Flashback

Chapter Forty

Some days later

When Saskia and the clerk reached the basement, he passed her paperwork to a colleague. ‘Please remember, Frau Müller,’ he continued, ‘that the box requires two keys to unlock it. I have the master key and you have the box key. Yours has no duplicate.’ He pushed through a set of doors. ‘If you lose it, you will be charged for the services of a locksmith to replace the lock. Your rental agreement covers an initial ten-year period. Should you fail to pay rent after this period, the contents of the box will be given to the government. There can be no exceptions.’

The clerk waited for a uniformed guard to open the door of the outer vault. The clerk was clearly nervous. Perhaps something about Saskia disturbed him.

‘Frau Müller,’ he said, adopting a more friendly tone, ‘would you like me to get you a glass of water? You seem rather…’

She shook her head.

The clerk stared at her for a moment longer.

‘Finally, then, please remember that you are not permitted to store illegal or dangerous material in the box.’

He left her in a room with a low ceiling and a single table. On the table was a safe deposit box. Saskia lay her rucksack alongside it and withdrew a polypropylene biohazard container. She put this in the box. Then she took a cinerary urn and placed it next to the container. On the urn was a letter: ‘For J’.

She eased the daffodil from her buttonhole and laid it on top.

This city, late in the day, felt foreign for the first time. Above her, the clouds were feathers around the setting sun. The buildings made labyrinths. Airborne data were threads that she might have gathered on another idle evening, but not this one. The wind’s edge dried her lips. Snow fell, as ever. Her steps were certain. A hatted green man appeared. Saskia crossed the road. Headlights greyed the tails of her jacket. On a fleeting thought, she looked at a driver, ready to run, but he was nobody.

She arrived at Tempelhoff airport half an hour later.

Saskia did not wish to remove her lensless glasses or touch the stiff peak of her cap, though she was sweating, steaming, tickled by her itch for Jem. The arrivals board told her that Jem’s flight had been delayed. With a targeted thought, Saskia interrogated a server in Luton and waited for the answers to stack, byte by stolen byte, in a lattice before her mind’s eye. There had been a technical problem on board the flight. Take-off and landing slots had been reordered and the crew changed. She turned from the information and used the constant pain of her hunger to refocus on her physical self, to exorcise the empty virtual.

For a few hours, she dreamed across plastic seats.

A man called Beckmann crouches in a cemetery while rain scores the ground. He pats together a female shape from the mud. He does not gift his sculpture with a left hand. When the lying form is complete, he bestrides its shoulders and Saskia thinks, No, don’t piss on her. Instead, he slides a revolver from his jacket and points it dead centre of the muddy head. Saskia knows that the revolver has one bullet. He fires. Saskia gasps.

‘There you are,’ said Jem. She looked exasperated. Her hair was blue once more. Saskia noted this and approved. ‘What happened? I thought you would be looking out for me.’

Saskia made to rise but her muscles, which were tighter and tighter these days, delivered a shocking pain up and down her body. She winced as though kicked.

‘Saskia?’

‘It hurts,’ she whispered, crying.

‘Lean on me. What the hell is happening to you? Your breath is awful. When did you eat?’

Later, in the lakeside house on Scharmützelsee, Saskia looked at Jem and felt too old for the company of her youth. They looked at one another in the molten light of oil lamps; the electricity in the house was off and Saskia wasn’t sure how to fix it. The meal was difficult. Salmon and bread were the only foods in the house. Saskia did not eat. Throughout the silence, she understood that the unspoken words concerned the loss of her beauty, the quiet staircase down which her mood had stepped, the putrefaction she could not clean from her pores, and her refusal to eat. Her eyes, too, were overcast.

At length, Jem said, ‘So Danny told me that they caught Wolfgang in the act.’

‘Wolfgang?’ said Saskia. The jump in context had confused her. ‘Yes, I heard. They found him organising an attack on an online casino. Petty blackmail, I suppose. Karel arrested him personally. It will help him get his career back on track.’

‘What about Cory?’

‘Cory? We met.’

‘Then?’

‘I showed him the reports.’ She took Jem’s hand and placed it, with a look of apology, between her legs. ‘Will you kiss me here? While there’s still time?’

‘What you need,’ said Jem, frowning, ‘is a doctor.’

Saskia put Jem’s hand back on the table. Her reply was bitter. ‘The medicines of 2003 are not good enough, nor the physicians.’

‘What do you mean?’ replied Jem. She tried to smile. ‘You’re indestructible, right? Like Captain Scarlet? Spectrum is Green, und so weiter.’

Saskia coughed. After a moment, during which she realised the odour of wet earth was just the blood in her nose, drying, she looked at Jem.

‘Do you know what would happen if I found myself onboard another plane, about to crash? I’d find a parachute and jump.’ Saskia took the bracelet from her pocket and placed it on the table. She repeated, ‘I’d find a parachute and jump.’

Jem stopped chewing. She looked at the bracelet as though it might explode.

‘Be careful with that.’

‘I thought you said I was indestructible.’

Jem threw down her fork. ‘Didn’t that woman, Jennifer, say that the mass measurements need to be precise? Otherwise it will go wrong? For all we know, the wormhole—or whatever it was—that brought down DFU323 might still be wobbling around somewhere around the centre of the Earth, hoovering shit up.’

‘There was a documentary on the television a week ago,’ Saskia said. ‘It included footage of a city in China—can’t remember the name—from the 1950s. The Maoist government had decided that birds were eating too much corn, so they devised a plan to kill all of them. For one twenty-four hour period, every person in the city was told to go outside and beat drums, blow whistles, and scream. The birds were startled into the air and too scared to land again. Eventually, they died of exhaustion and fell in great drifts. The documentary showed laughing people sweeping the birds into piles.’

Jem shook her head. ‘What’s that got to do with the wormhole? With us?’

‘Help me.’

‘Is this why you wanted me to come? So I could hang around in the waiting room this time?’

The drawing room had been given an amber cast by the storm lanterns in each corner. Saskia walked around the sheeted furniture to the far wall and pulled the cover from a pier glass. Jem joined her. The rational part of Saskia’s mind knew that this was not the apartment in which she had stood, in much the same posture, talking to Jem about her shortened hair those weeks before. This mirror ran from floor to ceiling and a set of bathroom scales lay at its foot. The sheets made simple shapes of a sofa, a card table, and an upright piano. Saskia looked at Jem and the younger woman’s expression told her that this was the end and both of them knew it.

‘Undress me,’ Saskia said.

Jem put her lamp on the table and began to unbutton Saskia’s shirt. She eased it over Saskia’s shoulders and laid it next to the lamp. Then she began to remove the rest of her clothes. T-shirt, bra, jeans, knickers. With each item, Jem’s fingers trembled.

‘No,’ said Saskia, as Jem touched the bracelet on her elbow. ‘Leave that.’

There were tears in Jem’s eyes and she looked betrayed. Saskia turned to face the mirror and considered herself through those younger eyes. The starvation had subtracted the curves of her body to leave something adolescent. Her breasts had been hollowed out. The sides of her rib cage were visible. Meat had vanished from her shoulders and thighs too. Her biceps were flat and tight. The twin bones of her forearms were highlighted by a running dent between them.

‘Why haven’t you been eating?’

‘I have,’ said Saskia. ‘Salmon, occasionally. With water and coffee.’

‘Stop what you’re doing,’ Jem said quietly. ‘Don’t go. I need to tell you something. It’s about Wolfgang.’

‘Shhh. Help me.’

Jem took Saskia by the elbow and kept her balance as Saskia stepped onto the scales.

‘Come with me, honey,’ Jennifer had said. ‘I can take you back. The band is calibrated to 48.98 kilograms. How much do you weigh, exactly?’

She looked down. 49.17 kilograms.

‘Take this,’ Saskia said, removing the jade ring from her finger.

Jem took it.

48.99 kilograms.

Jem’s expression questioned her. Saskia touched the bracelet in the sequence she recalled, perfectly, from her encounter with Jennifer. Something happened to the surface of the mirror. It was the merest movement, as though the mirror itself had shuddered. Then a low sound filled the room. A ship leaving port. Saskia moved to face the mirror. Her image became grainy.

‘Goodbye,’ said Jem. The word was slurred, childlike.

Saskia was already turning to a dream of the future that held a forest, a golden enfilade, a splendid soldier performing tricks on a horse, and a little muddy village far from anywhere. One thread wove through it all: that of the witch, Baba Yaga, who moved through eastern minds. Baga Yaga: the witch who travelled in a mortar with a pestle rudder that scored the forest floor. A silver birch to sweep her track, dismiss the fallen sparrows, erase all but a sense that something had been and gone.

‘Goodbye, Jem.’

She stepped through.

Afterwards, Jem backed away from the mirror. She was crying aloud now. Her breaths were moans and she stuttered as she inhaled. She looked at herself in the mirror and found the woman there pathetic. She walked up to the mirror and kicked it hard. She was still wearing her boots and the pointed toe flexed into the glass with a resistance she found satisfying. She kicked it again and again.

Jem walked to the veranda. The wind was northerly and unkind. She stopped at the rail and folded her arms and lowered her head. Here she cried again looking down at the muddy snow on the edge of the lake and then up at the lights of Bad Saarow.

At midnight, she found Saskia’s wardrobe and put on two of her jumpers. Both smelled of that particular perfume from the south of France. She went into the kitchen and put some coffee on. At least the gas still worked. As Jem sipped the coffee, she decided to walk to Bad Saarow. She swallowed the last of it and walked along the hallway to the front door and looked for her coat.

It was not there.

She held her breath. Her grief was suspended beside a greater fear: Was there someone else in the house? Had Saskia come back? Slowly, she held up her lamp. The hallway was empty.

When she turned back to the hat stand, she saw that her coat had been folded neatly on the wooden floor. There was a parcel underneath it. On top was a note that read:

There were no more tears. Jem was physically out of them. She folded the paper and placed it in her pocket. The parcel comprised a piece of folded cardboard. It had been sent to a post-office box in Bad Saarow. Jem ripped it open. Inside was a book called Resources and Parsing. Jem smiled. She removed its bookmark and said, ‘Hello, shorty.’

‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego.