An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

Genres: Friendship; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride; LGBT Gay; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

The new novel from the award-winning writer, Ben Fergusson, author of The Spring of Kasper Meier and The Other Hoffmann Sister.
In West Berlin in 1989, eighteen-year-old Ralf has just left school and is living a final golden summer with his three best friends. They spend their days swimming, smoking and daydreaming about the future, oblivious to the storm gathering on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But an unsettling discovery about his family and a meeting with the mysterious Oz shatters everything Ralf thought he knew about love and loyalty. And as old Cold War tensions begin to tear his life apart, he finds himself caught up in a web of deceit, forced to make impossible choices about his country, his family and his heart.
“The divided Berlin of the Cold War era is brilliantly resurrected on the cusp of momentous change in Ben Fergusson's An Honest Man...the novel movingly recounts Ralf's painful discoveries about love and loyalty.” SUNDAY TIMES
“During the hot summer of 1989, a group of friends mooch about, fall in love, swim and party. All perfectly normal - except this is West Berlin which is still divided by the Wall and awash with spies and paranoia . . . The author won awards for his debut, The Spring of Kasper Meier. This is equally atmospheric and thought-provoking.” DAILY MAIL
“Love and loyalty in Cold War-era Berlin: an outstanding novel.” SUNDAY TIMES
“A genre-melding mix of coming of age and spy thriller...Fergusson's prose combines a reporter's eye for detail with poetic scene-setting. "The sky was honey coloured," he writes of a party in a squat. "Around a large brick and plaster chimney, men and women drank, danced and lounged on sofas that had improbably found their way up on to the large flat roof?.?.?.?One girl was completely naked." But the Cold War and greater forces are in play. The party will soon be over and a profound betrayal is about to turn Ralf's world upside down. A fine summer read.” FINANCIAL TIMES
“The stunning, powerful and addictive new novel by the prize-winning author of The Spring of Kasper Meier...” ATTITUDE MAGAZINE
“A powerful and moving love story by a writer at the top of his game.” JOHN BOYNE
“Subtle and intense...a morally complex tale...This is a beautifully written and engaging novel that comes from the heart.” NB MAGAZINE
“I quickly found myself hooked. The character of Ralf and his relationships with both his family and friends (particularly Oz) are beautifully drawn. Ralf's journey from innocence to adulthood is fascinating, surprising and poignant as the plot twists and turns and the reader, along with Ralf, has no idea who to trust. It is a compelling story that held me captive until the last page. And thank God it had a proper ending that left me smiling!” RUTH HOGAN
“Profoundly moving - a deftly crafted story of love and loss, I believed every word of it.” JAKE ARNOTT
“Fiercely beautiful, this tender, yet powerfully told story of love and discovery cradles the reader in the most pleasurable way. A lush, unforgettable read.” KATE MAYFIELD, author of The Parentations

Release date: July 4, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

When I was still a geology student it terrified me, shucking open a chunk of mud-black shale to find a single fossilised ginkgo leaf. It was the idea of it falling onto the soft silt of a Pangaean river, sinking, compacting and finding its way into my hands 270 million years later. All that time compressed in hot darkness – it made me claustrophobic. But now it consoles me. When I have to listen to someone clipping their nails on the U-Bahn or watch shouting demagogues on TV dressed in ill-fitting suits, I think of molten rock, ice and pressure, that our short time on earth will go the way of the ginkgo leaf – a few flat impressions in a split black rock.

The Berlin Wall too is a trace now, a faint line of cobbles at Potsdamer Platz, a toothy wall of rusted rebars along Bernauer Straße marking the brief division, one of any number of divisions in the city and, viewed from a distance, the least important. For centuries the river was the deadly barrier, when the first Berliners and their cattle were sporadically swept from the shallow ford after a hard winter and a warm spring brought torrents heaving down the valley from the Lusatian Highlands.

From the geologist’s point of view, the greatest division is the oldest and most enduring: the great glacial valley that Berlin fills, a valley carved out, not by the glacier itself, but by the meltwater that poured from it as it retreated north. In life as it is lived, though, perspective is lost to us. Most Berliners feel the valley’s sides only unconsciously when they haven’t turned the pedals of their Dutch bikes for a few minutes, descending from Prenzlauer Berg, Schöneberg or Kreuzberg – mountains all – into the valley bottom below.

Even in that final summer of 1989, when West Berlin was still the lopsided half-city of my childhood and the Wall still a 155-kilometre physical reality, it was only a trace to me. I sometimes caught sight of its graffitied face lurking at the end of a street like a fugitive, but it was no more striking than the shoes and handbags in glass vitrines on Kurfürstendamm; the punks at Kotbusser Tor asleep on benches, stinking of leather and vodka; the scrubbed concrete buildings of Ernst-Reuter-Platz topped with endless luminous letters – AEG, Osram, Leiser, Telefunken, Scharlachberg – and the circular signs of Bayer and Mercedes turning incessantly, like coins spun on their edges.

I remember clearly the dense heat of the dining hall at the Berlin British School where I did my A-level exams, my grey polyester trousers damp and pinching. I remember the packet of Polos peeled open on the graffitied ply of the exam desk, and the smell of the school hall: plimsolls, Dettol and savoury mince. I remember waiting in the underpass by Berlin Zoo Station by a Beate Uhse sex shop, avoiding the glances of prostitutes and tramps while my friend Stefan earnestly bought his first pornographic VHS tape (which he later binned in a pique of feminist solidarity). I remember the tallies with the Wildlife Trust, the silver fish skin of the goggle-eyed sunbleaks that my friends and I counted in red buckets at Riemeisterfenn, the grey herons we counted at Grunewaldsee and the bog rosemary we counted at Hundekehlefenn, crushing the pink bulbs between our pink fingers as the morning sun bleached the alders and turned the silver bark of the birches the pinky orange of melon flesh.

And I remember Prinzenbad public baths, three huge outdoor pools and two meadows in the centre of Kreuzberg, a sparkling mass of white and red tile, blue water and pale bodies in bright spandex, where I met Oz and where the last traces of my childhood were washed away.

As he swam past, Stefan’s bone-white arm lifted out of the water, revealing his face, goggled, shaved, his air-blowing lips a soft pink ring. I was sitting with Petra and my girlfriend Maike by the low tiled wall that ran the pool’s 50-metre length, draped with colourful towels drying in the sun. I could hear the tinny sound of The Motels coming from a cassette I’d made Maike. Through the Walkman’s plastic window, I could see ‘New Songs for M’ written in Tippex next to a lumpen blob, an ugly attempt at a flower that I’d obliterated because it’d looked childish.

Maike stared down at a school copy of The Count of Monte Cristo striated with another student’s pencilled underlinings. She took so much pleasure in reading that her only prerequisite for a book was that it be long; if it was less than five hundred pages she wasn’t interested. So she consumed Stephen King and Rosamunde Pilcher as voraciously as she did Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann and Günter Grass. She squinted against the sun, her height visible in the folded leg that she clung to like a rock, her chin resting on her knee. Her damp hair, long, brown and unfashionably straight, hung around her shoulders, the tips adorned with water droplets like glass beads.

Petra lay on her front with her bikini top undone. Her ashy bob was tied into a ponytail and was dry, because she never swam at the pool – she just tanned. She wore large white-framed sunglasses and flicked through Brigitte, snorting derisively at the fashion spreads. It was always hard to tell if this glibness of hers was genuine. It certainly didn’t square with her academic successes; although Maike was always the cleverest, it was Petra who worked the hardest. She’d got the second-best Abitur grades – German A levels – in her school, and the Head of Biology at the University of Hohenheim had called her personally when he received her application.

‘Listen to this,’ Petra said, slapping my leg, as she began to read out my horoscope. Stefan passed again. The lifeguard blew his whistle at the rippling shadow of two boys who’d bombed into the water, and I saw a man emerging from the pool, water pouring from his brown back and red trunks.

The man rubbed his face and turned, and the water falling from his body shattered and steamed on the terracotta tiles. The trees behind him retained the bright green of early summer and his face, as he slicked back his black hair, was fixed in an expression of doubtful, open-mouthed concentration.

He was hairier than me, an attractive flurry across his chest and on his stomach, in his armpits as he lifted his arms to squeeze the water from his hair. A gold chain, very fine, shimmered like fish scales near his throat, and on his wrist he wore a digital watch, gold too, the link-strap brilliant with sunshine. His fingers parted and I looked down at the novel between my legs, white as tripe, and the amber hairs peeping out from the ancient elastic of my black trunks.

I knew him, or at least I’d seen him before, parked on our street, near the corner of Schiller Straße. He was there on the last day I cycled to school, sitting in a 1970s moss-green Mercedes 240D. One wrist rested on the black plastic steering wheel, the hand limp like Michelangelo’s Adam, with a cigarette between index and middle finger. The other hand was at his mouth, the nail of his middle finger touching the gap between his front teeth.

I might’ve forgotten about him, had he not still been there when I cycled home. His window was rolled down; I picked up a trace of cigarette smoke and tinny jazz music. And though I was cycling too fast to see what he was reading, I could tell from the pastel-coloured cloth that it was a hardback book without its dust jacket.

He reappeared once or twice a week, but he never noticed me; though the colour of the books changed, he never once looked up from them when I cycled past. When I saw him at the edge of the pool, though, our eyes met.

Perhaps the familiarity of Prinzenbad and my friends meant that I seemed in that moment completely comfortable with myself, and perhaps the novel between my legs made me look more adult and worldly than I felt. Because there were plenty of clues to my unworldliness. He might have noticed the biscuit-brown towel I sat on, stiff from a thousand washes, or my name in red thread on a white fabric label that had come loose on one side. He might have noticed that the book, a battered copy of Midnight’s Children, still with its plastic cover and yellow Dewey Decimal sticker, had been stolen from the school library. He might have noticed my hand-sewn towelling swimming bag, with the face of Fungus the Bogeyman sewn onto it.

I looked back down at the book, embarrassed we’d made eye contact, sweat breaking out across my back as his wet feet slapped towards me on the red tiles. I read the same line over and over again, staring at the yellowed pages warped by my damp hands. When his shadow blotted out the sun for a moment, I turned back a page, as if looking for something, and I inhaled very gently, trying to catch the smell of him, but I only got the chlorine on my body, in the pool, everywhere.

I put my back on the cool tile of the low wall and watched his figure recede as he made his way to the changing rooms. I felt anxious and inexplicably nostalgic, as if I was missing a feeling that I’d never felt.

‘Well?’ said Petra, staring back at me.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You weren’t even listening, were you?’

‘I was. You said Venus is in ascendance. And in August I need to be brave about my career,’ I said, repeating the last thing she’d read out from my horoscope.

‘You need to be brave about reading that here with all these Turks,’ Petra said, nodding at my book. ‘That’s what you need to be brave about.’

‘Why?’

‘Iran. Khomeini. Fatwa. Salman Rushdie.’

‘Have you had a stroke?’

‘The writer,’ said Petra, sitting up and tying her bikini top back on, briefly flashing the soft sides of her breasts, tanned to caramel and sparkling with sweat.

I looked at the name on the cover. I hadn’t yet got a taste for the news; it still felt like something people’s parents were interested in, and there was no internet yet to flash a constant stream of breaking stories. Back then, if you didn’t read a newspaper or watch the evening news, you remained blissfully clueless about the world beyond your apartment. ‘Is he dead?’ I said.

‘He’s not dead. They’re just trying to kill him, because it’s offensive to Islam.’

‘This?’ I said, holding up the book.

‘No.’ Petra frowned. ‘What’s that banned Salman Rushdie book?’ she asked Maike, pulling off the headphones of her Walkman, so that they fell onto her bare legs with a tinny clatter.

‘Hey!’ Maike said.

‘What’s that Salman Rushdie book that’s banned?’ Petra said again.

‘I don’t know. Didn’t Khomeini just die? Isn’t he off the hook?’

‘Satanic Verses,’ said Stefan, out of the pool, towelling himself down efficiently. Stefan’s skin was also pale, but his forearms and calves showed the tan lines of his T-shirt and shorts, the colour ending abruptly on his thighs and upper arms, like long brown socks and evening gloves.

‘Shift over,’ he said to Maike. She lay down next to me and put a cool hand on my sun-hot leg.

Stefan lay down too and put his arm over his eyes, revealing a sprig of armpit hair, so black it was almost blue. I became very aware of the physicality of my friends and my sweating body in between.

Maike took a damp strand of her hair and absently brushed it across her chin like a paintbrush. Though old friends, she and I had only been dating for a year, losing our mutual virginities early in the morning in a tent on the North Sea coast, the olive air filled with the smell of waxed canvas, unwashed hair and seawater. Although I’d applied to English universities, we’d already worked out a schedule for our continuing relationship and liked to pick out places we might live after graduation on the world map taped to the back of my bedroom door.

There is a picture of the two of us that I have on the shelf in my office at university. It’s fun, because my more perceptive students spot who it is; the first years have to read her book Wetlands: Sustainability, Construction and Structural Change in ‘Introduction to Physical Geography’. In the picture, which has that grainy softness so instantly nostalgic in the digital age, Maike and I are in Grunewald sitting on a fallen tree trunk and we’re both smiling with our eyes closed. Petra must have taken it, because I’m holding Katja, her sheepdog, on a lead. I’m wearing a large black T-shirt with an Adidas logo, white shorts, white socks and trainers, my auburn hair cut relatively short, but unstyled, a puffed, unselfconscious cap. Maike is wearing walking boots, jean shorts high on her waist and a white T-shirt with pale pink stripes. Her long hair pours off her shoulders in smooth brown strips like a river delta.

I remember liking my T-shirt and being aware that Adidas was an acceptable brand to be wearing, but I had no idea how these things made me look. Except for Petra, we all dressed carelessly, spending the money from our weekend and holiday jobs on four-season sleeping bags, microscopes, bright waterproofs and cards for the state library.

This is the last photograph I have of myself in which I look like this. After Oz, my poses close up, as if I’m trying to cover myself. I find it hard to find any photo of me up until my wedding day in which my arms are not crossed, my hand is not holding my throat or covering my mouth as if I’m trying to stop myself speaking.

It’s the same for Maike. That summer changed her too, and in every other picture I have of her – including the striking author photo on the back of Wetlands – she has flicked her long hair to the right shoulder, tipped her head, removed her glasses. I miss the artless, eyes-closed grin of the girl on the log.

‘I read Satanic Verses,’ Stefan said. ‘It’s really weird.’ Stefan had little interest in literature, but a lot of interest in politics – he was a vegetarian and a member of The Greens. The only books he read were either notoriously difficult – The Magic Mountain, Thus Spoke Zarathustra – or, like The Satanic Verses and his favourite book, Laughter in the Dark, in some way connected to scandal.

‘This is quite weird,’ I said, lifting up the book.

‘Suits you, Ralfi,’ he said and yawned.

The boys that had bombed into the pool ran past us spraying our hot skin with water. Petra sat up and shouted, ‘You vicious little cunts.’ The boys froze and bowed their heads sorrowfully; the younger burst into tears. ‘Oh fuck,’ Petra muttered, when the swimmers who were lined up against the wall turned to us. ‘I didn’t think they’d care.’

We laughed to protect her from outside scorn. And this might have been my lasting memory of summer 1989. Even that moment I might have forgotten, recalling only my A levels and the Wall if people asked what that year had meant to me. But of course, in the end, 1989 meant neither of those things. It just meant Oz, and espionage – how grand that word sounds now – and I suppose my family and the terrible things we did.

We queued for chips and Coke before we showered, the ceiling of the tiled pool café filled with bright inflatable animals and floats, the counter lined with bread-roll halves beneath scrambled egg, sliced egg, ham and salami, a soggy pretzel letter on each. We drank and smoked in our swimming things, our bare backs sticking to the white plastic chairs, picking unhurriedly at the chips covered in both ketchup and mayonnaise – Pommes rot-weiß. We were in no rush, we had nowhere to go. We’d all finished school four weeks earlier and were enjoying the impossibly long summer before university, blissfully ignorant of what our studies would involve and how they would change us.

Stefan, Petra and Maike had gone to school together and Stefan was the son of my mother’s best friend, Beate, and had thus been my assigned playmate since birth. As a group, our friendship had been cemented in North Hessen when we were eleven and twelve at Wilde Kidz, a camp for city children with a passion for nature. You might think that city kids who were into wildlife would be an accepting cast of misfits, but it was a fortnight riven with regional antagonism. It became clear that the children from Munich and Stuttgart weren’t estranged from nature at all, and spent their weekends climbing mountains and plucking ticks from their legs in the Black Forest. The children from Frankfurt and the Ruhr had learned to light fires with sticks in the Taunus and the kids from Bremen and Hamburg could sail.

In West Berlin’s 480 square kilometres, bounded in concrete and barbed wire, the natural habitats we roamed amounted to a few small woods, some overgrown train tracks and a bog or two, a fact made clear to the other children when, in the wooded depths of the Reinhardswald, Maike asked the trek leader when we would reach the next toilet. From then on, we were ridiculed, even when Stefan corrected one of the guides, who mixed up a medlar with a crab apple. When the guide acquiesced, one of the Bavarians shouted, ‘He read it in a book. He read it in a book in the library,’ and the other children collapsed into laughter, as if they had imbibed all of their knowledge from the wilderness direct.

Backed into a corner, we responded in the only way we could, becoming ostentatiously condescending. Petra led the charge, pretending not to understand the Southerners and making an overweight boy from Bochum cry when she told him he smelt of poverty. Lagging behind the others, we talked for a fortnight, shared our homesickness and agreed to meet up the first weekend back to collect owl pellets in Grunewald, the forest that fills Berlin’s western edge. I think we were all surprised when we all turned up.

We joined the West Berlin Wildlife Trust, knowing it would be good for future university applications – we were right – and together began what for all of us would be a lifelong pursuit: counting and measuring creatures, plants and land formations. At the lakes, we counted snails, frogs, toads, diving beetles and reeds; we sat outside ruined buildings in the dusk pressing our click counters as silhouettes of bats beat out and later beat back in; we marked out sections of rare dry grass with meter sticks and counted butterfly eggs, as grasshoppers sprang to safety, like flicked rubber bands. We loved it; it made us feel useful and grown up. Though we never talked about our shared passion abstractly, it quickly became a given.

Stefan, Maike and Petra were all a year older than me. I’d been sent to the British School run by the Army in Charlottenburg, taking A levels at eighteen while they were taking their Abitur at nineteen. Because my English mother worked as a psychologist and was married to my German father, we were one of the few British families that stayed in the city. Although they lived in different corners of Berlin, Stefan, Petra and Maike all came from Catholic families – a relative rarity in part-Protestant, mostly heathen Berlin – and so all attended the Catholic school in a Fifties building on Winterfeldtplatz. I had always been jealous of them, palling around together while I was stuck with another classroom of friendly British children whose approaches I rejected, embittered by years of desertions.

The final straw was a boy called Jonathan, who had arrived at the British School when we were both eight and stayed for three years. He had buck teeth, laughed at my jokes and was very badly behaved. We rode around town on buses – free with our British IDs – shoplifting from distant corners of the city and breaking windows in abandoned buildings. Once we threw stones over the wall at Spandau Prison in the hope of hitting Rudolf Hess, then still clinging on to life, and were chased off by the prison guards.

Jonathan’s mother was a Queen Alexandra Nurse and very patriotic, and in the few years we were friends I went with him to the Queen’s Birthday Parade at the Olympic Stadium. Once a month, his mother drove us through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin to buy Meissen pottery from Unter den Linden and Russian dolls from Natasha’s on Karl-Marx-Straße, then took us to a restaurant to eat cheap pink meat in breadcrumbs with tinned runner beans. Because my mum’s cooking was so bad, I was as delighted by these bland, salty meals as I was by the food Jonathan’s mum let us order from the FRIS book, a catalogue of goods kept in British military foodstores that military families were allowed to order at cut-rate prices. Like Christmas stockings, Jonathan’s mum laid out the steel FRIS box and by the afternoon it had been filled with luxuries that had eluded me until then: sliced white bread, digestive biscuits, orange squash.

But after one Christmas holiday Jonathan didn’t come back to school. His parents had been posted to Sardinia and I was heartbroken. When Stefan and Beate came over for dinner that Friday Stefan told me about Wilde Kidz and I begged Mum to let me go. And the moment I’d formed a permanent group of German friends I clung onto them.

I didn’t just idolise them because they were older than me. Stefan was socially engaged, Maike was clever, Petra was sharp-tongued and powerfully gave the impression that she didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought about her. I always felt like a pigeon that had found its way into an aviary of exotics. Stefan’s thin, hairless body and mop of curling locks made him look like an Italian, as did his thick black eyebrows that met in the middle; Petra had fine, sharp features and big breasts; Maike was statuesque, with long Bill Brandt legs and a nose as straight as a Greek sculpture’s.

The walking, cycling, swimming and camping we did meant I was fit enough, I wasn’t too short or too tall. My hair though had been carrot-red as a child, and this had led to teasing at the British School. Nothing severe but, being half German, it added to my sense of otherness.

My hair had darkened almost to brown, its redness only revealed in direct sunlight, in the freckles that covered my face and shoulders, the pale pink of my nipples and the russet hair on my legs and arms. Nevertheless, the vague sense that gingerness was akin to ugliness, that it moved me into the category of Kevin Cuddon, the boy with a purple birthmark on his face, and Nicola Dean, who had alopecia totalis and an NHS wig, meant that, in my circle of German friends, I felt grateful for their friendship and for Maike’s love.

I opened a second Coke. Behind Stefan, an overweight couple were filling in a crossword, half-shaded by an orange-and-blue Fanta umbrella. The man’s miniature trunks and the woman’s bikini were the same shade of turquoise, the elastic cutting into skin the colour of coffee, wrinkled and shiny like used cling film.

Behind them, I thought I saw the red swimming trunks of the man from the traffic lights, but the red cloth resolved into a white-spotted neckerchief tied Madonna-like around someone’s platinum-blonde hair.

‘Anyone want to watch a film at mine?’ Stefan said, tossing a Pez from a Garfield-headed dispenser into the air and catching it between his teeth.

‘How depressing is it on a scale of one to ten?’ Petra asked. ‘Ten is every other film you’ve made us watch.’

‘Don’t be a twat,’ said Stefan, crunching on the Pez and straightening his baseball cap, from under which his curling black hair bloomed up like smoke beneath a door.

‘What is it then?’ I said.

‘I got a pirate copy of Ugetsu. It’s this very cool Japanese film.’

‘Is it black-and-white?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, but it’s—’

We all drowned him out with our groans. Like his reading, Stefan’s film consumption was fully improving. He was a collector of difficult movies, attracted to anything that had been judged important. Through various dusty out-of-the-way shops and underground film clubs, he managed to get hold of the most obscure titles, introducing us to Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir and Yasujirō Ozu. He was the only person I knew who’d watched the whole nine hours of Shoah. His preference was for anything old, black-and-white and subtitled – a rarity in Germany, where most foreign films are dubbed, a practice, of course, that disgusted him.

‘It’s Kenji Mizoguchi! It’s one of the greatest films of all time!’

‘It’s too hot to watch girls laying eggs and cutting people’s dicks off,’ said Petra. She was referring to In the Realm of the Senses, which Stefan had made us watch that Christmas and which had become fodder for our teasing ever since.

Stefan’s face flushed red and he said, ‘It’s a different culture. You’re just embedded in Western norms about sexuality.’

‘Just because Japan’s exotic to you, doesn’t mean it’s not sordid,’ Maike said, taking off her large gold-framed glasses and wiping sweat from her brow with her forearm. ‘They have really ingrained issues with prostitution; it’s tax-deductible if you’re a creepy old businessman. Whatever the cultural differences are, they’re still people’s sisters and daughters and they’re still having sex for money.’

‘Fuck off, Maike,’ Stefan said.

Maike listened, only speaking when she had something to say, but it was always concise and accurate when it came, and thus more devastating. It happened often enough that ‘Fuck off, Maike’ had become a phrase we used any time someone was about to argue back and we already knew our own argument wasn’t going to stand.

I lay across the table with my hand out for a Pez. Stefan popped one into my palm and behind him I saw another flash of red – this time it was the man from the pool, the sun full on his back, catching the light in his wet black hair.

‘You’ll come, Ralfi. Alter, come on?’

Stefan was the sort of only child who hated being alone and made siblings of his closest friends.

‘Not a chance,’ I said.

‘I’m showering,’ said Petra. Maike stood too, but Stefan put his hands behind his head and said, ‘It’s thirty-two degrees. There’s no point. We’re all going to be soaked in sweat by the time we get home.

‘Shower later,’ I said encouragingly, thinking of the man in the red trunks – that I might be able to catch another glimpse of him if I went to shower alone. I didn’t want to talk to him, certainly not be noticed by him, I just wanted to pick up some detail up-close: a gesture, a scar, the sound of his voice.

‘Yeah, I’ll shower when I get home,’ Stefan said.

‘No you won’t, you dirtbag,’ said Petra.

The man should have already showered by the time I entered the changing rooms and, if I was lucky, have been pulling his clothes on in front of his locker. But when I walked in I found him still in his red swimming trunks, furiously spinning the wheels of a combination lock.

‘Scheiße,’ he muttered to himself.

‘Everything OK?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said the man, straightening. ‘Yeah. My lock’s broken or something. Or I’ve forgotten the code.’ I’d expected him to have a Turkish accent, but he spoke accentless, idiomatic German. He laughed and said, ‘I’m a fucking idiot.’

I hesitated, thinking I could get past him, leaving him to argue it out with the site manager while I watched through the crack of my cubicle door, but I said, ‘Well, if it’s a combination lock you could just crack it.’

‘What, like crack it off?’

‘No, crack the code.’

He shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Mein Freund, you’ve lost me.’

The word Freund made me feel good. Among my real friends and my family, no one called anyone else ‘friend’, unless they were being ironic.

‘Do you want me to … ?’ I gestured to the lock.

‘Be. . .