Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

They ran. He looked down and saw how shabby his running shoes were, bits were peeling. No German would run in such shoes.

A family on bicycles was coming at them, two abreast. He dropped behind Alex. The plump mother said thank you, three children each said thank you, the father said another thank you.

Running behind her, he admired her backside. He also admired her action. No show to it, no big knee lift or arm action. She just ran, everything straight. When he went up to join her, they touched, just a brush of upper arms, a sibilant friction.

‘DeLillo,’ she said. ‘Do you like him?’

‘I read the earlier books, the Oswald book, that was the last one I read.’

‘You liked that?’

‘I don’t know. I must have, I finished it.’

‘You give up on books easily?’

‘Yes. It’s an American thing. Gratify me or be gone.’

‘You don’t want to live in America again?’

In the beginning, in the early days in the old house on the canal, he had sometimes thought about going back to America. But the idea disturbed him, made him weepy. Go back where? He had no home, the people he had loved were gone, father, mother gone, he was alone. Lucas was all he had, if he had Lucas, they could not even touch properly and Lucas lived in London, he was English now. Go home to the place he left to go to Beirut? To Kaskis’ tiny apartment on the hill? It would belong to Kaskis’ family since Beirut. And later he came to think that Hamburg suited the way he felt, his condition. He was of it and not of it. He belonged and he didn’t. The Germans had partial memory loss and so did he. They had chosen what pieces to forget, but then perhaps so had he.

‘America overwhelms me,’ he said. ‘There’s too much of too little. Why would you think I don’t have any curiosity about you?’

The yellow eyes looked at him, away. ‘I should not have said that. A silly thing to say. What else do you read?’

‘Mostly, I get drunk and go to sleep in front of the television with the cable news on.’

It was true. He sat with a book in his lap, a glass in his hand and on the television an endless loop of death, destruction, pain, fear, famine and misery. Often he came back and watched again when he woke far out on the wrong side of the night, wet with sweat from his dreams.

They ran.

‘I also listen to music while I’m getting drunk watching the news,’ he said. ‘A multi-media experience.’

They ran. Anselm’s knee was beginning to hurt, the pain that started as dull, like a memory of a pain, gradually turned to fire in the joint.

‘You’re not interested in the music I listen to?’ he said.

They ran. He thought that this would probably be the only run they would ever take together and he did not know how to prevent that from being so.

‘People like you probably listen to Wagner,’ she said. She did not turn her head.

‘Wagner?’

He had no idea what she meant, he had no view on Wagner, his father had hated Wagner, the Wagners as a whole. But he also disliked her tone, it send a current of annoyance through him and, for an instant, he wanted to bump her into the canal-it would be easy, hip and shoulder. Splash. There would be no coming back from that and it would be over. He would go home. Resume his life without shrinks. She could crawl home, wet, have her own post-traumatic stress.

‘People like me?’

She said nothing, didn’t look at him.

They ran and he kept looking at her. ‘What kind of person am I?’

She still didn’t look at him. ‘You’re an adrenalin addict,’ she said.

‘You like percussion. You’re a seeker after percussion.’

‘I was a hostage, that’s all you know about me. Where do you get all these other opinions from?’

‘Just intuition. Professional intuition. You say you were often scared but you never stopped looking for chances to be scared.’

Anselm heard bicycles coming up behind them. He fell back to let them pass, thin androgynous people in latex outfits, helmets, thin dark glasses. Alex slowed for him.

‘That’s not a terribly clever thing to say,’ he said. ‘That was my job. That was what I did. I didn’t go to these places on holiday.’

‘Did you take holidays?’

The sun went. His knee was getting worse, soon he would be showing it, favouring it, he would be pathetic. This was why you didn’t run with other people.

‘Time to turn,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to be at work in an hour.’

They turned. He tried to slow the pace but she wouldn’t be slowed. She wanted to push him, he felt that.

‘Holidays,’ she said. ‘Did you take holidays?’

He didn’t want to answer. He couldn’t remember. He remembered the artist who hit him, that was all. It was possible that he hadn’t taken other holidays. Then he remembered sailing with Kaskis in the Bahamas. That wasn’t really a holiday. Kaskis was doing something there, some story on money laundering and corruption. He rang, said come over and we’ll have a sail, I’ll hire a boat. They took the boat out the morning Anselm arrived. There was a strong wind to begin with. It got a lot stronger and it changed direction. His experience was on smaller boats and this one was a pig. They should have expected that, it was a cruising boat, not meant for heavy conditions. Kaskis didn’t want to make for harbour. He also didn’t want to take down the mainsail. He agreed only after they dug in and, for a few seconds, it seemed as if they would pitchpole. Taking down the mainsail, Anselm was almost knocked overboard, cut his head. Under power with just the jib up, the boat threatened to breach in the troughs. Getting home took a long time. Kaskis loved it, he lit up with pleasure. You could see how he’d made Special Forces in the army.

‘I took some holidays,’ said Anselm.

The knee was not good. It was sending signals up and down. He looked at her. She was looking at him.

‘What kind of holidays do you shrinks take?’ he said. ‘Or do you just stay at home and introspect? Keep in touch with your inner selves. Do some mental scoping.’

‘Scoping?’

‘You could scope your anima. Do an animascope. An animoscopy. That’s got a nice medical sound to it.’

‘So you didn’t take holidays?’

‘What is this about holidays? Since when were holidays the measure of people? Did Marie Curie take a lot of holidays?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Your memory loss. Has that been permanent?’

‘How did we get on to that? What’s permanent? Permanent is a retrospective term. I’m still alive. Just.’

More cyclists, no leanness or androgyny here, a group of overweight women, bikes wobbling, breasts alive, jostling inside tracksuits.

‘Precision,’ said Alex. ‘It is important. Do you still experience the loss of memory? Correction. The absence of some memory.’

‘Some. Yes. I’ve lost all the good bits, the holidays. I’m left with the crap.’

Both knees were hurting now. He would have to stop, walk the rest of the way. He did not want to do that.

They ran for another hundred metres.

‘I’m tiring,’ she said. ‘Can we slow?’

He felt relief, he’d outlasted her, he didn’t have to be humiliated. ‘It’s just a kilometre,’ he said. ‘I was thinking we should pick it up.’

The yellow glance, a shrug. ‘If you like.’

She went away from him without effort, no sign whatsoever of fatigue. He watched her backside and could make no effort to go after her. The path turned and she was gone.

Anselm stopped, walked. She had tried to be kind to him, to spare him embarrassment. She had pretended to a weakness she didn’t have.

His response, wired into his brain, was to go for her throat.