Little Hands Clapping (10 page)

‘Not at all.’ He particularly liked the idea of the apartment. He disliked having to deal with landlords, and having to travel to and from work. ‘Perhaps you could give me your details, and at some point we could enter into an informal communication on the matter.’

She took a card from her wallet, and pressed it into his hand before taking her leave. She went into the shop, and her eyes lit up. A few minutes later she walked away with three bulging bags.

The girl behind the counter, who by this point had relearned how to work the till and had covered the cost of the flustered man’s mug from her own wages, picked up the telephone and called Lotte, who darted out from her office to look at the till roll.

‘This is wonderful,’ she said, her face even more ablaze with joy than usual. ‘Things are really starting to take off.’

Things did not take off. The spree had come too late, and the following day all the gallery staff were called into a meeting where they found themselves confronted by somebody they had never seen before, a stern-looking man in incredibly dark glasses. A deep scar, running diagonally across his right cheek, gave the impression that he had once fought a tiger, and won. When they were all seated he told them that a decision had been made. The exhibition had not done as well as had been hoped, and it was going to be dismantled and replaced by a four-times-life-size waxwork of Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff. ‘The largest of its kind,’ he said.

The airport’s senior management had known they would be unable to break bad news to Lotte, so they had hired this man, supposedly the toughest freelance firer in the business, to do the job for them. For his sake they had made him wear the glasses, which were completely opaque, so he would never know the face to which he was bringing such disappointment. He considered this insulting, but as they were paying him very well he had not protested. As he spoke his prepared lines he began, for the first time ever, to feel awful about what he was doing, and thankful that the young woman they had told him about was hidden from view. As he stared at the blackness in front of him he found himself wondering whether he was in the right job.

Lotte’s face continued to radiate joy as she searched for the good in this situation – good which she knew would be there somewhere. The girl from the shop reached into her sleeve and pulled out an extraordinarily large handkerchief, almost a tablecloth, and began to cry, and the old man’s latest junior looked quietly at the floor, despondent at her career having hit such a low so early on. Lotte realised that her dream had come to nothing.

‘I have let everybody down,’ she said. Her eyes twitched, and a tear ran down her cheek, and for the first time in her life she put her head in her hands. ‘All you good people,’ she choked into her palms, ‘I have let you down.’

The man had memorised his exit route, and without even giving them his scripted valediction –
The airport wishes you every success in the future
– he stood up and walked to the back of the room before anybody had a chance to see that Lotte’s tears had been infectious. As he passed her he caught a glimpse of her face through the gap in the side of his glasses, and this moment, just a fraction of a second, was enough to knock him off balance. He felt his legs buckle, and he miscounted his steps and walked into a stationery cupboard, where he remained. In the darkness he resolved to go straight home and call his brother, who had given him an open invitation to join his business making lavender bags deep in the countryside. At the time he had struggled to stop himself from turning crimson with fury and calling his brother all sorts of names, but now he could see it was the only option left to him, and he was grateful for it.

As the sobs continued, the old man reached into his wallet, and with the tips of two long, grey fingers picked out the woman’s card. He had a call to make.

To begin with, the press will have difficulty tracking down images of the old man, and it will be the photograph from his airport identification card that stares out from the front pages of newspapers. By this time Lotte, whose sunshine had quickly returned, will be two successful jobs down the line, and she will remember him with a shiver. ‘He was never very nice,’ she will say to her husband, who will not have heard her speak like this before. She will remember the time she had spent with him, and how she had always given him the benefit of the doubt, just as she had given so many people the benefit of the doubt. She will go to her computer and pull up the reference she had written, the one that had secured him the job. He was
punctual
, she reads.
Reliable
.
A highly valued member of the team. A pleasure to work alongside.
They read like the words of somebody who is not very bright, who sees the world only as it ought to be, and from that day something about her will change. There will be times when she will seem distracted, as if her mind is on something quite serious, and on occasion her brow will crease, as if she is trying to decipher a code. Sometimes she will look at a situation and not be able to find the good in it, and sometimes, just sometimes, she will even look at a person and not be able to find the good in them. She will be aware of this change, and feel grateful for it. She is going to be a mother, she tells herself. It’s time she grew up. Her husband will notice this shift, and he will be glad of it too: it had become quite exhausting being married to a ray of sunshine.

When Lotte calls the police they take her details, and at the end of their short conversation she tells them they are welcome to get back in touch with her if there is anything else they need to know.

They do not call. There is nothing else they need to know.

Doctor Fröhlicher had always known that he would practise medicine for as long as he was able. Whenever he attended a fellow doctor’s retirement party he couldn’t help picturing the massed ranks of the unwell upon whom they were turning their back, and he knew he could never do the same. He was determined to remain at the forefront of the profession, and most evenings he would settle down in an armchair with a medical journal to read about all the latest advances. If things had turned out differently this would have been the time he spent with his wife and family, and by filling it this way he was able to reassure himself that Ute had not died in vain, that in her passing she had helped him to reach new heights as a general practitioner. Whenever he prescribed a medicine that he might otherwise not have known about, or referred somebody to a specialist whom he had read was in the vanguard of their field, it was as if they were working as a team, and when the patient left his consulting room he would close his eyes, and say, ‘Thank you, Ute.’

He often imagined how she would have looked. In his mind’s eye she had a few lines on her face, and she wore reading glasses, but she was still slim and had kept her hair long, and she remained the most beautiful object he had ever seen. She would have calmed down by now too. There would have been none of her nonsense, not any more.

For all his dedication, the doctor’s medical ambitions were hampered by a recurring problem. His patients felt duty-bound to lift his spirits, and on entering his consulting room they greeted him cheerfully, and engaged him in lively chatter about very little. When the small talk ran out and the time came for them to present their symptoms, they began to feel uneasy. The pain in their thumb that may or may not have been the onset of arthritis seemed too trivial to mention when compared with the agony this man went through every day; the small patch of darkening skin that had kept them awake with worry became insignificant in the presence of such forbearance. They declared that whatever it was that had been troubling them had suddenly got better.
It is as if just being here in your consulting room has cured me,
they said.

He would ask them if they were sure, and they would insist that there was nothing wrong, that they had just been feeling a little under the weather but now they were fine. If he noticed that in spite of their protestations they looked ill, or anxious, he would insist on an examination, and he always found the root of the problem. This way he gained a reputation for being very thorough. Often, though, he took them at their word and let them go away, but never until they had assured him that they would make another appointment the moment they began to feel unwell again. Sometimes when the patient did finally return and admit their symptoms it would be too late, and all he could do was make sure that they were kept as comfortable as possible until the end.

Nobody ever railed on their deathbed that
It was the doctor – he should have seen the warning signs.
No grieving husband or wife ever came after him with a team of lawyers. Instead they sighed, and said he had done everything he could. When the television cameras arrive his patients will queue up to say just how dependable he had appeared to be, and how capable and kind, and how the news had come as such a shock.

He sat behind his desk and waited for his first patient of the afternoon, a Frau Irmgard Klopstock, one of the many middle-aged women on his books. As she sat down she started talking, red-faced, about how pleasant the weather had been, and how her garden had really come to life. Once this was over the doctor asked her why she had come to see him, and she told him how ashamed she felt for having troubled him, because the pain she had been feeling had gone away. ‘It is as if just being here in your consulting room has cured me,’ she said.

He had noticed something awkward about the way she walked in, and decided to press her. ‘Tell me anyway,’ he said, ‘before it went away, where was this pain?’

Frau Klopstock turned an even brighter red, and he gave her his gentle
You can tell me, I’m a doctor
look. In a trembling whisper, she told him. He smiled. She was relieved that he had pressed her, that she had finally told somebody other than her husband about this problem. She felt a weight lift from her shoulders, and was thankful for having such a wonderful family doctor.

He reached into his desk drawer for his camera. ‘Now,’ he said, reassuringly, ‘for medical purposes I am going to take a few photographs of the affected area. Frau Klopstock, please would you remove your . . .’ He gestured.

She did as he asked.

Doctor Fröhlicher smiled. With the new addition to his freezer the day had started well, and it kept getting better.

As he worked, the skeleton expert was grateful for the black curtain that surrounded him, because it stopped him from having to see the
Harsh Realities
room’s other exhibits every time he looked up from his work. To one side was a papier-mâché dummy of a woman in a bath, the water made from red Cellophane and her mouth hanging open as her eyes bulged and her sky blue head rolled backwards, and to the other side hung a series of photographs, blown up and mounted on canvas, of the shattered body of a Seoul stockbroker who, on seeing some unfortunate numbers appear on a screen, had hurled himself from a very high window. He was glad that this job would only last for one day.

The skeleton expert heard few footsteps. He was not surprised. He had no idea why anybody would want to visit a place like this.

As the museum closed for the day, Hulda returned to make sure the area around the new exhibit was left clean. She made two cups of coffee and took them to Room Seven. She pulled aside the black cotton, and as the coffee cooled she watched the skeleton expert attach the feet. She tried to let him do his job in peace, but it was impossible. Only by speaking, or singing, or humming, could she keep her most horrifying memories and her most petrifying visions of the future at bay. She could feel them creeping up on her, and urgently needing to fill the silence, she asked the skeleton expert all the questions he had come to expect from such encounters. As he gave his customary replies she found herself becoming fascinated, and in her subsequent questions she delved a little deeper, asking how the bones were prepared. He told her all about the ammonia, and the beetle larvae. After a few more technical questions, Hulda asked about the bones’ history.

He worked on as he told her what little he had learned from the skeleton’s executors. It had all been quite straightforward. Before he died, the skeleton had given a reason for his decision, one which people had been ready to accept: there had been a woman who had decided she didn’t want him after all, and he had believed he couldn’t live without her. The case could have come from a textbook, the only deviation being his request for his bones to be preserved.

Hulda noticed that, like all skeletons, it seemed happy. Inside all of us, she reflected, were smiling bones. She would do her best to remember from now on that even on the hardest days there was always a smile underneath her skin. She made a mental note to report this thought to Pavarotti’s wife, to let her know that the new exhibit had already brought inspiration to a troubled soul.

She still wished with all her heart that the skeleton had held on and waited for things to get better. She had held on. It had been hard, at times excruciating, but she was glad she had. Silence descended, and as steam rose from the coffee, she felt as if she and the skeleton expert were exchanging sad stories around a camp fire, and that it was now her turn to take the floor. She started telling him about her stepfather, and as her story went on he found he could no longer concentrate on his work. He put his tools aside, picked up his mug and listened in horror.

She didn’t tell him everything, not by a long way, but she gave him a flavour of what her life had been like for those years, how it had felt for her to be woken by the scratch of a moustache and a blast of breath that smelled of beer and pickled onions. She told the skeleton expert that at the end of one particularly awful night, when her stepfather had at last left her alone, she had cursed God for having allowed such things to happen to her. ‘You should have heard some of the names I called Him,’ she said, her face grave. ‘I shock myself just thinking about it, but at the time I was very angry, and I didn’t know who else to blame. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, well, I am afraid all three of them came in for quite a scolding.’