Sees — and feels — him collapse without a sound, no more than a slight hiss like the flow of air from the one of those balloons, albeit a bigger one. He falls like a felled ox, like a shot beast, onto the blue-green clinker floor with its small goose pimples and false fossils and genuine heating coils, and sticking out just over his right hip are the shiny handle loops of the scissors, like a magic, mythological symbol. The blades have penetrated him as far as they could go, ten centimetres at least, and even as she stands there staring at the body and at her own face in the mirror, she wonders if he is dead. Already dead? Is it so easy? Doesn’t it take any longer than that? Is that all that’s involved?
And she sees — in the unremitting cinema of her memory — how she leaves the bathroom, rushes out of the flat. How she slams the door behind her with a loud bang that echoes in the staircase and hangs in the air until she is outside in the courtyard with its bicycle stands and rubbish shed and elm tree and bench, because it is a sound-film running in the cinema of her memory. And there is another sound lingering in the air: she doesn’t know if it is real or merely an illusion — a hallucination or an audible mirage: just as she slammed the door, perhaps half a second beforehand, did she hear him shout her name?
Monica!
Is that possible? Did she really hear that?
And just look how she is running through the rain. Racing here and there along the dark streets that seem to be rocking and swaying and branching off in hitherto unknown directions, so that she loses all sense of where she is and of the way home. She continues in this manner for at least an hour — perhaps she doesn’t really want to reach home. . She pauses three or four times, leans against walls and tries to throw up: she succeeds on one occasion, but not on the others, and when she staggers into the kitchen in Moerckstraat the clock, the old, everlasting brass mantelpiece clock that she and her father bought at an auction when she was only five, is showing a quarter past eleven and her mother is sitting in the living room gaping at a blue-coloured crime series on the telly, and doesn’t even say hello.
She doesn’t even say hello, nor does she ask where her daughter has been.
And her daughter doesn’t tell her that she has just killed their shared lover. She simply stands there for a while in the doorway of the big room, which is certainly one of the smallest big rooms in the whole of the town, staring at the uncombed back of her mother’s head and the fast-moving, jerky pictures on the television screen. Then she goes into her own room and stays there for three days.
Three nights and three days.
Seventy-two-and-a-half hours.
Then she goes out.
The cafe was called Duisart’s, and was evidently open until three.
It was in one of the alleys between Armastenplejn and Langgraacht: she had never seen it before, but then, this was not her home district. The light was dirty yellow and the premises seemed a bit on the shabby side, but she found a corner where she was hidden away and didn’t have to look at any other of the sparsely distributed customers crouching over small plastic tables with their coffees, drinks and cigarettes. Men, almost exclusively men. Aged between thirty-five and a hundred. On their own or in pairs. An elderly, intoxicated lady with a spotted dog sat in a corner.
She ordered coffee and a glass of cognac: the waiter, with a ponytail, a nose ring and a flower tattooed on one cheek seemed to be wondering how old she might be, then shrugged and came back after less than a minute with the cup and the glass on a tray.
She sipped at the coffee and at the strong drink in the glass. She was not used to drinking alcohol, far from it: but a voice inside her told her that she needed it now. Something strong. Something uncompromising.
She needed to think straight, quite simply. And needed help in order to be able to think straight.
Needed to switch off that worn-out film show that filled her memory, and get to grips with things. Here and now. She emptied her glass in one gulp, and beckoned the waiter to bring her another one.
I have killed somebody, she began.
A man who was my mother’s lover. And my lover.
Who deserved to die. Didn’t deserve to live.
Not any more.
Why? Why did he deserve to die?
Because he had been exploiting them. Herself and her mother and their extraordinary fragility.
My guilt is light, she thought. As light as a feather. I shall be able to bear it, and nobody need know about it. Nobody knows what I have done, nobody knows about Benjamin Kerran and me, it is all and has all been exclusively between me and him, and now it is hidden away in my head, nowhere else. It hurts and chafes and drives me mad, but that is the only place where it exists. And it will pass. . my mother suspects nothing and will not be given any reason to suspect anything; if anybody else finds out about our connection with Benjamin Kerran, there is no reason to link that connection with his death. . My mother, I mean, my mother will not be connected with his death, there is no reason to do so, he has no doubt kept her just as secret as he has kept me, and when they find him nobody will suspect anything. . They’ve probably only met about five or six times in all. . no, there are no clues linking him to my mother or to me. They will look for a murderer, of course, male or female; but it will never occur to anybody to start looking around in a cramped little flat in Moerckstraat with ceilings so low that even a domestic pet would have to crouch down in order to move around, there’s no reason for anybody to search for anything in a place like that. No reason to be afraid, no reason to be scared any more, no reason to. .
The waiter arrived with her new glass and she broke off her train of thought. Just like cutting off a piece of thread that was too long. Paid, and waited until he had gone away. Then emptied the glass into her half-drunk cup of coffee, as she had seen her mother do, and as she remembered her father doing, and tasted the brew. Added a spoonful of sugar, stirred it and tried again. Much better, it almost tasted good, and warmed her up inside. She had never smoked — apart from a few giggly puffs at less than elegant dances when she was in class five or six — but now she suddenly fancied a cigarette to suck at as she sat in this gloomy cafe as the rain poured down outside.
But instead that voice came back to her. The thought of that voice. It burst into her head like a sour-tasting belch — Benjamin Kerran’s cry from the bathroom just before she slammed the door and raced down the stairs.
Monica!
Was it possible? Wasn’t it just her imagination? A hallucinatory cry from beyond the grave?
Or could it be that she really had heard him? That he really had shouted from that warm clinker floor in the bathroom with a pair of scissors stuck ten centimetres into his gut, his cock hanging helplessly like a piece of rag and his trousers crumpled around his ankles?
That he hadn’t died?
That he was still alive, despite everything?
Then, at least: that he was still alive then, at the moment when she left him and rushed out into the night like a terrified madwoman, her brains crushed like a crust of ice by the heavy boot of reality?
Where do all these words come from? she wondered. The heavy boot of reality? Something she had read, presumably. Lonely girls read more books than anybody else in the world, a woman teacher had told a gathering of parents when she was in class four. She wondered what pedagogical value such a disclosure could have; but of course there was little point in wondering about that just now, in sitting there and trying to trace the dodgy origins of her dodgy thoughts. . It was more important to sharpen them, to focus them and introduce a modicum of clarity. Decide what to do next. Was she drunk? Intoxicated already after no more than one-and-a-half glasses? It wasn’t impossible. She hadn’t had much to eat these last three days, next to nothing in fact, and alcohol had a greater effect on people if they had an empty stomach, even she knew that. Even Monica Kammerle knew that — but there was something else she didn’t know, and that was in fact the most important thing in the world for her to know just now.