The German Numbers Woman Read Online Free

weather. Only a looking glass fixed its effects on the face, as much as anything could, just as the weather was still, only a moment before altering for better or worse. If you accepted such rhythms, as of course you had to, existence was tolerable, hardly ever unpleasant for long.
    On first hearing the news of his blindness she said she would never look in a mirror again, because Howard could not, but there had to be one in the house otherwise he would wonder why, and she would have to tell him the reason.
    The mirror showed everything she didn’t want to know about herself, so she avoided it as far as possible, only able to look by persuading herself that the image was of somebody else: easy with the small make-up used to treat a glass off-handedly, as if it had no ability to destroy her equanimity, as nothing must be allowed to since recovering from her abortion.
    Her whole past with Howard, their entire life in fact, was connected to an event he was never to know about. The episode, forgotten for months at a time, had lately corroded her with haunting affect, the shadow almost meteorological – to use one of Howard’s words – in its unpleasantness. She didn’t see any justice in it, felt she had paid the price in dealing with the event all those years ago. Sensing the threat now, she let the murky pictures run through her mind so as to get rid of them sooner, though knowing they wouldn’t pass so willingly, having a power greater than her own.
    The sciatic pain was as if a scalpel had gone through the nerves of her lower back. She sat by the Formica-topped table to reinforce herself, to stiffen her body like a box hedge against the wind. The colours were always dark from that time, but the day it happened had been sunny. She had called on him at his large gewgaw-strewn flat on Baker Street, passing while in town to say hello.
    Dear Uncle Charles, she had known him from birth. ‘Let me show you around this rambling old place,’ he said. There was no reason to say no but if she had would it have been different? He had been watching her, and waiting. She was happy, and unknowing. In the bedroom she had no chance. He was a tall lumbering man, and she was too shocked to shout or scream. The bang across the head, and his cry – almost a shriek – that she should be ‘sensible’, made it impossible except to let him do what he wanted.
    He babbled, while holding her in a maniacal grip, that he had needed her (his words) for as long as he could remember. He was incomprehensible. She had loved him as an uncle for his eternal kindness, though not in this way, if this was love, which he swore it was.
    He said afterwards that she had encouraged him. The violence that was done to her was meaningless but meant everything. He had made her, and the blood proved it. Everything must be kept quiet, he said afterwards, a secret between them alone. He paid for the abortion, arranged it all, but only ever touched her that one time, terrified at what he had done. A prostitute would have been cheaper, but it was her he wanted. The operation (hard to say the real word) was so botched that she couldn’t have children even if she had wanted.
    She ran the whole thing through, hoping it would be goodbye, at least for a while. Charles had died of cancer, brought on, she liked to think, by his guilt, and grief which often at the time seemed genuine enough, and reinforced by his suffering which she could hardly bear to watch when her unknowing parents took her to see him in the hospital, though nowadays she burned with shame at having felt such sorrow. How could it have happened so that no one in the family knew? He was so skilled, or frightened, and she so compliant at evading and avoiding all signs of distress. If there had been more than one side to her then, there was only one now.
    She went to church occasionally, hoping to retrieve her faith, but none had come back as yet. Howard thought it was