They seem to have no intention of going to sleep. Julia smiles when she hears her son snoring. He’s alive and well, she says. They sit drinking more and more mugs of camomile tea. Lena with the fridge at her back, shuddering now and again when it switches off. She tells Julia that she and Armin ended up in a small bar with a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. A late-night place where they sat at a table that had been converted from an old bumper car.
They got talking to an English couple who had moved to Berlin recently. The man was drinking whiskey and soda, Lena says. The woman was doing a mai tai. They were terribly funny. They had us laughing a lot, she says.
They offered to buy us a drink.
His name is Geoff, he’s involved in some start-up company. Her name is Gill, she’s in food supplements and alternative medical products. They used to run a very successful health food business in a place called Stroud. They drove to Berlin in their car with two husky dogs.
They told us about their wedding, Lena says. Before they left for Berlin with all their stuff and the two dogs packed in the car, they stopped off at Stonehenge to re-enact the wedding vows. She described how he went down on one knee, asking her to remarry him. He’s such a laugh, Gill kept saying, talking about her husband in the third person. Look at him, you’d never think it, he’s the king of romance.
Gill put her arm around him and winked at us, saying – we had to wait for the full moon.
They assumed that me and Armin were a couple, Lena says. She asked us how long we’d been married.
She must have seen the ring on my finger, but then, for some reason, I laughed and said nothing. Instead of explaining that I was married to Mike back in New York, or going through a long story of why he wasn’t here, that he was coming over to Berlin soon, I kept it all to a minimum.
Maybe out of politeness to Armin, she says, I told them I was visiting relatives in Germany. I found myself telling them the story of the book, given to me by my father, and then stolen. It was Armin who found it on the ground in a park and brought it back to me. And then, guess what, they interpreted that as a major sign. Oh my God, Gill said, so that’s how you two met, it was the book that brought you together. She turned to Geoff and said – isn’t that amazing, they found each other with a stolen book. That book made up its mind to connect you, Gill kept saying.
Which is all true, Lena says, but I didn’t know how to stop them putting such a romantic spin on it. Armin eventually brought it all down to earth.
We’re friends, he said.
The English couple thought that was even more hilarious – oh fuck, Gill said.
They’re not married, Geoff said.
Mistaken identity, Gill said. I swear, you look so bonded, like the real thing.
Armin was totally cool about it, Lena says. He just started talking about the book, how it was about a man with a missing leg who plays the barrel organ. Armin said he happened to have a sister with a missing leg, he didn’t say why exactly, he made it sound like an accident. The English couple thought that was such an extraordinary coincidence, true life meeting up with fiction, like there was something in the book that had the ability to align the universe, Lena says.
Gill said – oh my God, what a beautiful story. That’s mind-blowing, Geoff, don’t you think?
Geoff got out his phone, saying – you know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard a barrel organ, live.
He spent a moment searching and came up with that familiar melody of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Like a carousel, Lena says, with wheezing notes rolling along, stopping and starting. There was a sadness in it, even though it was meant to be happy. We listened to it for a moment over the sound of jazz playing in the bar. Gill said their son Dwyer had a children’s book about a man with a barrel organ. The story of a monkey and a parrot who escape from the organ grinder and make their way off to the Caribbean, stowed away on a navy ship. After a big sea battle with pirates, Geoff said, they run aground on a tropical island, back where they came from.
We had to read it every night, Gill said.
And because they had been so funny earlier, Lena tells Julia, we were expecting a joke to come out of all this. But Gill started crying. Geoff put his arm around her. He then explained to us that Dwyer was dead. He was sixteen, Geoff said. He was beaten up one night in a random attack in the town, a very quiet place where you would never expect that kind of thing to happen. It was such a shock to the whole community, he said, nobody could believe it, not in Stroud.
He was in a coma for weeks, Geoff said. Gill stayed with him all that time. I looked after the shop. Then we had to make the decision whether to keep him on life support or to let him go. He had no life expectancy.
Gill was crying all the time, Lena says. Now and again she would take a drink to gather herself. I think she was on her third mai tai. She was taking out tissues from her bag, blowing her nose, trying to smile again.
The whole thing was caught on camera, Geoff said. The attack. We saw it in court, he told us, when they played it to the jury. We could have stepped outside while it was being shown. It was hard, he said, but we did it for Dwyer, to make it right for him, to be with him through those terrible moments. So that he wouldn’t be alone.
Geoff took her hand and kept looking at her, speaking for them both, Lena says.
Two boys around his own age, Geoff said, from well-to-do families in the same neighbourhood. Determined to carry out this act of mindless brutality. We say mindless, he said, but it was totally deliberate. You think they have no feeling, no empathy, but it’s the opposite, they got their kicks out of his pain, they could feel his suffering, our suffering. The shock of the whole community is what they were after. They wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t understand pain. The violence was unbelievable, he said, we will never forget it. We can still hear the sound his head made. I know that’s an illusion, he said, because there was no audio. We must have imagined it. When we got home, Gill asked me if I heard his head knocking against the pavement and I said yes.
We saw the fear in his eyes, Gill said.
There’s no such thing as justice in a situation like that, Geoff said, holding her hand as though they had just come from the court, Lena says. No amount of prison time is going to bring our son back. We had the impression they apologized for their actions only to get a shorter sentence.
I made a victim impact statement, Geoff said, and it was hard to put my anger aside. All I could find myself saying was that it had now become impossible for us to live in England. The smallest thing would remind us of what had happened. Every time we saw each other, every time we had breakfast or met each other on the stairs, we could only think of him missing. It was like we had begun to turn on each other. Like we could do nothing but blame each other for bearing a resemblance to the boy that was now dead. The brutality was in our eyes. The entire landscape was tainted by this one act of madness. In court, with the murderers of our son listening and staring at the floor, I found myself saying that England was not a country we could live in any longer, they had made it uninhabitable for us. We had everything going for us, a thriving business, a son who was a talented actor. After this, we had no option but to sell up and move abroad.
That’s why we went to Stonehenge, Gill said. For Dwyer, like a pact we made around his death. We would never split up or drift apart, no matter what happened. That’s why we went to Stonehenge, to sort of get married all over again.
She was trying to lighten things up, holding up her mai tai glass. We still have his monkey book, she said. We keep it open on a side table in the hallway, by the door. I change the page every day.
We go back to visit his grave once a year, he said, on the anniversary of his death in December.
He was a sweet boy, Gill said, really, really sweet. And so funny. A real comedian.
I’m sorry for telling you all of this, Geoff said. We’ve just ruined your evening, haven’t we.
Born comedian, Gill said. He would sit at the table over breakfast and have us in a heap. I don’t know where he got it from. He saw a funny twist in everything. He would have had a great career in stand-up, Gill said, he was so utterly natural, with this expression of incomprehension on his face, like nothing in the world made sense, she said, I think that’s what made us laugh so much. I’m still cracking up at some of the things he used to say, Geoff said.
Gill got up and started dancing, Lena says.
Oh, quick, she said, the Rolling Stones.
She made her way out onto the dance floor but she could hardly stand. She swayed with her elbows out. You know, Lena says, she was very graceful, smiling and crying at the same time. Her face was covered in those moving light spots from the disco ball turning overhead. She could not keep her balance. She collapsed gradually, with her hands up to her face. As if it was her son’s funeral and she was standing by his grave after the coffin was lowered. Armin went over to help Geoff get her up on her feet again. The barman called a taxi. They helped her out the door and I ran after them with her bag.