The Other Me (31 page)

I don’t know where my father is. I clench and unclench my fists. What did he do? My hands feel clammy. I wipe them on my jeans, staring around the bedroom. Think. Think. I abandon the vacuum cleaner, still plugged in, leave the bundle of cloths and bottles on the floor; I don’t bother to push the bedside table back against the wall. The scratched words stare out at me, the last thing I see before I turn and leave the room and go quickly down the stairs and out into the wet afternoon. Hurrying away from the house, I run along the pavement, head bowed into the rain.

Mr Gupta looks up when he hears the bell.

‘Is your wife here?’

He looks behind him warily, then angles his head so that he can call out through the plastic curtain while still keeping his eyes on me as if I’m mad. Perhaps I am.

When Mrs Gupta pushes her way through the coloured ribbons, I want to seize her hand. She looks calm and wise, her eyes fixing me with a deep stare.

‘You said you saw Mum, the day she died,’ I begin, tripping over my words, unable to go slowly. ‘When she came into the shop, did she say anything? Did she look worried or upset?’

Mrs Gupta adjusts the swathe of fabric over her shoulder and moves her head. ‘You don’t know?’

‘What?’ My pulse hammers in my ears.

‘You don’t know what state she was in?’

‘State?’ I repeat. ‘What do you mean? State?’

‘Child,’ she folds her chin into her neck. ‘Your mother wasn’t well at all. She was… quite unlike herself. ’

‘I don’t understand.’ My mouth is dry. My tongue fumbles around my teeth.

‘It was terrible… she was crying and wailing. She had bare feet. No coat on. She rushed away before we could help her.’

The shop lists to one side. The floor at an angle. I think all the packets and tins will come crashing down. I put my hand over my mouth, clutching at the counter to stop myself from falling.

Mrs Gupta is guiding me into a chair and talking quickly in Hindi to her husband. They place a glass of water in my hand.

‘Your mother was not herself, Klaudia. And this is why she was run over. She was behaving in a strange way. As if she was very sick. Mentally unbalanced.’

I sip the water automatically. It is tepid. I taste London pipes. I shake my head, and struggle to my feet. ‘I have to go.’

Wet grass moves under my feet, soft and muddy; rotten apples roll beneath me; above my head, dead leaves shift and sigh. The shed door is shut. I push it open without knocking. My father looks up, startled. He’s sitting at his workbench, a piece of wood in his hands, sawdust speckling his knees and scattered over the floor. The raw, sweet smell of it. Behind him I see the glint of silver, the edges and handles of his saw and hammers. All his tools lined up in the dark.

‘What happened to Mum? What did you do?’

He puts the wood down. Places a lathe next to it, his eyebrows shooting up.

‘The day she died.’ I can hardly speak. ‘She ran into the Guptas’ crying. Without her shoes. And Mrs Perkins. She said she’d heard Mum screaming.’ I take a step closer. ‘What did you do to her?’

He’s staring at me and I feel a slippage of something, certainty crumbling away over an edge. I don’t know who he is. I don’t recognise him. He’s that man in the mirror, his reflection saluting out of cold glass, the
Sieg heil
etched in flickering light and dark. I snatch at oxygen as if I’m being strangled, struggling to stay upright. He will grab my neck with his big hands and squeeze. Fear runs through me, cold and clean, wiping everything away, emptying me of myself. It’s as if I can feel his fingers pressing the air from my windpipe.

He looks down into his lap. ‘I failed her,’ he says.

The hair on my neck prickles. I’m closed in, choking among shelves lined with bottles of white spirit and castor oil. Jeyes Fluid. Pesticide. Brooms and rakes hanging from hooks. I put my hand to my throat.

Another person had materialised through his skin, pressing a stranger’s face towards me. I didn’t know who that man was, or what he would be capable of. But as quickly as he’d flashed into my father’s features, he’d disappeared, and another stranger sits before me. Someone with crumpled shoulders and drooping mouth.

He balls his hands into fists. ‘She changed. She didn’t recognise me. I was scared.’ His voice wavers. ‘I didn’t want them to take her away. I didn’t want them to lock her up. I thought she’d get better if I could just keep her at home, keep her safe. But she got worse.’

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

‘She was confused. She screamed. Terrible things.’ He rubs his forehead. ‘It started after she was poorly,’ he says in a dull voice. ‘Nothing too serious. A bit of a temperature. She thought it was just a cold. But a few days later she began to act strangely. She had funny turns. She thought I was trying to hurt her.’

I want to put my hands over my ears. I can’t imagine Mum behaving like that. I can’t imagine what she must have been feeling.

‘I found her going out barefoot. Or with her dress half unbuttoned.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I kept the doors locked. But she was crafty. She got all the way to the Guptas before I realised. She was on the pavement, confused and scared. She had no boots on, and it was so cold.’ His eyes glaze over, as if he’s seeing her poor naked feet again. He twitches his mouth and looks up at me. ‘She seemed to relax. I thought she was coming out of it. I held out my hand. But… she ran across the road.’

‘But… why? What was wrong with her?’

‘When I explained her symptoms at the hospital… afterwards… they told me she probably had delirium.’

‘Delirium? I’ve never heard of it.’ I shake my head. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He begins to make strange, choking sounds. Harsh, dry sobs. I shift in the dim light, not wanting to watch him. I’ve never seen him cry before.

‘I thought I could cure her with my love.’

I catch something in his voice: behind the grief, he is like a petulant child. I can hear myself breathing. He lets his shoulders slump heavily.

His head lolls forward. ‘I didn’t want people to see her like that. She would have hated it too. I didn’t want you to know. What was the point? I didn’t want you to remember her that way.’ He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘She was different, you see. She wasn’t my Gwyn anymore. I thought if I waited it out, she’d come back. The way she was before. Perfect and pure. My angel.’

‘I think I knew… I knew something wasn’t right.’ My voice is thin.

The shed is dense with dust, chemicals and the sharp scent of wood. I back away, through the door. ‘You kept her prisoner,’ I say quietly. ‘You kept her here, when she needed help.’

I want to hurt him. He is responsible for her death.

There’s no point. It’s too late. He’s lost her. There is no greater punishment. On the way past the apple tree I pause and place my hand on it. I slump against its rough bark. I can’t forgive him. My conscience whispers inside my head – what about me? If I’d come home when term had finished, if I hadn’t gone to Paris, she might still be alive.

It’s early morning. As I leave the house, I feel a splatter of rain on my forehead. Another hits the pavement, making a dark splotch. I begin to jog in the direction of the playground. I need to run. I can’t face my father. I hardly slept last night. My chest has been buttoned tight since he told me. I looked up delirium. He was telling the truth. It’s a sudden dementia that older people can get, with symptoms of disorientation, delusions and paranoia. Sometimes it’s a sign of another, life-threatening illness. Then I read that it can be reversible, if sufferers get help quickly enough. The thought of her desperation and fear, the image of her scratching those words into the wallpaper – that useless, pathetic gesture – makes me sick with shame. Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of something evil in him. But I’ve always known it was there. The running; the dancing; my new identity: they were all just ways of trying to blot out the knowledge, sever the connection. Only how can I escape something that lives inside me? I am his daughter.

The roads are wet, sharp with grit, puddled with oily water. The rain feels liberating, cleansing, the way it hits my skin, coating it with a cold membrane. I have to make a sudden jump to avoid a trail of rubbish dragged across the road. A large bin lies on its side on the pavement, innards sprawling, ragged scraps of plastic, an old tin can, sodden cardboard boxes and half chewed bones. I jog on, growing warmer. When cars pass, there’s a swish of tyres and spray splatters my legs.

I run and run, wanting to tear off all the lies, rip away the fibs and half-truths. I feel grubby with them, polluted, unclean. My legs are shaking. Rain slicks my hair, dribbles into my eyes, soaking through my clothes. I’m glad of it. But I can’t push myself anymore. I’m exhausted.

As I approach our house, a black taxi pulls up. It stops, engine running, diesel fumes pumping from the exhaust. The cabbie climbs out, wincing in the rain as he holds the passenger door open; he reaches in and slides a suitcase onto the pavement and a man unfolds himself, looking up at our house. I blink through the downpour, not understanding why my father is arriving in a taxi, when I left him not more than an hour ago at home.

But it’s not Dad. Of course not. It’s a similar-looking man, eerily similar: tall and thin, with the same distinctive straight nose and big, sloping brow. The cab moves away from the kerb, the yellow light flickering on. I am closer now, staring, a nagging memory pulling at me. I lick my lips, my breath coming faster; I think I recognise him. Except, doubt trips me up, as I realise that this man is older than I’d first thought. And under his loose clothes, he is bone-thin. He leans heavily on a stick, knuckles pressing through thin skin. Perhaps I’m mistaken. But as he turns towards me and I see his pale, blind eye, the weave of scar tissue distorting his cheek, I know I’m right.

‘Ernst?’ I touch his sleeve. ‘Uncle Ernst.’

I thought he wouldn’t recognise me. I’d been a child after all, a little girl with long blond plaits. But the anxious speculation in his face disappears and he says, ‘Klaudia,’ as if my name is something rare and elegant, like a piece of antique glass.

He doesn’t seem to notice that we’re standing in the rain. I take his arm, leaning to pick up his suitcase with my other hand.

‘I didn’t know you were coming… Dad didn’t say,’ I say over my shoulder as I unlock the door, guiding him over the step and into the hall.

‘Your father doesn’t know,’ he admits. ‘I didn’t tell your parents, I’m afraid. It was an impulse.’

An impulse? I push wet hair out of my eyes. ‘Don’t you live in New York?’

He murmurs an agreement, but he’s looking around him, distracted and expectant. ‘Are your parents here?’

I feel a jolt of pain. In his mind, Mum is alive, could come down the stairs or through a door at any moment. I don’t want to tell him about her. Not now. He looks exhausted. One thing at a time, I think.

‘Come and sit down. I’ll fetch Dad.’

I settle him on the sofa. He notices Mum’s knitting, and his eyes go to the photographs – nobody could fail to see the banks of images, arranged in rows – and he leans towards them eagerly. While he’s staring, I persuade him to part with his damp jacket. He slips it off absentmindedly.

‘I’ll get you some hot tea,’ I tell him, the jacket folded over my arm. It’s good-quality fabric, I notice, soft and supple.

He pulls his attention back to me, and he’s smiling. ‘You sound like your mother. This reminds me of a time, many years ago, before you were born, when I came to visit and she fetched me tea. There was cake, I seem to remember…’

‘No cake this time.’ I would like to stand and listen to him reminisce, but water trickles under my collar. ‘Back in a minute.’

Upstairs, I shrug off my wet top and towel-dry my hair. Pulling on a shirt, I run down to the kitchen to make tea. I stand over the kettle, waiting for it to boil, glancing towards the living-room door. I find it hard to believe that Ernst is in there, sitting on the sofa as if he’s just popped in from across the street, instead of across the Atlantic Ocean. My father comes out of the shed, hurrying through the rain across the garden with a new wooden sculpture in his hand.

‘We have a visitor,’ I tell him in a hushed voice. ‘Your brother. Uncle Ernst.’

My father’s face is utterly blank, stripped of expression, as if he’s spun back through the years into a state of pre-baby nothingness. His mouth sags. Then he recovers and gives me a severe, accusing stare. ‘Why are you saying this?’

‘I know. It’s unexpected,’ I say soothingly, trying to make him understand that this is not a trick that I’m playing on him, something that I’ve conjured up. ‘But he is here,’ I insist, keeping my voice gentle, even though I don’t feel like being kind. ‘He’s in the living room.’

‘He can’t stay. I won’t have him in my house.’

The words are blunt and sudden as stones thrown through a window. The kettle is screaming beside me, steam billowing between us. I automatically switch it off and pour water into the teapot.

‘He’s very frail…’ I flounder. I know they didn’t get on. But my father’s lips are twisting in disgust or hate, or both. ‘We can’t ask him to leave. He’s come all the way from America.’

‘What does he want?’ My father sways back onto the heels of his feet, wraps his arms across his chest, as if he’s hiding something. ‘Does he know about Gwyn?’

I shake my head. He slams the sculpture down onto the kitchen counter, where it wavers like a drunk and topples onto its side, rolling onto the floor with a muted clatter. As I bend to pick it up – another bearded disciple – he strides past me into the living room.

I hurry behind, bearing a tray heavy with the pot and cups. An atmosphere gathers around the brothers, tight and menacing as a fist. Ernst had been standing, but I watch him crumple, stepping backwards, a hand flailing beside him as if he’s searching for a support that isn’t there. I put down the tray in a hurry, tea slopping out of the spout, and step forward to curl my fingers around his. He sinks onto the sofa. I sit next to him, his hand caught in mine.