When I finally emerged from the edge of the forest on to the track, it was getting dark and I was so cold that my teeth were chattering. There was no sign of Kai and his ostentatious car apart from a curving mark in the rough surface of the track and a little spray of gravel. I stood and listened before I stepped right out from under the trees, but there was no sound of an engine idling, no human voice or footsteps audible. I found my jacket lying on the ground, one sleeve turned completely inside out, from where Kai had tried to hang on to me, and the shoulder seam parting. There was a dusty tyre mark right across the front of it. I brushed it down as best I could with bloodless fingers and shrugged it on. It was better than nothing but I was still freezing. I shoved my hands into the pockets and began to walk towards the town.
As I walked, I tried not to think about what had happened. In fact I tried not to think at all. I switched off and drifted away from the aching cold and the pain in my limbs and the weary trek ahead. I let the world shrink to the sound of my feet stumbling over the rough surface of the track and the sound of my breathing.
It took some time to reach the place where the track led on to a tarmacked road surface and then to walk the rest of the way into the town. I thought that if I stayed off the main road and kept to the footpath which ran parallel to the railway line, I might avoid meeting anyone. What an observer would make of my tangled hair and torn shirt didn’t bear thinking about. I thought I had a fat lip too; at some point during the struggle with Kai I must have bitten it.
My luck held all the way to the Werther Tor. As I limped through it, I could see that the pavement cafe was still open. Rather than parade myself right past anyone who was enjoying a last drink at one of the outdoor tables, I elected to turn right, along the narrow street running along the inside of the town wall. I thought I might walk down the backstreets unnoticed and slip into the bakery without being seen at all. But at that point my luck ran out.
‘Steffi Nett,’ said a voice I knew and loathed, a voice which positively suppurated disapproval.
Now I thought my legs would give way beneath me. No, howled a voice in the back of my mind. Not her. Why does it have to be her? Not Frau Kessel. Please. Caught in compromising circumstances, twice in one day – it had to be some sort of record.
‘Hi,’ I muttered under my breath, keeping my head down, avoiding her eye in the hope that she would not look closely at me. I tried to push past her but she was too quick for me. For someone in her eighties, she was surprisingly nimble. She grasped me by the upper arm, her wiry old fingers digging into the flesh. It was like having a very large bird of prey land on my shoulder, talons outspread for purchase.
‘You could have run me over, you two,’ she hissed as I tried to pull away. ‘Driving like that. There’s a speed limit in the town, you know.’
There were any number of replies to that, such as I wasn’t the one driving and What business is it of yours?, but as usual I was unable to articulate a single one. My tongue was as useless as a stone. I shook back my hair and did my best to give Frau Kessel a defiant look, but I knew I had made a mistake the moment I saw her expression change.
Her eyes narrowed behind her spectacles as she took in the rumpled hair, the puffy lip and – horrors! – the rent in the front of my shirt, through which a glimpse of bra was no doubt visible. I grabbed at my jacket and pulled it shut, but it was too late. Those beady old eyes had taken everything in.
‘Where is he?’ she asked me in glacial tones.
I didn’t bother to pretend innocence, to ask whom she meant. Instead I did my best to extricate my arm from her pincer-like grasp.
‘I have to go,’ I said, cursing my own feebleness. I was up to my neck in it anyway. I might just as well have given her an earful – it couldn’t have made things any worse.
‘Didn’t bother to run you home, then?’ said that relentless voice. Frau Kessel leaned closer and I caught a whiff of her scent, sickly sweet and powdery, an old-lady smell. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said in a venomous undertone. ‘I know it’s the modern way. But nobody respects a girl like that.’
She didn’t have to spell it out. I wrenched my arm out of her bony grasp and scurried away down the street, clinging to the shadows, the jacket pulled tight around my body. I didn’t meet anyone else on the way to the bakery. The backstreets were deserted. It was just evil luck that the one person I had run into was the last person I wanted to meet.
When I came into the flat, my parents were in the living room, watching television. I could see the ghostly blue light dancing on the wall and hear the unmistakable sound of Klara Klein’s singing drifting through the air. I guessed they were watching a memorial programme.
‘I’m home,’ I shouted, but I didn’t go into the room. Nor did I wait to see whether they would come out. I scuttled into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I felt filthy, cold and so weary that I could have lain down on the fluffy peach bathmat and gone to sleep.
With an effort I made myself turn on the shower and while I was waiting for the water to run hot I went over to the mirror to inspect the damage.
I looked as though I had been in a fight, which I supposed I had. The bitten lip had a bee-stung appearance, I had a streak of mascara under my right eye and my hair looked as though I had just got up after a particularly bad night, all of which had no doubt fuelled Frau Kessel’s prurient imaginings. I shuddered to contemplate the monstrous thoughts which must have slithered and bumped their way through the cloacal tunnels of her mind.
The shirt was ruined beyond all hope of repair, of course, and even if it hadn’t been, I would never want to wear either that or the jacket again. I dragged them off and left them in a ball on the bathroom floor; they would be going straight into the dustbin. Then I stepped into the shower.
I stood there, letting the scalding water soak my hair and cascade over my skin. The water was as hot as I could stand it, but still I was shivering.
I stayed under the shower for as long as I could, but eventually my father banged on the door.
‘Are you going to be in there forever?’ he bellowed.
I turned off the water. ‘Five minutes,’ I called back.
I suppose I spent four and a half of those minutes staring at myself in the mirror, in the porthole I had rubbed out of the steamed-up surface. My hair was dripping wet but clean. My lip was still swollen, but now that the smudged mascara was gone, my face didn’t look as bad as it had before. What gave me away were my eyes: they looked enormous in my face, bleak and haunted.
I tried a smile but it was a vain attempt. My parents would see at a glance that there was something wrong; there was no hiding it. In the end I spent the last thirty seconds tucking myself into a thick fluffy towel and snatching up my clothes from the floor. Then I opened the door and bolted for my bedroom.
‘Bathroom’s free!’ I shouted, and slammed the door shut. Explanations could wait for another time.