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Ellie woke in a cold sweat with the bedsheets tangled about her. The radio droned next to her, its dial blinking 7 a.m. She pressed her face into her pillow before the preceding day’s events came flooding back: she’d been fired. With a groan, she decided it was too late to return to the sanctity of sleep. She raked back the hair from her face and swung herself upright.
Her mornings usually consisted of scanning the headlines on her phone in bed, preparing a packed lunch and riding her bike to work with her freshly-brewed coffee sloshing in its flask. Not one to rest on her laurels, this newfound freedom from work disoriented her.
Her day didn’t begin in earnest without hearing her mother’s voice. It formed part of her routine like scrubbing her armpits with a washcloth or brushing her teeth. But she swallowed her instinctive reflex to call her mother. Shame bloomed in her chest about being fired. She couldn’t imagine her parents ever suffering any setbacks. Their belief in her, which once made her so strong, now made her weak and willing to withhold the truth.
She didn’t want to disappoint them.
Hiding from the world wasn’t an option, not for her. Even at weekends, Ellie rarely stayed home. Come rain or shine, she gravitated towards the city for a cultural hit: to the sprawling National Gallery, Museums Island or the open air cinema on the lush lawns of Berlin parks. Or if she longed for relaxation, she visited the misty women’s hamam in the Chocolate Factory in Kreuzberg, practiced hot yoga in the gym near her flat or met her college friends in the bars on Oranienburgerstraße in the soft glow of the Jewish Synagogue, where they would fritter away time over deep glasses of red wine, talking about the future. She’d never been any good with the brakes on. However rotten she felt, she needed a plan. She threw on a pair of threadbare jeans and a t-shirt, grabbed her private phone, and headed out. She’d tell her parents about her work predicament later, once she’d salvaged something of the situation.
Over the years, Ellie had learned to follow her bulldog instincts. The more she analysed Marina’s arguments and her reactions, the more certain she became that she’d missed a piece of the jigsaw. With renewed energy, she strode into a café in Prenzlauer Berg. Inside, plain brick walls and polished floors formed a moving canvas for an assortment of furniture and paintings on sale to customers. Patrons could buy the very seats they sat on. It was a concept typical of hip, ever-changing Berlin, and made this café one of her favourites. She nodded hello to the owner, a woman in a tassled top and space buns. Then she found a table and ordered coffee.
She pulled out her phone and dialled Tom at Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung.
“BAZ. Tom speaking.”
“Tom. Has my journal turned up yet?”
He whispered down the line in staccato beats. “No, not yet. Are you okay?” His voice dropped a notch lower still, until Ellie strained to hear. “You shouldn’t be calling–Marina’s office door is open. I was going to stop by and see you later.”
“I’m fine,” said Ellie, breezily. What did he think? It hadn’t been the greatest moment of her life, being hauled out of the office like a piece of furniture. She focused. “Maybe my journal slipped under my desk? It’s packed full of my thoughts. I’d hate to lose it.”
“I’ll look, okay?” said Tom.
“Thanks.” Next to her, a waitress splattered orange juice on the floor.
“You made the front page. Have you seen it yet?” He paused, and she clocked the note of anxiety in his voice.
The office had been too full of vanities and rivalries for friendships, but Tom was the exception. She could read him like a book.
“I’m on the front page? Which article?”
He didn’t respond.
At the café, the coffee machine churned.
“Oh, God,” said Ellie.
Her chair scraped against the wooden floor as she pushed it back. She waved at the waitress, left a couple of Euros on the table, and made a beeline for the nearest newsstand. She found the paper in seconds. There, next to her byline, splashed across the front page, stood a headline she had never intended to be published.
Ellie sucked in her breath.
REFUGEES BEHIND SOARING TREPTOW CRIME RATES
By Ellie Richter
“Are you there?” said Tom, his voice so far away he sounded like a cardboard cutout of himself.
The whisky muskiness of her voice disappeared, leaving a hard edge. “I’ll call you back.”
She stuffed the phone in her pocket and her eyes darted across the page. Marina had used the second article, the one Ellie had written as a gesture of willingness to obey, the one that had been destined for the wastepaper basket. How could she have been so stupid? A knot formed in her stomach and she tightly clenched the paper.
The vendor coughed. Ellie glanced up and pressed some change into his outstretched palm. He faded away. She stood in the middle of the street, poring over every word. A photo of the performers accompanied the article. Ellie searched their faces, guilt rising like a wave in her stomach, making her nauseous. She’d had a connection with the circus and its people. Marina had pushed her into the role of villain and Ellie hated her for it. Every fibre of her being flooded with remorse and she railed at the unfairness of having this alien voice thrust upon her.
She rang Tom. “Oh Tom, how dare she? She knew I didn’t want this printed. What on earth have I done? It’s all here, and my fault, a deliberate blurring of the facts under my byline. What am I going to do?”
He sighed. “Damn, I’m sorry. I thought as much after listening to the fireworks yesterday. Look, you wrote the words while you were employed by the paper. You’ve not got a leg to stand on.”
“I thought she’d tossed my work out along with me. What will the circus people think of me? It’s not what I intended. I’ve got to put this right.”
Voices boomed on the other end of the line and he hissed into the receiver. “I can’t talk here. Can we pick this up later? I’ll come–”
Ellie’s mouth turned dry. She’d lost her job and her integrity. “No, Tom, please, there must be something I can do. There has to be some reason why this stupid story is so important to her.”
Silence, then a pause. “Look, there might be nothing to it, but recently there’s been a few meetings blocked out in Marina’s diary, ones she’s been cagey about.”
Her wind whirred. “What do you mean, ‘cagey’?”
“I don’t know.” He dropped his voice a notch until she strained to hear. “You know what Marina’s like. She likes me to be on top of everything. Her coffee, her meeting notes, her contacts file, even her hair appointments. So when she blocks out a calendar entry, it makes me wonder.”
“Maybe she’s having an affair.”
He cackled. “You can’t be serious. You know she’s married to her work, and she doesn’t have eyes for anyone except Tina.”
Ellie stepped back from the bustle of the street and lowered her voice. “Okay, so you think she has something to hide.”
“Possibly.”
Something inside Ellie clicked, like the switch on a train track. “I need you to do me a favour.”
“I’ve said enough. I can’t promise anything.”
She took a deep breath and it whistled as she blew into the phone. She couldn’t leave things as they stood. She had to understand why Marina would go so far to bend a narrative out of shape. “I need access to Marina’s office and your work pass.”
Tom spluttered. “Are you insane? You were escorted from the building. There’s no way I’m letting you back in.”
Ellie thought fast. “Remember that time I hooked you up with Paul?”
“Yeah.”
“And all the time we’ve gossiped over buckets of red wine at the end of a long day?”
“Yes.”
She smiled, despite it all. Nearby, bikes whooshed past in the wide Berlin cycle lanes, ringing their bells at errant pedestrians. “How about the time I covered for you after your monster hangover?”
He groaned. “I remember.”
“I can’t do this without you,” said Ellie, crossing her fingers like she’d done as a child. Next, she’d be digging out the four-leaf clover she’d pressed between the pages of her favourite Murakami novel.
“Do what exactly?” said Tom.
She thought of Doris, Yusuf and Osman, and how they must hate her. If he said no, she’d have no way in. “I need to find out what’s going on.”
“I’m not giving you my pass. I’ll ring when everyone’s gone and meet you. It’ll be late. If you’re going to be this stupid, the least I can do is help.”
“You don’t know what this means to me.” A calm washed over Ellie, cleansing her. Her anger pulsed at Marina’s brazen disregard for the normal rules of etiquette, but perhaps Ellie could recoup something from the debacle. “One more thing. Is my laptop back with IT?” In all probability, it had already been wiped.
“I haven’t had a chance to return it yet,” said Tom.
“Good. I need a copy of the hard-drive.” She’d sweated over those words. They were hers, as sacred to her as her own thoughts.
“This is ludicrous.”
“It’s the right thing to do.” She felt the familiar tingle in her bones, when the truth lay just beyond reach and she could almost piece it together.
He lingered, not saying goodbye, and in the space between his words, she realised how much she had asked of his friendship.
“I can’t lose my job. Wait for my call.” He hung up.
Ellie stuffed the newspaper into her bag, way down, so nobody could see it, and headed for the S-Bahn, darting past street musicians who had hauled a whole drum kit out into the open. She’d seen a copy of BAZ in Doris’s apartment, and there could be no doubt that her article had been discovered at once. She hoped to explain to the circus performers that her words had been twisted, and that she didn’t mean them, but when she arrived, she found the big top quiet. At the residences, try as she might, Esme refused her entry.
“I heard what you did. I think it’s better you stay away,” she said, slight shoulders drooping, and her cheeks tinged with red.
“Can’t I come in? Maybe I could speak to Doris or Osman?” said Ellie, worried about angering Yusuf further. Her instincts told her the former two would give her a fair hearing.
Esme shook her head, and her pretty scarf rustled at her shoulders. “Not today.”
So, Ellie returned to her flat with the newspaper, and gazed morosely at the headline she had created. Then she dug up her battered old laptop from her university days. The computer, with its inch-deep casing, was a relic. No matter. She set herself up at the kitchen table, ignoring the missed calls from her parents, unplugged from the world and got to work piecing together the puzzle of her errant story.
That evening, after the sun had dipped beyond the horizon and leaden clouds gathered in great swaths over the streets and parks of Berlin, Ellie arranged to meet Tom. She waited for him a block away from the office, lingering on the wide expanse of pavement with its pink and grey cobbles, where canopies of linden trees stretched heavenward. When he didn’t immediately appear, she reached into her pocket on impulse and called her mother.
Her mother picked up on the first ring.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Ellie, thank God,” said her mother, although she didn’t believe in anything so other-worldly. “We’ve been trying to reach you all day. Your father’s here, keys in hand. He insisted he was coming over to see you’re all right. We’ve been worried.”
Ellie toyed with a cigarette butt on the pavement with her boot. The tone of this conversation already put her on the defensive, as if she were more child than adult. “I don’t have long but I wanted to check in.”
“Is everything okay, darling?” said her mother, no longer admonishing.
Her gentleness disarmed Ellie. For a second, she wanted to cry. Her mother always knew how to pierce through her toughness. “Of course, why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because, frankly, darling, that article you wrote wasn’t like you.” Omitting information in the course of a conversation with her mother took skill; lying, on the other hand, was impossible.
“I’m okay, Mama.”
“Ellie...” There came that warning tone, the one she remembered from childhood. Her mother might as well have been a truth-seeking missile. Every inflection of Ellie’s voice, every body movement provoked tireless scrutiny. Just like Katharina Richter’s flamboyant outer persona with her pink hair and block colour power-dressing revealed her fearlessness, so her inner values embraced truth at all costs.
What good would it do, lying now? As alarmed as her parents would be about the firing, their liberal instincts meant the article Ellie had allegedly written would have given them equal cause for concern. She was, after all, the daughter of a woman who kept all the placards from her various marches over the years, though some had grown tatty with age: a Love is Love sign, an Open Borders, Open Hearts one, and Ellie’s personal favourite, a giant vagina painted on a sign with the words Women Against Fascism in bold lettering above. While her parents would never force their opinions on Ellie, she knew they found significant deviations painful. As did Ellie.
So, the truth came out.
She braced herself. “Marina fired me yesterday.”
Her mother’s voice spiked. “What?”
In the background, her father muttered.
Her mother shushed him. “Be quiet, Martin. I can’t hear. What was that, Ellie?”
“I was fired.”
A long pause. “Oh, honey. I know how hard you worked. Was it that witch of an editor?” Her mother’s colourful language had been a delight since she was eight years old. She’d let her feminist standards drop for an instant in solidarity with her child, and Ellie loved her for it.
“The article was mine, but I didn’t intend for it to be published. There was another version, one I worked hard on but Marina found lacking.”
“Oh, Ellie. What a mess,” said her mother. She paused. “You didn’t mean to tear that circus apart?”
Ellie bit her lip. “No. It was just a lack-lustre attempt to prove to Marina I could follow orders.”
“I wish you hadn’t written it. It sounds like you might be better away from that woman if she can railroad you into something like that. You’ve visited that circus so often, I couldn’t think of a reason why you’d have taken that track. A project like that builds compassion, not enmity, especially when you peek behind the curtain and see the grief and hard work.” Her mother had been a social worker for decades; care and empathy were integral to her sense of self.
A hand squeezed Ellie’s shoulder. She spun to find Tom, huge eyes full of trepidation. Ellie hugged him, and whispered her thanks in his ear.
“Mama, I have to go.”
“Call us later?” said her mother.
“Sure.”
“We love you.” Her words held no sense of expectation, no inquisitiveness about Ellie’s next step or the career that might be floundering. Instead, her mother simply offered comfort.
“I know,” said Ellie. She disconnected the call and nodded at Tom. “I can’t thank you enough. Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
