Hand Me Down World (23 page)

Ramona is mostly a lump in the dark. But then a wail will come from her—not loud, but a woebegone sound that rises out of that still lump on the bed. I wonder if she is looking down at her dead husband with the scissors sticking out of his armpit. The lump then turns into a face peering across at me. ‘Was I doing it again?' she asks.

‘No,' I always tell her. Because if she isn't aware of what she was dreaming she soon will be.

‘Are you ok?' asked Paolo.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes. A bit of water went down the wrong way.'

Flat land met us off the mountain and we walked for hours without stop. Farm animals raised their heads to look at us. A chained goat sat in the roadside grass chewing and staring. It seemed to know we weren't from its world. It seemed to know everything about me in particular. As it chewed, its eyes followed me.

My knees hurt. They had never been a problem. The same with my back. But now it ached. I told Paolo and immediately I felt his hand exploring the region of my lower back. I lay down on the grass. He knelt beside me moving my legs and arranging my arms until he had tricked and stretched the ache out of my back and I was ready to carry on.

At some point he thought to say we were in Austria. I wasn't aware that we had stepped across a white painted line. But then I saw the rooftops and spires in the distance.

In the village Paolo bought some bread and cheese, and more water. He bought bus tickets. There was a short wait, then we were moving through countryside. I am sure I was the only one on the bus who didn't know their destination. Paolo placed a steadying hand on my knee. Perhaps it was to prevent me toppling into the aisle. In quick time we arrived at a larger town. I thought this was how it would be all the way to Berlin. A succession of towns, each bigger than the previous one. So it was disappointing to arrive at a smaller town. The hand moved to my shoulder to steady my nerves, to reassure. The boat will be by soon. Do not worry. The hand felt like a dead weight now, such as that which rests on the neck of a dog to hold it still.

In this village people looked at me. They didn't look at Paolo. Even the small children. While Paolo was in a travel shop I crossed the road to some public toilets and changed into my hotel maid's uniform. When Paolo came out of the travel place his broad smiling face changed. He seemed puzzled, but no one else in that village was.

He showed me the tickets, waved them in my face. A ticket for another bus and a train ticket. A ticket to Berlin. The ticket was in his name. He'd had to show his passport. He put the tickets in his trouser pocket and wandered off. The dog chased after its master.

I followed him up the street we were on, and down another, across a square, through a series of back alleys. Finally we came to what he had been looking for. In a small lobby I waited just behind his shoulder. After he paid the receptionist I followed him along a hall through a door to a room with one bed. The sheet hadn't been pulled over the lip of the duvet. I rearranged the pillows. Without a word Paolo began to undress. The light from the shuttered windows played over his fine body. When he saw what I was staring at he looked annoyed and moved the tickets to under the small lamp on the bedside vanity. He told me to take off my hotel uniform. He wanted to wash my clothes. I told him I could wash them. I don't like the idea of a man washing my under things. He shrugged and went into the other room. I heard the bath taps running. When he came back and saw I was still in my uniform he said tomorrow I would be going to the city. Tomorrow I will be on the train to Berlin. If I want to avoid suspicion I need to look like I belong on the train.

I told him I needed to be on that train. Need, he said, was another one of those things that makes people suspicious. I should keep that need to myself. I should look like I've been on that same train a dozen times before and there is nothing left to see or experience. ‘Here,' he said, patting the chair by the window. I walked over to it and sat down. Then he said, ‘Look out the window and tell me what you see.' When I started to describe a balcony, a roof with aerials, a pigeon, he cut me off. He said when I looked out the train window I must appear bored. ‘You understand? Pretend to be bored, as if everything flashing by in the window you have seen before on many, many occasions.'

He told me to think of the most boring thing I could think of. I know what that is. ‘Good,' he said. ‘Now look out the window.' I was conscious of him moving behind me, checking me from different angles. ‘That's very good. Now tell me what you were thinking of.'

I told him. Making beds. He gave a surprised look then burst out laughing. He bent down to kiss my forehead. He said I was from a different planet. But that was all right. He patted my head. The way he did so made me comfortable about getting out of my clothes. He wouldn't do anything. When I undressed I saw that I was wrong. I was no longer a pet. I was back to being a woman. I was back to being a need, an object on a shelf. He reached for that thing. I felt his hand on my breast. There was no pleasure in his face. None at all. I wondered, why is this man touching in this way? I know what a powerful and complicated thing need is. I know what a two-faced monster it is. Ramona never likes to hear me talk about need in this way because then she starts to think differently about her dead husband. She has come this far without feeling sympathy. It is important for her to carry on in the same way. To change now would only bring her back to an unbearable place. She does not want to feel regret over her husband's death.

I can see that. So when I talk to her about need I talk about the goal of seeing my boy, of getting my boy back in my arms. A need such as that obscures everything else. Even physical pain will bend to its will. The need in Paolo was not as simple as mine. His need was mixed up with other feelings to do with guilt. So when he reached out and touched my breast I helped him by laying my hand on top of his. I stroked his fingers until I saw the confusion and disappointment in himself leave his face, and a look replace it, a look that reflected only how my breast felt under his fingertips. That kind of feeling is nothing compared to the need I felt, and so I could satisfy him, just as I have so many hotel guests. Some of those guests have behaved like pigs in a trough. Others just want to feel that it is all right to be who they are, to feel the way they do; I think Paolo was like that.

Afterwards he bathed me, washed me down with soap and cloth. He dried me. He pulled back the duvet and laid me down. I did as he asked and closed my eyes. I listened to my clothes sloshing about in the bath. Then I must have slept. When I woke Paolo was standing beside the bed looking down at my face. My clothes were folded on the chair. He had been to the laundrette. The clothes were dry—and it was time to go.

He put me on the bus which would take me to the place where I would catch the train to Berlin. He handed me the tickets. On the train ticket I saw that he had changed Paolo to Paola. For the duration of the trip he said I was to forget my own name. I was to forget that and if anyone asked I was to say my name was Paola. Well of course I had no trouble following what he said. Paolo would get on a different bus and go back to the first village we had come to earlier in the day. The next morning he would walk back over the mountain pass.

There is not much to say about the next part. Everything went to plan. I got off the bus and found the station, I found the right platform, the right train. I felt clean in my clean clothes. I felt new. In that smart blue coat I felt like I belonged on that train.

I am reluctant to describe what I saw out the window. I don't want to sound like a tourist. I can't say how many beds I made, over and over, but I don't imagine all the beds I made on the train to Berlin is near to the number I have made in my life. For a time the train ran alongside a river. As the hills closed in I began to worry the world was about to play another trick on me. Then, just on dark, but with enough light to see, we left the river, the hills disappeared and we moved onto a broad plain. I felt a pleasing surge beneath me as the train picked up speed. I looked back at the shadows in the window. I was still making beds. A man sitting opposite me smiled. I looked back at the window. There was nothing he could do for me.

twenty-four

Defoe once told me about the journey of eels. He was in one of those moods where his homeland shone like a lamp through the darkest weeks of the Berlin winter. Eels, he said, slithered over grassland and through shingle to the sea. There they changed into sea-going creatures able to swim the length of an ocean. They breed in the depths, then their offspring swim back the way of the parents. When they arrive at the shoreline they change into freshwater eels and crawl through shingle, across grassland, to enter the creek where as a child Defoe sat crouched and ready with a stick and a nail poking out its end. I told him I felt sorry for that eel, and I didn't like the heart of that boy either. He laughed in the way that people do when they think I am joking. He went on to say that his father used to smoke those eels and hang them up to dry. He said they looked like football socks hanging on the clothesline.

I remembered that eel story the first time the inspector asked me what happened when I arrived in Berlin. Berlin is a different stage of my journey. I left ‘Paola' on the train. When I stepped onto the platform I was back to Ines. That smart blue coat of hers gave me the same invisibility as my hotel uniform had in that village. I had the money Paolo and all the others had given me. I had my plastic bag with my hotel uniform, toothbrush and sticking knife, and I had the road book I'd stolen from the snail woman.

Unlike the eel I had no idea what to do next or where to go. I hadn't thought about which rock to look under in order to find Jermayne. I didn't want to stick out like the last fish in the sea so I followed the people down the escalators and through the exit doors to the cold air outside the station, and here the crowd broke up and people hurried away from one another. Across a square, a few figures on the edge of the dark walked along followed by dogs with hanging heads.

I took one look up at the cloudy night and turned around and went back inside the station. People sat in plastic chairs outside places offering food. I wanted to sit down, but I didn't want to buy anything. So I joined the end of another crowd walking towards a different set of escalators and found myself on another platform. A train pulled in. The doors opened. I felt the crowd press from behind. It was so much easier to go with it. To turn around would only bring me back to the problem of where to go and what to do. So I entered the carriage. There were plenty of seats. I sat down. No one looked at me. By now I was tired of making beds. I thought this time I will just try to look like everyone else.

The stops came quickly. More people got off than got on. Soon the carriage was almost empty. At the next stop I got off and walked to the other side of the platform, and within a few minutes a train was pulling in. I got on and travelled back in the direction I had come. This time I knew where I was headed. And there, at Alexanderplatz—where I had first arrived—I arrived again. The escalators had been switched off. This time I climbed up to the level with the shops and kiosks. I bought a bottle of water and some wafers at one of the kiosks and sat down in one of the white plastic chairs. For five or ten minutes I am sure I looked like someone who is meant to be there. But as soon as I stood up from that chair I was back to being lost. I followed another crowd down the escalators to the same platform as before. This time I rode the train to the last stop. I got out and walked to the other side of the platform. The train was already there and, as if it had been expecting me, its doors open. It took forty minutes to deliver me back to Alexanderplatz.

When I left the station police vans sat watching the empty space of the square. I went back inside and found the women's toilets. The receptionist handed me the right change to open the door to a cubicle. The toilet was clean and the tiles were a gleaming white that never sleeps. It was warm and comfortable in there. Every now and then a toilet flushed and my head would snap up from a drowsy sleep. People came and went in the cubicles either side of mine. No one stayed for long. My plan was to spend the night in there but eventually someone banged on the door and said something in a loud and unpleasant voice. It was the receptionist. I came out and left her muttering and shaking her head.

Back in the main area of the station the crowd had thinned out. I headed for the escalators. On the platform I found a waiting train. When I sat down my head fell against the window. The seat wouldn't let me lie on it and I couldn't risk falling asleep. So I went back to making beds. My back hurt and my calves were tight from all the walking with Paolo. If Paolo was with me now I am sure the world would fall into place around his broad smile. The different stations came and went. I'd made my last bed when I woke to someone shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes to a young man in ordinary clothes. He had some kind of ID in his hand. He knelt in the aisle to bring himself to eye level with me. There was no one else in the carriage, although in the next carriage down I could see another black person looking up the aisle— looking without seeing. The young man crouching by me spoke softly in German, then, getting no response he switched to English. Politely he asked to see my ticket. My answer had a tiring effect on him. He looked into my face. Slowly he stood up. There he remained in the aisle blocking my escape until the train came into the next station. He asked me to follow him. On the platform we waited until the train departed and there was just the two of us. He asked me for my ID. I told him I didn't have any with me. He looked down at my plastic bag, then he looked back into my face. He asked for my name. Ines, I said. He asked me where I was from. Italy. His eyes were still. Where in Italy? I named the beach where I had swum ashore. In Ines' car I'd seen the sign and made a point of remembering it. Then he spoke to me in Italian. The sound of another train arriving drove away the silence. The ticket collector looked over his shoulder. He returned to his softly spoken English. He said I was lucky I had got him and not one of his colleagues. He led me to the ticket machine and showed me how to purchase a ticket and how to validate it. He asked if I had any money. I produced a fifty-euro note Paolo had collected from the partridge hunters. The amount surprised the ticket man. He was regretting his decision to let me off. He looked up the platform at the train coming into the station. He wanted to be on that train. He bought me a ticket, validated it. The train pulled in and we entered different carriages.