Snowleg Read online

  PART III

  England, Hamburg, Berlin1986–96

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “PETER!”

  His mother sat on the piano stool, caught by surprise. Meringues of uncombed white hair and a blue tracksuit dusted to the knees with pollen. And an animal that sprang across the carpet, barking. His dog.

  “Honey!” She leaped up and grabbed Honey by the collar and he remembered his grandfather’s words. With dogs, dear boy, you get what you put in.

  “Mum.”

  They kissed. His mother all face-cream and blushes. “I heard the door slam and I thought, That’s Peter.”

  “And it was.”

  “Why didn’t you telephone? We were expecting you tomorrow.” But she wanted to look at him more than she wanted to know the answer. “How long can you stay?”

  “A week,” giving Honey a cursory scratch under the chin. “If that’s all right?”

  “Stupid boy.” And she meant it.

  He found Rodney seated on a scroll-back chair among his photographic chemicals and open bottles of black ink.

  “Peter!” and threw down the card he was sketching. Captain and Mrs Rickards request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter Camilla to the Hon. Tristram Leadley.

  “Dad,” wondering why he felt nothing and thinking they’ll name their children Annabelle, Horace and Lavinia. “How are you?”

  “Well, well.” But the lump on his neck had grown and his skin had taken on the brownish tint of his developing fluid.

  “I hope you’re seeing someone about that?”

  “Don’t worry.” Rodney had always treated his infirmity with jovial tolerance. “I’m in good hands.”

  “Where’s Ros?”

  “She’s living in Grandpa’s flat. Until she finds her legs.”

  Seven years Peter had been in Germany and for a split second he took Rodney’s words literally. “Her legs? Something’s happened to her?”

  Rodney smiled. “She’s using the flat for her catering business. Your mother didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Mind? Why should I mind?”

  “Well, it’s yours as much as it is hers.”

  Twenty minutes later a red Mini braked in a bow-wave of white gravel, his sister waving through the open window.

  “Why didn’t you tell us, you horror? I’d have cooked something special,” running to embrace him. Still frizzy-haired, still puffy-faced. Still wanting to play Scrabble after dinner.

  That night, with a professional air, Rosalind drew out seven tiles from the bag, originally a felt pouch for Rodney’s watercolours.

  “You start.” But it was her only concession. After a particularly long interval, she warned: “We’ll have to set a time limit.”

  Peter studied the board. There was an open G. He rearranged his letters. Then stared, chest thumping. Using his blank, he could spell SNOWLEG.

  “One minute more,” warned Rosalind.

  “What about this?” And lined up three tiles on the board.

  “SLOG.” Rosalind enunciated the word with the seasoned Scrabble-player’s look of avarice. “What a waste of an S.” Then: “Daddy says you’re forgetting your English. Is it true?”

  On Sunday it was hot enough to sit outside. He lay on the lawn reading the Observer. The news seemed parochial, the pages full of people he didn’t know. He thought, I’ve come back to what I knew as my childhood home and I feel like a spy. He reflected on what would have happened if he had never walked up Revelation Hill. By now he would be a journalist or a publisher.

  “Darling?” His mother walked towards him holding a cardboard box. “Can I tempt you with this?”

  What was she up to now? Despite his long absence, he still felt her neediness. The massive biological engine of her claim on him. Ever since his sixteenth birthday, since, in fact, she gave him Honey (on the advice of her doctor who said a pet might be good for him), he had shrunk from her presents.

  She knelt on the sun-warmed grass. Curled inside the box was an ill-looking puppy, the runt of Honey’s litter.

  “It looks like conjunctivitis. I’ve washed the eyes in cold tea, but not a lot’s happening.” So much dried mucus – greeny-grey and growing yellow – had leaked into their corners that the eyes had cemented together.

  He had already rejected Honey. Not once on this visit had he taken his dog for a walk. “I don’t think so, Mummy.” But went on studying the puppy asleep in her arms, wheezing in small noises, its eyes flickering under the gummed lids. He reached out a finger and peeled off the sealing crust. “I really don’t think so.”

  In the morning, a call from UKE. “You’ve passed Go,” said his registrar. “Eleventh on the roll!”

  He ran to find his mother, who was busy hanging out what Rosalind joked was seven years of washing on the clothes line. “I’ve qualified.”

  “Oh, Peter.”

  She hugged him. Eyes watering. “I just wish . . .” And shook her head. “Grandpa would have been so proud.”

  “About the puppy,” he went on.

  His change of heart gave his mother a flash of hope that he would decide to stay after all. Become a country doctor like her father. But the dog, intended to keep him in England, became his excuse to keep away.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, at the age of twenty-five, Peter returned to Hamburg to specialise in paediatrics, his daily renewed determination to become what his German father had wanted to be.

  He lived in Eppendorf, in a second-floor apartment sublet from a stammering obstetrician at UKE. A bedroom, a small kitchen unchanged since the 1950s, and four steps up to a living room with a low ceiling, two windows and a bar-fire. “My old p-p-p-layroom,” said his landlord, who blamed his impediment on the fact that his parents had quarrelled in front of him as a child.

  In the evenings he boiled water in a frying pan, splashed in a little white vinegar and watched as the egg poached into a perfect rubbery planet. As Rosalind had taught him.

  And in the morning trod the goat path between his front door and the department of paediatrics. His mind on his work. Burying Snowleg beneath a procession of sick children and fluorescent corridors and long hours. Bolstered by his English talent for appearing to sweep anything very serious under the carpet. And Gus, whom he walked twice a day in the botanical gardens where he met other dog-owners and talked to them about their children’s snotty noses and the cold weather they were having. So extreme that he could hear the bark cracking in the arboretum.

  The great scare of paediatrics was that children fell sick very quickly. The great attraction: most recovered just as fast.

  The bread and butter of his work was asthmas, rashes, fevers of unknown origin. He learned that dealing with children was all about distraction, getting down to their level and not frightening them. It relieved him not to have to wear a white coat like residents in other specialities. He went on his ward round with a teddy bear tied to his stethoscope and his pockets full of sugar-free lollipops and stickers to put on plaster casts with mottos like “I had an X-ray and survived.”

  One on one with a child, Peter loved it, but paediatrics was also about treating the parents. In many cases they were the most difficult part of the equation. As a neophyte physician he did not always understand how traumatic it was for them, especially when they sensed his tentativeness.

  His strongest memory of his first year’s residency was of a patient in the urology ward. The boy was in urinary retention and his bladder was full and his urethra too traumatised to accept a catheter.

  “You look rather junior to be doing this,” said the boy’s mother. “Are you a qualified paediatrician?”

  “No.”

  “Which year are you?”

  “First.”

  “How many times have you done this?”

  “Oh, I’ve done many.”

  “How many have you missed?”

  “That depends.”

  “I’m sorry. I want
the most senior person touching my child.”

  “Listen,” he said gently, “I will use my judgment and if I’m not confident I will get someone more senior.”

  This time he came up over the pubic bone, put the needle through the stomach wall and anchored the catheter to the bladder.

  Later his registrar congratulated him, adding: “You may make a professional judgment that this is beyond your limit, but you must never panic.”

  It was work like this that led him to Bettina Grau.

  A few months before he met Bettina, Peter had a conversation in the canteen with a second-year resident called Draxler.

  “You seem a bit worn out, Peter.”

  “I’m absolutely wiped out.”

  Draxler looked up. Like all people in paediatrics, he was a short person, and Peter towered over him. “Well, we’re all worn out practically the whole time. Did you ever try fentanyl?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Try it,” said Draxler.

  One January afternoon, a 3-year-old boy came in for a hernia operation. Peter asked the ward sister for an ampoule of fentanyl and signed it out. But upon examining the boy after the operation, he decided that he would better benefit from a simple pain reliever, and inserted a suppository of Panadol. He slipped the unused ampoule into his lab coat and forgot about it until 2 a.m. when he was looking for a Biro. He rolled the capsule in his palm. By now – his seventh month of residency – he was barely sleeping four hours a night. Working so late that he was unable to sleep, unable to keep awake. As if he had lost his punctuation.

  He locked himself in the toilet, snapped the curved top, filled a syringe and injected himself between the toes. The effect was rapid and lasted an hour.

  Fentayl became the string that led him out of the labyrinth – the wilderness of hospital passageways, the heart-sagging physical and emotional exhaustion of paediatrics – and up into the jazz clubs and theatres of Hamburg. The insomniac who dreaded socialising, who, after he stopped seeing Anita, didn’t bother with bars and movies and cappuccinos, discovered in a startlingly short time his aptitude for serial self-abuse. Each time was the last, he promised himself. But quite soon he was injecting himself regularly whenever he wanted to unwind.

  And fentanyl had a further side effect on his febrile intelligence, at least in the first days. On fentanyl, Snowleg was razed from his consciousness as if the experience had happened not to him but to someone else, like an older brother or parent before he was born or a boy he didn’t recognise in a photograph. As if it was a history that didn’t belong to him and he was not a participant.

  In June, after a cold snap, the weather refound its heat. In the same week an invitation arrived for a mime that Pantomimosa was performing in Uhlenhorst, a neglected area of the city where the underground didn’t reach. On a stifling evening Peter reeled up late at the Kampnagel Theatre. He hadn’t seen Sepp and Teo for five years.

  He was heading for the bar when he tripped over a turquoise dog-lead, causing a piercing yelp.

  “Pericles!” A straight-backed woman darted out. Late thirties, medium height and expensively dressed in a blue polka-dotted dress and straw boater. Despite the intense heat she wore black suede mittens, like motorcycle gloves, that left her fingers exposed. She kneeled to soothe a long-haired Dachshund.

  Peter apologised. He offered to buy its owner a drink.

  “No.”

  But he insisted.

  “A malt whisky, then,” she said.

  He brought over her glass and raised his to Pericles. The dog looked ready to take a mouthful of his trousers.

  “I’m Bettina Grau,” she said, removing her boater to reveal a hewn white face and a fringe of blonde hair parted in the middle and smelling of coconut shampoo.

  Dark brown eyes scrutinised him, alert for his reaction. Then, realising with a small thrill that her name meant nothing, that he didn’t have a clue who she was: “Do you always go around with your shirt on inside out?”

  Installed on a bar-stool she talked easily about herself. “You’re a doctor? My father’s a doctor. Most of my art is inspired by medicine,” and described an exhibition she was preparing, “The Body and its Transgressions”, for which she had taken transparencies from Freud’s early works and superimposed them on Ojibway tribal medical charts.

  Peter nodded. He had never heard of a medical installation artist. But it dawned on him that he was familiar with one of her sculptures, a tree-house constructed in his wing at UKE using children’s prosthetic limbs. She wanted to hear his criticism of it and when he withheld this – he considered the sculpture ridiculous – she bent closer. “No, say exactly what you think. It’s important to me.”

  At that moment Sepp came up and, without noticing Peter, whispered in her ear. He pulled away and Peter could tell by his expression that he expected Bettina to follow.

  She took several steps. The floorspace had almost swallowed her when she stopped. A gloved hand reached back to Peter and the once-sharp eyes filled with a sort of longing. She was probably ten years older, but the expression on her face at that moment was that of a child. Under the dominion of her stare, Peter was filled with a tenderness that he hadn’t felt in a long time towards an adult.

  “Peter!” exclaimed Sepp, recognising him at last. “Join us for dinner, why don’t you? If Bettina agrees.”

  Their fingertips brushed.

  “Bettina agrees.” Her eyes shining brown like a Vietnamese doll. Cut from a stone he had never seen. Taking in every tall, thin inch of him.

  “It’s the Syracuse,” Sepp was saying. “Teo will give you a lift.”

  In the car, Teo turned to him: “You know, I’m rather cross with you, Peter. I’ve sent you at least ten invitations. Concerts, dinners – even an invitation to my wedding. Concerts are one thing, but a wedding . . . When you didn’t reply to that I figured you were lost to me.”

  “Your wedding?”

  “Exactly.” Teasing, but with a hurt edge, Teo said: “My wife tells me I’m humiliating myself if I make the next move.”

  “What can I say? I’ve been working.”

  They talked about foolish things and laughed and after a while they arrived at the restaurant.

  Teo parked the car. He was locking it when he said, “You don’t seem yourself.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “What’s the matter, Peter?”

  It had upset Peter more than he could have predicted to see Teo again. Ten years later he might have told Teo that he hadn’t been in touch because he didn’t like to think about that period in his life, their four days in Leipzig; moreover that he blamed Teo in some obscure way for not allowing him to demonstrate his courage and for ruining his adventure. On this warm evening in Hamburg, he searched for an explanation that would clear the air, but when he reached for it he felt weighed by a fatigue – a nagging unpleasantness – where language disappeared.

  Not knowing how to begin, he said: “Bettina. Tell me about her.”

  At the mention of Bettina, Teo issued a strange warning call like a cockatoo.

  “And what,” said Peter, “is that supposed to mean?”

  “In her own words? Instinct like a sewer, heart like a fridge. She’s intelligent. Rich. And fucked up.”

  “How so?”

  Teo chose his words with care. “Bettina has a lot of scar tissue.”

  “Explain.”

  “You won’t tell Sepp?”

  “I promise.”

  “Just bits and pieces I picked up from him. An uncle who abused her. A best friend who was an accomplice in the killing of Jürgen Ponto. Sepp thought he could sort her out. She practically destroyed him.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, I think Bettina mistakes having a dog for having a heart. She’s convinced she has a massive dose of love to give, but she’s kidding herself. She has much more to take and she uses it to staunch a wound that has nothing to do with love.”

  “What, then?”

&n
bsp; “Everything is subsumed to her artistic ambition. Stay away, Peter, that’s my advice. I lived with an artist once. It was hell. No, worse than hell.”

  Even as Teo delivered his verdict Peter clenched himself against it. By the time he was in the restaurant he had unheard it. The Syracuse was a Greek restaurant in Barmbecker Straße. Twelve people sat around a table. Bettina had saved Peter a place directly opposite her with her suede gloves. “Sepp’s filled me in. I know who you are.” Her father was a close colleague of Peter’s registrar. Over dinner she questioned Peter about his work. Precocious about medicine, she wanted evidence that he was on his way. He sensed that her interest in him might fade if he didn’t make his ambition glamorous.

  Because of a flood in her studio, she had taken a room in a hotel off Barmbecker Straße. He offered to walk her back. In the hot night she shivered as if tormented and welcomed it when he put his jacket across her bare shoulders. She invited him to her room and they sat on the sofa drinking Lagavulin out of bathroom glasses. She talked of her previous career as a medical illustrator and told him in hair-raising detail how she was molested by her uncle and how she stabbed him and spent a year in a reform school near Muntz, a watered-down prison for girls. Again, he felt a flux of tenderness.

  She uncorked a second bottle: “How do you know Sepp?”

  “I don’t know him well.” Instead of Leipzig he told her about England and the books he read repeatedly. In a sentimental, drink-slurred voice he quoted a verse from a favourite poem.

  “I love Tennyson,” she said, approvingly. He was surprised and impressed.

  It was past 2 a.m. when he left. He was kissing her goodbye when for the second time that evening he lost his balance. He felt his spread fingers on her shoulders, fingernails scratching the skin. Their mouths met and they fell back into the room.

  Afterwards, she lay on the bed with a small red smile. He heard a rhythmic slurp and her smile broadened as he propped himself up, trying to locate the noise. Their laughter was intimate when he realised that it was her dog licking itself.