I looked up at her again.
‘My clitoris,’ she said. ‘I get erections.’
It wasn’t an exaggeration. There was such wetness when she came, the sheet beneath that part of her was soaked.
All night I lay beside her while she slept. I watched her turn over, brush her face with the back of her hand. I saw how she gathered the corner of a blanket in one fist and brought it up below her chin. I listened to her murmur, lick her lips. Sometimes I thought I was imagining it all, and I had to reach out and touch some part of her, her shoulder or her hair.
When I heard the clock downstairs strike five I left the bed. She woke up, but quickly fell asleep again. After I’d dressed I wrote the name of my hotel and the number of my room on a piece of paper. I thought for a moment, then, underneath, I wrote, Ice melts. I put the note on the pillow next to her.
Outside, it was almost light. The air was so cold, I could feel the shape of my lungs when I breathed in. There was frost at the edge of the road and each blade of grass seemed brittle, as if a white rust had attacked it.
I was in the north of the city, out near the woods.
When I woke up the next day, the phone was ringing. I reached for it so fast, I almost knocked it over.
‘Martin? You awake?’
My heart dipped. It wasn’t her.
‘Martin? Are you there?’
‘Loots,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
He was ringing because tonight was his night off and he was just wondering if I’d like to come to supper. He thought we could eat late, maybe at around eleven. Nothing fancy — just fried chicken, some potato salad …
‘That sounds wonderful,’ I told him.
There was no tram to where he lived, he said, but he would be happy to pick me up. I felt ungrateful suddenly, ashamed that I’d been disappointed to hear his voice, especially in the face of all this generosity.
At eleven o’clock that night I was standing on the steps outside the hotel. I’d only been waiting a few minutes when a car pulled up. ‘Martin?’
Loots was wearing a leather coat and heavy work-boots, but his shoulders still bounced as he walked towards me.
‘Tell you one thing,’ he said, as he walked me to the car, ‘I’m not drinking any more of that plum brandy. I was sick as a dog.’
‘Me too,’ I said. Not because it was true, but because I liked him and I wanted us to have things in common.
Loots lived in the 9th district, an old working-class neighbourhood no more than a ten-minute drive from the hotel. On the way over, he asked me if I’d heard about Gregory. I said I hadn’t. Apparently they’d found him the morning after the wedding party with his head in one room and his feet in another. He was lying face-down on the carpet like a dead man — Petra had suggested drawing a chalk line around him — and when they turned him over, he had the carpet’s pattern printed on his cheek.
‘First I lose my wife,’ I said, ‘then I lose my daughter —’
Loots laughed. ‘Right.’
His apartment was at the top of a tall house. There was no lift, and the stairs were steep and narrow. He advised me to go carefully. People were always breaking their legs, he said, and that was people who could see. On the fifth-floor landing he edged past me and unlocked the door. Once inside, he showed me round. The rooms were small, with slanting ceilings, skylights in the bedroom and the lounge, and floors that sloped. A corridor ran the length of the apartment, front to back. This was where he threw his knives. The wall at the far end was covered with brown cork tiles, and on the tiles he’d drawn the figure of a woman. I admired his handiwork. I felt the smoothness of the tiles where the woman was, then I felt the knife-holes that surrounded her. Loots led me back to the kitchen and began to prepare the meal.
‘So if they didn’t actually allow you to throw knives at the circus,’ I said, ‘what were you doing there?’ I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer, while Loots fried some chicken breasts.
‘It was just a labouring job,’ he said.
He had to pitch tents, set up rows of seating, clean out cages. It was manual work, hard and tedious; if it hadn’t been for The Great Miguel, he wouldn’t have lasted.
‘The Great Miguel?’ I said.
The Great Miguel was the circus knife-thrower, Loots told me. For his performance he wore a red-and-white-striped blanket, a straw sombrero and a pair of knee-high boots with spurs. He whirled around the ring, flashing his eyes and shouting words like ‘Caramba!’. Cleo, his assistant, appeared behind him, striking defiant poses against a painted backdrop of cows’ skulls and cactuses. She wore a tasselled leather bikini, which was very popular with the crowds. She wore huge false eyelashes, too. And then came the moment when The Great Miguel closed in on her, eyes still flashing, and surrounded her with knives, machetes, even tomahawks. Cleo was The Great Miguel’s second wife and it was testament to The Great Love she felt for him that she had asked to act as his assistant. He’d killed his previous wife, a knife severing the artery beneath her arm. The blood had drenched a party of children from the local school. She was dead in four minutes.
Loots had heard this story late one night as he sat in a roadside restaurant with The Great Miguel. They were drinking schnapps together, just the two of them. The Great Miguel talked a lot about superstition that night. He talked about the third knife, which was the one that had killed Agnes, his first wife. He would never throw a third knife again, he said. He didn’t trust the number three any more. He would never take a room on the third floor of a hotel, for instance. If he was driving a car, he always went straight from second gear into fourth. The Holy Trinity was something he couldn’t even begin to contemplate. At last Loots understood why The Great Miguel always threw his first two knives, but dropped the third, point down, into the sawdust at his feet, before continuing. He’d always assumed it was showmanship. Now he realised that there was tragedy in that dropped knife, and that it wasn’t just fear either, but an act of remembrance, a kind of homage.
That same night The Great Miguel talked to Loots of passing on his craft. He drank too much, he said; his control was going. He held his right hand level in the air and showed Loots how the fingers trembled. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘No damn good.’ He drained the bottle that was in front of him and threw it past Loots’ shoulder. Loots couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. There was a huge plate-glass window behind him; he’d noticed it on the way in. He braced himself for the explosion, glass smashing glass. But, strangely, there was only silence. He turned round. The window was there, but someone had opened it. It was three or four seconds before he heard the bottle land, a faint sound on the road somewhere below.
Ordering another bottle, The Great Miguel went into a kind of rhapsody. He told Loots that he wanted to teach him the rhythm of the knife. The movement of a knife across the air was like a piece of music. That was what he said. You felt a bad knife the moment it left your hand. It had no rhythm to it. It didn’t sing. You should almost be able to score the air the knife passed through. Loots listened, fascinated. His only worry was, The Great Miguel was drunk; by morning he would have forgotten all his promises. But he didn’t. Loots was still paid to pitch tents and clean cages. Whenever he had free time, though, he watched The Great Miguel practising and studied his technique.
Loots paused for a moment, then he sighed. ‘It was Cleo who spoiled it all.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘I’d been with the circus about a year,’ he said.
Then, early one morning, he was woken by a loud thud close to his head. Another thud. Then a gap. Then another. At first, still half-asleep, he thought somebody was knocking on his door. ‘Who is it?’ he called out. There was no reply, but the thuds kept coming. One after the other, at two-second intervals, against the side wall of his caravan. He remembered the gap after the second thud and thought: The Great Miguel. The Great Miguel was throwing knives at his caravan at six o’clock in the morning. But why? Several times he called out The Great Miguel’s name — which, actually, was Erik — but still nobody answered.