Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

“A wonderful view, no?” Klaus is standing at the edge of the roof, his hands in his trouser pockets, his weight on his heels.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s wonderful.”

I bring my eyes back down. With its minimalist vine-covered pergola, its wooden decking, and its glazed pots containing stands of pale-green bamboo, the terrace has an oriental feel.

“Have you lived in the Far East?” I ask.

Klaus laughs again. “No, never.” He gestures at the table and the two glass bowls designed to shield candles from the wind. “I sometimes entertain up here — if the weather’s fine …”

We return to the living room. What is the connection between the prickly English couple and this curious, self-regarding German? I’d like to find out how they know each other, but it’s the one question I can’t ask.

Klaus leads me into the kitchen. In the middle of the room is a rectangular breakfast bar topped with black granite. A poster advertising a Rothko exhibition hangs on one wall, a framed black-and-white photograph on another. The photograph is by Su-Mei Tse, he tells me. He pours two glasses of chilled Sancerre, then opens a packet of unsalted cashew nuts and trickles them into a dish. I ask him what he does for a living.

“I’m an orthodontist.”

“An orthodontist?” My mind goes blank.

“I correct irregularities. In teeth.” He thinks I haven’t understood the word.

“There must be a lot of irregularities around,” I say.

He looks at me uncertainly, his glass halfway to his lips.

I indicate the granite breakfast bar, the art, the wine. “You seem to be doing pretty well.”

“Ah, I see. Yes. Well, there aren’t many of us, so there is plenty of work — and the procedures are quite costly.” He ushers me back into the living room, with its white leather sofa, its chairs upholstered in ethnic fabrics, its scatter rugs made from the skins of exotic animals. “So you like the place?”

“I like it very much,” I say. “I’m very happy.” Perhaps the wine is going to my head. I have eaten nothing since breakfast.

Klaus beams at me from the sofa. “Would you like to stay?”

“Yes. If that’s all right.”

“Of course. You can move in tonight. Your room is ready.”

“But I already paid for a room — at my hotel.”

“You’d be more comfortable here, no?”

“That’s true.” I hesitate. “I won’t be here for long. I’m only passing through.”

“Don’t talk about that now.” He gets to his feet. “I have a car downstairs. Shall we collect your things?”

/

That night I dream about Adefemi. I wake in the dark, my body slick with sweat. I push the covers back. The images inside my head are real as memories, but jumbled, illogical. We’re sitting in a bar, drinking beer out of brown bottles. He’s telling me about a place he wants to take me to. His fingers, long and elegant, form all kinds of shapes in the air. First crowns, then fans. There’s a beach of fine white sand, he says. And palm trees. And there are elephants clothed in red and gold. Elephants? I laugh. But I can see it all — the beach, the elephants, the sunlight splashing down on everything …

We need to pack. Our possessions are in storage, though. We hurry to the warehouse. We’ll take the minimum, we say. Forget the rest. But there’s much more than we remembered. Adefemi climbs to the top of a huge tottering pile of stuff and levers the lid off a box. Things start spilling out. I tell him it’s getting late but he doesn’t listen. Leaving him to sort through the boxes I enter another warehouse. The lighting is poor. I find myself in a wide central aisle with large cages on either side of me. In the cages, barely visible, are hundreds of people. They stare through the bars, their eyes unblinking, hollow. No one speaks or moves. At the far end of the warehouse, where the daylight is, I can see the place Adefemi has been describing — it’s some distance away and far below, over land that is hilly, lush, and green — and I know that if I want to see the palm trees and the elephants I will have to walk through the warehouse, from one end to the other, and I know I will never be able to do that …

My body has cooled down. A shiver shakes me.

Where am I?

I’m staying with Klaus Frings, in his apartment in Berlin. My heart thuds once, then dives deep. I leave the bed and move across the room. The moon is full and round on one side, worn on the other, the shape of a sucked sweet. I open the window. Cold air floods in.

I think of where Adefemi lives, two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor of a building in Trastevere. His next-door neighbor is a Brazilian woman who is always laughing, especially when she’s on the phone. Adefemi thinks she’s a benign spirit; her laughter makes him happy. I remember telling him that it would drive me up the wall. He lowered his eyes. Kit , he said reproachfully. This was in the summer of 2012. We were sitting at his green table with the front door open. A view of parked motorbikes and a wire-mesh fence. Overhanging trees. I talked about my mother that night — the IVF, the cancer, the long slow death. I talked about my father too. He never says he blames me but I’m sure he does. If they hadn’t tried to have a child she wouldn’t have died. It was the IVF that gave her cancer. It was all my fault . Adefemi watched me as I cried. Sometimes his tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth, a sound that meant he disagreed with me, and sometimes he held my hand, but he didn’t tell me I was being hard on myself or self-indulgent or that none of it was true. He knew that would only make me angry. I was often astonished by how intuitive he was. How gentle. He would do anything to get her back. He’d trade me for her, I know he would. He doesn’t have any time for me. He can’t even bring himself to look at me . I was exaggerating, but I needed to exaggerate. I had to paint the darkest picture. Seizing a pair of scissors off the table, I snipped at the flesh at the base of my thumb. The pain was like a flash; it made me gasp. I dropped to my knees on the tiled floor, two kinds of tears in my eyes. The blood slid down my wrist with real purpose. Sometimes I have to prove that I exist. That I’m vibrant on the inside. Colorful. That I’m not a freak, an experiment. A shell. Adefemi looked frightened when I cut myself, but he watched me do it all the same, as though he knew it to be necessary. He seemed to realize that it was the mildest form of something that had to be undergone.

At four in the morning, when I finally stopped crying, Adefemi reached out and took off my T-shirt. I lifted my arms above my head to make it easier. I was wearing nothing underneath. I remember the feeling of my hair falling against my spine, my ribs, the small of my back. It was always cool in his apartment, even at the height of summer. The temperature dropped as soon as you walked in through the door. His bedroom smelled of cement, as if it had only recently been built. He kissed my bare shoulders and then unzipped my jeans and pulled them off. He kissed me on the mouth. His breath tasted clean but sour, like vinegar.

To start with, it was as tender as the light of the new day pushing through the shutters, and it stayed tender for a long time, but then I wanted it to change. By the end it was fast and hard, relentless. The bed turned through forty-five degrees. Moved halfway across the room. The cries that came out of me were like bright paint flicked against a wall.

“I love the sounds you make,” he told me afterwards. “It reminds me of those birds that hover so high up that you can’t see them. But you can hear them. That’s how you know they’re there.”

“Skylarks,” I said.

My hand on his rib cage, his heart punching underneath. And the question I had then is the same as the one I have now.