What Was Left, page 17
She took off her clothes slowly and pulled her bathers over the fleshy tops of her thighs, away from the rolls of her stomach. The first wave that covered her feet nearly turned her around. It was so cold that every part of her said no. She set her teeth together and walked through the foam, the wind pelting her with cold splashes of sea, the surf pulling at her from below. As soon as it was deep enough she dove, opening her eyes to the swirl of murky sand. She pushed out past the other beach-goers, past the teenage girls, the wake boarders, the breaking waves. The cold became less so, enough to stand without teeth chattering. Rachel was way out, and far off she could see tall waves gathering. When the first one arrived it was fine—she dove at the right time, and came up soon enough to open her eyes and prepare herself for the second. She dove under the second, but came up too soon, and the top of the wave caught her and slammed her back down, spinning her ruthlessly. She swallowed seawater, flailed, and tried to find up, but just found down. Just as she had air, there was the roar of another wave breaking and Rachel got caught up and carried under again, smashed like a flimsy string of seaweed into the sandbank. She came up, coughing, pulling her bathers out of her crack.
‘You right, darl?’ a leather-skinned man in bright green budgie smugglers asked and she nodded, speechless. Two teenaged boys sniggered in their board shorts.
She wanted nothing more but to be on dry land again, as far as possible from the waves. Her eyes stung. She stumbled through the wash up to the beach, past the surf lifesavers, past the kids with buckets and spades. In the cold, slimy-tiled toilets, she showered and pulled handfuls of sand out of her bathers, and changed. She would walk out into the glare of the sun to find Lola and Peter waiting in the cafe—to find that nothing had changed.
Chapter 15
For a week now, Rachel has visited Gunther in the morning, and he tells her snippets of his childhood, but nothing more recent. His mother—Mutti –features heavily. The cat appears some mornings but not others, weaving between their legs and leaping up on the kitchen counter to drink from a china saucer beside the toaster. Gunther’s memory beyond boyhood is slippery. Whenever Rachel mentions the RAF, or prison, or Baader-Meinhof, he looks confused.
‘Was ist das? What does that mean?’ he asks, blinking slowly. This morning his nurse was there: a broad-shouldered, dark-skinned woman from Tunisia.
‘He no remember,’ the woman tells Rachel as she counts pills. She goes on to wash the teacups and heat soup on the stove. ‘They want to put him in a home, he get lost already six time. He think he on a boat. Did you hear ‘im say?’
Rachel nods.
‘Crazy man, but I seen it all. I tell you. He not bad as some.’
Gunther holds the box to his throat but it only buzzes.
Rachel doesn’t know what questions to ask him or what to make of it all. This isn’t what she came for, these broken shards. She came to fill in the past. She came to try to understand.
When the nurse starts to gather her things to leave, Rachel stops her by the door. Gunther is staring out of the window again.
‘Does he have any family, any other people that come?’ Rachel asks, in a half-whispered voice.
The woman wrinkles her nose as she thinks. Rachel touches her arm. ‘He’s my father,’ she says. ‘I need to know.’
Slowly, the nurse nods. ‘One brother came, long time ago. I don’t think he come back, but he might talk,’ she says. She digs in her purse for a mobile phone and then scrolls through until she finds his name. Hans. He gave her the number, the nurse says, told her to call if Gunther dies. She finds a pen and scrap of paper and holds it out so that Rachel can copy it down.
Rachel returns to the hostel that afternoon, a sliver of hope in her mind. There is a man standing in the lobby, staring at her, eating a bright green apple. For a moment she looks past him, thinking it can’t be—but it is him, unmistakeably: Eli. His head is still shorn, and the planes of his face are the only recognisable things in this foreign place.
‘Rachel,’ he says, and hugs her. He smells of sap and sweat. ‘And so we meet again.’
‘What are you doing here?’ She holds him tight, then releases him and looks up into his eyes.
‘Ben told me where to find you. I’m going to see him tomorrow, to visit him and Ava. I wanted to talk to you first.’
‘I thought you were in Nepal, trekking.’
‘Long story.’
They go up to the room she shares. Between the bunk beds, there is a small table with chairs, and the roommates are gone. There is an electric kettle and she makes them tea. Eli sits, silent, on the chair that is too small for his long body. He rubs the sides of his head with both hands.
‘So, you are going to see Ben and Ava?’ Rachel says. She wishes that he would ask her about Gunther, so that she can tell someone.
Eli nods. ‘It’s something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since you came, really. You brought it all back. And speaking to Ben again, of course. It brought her back.’
‘Who?’
‘Talia.’
‘Ben’s wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ben told me the story. He said you helped him when she died.’
Eli stands up and walks the circumference of the small room. He tries to push the window open but it is painted shut. ‘Why do they never let you get fresh air in these places?’
‘Eli?’
‘Okay.’ He sits on the edge of a bottom bunk and leans forward, resting his arms on his knees. ‘I loved her, Rachel. This is what I need to tell Ben. Before she died—I loved her. We were having an affair.’
‘Oh, fuck.’
‘Fuck, I know. She wasn’t going to see her uncle, that was her excuse. She was coming to meet me. We had met six months ago. She volunteered at a clinic where I was doing my internship—a vet clinic. She had this way with the cats. I never understood cats and they knew this, but as soon as she walked past a cat, it would lie down and allow her to stroke the length of its body. Any cat—I’d never seen anything like it. She had the same effect on me.’
Eli stands and moves over to the table, then abruptly sits. ‘She was so lonely then, she wasn’t used to being alone. It was her and Ava all day, alone. After becoming pregnant she never finished her law degree. She told me she had meant the domesticity to be a temporary stop on her journey, but it felt like the end destination. Like it was all there was ever going to be. She volunteered at the clinic to get out of the house. She wasn’t sure she was even interested in law anymore, so she thought of becoming a vet. We would have a drink together after the shift ended, around three in the afternoon.’ He takes a sip of his tea.
‘She kept her hair up in the clinic, in a bun, but that first time we went to a bar, she took out the clip and shook it free. It fell past her shoulders, midway down her back. And red—the reddest red. I couldn’t help but stare, and she pinched my cheek. “You’re cute,” she said. “And so easily corrupted.” Well, I was drunk after two beers. She took me back to her house and we undressed, giggling. She showed me the crescent scar from her caesarean, where Ava was lifted out of her womb. She showed me how to touch her. I had only turned eighteen, I’d only been with one or two high school girls, fumbling in the dark. She looked at the clock and said “shit” and jumped in the shower. Her family was coming home. She wanted me to stay around to meet Ava and Ben, to pretend I was just a friend who came over after work. It was so strange—I think that she wanted to see how far she could go. I felt, when I met them, like it was written all over my face, like he could smell her on my breath. But Ben was pleased because Talia was happy because she’d made a friend, and since I was so much younger—I don’t think the thought even crossed his mind. They were so welcoming. This beautiful, funny family. She had them and she had me. I knew I would only ever get what was leftover from her other, real life. He looks up at Rachel. ‘You think I am awful now, for lying all of this time. For letting Ben believe.’
Rachel shakes her head. ‘I’m just in shock, is all. Do you think Ben—’
Eli shakes his head vehemently. ‘Ben doesn’t know.’
‘But he’s a detective—a private investigator—his job is knowing.’
Eli sighs. ‘I think Ben had this idea of Talia from the beginning, from the moment he fell in love with her, and she told me that she was always trying to catch up to that, to the perfection he saw. But after Ava was born, she didn’t even know who that was anymore, that girl who he saw and fell in love with. Being with me was a way of shattering it, but she still put that mask on with Ben. The ideal mother, the lovely wife. Talia was a very good liar. And Ben wanted very much to believe.’
‘So when she died, you were there?’
Eli stands up again and starts pacing the room. ‘We were to meet at the bus stop near my flat where we had met several times before, as soon as she could find a reason to get away. I would always wait in the cafe across the street from the bus stop because I could see the buses come and go. I told her to take a taxi rather than the bus. The buses weren’t safe that year, eighteen people had died in a single explosion at the beginning of the summer, but she told me she was fine. She didn’t like to spend money, then, because she wasn’t making any, and she hated to use what Ben made. I tried to give her money for a taxi but she threw it back it me, “I’m not that kind of girl,” she snapped, “I don’t charge!” So I didn’t try that again. I told her if she was going to ride the bus to always stand beside the rear doors and to get off if she ever saw someone suspicious getting on. She rolled her eyes, but she did keep watch, and this was sometimes why she was late. She would change buses if she saw someone with very dark skin or someone carrying a big bag. A young man whose hands shook when he gave the driver his coins. She noticed things. Small things that she would draw your attention to—a man at the markets who was missing his left earlobe, the way one of my eyes squints sometimes when I smile. She wanted me to tell her once which of her breasts was smaller than the other and I couldn’t. They were the same, I swore it, although I enjoyed trying to tell the difference. “Wrong,” she said to me, “The right one is smaller. You men are blind. Even Ava can tell.” Ava still breastfed, something that Talia said was one of the only parts of motherhood she’d managed to do right. Sometimes, when we made love, her milk would come. I would feel strange then, a different guilt. I was already taking from her husband, but it was worse to also take that which belonged to her child.’
Eli has stopped pacing and looks down at Rachel. Her cheeks are flushed. Now this image is in her head—Eli at this beautiful woman’s breasts, naked, spent from having fucked her.
‘God, I’m sorry Rachel, I shouldn’t be telling you this. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’ve never said any of it out loud.’
Rachel looks up and across the room, into the intensity of his gaze. She looks away first.
‘It’s okay, keep going. Back to the bus stop, though. What happened next?’
‘She was late, again, but that was nothing new. I sat sipping my coffee, eating a pastry, trying to think about something else. My phone was in my hands, her number a thumb-press away, but I didn’t want her to think I was impatient. Or over-eager. Like I couldn’t give her space. The bus pulled up then, and there were a lot of people getting off, kids on a school trip, and she was stuck behind them. The bomber had been standing at the bus stop all that time, waiting to get on, and this was the bus she chose.’
‘She?’
Eli nodded. ‘Now it is not unheard of, but that was one of the first women to be a suicide bomber. If she was a man, the soldiers would have checked her ID card. Maybe she would not have gotten on. But none of us were expecting it then. She got on, paid the driver, and before Rachel could leave, before I could see anything more than a flash of her hair through a dirty bus window, the woman detonated. It was like the air was sucked from the world and blown back in. It was force as I have never felt. I fell from my chair, got up, the window in front of me had shattered and I leapt through it. The bus was a fireball, it was no longer even a bus. I felt sure she was dead, but I began searching, stepping over bodies, ignoring the shouts from soldiers who were trying to put out the blaze.’ He pauses.
‘Even though it was chaos, it was silent too. I don’t know if my hearing was gone from the explosion but all I noticed was all of these people milling around in silence. If it wasn’t for the bodies and the charred shell of a bus it could have been a street fair… only there were arms and legs—the explosive was so powerful that there were body parts scattered through the street. I can still picture it. A leg lying on its own in the gutter. A forearm and hand caught inside the doorframe. The smell of gunpowder and burnt flesh. I can remember these limbs, these smells, like it was yesterday.’
‘But you found her?’
‘She had been knocked out of the bus by the force of the explosion, but she was in one piece. Her hair, that was how I recognised her. She was not alive. She had been hit by some shrapnel in the neck, and it must have severed an artery. She was covered in blood. She was almost out the rear door when the bomb went off, so a few people around her survived with only injuries. But fourteen other people died on that day, three of them children. The suicide bomber was twenty-three years old. She was engaged to be married. She lived in a Palestinian refugee camp. Later, in the paper, the government said that she was pregnant when she blew herself up, that this was why she volunteered for such a mission. Because she would have otherwise brought great shame on her family.’
Eli has a sip of his tea and carries on pacing.
‘When I found Talia, I grabbed a paramedic straightaway. I held her thin fingers in my own while he checked her pulse and her wounds. I kissed her on her mouth and it was still soft, there was the warmth of blood. Her handbag was gone, her phone. I stayed with her while they brought a sheet and covered her, while they transported all of the injured to hospital.’
Rachel watches the crease between his eyebrows deepen.
‘I heard Ben before I saw him. He was shouting her name. He had been on the phone with her as she was getting off the bus. She had kept up her lie, saying she was going to visit her uncle. When he heard the explosion and then the line went dead, he panicked—he drove from work straightaway, but it was so hard to get close to the intersection. By the time he found us most of the injured had been taken away. The flames had been extinguished, there was only the blackened skeleton of a bus and the covered dead and scattered limbs and all of these people milling around, silent. He was pleading with a policeman, asking whether there had been a redhead, his Talia, and they were telling him to check the hospitals. I went over to him. He looked through me, but I reminded him that I was Talia’s friend, from the clinic. I said I had been sitting in a cafe, just studying, when I heard it happen. I came over to see if I could help and saw her among the wreckage. I led him to where she lay and watched as he pulled back the sheet. His wail is a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.’
Rachel stands up, walks over to Eli and puts her arm around him. ‘Here, sit,’ she says, motioning to a chair. He does.
‘I loved her, Rachel, but what I felt was nothing compared to his grief. He fell apart with it. I had to help him to walk away from there—he would have stayed with her. He would have lay down beside her and died. I could forget that I was grieving too, because helping him gave me a purpose, it was a way to forget my guilt. I was just being selfish, I realise now. Ben was a piece of Talia to me, a way of remembering her, and I didn’t want to let go of him.’
‘So you kept seeing him?’
Eli nods. His face is lined with pain.
‘I went off to do my army service not long after, but we stayed in touch. I sent postcards to him and little gifts to Ava. He was so grateful to me, for my kindness, but I hated myself for this, Rachel, and I was filled with anger. I took it out on the Palestinians that I came across every day, as if each of them were individually responsible for her death, as if each of them were to blame for the way things turned out, the way I lied to Ben.’
Rachel reaches over and puts her hand on top of Eli’s. She doesn’t know what to say to him. What can she say? His fingers twitch beneath hers.
‘So you are not the only one living with a guilt that is like a slow trickle of water, drowning you bit by bit,’ Eli says.
Rachel nods. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me. But I’m sorry you’ve suffered so much from this.’
‘I want to tell Ben.’
‘To make you feel better?’ Rachel asks.
‘To make him stop thinking I’m a good person.’
‘But if you do—’
‘What?’
‘You break his memory, his trust, your friendship, everything. He will wonder if there were other men and whether Talia even loved him.’
‘So I should keep lying?
‘I don’t know, I’m just saying think about the consequences. You might feel better, but Ben will be devastated.’
‘So I’m selfish to want to tell him, is that what you’re saying?’ Eli stands, narrowing his eyes at Rachel. ‘I find it hard to believe, after everything, that this is the advice you give me.’
‘Hang on, you’re taking it the wrong way.’
He stomps out of the room and slams the insubstantial door behind him. The walls reverberate.
‘Hang on, Eli. Come back. Let’s talk.’ Nothing is turning out as she had imagined. She lies down in her bed and curls her legs up, holding her knees. The scenes of the explosion are in her mind, mixed with scenes of Eli and Talia—and she can’t decide which disturbs her more: the dismembered limbs, the charred bus, the pregnant suicide bomber—or that Eli loved Talia.
Rachel is still married, she’s still a mother, and she has just completely alienated him—but she has imagined Eli lying beside her more than once. Talia had this many, many times. She shudders at her own jealousy. She envies a woman who is dead, with a little daughter left behind. It is almost too ugly to bear.
