If the two men weren’t laughing, they were arguing. With all the windows in the house open to try to let in a breeze, I heard their shouting no matter which room they were in. They sounded like a Retreater meeting for two—the real ones had been suspended for the summer; apparently even survivalists took holidays. I tried to ignore them, but would find myself straining to make out each word. My father shouted the loudest, lost control first; Oliver’s voice remained a steady measured drawl that sliced through the other’s fury. The arguments seemed to be the same ones, going around and around again: the best bug-out location, city versus country, equipment, guns, knives. The noise would reach a crescendo, then a door would be slammed, the flare of a match as a cigarette was lit in the dark garden, and the next day all would be forgotten.
One evening I heard a noise from the hall, and it took me a moment to realize it was the phone. When I picked it up, Ute was on the other end.
“Liebchen, it is Mutti.” She sounded a long way off. “I am sorry I haven’t called earlier. It has been difficult.” I thought she must mean that there weren’t many telephones in Germany.
“Papa and I have been living in the garden.”
“In the garden? That sounds nice. So you are OK, and are you happy now that school must be finished for the holidays?”
I was worried she would ask about the lessons I hadn’t been to, but instead she said, “Has the weather been warm in London too?” She sounded sad, as if she would rather be at home, but then perhaps trying to make me laugh, she continued, “Last night, a fat lady fainted from the heat when I was on the second bar of the Tchaikovsky. I had to start again from the beginning; it was absolute shambles.”
“I’m very brown,” I said, rubbing dust off my legs and realizing I hadn’t had a bath since the day Oliver had arrived.
“How lovely it must be to have time in the sunshine. I am inside every day, in the car, or in the hotel and then in the car again to get to the performance.”
“Do you want to speak to Papa now?” I asked.
“No, not yet. I want to find out more about what my little Peggy has been doing.”
“I’ve been cooking.”
“That sounds very helpful. I hope you’ve tidied the kitchen afterward.”
I didn’t answer her; I didn’t know what to say.
After a few seconds, in a voice I had to strain to hear, she asked, “Perhaps you could get Papa now.”
I placed the receiver on the padded seat beside the phone and saw that my hands had made dirty marks on the yellow plastic. I licked my fingers and rubbed at the smudges.
When I told my father who it was on the phone, he jumped up from the swing seat, where he had been lying in the sun, and ran into the house. I went down to the bottom of the garden, where I had been baking burdock roots in the hot ashes of a fire I had made by myself. Without understanding why, I thrashed at the embers with a stick, scattering them like glow-worms into the evening. A few landed on the tent, burning black-rimmed holes through the canvas and the liner. When the fire was a grey blotch on the threadbare lawn, I walked through the house and up to my room.
An argument between my father and Oliver was building in the kitchen. It moved to the sitting room and on into the glasshouse; I put my head out of the open window. Below me were two shadows, lit by the lamplight that spilled from the sitting-room door. When I put my fingers in my ears to block out the sound, the black shapes became silent dancers, their movements choreographed, each action planned and rehearsed. I pressed my fingers in and out again in quick succession, which made the argument come to me in bursts of noise, disjointed and staccato.
“You f—”
“—ker. What—”
“—itch. How cou—”
“—you’re pathet—”
“—an anima—”
“—ucking ani—”
And then Oliver laughing, like a machine gun, jerky and uncontrolled. A dark object, an ashtray or a plant pot, broke off from one of the man-shadows and flew past the other into the glass roof. There was a pause, as if the glass sheet were holding its breath; then it trembled, rippling outward and splitting apart with a tremendous noise. In a reflex action, I ducked even while the glass rained down on the men below. The father-shadow crouched, his hands over the top of his head. Oliver yelled, “Whowwaa,” as his shadow backed toward the sitting-room door and disappeared inside. My father’s shape stayed bent, so that from my position above him, he stopped being a man with arms and legs and a head and became a crow with a beak and wings. He made a noise like a crow too. I watched him with my hands on the window sill and my eyes just above them, while the sound of Oliver moved through the house—to the kitchen and upstairs to the guest bedroom. I heard drawers being opened and closed, the long rasp of a suitcase zip. Then Oliver burst into my bedroom and I saw myself as he must have seen me, crouching by the window in the dark.
“Seen enough, have you, little girl?” he spat. “Get a kick out of spying on adults, do you? Well, don’t worry, I’ve seen enough too. Of you and your dear papa.” He laughed bitterly. “And let’s not forget the remarkable Ute. It seems I’ve given them both a present they won’t forget in a hurry.” He left and went downstairs.
For a second I was frozen; then, thinking he was going back to the shattered glasshouse, I spun around and looked out of the window again. But the front door slammed, shaking the house, and below me, my father’s crow-body jerked as though it had been caught in one of our traps, and then it slumped. I crept back to bed and lay with my eyes bulging into the darkness and my ears straining to hear the next sound, which never came.
In the morning, I was woken by three short blasts of the whistle. My father stood at the bottom of the stairs, legs apart, head up. The backs of his hands had plasters stuck on them in several places, and there was another over the bridge of his nose.
“Pack your rucksack, Peggy,” he said, using his military voice. “We’re going on holiday.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, worrying what Ute would say about the broken roof and the glass all over the floor when she returned.
“We’re going to die Hütte,” said my father.
5
London, November 1985
At breakfast, I agreed to sit at the kitchen table to eat, instead of in my bedroom or on the floor of the glasshouse, where I could escape the stuffy warmth of the other rooms. Ute and I negotiated, and she said if I sat down with her and took time with spooning my porridge she would stop asking questions. I told her I would, because my father’s face was tucked away in a secret place. I knew she would continue to ask questions. She couldn’t stop herself.
The kitchen table had shrunk since I had been away, but everything else had multiplied and I found the kitchen was the most unsettling room of all. The quantity of things, the overwhelming choice of what to look at, pressed me to my chair and made me shut my eyes. The row of pots with always available tea, coffee, and sugar; larger containers marked SELF-RAISING and PLAIN; a blender gathering greasy dust; a roll of soft paper on a wooden stick; a shiny toaster that I avoided eye contact with; hooks with assorted mugs; a white fridge made multicoloured by magnets. I couldn’t understand why a family of three needed seven saucepans when there were only four rings on the cooker; why the utensil pot held nine wooden spoons if there were only seven pans; and how we could ever eat the amount of food available in the cupboards and the fridge.