The Other Me (10 page)

In my room, it doesn’t take long to throw things into a suitcase. I stare around me at the forlorn space, taking in my single bed, the
Strictly Ballroom
poster on the wall, torn at one corner. My old, faded dance timetable pinned up over the desk. I’m hardly ever here. When I booked my plane ticket, I needed Meg and her Liverpudlian humour, her sensible perspective and her crazy ideas. I needed Paris. The taste of a goat’s cheese salad. Sitting up late at night over a bottle of red wine. I don’t want to go anymore. I don’t want to leave Cosmo. But I’ve spent the money, and I can’t let Meg down.

‘Hurry up,’ his voice calls from the hall.

I’d thought we were catching the bus. But, as I bump my case over the steps onto the path, Cosmo is waiting at the kerb: he’s towering over a blue Mini with a proud hand resting on the roof, smiling like an advert. He opens the boot. ‘Mike’s lent me his car.’

A window rattles above. Lucy leans out. ‘Give Meg my love,’ she shouts down.

I nod, waving back. The day is darkening already, the sun a faint, pale disc slipping between clouds.

She pulls her head in and the sash closes with a shudder. Blank glass reflects the thick weight of sky. Cosmo takes my suitcase from me. Our cold knuckles clash. He slams the boot. I settle in the passenger seat. I’ve never seen him drive. I like the way he pulls out into the road, checking the mirror, touching my knee for a moment before he changes gear. He’s a natural. His long legs somehow manage to fold under the steering wheel; he holds it lightly, lets it slip through his fingers as he makes a turn to the left.

In the busy station concourse, the trapped dome of air is filled with the bustle of travellers, the tension of waiting, the rush of wings. There’s a sense of time opening and closing around us. People come and go. Lives switch left or right, like train tracks at points. Possibility seems to hover over our heads, unpredictable as the pigeons. Nerves knot in my stomach. I don’t want to go. I curl my fingers through his. I feel like a child on the first day of school.

My train is standing at the platform. We look at it from a safe distance, behind the barrier. A cleaner gets off, bumping a bucket at his side. Passengers get on, settling themselves, putting coats on the rack, opening books and newspapers.

The flap display on the departure board clicks and turns with a fluttering noise, dropping new destinations and train times. The station clock moves its hands. Seconds pass.

‘There’s your train,’ he says. ‘You mustn’t miss it.’ He’s putting on an accent: 1940s cut-glass Trevor Howard.

I bite my lip. I can’t remember my lines.

He holds my arms, staring into my face. ‘Shall I see you again? Please. Please. Next Thursday. I ask you most humbly.’

I can’t stop myself from laughing, and my voice wobbles and falls away from the accent I’m attempting. I don’t stick to the script. ‘Not next Thursday,’ I correct him. ‘After Christmas. Next term. I’ll be there. At your place. Just like we said.’

‘Have a wonderful time in Paris.’ He brushes his knuckles across my jaw, under my chin. It makes me shiver.

And then he’s kissing me and I’m kissing him back. The sound of the station recedes. Our lips and tongues are all that exist; the warmth of his skin pressed against mine, his hands moving around my cheeks to hold me steady.

‘I love you with all my heart and soul,’ he says softly.

‘You forgot the accent.’ My throat constricts.

‘No,’ he shakes his head. ‘I’m not Trevor anymore. That’s me. I love you, Eliza.’

I swallow. Heat scalds my cheeks. Things shouldn’t start with a lie. This has gone too far already. The next time I see him will be a new year. A new start. I’ll tell him then.

‘I love you too,’ I say.

KLAUDIA

1987, London

Shane comes out of a tunnel with three of his mates. It’s not five o’clock yet, but it’s winter dark. A train rattles across the bridge overhead. The steely screech of wheels on tracks is hard and unrelenting and urgent. I shiver, knowing not to run.

Shane steps forward, a beam of streetlight catching the gleam of his teeth. I recognise the three shuffling in the shadows behind him, all of them weak and mean, all of them bullies. They glance about furtively, and I sense their pent-up excitement. I back away, keeping my eyes on them. It’s one thing to be trapped in a school playground, and another to be caught alone in an empty street.

‘Remember those names I taught you?’ Shane is by my side, pinching my arm tightly. ‘Hope you learnt them like I told you.’

He pulls a canister out of his pocket and presses it into my hand.

There’s a smell in the tunnel that hits the back of my throat. Damp, soot, urine and old chicken bones rotting in paper take-away cartons. Something scrabbles in the shadows.

‘Just a rat, princess,’ he smiles as I flinch. ‘Now. Get writing.’

My mind has gone blank. ‘Start with an easy one,’ he says pleasantly. ‘Try “Hitler”.’

I direct the can at the dank wall, my finger on the aerosol nozzle. I’m shaking. ‘I don’t want to,’ I whisper. My arm falls away, my finger still jammed down, so that a spray of red showers the bricks like a blood splatter, smattering Shane’s shoes.

‘Bitch.’ He’s feeling inside my blazer, and he grabs my breast, squeezes hard, crushing me. ‘Your life won’t be worth living if you don’t do as you’re told.’

I gasp. My body recoils, and I struggle away, raising the can, moving my wrist, spelling out the letters. The paint hisses into the air, and the sour stink of chemicals fills my nostrils.

Three of them stand at the entrance; Shane is right behind me, his breath coming hard and fast. ‘Now write,
Hitler’s coming to get you scum
,’ he directs. My body feels numb, emptied out, wooden as a puppet’s. I do what he asks.

Another train rattles over our heads. A car passes in the street behind, its headlights moving across us, the wash of its glare flattening Shane’s features. The light skims the green slime of the tunnel with silver, and then slides away. I am alone. Nothing can help me. Puppet Girl. My strings twitch and my hand moves, spewing big shaky words onto brickwork.

‘Your dad would be proud.’ Shane takes the canister from my bloodless fingers and pulls me close, pressing his mouth over mine. I try to push him away, balling my fists against his chest. I smell the pus in his skin, taste beer on his tongue. His hand fumbles under my school skirt, fingers burning the thin skin of my thighs as he grabs between my legs and jabs hard.

‘That’s the end of the first lesson,’ he says. ‘Next one’s coming soon.’

I collapse onto cold concrete, shaking, alone, hearing footsteps and shouts of laughter echoing back to me. The arch of bricks presses down. My skin feels scalded where he touched me. I wipe at my face with both hands, pulling it, tearing at my skin with my nails, as if I could erase my features, take away the person I am.

I can’t be seen with books about Nazis under my arm at school. So I take a bus to the nearest public library. I sidle past the desk, being careful not to make eye contact with the librarian busy stamping books with brisk authority. In the history section, I’m relieved to find that I’m alone. I browse up and down book stacks, running jittery fingers over titles. I don’t even want to be seen to be taking an interest in the Holocaust, as if interest itself could tarnish me. I pull out three books and huddle over them in a quiet corner.

The first that I open is like the one I found in my desk. I force myself to read about ghettos and death marches. I flick past photographs of hollow-eyed inmates; benign-looking men sitting at desks in SS uniforms; brutal fences and stark buildings. The horror gives me a pain in my stomach. I feel exhausted by it: the unrelenting pile-up of statistics, cruelty upon cruelty. I close the book, my mouth dry, and glance around me. A mother is reading to her child at the next table. They sit with their heads close, and she runs a finger over the page as she talks, so quietly that I can’t make out the words. The child is slumped against her shoulder sleepily, thumb in his mouth.

I pick up a book called
Stalingrad
, and flick through to the index, running my finger down the ‘M’s. Nothing. I feel relieved and a little silly. I try another, scanning the close-packed index without discovering a familiar name. I’m not going to find my father in history books. The librarian walks past balancing a pile of hardbacks in her arms. She stops and glances down.

‘School work?’

I nod, not looking up.

‘If you’re researching World War Two, this one is very good.’ She stoops and picks a book off the shelf and puts it on the table.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper.

She’s gone on her soft-soled shoes.

I slide the
Diary of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front
towards me. It is heavy, thick with paper crammed with close text, broken up by black and white photographs. I look at the pictures first, turning pages slowly. There are old-fashioned-looking armoured trucks; another shows a group of grinning soldiers holding rifles, cigarettes in their mouths. They don’t look much older than me. The pages turn between my fingers. I find a photograph of a team of bedraggled horses straining through the mud up to their knees, pulling a big artillery gun. Even inside the blurry outlines, I can see the animals’ eyes are widened with terror. Another photo is of a destroyed Russian tank with sacks of flour strewn around it. I read a bit of the caption: ‘note the enemy dead in the immediate vicinity of the armoured vehicle’. Not sacks of flour. I lick my finger, spinning forwards quickly to the index. I find the ‘M’s and glance at the list. And there it is. ‘Meyer, Gefreiter, page 150.’

I shut the book. It must be a coincidence. It can’t be him. Meyer is a common name. But I have to look. My heart bumps against my ribs as I turn the pages. There’s a picture of three German soldiers pointing guns at unarmed people in ordinary clothes. One of them, I see with a shock, is a woman. She’s thin, young. Her blank expression is pinned before the barrel of a gun. I understand that I’m seeing her in the instant before she dies. Something else about the image jags, catches in my mind. The soldier nearest the camera is in profile. And despite the grainy black and white, I know that nose; that jut of chin. My hands begin to shake. My heart is crawling through my throat. I scan down, blinking, searching the caption. ‘Execution of Jewish partisans. Gefreiter Ohler, Gefreiter Krenz, Gefreiter Meyer. 1943, Russia.’

My father stands before me, legs planted firmly in the barren white that must be snow. He stares over his gun into the face of the woman. His lips are set, jaw clenched in an expression he wears a lot: that cold anger of his I’m so familiar with. Gefreiter Meyer.

The mother’s reading voice carries on behind me, a soft blur. I hear her child asking something and her answering hush, hush; the quiet click of shoes moving across the floor; rub and flicker of pages turning in the mild, bookish air. But in my head there is the crack of a gun; the crumple and thud of a woman falling into white, a single sigh as breath leaves her body.

I shove the book across the table and put my head between my knees. The floor lurches. My insides twist. Is this what he got his medals for? I can’t get the photograph out of my head. I think the girl will always be there now. Fixed inside my skull.

1993

September

Mum keeps patting powder onto her cheeks, but more shiny tracks appear as she dabs at her eyes with a screwed-up hankie. I squeeze her hand. ‘It’s only three years, Mum. It’ll go so fast.’

She shakes her head. ‘It’s your time to get out into the world. You won’t be coming home. It’s all right, love. I understand. But remember your bedroom will always be here for you.’ She pats my arm. ‘I’ll be here. In case you need me.’

I swallow. Saliva catching in my throat. She won’t let me speak. She puts a finger on my lips. ‘Run upstairs and say goodbye to your dad.’

I go slowly through the sitting room, trailing up the stairs, looking around me as if this really is the last time I’ll see it: the framed words from Scripture; surfaces cluttered with wooden statues; the umbrella stand and the clock in the hall.

Their bedroom door is ajar. I see him through the slender opening. He’s standing in front of the mirror doing up his tie. He finishes, adjusting the knot. He looks at himself, blue eyes and expressionless mouth. I take a breath, preparing to enter, not knowing if he will hug me this time, or just shake my hand as he usually does. But before I can take a step, or push at the door, he raises his right arm. He lifts it in a line, saluting his reflection with slow gravity, his arm rigid, standing straight and tall. Like the soldiers in films; the boys at school.

I put my hand over my mouth, beginning to back away, soundless over the carpet, but his voice reaches me.

‘Come in, Klaudia.’

I edge into the room, my cheeks burning. We both know what I saw.

He doesn’t blink. ‘Well, you’re off. Remember where you come from; don’t let university life go to your head.’ His face is a mask. ‘Work hard. Find the nearest chapel. Jesus will help you to stay on the right path.’

I’m feeling sick. I can’t look at him. I don’t understand. He’s in God’s army now. The executioner in the snow, gun raised to his shoulder, that’s in the past. My thoughts tremble around the image of him in the mirror, his action revealing something I can’t let myself grasp. It slides away, nothing but a reflection, a shadow moving over glass.

My feet are on the stairs, stumbling away. Mum waits below to walk me to the coach stand, neat in her coat with her handbag slung over the crook of her elbow. She smiles. ‘All right, love? This is a big day. I’m so proud of you.’

The front door swings open, letting in daylight, the sound of traffic.

PART TWO

THE TRAP

ELIZA – KLAUDIA

1995, London

It takes me ages to negotiate the train and Tube, lugging my over-stuffed and battered suitcase. I slump onto a seat on the heated, crowded bus, the final leg of my journey, and gaze out of the window at familiar grey London streets. There are baubles hanging in shop windows, and decorations glow from lampposts: angels blowing trumpets and fat men on sledges picked out in lights. Pavements are thick with people wrapped up against the cold, their arms full of presents.