Time's Mistress (20 page)

That stopped me. “No,” I said, clinging to the image of the young girl standing in the rainy night. “No,” I repeated. “She isn’t dead … I saw her last night … she was … younger …”

In a few days the world had stopped making sense.

“She’s dead, Caro.”

I desperately wanted to believe him, needed to believe that he wasn’t some kind of memory stealing vampire, that he was the same old Freddie he’d always been, but I didn’t know who I could believe anymore. Last night everything Ronni had said had seemed so
believable
and now, looking at the pain in Federico’s eyes, I couldn’t see how he could be lying. “So
who
did I see last night? Tell me that much, please Freddie. I
want
to believe you. I really do.”

He closed his eyes, looking for the strength somewhere inside him to say the words I wanted to hear. When he opened the again the clouds had gone. There was nothing but endless cobalt blue sky. “You met her, the Thief of Time. You met the demon that is killing me and you fell for her lies, didn’t you?”

“No, I—”

“Please don’t lie to me, Caro. She’s persuasive. Believable. She has a way of getting what she wants. I won’t hold it against you.”

“Yes, then … but only because I don’t understand.” I said weakly. It was more the truth than he could know. “Tell me so I can.”

“Her name is Corimera. No, that’s not true, that’s what she told me to call her. Her name is something else. She knew I understood the rules, that names hold power, true names, so she gave me a lie because she knew I wanted to believe her. You see, I loved her. But she doesn’t care about that, about love. She only wants what she can take, not what can be given freely. There is no power in receiving, only in taking. The more she takes from me, the more of my spirit she absorbs, the more about her I understand. It’s like a two-way mirror, I don’t see everything and nothing is very clear, but I do see outlines, ghosts. I’m not the only one she has done this to, I know that now. To one lover she is Hera, to another Helene, Sarah, she is whoever they need her to be, but her real name, her given name, is Death. She touches all of our lives, draws them to a close like one of the Fates cutting the thread of life. She found me in the street and made me love her because I had nothing else in my life left that was worth loving.”

I took his hand in mine, turned it palm up. Both his lifeline and his loveline were broken by an intricate motorway of cracks that had been bled over by newsprint. “Go on,” I coaxed gently.

“It was after my military service, I was working as a cameraman for SVT 1. It was nothing glamorous, mostly news coverage. A fire at a youth club in Göteborg. A prison breakout. Skinheads causing trouble. Bus strikes in Stockholm and a train crash. Point the camera and let the loss of life do the talking. An idiot could have done it but the thing was, it was me doing it. It was me pointing the camera and it began to affect me. If you stare long enough into the abyss, right? After the fire, having to film the faces of dead kids being carried out of the gutted building, I wanted to be as far away from the camera lens as possible … as far away from real life as I could manage … I wrote poetry for a while, and hung around coffee shops pretending I was
tres chic
, but it was either drivel or haunted by the faces of burn victims.” He looked at me then, and I could feel every ounce of his pain. I’d seen the television coverage of the fire; who hadn’t. Sixty-six kids dead at a Christmas party because of a faulty fire alarm. “So I just dropped out. I started drinking. A lot. Too much too ever have been healthy. I wasn’t looking for answers, I was on a quest for oblivion, and that was harder to find than any answer I might have gone looking for.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said for want of something to say, some comfort to offer. He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Because they were always there, even when I was drunk. Their faces, those dead kids staring up at me. And when I was drunk it was worse because they started talking to me. I just couldn’t cope. I wasn’t strong enough to kill myself. I think I thought that would only bring them closer, a mixed up kind of resurrection, not them brought back from the dead but me brought back to them … so I just drunk myself into a perpetual stupor while my life crashed and burned.”

The red-eyed waiter brought me an unasked for cafe latte and left us alone again.

“That was where she found me, in the gutter. I was living out of bins, sleeping nights beneath the railway arches of the Central Station or in the amusement rides in Gröna Lund. It was off-season so no one was around to chase me off. It was raining. I remember that. She likes the rain … I’d passed out beneath the canopy of the carousel with my arm wrapped around a unicorn’s ankles … She was beautiful, her black hair hanging in wet ringlets down her forehead, her skin like alabaster …” he drifted in his telling of the story, caught up in the memory of meeting the woman he called Death. “I thought my heart was going to burst in my chest just from looking at her. It was like I was looking at a part of myself that had always been missing … I don’t know how else to explain it. With her to fill my eyes there wasn’t enough room for dead kids … Without a word she held her hand out to me and I took it. No thunderbolts. No lightning. We walked beneath the Ferris Wheel and between the Ghost Train and the Tunnel of Love. I didn’t care where she was taking me. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to be with her.”

“So why do you call her the Thief of Time?” I asked then, sure that there was a rational, reasonable explanation for Veronica still being fifteen and Federico being closer to sixty. He looked at me as if to say:
are you stupid?

“Look at me, Caro. What do you see?”

“I see you,” I answered obtusely, I knew what he was getting at but I wasn’t about to give him it, I wanted to hear him say it. No easy get outs, no helpful misunderstandings. His words; his truth; his lies.

“No you don’t,” he said, his lip curling. “You see an old man. That’s why I call her the Thief of Time, because that is what she does. She steals every day, every memory, and leaves behind the husk, all withered and shrivelled like a piece of old fruit. That’s why. Just look at me. Look at me, look me in the eye and tell me I am
not
wasting away. Not ageing faster than that tangerine in your fruit bowl.”

I met his gaze, and then broke the contact.

“Can’t do it, can you?” he mocked.

“You’re sick, Freddie. I don’t know what is doing it to you, but I find it hard to believe some supernatural entity is bleeding the years out of you …”

His fingers drummed on the tablecloth. He didn’t seem aware of what they were doing, how loud they had become. “I never said she was anything more than a woman, Caro. You said that. I said she was the Thief of Time, Death herself, you said supernatural. You said impossible.” He started coughing; a shallow cough that couldn’t seem to dislodge whatever it was that was filling his throat.

“Freddie? Are you okay?” I asked anxiously. The coughing fit didn’t want to stop. After half a minute, more, he brought up blood. Flecks of the stuff sprayed from his lips to speckle the palms of his hands. “Jesus Freddie, what’s happening?” I was up and around the table but there was nothing I could do except wait it out. I rubbed and patted stupidly on his back. People were beginning to look. Someone shouted: “He’s choking!” but he wasn’t. He hasn’t eaten anything. Then it struck me; I hadn’t seen Federico eat a thing in all of the time we’d spent together since our reunion. He always ordered food and ended up leaving it untouched.

The red-eyed waiter pushed passed me, wrapped his arms around Federico’s waste and started heaving against his stomach, trying to force whatever it was that was choking him out. One, two, three. Quick jerks. Something red, glossed over with blood spat out of his lips and skittered across the floor and he was left gasping for breath in the waiter’s arms. Everyone was looking at Freddie. Not me. I was looking at the red thing that had come out of his mouth. It was blood definitely, and some kind of film, almost like an egg without the shell, the film meshed with white lines. While I stared at it, the white lines became thin spidery legs that twitched, stretching the mucus-covering that had eased the passage of whatever it was into this world. I tried to tell myself it was raw tissue from Freddie’s throat and stomach lining but it wasn’t. The legs finally tore the membranous sack and clenched the air, finding the strength they needed to support the things’ golf ball sized body, and then it was skittering away into the darkness beneath another diner’s table. I wanted to scream so badly there was no way not to. I reached out for the table. Needed it to keep me from falling. I couldn’t have seen what I had just seen.

I couldn’t have seen Ania Chaborik’s face on that … that … thing.

I couldn’t have …

“Caro? Caro?” It was Federico, wiping the blood from his lips as he reached out to steady me. I shook his hand off, backed away, turned and ran out of the cafe and into the rain.

O O O

“What the hell was that … that … thing?” I said bluntly. There were two ways of looking at it, and over the last three days I’d stared at both pretty hard. The first was that none of it had happened, no phone call, no Federico, no Veronica, no blood-spider, that I was the victim of one ugly hallucination but I knew that wasn’t true. So the other angle was that
all
of it was real. That was so much worse than merely seeing things.

He’d come looking for me after I left my machine to pick up all his calls. In each message he sounded progressively more desperate. I don’t know why, but I liked that. The clock on the wall had stuck at three. It had been like that for days but I didn’t have a spare battery to get it going again. Every time the phone rang Deuteronomy would start brushing up against it, trying to dislodge the handset from its cradle with his paw. Dumb cat didn’t realise the kind of trouble that was waiting on the other end of the line. After three days the calls finally stopped. I thought he’d given up. I was wrong. An hour later Federico was pounding on my door. Hard. Demanding that I answer. Finally, I gave in. I opened the door for him.

Now he was pacing the hardwood floor of my lounge, making cats cradles with his fingers. He looked like Hell … No that wasn’t true. He looked a little better than Hell. He’d looked like Hell when I ran out on him, now, if anything, he looked slightly worse.

He didn’t offer me a smooth lie; it was too late for that. He looked at me with eyes that looked as dark and broody as a thunder-sky. “You know what it was,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “It was someone … a friend … I can’t remember who … it was my memories of them. Gone.” He threw his hands up helplessly.

I got up from my seat and went over to the window to stare out into the street. I half expected Veronica to be sheltered in the doorway opposite but, as Federico had pointed out when he finally calmed down enough to talk, it wasn’t raining. A steady stream of cars, Volvos and Nissans of each and every colour and hue, moved in a metal snake down the road, a red city bus making the rattle at the tail.

“You don’t seriously expect me to buy into that, do you?” I said, doing my best Gillian Anderson impression. I didn’t turn around to look at him. I didn’t need to, thanks to the light he was reflected in the glass like a spectre overlapping the street below.

“That’s how it happens,” he muttered, still pacing. “I have no control over it you know … she chokes it out of me … I can tell it’s going to happen a while before it does. I find myself thinking about someone a lot. Not just how they look, things they say, everything. It’s as if she is leafing through the memories one by one, weeding the person out of my mind, then when she’s done, everything is out, it’s as if they become a hairball or something … you know, they just have to get out and I start choking … until I cough them out … That, back there in the cafe, that was nothing … I thought I was going to die the first time she stole someone from me.”

He was telling me the truth, or at least he thought he was, that much was painfully obvious.

“You’ve got to help me, Caroline. I can’t take much more of this.”

That much was obvious, just from looking at him. His eyes seemed to be falling into his skull, the cavities around them were so pronounced. Actually, it was as if he’d taken to wearing blue mascara on the skin beneath his eyes, or someone had punched him hard enough to bruise the entire eye socket of both eyes. And his hands … the folds of skin hung from his fingers like gloves that were far too big for his birdlike hands.

Prognosis terminal, Mr. Chuavas. Two, three days at most, I’d say, if you asked me,
I thought darkly. Two or three days.

“How?” I asked. “How can I help you? What can I do?”

“Tell me stories, tell them fast. I need to know my life. I need to share your memories, pretend they are my own. I’m running out of things for her to take, Caro. There isn’t much of me left …”
Two or three days
, I said to myself. “I need some fake plastic memories to buy me time … I don’t know what else to do, how else to fight her …”

“Jesus … I need a drink,” I said then, going through to the kitchen to brew a jug of strong black coffee, Swedish style. Thick enough to stand a spoon in. Freddie stayed in the lounge. “Put some music on,” I called through. “This is going to be a long night.” He grunted something and after a minute Ani Difranco was telling us all about her Little Plastic Castle. I got the joke after a minute.
Goldfish have no memory and the little plastic castle is a surprise every time…
“Funny, Freddie,” I said, pouring out my first cup of the night ahead. Corkscrews of steam curled up under my nose as I carried the two cups through. “So you haven’t lost your sense of humour, huh?”

He managed a smile. “I just remember you loving that damned song … Used to hum it everywhere you went.”

We sat down facing each other, no putting it off anymore. I reached over to the bookcase for one of my many photograph albums and flipped it open on Marcus’s baby face. I turned the page quickly. I didn’t want my son getting mixed up in this. Besides, Marcus was no business of Federico’s. None. Five years back in five pages and there was Freddie leaning against his car on that hill … I stared at the picture trying for the life of me to remember what was special about it. Nothing. It was gone.