Ian Hocking - Flashback

Jem’s spiel dried up.

As though that were her cue, Saskia dropped her shopping and entered the room, shouldering Jem aside. Her footsteps were silent. Jem remembered trying to walk silently across the floor minutes before. She had not been able to. Saskia could. She knew, Jem realised, which floorboards would creak.

Saskia touched the glass top of the desk. Her eyes moved from the contents—passports, tickets, camera—to Jem, then back again. Jem tried to judge her mood. Saskia seemed to be as preoccupied as a person working through a crossword. Her skin was ghostly, like a figure in stained glass, yet she was beautiful in an undeniable, cold way. Beholder’s eye be damned.

Saskia took the gun.

Jem said, ‘Wait.’

She did not know what to do. There was a chance that Saskia could rule against her in some way, and though the consequences of that were dim, shapeless in her mind—eviction? death?—Jem knew that she had to interrupt the process. She walked to her. In the glass of the desk, she saw an upside-down Jem meet an upside-down Saskia. Jem wondered, as she had many times, whether the reflected world could be the more real. The true world might play out in polished door handles, around bathroom taps, in the waltz of ice-cubes spun by a lazy hand.

They stood hip to hip. Both were looking at the gun. Saskia held it backwards, like a club, puzzling over it.

‘Sweetheart,’ said Jem, pushing away a strand of Saskia’s fringe.

‘How did you get in?’ Saskia asked. Her voice was sad. ‘I locked the door.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just saw you, that’s all. It was this morning. You were standing at the window of the bedroom. It was after we… it was afterwards. I was about to call your name when you turned away and left the room.’

‘You followed me?’

‘Only to the living room. I saw you pull out that book halfway. I knew it had to be a lock of some sort.’

‘Clever girl.’

Jem smiled, eager to make a human connection between them. Something beyond this exchange of information. But nothing in Saskia’s countenance altered. She looked at Jem, who searched her eyes for meaning, as well as her posture and the memory of her words. Emptiness. Jem took Saskia’s head in both hands and kissed her, hard. Saskia’s lips were dry and unresponsive. ‘You are not going to do this. Are you listening, baby?’

‘Do?’ Saskia asked coldly. ‘Do what? Baby.’

Jem revved herself, raked the throttle on her resolve, and thought, Game over. Saskia did not resist as Jem took the gun. Jem went to the kitchen with an idea to break the gun apart but she leaned over the sink and instead vomit erupted once, twice, onto the stainless steel. It was mostly spit. She looked at the gun. Now what?

Saskia embraced her from behind. Softness at last.

‘ Alles wird gut, Schlümpfchen ,’ she whispered, reaching around Jem’s waist. Everything will be fine. ‘Here.’ Jem watched the disembodied hands work. Saskia released the magazine with a twist and it dropped into her palm. She thumbed the bullets from the top. Each fell into the sink, dit , dit , dah .

When she had recovered enough to speak, Jem asked, ‘What does Schlümpfchen mean?’

‘Cute little smurf.’

‘Because of my blue hair?’

‘Because of your blue hair.’

Jem felt that Saskia had closed her eyes, but Jem’s were open still, staring.

So that was death, right there, passing me by.

Berlin, two weeks before

Saskia Brandt lived in an apartment in a north-western borough of Berlin called Wedding, which had formed half of the French sector, along with Reinickendorf, prior to reunification. The area struck Jem as a dead space that had been overlooked by the booming 1990s. Shops signs were as often Turkish as German. There was a Londonish coolness in the expressions of strangers. The houses and apartment blocks were grey cut-outs. It was, however, tidy. Nobody hung wet clothes from windows. The dooryards, driveways and pavements were scrubbed. Recycling bins were orderly and padlocked. This was Germany. But, equally, the fading aroma of dog shit rose from the roadside trees and the air was dusty, even this deep into autumn. Berlin was a flat city but the area around Saskia’s apartment felt too sheltered; it suffered from the lee of greater boroughs, missed opportunities and the doldrums of the everyday.

After shopping for clothes in Charlottenberg, they had returned to Wedding via the U-Bahn and begun the long walk up Dubliner Strasse towards the apartment. Jem listened to Saskia tell her about the borough and its problems while a second voice inside Jem, equally serious, told her that there was something doubly foreign about Saskia. It went beyond the German habit of treating life as a job, which Jem found both sensible and infuriating. It was a feeling that Saskia operated on many levels and Jem could sense only one.

The monologue had ended by the time they reached the apartment because Jem had been too tired to feign interest in tunnels dug beneath a wall that had fallen before her milk teeth. Saskia had not taken this personally. Indeed, she seemed to take nothing personally in recent days. A smile; then Saskia moved on.

The apartment block was six storeys of concrete surrounded by a car park. There was a school opposite. It was closed. Children went home for lunch in Germany. Jem watched Saskia climb the steps to the front door and open it.

‘Could you collect my post from the box?’ she asked. ‘It’ll lock itself when you close it.’

Jem, carrying one bag of shopping to Saskia’s two, said, ‘Sure.’

After a simple dinner, Jem helped Saskia load the dishwasher and tried to convince her that she should style her hair. Saskia agreed and Jem took a pair of scissors from the kitchen and followed her to the balcony.

Until now, there had been no question of a sexual relationship between them. They were friends. The question formed as Saskia’s hair fell on the spread towel like cinders and Jem leaned close. They spoke little. Opposite, across the balcony rail, the school’s windows flickered with the last of the sun.

‘You are not giving me a fringe, correct?’ said Saskia, tilting her head.

‘I could just dye it.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘How about platinum?’

‘No, thank you. And not too short.’

Jem gathered the stiff bristles between her knuckles and snipped. She was thinking about the last person whose hair she had cut. Wolfgang, her boyfriend, who was waiting for her back at their own apartment.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jem. ‘It’ll be short as.’

‘As what?’

‘As possible. It’s an expression. Like when you say, ‘I’ll be there as soon as’.’

In a blank tone that suggested her true thoughts were elsewhere, Saskia said, ‘English has some nice expressions. I like ‘kick the bucket’. And ‘up the swanny’.’

‘‘Pissed as a rat’.’

‘‘This beer belly is a fuel tank for a love machine’.’

Jem gave a forced laugh, partly to cover the tremor in her voice. This was too much. Saskia didn’t deserve what was in store for her. Not the amateur, first-time sex, which was only the start. There was also Wolfgang’s plan.

Saskia said, ‘A Scottish police officer told me that one. He knew a lot about beer bellies.’

‘It’s more like a chat-up line, anyway. Like, ‘If I said you had a sexy body, would you hold it against me?’’

‘‘Get your coat, petal’,’ said Saskia. ‘‘You’ve pulled’.’

Jem put the scissors and comb on the flower-box and tipped Saskia’s head forward, shooing the hairs. Then she moved in front of her to inspect the arrangement. It was shorter. Well balanced. At the same time, for want of a mirror, Saskia evaluated her expression.