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Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
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  10. 10
  11. 11
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  31. 31
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  37. 37
  38. 38
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  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
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  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
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  48. 48
  49. 49
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  51. 51
  52. 52
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  63. Acknowledgements

He felt a spasm of shock. What was she implying? Had he gone too far with his fanciful story, and now she took him for a murderer? He stared at her goggle-eyed. She was lying, surely. It was an attention-seeking ploy, nothing more.

A weariness descended upon him like a fog. Inventing this little anecdote for his own amusement had knocked the stuffing out of him. But where did it come from, this silly story of a father with a string of mistresses and a brother who always took his side? His own father, who’d disappeared from his life at the age of six, was presumably dead. He’d only ever had sisters, not an elder brother, though perhaps it had been a childish fantasy to want one. A rambunctious boy, it hadn’t been easy to grow up in a household of women.

‘Gosh,’ she said, dropping her insinuations about Ismail and lying back in the chair. ‘That’s a whole lot worse than what happened to me.’ She turned her head and coughed. A smoker’s cough. He wondered if she’d been able to find a source of contraband cigarettes.

She picked at a scab on her elbow. ‘I tried to kill myself.’

Who hasn’t?

Where did that come from? Vidor had never tried to snuff out his own life. It must be this place. Probably half the patients here had tried to off themselves, including that boy Ismail, and now all of them, including himself, were blending in together.

* * *

Afterwards, when Vidor was safely back in his room, though sporting a mysterious bandage on his head from a tumble he’d supposedly taken by the pool, he tried to make sense of the past few hours. He had no memory of being attended to by a nurse, and he couldn’t shake off the feeling of unease about the Canadian woman. For that’s what she was, apparently, assuming she had told him the truth. Not German at all as he’d assumed.

He’d had to endure a full fifteen minutes of listening to her plaintive voice, veering into a whine on the high notes, before he could make his escape. Hailing from a remote town in Saskatchewan, she’d taken up with a German man who was touring the country on a motorcycle. An unplanned pregnancy was followed by a quickie marriage and a move to Berlin, after which she lost the baby. They struggled on for a time, until she caught him with another woman. Tears, anguish, divorce. She’d stayed on in Berlin and tried to make a life for herself, though she had trouble making friends and feeling settled.