‘It wasn’t meant to be like that.’
She could hear her teenage self sniffing.
‘You were supposed to do better. You were going to be kinder and calmer, and start building bridges. Don’t you remember? You were going to find your father and let him be the pathway to finding your mother.’
It had been a good plan. It had been the plan the whole way back from Berlin, once Karen accepted that the city had left her with bigger questions than she could tackle alone. Father Kristoff had shaken the pieces of her childhood out of their old slots and Karen had travelled back from Germany as determined as a new-minted evangelist not to stuff them back in.
She had failed at the first hurdle.
Her good intentions had proved themselves to be skin-deep. That realisation might make her squirm now, but it was the truth. She hadn’t tried to mend fences, she had postured. She had carried on doing what she always did: setting her father tests and letting him fail, while she watched in disdain from her precious high ground. Deciding to be hurt when he wasn’t at the school gate to greet the coach, or in the house when she tipped her bags all over the sitting room. Conveniently forgetting that she hadn’t bothered to let him know the day, never mind the time, she would be returning. Deciding to be disappointed at his lack of interest, even though she had retreated to her bedroom long before he came home, and made no effort to get up before he went out again in the morning.
Karen winced, remembering how she had arranged herself on the sofa the next evening, wearing her best I-forgive-you face.
What had been wrong with her? Why hadn’t she run to him when the door opened and surprised him with a hug? Startled them both into the new start they needed? Because she was too proud? Or too angry? Or afraid of what he might tell her, or of what he had failed to? Whatever excuse she had found herself then, or plastered over the past now, it didn’t matter: the outcome wouldn’t change. Instead of moving towards him, she had waited and he had waited and the moment had crumpled into ‘so you didn’t even bother to miss me then’ on one side and a weary headshake on the other. Ten minutes restored to each other’s company and they were thrust back into old ways. A few months later, she had left for Manchester and told herself he was glad of it. She had never once asked him if that was true. Now, with Andrew lying in the hospital, all she could feel was the waste of it.
Karen put down the glass and realised, once again, she was crying.
Tell me what you want – at least give me a chance. Stop trying to end us before we get started.
How many boyfriends had hit her with that line? How many times had ‘I don’t mean to do it’ died on her lips?
‘So you struggle to commit. You haven’t met the one you want to get really close to, that’s all. When you do, everything will be different.’
All her well-meaning friends said it and swept away Karen’s ‘but what if I can’t’ as if the fear buried in the words couldn’t possibly be real.
She had tried. She had let Joe get very close and she hadn’t set him tests, at least not ones he didn’t know about. She had so wanted it to work, for them to win the whole package, but then she would panic and push him away and fall apart when he pressed her on why. It was Joe who had delivered the worst parting shot of all the ones she had gathered, hurled on a blast of confusion and anger when she shied from cementing two years of shared beds into something more permanent.
‘We all have hurt, Karen. You’re not a child anymore. You can’t keep hiding behind your dead mother.’
‘And is that what you do?’
The therapist’s question Karen could never find the right words to answer. The therapy sessions abandoned, like the pills a doctor offered that remained uncollected, in favour of locking the past firmly away in the past. A strategy that, as far as Karen was concerned, worked. That had got her through the bleak and frightening times when Liese’s suicide resurfaced and threatened to engulf her.
I won’t be defined by it; I won’t be damaged.
Which sounded believable, except here she was, alone, hunched up and brooding like a passed-over child.
‘Enough.’
Karen jumped up and put the whisky away before it made her any more maudlin.
The cold in the kitchen was getting under her skin. She needed to take the day back under control, to get back to herself. She headed for the sitting room and the one reasonably reliable fire. Nothing in there had changed any more than it had in the kitchen. The walls still needed a fresh coat of paint. The air still held the dry taste of old newspapers. The mock-coal fire still glowed for too long before the heat broke through.
Karen ran her fingers across the bookcase whose dusty contents hadn’t been touched for years and glanced at the drab landscapes spaced out on the walls. The house would have to be sold if her father’s new life was going to be paid for. All of it would need boxing up, and no doubt Andrew would demand inventories. He had mentioned bringing home files and papers when he finally retired, so he could stay active, running the regiment’s old-boys’ association. They would all have to be sorted. More poking through the past, the one thing she had no more desire to do.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night when sleep decided to evade her, Karen wondered why she had stopped, why she had convinced herself her mother’s history no longer mattered. Then, the confrontations and the silences and the confusions of long-ago discoveries slammed back and the urge to go delving again disappeared.
What was it someone had said, in the first whirlwind weeks of university, after too much cheap wine had made them think they were grown-up and daring? ‘How many people really know their parents? How many could honestly bear to?’ Karen had latched on to that like a life lesson.
She had worked hard; she had made friends and done well. She had set herself goals and she had achieved them. The degree in architecture she wanted, a starting position in a Manchester practice, a move to London and the kind of firm whose designs graced magazine covers. Karen had forged a life pointing forward and kept it steadier than she once thought she could. And if sometimes her life was lonely, lacking the one big love her friends all seemed to be finding, there was enough good in it to paper over that. She was happy enough and that was more than a lot of people could say; more than she had once expected. She wasn’t about to let returning to this house derail her.
‘Which means I can’t stay here. I’ll book a hotel, get some sleep and then I’ll start on the packing.’
That sounded more confident.
She switched on the television, in need of bright-eyed breakfast crews to buoy up her new determination.
‘And just because I found something once, that doesn’t mean it’ll happen again.’
Then she glanced at the television and all thoughts of hotels and packing crates vanished.
‘As the guards look on in bewildered confusion, the crowds keep on coming.’
Karen perched on the arm of the chair as the reporter realised this was his opportunity to make a grab for history and crammed his voice full of meaning.
‘The Iron Curtain lifted in East Berlin tonight.’
The images unfolding across the screen were hypnotising, unbelievable. Bodies swarmed like migrating herds out of the Eastern sector’s impossibly opened gates; crowds massed on the Western side to welcome them, clutching flowers and over-shaken champagne. Cheering couples danced hand in hand round the Brandenburg Gate. Laughing figures scrambled like ants onto the top of the Wall.