Between Each Breath

  ADAM THORPE

  Between

  Each Breath

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Acknowledgements

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446418895

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Adam Thorpe, 2007

  Adam Thorpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  Extract from ‘Silence. Dust’ from Through the Forest by Jann Kaplinski published by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Jonathan Cape

  Vintage

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099479925

  In loving memory of Frederick and Judy Busch

  About the Author

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. He has written five collections of poetry and ten works of fiction. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992; his most recent, The Standing Pool, is published by Jonathan Cape in 2008. He lives in France with his wife and three children.

  ALSO BY ADAM THORPE

  Fiction

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  The Rules of Perspective

  Is This the Way You Said?

  The Standing Pool

  Poetry

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  Birds with a Broken Wing

  ‘We are dreadfully real, Mr Carker,’ said Mrs Skewton; ‘are we not?’

  Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

  PROLOGUE

  The vehicle, a battered ice-blue Saab with a front passenger door in matt violet, raced down the wide dirt road on the southern peninsula of the island as fast as a clattery engine could take it. The plume of dust the car raised was out of all proportion to its size. It was summer on Haaremaa. The northern light was the gold of ryegrass; where it penetrated the forest of birch and alder on either side, it made minor miracles out of fine spiderwebs linking branches ten feet apart. The dust left by the car rose into the sunlight and shaped it, made it touchable.

  The young woman in the passenger seat was happy. She was holding a flat cardboard tray of eggs on her lap. She was happy because it was summer, it wasn’t cold or wet (as it had been, in fact, for three days), and because this evening, in her parents’ dacha, she would be making a huge cake out of the eggs for her husband’s thirtieth birthday the following day. Her husband, who was driving, was also happy, but in the measured way usual to him; he was a specialist carpenter and had built up a reputation on the island, despite its relative poverty and ageing population, that ensured he was the first and natural choice for the most interesting of the EU-funded building projects. These included a pine-roofed spa hotel, a community hall converted from a Communist Party headquarters, and a farm museum.

  The air rushed in through the open windows and caught the woman’s long, tawny hair, rippling it out behind her or agitating strands of it over her face. She was – and he of course knew this – exceptionally beautiful, even by Baltic standards: she had high cheekbones, slightly polished like the curve of cowrie shells. Her husband sometimes joked that her beauty was wasted in her job, which was helping to run the island’s community radio station. The car stereo – kept in place with brown tape – was playing a sample album by an obscure rock band from England called Castledown. It had been sent to the radio station as a promo. The present track was called ‘The Attending’, an ethereal, lyrical song that the woman loved for its simplicity: steely guitar, frail voice, English words she couldn’t catch completely but whose sad poetry she appreciated and that reminded her of the old songs of Estonia.

  She is standing

  on the shore

  the girl I dream of

  no one more

  Her husband’s taste was different: it was for free jazz and hard rock. She would have preferred him to drive slower, but underneath his gentle carpenter’s calm was this taste for the opposite, for speed and things scudding past on the surface, for distorted guitar and angry sax. He would race about the island on its dirt roads as wide as runways – built for Cold War bombers in its Soviet military days – as if he was starring in an American road movie, the stereo turned right up and his broad, sap-stained fingers tapping the wheel.

  Up to now, he had never had an accident. There were relatively few cars on the island, and plenty of space to evade or spin in the event of an emergency. The monotony of the forest either side was the chief danger: drivers would nod off and wander and sometimes die against a tree, especially after a night on the local vodka. Or they would simply take to the road drunk. But he was not a drinker. Apart from his tendency to push the old Saab too hard on its balding tyres, there was no reason why anything should have happened.

  The door on her side was violet because it had been backed into by the island’s snowplough, beaten out and repainted with the only can of metal colour – from the job lot her father had saved from Soviet days – that remotely resembled the original blue. Being good with his hands, and not able to afford professional help, her husband had done it all himself. The chief problem was the lock – the area most dented by the snow-plough. It had taken him a whole day to fix. The door had to be slammed in a certain way to enable the tongue of the lock to come home.

  Right now, the door rattled very slightly, but neither of them could hear this over the noise of the old engine and the gravelly dirt road and the lovely song on the stereo, let alone the rush of the warmish summer air in their ears. The door rattled because the tongue was not quite home: she had not slammed the door correctly, encumbered by the eggs on her lap, their shells still smeared with muck and feathers. They were not eggs from the dacha’s hens, as they would normally have been; a fox had done its nasty work
in an orgy of blood and feathers a few weeks ago, and they had not yet replaced the dead hens. But for this fox, she would not have been in the car at all, with the eggs from a cousin’s farm balanced on her lap.

  Now she was humming along to the song, the corner of her mouth puckered in a way he loved, like the very beginning of the happiest of smiles.

  The curving bend in the road was familiar enough for him to take it relatively fast, right out on the edge of – but not over – the safe limit of control. The rules of weight and velocity meant that she leaned against the door (there were no seat belts installed, of course) and the tongue slipped and the door opened. She started to fall out of the car, slowly, the fifteen eggs on her lap jittering in their moulded cardboard tray.

  Instead of putting a hand out to save herself, to break her fall, she tried to protect the eggs. It was an instinctive thing: she did not want the eggs to break, not a single one. He had already flexed his foot towards the brake and reached his hand out, but she had fallen too far away from him, and all he grabbed was air.

  She fell away from the car with both her hands over the eggs, so that the back of her head hit the grit surface first. By the time the car had slewed to a dusty halt, she was lying on the road in a welter of yolk and glassy white, open-eyed and as if about to say something, her hair spread out like a fan. A blackbird, practising its scales a few yards into the wood, was disturbed by a great howling that felt dangerous, and fell silent as if in homage.

  ONE

  The pub, called O’Looney’s, was thick with drunken Finns. It was playing the same screechy Irish number as two days back, at full distorted volume. The Finns were singing over it, football songs sol-faing over the Irish folk: starlings swirling onto and off the black wires.

  I left the pub without ordering and went back down the street to the café-bar clocked on the way up. It was playing minimal lounge and had chairs of perspex with the names of French poets scratched on. I sat in the bay window on Appolinaire. I wasn’t certain it was spelt right. Appolo. Appollo. Apollo.

  Frayed by a morning in the flat spent making sense of a descending diatonic scale in four different tempi, I needed to chill out, but the chair was not designed for comfort. Still, it felt good in here, it felt Continental and far away, with a silvery northern light outside that fell through the glass onto the table and my hands, along with the etched name on the window: Majolica. I moved my hands and the name rippled over the knuckles, making them look as if they were caught in a sandwich bag.

  The cobbled street was quiet, gusted by the cool October wind. This is OK, I thought to myself.

  The house opposite was hidden behind scaffolding and green tarps that slapped now and again against the metal poles. The finished houses were brightly coloured, not looking in the least bit medieval. Those yet to be dealt with were grey and dirty, their brown stonework chipped and their balconies leaning. Part of me preferred these houses, as if I’d known them before. Maybe their neglect reminded me of Hayes.

  What looked like a ghost with sunlit hands turned out to be the waitress, approaching my table from the kitchen. I swivelled to give my order, but her face was turned away – someone was calling her from the kitchen. I only saw the flange of her right cheekbone and a cataract of tawny hair.

  Then she faced me and the corner of her mouth puckered.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi. A latte, please. Thanks.’

  She called out something in reply to a yell from the kitchen. She was wearing tight jeans and a cutaway shirt.

  I looked out of the window again. My outlook commanded quite a stretch of the street’s vista. One of the Finnish drunks further up was performing a ballet, his T-shirt on his head like a wimple.

  No great expectations of this trip, on my part, to be honest. Then the airport’s sliding glass doors had opened to an expanse of marshy grey water, low wood-covered hills and some dilapidated buildings off to the right. Unspectacular, a bit like Cheshire or somewhere, but the air was different. So was the light. Birds dimpling the water beyond a blurry line of reeds. Really different, in fact.

  I felt excited. Happy, even. I was like an old-fashioned little boy in a train, glimpsing the sea for the first time.

  A driver with long sideburns was already opening the boot of a battered yellow Mercedes and wafting me towards it like a feather.

  ‘Please, please.’

  The front seat was occupied by the remains of a sausage in its wrapper, so I sat in the back on a torn tartan rug. The car was a fug of bitter, American tobacco. It instantly turned into a getaway car – although I had not yet negotiated my seat belt, which turned out to be broken – with a throaty roar that I thought at first was the plane taking off beyond the wire fence. We hurtled past abandoned factories, Stalinist housing schemes and construction sites with big gravel dunes. Skeletons of big-box stores squatted in a waste of mud, yellow cranes and adland hoardings. I wondered whether I shouldn’t shift across and try the other seat belt, despite a sharp rip in the plastic upholstery.

  Life, I thought (clutching the broken belt to my chest), is an adventure.

  The driver’s identity card swung from the mirror, showing a younger man with burning eyes. Olev. Voices kept breaking in over the intercom as if something catastrophic was occurring. In the photo swinging from the mirror, Olev looked like a psychopath. Maybe Russian. Dirt-track detours around roadworks got Olev muttering savagely, as if they’d sprung into being in the brief time he’d been waiting for a pickup.

  We were stopped at the lights when Olev’s staring image suddenly reproduced itself between the seats: plumper, stubbled. The eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘Hoor?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Hoor? Hoor?’

  It sounded as if he was about to throw up. He was waving an unlit cigarette about. It was taking me a moment to cotton on.

  ‘Oh – sorry! Thanks, but I don’t smoke,’ I said, at last.

  Olev frowned at me. He wasn’t offering me a fag, he wanted a light. I gave a little self-conscious snort, indicating stupidity, and tapped my coat’s breast pockets. ‘Um, sorry! Nyet. No light. No matches. Rien.’

  The real Olev disappeared, his seat bouncing and squeaking on its bolts, leaving his photo to carry on glaring at me below an equally baleful, fleshier slice in the mirror. When the car suddenly filled with smoke – Olev steering with his elbows as we raced away – I had to confess I felt a bit at sea.

  I did my best not to cough, keen not to appear effeminate.

  We reached the edge of the old town’s pedestrian area, bumping up onto the pavement as if it was in the way. Olev shouted something over his shoulder, conducting an orchestra; it took me a minute or two to get it. A car could go no further without a special licence, the street was the next right. The meter declared a price in kroons that I couldn’t begin to calculate; I handed over a thick wad of notes (the equivalent, I later checked, of about ten quid).

  Olev got out and opened the boot and removed the suitcase with a grunt.

  ‘Please,’ he said, pressing a soiled little card into my hand.

  Disko, Baar, Saun – 24 hr.

  I thanked him without enough irony, then waved with unnecessary heartiness as the taxi accelerated off – as you would to an aunt who had stayed too long.

  At the café table, only three days on, I contemplated the meaning of home. I certainly felt at home in Tallinn. I had felt the same about Berlin, even before the Wall came down, even after my one sortie into the Eastern sector for a glasnost music festival.

  ‘Your coffee.’

  ‘Oh, great. Thanks.’

  The corner of her mouth puckered again as I looked up: the post-Soviet, Estonian smile. As minimal as the café’s music. No, not true: it flickered over the whole of her face, like sunlight and cloud shadow over a field of ripe corn. And then she was off.

  Some fat and elderly tourists were wobbling after a little flag on a stick. Apart from these and the drunken Finns, there was no one else on the
street. I was picturing that very large East Berlin hall with its fitted carpet no one had bothered to glue, so it slid about under your feet; and the Soviet bloc composers with their fake leather jackets, chain-smoking even at breakfast. I couldn’t remember what we talked about.

  The tourists spotted the clutch of Finns, who were embracing each other as if on a storm-tossed ship, and turned up a side alley.

  The latte was more than passable.

  Calling out an order, the waitress played the ghost again in my view of the street.

  I took another sip of my coffee and added half the paper tube of sugar, stirring once. A stroll around the castle, if the rain held off. I’m not a great one for novels, but I had brought along Anna Karenina. The Penguin copy was battered and creased, and a segment of some thirty pages had come unstuck – kept dropping out. So I had to be careful. This time I would finish it. The lounge music was scribbling two-beat figures in my head, semitonal oscillations that could have been interesting if crossed with something pentatonic in E flat major – a trumpet, maybe. A louche girl’s voice had started up, something about spending a lifetime with you, weaving around the extremely downbeat bass.

  The door squealed and the waitress went out onto the café’s little terrace – just a couple of tables on rough planking, like a projecting medieval stage. A customer with a grey ponytail and a long black coat was braving the gusts; she took his order, glancing up to where the Finns were attempting handstands. She seemed to know him – he was nodding, looking serious.

  Sometimes you wish you could be like everyone else: at home in the world, as if they’d known about it before they were born.

  Then the man laughed, and so did she.

  There was a tower up at the castle, flying the Estonian flag for as long as the country was free. Until about ten years ago, it had flown mostly other people’s flags: Danish, Swedish, Prussian, Russian, German. Then the Red Flag. I would now go up and sit there and tackle the lower slopes of Anna Karenina until the cold got through to the bone, like common sense.