Mrs. Ridgewell asked if they’d had a quarrel. No, he said, they never quarrelled.
“She was a nice girl,” the manageress said. “Very reliable.”
“Like a Polish builder.”
“I hope you didn’t say that to her. It’s not a nice remark. And I don’t think she was Polish.”
“No, she wasn’t.” He looked out to sea. “Oorals,” he found himself saying.
“Pardon?”
You went to the station and showed a photograph of the missing woman to the booking clerk, who remembered her face and told you where she’d bought a ticket to. That’s what they did in films. But the nearest station was twelve miles away, and it didn’t have a ticket office, just a machine you put money or plastic into. And he didn’t even have a picture of her. They’d never done that thing couples do, crowding into a booth together, the girl sitting on the man’s lap, both giggly and out of focus. They were probably too old for that, anyway.
At home, he Googled Andrea Morgen and got four hundred and ninety-seven thousand results. Then he put her in quotes and cut it down to three hundred and ninety-three. Did he want to search for “Andrea Morgan”? No, he didn’t want to search for someone else. Most of the results were in German, and he scrolled through them helplessly. He’d never done languages at school, never needed them since. Then he had a thought. He looked up an online dictionary and found the German for “swimmer.” It was a different word if you were a man or a woman. He typed in “Andrea Morgen” and “Schwimmerin.”
Eight results, all in German. Two seemed to be from newspapers, one from an official report. And there was a picture of her. The same one he’d found in the drawer: there she was, second from the left, arms around her teammates, big wrinkles in her white swimming cap. He paused, then hit “Translate this page.” Later, he found links to other pages, this time in English.
How could he have known, he asked himself. He could barely understand the science and wasn’t interested in the politics. But he could understand, and was interested in, things that, even as he looked out at the sea from a window table in the Right Plaice, were already beginning to change his memory of her.
Halle was in what used to be East Germany. There had been a state recruiting scheme. Girls were picked out when they were as young as eleven — only four years older than that chubby little girl in the photograph. Vernon tried to put together her probable life. Her parents signing a consent form, perhaps a secrecy form as well. Andrea enrolled in the Child and Youth Sports School, then in the Dynamo Sports Club in East Berlin. She had some school lessons, but was mostly trained to swim and swim. It was a great honor to be a member of the Dynamo: that was why she’d had to leave home. Blood was taken from her earlobe to test how fit she was. There were pink pills and blue pills. Vitamins, she was told. Later, there were injections — just more vitamins. Except that they were anabolic steroids and testosterone. It was forbidden to refuse. The training motto was “You eat the pills or you die.” The coaches made sure she swallowed them.
She didn’t die. Other things happened instead. Muscles grew, but tendons didn’t, so tendons snapped. There were sudden bursts of acne, a deepening of the voice, an increase of hair on the face and body; sometimes the pubic hair grew up over the stomach, even above the navel. There was retarded growth and problems with fertility. Vernon had to look up terms like “virilization” and “clitoris hypertrophy,” then wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need to look up heart disease, liver disease, ovarian cysts, deformed children, blind children.
They doped the girls because it worked. East German swimmers won gold medals everywhere, the women especially. Not that Andrea had got to that level. When the Berlin Wall came down and the scandal broke, when they put the trainers, doctors, bureaucrats — the poisoners — on trial, her name wasn’t even mentioned. In spite of the pills, she hadn’t made the national team. The others, the ones who went public about what had been done to their bodies and their minds, at least had gold medals and a few years of fame to show for it. Andrea had come out with nothing more than a relay medal at some forgotten championship in a country that no longer existed.
Vernon looked out at the concrete strip and the shingle beach, at the gray sea and the gray sky beyond. The view was pretending that it had always been the same, for as long as people had sat at this café window. Except that there used to be a row of beach huts blocking the view. Then someone had burned them down.