Hand Me Down World (24 page)

I rode the trains for the rest of the night. For each new trip I bought a new ticket. For most of the night the trains were almost empty. I had no idea of time passing. At some point I woke to find someone wedged in beside me, another two bodies sat opposite, eyes and faces poking out the tops of their coats.

At Alexanderplatz I got off and followed the crowd up the escalators and headed for the toilets. A receptionist gave me change and I went through to my cubicle. I hung the plastic bag on the hook behind the door and sat down. I thought,
unless I leave the railway station I will never find my boy.

This time I went out the other side of the station and followed a path. It led under some young trees to a large fountain where people gathered to take pictures. I tagged onto the end of a group of tourists and followed them through the doors of a nearby church. People took photographs in the dark. A black man, a man of the church, took off his glasses. He rubbed at his eyes, he replaced his glasses and looked off in another direction. I waited for him to look again as I knew he would. Yes, pastor. I am still here where you saw me.

I sat on the end of a pew for much of the day. Eventually a woman came up and spoke softly in my ear.

I walked back to the station. From one of the kiosks I thought I had bought a cup of hot tea. Instead I was served a glass of beer and a small saucer of nuts. I ate those and after forcing the beer down I went back to the toilets.

I was back in the sea waiting for the promised boat to come by. I thought,
how do I find my boy? Where is Jermayne?
I sat in there for a long time. Toilets flushed either side of me. I didn't mind it in that cubicle. It was easier, because I knew as soon as I left that cubicle with its sleepless tiles I would have to look like I was on my way to somewhere. Just like the other time there was banging on the door and I was turned out. In the main concourse I caught the eye of a black man in a business suit. His confidence reminded me of Jermayne. Another man sitting in one of the white plastic chairs rolled his head back to laugh just as Jermayne had at the cocktail bar by the hotel pool. A man leant forward with a laptop on his knee. Jermayne's intensity had that same tilt about it. I saw a woman pushing a pram. I saw a beggar woman carrying her child on her hip. Jermayne had picked the baby up off my breast. A person deprived of sleep does not know where they are going. They are led by old instinct. Soon I was back on the train.

twenty-five

According to the testimony I dropped my plastic bag on the platform and the little Frenchman picked it up. I don't know why he made that up.

It was the third night of riding trains. By now I knew I was on the U5. I could relax. I could sleep on the train if I so wished. Other people did. Or I could look up at the little television and watch the weather forecast. The highs and lows over Europe. People playing tennis. Men playing football. A plane crash somewhere. Sometimes I looked through newspapers people left behind. I'd fold a newspaper into a pillow and lean my head against it pressed to the window. This is how I slept now.

I woke to someone shaking my shoulder. The plastic bag was still on my lap but another ticket collector stood swaying in the aisle. This one was older, grey, with a moustache, white eyebrows, pale eyes that drown kittens. He showed me his ID. I didn't have a ticket. As I'd come down off the escalators I had seen the train and rushed to catch it; other people were doing the same and we all swept by the ticket machine. I remember rushing as if I too could not afford to miss it. Now I was asked to leave my seat, to stand in the aisle where everyone could see my shame. I followed the ticket collector to the doors. The start of a platform came into view. When another person held up two tickets and spoke to the collector, I saw the back of the collector's head nod. He turned to me and said something I didn't understand, then he moved on leaving me with the stranger who had come to my rescue.

Bernard doesn't stand up very well to close physical description, and I want to be kind so I will concentrate on his finer aspects. Beneath a mop of dark curly hair with bits of grey and red his smile had not left his face. He wore a silver earring. The hair, his smiling eyes, and that earring—that's all there was to him. The rest of him was coat. A long black heavy coat. It hung off his shoulders and reached an old pair of red sneakers. When I thanked him his smile brightened, but I did not see any need or neediness. Instead I saw something glitter from his front teeth. A small diamond, a gift from an aunt, the last diamond from a necklace that had belonged to the aunt's great-grandmother. I would find this out later. In Paris his friend was a dentist. Yes— that and the rest of the story he told the inspector would come out later.

The train slowed down for the station. Faces on the platform rushed by the windows. The doors opened and I followed my new friend out to the station platform and up a flight of steps. At the top step he stopped and introduced himself. I did the same. ‘Ines,' he said. ‘Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?' First I had to ask him something. Why did he have two tickets? He smiled—he seemed to warm to me more for having asked that question. He said the collector only looked at the valid one. The other one he picked up from the floor. He told the ticket collector we had got separated in the crowd. There was something else I needed to ask—why me? He shrugged and turned his hands out. He looked away and back again with his diamond-crusted smile, his eyes dancing around me. ‘If you must know,' he said, ‘it is because I have seen you on the trains.' He raised his eyes but I had no more questions and we moved up to the street above the subway. The sky looked damaged in a way I had not seen before. I wondered if I should start making beds. Then I thought, no. I want to look. I want to see. We stopped at a road for a tram to squeal around a corner. A line of yellow-lit faces turned to watch us waiting at the lights. Then my friend put his arm through mine and led me across the road to a cafe.

It was in that cafe I told my story to Bernard. When I stopped talking I found his hand closed over the top of mine. He dropped his head, closed his eyes, then opened them, but kept his head down. When he saw I hadn't touched the brandy he reached for it and downed it in one gulp. Then he looked up. It was dark in the cafe but I knew he wasn't smiling. I couldn't see the diamond. His black coat hung over the back of his chair. The lamplight caught his blue denim shirt and his flushed cheeks. He asked if I had a place to stay. I told him I have the trains. He gave a nod, looked down at the table. He was still nodding. The diamond flashed briefly in his mouth. ‘Ines,' he said. ‘I would consider it a great honour if you would stay with me. Tomorrow we will look for your boy.'

Prison has held no surprises for me. Perhaps I am unusual in that respect. Newcomers are usually heard to cry in the night. They call out the names of their loved ones. Then the sun rises and the names are gone. At the hotel I learned how to pass from one world to another. For long periods of the day I shared the foyer and the rooms with the guests. At night I followed the paths to the dormitories where we slept. At the last hotel we were instructed to brush our teeth before speaking to a guest. Our hands had to be scrubbed and our fingernails inspected by the supervisor before we could present ourselves in that other world. In our own world we accepted each other without teeth being brushed or hands scrubbed. We got around in bare feet, which was a sackable offence in the other world. It was hard to believe two more different worlds could sit so close to each another.

I followed Bernard home to another world that night. As we left the cafe I thought I must try to remember the streets in case I need to find my way back to the world of trains. I tried to remember the name of each new street, but they were like the names of hotel guests. They did not stick. Within ten minutes I thought,
I am lost
.

Ramona always asks what made me trust the little Frenchman. I start with his face, its absence of need. She understands that, but not his coat. That huge coat I clung to, stuck like a barnacle to the side of a barge, as we drifted along streets with too much life in them—cafes, bars, people—to be particular in a way that would make them memorable. I decided that, since I was lost, I would trust him.

We crossed a road and arrived at a long wall. There we passed through a gap to another world which at first I could not see. The ground was rough underfoot and apart from the campfires and lit faces it was pitch black. Bernard produced a flashlight from his coat. I followed that beam of light down the side of a huge building to a door. Inside was as dark as out, but here there were small clusters of lights, single lights, fire-fly light, light as tiny as a lit match, but not a light that could be switched on at the wall. I saw sleeping bodies. I saw a naked woman astride a man. The light found a dog sniffing an abandoned mattress. We came into a better lit area. Here a man sat with his back to us facing a computer screen. In a dark corner near the computer man was Bernard's bed. The light landed on a duvet and three pillows. Bernard passed the flashlight to me while he searched for clean sheets through four drawers all different sizes and stacked on top of one another. I took off my clothes. When he looked up from fixing the bed his eyes went blank. He showed me my side of the bed. He gave me two pillows, and kept the small one for himself. After I lay down he switched off the light. Bernard did not get into bed. He lay on top, on the other side, in his coat. When I woke the next morning I was able to see that he had taken off his sneakers. His eyes were closed. He slept without seeming to breathe. I looked up at the pigeons roosting in the rafters. I saw a white dove, and then another. I counted three children's party balloons caught against the rafters. I listened to babies and small children waking. I heard tiny feet and the complaints of tired parents. A small face appeared next to mine and then ran off.

twenty-six

Thanks to the man with the computer it turned out to be easy to find Jermayne John Hass. John was his father's name. His father was an American soldier. Jermayne took his mother's maiden name for his own after John returned to Detroit. I told this to Bernard as we crossed the bridge into Jermayne's neighbourhood. He replied with something in French. I asked him what it meant and he said it didn't matter; it was something mean and I didn't need to know. He was letting out the viper that lived inside him. ‘Now,' he said, ‘I will be perfectly behaved.'

Bernard's head turned to follow a green van moving slowly along the street. He asked me if I had a passport.

‘No.'

‘Do you have any ID?'

He stopped walking then to ask me where I was from. I told him I was from the Four Seasons Hotel. I waited for the next question. But he didn't bother. We carried on, and then the questions arrived. Did I have a photograph of the boy? ‘No.' Would Jermayne recognise me? I wasn't sure. What about his wife?

‘What wife?' I asked.

I had waited a long time for this moment, yet why was I dragging my feet? Why did I feel so unhappy? I'd spent every waking moment thinking about what might lie around the next corner. Why the tears? I don't know. ‘Why?' That is the little Frenchman asking. ‘What is this? Look at you.' Through blurry eyes I saw the diamond. I told him I was sorry. ‘Sorry for what?' he asked.

‘For everything.' I was thinking about the woman lying at the bottom of the steps. In the here and now of the grey-misted traffic in Berlin, a stranger with a diamond in his tooth was smiling and cooing at me as strangers once had at the parrot through the bars of the birdcage.

We came to a canal. As we started to cross a small bridge Bernard put his arm around my shoulder. He held me close to him, as if we might be lovers, and that was the point. Trees. Cobbles. Buildings with ancient bearing. We were in the right street. We walked quickly, faster than before. Bernard told me to look straight ahead. Think of France, he said. I thought of France. I'd once had hotel sex with a man from Tours. A vain little man who liked to slap his cock in his hand. Bernard looked up the street—to France, except for a brief moment when I was aware of him staring into my face. I hoped the man from Tours didn't show up there. He walked me a little faster. At the corner he stopped. He said we'd just walked by Jermayne's building. Now what? What did I want to do?

We walked on down to the next bridge, crossed the canal and walked back the other way under the trees. Near the first bridge Bernard put his arm around my shoulder again. He pointed out the door of the building. I counted up five floors. I looked in every window. Bernard led me to the cafe on the corner. We chose a table by the window so I could look back at the building that held my boy. He ordered hot chocolate for me. He asked if I was cold. He said I looked cold. I did not possess the kind of feeling that registers cold or hot. I had lost that capacity. I was two eyes and a beating heart. He told me to stop staring. ‘Just look like a normal person,' he said.

We were two hours in that cafe. That afternoon the door to the building on the other side of the canal opened just the once, and when it did my heart rose to my mouth and dropped back into place—all in the space of a second—as a white man got his bike out the door and pedalled off under the trees.

Before we left the cafe Bernard produced a woollen hat from his coat pocket. He told me to put it on. I pulled the hat down to my eyes while we sat on a bench above the canal under the trees. Swans glided by on the dark water. Joggers ran past. Cyclist after cyclist. Once I heard a child cry out. Bernard got up to walk his feet back into feeling. He asked if I was hungry. I shrugged. I didn't want to leave the bench. We saw the man with the bike return to the building. We looked up as a light came on in one of the third-floor windows.

We went back to the cafe. Two women were sitting at our table. They looked up at me. Bernard apologised and led me to another one. We sat there until all the lights had come on in the building. Bernard left the cafe to cross the bridge on his own. I watched him return, head down, hands in his pockets. He nodded and I got to leave. This time we walked over the bridge, we crossed the cobbles and walked up to the door. Bernard pointed to the names above the intercom.