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Authors: Kevin Brophy

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BOOK: Another Kind of Country
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‘Patrick! Dear, dear, you’re drenched!’ She stepped back into the surgery hallway, furled her umbrella and regarded Patrick with a kind of bemusement.

‘You’ll catch your death, whatever will your father say?’

‘Is my father still here, Mrs Oliphant?’

She went on tut-tutting about his wet hair, about the threat of pneumonia. He had to assure her that it wasn’t necessary to fetch a towel for him. He had to ask again if his father were still there.

Mrs Oliphant’s round head bobbed up and down. ‘Poor man, he’s with his last patient, Mrs Stafford. I told him I’d wait but he insisted that I go – it’s my bridge night, you know. We were running on time until Mrs Cole’s appointment, she had twins last month, you know, and you know what your father is like, forever helpful, forgetful of the clock when he’s with his patients . . .’

Patrick had grown used to Mrs Oliphant’s songs of praise of his godlike father. He tuned out. To Patrick his father was a remote figure who wore bow ties and only rarely used his pair of season tickets to Wolverhampton Wanderers. Which was good news for Patrick and his pals.

Mrs Oliphant finally reminded herself again of her bridge night and said that she must go. She didn’t think that Dr Miller would be much longer with Mrs Stafford and anyway Patrick knew his way around the place and if he liked he could make himself a nice cup of tea, it would warm him up while he was waiting.

Mrs Oliphant drew the door shut behind her with surprising softness. Dr Roger Miller’s surgery premises seemed tomblike after her departure, as though she had taken with her into the wet night all trace of energy, of vitality.

Patrick stood for a minute in the darkness of Mrs Oliphant’s reception room, the walls filled with shelves of manila folders, the curling edges of ancient pages peeping like dry leaves from broken mouths. He ran his finger along a line of files and they crackled like dead foliage. His father’s history was typed in these files, he knew, each page signed off with his father’s indecipherable scrawl. So many hours, so many days. So many weeks and years spent in the rooms upstairs where his father treated his women patients. He wondered how his father could endure it.

He looked in the small
kitchen at the back of the ground floor. Mrs Oliphant’s advice about a hot cup of tea came back to him but Patrick thought he couldn’t be bothered. He wondered how much longer his father would be with Mrs Whatever-her-name-was.

There was no sound from upstairs. The house seemed settled in its own silence. He looked into Waiting Room No. 1, then Waiting Room No. 2 on the other side of the hallway. Both rooms were identical: flower-print curtains, beige carpet, stiff-backed dining-room chairs ranged along the walls. No copies of
Reveille
or
Titbits
here:
Country Life
,
Horse & Hound
and other assorted glossies were neatly arranged on the mahogany tables in Dr Roger Miller’s non-National Health waiting rooms. Two such rooms were required, Patrick had heard his father explain, because his patients sometimes wished to wait alone, in the privacy they were paying for.

Patrick peeped between the window curtains, saw the sheen of his father’s Jaguar at the side of the house. He watched the rain bounce off the polished bodywork like useless pellets.

The house seemed to creak and yaw in the rain. What could be keeping his father? Maybe Mrs What’s-her-name had left quietly while he had been daydreaming in the kitchen. Maybe his father was merely scrawling his spidery notes on more pages for Mrs Oliphant to file away on her crowded shelves.

At the foot of the staircase in the hallway he stood listening. Only the whispering silence of the house came down to him. He climbed three steps, four, and stopped to listen. Still silence. He went higher until he could just see over the edge of the landing. Between the carved railings of the balustrade he could see that a sliver of light shone from the edge of the door to his father’s room.

Light but no sound. Surely his father
was just scrawling away at his notes.

Afterwards he would never be able to explain to himself why he tiptoed up the carpeted staircase. He would remember only that his heart was pounding, as if in his teenage heart he already knew that what awaited him at the top of the darkened stairs would forever change his life.

He stood listening on the landing. A low moaning of someone in pain came from the consulting room. He edged closer to the door. The door was barely ajar but the knife edge of light was enough for him to see inside.

Mrs What’s-her-name, beehive hair a collapsed mess, was propped up against the raised head of the doctor’s consulting couch. Naked from the waist up, her small white breasts seemed to stare accusingly at Patrick. Dr Roger Miller stood beside the couch, one hand cradling Mrs What’s-her-name’s left breast. His other hand was stroking the woman’s inner thigh. Her thighs were marble pillars of whiteness framed between her brown stocking tops and her white skirt pushed up around her waist.

Patrick could barely breathe.

He saw his father’s hand push upwards between the white thighs towards the brown mossy thatch. The white thighs stirred, spread themselves.

The woman moaned.

This is not real. Move.

But his feet refused
to budge. In a moment, he knew, he would scream.

He didn’t. He watched the woman’s hand fumble, saw the white hand emerge from his father’s trousers, heard his father moan.

Move. Or vomit and then faint into your own sick.

He moved, somehow without sound.

The moaning was louder, more hurried as he picked up his schoolbag at the bottom of the stairs and let himself out quietly into the night. Fear and panic drove him at full tilt through the blinding rain. Or maybe his own tears were what blinded him.

He could hear the music playing even before he opened the door of the big house on Compton Avenue. Donald Peers, ‘The Longest Mile Is the Last Mile Home’. Sometimes he thought his mother did nothing else all day except load records on the spindle of the mahogany-cased radiogram.

She was waltzing between the coffee tables in the sitting room, singing along with the radiogram, a lighted cigarette replacing a partner in her left hand.

She ceased her singing when she saw Patrick, dripping, soaked in the hallway.

‘Your father’s not home yet, Patrick.’

He let his schoolbag fall on the carpeted floor.

His mother came and stood beside him. He could smell the alcohol on her breath.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen him, Patrick, have you? No, of course you haven’t, silly me.’

He hadn’t hugged his mother for years but he put his arms around her and held her small, thin body tight.

‘Patrick, you’re soaking! You’ll destroy my
lovely frock – I put it on specially for your father this evening.’ She tried to draw away from him but he tightened his embrace. ‘Please, dear, you must get out of those wet things – and I must check on your father’s dinner, he should be home soon. I never know what keeps him so late.’

Something clicked in his sodden brain.
She knows. But she doesn’t want to know
.

He let her go then, stood looking at her, at the stains of wetness on the pale blue flowered dress, the necklace of pearls, the permed hair.

He knew he would say nothing. To say anything would be to disturb, most likely destroy, her whole existence, her routine, her home, all of it as carefully crafted as her perm.

He told his mother that he wouldn’t eat, his mouth was still sore after the dentist and anyway he wasn’t hungry.

Later he was in bed, lying awake in the darkness, when he heard the hall door opening, his mother’s words of welcome. He imagined the cheeks kissed, how was your day, you must be famished.

He wondered if Mrs What’s-her-name was exchanging the same civilities with Mr What’s-his-name. Did she manipulate
his
penis in the same way she handled Dr Roger Miller’s?

He didn’t want to think about his own parents lying together in bed. He didn’t want to be connected to them in any way. He could see that, somehow, he’d have to look out for his mother but he knew that from now on he would have as little as possible to do with Dr Roger Miller. It did not seem possible that he was even related to Dr Roger Miller, Obstetrician/Gynaecologist.

Patrick Miller, aged fourteen, wondered if he might even be a foundling.

Eleven

September 1989

East Berlin

German Democratic Republic

General Reder will organize it
.

Rosa’s confident words came
back to Miller when the contact was made on Monday. For all their sakes – especially his own – he hoped that the glaring unsuitability of the approach was not typical of how General Reder conducted his affairs: a young fellow bumping into him in an uncrowded street, a muttered apology, the folded note pressed into Miller’s palm while the delivery man hurried away. It had about as much finesse as that of the bull in the proverbial china shop.

Miller wondered if it was merely a ludicrous pretence, specially designed to be noticed by observing eyes. He’d been in East Berlin now since 1980, was accepted as a contributing member of the working class, yet he never doubted that he was watched. Even for a believer like himself, it was the price of living in a society under siege.

And the longer you went on living under the unseen, watchful eyes, the harder it was to cling to your belief. It wasn’t just the TV images. Even the dogs in the street could smell the rotten carcass of the regime. And that was it, Miller told himself: the regime, not the system.
You gave what you could, you accepted only as much as you needed
– this was a truth forgotten by the old men at the top, the grey faces in their grey suits and uniforms.
But you, Patrick Miller, sometime Englishman, cannot forget: you’ve come too far to forget
.

He pocketed
the piece of paper, swung his briefcase briskly. The typescript of a collection of workers’ poems inside the briefcase wouldn’t take too long to read that night. Why a small company in the north-east of England had contracted to publish an English edition was yet another puzzle to Miller. Miller’s guess – never spoken, never written – was that East German (i.e. Soviet) money went into the funding of the radical publishing house in the north-east of England.

In approved East German literary journals the English publication would be trumpeted as another success for proletarian art, for the superiority of the East German state. And, no doubt, fellow-travellers in England would applaud and praise the work.
If you were still there, yours would be one of the voices raised in praise
.

For a moment Miller wondered if the folded paper in his pocket might not in fact be from Axel. But only for a moment. Axel’s material would never come in so amateurish a fashion as a bump-and-handover by a youngster in torn jeans and a silver stud in his left ear.

Miller hurried homeward. Having an unread note from an uncertain source in your pocket was not a healthy idea.

His flat was on the top floor of a peeling block near the Hackescher Market. It was a noisy location, opposite the railway station, but Miller enjoyed his view of the trains rattling along the elevated tracks. In the September evening the peeling pillars of the station platform caught the fading light of the sun and shone as though sheened with new life.

He watched a train pull in, its windows mirrored with light. He watched the waiting passengers stand back to allow passengers to alight; he watched how those waiting boarded without fuss or pushing. No matter what he saw or heard – or feared – this worker’s republic was still admirable: it was still a society that valued good manners.

He waited
at his window until the train clanked away eastwards.

Unfolded, the note was no bigger than a matchbox. The message was blunt:
Ostbahnhof Currywurst 20.15.

The writing was small, tidy. There was no signature. He wondered if it was Rosa’s hand. He hoped not. No matter how you disguised your writing, the graphology experts at Normannenstrasse could always unpick the disguise. And if for any reason they couldn’t, the Stasi HQ did not lack for less sophisticated interrogators who would simply beat the admission out of you.

Miller tore the scrap of paper into even tinier pieces which he flushed down the lavatory.

He left his apartment just after 6.30. The evening was darkening, the lights on in the small
Kneipe
beside the arches under the railway track. He sat at the window in the bar reading that day’s
Neues Deutschland
. The Party newspaper was full of the usual platitudes about quotas filled and targets achieved by the national economy but Miller held a sneaking regard for it. He just wouldn’t like to be writing a column for it, always attempting to second-guess the censor who would measure your words against the Party’s own orthodox template.

He turned the pages, glanced through the window at the stragglers heading home. None delayed, studied him through the glass.
As if you’d be able to tell
.

Nor could he tell on the platform, waiting for his train. He stood reading his folded newspaper, remembering to turn over the pages. Around him rose the murmur of low conversation. A gaggle of teenagers with spiked hair and a couple of shared bottles of beer. A courting couple holding hands. A mascaraed older woman with her dyed yellow hair peeking from a scarf and a near-hairless little dog straining on a lead. At the far end of the platform a tall fellow in an overcoat patrolled like a sentry, cigarette glowing like a warning light in the gathering gloom.
As if you could tell
.

The train had
more empty seats than passengers. Miller wondered about the wisdom of a meeting in such exposed circumstances. Especially when you didn’t know if you were on a wild-goose chase. Axel would never set up such a meet.

Still, you had to suppose General Reder knew what he was doing. You didn’t survive the Battle of Kirovograd and a Soviet POW camp without a modicum of cunning.

BOOK: Another Kind of Country
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