Summer Lies Bleeding (7 page)

How could I have been so stupid?
thinks Kerstin, as she sits at her desk furiously speed typing data she knows so well she could recite it verbatim.

When she got back to the office after buying the purse, she had clicked open the document containing the Delta report and found that the whole section she had completed that morning was gone.

‘I pressed “save”, I know I did,' she had cried, as she desperately scrolled down the page. Cal had overheard and was there in seconds, standing by her elbow, offering help, pressing her keyboard. Please get off, she had willed him. By touching her computer, by tainting the space around her, he was just making things worse, much worse.

‘Nah,' he had said, after five minutes of clicking various help settings on the computer. ‘It's gone. You can't have saved it, you plonker. Still, you ran out of here in such a mad rush, I'm surprised you remembered your own head.' He had then
offered to stay behind to help her, but that was the last thing she wanted and she had fobbed him off saying he would be a better help if he got started on the Gonshalff Report the next day, which would give her a head start. And now, at last, she is alone in the silent gloom of the office.

She presses ‘save' after each paragraph just to be sure and after the fifteenth ‘save', leans back in her chair, her eyes sore from staring at the screen. It is then that she notices the picture on the wall opposite.

Last week there had been a photograph in that space – a grainy print of a firework igniting; sparks of light flickering from its mouth. It was a menacing picture, not helped by the fact that the firework in extreme close-up rather resembled a gun. Now the picture has been removed and replaced with an Impressionist-style painting of a man sitting in a boat on a lake of lily pads.

Kerstin does not understand this sudden vogue for ‘office art'; the idea that employers can somehow control the moods of their workers through the images they display on the walls. Sircher Capital signed up to the scheme at the beginning of the year and now each month a new piece of original artwork appears on the walls, seemingly by magic. The fact that a man called Colin Andrews from the Essex-based Art Works company comes to the office after hours and discreetly hangs a new piece is less intriguing than the thought of the pictures just appearing. But Kerstin finds the ever-changing view disconcerting
and rather than speeding up her productivity it saps her, makes her feel tense and uncertain.

She looks at the picture; it is a pastiche, a badly executed piece of nothingness; ugly, like everything else in this place. The office, with its pine table and beige rugs is dry and anaemic; like a body drained of its blood. The flowers on the windowsill look artificial, even though they are delivered twice a week from a florist in Mayfair. Their colours – pale lemon and lilac – are insipid and drab and they melt into the beige walls and window blinds like spilt tea on a dirty carpet. The leaves are compressed against the clear glass vase, dead and motionless like they are stuck in formaldehyde. The air they breathe is static, the oxygen being sucked up into the lungs of the traders as they shout out the minute-by-minute fluctuations of the stock market. The flowers should not be here, she thinks. They should be in a beautiful garden with moist soil to drink and fresh air to keep them alive.

Kerstin stands up and walks over to the flowers. Instinctively she bends her head to smell them but there is nothing, no fragrant flower smell just a dusty half-scent like cardboard or used money. Maybe that is it, she thinks. Maybe that is what happens inside these four walls; all that is natural and alive becomes tainted with the very thing that is being cultivated in this hothouse; maybe the only thing that can survive here is money.

The apartment building in Cologne, where she grew up,
had been designed to bring in the light. She remembers an abundance of pale wood and glass, the scent of fresh flowers and plants, alive and green and thriving. At this thought, she steps away from the flowers and returns to her desk and the report accumulating on her computer screen.

Delta, a Cologne-based construction company with a €10 billion portfolio are slowly changing the landscape of Kerstin's home-city. Known for their elaborate high-rise constructions; concave behemoths of coloured glass where young, wealthy professionals can buy pod-sized one and two bed apartments for the same price as a detached house with land, the Delta brothers caused controversy a couple of years ago when one of their proposed developments, a helter-skelter shaped apartment block known as ‘The Snake', had threatened to block out a substantial part of Cologne's most famous building, the historic cathedral whose mighty spires can be viewed from almost any point in the city. After huge opposition from various heritage bodies, the brothers had to modify their plans and the view of the great cathedral remained intact. Kerstin's mother, Eva, a leading art historian and the daughter of Klaus Engel one of the team of stonemasons and wood carvers who rebuilt the cathedral after the Second World War when the city had been reduced to a pile of rubble, had been one of the loudest detractors.

As a child, Kerstin had often visited the cathedral; its bulk gave her a great sense of reassurance, it was impossible to get
lost in the city while that sleeping giant watched over you from every point. Her mother would take her to midnight mass on Christmas Eve and they would pray by the shrine of the Magi whose relics were housed in there. As they walked home through the icy streets, Kersten would listen to stories of her grandfather, Klaus; how one night while working alone in the crypt of the cathedral, he had been distracted by a faint knocking sound coming from the entrance, as though someone had entered the cathedral and closed the heavy wooden door behind them.

He had put down his tools and walked out onto the altar, shading his eyes with his hand to get a closer look. As he stood there, he felt an overwhelming sense of peace and warmth. Though it was the dead of night, a glorious light filled the room, seemed to stream through the stained-glass windows; while underneath his feet, a muffled noise rose slowly. It was unlike any sound he had heard before: sublime choral voices singing in Latin how death is not the end; how life endures in glorious colours beyond the final resting place. He had put his hand to his chest as he stood, cloaked in this sublime feeling of protection. Then, as suddenly as they had started, the voices stopped, the light dimmed and he felt something brush against his face, as delicate as a breath. In the darkness, he could just make out the figure of a woman walking down the aisle towards the door; the folds of her blue dress billowing slightly as if blown by a breeze. Then he heard the
door close, as he had heard it open just moments before. And he had returned to the crypt, taken up his tools and worked until morning when the other stonemasons arrived. But he never told them of his experience; he kept it hidden in the depths of his heart until he lay dying, a happy, contented man of eighty-one, when he took his only daughter's hand and told her of the night he had been visited by an angel.

Her mother has always been a mystery to Kerstin; an artistic bohemian spirit who believes in horoscopes and muses and angels. Her relationship with Kerstin's father, a professor of Physics at the University of Cologne, had been brief and tempestuous. He was thirty years her senior and far too set in his ways to embrace the world of babies and nappies and nursery rhymes. But the relationship had created a scientifically-minded child who went to bed reading mathematics textbooks rather than stories; who abhorred the chaos of her mother's cluttered life; who preferred numbers to words; theories to intuition. But though Eva would never truly understand her, Kerstin's grandfather seemed to see something in his intense little grandchild. When she was a toddler she would sit for hours placing her building blocks into neat piles of even numbers. In the months before he died, her grandfather would watch her with a smile, then he would pat her head, turn to Eva and tell her that it was good that the child searched for order in this chaotic world; hadn't he done the same when he helped rebuild the cathedral; turned that pile of rubble into a place of worship once more?

Kerstin looks at her watch. It is almost 7:30 p.m. Just a couple more pages and she will have made up the ground she lost earlier. It will be her name on the top of the report, her writing, her insights. She has worked hard on this report, with more diligence than she would afford others. How could she not, with something as close to home as Delta? But where she should be feeling pangs of guilt – for her mother's tireless conservation efforts, the legacy of her grandfather – she feels strangely indifferent, as though this report is a piece of abstract art, a paper trail that will dissolve once it hits the air. They will be proud of me, she thinks, her parents, proud of their diligent daughter with her gift for moulding words and numbers into coherent statements of intent, calls to arms for wealthy investors with deep pockets. Yes, they will be proud, she concludes. Her mind is calm as she works; three months of research now ready to be reconciled into order and coherence. She will not let herself get distracted by dark thoughts because that will only lead to the counting, and for now the only numbers she needs are the ones on the screen in front of her. With her grandfather's words ringing in her ears, she returns to the report.

*

Seb stands in the empty restaurant looking at the picture that he has spent the last ten minutes hanging on the wall. He puts his head to one side and squints.

‘Hmm, I'm still not sure,' he says to Yasmine, who is sitting
at the table opposite, busily writing menu plans for Wednesday night.

She looks up from her work and sees the picture. It's a line drawing of a fig tree bursting with fruit; one of her favourites from the twenty pieces chosen as part of a community arts project run by Seb's gallery, Asphodel.

‘I think it looks great,' she says, enthusiastically. Yet, she can tell just by looking at her husband's pensive expression that he will spend the next ten minutes or so moving the picture a millimetre this way, a millimetre the other way, before returning it to its original position. It's like he distrusts things falling into place too easily; he always has to look at something from all angles before making a decision.

As he adjusts the picture, she shakes her head and smiles then returns to her carefully crafted menu. At the top of the page she has written ‘Iced Tea Shots' to be served on the roof garden and a little ripple of excitement flutters through her body as she remembers the smell of that incredible jasmine.

‘I got a call from Paula Wilson this afternoon,' she says, not looking up from the page.

‘Who's Paula Wilson?' asks Seb, as he takes the picture down from the wall for the third time.

‘She's the herb supplier I told you about,' says Yasmine. ‘The one I met at the Bath Food Festival. She grows these amazing jasmine plants – Andalucian jasmine. It has the most incredible scent. I brought loads back with me, you remember; I
made that iced tea and you said it was the best iced tea you had tasted outside of Morocco.'

‘Oh yeah,' says Seb, only half-listening. The drawing is starting to annoy him. It just doesn't look right. There is something twee about it, something banal and over-simplistic but Yasmine had insisted on it as soon as she saw it among the pile of entries that had poured into the gallery. She said it reminded her of the fig tree that had grown in her grand-father's back yard in Tangier; said it represented abundance, fertility and nourishment. So Seb has no choice now but to keep trying to find a spot for it.

‘She's dropping off a potted pair tomorrow,' says Yasmine. She puts her pen down and sits watching Seb fumble about with the picture. ‘I told her I was happy to pay for them to be delivered but she insisted, said she's going to be in London and would like to come and see the restaurant and meet us. That was nice wasn't it? I'll invite her to the launch if she's still here on Wednesday.'

‘Hmm,' says Seb. He is standing back, looking at the picture, which he has hung back in its original place.

‘Honestly, babe, it looks great there,' says Yasmine. ‘You mustn't over-fuss. If you analyse something so intently it's bound to look wrong. That's what you're doing now. Trust me, it looks fine where it is.'

Seb shrugs his shoulders, walks over to where Yasmine is sitting and flops down into the chair opposite her.

‘I know I over-complicate things, Yas, but I just want it all to look perfect.' He reaches across the table and strokes her cheek, ‘I'm so proud of you,' he says, gently.

Yasmine smiles and holds his hand against her face. ‘Say that again when Wednesday's over and nothing's gone wrong,' she says, kissing his hand. ‘I just keep thinking there's some huge detail I've overlooked, something really obvious that I'll only remember at 6 p.m. on Wednesday night when it'll be too late. I'm having nightmares every night about it – last night I dreamed the kitchen blew up, the night before that I dreamed that we had no oven …'

‘That's natural,' says Seb. ‘This is a huge undertaking; it was the same with me when I set up the gallery. Do you remember, I used to get up at four every morning to write lists?'

Yasmine nods her head and smiles. ‘Yeah, and I was no help: six-months pregnant and full of hormonal rage.'

Seb laughs. ‘We got through that though, didn't we? And we'll get through this. Everything is in order, and it's a trial run really. But even so, we've got fantastic staff, a fantastic menu, an amazing location and the world's best chef.'

Yasmine rolls her eyes at him teasingly. ‘Yeah, who needs Ferin Adrià,' she laughs, leaning back in her seat.

It is the most relaxed she has looked for weeks and Seb thinks how he would like to press the pause button just for a moment, stop the momentum, the juggernaut that is this project, and stop and breathe, just the two of them.