Julia touched her forehead and felt sweat. The television’s LED clock glowed red in the room: 00.35. She hadn’t slept for even an hour. The nightmare she’d just woken from, in which she’d seen her daughter, in sexy attire and half naked, get into a car with a strange man, had seemed far longer than that.
She wondered what had torn her from her sleep. She thought she’d heard a noise, a gusting wind at first, then a bang like a door slamming shut, but that could have been in her dream.
In all likelihood it was her full bladder stopping her from staying in bed.
She blindly felt for the switch of the night light. A dim, blueish glow helped her orient herself in the cabin.
She got up. Cold air poured in through the balcony door, which she always left open a crack at night. Having just been wrapped in a thick duvet and Egyptian cotton, now she was freezing and she wished she’d chosen flannel pyjamas to wear at night rather than a silk top with spaghetti straps.
She trudged to the bathroom as if in a daze, while the swell of the sea confused her sleepy sense of balance even further. The creak, groan and squeal of every single furniture joint, familiar by now, echoed the state she was in. She felt battered. Her mouth was dry, her head aching. She had to go to the loo and needed a sip of water, preferably flavoured with aspirin.
The soft carpet beneath her feet suddenly felt different. Julia turned on the desk lamp, bent down and spotted an envelope that had been pushed beneath the connecting door.
On the front it said ‘For Mama’ in Lisa’s unmistakeable squiggly handwriting. At once Julia was wide awake. A horrible, familiar feeling took her breath away.
A few years ago Julia had heard muffled shouting while standing at a supermarket checkout in Schweizer Viertel. At first she thought a mother was calling for her child in the carpark, but then the shouting became more hysterical. All of a sudden two customers and a member of staff started running to the exit. As Julia exchanged a worried look with the cashier, she saw in the woman’s eyes the same morbid schizophrenia she was feeling herself: torn between the desire to satisfy her own curiosity and the fear of bearing witness to something so terrible that she wished she’d never been there. The contradiction that had troubled her back then now visited her again. Only with a thousand times greater intensity.
She had to open the envelope. She absolutely wanted to find out what was in it, even though she was almost certain that a letter a daughter secretly leaves for her mother at night couldn’t be good news. Just like the wailing screams of a mother in a busy car park, where suddenly no cars were moving.
She was trembling as she tore it open, cutting herself on the sharp writing paper as she pulled it out. She opened up the page folded in the middle and read Lisa’s message, which she ought not to have received for many hours, not until nine o’clock, when her alarm would ring for them to have breakfast together. The letter consisted of a single sentence, itself only three words long.
I’m sorry, Mama.
This was all Julia needed to feel sheer terror for her daughter, to which nothing else in the world could compare.