Unnatural Order. Liz Porter

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СКАЧАТЬ fruity local red wine and watching Karl make chicken soup with Maultaschen, large pockets of meat-filled pastry like giant wontons. And again that evening as they strolled among the tents and stalls erected for a local festival, whose name she never quite caught, and he spent five minutes carefully explaining the difference between Bratwurst, Knackwurst, Weisswurst and Rodewurst – and then bought her one of each so she could tell for herself. He was also sticking to his promise to avoid pressuring her about any future plans. Instead he questioned her about her past, encouraging her own confessions by telling stories of his own, and refilling her glass to aid the conversation’s flow.

      Perfect interview technique, Caroline noted. But she kept on talking, carelessly aware that her mere presence in his flat was a delight to him. If something she said were to shock him out of his obsession with her, then so much the better. So she held nothing back.

      When she looked back on this short idyllic period, it seemed that they must have talked for the whole week. With time out for sex – a wonderfully huge amount. And hours spent eating meals cooked or chosen for her by Karl.

      Her confidence was supreme. She took it for granted that he loved her. The only question was: would she be able to love him in return?

      Chapter 5

      The great warm bath of Karl’s affection seemed to be having a salutary effect on her character, Caroline noted to herself as she dressed to go out for afternoon tea with Karl’s colleague, Sabine. She felt inexplicably gracious. Tactful. Protective, almost. For once she felt like keeping her harsher observations to herself. It wasn’t that she was afraid of alienating him. She merely felt kind. So she held back her opinion of the way most of his female friends dressed. What a herd of affluent little brown mice they were in their tastefully boring skirts and trousers with suitably matching jumpers. And all of them so clean, it made her yearn for the punks on the Tube.

      She laughed when Karl pointed out that people walking past them in the street were staring at her big black shoes, her bright pink socks, her tight black trousers.

      In London, she told him, nobody gave her a second glance.

      ‘Ah, but this isn’t London,’ he said. ‘German women don’t like to dress in such an eye-catching way.’

      ‘Maybe not in Gellingen,’ she replied. ‘But I bet they do in Berlin.’

      ‘You’d probably be happier in Berlin,’ he said. Which was her cue to disagree. His love may have made her kinder, but it was yet to make her a liar. Heartlessly, she shrugged.

      Sabine opened the front door to reveal a scene that would become familiar over several afternoon teas that week. The four other guests sitting around the tea table were all teachers: the men with neatly trimmed beards and colour-framed glasses, the women fresh-faced and wholesome.’

      ‘Tee trinken’ was an important ritual here, conducted at a table laid with matching crockery, cloth napkins and two large cakes. Pots of tea and coffee sat on little china stands, each with a small squat candle lit underneath to keep it warm.

      Sabine was a gentle mathematics teacher with an uncharacteristically savage haircut. She greeted Caroline with genuine warmth. But a certain proprietary look that she cast at Karl from time to time suggested a greater intimacy than Karl had, as yet, admitted. Caroline’s thoughts drifted as the others compared notes on the timetables they’d been landed with. Sabine and Antje discovered that they both had Friday afternoon off, and started planning a tennis afternoon.

      ‘Perhaps you would care to join us, Caroline,’ said Antje in her carefully formal English teacher’s English.

      Caroline blushed, wrenched back from thoughts of her own life eight years ago in Melbourne. Something about the cakes – but certainly not the table setting – had made her think of the impromptu afternoon tea parties on the floor of Steve and Vicki’s bedroom in the seedy terrace next door to her flat.

      How she had loved sitting with her neighbours in a chaos of cake boxes and milk cartons. The teapot was made of battered tin, the cups were chipped and all the teaspoons were bent and burned. But when they had drugs – and she had never been there when they hadn’t – the mood was always festive.

      She told herself she didn’t admire them for sneaking around in the middle of the night breaking into chemists’ shops, although she quietly envied them the guts it must have taken to do the break-ins.

      She most certainly didn’t covet the customers Vicki picked up on the street and brought back to the small bedroom at the end of the hall. But she respected the black humour with which both of them viewed the world. And she enjoyed the parade of characters that passed through their room, looking for a $30 deal and a place to have it; like Julie, nicknamed “the axe lady” because she was supposed to have armed herself with an axe for a chemist’s shop hold-up once. She used the room by day while Vicki used it by night.

      Caroline had also admired their talent for excess. At 32, she’d finally outgrown that emotion, although she hadn’t changed her low opinion of those who had never dreamed of living anything other than an orderly and obedient life. But she cringed at the memory of her 24-year-old self, because that Caroline was as immature as her 16-year-old self with its confused yearnings for Byron and opium dens and its disregard for prefects and other supporters of the status quo.

      The contents of the bookshelf she had left behind in her Sydney flat spelt out her fascination with excess, the worn books on Byron lined up with Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the works of the opium-eaters Coleridge and De Quincy, the addict poet Baudelaire and his opiate-inspired colleague Gerard de Nerval. On the bottom shelf, the sexy Restoration Comedies were squashed in with a few set texts from her German courses. The three years she had spent studying drama were a blur of noble generals and virtuous heroines. The only characters that had ever appealed to her were Wedekind’s demonic and sexually voracious Lulu and Brecht’s rebellious, promiscuous Baal. So she kept Pandora’s Box and Brecht’s Collected Plays and threw all the Schiller and Goethe in the bin.

      Literature had given Caroline extra evidence for a world view that she had developed at 16. Her reading merely helped order it around two mutually antagonistic poles: Goethe’s icy cold, ethical North and light-hearted warm and aesthetic South; Apollonian strivings for order and restraint and the Dionysian drive towards orgiastic abandonment. For her, sitting up reading in her narrow bed, it all seemed very simple. The bourgeois was opposed to the artistic; the law-abiding to the criminal. She had already pounced upon a book called Opium and the Romantic Imagination, hoping to find within it some sort of endorsement of the creative powers of opium. All she needed was to read Jean Genet, with his visions of the artistic and criminal outsider, and she was ready to meet Steve and Vicki and to fall under their spell.

      Fortunately for her sake, none of the junkies she met at Steve and Vicki’s were artistic. In fact the majority were more like Julie, whose hard grey eyes took her measure and clearly found her wanting.

      Caroline squirmed just thinking about it. How out of place she must have looked with her fashionably eccentric clothes and her “nice girl” job, teaching ex-prisoners English. Not to mention her clean complexion, unspoilt by the pimples and spots that all the junkies seemed to have. She could comfort herself with only one detail. At least they hadn’t known all the nonsense she’d been thinking.

      Years later, when Caroline was visiting from Sydney, she discovered that the house had been replaced by an ice-cream parlour. She also found out that Steve had died, Julie was in jail and Vicki had straightened out, gone back to school and then to uni.

      That СКАЧАТЬ