Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

After Mum died, you certainly went missing. You left me with relatives, the parents of my friends, au pairs. They were nice enough, but they weren’t you. And even when you were there, you weren’t there. I know you were grieving, but still. You seemed to find it hard to be at home. Was that because it reminded you of her? Or was it because I reminded you of her? Maybe you blamed me for the whole thing. Because in a sense I was responsible. If she hadn’t had a child, she would still be alive. There’d still be the two of you. I know we never really talked about her death, but sometimes I imagine us having an argument and that’s what you always say. Why her? Why not you? Because if you’d had to choose between us I know you wouldn’t have chosen me .

In fact, I’m not even sure you wanted me in the first place. Maybe I was her idea. Her dream. As Rome was. And when she got ill you were proved right, and that made you angry. I can imagine you shouting at her. You should have listened to me! If only you’d listened! Yes, you wanted her, not me. But she wanted me. So when I lost her, I lost everything. Is that unfair? If so, I’m sorry. It’s how I feel, that’s all. It’s how I’ve always felt. Some things you always thought were solid turn out to be made of fucking tissue paper and rubber bands. It’s not until you touch them that you find out. Not until they fall apart in your hands .

I’m not coming home, Dad. I’m going in the opposite direction, returning to something I’m used to. Something that makes sense to me. I don’t expect you to understand that .

I’m not even sure you’re reading this .

Are you reading this?

Your daughter ,

Kit

I don’t much care for the letter. It seems confrontational, and the “fucking” is overly dramatic, but I don’t have time to make any alterations. It will have to do. At the last minute I decide to enclose one of the passport photos Oswald gave me. I study the picture before I slip it inside the envelope. My face is joyful, and also fierce, my chin tilted in a suggestion of defiance, which seems in keeping with what I have written. Oswald looks unwholesome, as always, but the exhilaration is visible in both of us. We’re giving off a kind of glow, and I’m reminded of the morning I spent in Pavlo’s gallery. The light that illuminates an icon is an inner light, he told me. In an icon there are no shadows.

When the taxi stops at a set of traffic lights I scribble on the back of the photo: Me and my friend Oswald, on the night we saw the spaceship . A bit enigmatic, perhaps, given the tone of the letter, but I’m feeling lighthearted, mischievous. Will my father keep the picture? Will he treasure it?

Or will it end up in the hands of the police?

/

I have only been sitting in the Einstein for a couple of minutes when the waitress with the chestnut hair stops at my table.

“Still here, then,” she says. “How are you?”

My encounter with Raul left me with bruises on my neck, my upper arm, and my wrist, but since I’m wearing a sweater and a scarf nothing shows.

“Fine, thanks,” I say. “You?”

Her eyes narrow. “I’m surviving.”

Half an hour later, when I have finished my coffee, I call her over and ask whether we can speak in private. There’s a subtle alteration in her face, as if it’s a computer screen and someone turned the brightness up. She has a word with the woman at the cash till, then motions to me. As I follow her outside she says she only has five minutes.

At the top of the steps that lead down to the street she turns to look at me. I wonder what she thinks I’m going to say. Ever since I first saw her I have found her intriguing. She’s aloof but also provocative; I’m fairly certain she’s bisexual. Freckles are sprinkled across her nose like grains of demerara.

I ask if she’s working on the seventeenth.

“The seventeenth …” She looks past me, thinking. “Yes,” she says eventually. “Yes, I am.”

“Would you do me a favor?”

Her eyes, which are the color of autumn, a blend of yellow, brown, and gold, widen a fraction.

“It’s not difficult,” I say.

On October 17, I tell her, at midday, a man will walk into the Einstein. He will be looking for me but I won’t be there. I produce the letter.

“I’d like you to give him this.”

She looks at the envelope and reads my father’s name out loud. She has trouble with “Carlyle.” I correct her pronunciation.

“It’s very important that he receives the letter,” I tell her. “It couldn’t be more important.”

“What does he look like?”

I think of my father as I last saw him, on TV, in the window of that shop in Mitte. He’s in his early fifties, I tell her. Tall, with dark-brown hair and dark eyes. He’s English.

“He sounds attractive,” she says. “Is he your lover?”

“He’s my father.”

“Oh.” She’s about to apologize but then she sees me laughing. She starts laughing too.

I give her fifty euros. I want her to pay for anything my father orders, I tell her. If there’s any change she should keep it.

“And if he doesn’t appear?” she says.

Though I have addressed this possibility — obliquely in the short letter, more frankly in the longer one — I haven’t really wanted to envisage it. The idea that the letter might lie unopened until someone decides to dispose of it isn’t easy to bear, or even think about.

“You get to keep the money,” I say.

“And the letter?”

I shrug.

I thank her for helping me, then start down the steps. As I reach the pavement I turn and smile at her.

“Will you be coming here again?” she calls out.

“I’m afraid not.”

She looks over my head, into the street. Her face, laid bare by the white light, loses its hardness and becomes much younger suddenly, like that of an anxious child. She runs down the steps and throws her arms round me. There’s a staggered feeling, something intense and yet displaced, the emotion and the situation not compatible exactly, but parallel somehow, equivalent. Tears lift through me but don’t quite reach my eyes.

She stands back. “Well,” she says, “it was nice meeting you.”

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Lydia.”

“It suits you.”

She thanks me with a quaint, almost theatrical dip of the head. “And you?”

“I’m Kit.”

She repeats my name.

“It’s short for Katherine.” I check my watch. “I have to go.”

“Goodbye, Kit.”

“Goodbye.”

/

That evening I’m just settling into my seat when I see Oswald below me on the platform. He has Josef with him. Since he can’t possibly know I’m there I could easily hide from him but I decide there’s no need. I go to the door at the end of the carriage, slide the window down, and call his name. His head snaps round. Looking worried, he walks over.

“I was wondering where you’d got to.” He registers the fact that I’m on a train. “What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving.”

He looks back along the platform, checking on my destination. “Moscow?”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I tell him. “It means I can say goodbye. It was good to meet you, Oswald. We had a great time, didn’t we — though I’m sorry you lost your special piece of concrete.”

“Oh, that.” He smiles. “Well.”

“I feel it was my fault. If I hadn’t been shouting at you —”

“No, no.” He looks at his shoes, then up at me again. “It was worth it.”

“That man, he was so rude. I mean, we weren’t doing anything —”

“That’s right. We weren’t.” A loud blast from the train echoes off the curved glass roof and Oswald’s features tighten. “Will you be coming back?”