The Shelter of Neighbours (11 page)

They knew something about her that she did not know herself.

So it seemed. So she was glad to get away, after one more day of it, glad to get home, or to the place she now called home.

In the place she now calls home, in that city, there is a famous amusement park, prettily spread over the slopes of a gentle hill. You can go there even if you don't want to go on the rides, just to walk around, to listen to the fairground music, to eat in one of the many restaurants. To enjoy the special fairground atmosphere, which is different from any other mood, in its combination of smells and music and laughs. The smell of summer grass. The screams of blissful terror. The warm sun on your skin.

Sara has not been there for years. But now, after the champagne, Lisa gets a whim; she wants to visit the fairground to celebrate her marriage; she wants to have fun in the sense this city understands it. And she wants to go immediately, because in a few days she will be leaving to join her husband and she seems to suspect that she may not return for a long time. She wants to go to the fair, tonight.

The Teacup. The Flume. Grandfather's Motor Car.

They're the easy ones.

The Ghost Hotel. The Hangover. Mount Everest.

They stroll through the fair. It's dark but still warm. The coloured lights twinkle and the tinkling music sparkles in the air. There aren't many people around; tomorrow the schools open, and so do many workplaces. Half the population will be back to work after the long summer holiday. It feels like the height of summer, but this is the night when people are gearing up for winter. Going to bed early, packing their bags and lunch boxes, like squirrels are packing their dens with nuts against what's ahead.

Sara and Lisa sit in a Teacup, on a merry-go-round that moves at about a kilometre an hour. It's usually patronised by toddlers, and the occasional granny. Tonight Sara and Lisa are the only passengers. The boy who collects the money doesn't bat an eyelid as he takes their cash and starts the machine. They revolve slowly and don't talk because the music is so loud. Sara is bemused, but Lisa smiles and looks around at everything, as if she is memorising what she sees.

‘Let's try Mount Everest', is what she says, the minute they get out of the Teacup.

The roller coaster. A kilometre of track, swooping and looping and soaring high above the fairground. From its cars people scream in a mixture of delight and terror. Little faces far away, mouths open and eyes closed, being shuttled up and down the steep track, looping the loop, turned upside down for seconds at a time. Little faces with closed eyes and screaming mouths belonging to people who are eighteen years old, max.

Could even they enjoy it?

Sara has never gone on even the easy roller coaster, the Mountain Train, which is cushioned by trees and shrubs and pretends to be a precipitous version of a country railway.

She is disbelieving.

‘Let's!' says Lisa. ‘Just once in our lives.'

She persuades her.

How?

Sara has never once in her life wanted to go on any roller coaster. She has visited this amusement park often, with Thomas, with visitors from Ireland. Her nephew from Dublin went on Mount Everest – he was thirteen at the time. He came off, trembling and white as a ghost, weakly protesting that ‘It was cool'. Sara hadn't been able to watch while he was on the thing.

And now she finds herself standing in the queue – long, since this is the most spectacular, the most scary, the most popular ride. She is handing over a lot of money to the girl in the ticket office, a brusque and impatient individual who, when Sara hesitates as she clambers into the car, tells her to hurry up, in a cross voice. Sara is fastening her harness, listening to Lisa say, ‘I always wanted to do this but this is my first time.'

Slowly the car climbs up the first track, a few metres at a time, as other customers embark. By then they are close to the top of the first loop, and although they have inched their way up, Sara is already frightened. She can't bring herself to look at the ground, about thirty metres beneath. She flies half a dozen times a year, she has climbed mountains ten times higher than this roller coaster, she is perfectly safe, strapped into a little steel car on a machine that has been tested and double tested by health and safety inspectors in this country, probably the safest country on the planet. She tells herself this, and other things: you have to do it once, you have to take the risk, it will do you good. But she feels more terrified than she has ever ever felt.

Abba sings. ‘Dancing Queen'. She can just hear it, mixed with the laughter, the shouts.

Once she was attacked by an Alsatian dog as she walked in the country, back in Ireland. He pulled her around by her coat-tails for a minute or perhaps an hour – when you are frightened, you move to a different clock, or to a timeless state, as close as you get to experiencing infinity. Eventually, the dog bit her neatly on the calf and ran away.

While he had been assaulting her, she had thought of people ripped apart by dogs in Nazi concentration camps, and she had waited for the dog to bite her eyes or her cheeks or any part of her body. But, like a Christian confronted by a lion in the circus, she had not lost her head. Far from it. Her mind worked hard, on a strategy for escape; and she was still working on that when the dog bit her – harmlessly, it hardly even hurt.

This is a thousand times worse.

She is strapped in. There is no point in planning an escape because she cannot get out. The machine, the person who operates it, is in control. All she can do is repeat to herself that hundreds of people go through this every day. Everything is going to be
ok
, everything is going to be
ok
.

But even Thomas's mantra does not console her.

A whistle sounds. Her blood curdles and the pace quickens. It is still slow as they mount the crest of the first hill but then they hurtle down the other side at a speed that makes her want to die. Then they race up the next slope. She glances at Lisa, who is smiling, just as she smiled in the Teacup. Is it a fixed grimace? Is she pretending?

Down they go, like a stone falling over the side of a cliff into the churning sea.

Oh God, oh God! I say. I don't believe in God. My family converted to the Church of Ireland soon after they came to Ireland from Lithuania and I am an atheist. This is ridiculous, I say, soon it will be over and you'll be glad that you did it. It tests your courage – which is lacking. When you get off, you won't worry about anything ever again – maybe that's why people do it. They ascend Mount Everest, strapped into a steel box, to put everything else in perspective? Words fail me.

I can't open my eyes but I can't close my ears and everyone is screaming. As we hurtle up slopes and are flung back down, the air is rent with bloodcurdling screams. Screaming must make it easier. I try to scream but I can't. Words fail me, screams fail me.

Now we're looping the loop.

I am the dancing queen.

We are upside down, we are defying gravity, my hair is hanging down over my face. And now I scream, I scream Lisa screams we all scream. Make it stop God make it stop.

It stops.

The machine stops.

The timbre of the screaming changes from one of pretend terror to a real scream of fright. Because the machine stopped in mid-flight. Every car is frozen exactly where it happens to be, on the slope, on the crest, on the loop.

Sara and Lisa are upside down on the inside of the loop. The harnesses are secure and the car locks to the track by a magnetic force, so they don't fall to their deaths. But they are upside down and the blood is going to their heads.

‘Hey? What's happening?'

They can still talk.

‘It's broken down,' says Sara calmly. It is not nice being stuck upside down on a roller coaster, but it is marginally better than being in motion. Her prayer has been answered. ‘I'm sure they'll fix it soon,' she says consolingly. She notices that Lisa's hat has disappeared. It obviously fell off when they looped the loop.

Abba have stopped singing. In fact, a hush has descended on the entire amusement park and up here in the air Sara feels enclosed in a silence as comforting and mysterious as the silence of the seabed.

She begins to get a headache.

A voice booms out and says that the roller coaster has stalled due to a mechanical fault. The fault will be fixed as soon as possible. There is no danger, do not panic. We apologise, we apologise.

‘It's like an announcement on a train,' Lisa says.

‘Except we're upside down. How can we not panic?'

‘We're not quite upside down,' Lisa points out. It is true. They are slightly left of centre on the inside of the loop.

‘I'm more upside down than I ever was before in my life.' Sara makes a face. ‘I don't like it. I'm starting to feel sick.'

More announcements.

They can't fix the fault. The air rescue service has been called, the fire brigade. Help is at hand, be patient.

Do not panic.

Do not panic.

‘Why don't they send an angel around with free drinks?' says Lisa. She looks different, upside down, with her hair floating in the air – her hair looks more plentiful and thicker, and with her pink cheeks, she looks younger than her upright self.

‘Do I look different, this way round?' Sara asks.

‘Ten years younger,' says Lisa. ‘It suits you.'

‘Hm,' says Sara. ‘I must do it more often. I must practise walking around on my hands.'

Sara is sick and dizzy but she is not in the least bit frightened.

On his way back to Italy, the woodcutter planned to visit the Nazi concentration camp.

‘Why?' asked Sara.

It was where her colleagues at the conference had gone, and she had wanted to ask them the same question. It had irritated her, although she did not understand why, that they were all so eager to go to the concentration camp. Hitler had lived in this city for years as a young man, and, although it was a city alive with music and art, with psychology and culture, with architecture and every aspect of civilisation, it was this one fact, this aberration, that obsessed the librarians. They went to the Jewish Museum, they had to go the concentration camp, they were prejudiced against the citizens in a visceral way. ‘They look like woodland animals, in those little hats,' a woman from the children's library in Birmingham had said. ‘Their fur coats, their little noses.'

You would think the English had an unblemished history, free from guilt.

‘It's good to get close to the concentration camp,' said the woodcutter, or words to that effect. ‘It is good to feel it in the heart. You read about it, it is different. You do not feel until you go. To the place.'

‘I suppose so,' nodded Sara. Thinking, voyeurism. Vulgar. Like visiting those medieval torture museums that have sprung up all over the place, in any town with any pretensions to a medieval origin. Tourists like to visit them, too, to gawk at the rack and the thumbscrews between their morning swim and their cappuccino on the terrace. They contemplate, not the sins of the politicians or the religious zealots, but the pain of the martyrs. Misery likes bedfellows. Misery likes greater misery. Tasting terrible pain in the safe confines of a museum puts personal suffering into perspective. It's all relative. Healthy people make these comparisons all the time, weighing a divorce against execution in the gas chambers, chronic arthritis against the Iron Maiden. ‘Musha, it could be worse,' Sara's mother had said. Often. That's why the woodcutter is going to Mauthausen now, the weekend after his wife has turfed him out. He's going to contemplate something worse than being dumped by a donna in cashmere.

Naturally, Sara kept all these thoughts to herself.

‘Also,' said the woodcutter, ‘I am a Jew. My family was hidden in a convent during the war. An Irish priest helped them – Father O'Flaherty, I think. Have you heard of him?'

‘No,' said Sara.

‘Some of them were sheltered in Italy. But some of them went to Mauthausen.'

‘Did any of them survive?' Sara was feeling sick.

He shook his head and said neutrally, ‘Mauthausen was a Level Three camp. Nobody survived.'

When she met Thomas in the library, he had read from a thriller, an excerpt about a woman who is strangled and then tied to a kitchen chair, in a sitting-up position. When the detective arrives, he thinks the woman is alive, in her kitchen, reading the paper or something. Sara found it hard to envisage. Wouldn't she have looked dead, somehow, even after a few days, even if the job of tying her to the chair had been skilfully done? Life departed so rapidly from everything, once dead. How would a detective not see death in the back of a head? In an arm or a leg? The details were ignored in the novel and Thomas made the scene sound convincing enough.

Thomas read the grisly passage in a low key, ironic tone, and went on to read even more graphic horror scenes. The five old ladies who constituted his entire audience listened with polite attention, and smiled and clapped their hands when he had finished. Then they lined up to get books signed and to thank Thomas for coming to the library. He was friendly and grateful. ‘Thank you,' he said. ‘Thanks for coming. Thank you for listening.'

What Sara knew about Thomas when he phoned to ask her to dinner was that he had written some nasty, and apparently not very popular books, mostly about murdered women.

The amusement park management brings everyone to the hospital for a check-up, then sends them home in taxis. It's after midnight by the time Sara reaches home. She sees the message light flashing on her phone. There is no message, but she guesses Thomas has been calling, wondering where she is. He never leaves messages. She telephones the cottage. No reply. She leaves a message summarising what happened.

Then she writes an email to Ernesto, which is the woodcutter's name.

Dear Ernesto,