Richard House - The Kills

‘Tomas.’

‘He has a name!’ Isa clasps her hands heavenward. ‘Is he smooth or hairy?’

‘I don’t know, I think smooth?’ Rike takes the question semiseriously. ‘He has a little hair on his arms. But I think he’s smooth.’

‘Take the opportunity, Rike, I’m serious. Just don’t screw it up.’

Isa settles onto her elbows and looks out at the bay, middle distance, with a wince at some subterranean movement, the child unsettled inside her. Sometimes Rike finds her sister unbearable.

* * *

Rike checks her computer for messages. She checks for messages from her brother.

Isa asks if Rike has spoken with Mattaus yet.

‘I’m trying to find out what his plans are. Is Franco still in the apartment?’

‘I think that’s what he said. He — obviously — wasn’t saying much. It isn’t as black and white as you think.’

‘Good.’ Rike resists the urge to defend Franco.

‘Listen.’ Isa’s voice remains flat, rational. It is the voice she uses when she needs to explain something that might, in any other circumstances, be unreasonable. ‘About Mattaus. Has he said anything about the man he’s seeing? What has he told you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘The man he’s seeing has paid for a house somewhere, he’s rented a villa, but I don’t think he’s staying there. The villa is in Larnaca, but I think he works in Limassol.’

Rike doesn’t understand. ‘The apartment is shared with Franco and Mattaus. They both bought it?’

‘I’m talking about where he is now. He’s living in a villa.’

‘Where?’ Rike settles in the seat, turns to see her sister. ‘He’s here on holiday, no?’

Neither of them know where Mattaus is exactly.

‘Look.’ Isa is hesitant. ‘There’s no good way to say this. But why is he living in a villa that another man is paying for? I mean. What does that make him?’

Isa pauses again, she has warmed a plate of pastries and the air tastes of hot butter.

‘Who pays for somewhere they don’t live?’

‘What are you thinking?’

Isa is uncharacteristically slow in coming to the point.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘I think Mattaus’ new boyfriend must be married.’

Rike laughs. The idea that her brother is seeing a married man is neither shocking nor a surprise. ‘It’s possible, but Mattaus would have said.’

‘Would he?’

‘Of course. It’s another man on his team. We would know. You’d have it on a T-shirt already.’

‘What if he didn’t know? Or what if he was lying to us?’

‘But why would he lie?’

‘That’s what Henning says, but usually he tells us everything, every last detail. We only have what Mattaus says. There’s nothing else to go on, no other information.’

Rike laughs at the absurdity. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so worried?’

‘Because it’s strange. Even for Mattaus. And it’s strange that he would lie to us or keep something hidden and that’s what I think he’s doing.’

Rike shuts the computer and says that there’s no reason to doubt him. ‘All you ever have is what someone tells you. That’s normal. That’s what we do.’

‘But I think he’s lying.’

For Rike the problem isn’t why her brother would lie to them, but why he would share with them the details of his life. Unlike Isa she isn’t so certain that they are the kind of family who share confidences.

6.4

Rike wakes in the early pre-dawn to a heavy rainfall, her mind too active to return to sleep. It’s a clean awakening, right out of sleep, and if this hadn’t happened most nights since her arrival she’d think that there was a reason for this, some disturbance, some problem, something to fret over.

She checks her emails and finds a message marked MFP with a link to a website. It doesn’t make sense that work like this would be happening in Cyprus, and not New York or Berlin, although some of their events, when she checks them online, have occurred in similarly offbeat places: an airport lounge at Kuala Lumpur, a lakeside beach on Fraser Island, a castle courtyard in northern Italy.

Three videos are already online. One at Kolossi, right by the castle, no more than five kilometres away. The man wears a mask, not a mask so much as part of a costume, a fake panda head, round and black and white, with crosses for eyes as if it might be blinking, or maybe even dead. The man is wearing shorts, slightly baggy and blue, with a white cord. Shirtless, his body seems American to her: thick, broad-shouldered, a man who works out perhaps, or works out but doesn’t particularly watch his weight. In this first video, the man picks up a stone from one side of the path, in front of the entrance to the castle, carries it to the other side of the path then stands back, in position, right in the centre of the path and faces the camera.

The man with the panda head takes his time. He looks to the stone, to the camera, to the place where the stone was, then, with some deliberation he looks at a third spot. Having identified this new place the man returns to the stone, picks it up and moves the stone to the new, third place. The stone, not small by any means, is white and doesn’t come from the castle, but looks to have been brought from a beach, being smooth and almost perfectly round. And the way he holds it, with both hands, she can see it isn’t light. When he returns to the centre of the path he looks with great care at four places. The place where he has now set the stone, the place where the stone was last, at the place where the stone was originally set, and finally, the camera.

She doesn’t know why this is funny. His gesture? The minimal movement of his head, or perhaps the anticipation? That you know exactly what he will do? Is this what delights her, what she finds so pleasing?

The video continues.

The man, after looking, regards the two places where the stone has been set and where it now lies, then identifies a fourth spot — and so he moves the stone to this place, a little further from view, almost out of frame. Once again he returns to the centre of the path, and again he regards the place where the stone now lies, and the three places where the stone has previously been set.

On the fourth move the man sets the stone out of the range of view. He does this seven times, always returning to the path to stand dead centre and look to each of the places he has set the stone. The castle behind him, a square stone block, the sky behind that a simple blue, in the distance the handsome spindles of a row of cypress trees, a slight wind bothering them, but nothing else within the frame: the man, the path, the castle, the trees and the sky. The man is now sweating, and she can see why he isn’t wearing a shirt.

She insists that Henning and Isa watch the video, plays it for them on Isa’s laptop, and at first, like her, they find it hard to be interested, but after the second move, once there’s a pattern established, they both look puzzled, and remain curious and quiet while they watch the entire clip.

Isa takes the laptop to watch the video again.

‘I never get this stuff,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand why it’s so compelling. What is this?’ Light from the screen illuminates her face. There is a memory here that Rike can’t place.

‘Does anybody know who they are? Why the head?’ Henning chews as he speaks.

Rike doesn’t know. They have a Facebook page, they call themselves Mannfunktionprojekt or MFP for short, and this, she guesses, maybe means that they’re German. There’s a date on the website to show when another piece will go online.