The Husband's Secret(5)

            When they got to Berlin, they found tourists lined along the Wall, trying to chip off pieces as souvenirs using keys, rocks, anything they could find. The Wall was like a giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorized the city, and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains.

            Without proper tools it was almost impossible to chip off a proper piece, so Cecilia and Sarah (well, Cecilia) decided to buy their pieces from the enterprising locals who had set out rugs and were selling a variety of offerings. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from gray-colored chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-size chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti.

            Cecilia couldn’t remember how much she had paid for the tiny gray stone that looked like it could have come from anyone’s front garden. “It probably did,” said Sarah as they caught the train out of Berlin that night, and they’d laughed at their own gullibility, but at least they’d felt like they were a part of history. Cecilia had put her chip in a paper bag and written “MY PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL” on the front, and when she came back to Australia she’d thrown it in a box with all the other souvenirs she’d collected: drink coasters, train tickets, menus, foreign coins, hotel keys.

            Cecilia wished now she’d concentrated more on the Wall, taken more photos, collected more anecdotes she could have shared with Esther. Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome, brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly sexy, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky.

            If only she’d been the sort of curious, politically aware girl who had struck up conversations with the locals about what it had been like living in the shadow of the Wall. Instead, all she had to share with her daughter were stories about kissing and ice cubes. Of course, Isabel and Polly would love to hear about the kissing and ice cubes. Or Polly would; maybe Isabel had reached the age where the thought of her mother kissing anybody would be appalling.

            Cecilia had put “Find piece of Berlin Wall for E” on her list of things to do that day (there were twenty-five items—she used an iPhone app to list them), and at about two p.m., she had gone into the attic to find it.

            “Attic” was probably too generous a word for the storage area in their roof space. You reached it by pulling down a ladder from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

            Once she was up there, she had to keep her knees bent so as not to bang her head. John-Paul point-blank refused to go up there. He suffered from terrible claustrophobia and walked six flights of stairs every day to his office so he could avoid taking the elevator. The poor man had regular nightmares about being trapped in a room where the walls were contracting. “The walls!” he’d shout, just before he woke up, sweaty and wild-eyed. “Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?” Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn’t have put it past his mother), but he said he was pretty sure he wasn’t. “Actually, John-Paul never had nightmares when he was a little boy,” his mother had told Cecilia when she asked. “He was a beautiful sleeper. Perhaps you give him too much rich food late at night?” Cecilia was used to the nightmares now.

            The attic was small and crammed, but tidy and well organized, of course. Over recent years, “organized” seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing that her family and friends commented on and teased her about, it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now extraordinarily well organized, as if motherhood were a sport and she were a top athlete. It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?

            And that was why other people, like her sister, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia’s attic was stacked with clearly labeled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn’t look quite Cecilia-ish was the tower of shoe boxes in the corner. They were John-Paul’s. He liked to keep each financial year’s receipts in a different shoe box. It was something he’d been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoe boxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space.