Richard House - The Kills

He watches the car round the salt lake. Small and silver, shimmering. He starts running as it joins the road and heads toward the green bank of cypresses, almost gone. Of all the scenarios he’s worked through, none were this complicated. Tomas looks to the town. This wasn’t supposed to happen until after he’d left.

* * *

A man walks into a desert. He walks for four days, maybe five if he carries or comes across water. He’s found by an archaeological team. The man is unrecognizable. He looks like scabbed raw meat. His head, his hands and arms alive with flies.

He isn’t dead, which is somehow more shocking. And he resists being helped. They haul him into a jeep. No one wants to sit beside him. And the man, who has made no movement, makes it clear that he wants to get out of his clothes. The skin on his chest and back is a sore crimson, but not broken, not erupted, unlike the fully exposed skin. Under his pants, right at the buckle, there’s a line where the red immediately cools, and the body becomes human again and can’t be compared to meat, or a crust, or something infernal.

The archaeologists aren’t naive, and they understand how suffering doesn’t compare to anything else. It is exactly what this is: a person reduced to animal function.

11.7

Rike asks to be brought into town. Once away from the beach she’s embarrassed about her reaction. The woman, Sarah, says that she will take her home, or to a police station. She advises Rike to talk to the police.

‘That man was harassing you, and you should report it.’ She senses Rike’s reticence. ‘Look, it was you today, and you got away. The next one might not be so lucky.’

Rike agrees, feels a little shame over the story she’d told to the woman. That man is bothering me. He won’t leave me alone. Given the circumstances she’s not happy about lying, but how else to explain this?

She promises that she will speak with someone. Promises. But insists on being let out as soon as they reach Limassol waterfront.

Rike waves goodbye to the children then hurries from the car, slips down a pedestrian street busy with tourist trade, the tables of carved wood goods, T-shirts, place mats, bangles, and finds a café where she can look again at the book — because this is crazy, this hasn’t happened. Somehow she has this all wrong. She sits in the café and marks up passages with a pencil. At each page the discoveries are familiar and deeply unsettling. Rike sits with the book and reads. She doesn’t like to have the book in her hands, doesn’t like to read, line for line, the stories Berens has passed as his own. It helps that the book isn’t very good. She can justifiably dislike it on these grounds. It’s an effort to sit with it, a conscious effort.

It doesn’t take much to find the material. The discoveries are so immediate she begins to think there’s something a little dumb about the whole thing. It’s just plagiarism, that’s all this is. Petty theft.

Not clever. Not at all.

* * *

She returns to find the apartment empty and a note from Henning with a mobile number she doesn’t recognize. The note is simple. Isa is in hospital. It isn’t serious. It is a precaution. She calls the mobile number and speaks with Henning.

‘How serious is this?’

‘It’s nothing. They’re just being careful.’ He’s with Isa right now and she’s laughing. He probably shouldn’t be on his mobile.

Rike says she’ll come directly to the hospital.

Henning tells her not to worry. ‘They have her on a stretcher,’ he says. ‘She’s behaving as if she’s lying on a sunbed. This is just a precaution. It really isn’t that serious.’

Rike asks what the problem is.

‘She had a little bleeding. It’s nothing serious.’

They’ve heard news about Mattaus. He’ll speak with her when he gets back.

Rike can hear the medics telling Isa to breathe slowly.

‘I’m coming,’ she says. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

Henning doesn’t discourage her, and asks if she could bring Isa’s overnight bag. It looks like they’ll want to keep her in overnight.

Rike takes a taxi. Grateful for a little time to digest what’s happening. Baby. Mattaus. Tomas. And while she’s spared an excruciating discussion with her sister (what did I tell you about the man? What did I say? The minute I heard the story about the dog, I knew ), she’s mortified by the possibility that the situation, with an unborn child, has shifted into territory none of them want to revisit. While she’s recently felt secure in the fact that she’s hit bedrock, that things couldn’t get worse, she’s beginning to realize that this isn’t the case. Things can always get worse. Even now the situation is unstable, worse could be about to happen. She concentrates on the immediate moment and focuses on arriving at the hospital. She sits in the front passenger seat and ignores the driver as he tries to be polite.

* * *

‘Nothing serious’, the hospital advises. Henning comes out of Isa’s cubicle. It’s what they call spotting, he says, scratching his head. Which both is and isn’t unusual at this point depending on who you speak with. It’s only a problem if it doesn’t stop. To be on the safe side they want to keep her under observation. It’s a little unexpected but they’ve told him not to worry. He doesn’t know what any of this means. Doesn’t know either how long they will keep her. He’s never heard of spotting before, nor how long it might continue? An hour? A day? Until the baby is born? He’s called Udo, because Udo wants to speak with him about Mattaus, and because Udo needs to know what is happening. If Rike could do him a favour and keep Udo busy, just for the moment. The information from the doctors can only be described as random.

Hands clasped, Rike makes a deal that she will suffer any kind of indignity just as long as the baby is OK. Just this one thing. I’ll never ask for anything else.

Henning summarizes for Rike. She needs to catch up. ‘Mattaus has disappeared.’ He drops facts. Is clumsy with them. Her brother’s name rings with accusation. As if he’s the cause of this trouble with Isa.

‘Rike. There has been an accident. Last night a man fell from a balcony at the Miramar.’ He allows Rike to digest the information. ‘OK? The man who fell was Mattaus’s boyfriend. They found Mattaus’s phone in the same room. They’ve only just traced it.’

Rike isn’t sure how to take this. She wants to know what happened to Mattaus’s boyfriend.

‘You brought that book?’ Henning asks, as if this is insensitive. Another connection to Mattaus they just don’t need. Rike holds it up as if she intends to read it out loud or swear an oath. ‘The man fell seven floors. He hit the poolside.’

Rike looks at the book and says, ‘Oh.’

* * *

Rike isn’t allowed to speak with Isa, every time she approaches the booth curtains are drawn and she is asked to wait. After an hour Isa is moved to a private room with brisk efficient fuss. Nurses surround the trolley and Rike can’t see her sister, just bare feet, just hair. If she could see Isa she would know how serious this is. It’s just a little spotting. She needs a little rest. Unconvincing platitudes and little theories. A little bed rest at the worst of times. Rike repeats her deal: let the baby be OK. If anything bad needs to happen, let it happen to me.

She starts to add clauses when Udo arrives. Anything can happen as long as the baby and Isa are OK. OK means no complications. OK means everything returns to how it was pre -spotting. Assuming that everything was OK then, and this isn’t the result of some condition, of some other trouble. If she thinks about it Rike isn’t sure what OK means. Baby. Isa. Mattaus. Lexi. None of these people are OK. Tomas Berens, most certainly, is not OK.