Little Hands Clapping (3 page)

‘Do you know that tune?’ she asked.

The old man had heard it before, as it played on other people’s radios. He said nothing.

‘It’s called “Live is Life”. It’s by an Austrian rock group called Opus, and is all about how much they enjoy playing concerts.’

He continued to say nothing.

‘It’s quite a silly song, but I like it because it reminds me of my childhood.’

He wondered how anybody could enjoy being reminded of their childhood.

‘Or at least my childhood up until the age of eight. I was born the year it became a hit, you see, and my elder sister, who was a teenager at the time, bought me a copy as a gift. When I was just two days old she stood outside one of their concerts and waited for them to sign it just for me. There were many fans there, and she could only get the autograph of their drummer, Günter Grasmuck. She told me as I lay in my crib that she thought he was the most handsome man she had ever seen, and that one day she was going to marry him. And do you know what?’

He clenched and unclenched his long, grey fingers as Hulda carried on.

‘Four years ago, in a quiet civil ceremony in the small Austrian city of Eisenstadt, my sister became the fifth, and we can only hope final, Frau Günter Grasmuck.’ The old man stood and started walking up the stairs, but Hulda carried on. ‘I’m only joking, Herr Schmidt. My sister didn’t really marry Günter Grasmuck. In truth she married a man called Günter Grünbaum, an under-floor heating specialist from Ulm. To clarify though, she
did
stand outside the concert to get Herr Grasmuck’s autograph for me when I was just a baby, and although she had wanted to marry him, it turned out to be the only time they met.’ The further the old man went up the stairs the louder her voice became. ‘Every year on my birthday we would play the song and sing along, even when it had fallen out of fashion. Every year until I turned eight, because that was when my mother met the man who was to become my stepfather and things began to go wrong for both of us, but for me in particular.’ He had gone from view, and she was now shouting at the top of her voice, her head tilted back and her hands cupped around her mouth. ‘My sister had left home by that point and was unaware of our difficulties, and didn’t feel the need to protect us.’

A door slammed upstairs, and Hulda smiled as she went through to Room Four,
Unfortunate Survivors.
She began by dusting the frame of a photograph of an American boy, half his face a mess of scar tissue. His parents had blamed heavy metal, but Hulda had a feeling there was more to the story than that. Whenever she looked at him she hoped his life had improved since the picture had been taken.

‘
Every minute of the future,
’ she sang, ‘
is a memory of the past.
’

At ten twenty-nine they stood in the hallway, by the bolted front door. Hulda smiled at her superior. She saw him as somebody who needed to be brought out of himself, and had long ago decided that she would be the one to do the bringing out. ‘We’re quite a team aren’t we, Herr Schmidt?’ she said.

He looked at his watch. At precisely ten thirty he unbolted the door, and with a bright smile and a
See you tomorrow
, Hulda went away. He hooked the door open, walked over to his desk and waited for people to arrive, hoping nobody would. But they did. His first visitors, a young man and a young woman, came in just before eleven o’clock. Lovers or siblings, he couldn’t tell. Maybe they were both. It was nothing to him. They wore matching waterproof jackets and carried identical backpacks. They didn’t look towards him as they passed, and they left after fifteen minutes, just long enough for them to have gone from room to room without stopping to look closely at anything. They put no money in the donation box, and before they were out of the door they were already huddling over a map, looking for the next attraction to visit. A few mumbled words about when and where they were planning to eat lunch told him they were from northern Italy, somewhere between Milan and Verona, most likely Travagliato or Gussago. He had heard this accent spoken before, and felt no satisfaction in hearing it again.

One thirty, the time allotted for the guided tour, passed with no takers, as it had done every day since the museum opened. The old man left his post to go to the lavatory. When he returned to his desk he found an unmarked envelope lying there. He sat down and eyed it for a moment before sliding it towards himself with a long, grey finger. Inside was a handwritten note. It was unsigned, and just a few sentences long. He thought its confessional hysteria ludicrous, but for a moment he almost smiled.
Pavarotti’s wife will love this
, he thought. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

At five o’clock he closed the front door. The day had ended with a total of twenty-six visitors, not one of whom had stayed for any length of time or made an enquiry. He emptied the donation box and found two euros thirty, which he entered in the logbook. Then in the
Visitor Numbers
column he wrote
78
. He had worked in museums for some years, and had always found it helpful to treble the real figures whenever possible.

Switching off lights as he went, he made his way back to his rooms, where he ate a chunk of bread and a slice of hardening cheese, ironed a brilliant white shirt for the morning and started rereading the
Þ
section of an Icelandic–German dictionary. It was all very familiar, and around
Þjónari, Þjónkan
and
Þjónn,
his eyelids began to fall. He got up and changed into his nightshirt and nightcap, then remembered the woman’s bag. He emptied its contents on to the kitchen table. There was a small mirror, some tampons, a paperback novel, an unopened packet of chewing gum, a ballpoint pen, a small tin of lip balm, some old train, bus and cinema tickets, and a wallet which he opened to find a credit card, and a driving licence that told him her name and that she had lived in Frankfurt. From the photograph he could see she had looked much the same in life as she had in death. A zipped compartment revealed the only item he was interested in keeping: a twenty-Euro note. Everything else went into the bin.

With no reason to stay awake any longer, he lay on his narrow bed and pulled the white sheet over his body. He looked into the darkness. The street was quiet, and no noises came from the rooms below. His eyes closed and his mouth opened. No spider crawled in.

The old man rose at six. In bare feet, and still in his nightshirt and nightcap, he began his weekly rounds, making sure there was nothing that would surprise the museum’s proprietor and her husband on their visit. Following the suggested route, he started in Room One,
Through The Ages
, where he checked the exhibits for damage. The sculpture of Antony and Cleopatra was fine, and so were the portraits of Heinrich von Kleist and Vincent van Gogh, and the holographic representation of the self-immolation of Thích Qu
ng Ðúc. He walked through to Room Two,
Reasons Why.
Once again nothing had been disturbed, and Hulda’s cleaning had been thorough.

It was not long before he reached Room Eleven,
Familiar Faces
, which was situated in the basement and marked the end of the suggested route. On the half-landing hung a large painting of a young Billy Joel, his face contorted in despair as he drank from a bottle of furniture polish. Pavarotti’s wife had read about the singer’s anguish and of his unusual choice of self-administered poison, and when she heard he was coming to the city to play a concert in the castle grounds she had immediately commissioned an artist’s impression of the scene and written a long letter inviting the subject to unveil it. To her mystification he had not responded, and the painting had ended up being hung without fanfare. The old man paid it the minimum of attention as he continued down the stairs and through the doors.

Room Eleven was the largest of the exhibition spaces. It began with two photographs of Marilyn Monroe: in the first she was subduing her billowing skirt in a promotional still for
The Seven Year Itch,
and in the second she was lying in the morgue, her beauty gone so completely that it was as if it had only ever been a mirage, or a trick. Then came a photograph of Kurt Cobain’s right leg, a charcoal drawing of Ernest Hemingway, a knitted doll of the Singing Nun, a scale model of the Hollywood sign complete with a four-inch Peg Entwistle plummeting from the top of the letter H, and a dolls’ house with the walls cut away to reveal Sylvia Plath with her head in a gas oven, her children asleep in the next room. Next there was an exceptionally lifelike waxwork of Yukio Mishima in his final moments, his face impassive as he held a sword in his hand, his guts spilling from a slit across his belly. This was the museum’s most photographed exhibit, with tourists taking turns to stand beside it with their thumbs aloft, as if this was Madame Tussaud’s and he was Indiana Jones or Enrique Iglesias. Beside Mishima was an embedded television screen. The old man pushed a button and a minute-long silent film began, showing a re-creation of Virginia Woolf’s fateful wade into the River Ouse, her pockets filled with stones. Without interest he watched it to the end, then moved on to the small but life-size dummies of Hervé Villechaize and David Rappaport, each in their own diorama – Villechaize slumped beside a patio door and Rappaport lying under a bush and being discovered, too late, by curious dogs. This side of the room finished with a cardboard cut-out of a leather-trousered Michael Hutchence, and as the old man passed it he was not surprised to see that on the singer’s hand, the one holding the microphone, somebody had written the words
WANKING ACCIDENT
. This happened from time to time, and the old man carried the cut-out to the store cupboard and piled it up with all the others that had been defaced by visitors who felt this exhibit had no place in the museum. He was irritated by the thought that at some point he would have to go to the trouble of throwing them away. There were only four clean spares left, and as he took one of them out of the cupboard he knew it would not be long before it too was to join the pile of rejects. He made a mental note to order yet another batch.

When the fresh cut-out was in place, the old man moved on to the other side of the room, where the theme lightened. First came Brigitte Bardot, then Gary Coleman, Owen Wilson, Elizabeth Taylor, Halle Berry, Sinéad O’Connor, Vanilla Ice, Tina Turner and Tuesday Weld. It was no accident that these were the last exhibits on the suggested route. They were all photographs taken after their failures, the subjects looking straight into the camera and smiling – smiles which, as Pavarotti’s wife had emphasised time and again, they would never have smiled had their plans not gone awry. She called them
smiles of inspiration
. To her the museum was a prevention initiative, a way of dissuading people whose thoughts might be heading in the wrong direction, of confronting them with the reality of taking such a step. These photographs, she frequently explained, were there to remind their visitors that there is always hope, that they must hold on through the bad times.

The old man felt his usual small surge of distaste at the sight of these faces, then returned to his apartment in the eaves, where he sat at the kitchen table, took a single cracker from a tin and put it in his mouth. He chewed for a while, staring straight ahead as his thin, grey tongue darted around his mouth, picking pieces from the gaps between his teeth.

‘Another pleasant morning,’ said Hulda at precisely nine o’clock, ‘although this could change later on. Who would be a meteorologist? Certainly not me. And not you either. No, you have chosen instead to go into the world of museums, and what an interesting world it is too.’ The one-woman cacophony continued as she walked inside and went to her cupboard. By the time she emerged, he was halfway up the stairs. ‘Are you looking forward to your weekly meeting?’ she called. He didn’t respond. She smiled to herself. As always on these days she would spend her ninety minutes checking that the entrance shone brightly, inside and out. She wanted to make sure she wasn’t in a far-flung room when Pavarotti arrived. Something about him made her feel light-headed, and she couldn’t stop herself from wishing that theirs was not a professional relationship, and that she could ask him if he had a brother, a brother who was like him in every way but who might be unlucky in love and still searching for the right girl. A sturdy girl, perhaps, who has been through difficult times but emerged a stronger person, always eager to see the sunny side of any situation.

She opened the front door, stepped outside and breathed a light mist on to the brass plate, which she rubbed with her cloth. When she stepped back to inspect her work, her smiling face was reflected in the metal. She looked at the blue sky. At times like this it almost seemed as if she wasn’t going to Hell. She knew she was though, and there was nothing she could do about it. In the meantime there was plenty to be getting on with, starting with mopping the tiles in the entrance hall.