Читать книгу The Darkness that Divides Us - Renate Dorrestein - Страница 10

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A is for Abacus

We must at some point have made up our minds never to exchange another word with her, because, as if by prearrangement, there was always a deathly silence the moment she came into view. We’d clamp our lips shut and look the other way when we saw her coming into the schoolyard or when we passed her in the street, playing hopscotch or marbles all by herself.

When had it started? It must have been the year we learned to read, in Miss Joyce’s class. So long ago, anyway, that it was as if a ring, faint but unmistakable, had gradually been drawn round her, marking the spot where she was standing, walking, or sitting: a sign that she had been singled out as a target. As the scapegoat.

Our silence did not mean we didn’t have anything to say to her. We wanted there to be no mistake about that, and that’s why we often lay in wait for her after school. Four of us, or six, or, if there was nothing else going on, a bunch more.

We’d hide in the shrubbery on the old village green, behind the hornbeam hedge whose leaves in spring were the colour of chocolate. In front of the hedge stood a bench overgrown with brambles. In the old days, when the green was still being maintained, it was a popular spot for courting couples. Now it was mostly deserted. But it wasn’t considered particularly unsafe, since it was overlooked by all the houses surrounding the green; anybody could see what was happening out there, unless everybody happened to be looking the other way at the exact same time.

Elbowing one another in the ribs, we hid behind the hedge. The moist earth was crawling with spiders that tried to scramble away on buckling legs when you held a match to them. They made a popping sound as they burned; the shrivelled little ball gave off a measly puff of smoke.

As soon as we saw her coming, we put away our matches and ducked. We were packed so close together that we were just one big huddle of quivering muscle and flaring nostrils.

On the other side of the hedge we heard her pace slacken. Her footsteps slowed until she came to a sudden halt. She was weighing her chances, probably: her after-school tutoring session had run a little longer than usual, dinner smells were already wafting out of the open windows, the street was empty; all the kids had been called inside. Maybe today was her lucky day. She started fidgeting, her fingers plucking at a hem, as if trying to find something to hold on to. Her clothes were always a muddy colour. It was only to be expected of those Luducos, our mothers said, shaking their heads. Men didn’t know how to do the laundry, nor did they have a clue about dressing a little girl properly. ‘The poor child,’ they said.

We stared at each other, our cheeks bulging with excitement. Nobody wanted to go first, or worse, last. That thought spurred us to leap out, all together at the same time, to block her way. Arms crossed, legs planted wide, chins raised. A human barricade.

Her mouth and eyes rounded into perfect Os, her face grew so pale that the freckles looked like ants crawling across her nose, and her carroty plaits, which she had grown long again just to annoy us, sprang loose from the shock.

There was a total silence all around. No sound of telephones ringing in any of the houses. No pan clanging on any cooker. No baby even dared to start crying. No housewife was chatting with a neighbour over the hedge. Even the brambles stopped growing as we thrust the scrap of paper with our latest ultimatum at her, at eye level so that she could read it. She had trouble working out what it said. But we had plenty of time. We gazed at her, relaxed, as drops of sweat welled on her upper lip. When she was finally done deciphering our message word for word, we stuffed the piece of paper down her throat to make sure it wouldn’t be used against us. Obediently she chewed and swallowed it. She kept her eyes down, but we were only too aware how blue they were, as blue and brazen as ever, despite her cowering demeanour. The picture of innocence, she was. Oh, she was good. We gave her a shove, sending her stumbling across the deserted square with our promise churning in her gut: ‘We gonna get you, scumbag.’

The moment she disappeared from view we were overcome with the urge to shake ourselves like dazed, wet dogs. Suddenly we felt a pressing need for noise. We started making a racket, yelling whatever came into our heads, to convince ourselves we had every right to put her on notice that for the rest of her days her life was going to be a living hell. Tomorrow we would make her pay. Or, better yet, a few days from now. Just as she began to think she was safe again, we’d give it to her good, we would. This year was our last chance: soon we’d be turning twelve, and at the end of the summer vacation we were all going to different schools. At home they had already started gazing at us sentimentally, reminiscing about our happy childhood, which, they said, was very nearly over.

All of us—most of us, anyway—were born here, in the sole modern housing estate of a sleepy little town that would have fallen off the map long ago if a stretch of no-man’s-land squeezed between canal and motorway hadn’t appealed to a bunch of builders as a prime piece of property.

Our fathers smugly declared they had been the very first residents to move here. Pioneers of sorts, they were. In those days there wasn’t another housing estate anywhere else in the whole entire country, I kid you not! The national TV news had come to film the prime minister inaugurating the first house—at least that’s what our mothers told us, their eyes still glowing with pride. They’d lost no time spiffing up the place, planting bamboo and embellishing their yards with droll garden ornaments. Then they were off to the salon to have their hair highlighted.

Your dad did have to earn good money if you wanted your own little plot of split-level property here, but in relative terms the prices were a joke. For a similar chunk of dough in Amsterdam, you’d be in a third-floor walk-up with no view. And here you had all that fresh air into the bargain.

That first summer on the housing estate, our parents barbecued up a storm. The whole neighbourhood joined in; after all, pioneers have an obligation to eat well, they have to set an example! Our mums made potato salad by the bathtub, our dads tied on aprons and sharpened their carving knives. In winter everyone pitched in to erect a colossal Christmas tree in the new shopping-mall square, where the wind howled so fiercely that they’d needed gallons of mulled wine not to get blown off their feet. And by the time summer came round again, we were born, one after another, in dribs and drabs, but pretty close in age all the same, as if the bank had threatened to foreclose on the mortgage unless a baby was produced by a certain date.

Back in those days we had no idea how that worked, babies getting born. We had no concept of all that’s involved, or of the possible consequences. We simply appeared out of nowhere, from one moment to the next, to our parents’ immense joy. They leaned over our cribs, they cradled us in their arms—carefully, because we were such precious little darlings—and showed us that we really had the best of both worlds: bathrooms with all mod cons and hygienic stainless-steel kitchens, but also the countryside outside our back doors, brimming with cow parsley in bloom and mud that would ooze into our wellies when we were a little older, squishy and delicious.

We sucked air into our lungs and screeched with delight. We hollered so loudly that we could hear one another right through the walls right and left of us and across the street. This, too, was part of the deal: little friends our own age, thrown in for free. What fun it would be to grow up together—first steps, first words, first tooth, first bloody lip. And we’d ride our tricycles together! Where else could you ride a tricycle as safely as down our lane?

We had it made. We were in clover. As if the whole world knew exactly what we deserved.

The heart of the original village consisted of four narrow streets around a central square. It was there that our mummies headed every day to do their shopping.

Shaking their highlighted curls, they parked our pushchairs inside the musty-smelling greengrocer’s; the man’s fingers were so swollen with arthritis that he had trouble wrapping the crisp fresh lettuce in newspaper, and if you didn’t have the exact change on you, you had to slip behind the counter and help yourself from the till. No place else in the world had such tasty vegetables, our mothers assured him, I really mean it, Mr De Vries. They squatted down in their tight jeans and handed us carrots to suck on. Then they dawdled for a while longer, hoping for a chat; it wasn’t as if they had that many people to talk to, but Mr De Vries just went on silently weighing the split peas, and, suddenly embarrassed, they fled from the gloomy shop, needing to put distance between themselves and old age and aching bones and hard work—out, out!

Once safely outside, they collected themselves. They bent down and with flushed cheeks made shushing noises into our perambulators. You could tell how glad they were that we, even more than they, were helplessly dependent on things beyond our control. After all, they didn’t need anyone to wipe their little bums. They stuffed the lettuce firmly into the pushchair’s shopping net, and once again we felt ourselves going bumpity-bump over the cobblestones. Overhead we could see blue skies with the odd cloud here and there that looked like an elephant, or a chicken. Then we’d pop our thumbs into our mouths, because nobody was asking our opinion anyway.

The butcher’s. Meat slaughtered on the premises.

The baker’s. A country brown loaf.

When our mums were done with their shopping, they’d gather on the village green across from the former rectory. We lay dozing on plaid blankets, snuggled against their hips. Their tanned, pale, or freckled faces glistened in the sun; they dabbed their necks, their voices brayed. Even in our semi-comatose state it made us uneasy, we got itchy, we began to whinge for no reason, just to get their attention. Their panic was understandable. To be twenty years old, far from the big city, banished to a brand-new housing estate in some itty-bitty backwater no one’s ever heard of, left to cope all by yourself in this suburban Wild West while your husband was stuck somewhere out there in a traffic jam—but then they would shake themselves, grabbing their painted toenails or the ends of their bleached hair and then tugging as hard as they could, and they were off again, shrieking with hysterical laughter. There was always something to gossip about. There was always some scandal you could freely dish the dirt on, even in the presence of infants. And there were always good snacks, too, to be shared around.

The summer we first opened our astonished eyes, the treat was often strawberries: it was a great year for them, they were as big as duck eggs, the whole world reeked of their sweet, cloying aroma. With their tapered fingernails our mothers pinched the stems from the berries, they bit them in half and gently prodded the pieces into our drooling mouths. The juice ran down our chins, staining our baby knits.

‘Watch out for wasps,’ Lucy’s mother cautioned.

In the sea of maternal bodies she was the only one you could have picked out blindfolded. That was because she smelled of patchouli, whereas our mothers all smelled of Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris. Because our mummies had our daddies, they had real husbands who could afford to buy them perfume recommended in Avenue magazine, and a closet full of sexy summer frocks besides.

Lucy’s mum, in her slinky, home-made, invariably black dresses, with her sleek black hair, was the exception in more ways than one, because she was the only one who lived in the old village. Oh, not very long, she replied when asked how long she’d been there, and laughed. Even though our mums couldn’t find out as much about her as they’d like, they were fond of her. She was the merriest of them all and could always be counted on to come up with a solution to any problem. She could tell your fortune with the help of a deck of Tarot cards. There was no point looking back, she would say, you should always look ahead at what was next. ‘Look, this is the Three of Cups. The card of friendship,’ she told our uprooted mothers. ‘That’s the most important card in the deck.’

In unison we burped and in unison we produced stinky nappies. We slept, we had the colic, we learned you were supposed to chortle if someone cooed ‘ta-ta’ at you, we stuffed things into our mouths, we grew. We grew like cabbages. At first we reconnoitred the world on our hands and knees, but soon we started walking and pulling breakables off tabletops. We explored electric outlets and discovered the stairs. We said ‘Mama’ for the first time and were practically hugged to death. Every new milestone was recorded for posterity by video cameras. As far as we knew, the world revolved around us, and every so often we got to blow out another candle on our birthday cake.

Our daddy gave us a brightly coloured abacus, so that one day we’d be able to do sums, to calculate the costs and the benefits, credit and debit and all the rest, or, alternatively, a doll with eyes that shut and real hair, to prepare us for a role no less important. With his heavy daddy-hand he ruffled our hair. He squeezed us close. He rolled around the bathroom floor with us. His face was set in a har-dee-har expression. He sprayed us with the garden hose. On Saturday afternoons we washed the car together, each armed with our own scrub-brush, for the rims. On Sundays we dug in the garden. We planted bulbs and raked leaves. ‘Is this paradise, or what?’ Daddy asked. But then he’d gaze over our head at the spindly elms poking up in the flat polder landscape, and let out a deep sigh.

At night, when they thought we were asleep, our mummy would snap at our daddy, ‘But who insisted on moving here in the first place?’

‘Oh, not you, I suppose!’

‘And now you’re home late for dinner every night.’

‘What did you expect? Did you think my office would open a branch out here in the boondocks?’

‘You’re away all day long, while I’m trapped here, cooped up with the kids!’

Through the walls we heard how mad our mummies were. They wanted a chance to show who they were—to the universe, to our fathers, perhaps even to us. They were special, goddamnit; they had talent and potential, far greater than your average Jane! After one of these outbursts you could bet your boots that the next morning we’d find them buttering our bread with a resentful glint in their eyes; it was we, after all, who were tying them down hand and foot. It was because we had to grow up in a place where the air was pure and the cow parsley grew that they were now stuck out here. We were their cross to bear—day in, day out.

We kept quiet as little mice, watching them muttering under their breath. When you realized that you were somebody’s cross to bear, it became hard to get the dry bread down, and your heart started pounding like mad. It seemed that your birth had set off an unanticipated chain reaction. Mummy had become invisible because of you! She was sacrificing herself for you! She had a whole laundry list of motherly grievances! Even hours later your hand wouldn’t stop shaking enough for your crayon to stay inside the lines.

When the day had had such an inauspicious start, we’d often spend the afternoon in the old rectory on the village green where Lucy lived with her mother and the Luducos.

It was a rambling, rather draughty house, with an old-fashioned doorbell pull, a panelled staircase and creaky wooden floors. Lucy’s mother, who didn’t believe in looking back at the past, had her studio on the second floor. Piles of books and papers lay scattered all over the floor. There were jam jars with dried paints on the windowsills, and the walls were papered with charcoal sketches for her picture books. Clara 13 was her most famous book, about a cow with a permanent streak of bad luck. All of us had a copy of it at home.

In the darkest corner of the room was a table topped with a green felt cloth. That was the Tarot table. Here your fortune was either made or lost. Here the Five of Wands made you war with yourself, the Wheel of Fortune turned everything topsy-turvy, and the Knight of Cups was known to turn up to save the day. Really, there was nothing supernatural about it, said Lucy’s mother, but hey, wait, look, here’s the Two of Pentacles, that amazing card that augurs a big change, plus the High Priest, the most protective card of all.

Eagerly our mummies saw their fortunes spelled out for them in the cards. They leaned over the fascinating pictures that told the story of their lives in cartoon-strip form. Meanwhile we stood there gaping at Lucy’s mum. She had a dimple in one cheek. Her eyes were cornflower blue. The buttons on her blouse were always half-undone, and when she crossed her legs, you could see a tanned limb through the long slit in her black skirt. Gazing at her, you’d feel so happy and dreamy inside that you couldn’t believe she could seriously be somebody’s mother. ‘Lucy is upstairs, kids,’ she’d say, glancing up from her cards. ‘Run along up and go play.’

We didn’t have to be told twice. We clambered up the staircase whose every tread let out a soft groan.

Since no one can make a living from picture books alone, Lucy’s mum had a couple of lodgers living on the third floor. The Luducos, as we called them, were two slow, amiable men of indeterminate age who were constantly on the phone. You hardly noticed their presence, except for their shoes lined up in the corridor. The ones belonging to Ludo were all black leather brogues; the ones belonging to Duco were sneakers in various stages of disintegration. We pinched our noses shut when we passed by.

Lucy’s domain was all the way upstairs in the attic.

Her room had a swing hanging from the rafters. There was always a bunch of freshly picked pansies sitting in the dormer window. The floor was strewn with rugs and cushions. Lucy didn’t have a Minnie Mouse nightlight like ours, but an artistically swagged string of Christmas-tree lights nailed to the wall above the bed. On the wall opposite, her mother had painted a rainbow, with blue ocean waves underneath, and a ship filled with giraffes, zebras, and lions sticking out their perky heads.

We usually found Lucy sitting cross-legged on the floor when we came in, engrossed in some solitary activity that would immediately strike us as the only possible game anyone would want to play today; indeed, the game without which there wouldn’t even be a today. Eagerly we plopped down beside her and spat into our hands.

Under her Indian-cotton dresses Lucy’s knees were always a patchwork of scrapes and bruises; she had grubby toes sticking out of plastic sandals and the mud of half a riverbank under her fingernails. She was the exact same age as us, but she’d already experienced so much more. She had discovered a rusty treasure chest filled with gold ducats in the ruins of some old castle; she had battled sabre-toothed tigers; she had sailed a pirate ship, wearing a wooden leg and with a green parrot on her shoulder. She’d spilled hundreds of glasses of orange squash, too, without any dire fallout. Just watch us try that at home. At our house, spills always left tell-tale stains on the tablecloth.

We asked our fathers more than once for some clarification on those squash stains. Daddies always seemed to know everything. But even they had no good explanation. Besides, they would always get this funny look on their faces whenever we started on about the way things were done in the rectory, or explained that if something got spilled over there, Lucy’s mother just laughed it off. Then our dads would cough and leave the table to walk the dog—our dog King, Whisky, or Blondie.

Lucy told us our dads sometimes lingered on the green for hours, gazing up at the rectory’s lighted windows. They’d grab their groins and scratch down there for a while. And then they’d head home again. Back to their own wonderful, modern houses. Saved from the nuisances of living in a white elephant: crumbling concrete, dry rot, and sagging beams. You had to be completely nuts to want to live in a place like that in this day and age, our fathers thought—it’s cuckoo.

Lucy saw it all. Nothing escaped her, for she had not only a dormer window but also an eagle eye. She reported her findings to us in the rectory’s spacious, overgrown garden every afternoon. Seated on the rim of the sandbox the Luducos had built for her, we listened to her deductions. But when a grown-up came within earshot she’d go all dimple-cheeked, squinting up at them adorably.

‘Are you kids having fun?’

‘Yeah, we are,’ we’d babble, impatient.

‘What game are you playing?’

‘Eskimos,’ said Lucy.

Oh, those kids! The things they say—just this afternoon, for instance! So cute, the stuff they come out with!

And so we were able to exchange, unhindered, a wealth of information while losing our first baby teeth and learning to button our coats and telling our grannies what was going to happen when we turned four. ‘When I’m four I’m gonna go to school,’ we lisped earnestly. Thinking happily: And then I won’t fit in my old bed anymore. Oh boy, when you turned four! The morning of your birthday you’d wake up to find your legs sticking out a mile beyond the bars of your cot. Everyone knew that was what happened.

The nursery school was a few kilometres from where we lived. We walked the whole way there and back every day, stoic as seal hunters, and there we learned to snip, paste, and weave placemats. We also went on a school trip to Utrecht Cathedral. At the sight of the gigantic church organ, Lucy asked, thrilled, ‘Is that the Statue of Liberty?’

On the way back we belted out a Russian sea shanty.

We didn’t need any Tarot cards to see into the future, not even the Three of Cups. It was written in stone: our friendship would last forever.