Katherine Carlyle (27 page)

I choose a small room at the back of the house. The window, half hidden by a threadbare orange curtain, looks back up the slope towards other, grander properties, including the brown-and-white building, which used to be the miners’ canteen. Scattered about on the floor are a number of random objects — among them a bone-handled knife, a single mattress, and a crumpled Pepsi can. On the windowsill are five stubbed-out cigarette butts. Four have brown filters. The other one is white. I imagine a tryst where the man was nervous and smoked more than the woman. The gap between the white filter and the brown ones suggests the couple didn’t quite connect — it seems unlikely they made love on that soiled mattress — and the man left the house frustrated and alone. I draw the cigarette butts, then I draw the knife. This takes a good couple of hours, and I keep myself going with biscuits, chocolate, and bottled
water. When I have finished I climb back out of the open window, hoping no one sees me until I’m back on the gray wooden steps.

/

The day before Axelsen is due, I enter the building that houses the museum. On the second floor is a library. When I walk in, a young woman is sitting at a desk, sorting through slips of paper. Her dark hair is cut straight across, stopping just short of her eyebrows, and a close-fitting black sweater shows off her slender arms. Her movements are slow, as if she’s sedated.

“Can I help you?” The woman speaks English in a low, slurred voice I feel I could have predicted.

“I thought the doctor was the only person who spoke English,” I say.

“You know the doctor?”

“He eats breakfast in the hotel.”

She nods, then gathers up the paper slips and puts them in a drawer.

“You have a great voice,” I tell her. “Do you sing?”

“Only when I drink too much.”

I smile. “How did you know I was English?”

“Somebody tell me an English girl arrive. Everything is news here. Small town.”

“Do people read a lot?”

“Not so much. But we have one or two people, they like books. The winter is very long.”

Later, when I have walked round the library, which seems to specialize in technical literature — books on geology and
engineering predominate — I ask the woman about herself. Her name is Zhenya. She came to Ugolgrad with her husband on a two-year contract. Her husband works for the mining company. She sighs, then adds, Like everybody else. They left their six-year-old son in Donetsk with his grandparents. It was a difficult decision, and there’s hardly a moment when she doesn’t think of him, but it isn’t for much longer. They plan to return to Ukraine in the summer, and it will have been worth it. You make good money here, she says. More than back home, at least.

“And there’s nothing to spend it on,” I say.

“Phone calls,” she says, “and vodka.”

I’m smiling again.

“You’re curious about our town?” she asks. “You are — how to say it? — a voyeur?”

“Not at all. No. A voyeur is a person who is on the outside, looking in. I want to become part of the place. I want to live here.”

“You want to
live
here?”

“Yes.”

Zhenya’s deep-set eyes and the dry way in which she expresses herself give her a haughty condescending air, and yet she seems happy to talk. It’s possible she is grateful for the company. I imagine her days must pass in silence — unless one of the few people who reads books happens to appear. An idea occurs to me, and I decide to try it out on her.

“Perhaps I could work here,” I say, “in the library.”

“I don’t think so.” Zhenya looks past me, towards the curtained doorway, with that distant gaze of hers. “There is not enough even for me to do.”

“Not as a librarian. I could clean. With books, there’s always dust.”

She looks straight at me, and her eyes are focused suddenly, and clear. “Strange you say that.”

She tells me that Mrs. Kovalenka, the cleaner, has recently been taken ill. The poor woman had a stroke, and was airlifted to the mainland.

A scene from
The Passenger
comes back to me. Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider are having drinks on the terrace of a hotel that appears to be in the south of Spain — the décor is flamboyant, Moorish — and they’re both smoking, their glasses of rosé offset by the pale green of the tablecloth. He’s curious to know whether she believes in coincidence. She says,
I never asked myself
. Then she smiles, but only with her eyes, which are mischievous and smudged.
I never used to notice it
, he says in his slightly nasal drawl.
Now I see it all around
.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “But I could fill in for her, perhaps — until she returns.”

“She’s old,” Zhenya tells me. “I don’t think she will return.”

My heart speeding up, I wait to see what she says next.

“We don’t pay so much — not what you are used to.” She smiles faintly. “This is not England.”

“I only need enough to live,” I tell her.

“I will talk to the authorities.”

“Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.”

“No” — and she glances at the papers on her desk, her eyebrows raised. “I do not know.”

/

At three o’clock the following afternoon I pull on my parka, my fur hat, and my gloves and I leave the hotel. It’s light outside, but only just. A gray sky blankets the town, and flakes of snow stick to my clothing as I hurry down to the dock. The temperature is dropping every day. Though I haven’t seen a thermometer I can tell it’s below freezing, and October isn’t even over yet.

I descend the two hundred-odd steps, passing the viewing platform and the house whose interior I have begun to document. The ship from Longyearbyen has already docked, its black hull flush against the quay. I shield my eyes and peer through the rapidly darkening air. Axelsen is in the cabin on the bridge, his head and body framed in the side window, the light a murky aquarium green.

Once the tourists have disembarked — there’s only a small group, all wrapped in waterproofs — I say hello to Torgrim, then I climb on board and pass through the door that leads to the bridge. The smell is the same as before. Oil, metal. Brine.

When Axelsen sees me, he adjusts the peak of his baseball cap, then folds his arms and leans against the wall, partially obscuring a chart showing various species of whales. Next to him are three pairs of binoculars in upright brackets.

“No suitcase,” he says.

“No.”

“So I was wrong.”

I go to the window. The floodlights are on, and snowflakes whirl and jostle in the brittle sodium glare. Beyond, there is nothing but grayness, impenetrable, chaotic, all-enveloping. “I’m going to stay for a while. It suits me here.”

When he doesn’t say anything I face him again. I sense him repeating the words to himself, testing them for authenticity.

“I found a job,” I tell him.

That morning the humorless woman from the bar handed me a note from Zhenya asking if she could see me. After breakfast, when I called in at the library, she told me I had been hired as a cleaner. We went through the paperwork together. Later, she walked me round to the mining company’s main office, where there were more forms to fill in. While in the office, I learned that Mrs. Kovalenka’s family have contacted the company to say there are medical complications, and that she won’t be coming back. Zhenya has suggested I move into Mrs. Kovalenka’s apartment. It will cost much less than the hotel.

“You will work as a cleaner?” Axelsen’s voice lifts in disbelief.

“Yes. Why not?”

“You don’t look like a cleaner.”

“You think I don’t know how to clean?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’ll see. Next time you come —” I break off, thinking. “When
is
the next time?”

He picks up a manual and slowly flips through pages that are thin as onionskin. “I will be back in April.”

“Five months.”

He nods. “And even then the winter will not be over. The winters are very long up here.”

“So everybody keeps saying. But that’s why I came — for the winter.”

He seems to lose patience, letting his breath out fast and turning towards the window, then he checks himself and looks at me steadily, sideways-on. “There are things you can’t tell me.”

Startled, I’m reminded of Adefemi, and how he used to talk sometimes.
Somewhere there’s another version of us that got married, and
had children, and lived together for the rest of our lives
, he told me on the night we agreed to separate. He would say things that were so perceptive, so
right
, that I would gaze at him with eyes that felt wide and liquid, like a Manga girl, but he never seemed to appreciate the significance or value of his words, and he wouldn’t be able to remember them afterwards, nor would he have any idea of the effect they had on me. They were involuntary and obvious — to him, at least — and it was in his nature to allow them to pass through him. He was thriftless in that way. Axelsen, also, doesn’t seem to be entirely in control of what he’s saying. It’s as if he knows something he should not know. As if he momentarily became a medium. He even
looks
slightly dazed, like someone waking from a trance.

“I brought you something.” He opens a cupboard, takes out a flat package, and hands it to me. The wrapping paper has Santas on it.

I smile. “Christmas is early this year.”

“It was the only paper I could find.”

I tear off the wrapping. Inside is a red hot-water bottle, just like the one my mother used to put in my bed when I was little. I feel tears coming.

“Did I do something wrong?” Axelsen asks.

“No, no. It’s all right.” I sniff, then wipe my eyes. “I haven’t seen one of these for years.”

“Just something for the winter.”

“So you knew all along. You knew I wasn’t going to change my mind.”

“Sometimes, if you do one thing, you can make the other thing happen.”

I understand the principle. Like the opposite of tempting fate.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” I say. “But thank you, anyway. It’s a lovely thought.”

He looks away from me, adjusts his baseball cap.

“What’s your first name?” I ask.

“Olav.”

I step back, towards the door. “Enjoy the winter, Olav. I’ll see you in April.”

“And your name?” he says. “You won’t tell me your name?”

“I’ll tell you — on one condition.”

Folding his arms, Olav turns back into a figure of authority — decisive, unruffled.

“If somebody asks about me,” I say, “or shows you a photo of me, you must say you haven’t seen me.”

“What if it’s the police?”

Once again he catches me off guard but I don’t hesitate. “You haven’t seen me. It doesn’t matter who it is.” I pause. “You have to promise.”

“That’s a big condition.”

But he promises, and so I tell him.

“Misty?” he says in a voice that suggests he would never have guessed. “It sounds like a country-and-western singer.”

A boat on a lake, three men in tartan shirts. My mother up on her feet, singing
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose …

Lights glittering all along the shore.

Then later, in a motel outside Milan, a man shouting,
Maledetta putana
, in the car park at four a.m., and my mother murmuring,
Go back to sleep, darling
, and then, half to herself,
It’s just some drunk
.

“Do you like country-and-western?” I ask Olav.

“Actually, I do — and Röyksopp.”

“I’m sorry?”

He grins. “It’s Norwegian music.”

Later, back in my room, I wonder why I didn’t tell him who I was. I owed him the truth — surely. But perhaps I didn’t feel I could bank on the fact that such an honest straightforward man would lie successfully on my behalf. At least now, if someone asks him about Katherine Carlyle, he can say, with his hand on his heart, that he has never heard of me.

/

I gaze down at the dull pewter-colored key Zhenya gave me, unmarked except for an unevenly stamped number. A few weeks ago, Klaus asked me what I was doing in Berlin and I told him, rather pretentiously, that I was “experimenting with coincidence,” and now, as I stand in the corridor outside Mrs. Kovalenka’s apartment, the walls a hospital green, the air smelling of reheated food, I realize my idea has become a reality. I would prefer her departure to have been less traumatic — a lottery win; a golden handshake at the very least — but once again I have the impression that I only have to apply the slightest pressure to the fabric of the world and it will give. It’s as though I forged the key through sheer force of will; I wanted it so much that it came into being. Is it any wonder I feel powerful? I haven’t met the cleaning lady, and probably never will, yet I’m about to wrap the remnants of her life about me like a cloak. I could take her name, adopt a new persona. Complete my disappearance.
Misty Kovalenka
: less like a country-and-western singer than an ice-skater or a tennis star.

Facing the stairwell, Mrs. Kovalenka’s cheap wooden front door has been treated with a clear varnish and fitted with a Judas eye. I insert the key into the lock and feel it engage. The door clicks open. A gust of air moves through the gap like someone breathing out. A final sour exhalation. The door’s bottom edge catches on the floor as I enter, and I have to push it with both hands. Expecting similar resistance when I close it, I give it a good shove. It slams loudly, then stares at me with its Judas eye.
What?

Inside the apartment it’s colder than in the stairwell, so cold that I can’t smell anything. The hallway is L-shaped, with a glass light shade in the ceiling. Just inside the front door, on the left, is a windowless kitchen, its walls the scorched yellow-brown of nicotine-stained fingers. A half-full glass of tea in an ornate metal holder stands on a work surface. I open a cupboard. A jar of pickled mushrooms, a tin of sprats. A few packets of rice and crackers. At the end of the hallway or corridor, on top of a chest of drawers, is a kind of shrine, with china animals, church candles, and a tin jug filled with plastic flowers. Tacked to the wall above is a picture of Jesus, his soulful eyes gazing skywards, a red heart bleeding through his robes. There’s also a photo of Putin, cut from a magazine, and one of Marcello Mastroianni, as he appeared in
La Dolce Vita
. The bathroom, which is also on the left, has the white-tiled walls and floor of a slaughterhouse. The mirror above the sink is cracked, but the tube of toothpaste on the shelf below has been carefully rolled from the bottom and isn’t quite empty. A pink towel hangs on a rail. One moment I feel like a detective, clear-eyed, forensic, looking for evidence or clues. The next, I’m one of Mrs. Kovalenka’s relatives, feeling for her. Missing her. I asked
Zhenya about the cleaning lady but she didn’t give too much away. Quiet, she said. Lived alone.