Almost angrily, I said, ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’
Edith Hekmann laughed. ‘Above you.’
I reached up with my left hand. Nothing at first, just air. Then I felt something that was made of wood. It was smooth, carved into a shape. And it moved when I touched it.
At last I made the connection. ‘It’s a baby.’
I let go of it and it swung sideways. There was a series of small collisions, as wood knocked against wood. Click click CLICK CLICK click click — it reminded me of pool balls on a table, the sound they make when somebody breaks.
‘How many are there?’ I asked her.
‘I never counted.’ She came and stood beside me. ‘It’s years since he made one, but he still looks at them. Still lies there on his bed and looks at them.’ She walked past me, into the room. ‘He’s got talent,’ she said, ‘don’t you think?’
I didn’t know if talent was the word. I murmured something.
‘Karin took the baby away from him,’ she said, ‘and once they were gone there was no one who could explain it to him, not even me.’ There was a silence. ‘She turned him into what he is.’
I was only half-listening, though. I was still looking up into the mass of babies that were hanging from the ceiling …
It was a while before I turned to face her. She was standing by the window, looking out into the night. I thought she’d forgotten I was there. But then she spoke again.
‘Are you artistic, Mr Blom?’
I was still kneeling at the edge of the pool. I was no longer aware of my heart beating, or the places where I’d hurt myself; I was no longer aware of the cold. I was thinking about the wooden babies twisting on their strings –
A perfectly ordinary room.
There was a feeling now, a feeling that I remembered having in the car-park after I’d been shot. I was falling from a plane, and the plane was flying on without me. It wasn’t just separation, abandonment. It was the falling itself. Something giving way, something seeming to expand in front of me. A kind of gap had opened up, and it was widening. I left my screams behind, thin sounds curving into absolute infinity.
My dark glasses, my white cane. Where were they?
I tried to remember the lay-out of the steps. Think. THINK. There were three flights in all. You walked down the first flight, then turned to your right and walked down another one. Then you turned to your left. The last flight was the longest. I must have fallen somewhere near the top of the last flight.
I began with the bottom step, feeling the length and breadth of it, searching the ground on either side as well. It was a laborious process, and my hands were almost numb, but I could think of no other way. It would look odd, I thought, if someone saw me from an upstairs window. It would look like worship, part of some quaint religion.
I found my cane on the seventh step. I sat down and examined it; it seemed undamaged. The glasses would prove more difficult. A wind pushed at the trees near by — a night wind; I could detect no daylight in it yet. Not that it made much difference now. There would no longer be any days or nights for me. There would only be time — continuous, unvarying.
The eighth step yielded nothing. I was cold and tired. What if the glasses had landed some distance away, in the shrubbery?
As I started on the ninth step, my hand discovered something hard and rounded, with a kind of edge around it. I bent my nose to it. Leather.
It was a shoe.
‘Mrs Hekmann?’
Wait a minute. It wasn’t a woman’s shoe. It was too big to be a woman’s shoe.
‘Who are you?’ I said.
I found a second shoe.
‘Loots?’ I said. ‘It’s not you, is it?’
No, it couldn’t be. Not yet.
‘Who are you?’
My son. He’s come back.
‘Mazey?’
I was standing now. I could feel his breath on my face.
I had no idea what he intended. I had the feeling I should treat him as I would an animal. Stay calm. No sudden movements. Whatever you do, don’t run.
Something was placed against my chest. I was pushed backwards. I staggered down one step, then another. I didn’t fall, though. It must have been his hand.
I still had my cane. Supposing I used it as a weapon?
No sooner had the thought occurred to me than the cane was snatched out of my grasp. I heard it leave his hand. The sound it made, the sound a whip makes when it cuts through empty air. I heard it land in water somewhere to my left.
The violence was happening in silence.
Nothing was being said.
‘What is it, Mazey? What do you want?’
The hand pushed me backwards once again. I managed not to lose my balance. I had to be somewhere near the bottom now. I reached out with my foot, found level ground.
Words would be no use. He wasn’t even going to speak.
Was he trying to frighten me? Probably not. He didn’t know what fear was. I remembered what Edith Hekmann had said. The simple things he doesn’t understand. Like we get older.
Like we die.
I thought she must have told him that I’d wronged her. Now he was trying to get rid of me. He wanted me gone. Was he capable of measuring his own violence, though? Somehow I doubted it. He could kill me and not even be aware of it. He would stoop over my body with a kind of abstract curiosity, not understanding why all the movement had gone out of it.
It was also possible that she’d loosed him on me like a dog.
I walked backwards, trying to determine where he was. But he was moving quietly, if he was moving at all; the snow took every sound and softened it. Suddenly my heel tipped; there was nothing under it. I’d reached the edge of the pool. There was only one way to keep track of him — at least, only one that I could think of. I had to translate each movement he made into a noise. I had to make him visible.
I turned quickly, jumped in.
It was warm, warmer than I’d expected. Almost the same temperature as a bath. I rose to the surface. My head cooled as the night air closed over it. I was out of my depth. I worked the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other. I worried that Mazey might leap in after me, land on top of me. I wouldn’t stand a chance then.
At last my feet were free of my shoes. I slipped out of my jacket and swam away from it. I had no sense of where Mazey was. My plunge into the pool must have taken him by surprise. Confused him.
I don’t like swimming-pools. The words came to me, but they were strangely meaningless, redundant. Could it be that one fear cancels another? I was making for the middle. I was calm. Moving cautiously through the water, scarcely disturbing it. So I could hear what was happening.
Then, some distance behind me, the water erupted. It was him. It had to be. He’d stood there on the edge and thought about it. Then he’d jumped.
I started swimming faster, away from the noise. Staying afloat was hard, especially in clothes; it was sulphur water, and it didn’t support you the way water usually does. I could hear splashing coming from behind me. It didn’t sound as if he swam too often. That was a relief. It meant I was in my element, as opposed to his. Unless it was his fury I was hearing …