Daughters, p.3
Daughters, page 3
‘Pull over somewhere, Betty!’ she said.
I swerved at full speed into an exit to a service station, where she handed Kurt a bottle of water and wiped the blood from his chin.
When he was able to speak again, he said, ‘Bloody hell, Betty, the way you drive, I could’ve saved myself the money for the clinic.’
He leaned back with what appeared to be a smile.
‘You know what I haven’t eaten in ages? A petrol station hot dog. With a nice big blob of mustard.’
He asked Martha if he could have one, if she’d get him one, just a sausage, no roll, and as she was getting out, she turned to me and asked, ‘Want one too?’
I nodded. A sudden fear gripped me that we wouldn’t make it to Switzerland, that we wouldn’t arrive safely. In this context, the word ‘safe’ was absurd, of course. But I didn’t want him slipping away in the back seat. I didn’t know the first thing about dying.
‘Do you smoke, Betty?’ he asked from the back.
Rarely had I craved a cigarette as much as I did right then. Kurt handed me one of his roll-ups, and I gave him a light. After a couple of drags, his cough subsided, and the only sounds he made were of pure pleasure.
‘So Martha tells me you live on your own.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty used to it by now.’
‘Don’t get too used to it. It’ll drive you round the bend, Betty. People who live alone think too much, round and round in circles they go. It makes you dizzy, so dizzy you think you’re going to throw up. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’
Martha was standing in front of the car, holding three hot dogs and screaming at the windscreen. Her rage was directed solely at me.
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ she yelled.
I stubbed out my cigarette and opened the passenger door. In the rear-view mirror, I saw Kurt wink at me.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Martha slid into her seat and thrust a hot dog into my hand. ‘Why don’t you spit a bit of blood onto it too while you’re at it, for the flavour? Honestly, you’re unbelievable.’
‘Calm down, sweetheart. I’ve always enjoyed smoking with women. Cigarettes and women, now that’s my idea of heaven.’
‘Your idea of heaven?’ Martha snorted. ‘If it wasn’t for your idea of heaven, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.’
‘You wouldn’t be sitting here now, that’s for sure. Your mother was a magnificent smoker. If she hadn’t been so good at smoking, she wouldn’t have caught my eye. I don’t know how she did it, but she used to send the smoke rings floating up out of the corner of her mouth. There was always a halo hovering above her. I know it’s hard to imagine it now, but your mother smoked her way to sainthood. I soon found out she was anything but a saint, but when I first met her, let me tell you, she was a Madonna!’
Kurt looked at the sausage in his hand, examining it with a fascination that’s probably only possible to muster either very early or very late in life. Maybe some kind of affection for the world finally takes hold of you right before the end. As he bit into the sausage, he emitted a low hum of satisfaction.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t stop for the night after all,’ Martha whispered after checking Kurt was asleep behind us. ‘Something feels off. There’s something up with him.’
‘Hardly surprising under the circumstances, is it?’
‘No, something else. I don’t know what.’
We listened to his breathing. It was fitful, with long pauses between gulps of air.
‘The appointment is tomorrow at two,’ I said. ‘And tomorrow is tomorrow, even if we get there today.’
‘Fucking physics.’
Martha pressed her uneasiness back into the seat. It was all too cramped for her. She exhaled slowly, like she was trying to create some space for herself on the inside.
‘I think I need a fag,’ she said.
I instinctively slowed down, as if I, of all people, was about to give her a lecture on the evils of smoking.
‘What?’ She wasn’t whispering any more. ‘This is an ashtray on wheels, what do you want me to do?’
‘In the back, in my jacket pocket.’
She reached behind her and lingered there for quite a while, then grabbed my jacket and asked whether I noticed a funny smell. I sniffed but smelled nothing. Just the odour of the three of us. Tension, sadness, fear, age. And not enough space. It smelled like a cage. That’s when it occurred to me. The distinctive cage smell that always emanates from the same source: urine.
‘Should I stop?’ I asked.
‘No, let him sleep.’
She lit cigarettes for us both and said, ‘Tell me about your mess of a life so I can forget about mine for a while.’
I ran my thumbs up and down the steering wheel and sighed.
‘I live the kind of life,’ I said, ‘that generations of women before us fought for. You can’t call that a mess. I am the embodiment of maximum freedom.’
‘Exactly. You’re getting peculiar. It’s about time you fell in love again.’
‘I beg your pardon, how am I getting peculiar?!’
‘You’re cantankerous. That’s putting it mildly. To be quite honest, you’re turning into a cynic.’ Martha looked at me.
‘Right. And falling in love is the solution?’
For years now, people had been advising me to fall in love. Like that would save me, like I needed to be saved. Like I didn’t have better things to do.
‘What happened to the last guy?’ she continued.
‘Who?’
‘The artist or whatever he was.’
‘He had tattoos.’
‘So? You can’t feel tattoos.’
‘I’m done with tattooed men,’ I said. ‘They never stop talking. Worse than anglers they are. His explanations of his forearms were interminable. His life story in ink. Family on the right, friends on the left. Genealogical tree, twists of fate. When I first started having sex, men would use their scars to tell me their life stories. It didn’t take long. The appendectomy, the skating accident, the torn meniscus. No one had more scars than that. Now there are the bypasses too, but they’re quick to tell. A heart attack is unsentimental. Tattoos, though, are stories seared into flesh. I’ll tell you what, this generation is well prepared for dementia. When they have trouble remembering something, they’ll just have to look at their bodies, everything else will be stored in the cloud. They should go ahead and tattoo their password onto their wrists right now.’
‘Jesus, sorry I asked.’
Martha wound down the window to let out the smoke, the bad atmosphere, the stink of urine.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said. ‘About men.’
‘Fine. Me neither. It’s boring, anyway.’
‘You start at ten years of age, constantly obsessing about boys. Constantly miserable. It’s so seamless. You spend three or four decades droning on about men, then you start droning on about your ailments. What a waste of a life.’
‘You forgot the kids in between.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Shh, be quiet for a minute.’ Martha was whispering again.
We tilted our heads, as if that would help us hear better.
‘Is he still breathing?’
‘I think so,’ I said, slowing down.
Kurt was breathing like a fish. Every few seconds his mouth popped open, as if he was blowing little bubbles.
‘Maybe he’s in a deep sleep,’ I said.
‘Why is he doing this to me?’ Martha glared ahead at the road, not expecting an answer, not even from herself.
I put my foot down on the accelerator – I just wanted to get to where it would all be over – while Martha searched for a radio station she couldn’t find. Just snatches and static, as though we were driving through a no man’s land far removed from any frequency. We had an elephant in the car we couldn’t talk about, so we were silent, but it wasn’t a comfortable silence. Dying is torture, it should be abolished. There should just be life and death, with nothing in between. A sense of release washed over me when I heard a groan from the back seat. In the mirror, I could see Kurt trying to orient himself. No sign of Switzerland, just the A7 somewhere between Fulda and Würzburg. I was doing my best, but Germany is a long country.
Kurt leaned forwards and asked if we could hear a noise.
‘What noise?’ I said. ‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘A kind of clicking, very low … There. Can you hear it?’
‘He’s right,’ Martha said.
‘There it is again! Hear it, Betty?’
It was an intermittent, even scraping sound.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
Kurt smiled. ‘He’s thirsty.’
I squinted as I tried to make out the needle. These days I could only see distant objects clearly. Up close, things were disappearing, vanishing a little more every month.
‘The tank’s half-full,’ I said.
‘It’s the oil. You can’t see it, you just hear it. He needs oil. And while we’re at it,’ he said, ‘I need a beer.’
‘You must think we came down with the last shower! We’ve only been on the road four hours.’
He’s drinking himself away, Martha once said to me. He’s dissolving himself. In a drinker, everything liquefies. Head, heart, and finally the body. Everything melts away, is no longer solid. She’d been referring not just to her father, but to our friend Jon too. Back when Jon was still alive, just about, and none of us was managing to haul him back to sobriety. You stand there with your arms empty, Martha had said, hugging someone who disappeared long ago.
Now she sat in silence, biting her lips raw.
‘But it’s true,’ Kurt said. ‘We’ve always boozed together.’ He gave a dry, slightly bloody laugh. ‘He’s a fast drinker, I’m afraid. Better get a five-litre bottle.’
‘Five litres?’ I asked.
‘Or ten?’ He looked lost there in the back seat. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We haven’t been out on the road in a long time, and then there’s the mountains. We’ve never been in the mountains. Just imagine, my whole life I’ve only ever driven across flat land. A very northern German life, when you think about it.’
I exited at the next service area and Kurt crawled out of the car, his crutch tapping ahead of him.
‘I’ll go get us something to drink.’ He wore the expression of someone who would have to force his way through dancing mobs to get to the bar, when in fact there were just two other cars parked here. A girl was sitting alone in the passenger seat of one, crying. Her right eye was swollen and would soon turn black.
This innocent Wednesday in April, wanting nothing to do with all the misery, silently darkened. I’d given up on religion in my teens, yet whenever the sky clouded over and the rain refused to fall, I still often thought: God has shut the window, and we’ve been left all alone.
The girl sat there defenceless, staring out of a black limousine with a six-figure price tag. There was something familiar about her, but whether it was from a film or the past, I couldn’t say. Perhaps it was just the look in her eyes I’d seen before, a look that suggested she’d given up hope of being rescued long ago. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
I opened the bonnet of the Golf, pulled out the dipstick, wiped it down, checked the oil level.
‘Well?’ Martha asked. ‘Is he right, or is he just looking for an excuse to get pissed?’
‘The engine’s drying up,’ I said. ‘You’d better go in and help him.’
‘I’m not carrying his sodding beer for him.’
‘Carry the oil, then.’
‘He trained his car well, didn’t he? “We’ve always boozed together.” What a load of crap, that “We’re old pals” bullshit. It’s a fucking car! No one’s best friend should be a car.’
‘Certainly not a Golf, anyway.’
‘I mean, doesn’t he want to experience something beautiful, say something meaningful? There must be one thing he’d like to do. Last things, champagne, oysters, the sea, a mountaintop. Anything but a beer from a petrol station. Under a grey sky at the arse end of Germany.’
There were tears in Martha’s left eye, and this enraged her even more.
‘The man is a dead loss! “I’m content, honey bunny, I have everything I need.” Right. A TV, a reclining armchair and a beer in the fridge. “Content, honey bunny.” God, it makes me sick!’
Kurt shouted over at us from the petrol station shop. He was calling Martha’s name. It looked like he’d been standing there for a while.
‘Better take his bag with you,’ I said, and she nodded, took the bag of nappies from the back seat and walked over to him with a forced smile. I watched them disappear into the shop together, her hand hovering at his back without touching it.
As I peered into the engine compartment, I found myself hoping he wouldn’t make it, that he’d snuff it after the next bend. I wished for a head-on collision to end our journey. I was wishing I knew enough about cars to meddle with this one, I was fantasising about a seized piston, when a car door opened beside me and closed again with a muffled thud. The more expensive the car, the quieter it is. If you’re rich enough, you can have your peace.
He was a wiry guy. With one hand, he grabbed the girl’s hair, as if he was trying to rip out clumps of it, and with the other, he shoved a bar of Kinder chocolate between her lips and started the engine. All the while, she stared square ahead. Silently, the car glided past me and out on to the A7, leaving in its wake a squalid sense of my own spinelessness.
‘We should’ve taken the girl with us,’ I said to Martha as she handed me a litre of oil.
‘She was a child.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You can’t just take other people’s kids. No matter how much you’d like to. It’s against the law.’
‘It would be a small crime to end a big one.’
‘That’s how every war begins.’
‘In here!’ Kurt said behind me. He knocked on the oil tank with his crutch.
‘You can’t smoke here,’ Martha said. ‘This is a petrol station.’
‘Bah, what a load of cobblers. In the old days, the petrol attendants used to have lit fags hanging out of their mouths all day. Anyway, if they do see me, what are they going to do about it?’
He leaned against the Golf with his beer and cigarette. He was right: the world could go fuck itself.
I poured in a litre, checked it again, poured in a second litre and then a third. The car was a bottomless pit. When we finally made it back out on the road, I savoured the sound of the lubricated engine.
‘Sure you don’t want one?’ Kurt asked us. ‘I bought a couple extra beers just in case.’
‘Not while I’m driving,’ I said, and Martha pointed out it was her who’d bought the beers. Kurt’s bank account was already closed.
‘But I’ve no debts,’ he said. ‘You won’t be left with a cent of debt. You’ll break even. And you can hold on to the car, of course. And I still have the stereo, the Kenwood.’
‘Great, a CD player with a tape deck,’ Martha said.
‘It’s top of the range!’
‘Nobody uses those things any more.’
‘That’s not my fault. Collectors might be interested in it.’
‘Maybe. I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want any of this. I mean, what the hell is going on? Smoking, drinking, Switzerland, dying?’
Kurt swiped the air with his hand, swatting away her questions like flies.
‘If it weren’t for women,’ he said out of nowhere, ‘I’d be a rich man. They fleeced me, the lot of them. Take your mother. She gave me a camera when we got married, and then when we got divorced she demanded it back. Unbelievable.’
Kurt shook his head for emphasis. We kept our mouths shut.
‘That’s women for you,’ he continued. ‘Fall in love with them, and they’ll clean you out. Not you Martha, obviously. In your case, Betty, I’m not so sure.’
‘This must be the hundredth time I’ve heard that story,’ Martha said. ‘It’s more than thirty years ago now. I’ve been listening to the same stories from the both of you for more than thirty years, and never, not once, have you said anything nice about each other. It’s a miracle I got married myself.’
‘A miracle, or plain stupidity,’ Kurt said.
In truth, it had been neither. Martha and Henning had decided to get married so that their health insurance would cover their IVF. Only for married couples, only for women under forty. And now Martha was running out of time. If she didn’t get pregnant within the next six months, they would end up either childless or destitute. Possibly both.
‘Cut it out, Kurt!’ Martha had turned around to face him and was pulling at her seatbelt, but it just tightened with every tug.
‘All I’m saying is you need to watch out, young lady. Women can be cleaned out by their husbands these days. You might end up paying him maintenance so he can keep painting his funny little pictures.’
‘They’re not pictures, they’re animations.’
‘And you can thank women like your mother for it!’
Kurt had talked himself into a rage. ‘Emancipation. Self-actualisation. What a load of bollocks! Your mother actualised herself so well she forgot there are other people in the world. And what does she do in the end? She goes off and marries a bald, rich fool! Oh well, at least it meant I didn’t have to pay maintenance any more, I suppose.’
I concentrated on driving faster and faster. Kurt wasn’t a bad man, he just hadn’t moved with the times. He’d been steamrolled by them, and no one had warned him.
‘And who funded them, all those bra burners, who paid for their dungarees? The ex-husbands! And then off they went to France in their brand-new Volkswagen Beetles, the pill stuffed into their glove compartments. The kids shunted off to granny. And when the money was gone, they couldn’t get remarried fast enough, to pansies with degrees.’
I stamped on the accelerator, feeling fury in my right foot and something like understanding in my left. I wasn’t moving with the times either, a realisation that had dawned on me shortly after my fortieth birthday and hardened each time I watched the parties going on beneath my window.
