The news reports about me appeared less often. After about two months, they stopped altogether. I thought, I can’t be that hard to find, can I? Have they just given up? I missed my mother. I missed Willa too, painfully. I missed lying together in the garden plotting out our futures, swimming, playing tennis, even all that nutty advice she’d try to ram down my throat. And I worried about them. How they’d be doing, how they were coping. If they were worried or scared. I imagined walking back along the road and going home, sitting at the kitchen table as if nothing had happened. What if they blamed Frieda? I could fake amnesia perhaps. Say I’d been taken by aliens or just point-blank refuse to answer any questions. Say I didn’t know.
I wasn’t going to stay away forever. Just a little bit longer, to make my point. Meanwhile, I was happier than I’d been in a long time. I felt safe. And I genuinely liked Frieda. She was good company, I liked the ever changing cloud of her mind, the fluid way it moved and shifted between ideas. Sometimes she’d want to discuss something she’d seen on the news, ask questions and debate my answers; then at other times she’d tell me the same thing three times in a row. Sometimes she talked about her life, her childhood in Munich, her parents, her school, her first ever cat, Petit Chou. She could be outrageously funny one minute and lose track of what she was saying the next. And that was okay too: it was just a different way of thinking. It was like her brain was a spiderweb with a whole bunch of broken threads: if she walked down one and found nothing there, she just reversed and trotted off down a different strand. A conversation with her wasn’t always linear, but it all made sense; you just had to stay with her, walk with her, follow wherever she wanted to go. She only ever seemed genuinely confused when there were other people about. Sometimes I even wondered if she were putting it on.
She did sometimes call me Elisabeth, but when she did that I pretended I hadn’t noticed. But still, sometimes I slipped on Elisabeth for size. I ran the name around my mouth. She felt older than me, wiser, neater, less of a mess. A better person than me. I looked in the mirror and mouthed Elisabeth at my reflection. It was such an elegant name, all those syllables. And I didn’t want to embarrass Frieda by correcting her. So I never said Laika, my name’s Laika. And that wasn’t even a lie. I’d seen the news. Everyone knew it: Laika had gone.
20 Memory Box Claudette
Then it was November the third. My birthday. I didn’t tell Frieda that, of course. The day was thick with gunmetal clouds and far too cold to walk around the garden, so in the afternoon she and I went upstairs and sat together in the room full of boxes, Frieda on a chair and me cross-legged on the floor. She wanted help finding something, she said. She directed from the chair as I sorted through boxes of clothing, holding up shirts, jumpers, dresses, old ski trousers, shoes, things she’d once loved, she said, things that at one time she’d never wanted to let go. Things she said would fit me.
It was photographs she was after. First, she showed me the photos of her wedding to Ted in Aldershot, holding hands, both of them dark-eyed and smiling.
Her eyes grew soft. “He was a lovely man,” she said, “a violinist. He helped me, you know. He got me out. Then we came here and got married and I became Elfrieda Laschamp. Before that, I was Elfrieda Openheimer.”
“Did you have children?” I said.
The moment it was out of my mouth, I knew I’d asked the wrong thing. She went still for a bit, her eyes moving somewhere distant.
“No,” she said. “We wanted them, both of us. But my body wouldn’t cooperate. It had some healing to do. I had some healing to do. And by then it was too late.”
She examined each photograph, holding them up close to her nose. There was Ted playing a violin, Frieda in a polka-dot bikini, Frieda and Ted in a boat on a lake.
Eventually she found the one she was looking for.
“That’s her,” she said at last.
She passed me a photograph of a young girl on a beach, a girl my age, perhaps, with dark eyes and long hair, blowing bubbles through a metal ring on a stick.
“That’s Elisabeth.”
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
“Yes.”
She passed me the photograph, and I could instantly see the likeness to Frieda in the shape of her cheekbones, her lips, her brow. It must have been a warm day. The light touched her shoulders. The stream of watery bubbles hung glistening in the air.
“I took that photo,” Frieda said. “It was one of those perfect days, the ones you hang on to for the rest of your life.”
“It shouldn’t be here, stuck away in a box.”
“I think you’re right. I’ll keep it with me from now on.”
She went quiet for a few moments, lost in her own thoughts.
“Now, then,” she said, “d’you think you can move that thing?” She pointed at a heavy wooden chest next to the wall. “You’ll have to move those boxes first. Can you lift them? No? Well, just shove them, then. That’s it. Clear that space by the wall.”
I followed her instructions, but I wasn’t quite sure why. There was nothing there but a wide section of skirting board.
“That’s it. Now put your fingers under there, yes, that big bit of wood, and pull.”
“Pull? It’s solid.”
“You’ll have to work your fingers under. There. That’s right, try again.”
The next time the board came away in my hand, revealing a small crawl space hidden in the eaves. It looked like a triangular-shaped coffin, with hard boards below and a steeply sloping ceiling. It was probably just about large enough to contain a small adult, lying flat.
“I had Ted make it for me,” Frieda said. “Turn that panel over. See on the back? Once you’re inside, you use those handles to pull the board back into place. There’s two little wooden swivels too, so it can lock from the inside. There should be a light switch somewhere, so you can read—well, there was a light once, I don’t know if it still works. I used to keep a pillow in there, and a blanket. It was all perfectly comfortable.”
I peered into the claustrophobic hole.
“Did you ever—use it?”
“I never needed to, not properly. But Ted made it for me, and it was just nice to know it was there. We all need a safe space. Well, that was mine. Put your hand to the right now, will you? Have a feel around—can you find anything?”
I lay flat on my stomach and poked around until my fingers touched something angular and hard.
“A box, I think, yep, a box. There’s a box.”
“Good. Bring it out.”
I pulled out a box the size of a thick hardback book and passed it up to Frieda. She drew a wavering line through the gray dust on its surface, revealing a glossy stream of chestnut-colored leather. Then she opened the lid and pulled out a creased black-and-white photograph of two serious-looking girls with deep, pool-like gazes.
“This was us,” she said. “It’s the only one I’ve got of us together.” For a long time she sat in silence. Then she ran a finger over the faces and put it to one side. She turned again to the box in her lap, picking out things and holding them out for me to see: a fabulous necklace with diamond clusters, a bracelet strung with sapphires, a gold watch.
“Wow,” I said, “that’s one serious box of treasure.”
“It is,” she said. In a quiet voice she added, “And I’d have given the entire lot of it in exchange for a ticket for Elisabeth.”
For a while she stared open-eyed at the wall. Then she seemed to gather herself. She held up a pair of pear-shaped emerald earrings, each one topped by a huge diamond stud.
