‘Okay. Can you at least tell him to call me as soon as he gets out of theatre? It’s an emergency.’
He was about to hang up when he suddenly remembered something. ‘Just a moment. Can you see my phone number on your display?’
‘No. It’s withheld.’
Shit, he won’t be able to reach me at my old number.
‘But if the professor really is your father-in-law he’s bound to know your mobile number.’ The scepticism in her voice was unmistakable now.
‘Yes, of course.’
Marc hung up. He rested his forehead against the head restraint of the front seat and massaged his temples. Nothing relieved his headache, neither the cool imitation leather nor the gentle pressure of his thumbs. Why had he bought aspirin and codeine instead of some other painkiller that didn’t need washing down with water?
‘Everything okay back there?’
Marc laughed silently.
Everything okay?
Sure. Discounting the fact that a girl whose life he’d saved that morning was dead and his wife, who had until recently been lying in a mortuary, was still alive but failed to recognize him, everything was fine.
‘Know those days when the earth seems to be turning in the opposite direction?’ he said, taking note of the cabby for the first time. In a lonely hearts ad she would probably have described her figure as ‘womanly, with curves in all the right places’. The truth was, she filled the seat from door to gear stick.
‘Like in: “Stop the world, I want to get off?”’ she said.
Her sympathetic chuckle went with the colourful material in which her ample form was swathed. Marc guessed that her wraparound dress was of African origin. That figured, to judge by the three Rasta plaits dangling from her neck.
‘Sure, man, I know what you mean.’
I wonder if you do.
The taxi braked sharply to avoid a couple so intent on catching a bus across the street that they’d darted out in front of it.
‘I picked up a granddad yesterday. Nice old guy. Late seventies, I guess. Halfway there he suddenly forgot where he wanted to go.’
Okay, maybe you do have a rough idea.
‘Worst thing was, he forgot he was in a cab – thought I was kidnapping him or something.’
‘What did you do?’ Marc asked, looking out of the window again. The neon sign of a car rental firm flashed past.
‘If I’ve learnt one lesson in life, friend, it’s this: when people go mad, stay sane.’
A fellow cabby was turning into Friedrichstrasse ahead of her. She tooted him twice in salutation.
‘I just ignored granddad’s hullabaloo and took him where he’d asked to go in the first place. His daughter was expecting him, luckily.’
She double-parked and looked in her rear-view mirror. ‘Alzheimer’s. You meet new people every day, huh?’
From the way she roared with laughter at her old chestnut of a joke, she might just have invented it. Then she peered out of the window dubiously. ‘You did say No. 211 Französische Strasse?’
The taxi gave a lurch as she swung round in her seat.
‘Yes, why?’
‘I hope you’ve got a hard hat with you.’
Chuckling, she reached for her receipt pad, but Marc waved it away and gave her the last few notes in his wallet. Then he got out to make sure he wasn’t suffering from an optical illusion. The view from the cab was so unbelievable, he had to take a closer look.
A hole.
The nearer he got to the fence, the slower and more hesitant his steps became. It was as if he were approaching a clifftop. Which, in a sense, he was.
Wind was blowing into his face and rain was blurring his vision, but not enough to prevent him from identifying the numbers of the commercial buildings to his right and left. He shivered.
This is impossible.
Left 209, right 213.
He advanced another step. The tip of his nose was now almost touching the sign that prohibited members of the public from entering the construction site.
He looked again at No. 209, the office building on his left, and then at the investment bank on his right. Finally, he looked down.
Seven metres down into the pit which had earlier that day been the site of No. 211, the Bleibtreu Clinic. It had vanished like the last remaining vestiges of normality in his shattered existence.
20
Before Marc’s father died of liver failure at the age of fifty-seven he had been a business consultant, an artistes’ manager, the owner of several hotel and casino complexes in South Africa, the father of two illegitimate children, an alcoholic, a composer, a cartoonist, a bodybuilder – even an international-bestseller writer under various pseudonyms. All this in addition to his activities as an incompetent lawyer. And all in his imagination alone.
Frank Lucas had naturally told no one in the family of his experiences in this illusory world, any more than he had informed Marc, Benny or his wife that the small law office for which he daily set off with an empty briefcase had long been in the red because of his repeated legal blunders. In spite of his schizoid disorders, however, he had succeeded in keeping his head above water for another two and a half years, thanks to a few gullible clients. Even Anita, his secretary, had continued to work half-days for almost no pay until, shortly before his death, she realized that she would never benefit financially from his forthcoming construction project in Brazil because that, too, existed only in her debt-ridden employer’s imagination.
None of these things – Frank’s schizoid disorders and the family’s disastrous financial position – had come to light until the day the police rang the doorbell and asked to interview Marc’s sister about the rape she’d undergone. The family’s reaction took them aback, for there was no sister and no rape. For the first time in his life, Frank had lied to the wrong people.
They’d all had their suspicions, of course. Neither his wife nor his children had failed to notice his mood swings, insomnia, recurrent bouts of sweating and penchant for self-dramatization. On the other hand, didn’t they love him partly because he didn’t take the truth too seriously? Because of the fanciful, incredible, picaresque stories with which he’d won his wife’s heart and held Marc and Benny spellbound in their bunk beds? Besides, didn’t a good lawyer have to lie occasionally in order to get his clients off the hook?
For fear of the truth, the whole family shrank from questioning Frank’s Sunday-lunch accounts of the week’s events. His wife sneaked off to the bottle bank with the empties more and more often to prevent the children and her neighbours from catching on, but she never believed her husband had a drink problem, and Marc himself was now no longer so convinced of it.
Although the doctors subsequently stated that Frank’s delusions were the result of recurrent alcoholic binges, Marc thought the converse more likely. His father had never drunk himself into a world of illusion; having always lived in one, he’d resorted to the bottle only in his lucid moments, when the agonies of self-recognition became too much to bear. Marc had often wondered if anything could be more terrible than the moment when the veil of illusion is drawn aside to reveal the cruel actuality behind it; the moment when your dearest wish is a swift return to your accustomed world. Even when it doesn’t exist.
Did you go through this too, Dad?
Marc breathed deeply, clinging to the construction site’s wire-mesh fence like an exhausted long-distance runner. He had seldom felt as close to his father as he did now. Perhaps the doctors had been wrong to say that Frank’s disorder wasn’t hereditary. Perhaps he, Marc Lucas, wasn’t the person he thought. Perhaps he had never been married, never fathered a baby and never visited this Bleibtreu Clinic. Perhaps the voice behind him existed only in his head…