you and my mother… did you ever have a relationship?’

His eyes widen for a second, and then he nods.

It’s like puncturing a balloon. All the tension leaves my body. I slump forwards, towards him.

I feel his hand on my head, stroking my hair. ‘My dearest,’ he murmurs.

Another certainty is entering me. A knowledge that is as extraordinary and familiar as my own skin seen close up.

I keep my eyes on the bed. The white fold of sheet. The woollen weave of the blanket.

‘You’re my father… aren’t you?’

His hand pauses against my head. His fingers tremble.

A small noise escapes my throat. I bend over, careful not to crush him, and put my arms around him, burying my face in the thin hollow of his neck. I could lift him up. He would weigh no more than a child. I breathe quietly, smelling the sour taste of decay. I press my lips to his scratchy, sunken cheek. His arm curls around my back. We stay like that until the pain means he has to move.

I busy myself plumping the pillow behind his head. A hard lump of feeling is lodged in my throat: joy and grief.

‘Your mother asked me to keep it secret… she thought it best… she didn’t want Otto —’

‘I know.’ I want him to stop talking because I can see that it hurts him. ‘I won’t say anything.’

‘We didn’t have an affair,’ he says. ‘I need you to know that. We slept together once. We loved each other from a distance. I loved her very much.’

Enough to let her go, I think.

I used to make up daydreams when I was a child, dreams of running into my father’s embrace. I imagined myself hurtling towards him: my feet swift and agile, and then the joyful leap into his open arms. He swept me up, holding me against his broad chest. And I heard the thud of his heart, felt the rasp of his chin. He wrapped himself around me, as I nuzzled into his neck, whispering against the warmth of his skin,
Daddy
.

I kept my eyes tightly closed in that moment, not wanting the dream to end, but it always faltered, because however hard I tried, I couldn’t picture my father’s face.

ERNST

Amoya is here; her skin gleams. I smell coconut oil, sweet. There is the pin-prick. Sharp and necessary. She finds the vein first time. She’s good. She lets go of my arm. ‘I’ll be back later, Mr Meyer.’ Her voice floats away.

Cold swims through me, loosening the hooks of pain. Dark eels drift away into the murk. The liquid chill travels on; it swells into my heart, washes onwards through the narrow column of my neck, breaking behind my eyes in a wave of white. White mist. Geese moving inside a cloud, crying and complaining. Otto walks ahead. Blood trickles down his calf. My feet slip on the icy lip of a puddle. Wait for me, I call. Otto. So impatient. Striding on with bright blood running down his leg.

He was born without a sense of humour, that one, Bettina says with a wink. Bettina: impish and teasing as ever, tossing her hair out of her eyes. I look for her, wanting to return the wink, let her know we’re friends. But she’s moved beyond the edges of my vision.

It’s strange in this borderland between living and dying. The morphine promises me more. But there is never enough. Klaudia will fetch it for me. She will take me home. My daughter. My little girl with her plaits swinging behind. Sweetheart.
Liebling. Schatz. Du machst mich so glücklich
. She holds out her hand to me. It should be me leading her to safety, not the other way around.

My bed is a raft floating across the lake. Beyond there’s the forest, dark and full of wolves. But inside its thickets is the cottage. And I have to get there. I will scramble off the raft and make my way through the secret paths. Sarah and Daniel will be there, waiting for me. Sarah. The door slammed shut behind you. The train moved off. And I stood and watched. I let you go.

Gwyn moves through the trees. ‘Don’t worry, cariad,’ she whispers. ‘It will be all right. God forgives you. Sarah is there. She’s waiting for you.’

She leans down and kisses my forehead. She kisses my blind eye and my scar. Her tongue is damp and warm; her breath is like honey. I wish that she would stay. I wanted to dance with her one more time.
Dancing is a joy and the heart in love laughs. Ja da pfeift der wind so kalt.
But the wind is so cold, and I’m so tired. Better that she lies down beside me and puts her arms around me. I’d like to feel the pressure of her head against my heart, the soft uncurling of her hair under my chin.

There’s someone else in the room. A sturdy man moves to the other side of my bed. He’s built like an ox. I smell cigarette smoke and damp earth. He puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. ‘Damaske,’ I manage. ‘There you are.’ His face is whole and round, ruddy-cheeked. He winks at me, moving the cigarette in his mouth.

Who is missing? There’s a woman below the spreading chestnut tree at the edge of the field. But I can’t get to her. The ploughed earth between us is deep and dark. It’s seething with lice, rolls of wire; dead men’s hands stick up out of the mire, clutching their rifles. A tank’s burnt-out carcass is borne up on the swell of muck. She waves. I wave back across a drifting mist of battle smog, the stink of cordite making me cough.

And there is Otto, young and strong, running through long grass, his head tipped back. He’s laughing. ‘Catch me if you can!’ he calls out, and his voice is clear and loud inside the warm summer evening. There are woodpigeons calling, soft and throaty, and the swallows swoop and dip, blue wings flashing.

Otto looms close. He hangs over me, peering down. He’s not a boy anymore. I smell smoke in his hair. The ashy stink of old fires.

‘You should never have come back,’ he says.

KLAUDIA

This morning, while Amoya was out of the room, I slipped vials of morphine into my closed hands, walked into my bedroom and hid them in my sock drawer. Ernst was right. They were easy to steal. She’d left them inside an open bag, on top of other things, so that it was the work of seconds to take them. Ernst has given her the afternoon off. Amoya will return for the night. I must help him before she gets back. My job is to inject the fluid into his poor, thin arm. I’ve never pushed a needle into a vein before. I hope I won’t hurt him.

There’s nobody else in the chapel. I can sit quietly in a pew and think. I don’t believe in my parents’ God. But I’m not like Ernst. I do believe in something – a force for good, something higher and better in the world. Although I feel that helping Ernst to die isn’t wrong, I wish there was someone else to tell me that it’s right. I need reassurance. But I have to do this alone.

I’ve struggled all my life to make the wrong father love me. It’s every child’s nature to love. When it isn’t returned they think it’s their fault. The moment Ernst told me that he was my father, I felt that old wound heal and a new wound open: his guilt scorching me. He did something unforgivable. But it’s haunted him, all this time. I know it has. What he did was evil. Yet, despite it, he’s a good man. My mother said that once about Otto. This time I believe it.

It was my mother who told the biggest lie. What must it have been like to live with her lie every day? I’d thought she’d lived a dull life. I’d thought nothing had ever happened to her. Now, when I consider the choices and sacrifices she made, the agony that must have gone with each of them, I wonder how she squared it with her God. When she prayed, was she asking forgiveness? Was she asking for the strength to endure, to fulfil her duty with a man she didn’t love anymore? Or did she love him? Did she love them both?

I wish I’d known Ernst when I was growing up. I wish I could spend time with him. We don’t have that luxury. It’s funny; he should still be a stranger to me, but there has always been a familiarity between us, a sense that I’d known him before. I’m glad that I can do this for him, that it’s me that will fulfil his last request.

A shadow falls over me. There’s the rustle and flicker of someone walking past and I glance up. The scent of lavender hangs in the air. I look around at the empty pews, the closed double doors into the street. I’m alone. I feel a sense of urgency, a need to get home, strong as a hand tugging at me. I struggle to my feet and walk quickly out of the chapel.

I turn and begin to run along the pavement. It’s drizzling: a freezing sleety rain. I forgot to put on a coat. The chill bites at my skin, seeps inside my bones. Afternoon is drifting into evening. All the streetlights have come on. Cars pass, their headlights picking out the rain in shimmering beams. The snow has gone from the street, except the rutted, blackened remains lying in drifts at the side. Car tyres leave mushy tracks through the wet.

There are no lights on. No noise or sound of voices. A deep, dense silence exists. I break it as I close the door behind me, like breaking a spell. I hear my lungs pulling air in and out, the creak of my shoes, the rustle of my clothes against my skin. I pause at the foot of the stairs, standing with my hand on the banister, afraid of what waits for me. My pulse quickens in my wrists. I drag my feet up each stair tread, my hand sliding along the polished wood.

The door to the spare room is closed.

There’s a shape hunched by the bed. At first I think that Ernst has somehow pulled himself into a chair. Then I realise that it’s my father. He’s slouched low, his head hanging forward. Ernst is a motionless shape under the sheets. I stand for a moment with my hand on the door handle, hardly daring to breathe, not wanting to go in. I don’t want to disturb a final reconciliation. Neither of the men moves.

I approach quietly, standing by my father’s shoulder. He doesn’t acknowledge me. When I glance at Ernst’s face my body goes cold. I know at once that he is dead. He is vacant. Empty. His body lies on its back and his face, parched and yellowed, stares up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. His mouth gapes. I want to close it. I want to slide his lids shut too. But I’m afraid to touch him. He looks like a creature that has been excavated from a tomb, something that is thousands of years old. His wounded hands lie over the sheet, fingers spread as if in surprise. I force myself to lean forward and touch them. There is a hint of warmth inside the skin; I feel it drawing back like a tide.

I gasp.

My father doesn’t move. And I notice the pillow on his lap. He clutches it tightly, his hands curled into fists.

I shake him. His fingers curl even tighter around the fabric, and he lets out a low moan.

‘What have you done?’ My voice scratches the air.

A sound breaks through the gloom: the doorbell, its chimes loud and ordinary. A trilling electrical noise that echoes before it comes again. It can’t be Amoya. She has a key. I stand, my heart beating. It chimes again, insistently. Someone is pressing the bell repeatedly, as if they know I’m here.

I obey its call, turning away from the bed. I walk slowly down the stairs. Through the frosted glass of the front door I make out a tall shape. The shape has its face pressed against the pane, trying to see in.