His mother’s response to this lecture had been to plant her hands – which in Marc’s recollection were usually encased in yellow rubber washing-up gloves – on her ample hips. Then she threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘in that case I won’t give you any more pocket money because you’ll only spend it.’
Today, more than two decades later, one might have gained the impression that Marc had gone along with that deal. His flat still looked like a chaos theorist’s ideal object of study.
‘Good God!’ As he walked in, Constantin gave a noisy sniff as if he expected such a pigsty to give off an awful stench as well. In fact, the place was redolent only of freshly sanded floorboards, freshly applied emulsion paint, and the other smells typical of redecoration that had been lingering in the air since Marc moved in.
‘What happened here?’ Constantin asked, doing his best not to tread on any of the numerous objects strewn across the floor of the little hallway.
‘Nothing.’ Marc shoved a stack of CDs aside with his foot. ‘I dropped a box, that’s all.’
‘Only one?’
Lying on the floor surrounded by remote controls, income tax files, two multiple sockets, an overturned lamp, three photo albums and numerous books were several overturned pot plants. All had dried out, even the cactuses.
Marc stepped over the box whose contents lay strewn across the lobby. He’d left it out in the rain for too long, and the cardboard bottom had become so sodden it couldn’t support the higgledy-piggledy contents and gave way. It was the very last box, which he’d meant to leave out for the dustmen in any case. He was so furious with himself he’d deliberately hurled the box full of house plants at the front door.
Sudden rages…
Another new trait laid bare by the scalpel of grief.
‘What on earth has happened to me?’ he muttered to himself as he went into the living room to turn on the standard lamp, which doubled as a DVD rack.
This, the largest room in his two-room flat, made a better impression, although the numerous unopened boxes littering the floor resembled aid packages jettisoned from a helicopter. There were no shelves or cupboards that could accommodate Marc’s few possessions, so he lived out of a suitcase like a commercial traveller. He took anything he needed straight from the box – if he could find it. Sandra had always been the practical one of the two. She would have neatly labelled the boxes with their contents.
Marc heard a cupboard door being opened in the adjoining room. He slowly subsided on to a black leather sofa which the removals men had deposited in the middle of the room facing the window. The raindrops that were lashing the panes at irregular intervals created an inappropriately snug atmosphere in the gloomy, rather overheated living room.
‘Nobody here.’
Marc swung round. Constantin had somehow contrived to enter the room silently in spite of his leather soles.
‘I’ve checked the kitchen and the bathroom. I even looked under the bed. There’s nobody here.’
31
‘There must be,’ Marc said wearily, although he knew his father-in-law was telling the truth. He’d known it the moment his key fitted and the door swung open. Just as it did here in the living room, everything looked exactly the way he’d left it that morning.
Sandra had never been fussy, that was for sure. She was quite as capable as he was of turning a tidy room into a shambles in no time at all. But her love of plants was so great that she would never have carelessly uprooted her favourite bonsai and left it lying beside its own potting compost. And that fact allowed of only one conclusion.
Sandra wasn’t here – never had been.
Marc felt Constantin sit down beside him. ‘I’m losing my mind,’ he whispered with his eyes shut.
‘No, you aren’t.’
‘I am.’ Marc kneaded his temples. The soothing pressure did nothing to relieve the nausea constantly simmering away inside him. ‘I saw her. I could have put out my hand and touched her.’
‘Here, take this.’
He looked up. His father-in-law must have found a plastic mug in the kitchen and was holding it out. He himself had appropriated a cut-glass tumbler with a slightly chipped rim.
‘Drink up, it’s only water. You need plenty of fluid when you’re in shock.’
The white mug’s thin, fluted sides made a crackling sound as Marc grasped it. Its contents gleamed like the surface of a dark lake in the dim light. He raised it to his lips but stopped short.
‘Just water?’
‘What else?’
Constantin deposited his glass on the coffee table. Then he took Marc’s plastic mug and drained it in one. ‘Satisfied?’
He looked down at Marc with a paternal expression.
‘I’m sorry.’
Constantin nodded and picked up his glass again. It left a ring of moisture behind on the coffee table. ‘But I ought to give you something to relax you soon. I’m genuinely worried about you, Marc.’
‘That makes two of us.’
I feel like someone who’s swallowed a magnet that attracts insanity, not metal, and I’m very much afraid its effects are getting stronger by the minute.
‘Come on, it’s getting late. Let’s go to the clinic.’ Constantin put his empty glass down, plumb on the wet ring. He held out his hand, but Marc had shut his eyes again. He had learnt, even as a boy, that he could think better when not all his senses were activated. When he opened them again his father-in-law was standing at the window, tracing the course of a raindrop trickling down the pane like a teardrop.
‘How often do you think of that day in May? How long ago was it exactly?’ Constantin’s voice had gone husky all of a sudden.
That day in May.
They had never referred to it as anything else. In their conversations it had never been ‘the day Sandra was attacked’ or ‘the day they gagged her and tied her to the kitchen stove with a wire noose’. Nor was it ‘the day Sandra should really have accompanied him to a lecture but stayed behind at her father’s house because of morning sickness’.
‘Christian would be three now,’ Marc replied.
‘Exactly. It was three years ago.’
Constantin sighed, as if an eternity had gone by since then. And it had, in a sense. Sandra had been pregnant once before. The burglars came just as she had settled down with a family pack of crème brûlée ice cream on her lap to watch an old King of Queens DVD. It was six hours before Constantin came home. By then the two thugs in ski masks had forced the safe, stripped the walls of valuable originals and gone off with cash, a collection of antique clocks, all the family silver and an old laptop.
Six hours.
The bleeding had started three-quarters of an hour before.
‘Is that why you didn’t want to choose a name for your second baby?’
Marc nodded. ‘Yes. That day destroyed so many things. We thought she could never have another child. When she became pregnant after all, we didn’t want to tempt providence. Pure superstition.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Ironical, isn’t it?’
Constantin turned round. He looked infinitely old all of a sudden. ‘You’re wrong, you know.’