‘Andrea, are you married?’
‘Can we watch TV as long as we like?’
‘Were you married?’
‘If I ate three would I be sick?’
‘Why aren’t you married?’
‘How old are you?’
‘What team do you support?’
‘You got any children?’
‘Are you and Dad getting married?’
He learnt the answers to some of these questions – like any sensible woman, she wasn’t telling her age. One night, in the dark, after he’d delivered the kids back, and was too upset for sex, as he always was on these occasions, he said, ‘Do you think you could love me?’
‘Yes I think I would love you.’
‘Is that a would or a could?’
‘What is the difference?’
He paused. ‘There’s no difference. I’ll take either. I’ll take both. I’ll take whatever you’ve got to give.’
He didn’t know why it started, the next bit. Because he was beginning to fall in love with her, or because he didn’t really want to? Or wanted to, but was afraid? Or was it that, deep down, he had an urge to fuck everything up? That’s what his wife – ex-wife – had said to him one morning over breakfast. ‘Look, Vernon, I don’t hate you, I really don’t. I just can’t live with you because you always fuck things up.’ Her statement seemed to come out of the blue. True, he snored a bit, and dropped his clothes where he shouldn’t, and watched the normal amount of sport on TV. But he came home on time, loved his kids, didn’t chase other women. In some people’s eyes, that was the same as fucking things up.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘For sure.’
‘No, “for sure” is American. English is “yes”.’
She looked at him, as if to say, Why are you now correcting my English?
‘Yes,’ she repeated.
‘When I didn’t have a condom and you said it was OK, did you mean it was OK then or OK always?’
‘OK always.’
‘Blimey, do you know what a twelvepack costs?’
That had been the wrong thing to say, even he could see that. Christ, maybe she’d had some terrible abortion, or been raped or something.
‘So you can’t have children?’
‘No. Do you hate me?’
‘Andrea, for God’s sake.’ He took her hand. ‘I’ve got two kids already. Point is, is it OK with you?’
She looked down. ‘No. Is not OK with me. It makes me very unhappy.’
‘Well, we could … I don’t know, see the doctor. See an expert.’ He imagined the experts over here were more clued-up.
‘No, no expert. NO EXPERT.’
‘Fine, no experts.’ He thought: adoption? But can I afford another, with my outgoings?
He stopped buying condoms. He started asking questions, as tactfully as he could. But tact was like flirting: either you had it, or you didn’t. No, that wasn’t right. It was just easier to be tactful if you didn’t care if you knew things or not; harder when you cared.
‘Why are you now asking these questions?’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Sorry.’
But he was mainly sorry that she’d noticed. Also sorry that he wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. When they first got together, he liked the fact that he didn’t know anything about her; it made things different, fresher. Gradually, she’d learnt about him, while he hadn’t learnt about her. Why not continue like that? Because you always fuck things up, his wife, ex-wife, whispered. No, he didn’t accept that. If you fall in love, you want to know. Good, bad, indifferent. Not that you’re looking for bad things. That’s just what falling in love means, Vernon said to himself. Or thinking about falling in love. Anyway, Andrea was a nice person, he was certain about that. So what was wrong with finding out about a nice person behind her back?
They all knew him at The Right Plaice: Mrs Ridgewell the manageress, Jill the other waitress, and old Herbert, who owned the restaurant but only dropped in when he fancied a free bite. Vernon chose a time when the lunch trade was starting, and walked past the counter towards the toilets. The room – more of a cupboard, really – where the staff left their coats and bags was just opposite the gents. Vernon went in, found Andrea’s bag, took her keys, and came back out flapping his hands as if to say, That whirry old hand-drier never quite does the trick, does it?
He winked at Andrea, walked to the hardware shop, complained about clients who had only one set of keys, strolled around for a bit, picked up the new set, went back to The Right Plaice, prepared a line about the chilly weather playing havoc with his bladder, didn’t need to use it, put her keys back, and ordered a cappuccino.
The first time he went, it was the sort of drizzly afternoon when no one looks at anyone who’s passing. A chap in a raincoat goes up a concrete path to a front door with frosted glass panels. Inside, he opens another door, sits on a bed, gets up suddenly, smoothes out the dent in the bed, turns, sees the microwave isn’t rubbish actually, puts his hand under the pillow, feels one of her nightdresses, looks at the clothes hanging from the picture rail, touches a dress she hasn’t worn before, deliberately doesn’t let himself look at the pictures on the little dressing table, sees himself out, locks up behind him. No one did anything wrong, did they?
The second time, he examined the Virgin Mary and the half-dozen pictures. He didn’t pick anything up, just went down on his haunches and looked at the photos in their plastic frames. That must be Mum, he thought, looking at the tight perm and big glasses. And there’s little Andrea, all blonde and a bit chubby. And is that a brother or a boyfriend? And here’s somebody’s birthday with so many faces you can’t tell who’s important and who isn’t. He looked again at the six-or seven-year-old Andrea – just a bit older than Melanie – and took the image home in his head.
The third time, he eased open the top drawer; it stuck, and Andrea’s mum toppled over. There was mainly underwear, most of it familiar. Then he went to the bottom drawer, because that’s where secrets are normally kept, and found only sweaters and a couple of scarves. But in the middle drawer, under some shirts, were three items he laid on the bed in the same order, and even the same distance apart, as he found them. On the right was a medal, in the middle a photo framed in metal, on the left a passport. The photo showed four girls in a swimming pool, their arms round one another, a lane-divider with cork floats separating one pair from the other. They were all smiling up at the camera, and had wrinkles in their white rubber caps. He instantly picked out Andrea, second from the left. The medal showed a swimmer diving into a pool, with some lines of German writing on the back and a date, 1986. How old would she have been then – eighteen, twenty? The passport confirmed it: date of birth 1967, which made her forty. It said she was born in Halle, so she was German.
And that was that. No diary, no letters, no vibrator. No secrets. He was in love – no, he was thinking about being in love – with a woman who had once won a swimming medal. Where was the harm in knowing that? Not that she swam any more. And now he remembered it, she’d got all jumpy at the beach when Gary and Melanie made her go to the water’s edge and started splashing around. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded. Or perhaps it was quite different, swimming in a competition pool versus having a dip in the sea. Like ballet dancers not wanting to do the sort of dancing everyone else did.
That evening he was deliberately jolly when they met, even a bit silly, but she seemed to notice, so he stopped. After a bit, he felt normal again. Almost normal, anyway. When he’d first started going out with girls, he found there were moments when he suddenly thought: I don’t understand anything at all. With Karen, for instance: they’d been jogging along nicely, no pressure, having fun, when she’d asked, ‘So where’s all this leading, then?’ As if there were only two choices: up the aisle, or up the garden path. Other times, with other women, you’d say something, just something ordinary, and – splash – you were in deep water.
r /> They were in bed, Andrea’s nightie pulled up around her waist in the fat roll he was quite used to feeling against his belly, and he was going it a bit, when she shifted her legs and crushed him with them, like a nutcracker, he thought.
‘Mmm, big strong swimmer’s legs,’ he muttered.
She didn’t answer, but he knew she’d heard. He carried on, but could tell from her body that her mind wasn’t on things. Afterwards, they lay on their backs, and he said some stuff, but she didn’t pick up on anything. Oh well, work tomorrow, thought Vernon. He went to sleep.
When he dropped by The Right Plaice the next evening to pick Andrea up, Mrs Ridgewell said she’d called in sick. He rang her mobile but she didn’t answer, so he texted her. Then he went round to the house and tried her bell. He left it a couple of hours, phoned again, rang the bell, then let himself in.
Her room was quite neat, and quite empty. No clothes on the picture rail, no photos on the little dressing table. Something made him open the microwave and look inside; all he saw was the circular plate. On the bed were two envelopes, one for the landlord, with keys and money inside by the feel of it, the other for Mrs Ridgewell. Nothing for him.
Mrs Ridgewell asked if they’d had a quarrel. No, he said, they never quarrelled.
‘She was a nice girl,’ said the manageress. ‘Very reliable.’
‘Like a Polish builder.’
‘I hope you didn’t say that to her. It’s not a nice remark. And I don’t think she was Polish.’
‘No, she wasn’t.’ He looked out to sea. ‘Oorals,’ he found himself saying.
‘Pardon?’
You went to the station and showed a photograph of the missing woman to the booking clerk, who remembered her face and told you where she’d bought a ticket to. That’s what they did in films. But the nearest station was twelve miles away, and it didn’t have a ticket office, just a machine you put money or plastic into. And he didn’t even have a picture of her. They’d never done that thing couples do, crowding into a booth together, the girl sitting on the man’s lap, both half silly and out of focus. They were probably too old for that anyway.
At home he googled Andrea Morgen and got 497,000 results. Then he refined the question and cut the results down to 393. Did he want to search for ‘Andrea Morgan’? No, he didn’t want to search for someone else. Most of the stuff was in German, and he scrolled through it helplessly. He’d never done languages at school, never needed them since. Then he had a thought. He looked up an online dictionary and found the German for swimmer. It was a different word if you were a man or a woman. He typed in ‘Andrea Morgen’, ‘1967’, ‘Halle’, and ‘Schwimmerin’.
Eight results, all in German. Two seemed to be from newspapers, one from an official report. And there was a picture of her. The same one he’d found in the drawer: there she was, second from the left, arms around her teammates, big wrinkles in her white swimming cap. He paused, then hit ‘Translate this page’. Later, he found links to other pages, this time in English.
How could he have known, he asked himself. He could barely understand the science and wasn’t interested in the politics. But he could understand, and was interested in, things he wished afterwards he’d never read about, things which, even as he looked out at the sea from a window table in The Right Plaice, were already beginning to change his memory of her.
Halle was in what used to be East Germany. There had been a state recruiting scheme. Girls were picked out when they were as young as eleven. Vernon tried to put together the probable life of that chubby little blonde girl. Her parents signing a consent form and a secrecy form. Andrea enrolled in the Child and Youth Sports School, then in the Dynamo Sports Club in East Berlin. She had school lessons, but was mostly trained to swim and swim. It was a great honour to be a member of the Dynamo: that was why she’d had to leave home. Blood was taken from her earlobe to test how fit she was. There were pink pills and blue pills – vitamins, she was told. Later, there were injections – just more vitamins. Except that they were anabolic steroids and testosterone. It was forbidden to refuse. The training motto was ‘You eat the pills or you die’. The coaches made sure she swallowed them.
She didn’t die. Other things happened instead. Muscles grew but tendons didn’t, so tendons snapped. There were sudden bursts of acne, a deepening of the voice, an increase of hair on the face and body; sometimes the pubic hair grew up over the stomach, even above the navel. There was retarded growth and problems with fertility. Vernon had to look up terms like ‘virilisation’ and ‘clitoral hypertrophy’, then wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need to look up heart disease, liver disease, deformed children, blind children.
They doped the girls because it worked. East German swimmers won medals everywhere, the women especially. Not that Andrea had got to that level. When the Berlin Wall came down and the scandal broke, when they put the poisoners – trainers, doctors, bureaucrats – on trial, her name wasn’t even mentioned. In spite of the pills, she hadn’t made the national team. The others, the ones who went public about what had been done to their bodies and minds, at least had gold medals and a few years of fame to show for it. Andrea had come out with nothing more than a relay medal at some forgotten championship in a country that no longer existed.
Vernon looked out at the concrete strip and the shingle beach, at the grey sea and the grey sky beyond. The view was pretending it had always been the same, for as long as people had sat at this café window. Except that there used to be a row of beach huts blocking the view. Then someone had burnt them down.
At Phil & Joanna’s 1: 60/40
IT WAS THE week Hillary Clinton finally conceded. The table was a clutter of bottles and glasses; and though hunger had been satisfied, some mild social addiction kept making hands reach out to snaffle another grape, crumble a landslip from the cliff-face of cheese, or pick a chocolate from the box. We had talked about Obama’s chances against McCain, and whether in recent weeks Hillary had demonstrated guts or mere self-deception. We had also considered whether the Labour Party was any longer distinguishable from the Conservatives, the suitability of London’s streets for bendy buses, the likelihood of an al-Qaida attack on the 2012 Olympics, and the effect of global warming on English viticulture. Joanna, who had been quiet during these last two topics, now said with a sigh,
‘You know, I could really do with a cigarette.’
Everyone seemed to exhale slightly.
‘It’s just on occasions like this, isn’t it?’
‘The food. That lamb, by the way …’
‘Thanks. It’s six hours. Best way to do it. And star anise.’
‘And the wine …’
‘Not forgetting the company.’
‘When I was giving up, it was the disapproval I hated more than anything. You’d ask if anyone minded, and they all said no, but you could sense them turning away and not breathing in. And either pitying you, which was patronising, or even kind of loathing you.’
‘And there would never be an ashtray in the house and they’d do a long, exaggerated hunt for some old saucer which had lost its cup.’
‘And the next stage was going outside and freezing to death.’
‘And if you stubbed it out in some plant pot they’d look at you as if you’d given a geranium cancer.’
‘I used to take my butts home in my purse. In a plastic bag.’
‘Like dog crap. When did that start, by the way? About the same time? People walking around with inverted plastic bags on their hands, waiting for their dogs to crap.’
‘I always think it must be warm, mustn’t it? Feeling warm dog crap through the plastic.’
‘Dick, really.’
‘Well, I’ve never seen them waiting for it to cool down, have you?’
‘These chocolates, to change the subject. Why do the drawings never match what’s in the box?’
‘Or is it the other way round?’
‘The other way round’s the same way round. They still don’t match.’
/>
‘The pictures are only an approximation. Like a communist menu. What would exist in an ideal world. Think of them as a metaphor.’
‘The chocolates?’
‘No, the drawings.’
‘I used to love a cigar. It didn’t have to be a whole one. Half would do.’
‘They gave you different cancers, didn’t they?’
‘What did?’
‘Cigarettes, pipes, cigars. Didn’t pipes give you lip cancer?’
‘What did cigars give you?’
‘Oh, the poshest kind.’
‘What’s a posh cancer? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’
‘Bum cancer’s got to be the bottom of the pile.’
‘Dick, really.’
‘Did I say something?’
‘Cancer of the heart – is that possible?’
‘Only as a metaphor, I’d say.’
‘George the Sixth – was that lung?’
‘Or throat?’
‘Anyway, it proved he had the common touch, didn’t it? Like staying in Buckingham Palace and getting bombed, and going round the East End shaking hands in the rubble.’
‘So getting a common form of cancer was in line with that – is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’
‘I don’t think he would have shaken hands. Being king.’
‘Here’s a serious question. Obama, McCain, Clinton: which of the three of them was the last to smoke?’
‘Bill or Hillary?’
‘Hillary, of course.’
‘Because we all remember Bill’s use of a cigar.’
‘Yes, but did he smoke it afterwards?’
‘Or keep it in a special humidor like she kept the dress?’
‘He could auction it to pay Hillary’s campaign debts.’
‘McCain must have smoked when he was a POW.’
‘Obama must have had a joint or two.’
‘I bet Hillary never inhaled.’
‘By their smoking shall ye know them.’
‘Actually – as your token American present – Obama used to be a big smoker. Took to Nicorettes when he decided to run. But – fallen off the wagon, I hear.’