The Quiet Twin

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Book: Read The Quiet Twin for Free Online
Authors: Dan Vyleta
with shelves laden with cheap plates and mugs and some tin cutlery. The scorched coil of an immersion heater lay not far from an empty metal sink. It struck him that whoever had left this place behind had gone to the trouble of scrubbing the sink clean until it sparkled, and he pictured Frau Pollak standing hunched over its surface, a wad of steel wool in her hand, her suitcase already sitting in the yard. The cutlery was dusty, but none of it soiled.
    Beyond the kitchen lay a further corridor, which in turn led to a mechanic’s garage, now barren of tools but still alive with the vivid smell of motor oils. On his right, the garage doors stood wide open, blue sky beyond. He stepped out and saw the girl waiting for him by the pile of rubbish she had indicated before, arms thrown high over her head, and rushing her body through a drill of awkward pirouettes that tossed up the hem of her purple dress. The yard was in disuse but not as badly littered as it had seemed from outside. Most of the rubbish was close to the front of the yard, where people had rid themselves of items of household waste by tipping them over the gate. Cabbage stumps and potato peelings lay scattered amongst broken bottles and the carcass of a bicycle, rusted beyond repair. A pulpy bundle of newspapers lay rotting in the sun.
    When she saw him coming over, the girl cleared a patch of yard with her dirty canvas shoes, then threw herself down on to the ground as though gripped by a sudden seizure and bent her limbs into a particular shape, one knee tucked up towards her chest, the other stretched behind her, with both arms wrapped tight around her head. The doctor rose on tiptoe to see whether anyone was watching them from the other side of the gate, then crouched down very close to the girl, pulling down her dress a little where it exposed the edge of her dirty knickers.
    ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ he said mildly. ‘You’ll get filthy.’
    ‘Just like this,’ answered the little girl. ‘And the tummy was all slit.’
    She gestured to her abdomen, and made a disgusted face. ‘There were rats, you know, but the boys threw stones at them and chased them away.’
    ‘And you really saw it for yourself?’
    ‘Him,’ she corrected, then nodded. ‘His name was Walter.’
    ‘Walter,’ he said. ‘It’s a funny name for a dog.’
    She got up from the ground and dusted off her knees. ‘Janitor says it’s better this way because he was so very old.’
    Her eyes darted up to see what he made of the idea.
    ‘That’s probably true,’ he said, grudgingly, annoyed with the man for being so open with the girl. ‘It’s not a nice way to go, though.’
    ‘No,’ said the girl, and for a moment he saw in her eyes all the fear and horror that had been engendered by her encounter with Speckstein’s cut-open dog.
    She reached out to him, and he took her hand again, and together they made their way through the garage and the kitchen, and on through the windings of the corridors beyond. The girl was quiet now, lost in her thoughts. When they came out by the gate once more, she tugged at his hand and stopped him; stood once again with her temples pressed against the grating near its handle.
    ‘I heard the policeman say something,’ she murmured quietly, then sucked in her lips. ‘He said – he said the dog had “ bled out elsewhere ”. What does that mean?’
    ‘It means there wasn’t enough blood on the scene. It must have been killed somewhere else.’
    She nodded, then abandoned her stance and turned her back on the gate: a hunchbacked guardsman, turning on her heels, pigtails for a helmet, her lips rolled inwards over the double ridge of teeth.
    They were back in front of their own building by the time she spoke again.
    ‘I didn’t like the policeman.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because he said that Father was a drunk,’ she explained, patiently, as though to someone younger than herself. ‘He is, you know, but it was unkind of him to say so.

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