Dead Letters Anthology (6 page)

They come out at night
, she used to say. Moths, and sometimes, memories. Memories of our old life, and of the sister I’d left there. Izzy Blau, with whom I’d spent the happiest summer of my life, and who had died when Oma agreed to let her son – after a year of therapy, anger management and remorse – take his daughter, unsupervised, for a day by the seaside.

She was six. Ma didn’t know what had made him so angry.
He was always angry
, she said.
That was why I ran away
. But this time, his anger had found a special kind of focus. Perhaps my sister had tried to fight back. She was tougher than I was. Anyway, he’d tried to make out that it had been an accident – that someone else had done the deed – but no one had believed him. Konrad Blau had made the news. My mother went back to her maiden name. And I grew up angry, without knowing why, until my mother told me:

You look so like him
, she used to say.
You always did. It’s frightening.

She must have seen the look on my face, because she turned away, lit a cigarette, and said, “Don’t be like that, Carey.”

I said: “Why did you leave her behind? When you knew what he was like?”

She shrugged her helpless shoulders. Years of indulgence had made her fat; if I struck her, the blows would make ripples in the pallid flesh. I remembered smacking a jellyfish with the side of my spade – her skin was just the same shade of white – dead and helpless on the sand.

“I did it for you, Carey,” she said. “Izzy was the strong one. Izzy wouldn’t have grown up like him.”

“Izzy didn’t grow up at all.”

She started to cry, as I’d known she would, and reached for the bottle at her side. And afterwards, there was a fire – always a risk, when smoking in bed – and I was alone in the world, at eighteen, with nowhere to go but to the place where everything returns, in the end.

The last of the photographs came onto the screen. It looked more modern than the rest – it could have been taken yesterday. A group of people, looking up, some holding digital cameras. I thought it might be another parade; but this was something different. The faces here were pinched with concern, and looking beyond them, I could see the palisade of the National Returns Centre, reflected with a hellish light—

The laptop screen was covered with moths. I tried to brush them aside with my hand. Their sooty wings left a residue that blurred my mother’s face from view. And yet here she was, looking older now, her hair gone from bleached-blonde hair to white, tied up in an old woman’s ponytail. Over twenty years after her death, thinner than I remembered her, watching, camera in hand, from the scene of an incident.

That was a week ago. What now? The moths – the moths are everywhere. The sound of their wings is like the sound of flames against the window. I haven’t been to work all week. I know the moths will be there too; clustering in the overhead lights; casting their giant shadows. Their acrid dust is on everything: my skin, my clothes, my possessions. Their plump and furry bodies hang from the ceiling in luxy swags; the sound of them is the grazing of sheep in a field of white noise.

Moths come out at night
, she said. In this case, they are hungry for more than the contents of my wardrobe. They crawl into my ears; my hair; they spill from drawers and suitcases. I have tried to run. But the moths always manage to follow me. Even in this boarding house, the moths are already everywhere; teeming with those memories that only dare come out at night.

I’d thought myself safe in the mail room. It was quiet and peaceful there. There I laid the dead to rest, away from the ghost of my mother. But mothers, like moths, come out at night; and now my mother is everywhere. In my bed, my clothes, my head – eating me from the inside.

Imagine a warehouse in Belfast. Imagine the dead letter office. Miles and miles of memories, safely cocooned in envelopes. Continents of paper, waiting to be discovered. And those moths are in them all; pressed between the pages; hungry for more than just revenge. Cut me open after this and there will be nothing but dust inside me; dust, and the wings of a million moths, a million vanished memories. Imagine setting a match to it all, in the dark, at midnight. Imagine typing in the code; coming in through a side door. Imagine the silence of the place, like a mausoleum. Imagine my mother standing there, all in dust and velvet.
Moths come out at night
, she says. But the night is endless.

As I strike the match, she comes towards me like a cumulus. As I try to turn and run, the moths descend upon me. And as we fly towards the flame, she holds me in her soft embrace, and whispers:

Darling. Mother’s here.

Joanne Harris is the best-selling author of fifteen novels, three cookbooks, two collections of short stories, two short musicals and a
Doctor Who
novella. She has judged a number of literary awards, including the Orange and the Whitbread Prizes, and in 2014 was awarded an MBE by the Queen. In spite of this thin veneer of sophistication, she also tweets compulsively as
@joannechocolat
, plays regularly with the #Storytime band – which was formed when its members were still at school – and dreams of being marooned on the
Lost
island.

“The past is a foreign country”
L.P. Hartley,
The Go-Between

Karla had known Lukas when they were children. Lukas had wanted to be an inventor, to make things with buttons to press and levers to pull, machines fizzing with electricity. They were still very young when they lost touch. She thought of him often over the years, and always imagined him building something in a garden shed or working at an experiment in a laboratory or standing in front of a blackboard that was covered in almost impossible mathematics, though Lukas himself, in her imagination, was always a boy, frozen in time, in the 1940s.

Anyone whistling or cracking their knuckles made her think of Lukas, as did cap guns and fireworks, whose sulphurous smell lingered in the cold air.

She supposed that he was still in Germany, while she had moved to London with her English mother. One summer, in her teens, she had sent him a postcard, but she never received a reply. Nowadays, she could have typed ‘Lukas Birchler’ into a search engine and let it find him for her, but in those days there was no such thing. By the time computers were replacing the typewriters in the office in which she worked, she was retiring.

She was in her seventies before she saw Lukas again, in the lobby of a Spanish hotel. She was there on holiday, and had noticed the arrival of this elderly man wearing a trilby and walking with a stick. Despite his age, when he put down his suitcase and cracked his knuckles, Karla was sure that it was him, even before she heard him say ‘Birchler’ to the receptionist.

Over dinner, Karla told Lukas about her life in London, her secretarial career and her late husband, and Lukas told Karla about his work as a physicist, the research he had done, the papers he had published in scientific journals. ‘I knew it!’ she said. ‘Please tell me you have an inventing shed!’ and he told her that he did. ‘I remember all the things you wanted to invent,’ she said. ‘You wanted to make a robot that would do your homework for you.’ Lukas laughed, nodding. ‘You had plans to build all sorts of machines.’

‘I’ve had some success,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My goodness, it sounds like you’ve done very well for yourself. We have so much catching up to do. How long are you here for?’

‘For two weeks,’ said Lukas. ‘I’ve been told I have to take it easy.’

‘You do that,’ said Karla, patting his hand. She suspected that Lukas was one of those people who never quite manage a holiday even when they’ve made it as far as the beach; his head, she thought, would still be back in the lab or the inventing shed.

They talked about their home town. It turned out that Lukas and his mother had left there not long after Karla and her mother. Both their fathers had already gone missing by then.

‘I found some curious old photographs,’ said Karla, ‘in amongst my mother’s effects, after she died. There are half a dozen of them, black and white, in an envelope marked “Lucerne, 1941”.’ One, she said, showed some men outside the Hotel Schlüssel in Lucerne. In another, there were men and cars gathered on a mountain road, and on the back of this one, someone had written, ‘WHERE IT WAS DECIDED’. ‘I assume that my father took the photographs, and I wondered if one of the men might be your father, but I didn’t remember him well enough to be sure. Now I’ve seen you, though, I swear that one of them must be either your father or your grandfather. There is a man – seen walking away from the Hotel Schlüssel, and in the gathering on the mountain road – who is the spit of you, right down to the trilby and the walking stick.’

‘Is that right?’ said Lukas. ‘That’s very interesting.’

‘The photographs are at my house in London,’ said Karla. ‘I could send you a copy when I get home, but I’d very much like to look at them with you. Are you ever in England?’

Lukas said that he had no plans to come to England in the foreseeable future.

‘Never mind,’ said Karla. ‘I’ll send them in the post.’

Lukas came to Karla’s room that night. Sitting on the edge of her bed in the lamplight, he asked her about the photographs. Having studied them many times, she could tell him all manner of details, such as, outside the hotel and on the mountain road, it was raining – the men were wearing overcoats and carrying big black umbrellas; and one picture showed an incoming ferry whose name was
Rigi
; and it was possible to read the time on the clock at the ferry terminal, and the name of a street, Löwengraben, and the number plate of one of the Volkswagen Beetles on the mountain road.

When Karla had told him everything she could, Lukas said goodnight and returned to his room.

In the morning, Karla phoned her daughter, told her where she might find these photographs and asked her to send them to the hotel so that she and Lukas could look at them together. The post should only take a few days.

Karla looked for Lukas in the breakfast room, so that she could tell him, but he wasn’t there; she didn’t see him anywhere that day, or the next. By the time the photographs arrived – found and posted promptly, with a note on the envelope to say ‘They were where you said they would be’ – Karla had discovered that Lukas had gone. His luggage, she had learnt from the reception desk, had been sent on to the Hotel Schlüssel in Lucerne.

Karla asked the receptionist to find and dial the number of the hotel. Lukas could not at first be reached – he did not appear to have arrived – but some hours later the Hotel Schlüssel returned her call, putting Lukas on the line. Karla said to him, ‘What are you doing there?’

‘I looked online,’ he said, ‘and saw that the hotel was still here. It has a good rating on TripAdvisor.’

Karla could hear some commotion going on around him. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘It’s my luggage coming in,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just got here. I went via home to collect a few things. I have rather a lot of luggage, including a few awkward items.’

‘Well, I’ve just received the photos. I asked my daughter to send them here. Are you coming back?’

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Lukas.

‘Well, how long will you be in Lucerne for?’

‘Indefinitely,’ he said.

He was exasperating. Karla put the phone down and looked at the packet of photographs in her hand. She would send them on to him.

In her room, she made use of the hotel stationery, addressing an envelope to Lukas at the Hotel Schlüssel and enclosing the packet of photographs. She went to the post office before lunch.

When she did not hear from Lukas, she called the Hotel Schlüssel again and was told that Mr Birchler had gone.

‘Gone?’ she said. ‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ the receptionist said, ‘but he said that you might call. I didn’t personally see him leave but he has gone, although he left behind many of his belongings.’ Amongst these abandoned belongings were some unwieldy items of equipment and some books:
Germans Against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under the Third Reich
and
The Plots to Kill Hitler: The Account of Fabian von Schlabrendorff.
For now, the hotel had put these things into their lost property.

‘And you’ve no idea where he went?’ asked Karla.

‘I think somewhere far from here,’ said the receptionist. ‘I think somewhere he knew when he was small.’

‘Perhaps Germany, then,’ said Karla. ‘Was he expecting to return?’

‘I really couldn’t say,’ said the receptionist. ‘But we won’t keep his things in lost property forever.’

Karla asked about the photographs, whether they had arrived in time for Mr Birchler to see them, but the receptionist could not be sure what Mr Birchler had or had not received before leaving. Karla left her contact details with the receptionist and with the desk of her own hotel in Spain so that Lukas would be able to get in touch and so that she might get the photographs back at some point.

In fact, this package had not yet been delivered to the Hotel Schlüssel; it was still in transit. When it did arrive, the receptionist, seeing that Lukas Birchler was not a guest of the hotel, wrote on the envelope ‘
Unbekannt!
’ and ‘
NACHSENDEN
’, before recognising the name, remembering him and adding ‘
INS AUSLAND VERZOGEN
’. She put it back in the post, to be returned to the Spanish hotel whose address was printed on the envelope.

Karla, meanwhile, was aboard the aeroplane that would take her back to London. She had not heard from Lukas again, but she was very pleased to have encountered him after so many years and to have had the chance to catch up. She had been so tickled to discover that he really did have an inventing shed in which to build those machines he had always talked about – everything from the homework robot to what he had always called his big project: a machine that could travel through time. He used to talk about that a lot. Karla had said that if she could go back in time she would like to be Jean Harlow kissing Clark Gable but Lukas had said it would not work like that. What he had been interested in was whether one could go back and change the past. And if not, he had said, at least one might learn something by being there.