Ian Hocking - Flashback

‘Now, you will accompany us,’ said the inspector, straightening his back, ‘to Berlin. There you will face charges of murder and attempted murder.’

Cory laughed.

Jem felt the quickening of her tears. She envied Duczyński the drive that rallied him against a problem, when the outcome—their deaths in this little hut—was as certain as the impact of Star Dust on Tupungato, or DFU323 against Bavarian soil. She wished she could spit cock-sure comments at Cory instead of bending her head and crying.

The sobs came silently at first, then with greater intensity. She wondered whether it made Cory think about the human cost of his plans or if it merely distracted him. But she cried and nobody spoke. She cried until a hand touched her head. Jem looked up.

‘Don’t cry, mein kleiner Schlumpf .’

As Saskia stroked her hair, Jem remembered cutting Saskia’s on a balcony in Berlin, lifetimes gone.

‘Well, you had me at ‘ Guten Tag .’’

‘Take my hand.’

Saskia blinked slowly. With that, Jem wondered if the last tasks of the ichor inside her were complete. Had Saskia risen, fully now, from the dead?

‘Cory,’ Jem said, ‘I have something to say.’

Cory did not reply. He stared at her, waiting, until Jem reached into the coat Saskia wore. It was Danny’s coat. She took the Hänsel doll from the inner pocket and, under the thoughtful gaze of Cory, lay him on the floor. The doll wore Lederhosen and a velveteen hat. His cheeks were rosy and his feet were bare.

‘Listen,’ Jem said. ‘A couple of years ago–’

‘No,’ said Danny. His face was drawn tight. ‘Not now.’

‘A couple of years ago,’ she repeated, ‘when I was finishing my degree, I began to experience panic attacks. Until that point, life was normal. I worked at a hairdresser’s for spending money. I had a wide circle of friends. I went to the pub, did student voluntary work, and generally enjoyed myself.

‘The last, big panic attack happened on a Saturday morning in February. That was the attack that ended it all. The trigger was something banal: the redness of the fire escape door. Whether it was the colour, the shape, or what it represented… I didn’t know. But I completely flipped out. It was serious enough for friends to call an ambulance. The paramedic thought I was putting it on.

‘Eventually, Mum and Dad sent me to our GP. He had last seen me as a sixteen-year-old gobshite demanding the pill. Now I was back, staring at the floor like a little girl, while Mum explained that it was best if I saw a therapist. Mum is big on therapy. The GP agreed. I spent the next week in bed. I didn’t talk, watch the television, or shower. I hardly ate. Late at night, walking around the house, I had a third panic attack in the attic bedroom that used to belong to Danny.

‘You know, I thought the therapist would have a room lined with books, antiques, and a tropical fish-tank. But she worked from home and we talked in her kitchen. She listened to me describe the circumstances of my first panic attack. She asked me what the door reminded me of. I told her about the red door in my brother’s attic bedroom.’

‘Jem,’ said Danny. His obvious pain brought her out of the story for a moment, and she became self-conscious. What was the use of talking? Did they think she was foolish? But the faces of the men, and of Saskia, diminished her fears. Each was focused on her.

‘Over the next weeks,’ she continued, ‘I got deeper and deeper into the programme. At the therapist’s request, I wrote about the bad memories of my childhood. Five weeks into the therapy, she told me that I showed all the symptoms of an incest survivor. She directed all our discussions towards the red door. I didn’t know what it represented. I drew it, wrote stories about it, and went through word-association games designed to unlock it.

‘Finally, she began to hypnotise me. I remember the first session. It was difficult, but she congratulated me on my susceptibility to the procedure. By the second session, we had found the key that opened the door. Or so I thought.’

Danny had crouched at the wall. His head was on his knees. He looked like a child told to make himself tiny.

‘Go on,’ said Cory.

‘In the memory, I was twelve. It was a summer evening. Thundery. I went up to tell Danny that Dad had agreed to take us to a theme park that weekend. I remember crashing into Danny’s room, bursting with news. It was empty. Our house used to be a mill, and the rooms are long and low. The red door was just the entrance to the attic, which was stuffed with Dad’s old sports gear—a leather cricket bag, a bundled tennis net—and unwanted wedding gifts. There was a clearing in the middle of the attic space where Dad planned to lay down a model railway.

‘That night, a high-pitched tune was coming from behind the attic door. I opened it. Danny was sitting next to a cardboard box. He wore shorts and flip-flops: his summer outfit. He was dangling two puppets into the box as though it was a theatre. Hänsel and Gretel were dancing to the tune played by the music box of our grandmother. The tune was ‘I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ’—Bach? I remember how his expression changed when I closed the door. From contentment to surprise to something else. I saw… an erection in his shorts.

‘Then I awoke from the hypnosis. The therapist demanded I finish the story, but I left her house and never returned. I walked home and wrote a letter to my mother describing how Danny had systematically abused me. Then I went to his old room. Danny was at university in Durham, but there were some clothes in the wardrobe. I cut the sleeves off his shirts. You know, like a divorce. Later that night, I turned up at the house of my Uncle Barry in York. He let me stay on the proviso I called Mum. I didn’t. I left for London in the morning. I got a sweeping job in the second salon I walked into, and restarted my life.’

She looked hard at Cory.

‘And when did you suspect the memory was false?’ he asked.

‘At first, I didn’t. Perhaps because I had destroyed my family with that one letter, I almost required the memory be true. Otherwise it was pointless. I was pointless.’

‘Jem…’ said Cory.

‘In my memory of the abuse,’ she said, ‘the dolls were puppets. Marionettes, I mean: they had strings on their arms and legs. But the actual dolls we played with were not, and never had been, marionettes. Danny could never have played with them in the way I remembered that night.’

‘It took me years to find him,’ said Danny. He spoke to his shoes. ‘Mum had given our toys to a kid who lived up the road. His parents sold them in a car boot sale. Eventually, Hänsel showed up on eBay. He was one of a kind, you see.’

‘I have other memories, I realise now,’ said Jem, ‘of playing with the dolls in the field behind our house. They never had strings. But even when Danny rediscovered Hänsel… Memory is like a second person in your head; a companion who guards your experience. And jealously. Memory tells you stories.’

Jem watched the face of the killer. Her memories, even false, were still her own.

‘I remember sitting beneath an oak with my wife,’ Cory said quietly. Jem could hear the distant buzz of a helicopter. ‘We were at the edge of a cornfield. I proposed to her with a ring that had belonged to my grandmother. She was your age, Jem.’

‘Maybe that memory is true.’

‘Catherine was there on the day I crossed the bridge back to 1947. There were three of us in the prep room: me, Catherine, and Freddo. Freddo was my second. He would replace me if something went wrong, just as I had replaced Jackson. I asked him to excuse us, and he left Catherine and me facing the mirror. She told me I looked like a southern gentleman in my white suit. She told me that my mission would save people like my sister, who had died of the cholera. She told me that my mission was everything, and she understood, and she would wait.’ He shook his head. ‘God, I had to find Harkes.’ Cory looked at Saskia. ‘Three weeks before I crossed the bridge, there was an incident involving David Proctor.’