Katherine Carlyle (11 page)

A few months later I walked into her bedroom and found her lying on her back with her eyes closed. Only her head showed above the covers. It was the middle of the day. The sky in the window was patchy and gray, rain threatening. Rome in the winter, the river breathing its damp vapors into the city. All the old, sad stones. Her hair was gone by then. Her eyebrows too. She looked fragile, ethereal. Half erased. A baby bird, an alien. A ghost. My throat ached at the sight of her.
I love you so much
, I whispered. She wasn’t aware of me. She didn’t even wake.

There were good times after that, moments of almost hysterical elation, the brightness of forgetting. Then something would catch in me and I would remember what the future held. Like the statue of the winged woman in the Tiergarten, and those clouds gathering behind her, loaded, black …

I was with her when she died. It was the evening of May 12. My father was in the kitchen with my mother’s sister Lottie, who had flown over from England. He had opened a bottle of wine and laid out olives, artichokes, prosciutto, and fresh bread. To keep our strength up, as he said. I couldn’t eat. Instead, I sat by the bed, my mother’s hand in mine, the sky above the Vatican warm yellow streaked with red, like the flesh of a peach. The usual sounds rose up from the street — plates being stacked, a church bell tolling, a motorbike. I wasn’t conscious of my body, only my hand holding hers. I was walking along a beach. On one side tall grasses
fenced me in. Bleached to a pale, sugarcane yellow, they tapped and clicked in the offshore breeze. Off to the right was a brooding ocean, the waves explosive, the dark blue farther out flecked savagely with white. The sand beneath my feet was cool and slightly gritty. I don’t know where I thought I was. Puerto Rico, perhaps. Or Nicaragua. No place I had ever been. My mother was drawing breath, with long gaps in between, each intake arduous and harsh. As I walked on that imaginary beach I remained aware of her breathing, regular, relentless — hypnotic. But then the sounds ended and I realized that the last breath I had heard had been her last, though I hadn’t known it at the time, having expected to hear another, and then another, having become accustomed to the rhythm, not having been able to accept, or even contemplate, the possibility of silence. It had been like being on a train and watching the telegraph poles flick by, the wires rising and falling, linking one pole to the next. You watch the poles, you’re always waiting for the next one, and then suddenly they’re gone. There’s nothing in the foreground, nothing to focus on. The view that was always there is all there is. Gaping. Empty. I stared at the veins on the back of her hand and thought about the blood slowing down. Once it stopped, it would never move again. She would never talk to me, or stroke my hair, or drive me to unexpected places. I buried my head in the duvet, and my body was returned to me, shaking uncontrollably, and cold.

/

“The way I see it,” Cheadle says, “you could use some support. Some backing.”

We are sitting at a corner table. It’s Saturday, a fortnight since I landed in Berlin. The restaurant walls are yellow and the air smells of lemongrass and coconut. The light is operating-theater bright.

“Here’s the thing.” The American hunches over, his head wedged between his shoulders, no neck apparent. “How about I adopt you?”

I’ve heard a few propositions in my time but never anything like this. A devious smile creeps onto his face, not because he’s joking but because he knows he has wrongfooted me.

“Adoption of adults,” he says airily, “it happens all the time. In Japan, for instance. To give the person in question better prospects.”

“Better prospects?” I consider his plastic raincoat, his dented face. His wild, wispy hair.

“We’d have to do it legally. Everything kosher. There’ll be forms to fill in. Depositions. Affidavits. Whatever the fuck the word is.”

I look past him, into the restaurant. The other customers are mostly people in their twenties. People leading normal lives. Apartments, jobs. Relationships.

“You only met me twice,” I say.

Cheadle finishes his whiskey, then reaches for his beer. “Sometimes you’ve got to go with your instincts.”

I could hardly disagree with that.

“Who’s the guy you were with the other night?” Cheadle asks.

“That was Klaus.”

“You sleeping with him?”

“Not really.”

“ ‘Not really.’ ” Cheadle chuckles.

“He’s been very generous,” I say.

“I bet he has.” Cheadle signals for another whiskey. “So anyway, you want to become my daughter?”

“I’m not sure my father would approve.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“Isn’t that bigamy or something?”

Cheadle laughs so loudly that people at the nearby tables turn and stare at us.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I’d take better care of you than he does.” A prawn cracker explodes between Cheadle’s teeth. “I’d probably leave you more money too. You’d be better off all round.”

“What’s in it for you?”

He stops chewing and I realize I’ve impressed him. Perhaps that’s what he likes about me: the quickness, the unpredictability — the cheek.

“Nothing,” he says. “I’m a philanthropist.”

“In the great American tradition.”

“Right.”

“No small print? No hidden clauses?” I’m thinking of Klaus’s promise of privacy. “No strings attached?”

Cheadle opens his raincoat, like a man about to try and sell me watches. “No strings.”

“Where are these Russians, anyway?”

“They said they’d be here at ten.”

I glance at my watch. It’s twenty past.

“So you’ll think about it?” Cheadle says.

When you’re young, a lot of older people have a grasping quality, like vampires. They’re all over you, even if it’s only with
their eyes. They used to
be
like you, though you usually can’t see it. That’s why they need you around. They want to siphon off a bit of what they’ve lost. Because you’ve got plenty and you don’t even know it — or if you do, you take it for granted. I don’t think Cheadle’s any different, though he’s more adept at disguising it.

A metallic-sounding guitar starts up, bright chords with surf crashing and hissing underneath. Cheadle takes out his phone.

“I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz,” he says.

He puts the phone to his ear and stares past me at the wall. He says yes and no, and very little else.

When the call’s over, he tells me that his Russian friends aren’t coming after all. “Still, Pavlo should be here soon.”

“Who’s Pavlo?”

“He runs a gallery on Winterfeldplatz. He sells icons. Beautiful things.” Cheadle pauses. “Pavlo’s from Sebastopol.”

“That’s not Russia.”

Cheadle shrugs. “Close enough.”

Actually, I think, you’re wrong. It isn’t.

/

Pavlo is a small muscular man with a closely trimmed gray beard and mustache. His clothes are sober — a black jacket over a black V-necked sweater — but he has a pumped-up, skittish quality, like a thoroughbred before a race. The moment he sits down he tells Cheadle he’s in love.

“Who’s the lucky girl?” Cheadle asks.

Pavlo ignores the sarcasm. She’s twenty-three, he says. From Lithuania. Her name is Katya. She works in the Laundromat next
to his gallery. For the next hour he talks about nothing else, his eyes welling up when he describes her.

It’s not until we order coffee that the conversation turns to icons. Most of the pieces he acquires have a Russian provenance, Pavlo tells me — or sometimes they come from Greece. They tend to date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s always been profitable, he says, but he would never have been able to open a gallery if Cheadle hadn’t come in as a partner.

“So he really is a rich American,” I say.

“Rich?” Pavlo’s mouth turns down. “I don’t know. All I know is, he invested in my business.”

Cheadle reaches into his inside raincoat pocket, takes out a piece of paper, and passes it to me. It’s a bank statement. The account is in the name of J. H. Cheadle, and the balance is in excess of one million euros.

“Believe me now?” he says.

I’m not sure what to believe, but Cheadle seems to feel that he has proved a point.

Later, when Pavlo has left, Cheadle walks me to the nearest U-Bahn station. We pass a shop that sells electrical equipment. There must be forty or fifty TVs in the window, all tuned to CNN. I come to a standstill, shock waves spreading outwards from my heart. It’s a moment before Cheadle notices I have stopped.

“You want a TV? I’ll buy you a TV.” He steps back and stares at the sign above the shop. “I’ll buy the whole damn place.” He drank beer and whiskey with dinner, and his eyes have a fanatical glitter.

I point at the window. “That’s my father.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I am. It’s him.”

We stand in the gauzy Berlin drizzle and watch my father talk into a microphone with the earnest controlled enthusiasm so typical of TV journalists, his royal-blue shirt thrown into beautiful relief by the sun-blasted landscape behind him. With his free hand he gestures to lend emphasis to the point he’s making. Once or twice he half-turns to incorporate a heap of rubble, a burnt-out car. Reading his lips, I decipher the words
chemical weapons
.

“You don’t look anything like him.” Cheadle sounds disgruntled.

Ordinary everyday reality isn’t good enough for my father. He has to appear to me in HD. I turn from the window and walk over to the gutter. Trees line the curb. Are they maples? Limes? I ought to know.

“He doesn’t even know you’re here,” Cheadle says.

A dark van races past, its tinted windows closed. From inside comes the thud of hip-hop, as if the van is an animal. As if it has a heart.

Cheadle swivels on the pavement, jaw tilted, truculent. “I’d be a better father.”

Now the TVs are showing golf.

My collar up, my hands in my coat pockets, I peer down the road. Two sets of traffic lights glow red.

“Where’s this U-Bahn station?” I say.

/

Waiting on a damp platform, I replay the scene outside the TV shop. Not one image of my father. Dozens. So perfect, that. The duplication questions — or even mocks — the idea of an intimate relationship, and then there’s the fact that I watched him from
outside, on the street, that we were separated by at least two sheets of glass.

I didn’t notice if his report was live or not but I feel he must be on his way to Rome by now. Those shock waves round my heart again. I suppose I have been waiting for this moment the way a bullet waits in its chamber, cold and snug, for someone’s finger to squeeze the trigger. That sudden burst of speed, a lightning transition from cool oiled darkness to a world that is brilliant and odorless. It won’t be long before he notices my absence — if he hasn’t already. After all, it’s his job to sense when something’s not quite right. Who will he call first? Adefemi?

“I haven’t seen her, Mr. Carlyle, not for months.”

“Really?”

“We broke up.”

“Oh.” My father pauses. “I’m sorry to hear that.” And he
is
sorry. He likes Adefemi.

“We broke up in May.” Now it’s Adefemi’s turn to pause. “She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

An awkward conversation, which only lasts a minute or two.

A cul-de-sac.

My father will contact my friends and it will rapidly become apparent that none of them knows where I am. They will be disconcerted, bewildered; they might even feel betrayed. Massimo is the only one who might be able to help. Intuitive and oddly transparent, he’s always spilling people’s secrets, things he doesn’t even know he knows. My father might pick up on this tendency in him. If Massimo is still in Rome my father will
arrange a meeting — probably at his favorite café, in Campo di Fiore.

Late September. The sunlight a tarnished gold that turns the shadows purple. Cut flowers in buckets. My father sits outside with a black coffee and a paper. He thinks Massimo is lazy and spoiled.
What do you see in him?
he always says.
I don’t know what you see in him
.

Massimo is half an hour late.

“Mr. Carlyle.” He drops into a chair next to my father and runs a hand through his unruly dark-brown hair. “It’s good to see you.”

My father, who has been growing impatient, is surprised to find himself disarmed by Massimo’s smile.

Massimo orders a cappuccino. Someone is playing scales on a piano, the notes spilling from an upstairs window.

“Have you seen Kit?” my father says.

“Not for a while,” Massimo says. “She hasn’t returned any of my calls. I thought she might be in England.”

“She doesn’t seem to have been in our apartment — at least, not recently — and she’s not in Oxford either.” My father hesitates. “You don’t know anything?”

Massimo toys with a sachet of sugar. He wants to do right by my father — he probably wants to impress him — but he doesn’t respond well to questioning or pressure. He might be wondering if I’ve gone off with someone. He knows I’m capable of that. Little jagged shafts of jealousy might be going through him.
It’s you I want
.

“When did you last see her?” my father asks.

Massimo starts talking about the night we went to the club in Testaccio.

My father interrupts. “What date was this?”

“What date?” Massimo frowns. “It was a Wednesday. About three weeks ago.”

“What happened?”

“The usual things. We talked — and danced. There were a few of us. Then she came back to my place. I don’t remember too much after that. I was a bit wasted.”

“What about Kit? Was she ‘wasted’ too?” My father’s tone is acidic but Massimo doesn’t notice.

“No,” he says, “not really.”

“How do you know?”

“She rode home.” Massimo thinks back, then remembers. “I offered her some coke. She didn’t want it.”

My father gives him a look.

Massimo gazes off into the distance. Once again it’s possible that he doesn’t register my father’s disapproval — or if he does, he might murmur,
Yes, I know. I really should stop
.

He has no intention of stopping, of course.