The Double Life of Daniel Glick E-Book

Maurice Caldera

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

beguiling combination of paranoid fantasy and tragi-comedy, Daniel Glick's entire family disappeared the night of the earthquake, as did so many others. At least that's what he tells people. He was at the circus when it struck and he just managed to escape as the circus tent fell onto all the spectators below. All the clocks in the city stopped at twenty minutes past eight and they will only start up again when the next one is due. That is what they say, and Daniel has thought about nothing else for the last two years. His wife Marina got sick and tired of listening to the same old stories and one day she too was gone. They'd only been married a year. The neighbours asked themselves what could have become of his wife, one day she's there, the next she's gone. They called the police who took up all the floorboards and found nothing, not a thing. Daniel told them over and over that he would never hurt a fly, and that is the truth. Yet someone follows him wherever he goes, watching his every move to see what he does next, but Daniel Glick is just keeping an eye on the clocks of the city waiting for them to start ticking again, because this time he is prepared.

Leseprobe

Maurice Caldera was born in Madrid in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the UK.

The Double Life of Daniel Glick is his first novel. He is currently living in London and working on his second novel.

Contents

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Copyright

One

That day I felt sick. I counted the minutes till the end of the day, they were long and dull and I wanted them gone. Perhaps I was just bored. I asked my boss if I could go home, but he said that I should hold on for as long as I could. He didn’t even look up from the papers spread before him on his desk; he was hunched over them as though I was trying to copy his answers in an exam. I went back to my own desk and held on until the end of the day, and I left when everybody else left, just like I would have on any other day.

My boss’s name is Mr Ferrer, but we all had to call him by his first name, his first name is Daniel. He only became our boss because the one before him died in the earthquake, his name was Mr Banos, and I bet you that he would have let me go home if I had told him that I wasn’t feeling well, he would have put down what he was doing at that very moment and he would have asked me what was wrong. The block of flats where Mr Banos lived collapsed on top of him and there was only one survivor. A few of us from work went to see the building, and it was hard to believe that even one person had survived, the top floor was completely intact, but the other five storeys were squashed underneath it, neatly folded like an accordion shut tight.

Mr Ferrer was tall and thin and looked a lot older than he was, he wore white shirts that were so worn and so old that you could see right through them, I swear you could actually see the darkness of the hair on his chest right through the material of the shirt, and his teeth were crooked and brown, like the pictures of teeth in the dentist’s waiting room that show you how your teeth will end up if you don’t look after them.

My name is Daniel Glick and I didn’t really talk to many of the people in the office because you couldn’t really trust any of them. There was one man who I got to know because we both started working there on the same day, we met up in the canteen and had lunch together for the first few weeks until we got to know the other people who worked with us, and then we had lunch with them instead. His name is Daniel as well, and at first we laughed about the fact that there were three of us with the same name, but then it just became annoying rather than funny and nobody joked about it any more. After awhile he was promoted to a job on the third floor and he ate by himself in the canteen, and we hardly exchanged a word after that.

That day the people in the train on the way home were stuffed in like matches in their box, the way they are every night, the air was thick with their smell and their breath and it made me feel sick for real. At last I reached my stop, and at last I could breathe. I stood on the escalators that rolled up into the street, and the further up they went the more blinding the daylight seemed, as though I had spent the whole of the day under the ground. The pavement outside the station was covered in leaves that crunched under my feet as I walked home, the leaves left on the trees were either red or yellow or brown, some of them hovered in midair like the magic carpets in the stories my mother used to read to me when I was a child. Every day those leaves were collected and incinerated in large metal bins, the smell of burning leaves made its way into every room in every house in the city, and still the ground was covered in them, and still they crunched under my feet with every step that I took.

I pushed the heavy metal door of the entrance to the block of flats where I live. As always it was dark inside and I stepped cautiously until my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and I could let go of the banister and make my way up the stairs unaided.

Someone was walking up the stairs ahead of me, I could hear them huffing and puffing, and I could hear the stairs creaking as they shifted their weight from one leg to the other. In the wintertime the old people living in the building walked up and down the stairs for exercise, my grandfather used to do it along with all the other old people, and at times the stairs were crowded with pensioners walking up and down silently, as though it was a punishment, and you had to squeeze past them as you made your way up or down. On that particular day it was Mrs Roman who was walking up the stairs, and she only realised that there was someone behind her at the very last moment.

‘What do you want?’ she said to me, as though I was sneaking up on her.

‘It’s me, Daniel.’

Mrs Roman was old and forgetful, and since her husband had died her memory had deteriorated so much that sometimes she didn’t even know what day of the week it was. ‘My husband walked up these stairs three at a time,’ she said, ‘he was tall and strong and he’d knock you down to the ground if he heard you talking to me like that.’ Mrs Roman seemed to have her husband mixed up with somebody else, he was tall just like she’d said, but he wouldn’t have knocked anyone down to the ground, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Mr Roman had a stutter that was so bad that sometimes he couldn’t even finish his sentences, and my grandfather used to make fun of him in front of everybody, even though they were the best of friends.

‘How have you been keeping Mrs Roman?’ She pulled herself up onto the next step, already out of breath from all the exertion of the steps that had come before and all the words that she had just spoken, and you didn’t have to know her to see that she didn’t have long left; she looked thinner and paler than I’d ever seen her, her hair was dirty and knotted like the hair of an old doll lost at the bottom of a trunk in the attic, and she wore her dressing gown all day long because she couldn’t be bothered to put any clothes on. ‘You should take a walk outside in the sun.’ I spoke louder so that she could hear me, and my words echoed up and down the stairs to all the other floors and back again, but Mrs Roman, who was standing right next to me didn’t catch a single word, she stopped for a moment and looked around her, as though she had heard something but couldn’t quite make out what, then she went back to concentrating on taking one step at a time, and all I could do was follow behind her until I reached the third floor which was where I lived. Mrs Roman still had two more floors to go, she raised her arm in the air and the old flesh underneath it dangled from side to side as she waved me off, and it seemed that perhaps she had recognised me after all.

That was the day that Marina had left for good. I realised she wasn’t there any more from the moment I closed the door behind me, I looked into each of the rooms and she wasn’t there, and her things weren’t there, and she would never come back again, and maybe that’s the reason why I had felt sick that day at work.

She’d been taking her things from the flat bit by bit, all the things that she had brought with her after we were married were slowly making their way out again, bit by bit so that I wouldn’t know. At first it was little things and I didn’t notice they were gone, but then every day there was something else I couldn’t find; towels and plates and soap, and things that now I can’t even remember, things that you never think about until they’re not there any more. Every night whilst she was busy peddling at her sewing machine, I crept away into the bedroom, opened her drawers and looked through her things, and every night there were fewer and fewer things there; her drawers were half full and the metal coat hangers that had once strained with the weight of all her clothes now hung spare, and clinked against one another when I opened the door of the wardrobe, and still she didn’t say a thing and I didn’t dare ask her. The dolls that Marina had brought into the flat and that she sat up against the pillows every morning without fail after making the bed, watched me going through her things night after night, they were sat up straight with their arms bent unnaturally by their sides, looking more terrified than usual.

But even the dolls began to disappear one by one, first the little ones that sat in-between the bigger ones because they were too small and lifeless to sit up by themselves, and then the bigger ones, the ones that looked like real little girls, and have real eyelashes like little girls, and whose eyelids can shut when you lie them on their back, and still Marina said nothing.

For days I thought about nothing else, I sat at my desk staring out into space wandering what she could possibly be up to, until I couldn’t contain myself any longer, I stepped into Mr Ferrer’s office and asked for his permission to go home, he scratched at his papers, then at the blond and ginger bristles on his face, and took a long breath like he was about to speak, but he took so long to say anything that I thought he was about to sneeze rather than speak. His office was tiny, and instead of a door it had a pair of curtains that he could close for privacy, they were old and worn just like the shirts he wore, and even though you couldn’t see through them, you could hear every word that was said on the other side. Finally Mr Ferrer spoke, ‘close the curtains for me will you.’ The sound of typewriters died down all around us, and I knew that everybody in the office would be listening to whatever Mr Ferrer had to say. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that you work for the government, and the things you do will affect every single person in the country.’ I nodded my head, although I doubted that it would affect one person let alone every person in the country. ‘That’s why you should come to me if you have any problems and tell me the same as you would tell your own brother.’

His words were wasted on me, I didn’t have a brother or a sister, or a mother, or a father, I just had a wife who hardly said a thing to me and who was clearing the whole place of all her possessions, and I was never usually sick, but he had to make a meal of it because he liked to watch me squirm. ‘It’s nothing serious,’ I said to him, ‘it’s just that I don’t feel very well today, I think I’ve got a bit of a temperature,’ I put the palm of my hand up to my forehead, ‘but I promise you if it was anything serious I would tell you straight away.’

Mr Ferrer chewed at his pen the whole time I was speaking and he took it out of his mouth once I’d finished, like it was a thermometer and he was checking his own temperature, when really he was just checking to see if there was any pen left to chew. He used the same chewed up pen to point at the door as a gesture for me to go, I didn’t wait for another word or a sneeze or anything else, I pulled back the curtains and got out of his office as quickly as I could before he changed his stupid mind. The sound of typewriters started up again, everybody watched me as I buttoned my jacket, they watched without looking.

But the woman at the desk next to mine, who wears her coat all day long and never says a word to anybody, had noticed that I was restless on that day. ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re like a monkey today, you’re so unsettled.’ She was a small, quiet, frail woman who seemed older than she was and never usually said a thing. She only gave one word answers when she was spoken to, and mostly you forgot that she’s there at all, but that day she did speak, and everybody listened, because she never usually said a thing. I told her that I was all right and carried on with my work, and I said to myself that I should stop fidgeting in my seat, but I must have mumbled the words out loud and not just thought them in my head. ‘What did you say?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ I looked back down at the papers on my desk. So everybody watched me when I walked into Mr Ferrer’s office, and they watched me as I buttoned up my jacket and packed up my things, and they all knew that there was something not right on that day, and I knew that Mr Ferrer would ask them about me, and I knew that they would tell him without hesitation because that’s how things are in that office.

I was like a monkey, just like that woman had said. I walked up and down the platform from one end to the other end as I waited for the train, and when it did arrive, I stood up all the way, holding on to the metal bars above my head, letting them take the weight of my body, just like a monkey swinging from the trees.

There were few people out on the streets, everybody was either at work or at school or exactly where they were supposed to be. I took a seat in a small bar in the same street that I live in, from which you could see the flat without even straining your eyes. My grandfather used to go drinking there and many times I had walked past the bar and seen him from the street, but the only time that I had ever gone inside was after the earthquake when I had gone out looking for him everywhere that I could think of. Sometimes at night on a Friday or a Saturday you can hear the men inside the bar playing cards and talking loudly, and sometimes when they leave they bring their singing or their arguments out onto the street, until they arrive at their homes, or until somebody throws a bucket of dirty water over their heads, which sometimes makes them only sing louder.

There was nobody in the bar that day except the man who worked there, a young man, younger than me, with short hair, his elbows were resting on the counter, and his head was being held up by his hands, as if to stop it falling off his head and rolling onto the ground like a ball. I sat down at a table by the window so that I could see out into the street, and the barman came out from behind the bar, dragging his feet as though he had hauled himself from the other side of the world. When I asked him for a coffee he just stood there like he hadn’t heard, and stared out of the window for a moment or two before dragging himself back to the other side of the world, where he’d just come from.

All the tables in the bar were covered with plastic table-cloths so that they could be easily cleaned, but no one had actually bothered to clean them, and so they were covered in crumbs and the sticky stains of spilt drinks, a few flies patrolled those tables, and their buzzing was the only sound that you could hear in the bar on that day. The chairs around the tables were the sort you can fold away, they were made of metal and had the name of a local beer written in red across the backrest, on some of them the name was almost worn out from all the times that people had sat in the bar and leaned back to drink their beer. The barman brought the coffee and stood over me until I fished around in my pockets for some coins, so that he wouldn’t have to come back for it. Outside in the street nothing happened, the coffee had come, cooled down and been drunk, and I was about to ask for another one, when I saw Marina leave the building to take out the rubbish. She held a plastic bag in her hand and I saw her walk towards the bins, but she didn’t stop at the bins, she just kept on going and only stopped when she got to a black car parked further down the street that looked new and shiny. I had to move my chair to the other side of the table so that I could see what she was up to. She placed her hand under the metal of the boot, opened it up, dropped the bag inside, then closed the boot, which took her four attempts. She looked so little next to the car. She walked back to the block of flats and I didn’t see her come out again.

Inside the car there was a man smoking a cigarette, all I could see of him was his short dark hair and the smoke that rose in sudden puffs through the open window of the car. For a moment the smoke hovered above the car as though it was unsure where to go, and then it was dispersed by the little air that there was on that day. Other than that, the man didn’t move, and after a while the car drove off. That’s all I saw.

I moved round to where I had been sitting before, the lazy barman was no longer at the bar but standing right behind me, leaning against the wall with his arms folded. ‘She does the same thing every day, same time, same car.’

‘Whose car is it?’ My voice was shaky, and I had that pang in my stomach that you get when you are scared or excited.

‘Fuck knows.’ He moved away from the wall and took the empty cup and saucer from my table, ‘Another coffee for you?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have a beer this time.’ I said.

The barman seemed a little happier than before, perhaps because opening a bottle of beer would be less of a strain than making a coffee, and when he walked to the bar he didn’t drag his feet like he had done before. ‘She won’t come out again now.’ He pulled the top off the bottle of beer and it rolled out onto the floor behind the bar to a spot where he couldn’t see it, and where he wouldn’t go looking.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because there’s nothing else to do here but stare out of that window, and I’m telling you she won’t be coming out again.’ He came back to where I was sitting and poured out half the beer into a glass, which he placed on the table that shook from side to side because its legs were weak and unsteady. ‘I won’t be doing this job too much longer I can tell you.’

‘What do you think she’s doing?’ I asked him.

The man shrugged his shoulders and made an ugly face.

‘Fuck knows,’ he said, ‘all I know is that it’s the only thing that happens on this street. What do you care anyway?’ I shrugged my shoulders, made a similarly ugly face back at him and took a sip of beer.

The barman began to talk about other things, he was new to the city and new to the job and desperate for conversation, he thought everything was boring, he must have used that word a hundred times, and everything that wasn’t boring was expensive, he told me about his spending in great detail, down to what he made in the bar and how much he sent his parents every month. But all I could think about was Marina. He brought me another beer as soon as I finished the first, and the more beers I had the happier he became, as though the alcohol was going to his head and not mine. When he smiled you could see his teeth were all crooked and crammed into his mouth, and they leaned over each other backwards and forwards, this way and that, like old forgotten gravestones in a cemetery.

More people came into the bar, some of them knew the barman by his first name and some of them actually seemed to like him. He kept bringing me more beers, and I kept knocking them back without even knowing if they were free or if I had to pay for them, but in the end he charged me for all the beers and I had just enough money in my pockets. He took out a bottle of special brandy that he said was from his village, and he poured some into a small glass, all the people in the bar made a toast to something that I can’t even remember, and we all drank it down in one go, and he even charged me for that.

By the time I left the bar it was dark outside, I had no more money in my pockets and my legs were weak and unsteady. I held on to the banister at the bottom of the stairs and closed my eyes, but my head started to spin, it spun faster and faster until I had to open my eyes, and only then did the spinning stop, and only then could I climb the stairs, slowly one by one just like the old people who walk up and down for exercise.

Marina was busy at her sewing machine, I could feel the floor vibrate underneath my feet as if there was an earthquake coming. She was making a wedding dress for the daughter of the woman who lives on the floor above. There was so much of the shiny white material on the floor and on her lap and all around her that she looked like she was actually wearing the dress, and it reminded me of the dress she wore the day we got married, and just like that all the anger I’d felt towards her left me and all I could think about was the day we got married and how beautiful she looked in her dress.

I went to the kitchen and drank two glasses of water, one after the other so that I was breathless after the second one. I cupped my hands under the tap and splashed some water onto my face, and I felt all around me for the towel with which to dry my face, but I knew that I wouldn’t find one. ‘Where are all the towels?’ I went in to show Marina, the water dropped from my face onto my shirt and onto the floor, but Marina didn’t even look up, she just pedalled faster and faster, as though she was pedalling away from me on a bike, and all my anger came straight back. ‘Look at me Marina, I can’t even dry my face, there’s not a single towel in the kitchen.’ I tried so hard not to sway from one side to the other so that Marina wouldn’t know I had drunk so much, but she didn’t stop pedalling on the machine, and she didn’t look up once.

‘You’re standing in the light,’ she said eventually.

I moved away a little from the light so that she could continue what she was doing. ‘Marina if there’s something wrong you can tell me the same as you would tell your own brother.’ I couldn’t believe that I had actually said the same stupid thing to my wife that Mr Ferrer had said to me.

‘What’s my brother got to do with anything?’

‘It’s just a way of saying it, that’s all.’ My words slurred one into the next.

‘Well find some other way of saying it and leave my family out of it, I don’t go on about your family, do I?’

‘All my family died in the earthquake,’ I said.

‘Can we have one day without you talking about the earthquake, or is that too much to ask?’

‘I just want to know what’s wrong with you.’

‘How can I finish this dress if you keep standing in the light?’ She was right, I had moved a little closer without even realising it. I stepped all the way back to the other side of the room to be sure that I wouldn’t stand in the light again. ‘Marina, I can’t find anything in this house.’ I waited for her to say something but she just kept on feeding the material through the machine, and the needle raced through as it stitched one piece on to another. I moved towards her but this time I didn’t care about the light or the dress, I picked up the material that was all around her on the floor and I wiped my face with it until my face was dry. ‘What are you doing, you’ll ruin it.’ She pushed me away from her, and I was so unsteady that it forced me all the way back against the wall, and maybe I shouldn’t have had that last brandy, even if it had been free I shouldn’t have had it.

‘I saw you put things in the back of that car,’ I screamed back at her.

‘You’ve gone crazy.’ You could see the little blue veins standing out from her neck as she spoke to me.

‘Let’s go and ask the man in the bar across the street, he sees you do it every day.’ I moved back to where she was, took her by the arm and tried to pull her away from the chair in which she was sitting, but Marina seemed to be fixed to the chair, as though she had sewn herself onto it.

‘You’ve been drinking yourself stupid in that old man’s bar, I could smell it the moment you walked in.’ I pulled her by the arm again. ‘Leave me alone, I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she screamed.

‘You’re my wife and this is my house, and you’ll do whatever I say.’ I yelled at the top of my voice and the people from upstairs banged a shoe or a stick or something on the floor, and I let go of her. Water formed in her eyes and flowed onto her cheeks and some of it fell straight onto the dress.

‘She hasn’t even tried on the dress and it’s already stained with tears.’ She rubbed away the tears that had fallen onto the material. ‘It’ll bring her bad luck and it’s your fault Daniel, you bring everyone bad luck.’ The material rustled as she held it in her hands.

‘That’s not true,’ I said.

‘Yes it is true,’ she was still sobbing.

‘I promise you that it’ll bring her good luck.’ I took the material of the dress, brought it up to my face and kissed it. ‘Good luck,’ I said. I kissed it over and over and said good luck over and over so that all the bad luck would turn to good. Marina’s tears suddenly dried up and instead she looked at me like I’d lost my mind, I took her hand in my own and I kissed it like I had been kissing the dress, and I kept repeating the same words over and over. She tried to pull her hand away from me and shut it tight into a little fist so that I couldn’t kiss it any more. I put my hand underneath the material of the dress that she was making, and I felt my way through all the layers until I got under the material of Marina’s own skirt and found her bare legs. I pressed my hand between her legs and they shut tight just like her hand had done. I pulled them apart and slowly they gave way, and I could feel the warmth between them, and the hair under her pants, and all the time I was getting more and more excited. Marina began to scream, and with my other hand I covered up her mouth so that no one would hear, and instead her little feet stomped the way that a spoilt child’s feet stomp when she doesn’t get her own way, but all I wanted was to touch her there between her legs where I knew she liked to be touched. The chair she was sitting on fell back and we both landed on the floor with that beautiful white material all around us. There was a knock at the door. ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘If you two don’t shut up, I’m calling the police.’ It was the voice of the woman who lived upstairs, the one whose daughter’s wedding dress was surrounding us.

‘You won’t hear another sound, I promise.’ And sure enough, nothing else was said, we didn’t even move until we heard the door to her flat upstairs slam shut, and the floor-boards creak as she made her way around the rooms directly above us, and all the time my hand had stayed right there between Marina’s legs.