The Gloaming (19 page)

‘How did you know I was here?' I hear myself say this, as if from a great distance.

Gloria takes a drag. ‘How did I know you were here? Magic!' She makes a spooky ghost noise then laughs. ‘Jamhuri works for me, doll. I pay his salary.'

We drive. The road dips and turns vaguely inland. We pass small villages, collections of huts, lit only by kerosene lamps. The lamps blink like fireflies. There are faces—pieces of people—and then only road in the headlights. For long stretches there's nothing but sisal. Once neat rows gone to bush. The before and the after is relentless.

Moving, we are moving over the roughshod road and under the trees, under the restless rustling trees. Through the dark town. Past the hospital, past the Yacht Club.

‘I shouldn't have told you about Harry like that,' Gloria says at last. ‘He's harmless these days. Defanged, declawed, sitting at the bar. It's the self-pity I can't stand.'

Gloria's smoke loops up like a genie. She carries on, she has what she wants to say, why she's come to find me: ‘Life is full of sorrow and shittiness. But it's what you make of it.'

Now we are on the narrow sand track. A bearing has gone in the Corolla's wheel, rattling like a stone in a tin can.

‘That's what I'm getting at, doll. What have you made of it? What have you
done?
Have you done anything good? Anything beautiful? Have you created anything? Music? Art? Have you made anything better? Even in a small way? A small light in this dark world? Have you even been
happy?'

She throws the lit nub of the cigarette out the window. ‘You should ask yourself what the hell you think you're here for.'

I feel an odd narrowing, as if in my bones. A sense, I suppose, of intense definition. I am present.

‘Your small, selfish little life.' Her voice leaks in a hiss of vehemence. ‘Your guilt, your poor little broken heart. So fucking pointless.'

We arrive. There's no sign of Jamhuri, but the gate is open. Gloria drives in, stops the car. I know it's impossible, but there seems a momentary pause, a gap of total silence, between the dying of the engine and the rushing of the outer sea, the high tide surging in the mangroves. There's a wrinkle in time. And then the earth lurches forward.

‘Get out.'

I obey.

She leans out the window. ‘It's what you make of it anyway, doll.'

The car starts up again, and as she pulls away, the broken bearing pings. Gloria switches on the radio to the tinny sound of Swahili gospel.
We love God, God will help us, God-God-God, ping ping ping
.

A spark flies up from the muffler as it hits a rock. Only one tail light works, burning the dark like her cigarette, until it is extinguished by the bend in the track.

I turn toward the house.

The door is open.

 

I opened the cupboard under the sink, a reflex, really. What I'd begun to do whenever I came back.

This time the duct tape wasn't there.

I checked again, behind the detergent and spare bottle of dish soap. I stood and looked around, I felt it was what I should do. The kitchen. The living room. The small bathroom. Each revealed itself utterly normal. Dormant. The sofa wasn't floating in the air. The toothbrush didn't chatter.

But the bedroom door was shut.

The closed door formed a dull void. Only a sliver of light glistened from the narrow gap between the door and floor.

I waited in front of the door. I placed my hands against it, palms flat against the grain.

‘Hello?'

No one answered.

‘Hello,' I said again.

I listened for a shuffle, a footfall. I watched the gap to see the crossing of a shadow. But there was no one.

I put my hand upon the handle, the round knob cool and smooth, an ergonomic fit. I turned it.

The room was exactly as I had left it, the curtains open, the bed made.

I thought perhaps that I'd closed the door by mistake, although I've never liked closed doors. Always the implication of what's behind them.

Perhaps the wind had closed it, a draft from another room.

And then I noticed the arrangement on the bed.

A plastic bag, the supermarket kind. Carefully folded.

The roll of silver duct tape.

A small swatch of fabric. About four inches in length. Red cotton flannel with white and yellow flowers. Individually, the objects were unremarkable.

But as a trilogy.

It didn't take me very long. My winter clothes I put in a trash bag in the basement. If Mrs Gassner found them before the trash collectors, she would sell them, for they were of excellent quality. I had so little else. All those years with Tom, the packing and unpacking, there was so little else.

And I left.

Left you.

Carefully, without slamming the door.

 

And now you stand at the entrance to this other house, on this other continent, and it's as if no time has passed at all. As if we just stepped through the door at Arnau and onto Tanga's sandy earth. You—my silent dancer—you are pale, almost translucent in this half-moon, sea-fractured light. Your hair is thin, you wear your raincoat and I think you must find it too warm. You are overweight in the way of middle-aged men. I recall how I saw you that night in Arnau. After my lover left. And I wonder if that is when you decided to kill me.

I believe I know the smell of you, some part of my brain recalls it, the distinct yet subtle odor of your hate as you sat drinking my coffee in that pathetic flat. Where I stayed put like a well-trained dog.

You watch me walk toward you, under the tulip tree, across the threshold of sand. You think how much thinner I look, almost gaunt. The sharper angle of my cheekbones, the outline of my chin and jaw. You can imagine the skull beneath my skin.

‘
Sagen Sie nichts
,' you say, you plead. ‘Don't, don't speak.'

This is the first time I have heard your voice. We don't appreciate how a voice gives dimension. Perhaps this is why you don't want me to speak: you want to control your interpretation of me, keep me paper thin. You are entitled to whatever you need.

I think about a friend of my father's and how he had his cancerous larynx removed. He spoke holding an electronic device to his throat. This gave him the ubiquitous, halting voice of a computer. For a long time he kept the old greeting on his answering machine just so that he could listen to his own voice. I don't know why I think about him now with such sadness: how he hunched over the answering machine, finally, one day, pressing delete.

You hold a blue plastic bag and a roll of duct tape. Is it the same roll you left in Arnau? The bag is from the market in town, a
malbolo
. You are crying, your bland, wide face completely wet with tears. I might as well have flayed you alive and ripped out your guts. I have destroyed you.

I step into the house and shut the door behind us.

‘She was the good in the world.'

Even if you had not forbidden me to speak, how might I reply? No correction can be made. We talk, we speak, so many millions of syllables spilling from our mouths in a lifetime. And it's just narration.

Sorry, the most useless fucking word.

But what we do—

Gloria said.

What we make of sorrow and shittiness.

I offer you my life. What you need.

I step toward you.

Kneel down.

You put the bag over my head.

You wind the duct tape around my neck. I hold out my wrists and these you bind. I hear the sucking of my breath against the plastic and the sound of your feet. I see the outline of you fade into darkness. I feel myself begin to panic, the bag clinging to my head like a skin. Lie down, I tell myself, in this embracing dark.

Un-become. Un-be.

Rain, air.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, to the left, I see a dog leaping, bounding, tail in the air, and a woman yells his name. An English name: ‘
William
!' I glance in her direction and the dog is suddenly rushing at my car and I jerk the steering wheel to the right. I slam on the brakes. I feel the weight of the car shift with the swerve and hear the squeal of the tires and I look ahead and see three children and they are looking at me, riveted, faces bright with concern for the safety of the dog. A girl and two boys.

I want to stop the car, I'm certain I do. I'm supposed to. I've been a lovely hostess and I've spoken carefully and I've worn navy blue, I know if I turn the wheel again now there is still time, the merest fraction of a second, for instance Elise stepping up to stand beside Tom on the summer day by the lake and me walking ahead, the boats on the bright water, the fluttering of birds. All that is required is that I turn back to him. All that is required is that I allow the neurological signal from my brain to travel to my hands so that they may turn, turn the steering wheel hard to the left. But there is only Tom leaning in to hear Elise, her hands upon the air, and so I drive on, I keep going, I drive on, straight on.

I drive straight on.

And I see the fluttering dress as the little girl flies into my vision, a demented angel falling from the sky with her mouth rounded into an ‘O' of surprise, and she hits the windshield and the glass shatters, tinkling, tinkling like bells, sparkling like snow, and the child in the red, flowered dress lifts back up into space; the wires connecting her to heaven retrieve her and she disappears from me and I feel oh a great gurning loss that she has been taken. I saw her face and she did not know that she was dying, did not know I was killing her.

 

It was raining. It always rained when these things happened, though Strebel knew this was just his impression, that the memories were collecting, cramming together into one rainy day. The benefit of rain was fewer rubberneckers, fewer bystanders, and therefore fewer people to come forward later with completely useless information.

Strebel got back in his car and sat for a moment, the rain battering, obscuring. It had just started an hour ago. If the rain had begun earlier, the accident would not have happened. The woman with the dog would have stayed at home. The rain would have washed away the slick, invisible residue of oil that accumulates on tarmac and the car would have driven—skidded—differently.

He could go on. He knew the parents would. Those itchy little ifs, like earwigs, burrowing into their brains. He didn't want to be here, didn't want to be involved—essentially this was a traffic incident. But his boss knew very well what it could turn into, given the driver wasn't Swiss. Given the victims were photogenic children. At least the driver was American, not a Muslim or an illegal immigrant. He was confident he could control the outcome.

The children had been on their way to the Fun Park, they'd been thinking about sweets and rides that tossed them in the air, they'd been happy, excited. Strebel rubbed his face and turned on the engine. He drove to the hospital in Bern. There had been talk of airlifting one of the children—the little girl—to Zurich. But not any more. The traffic was appalling, due to the rain, and he considered putting on the siren. But there was no rush now, no rush at all.

In the parking lot he looked out at the hospital, a rectangular block, as if the building was trying to hide in blandness. It might not be noticed, might not remind people that there was always a bed with their name on it. He thought about what he needed to say. The words always sounded wrong. It was impossible to convey the sorrow he genuinely felt, a sorrow that never abated. A sorrow that made no difference at all. He looked through his notes at the name. The name had to be right. He had to know ahead of time if there was an odd pronunciation or inflection. Sometimes he had to practice with foreign names so that he didn't stumble. Sophie. Not Sophia. Sophie Leila Koppler. Was that Ley-la or Lie-la? Was it Middle Eastern? He'd have to ask Caspary.

Strebel got out into the rain and let it pummel him. It was better if he looked wet and bedraggled; his sympathy would appear more authentic. Next of kin didn't need some wide-eyed optimist.

Inside the hospital, the wet soles of his shoes squeaked on the white floor and a drip from his hair ran down the back of his neck. He knew the way to the trauma unit and wished he didn't. In the lobby, he saw Caspary who pointed to a middle-aged man in a dark blue raincoat, standing by a potted plant.

‘He only just got here,' she said. ‘He doesn't know.'

‘Is there anyone else?' Strebel asked. ‘The mother?'

Caspary shook her head. ‘She died of cancer last year.'

Child and mother, both in one year.
Well done, God
, Strebel thought and turned to watch a nurse hand Sophie Koppler's father coffee in a styrofoam cup. He didn't drink the coffee, but stood with the cup in his hand. When he finally noticed it, he seemed baffled. Who had given him the coffee? And what was he doing here?

I come into people's lives at the worst possible time, Strebel thought. He started toward Mr Koppler, then turned back to Caspary. ‘Ley-la or Lie-la?'

‘Lie-la.'

Mr Koppler didn't notice him approach, even though Strebel was walking directly at him. Strebel gently touched his elbow. ‘Please sit down, Mr Koppler.'

Mr Koppler complied, almost spilling the coffee; Strebel took it from him, placed it on the floor.

‘I'm Detective Chief Inspector Paul Strebel,' he said. ‘I'm so sorry to tell you that your daughter Sophie has passed away.'

‘Sophie?' Mr Koppler looked at him, bewildered.

‘There was a car accident.'

‘But she wasn't in a car.'

‘She was hit by a car. On the side of the road. At the bus stop below Arnau.'

‘Sophie?'

‘Yes. Sophie Leila. Your daughter. She's been killed.'

‘But she wasn't in a car. We walked.'