Читать книгу The Darkness that Divides Us - Renate Dorrestein - Страница 11

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B is for Beetle

The summer we turned six—one after another, in dribs and drabs, but pretty close to one another all the same—it wouldn’t stop raining. It rained so hard that our toes went mouldy inside our wellies and our fingertips were permanently wrinkly. It rained morning, noon, and night; it rained for every birthday party, right to the bitter end when our parents came to pick us up. Umbrellas on your birthday were a bad omen; everyone knew that. It meant something was hanging over your head, something bad was just waiting to happen.

Only in the night-time did it ever stay dry for a few hours, as if the elements were taking stealthy advantage of the darkness to gather fresh energy. But even then we didn’t get a break, because our sleep was still disturbed by the noise of water gurgling down the drainpipes. We dreamed that out in the meadow, where we went to play, the ditch overflowed its banks and swelled into a seething river. The water cascaded over the speed bumps and gushed down our streets. It sloshed against the front doors, it rose and kept rising. When we peered out our bedroom window, we saw bulging fish eyes staring blankly back at us. Alarmed, we dragged a chair over to the window so we could look out. In the moonlit waves we saw ruined lampshades bobbing by; pots that had once held lush houseplants; tablecloths whose colours, cross-stitched by our grannies, had begun to run; welcome mats; old newspapers; and the cushions of the living-room suite our daddies had worked so hard to pay for. Way out in the distance we even caught a glimpse of a cooker adrift, its pots and pans still rattling on top, and, not far behind, an entire family packed like sardines inside a giant enamel colander, paddling away like crazy. Not long now and we’d all be goners.

Upon waking up in the morning it was reassuring, to put it mildly, not to see fish scales plastered to the walls. We were so relieved that at breakfast we went a little wild. One fine day our mothers just lost it. Stop it! I can’t take it anymore! For Christ’s sake, go play outside, let off some of that steam! Their voices were at such a high pitch that we knew it meant trouble. Nervously we grabbed our macs from the peg, pulled on our boots, and got the hell out of there.

Your mother had to have the house to herself for a few hours every so often or she would go completely round the bend. Her own mother had felt the same, as had her mother before her; it couldn’t be helped, mothers as far back as the Stone Age all suffered from the same syndrome.

Heads tucked inside our mac hoods, we ran to our meadow to inspect the water level in our ditch. We hadn’t been there in all the weeks it had rained, and were surprised to find a crane and several backhoes parked there. When the summer was over they were going to start building a viaduct there. It had been in the newspaper; our parents had read it aloud to us, including all the pros and cons. So they were still intending to build that bridge? So you mean people thought that by the end of the summer, the world would still exist?

We were just debating amongst ourselves what we should do when Lucy came splashing along. Lifting her knees up high, she stomped down hard in puddle after puddle; at every splash her plaits would whip round her face and she’d shriek with delight. ‘Don’t you think we should build an ark?’ she called to us from a distance.

All the ominous thoughts were at once forgotten. We ran to Mr De Vries’s store for some vegetable crates. Then we raided our fathers’ tool chests for nails, nuts, bolts, saws, hammers, and pliers.

We worked in shifts, from early morning to late at night. Some of us sawed and hammered. The others had already started digging earthworms out of the mud, catching beetles, pill- and ladybugs, and trapping slugs so big and fat that they almost didn’t fit in the jam jars our mothers were kind enough to provide. You had to punch a hole in the lid to give them air; if they couldn’t breathe, they’d die. The toads, the slippery yellow-bellied salamanders, the tadpoles, and the sticklebacks were kept in buckets, with some duckweed. After the deluge, every crawling or swimming creature was assured of a safe future, if we had anything to do with it.

And on an afternoon when the clouds hung so low you could practically reach up and touch them without even standing on tiptoe, we started with equal verve on every flying creature there was.

Some way off, next to one of the idle backhoes, we spied the new kid watching us again. We’d noticed him lurking about for the past several days. He was all skin and bones, and his heavy blond hair made his head look at least three times too big for the rest of him. ‘Here comes Water-on-the-brain!’ we hissed, as soon as we caught sight of him. When he was around we found ourselves talking in louder voices and laughing more than normal. Noisily we bragged about our ark and our animals. We gave each other encouraging slaps on the back while out of the corner of our eyes keeping careful tabs on the new boy hanging out by himself, aimlessly kicking at clumps of grass.

But catching a bird by the tail with some stranger watching your every move was harder than you’d think. We finally plunked ourselves down at the water’s edge, panting heavily, for a powwow. Somebody suggested scattering breadcrumbs on the ground and then pouncing with salt and a net. Lucy said we could probably rustle up a net big enough in the rectory’s basement. We immediately took her at her word. In that basement anything we ever needed always seemed to be there for the taking, usually in plain view, as if helpful hands had put it out for us.

Waiting for Lucy to return, we were just lighting a bulrush cigar when Water-on-the-brain approached us. He gazed at us with his hands in his pockets. ‘So, how’s it going?’ he asked politely.

We glanced at our jars and buckets. We already had quite a trove.

‘How’re you gonna catch the pelicans? Or the zebras?’

We were rather taken aback for a moment.

‘I can help, if you want.’

To save face, we howled with scornful laughter. Oh, sure! Really? Maybe he knew how to catch a duck-billed platypus! And we didn’t have any dinosaurs yet; we’d welcome any suggestions. Yeah, right! We started shouting out the names of animals. We yelled elephant, we yelled lion, we yelled crocodile, we yelled and yelled, all excited at first, but then less so, as it dawned on us that now our ark would have to be at least ten times bigger and, come to think of it, we’d probably need cages, too, if we didn’t want to end up being mauled or devoured.

We were still yelling when Lucy returned, dragging a huge fisherman’s net behind her. She began spreading it out in the mud without deigning to look at the new boy. It was only when she was done wiping her hands on her jeans that she turned to him and asked, ‘And who are you?’ She was a head taller than him.

‘Thomas Iedema,’ he answered promptly. ‘I moved in last Monday, on Shepherd’s Close.’ He gestured at the cluster of houses in the distance. The rain had plastered his hair to his oversized skull.

We didn’t know whether to feel envy or mistrust. We had spent our wholes lives in one place. Here was a boy who had actually lived somewhere else, which meant he must have seen quite a bit of the world. But hadn’t we been told that moving house was for Gypsies? It only led to trouble, and broken crockery.

‘My father’s got a job here, with the Parks Department,’ he went on. ‘We used to have a shop, but it closed. So …’

Impatiently, Lucy asked, ‘So what do you want from us, exactly?’

Thomas Iedema shrugged. ‘I know about all the animals. My father has this book, it’s so cool! It starts with the amoebas. First you have to work through all the invertebrates and arthropods; you’re halfway through the book before you get to the mice and such. So if you want, I could …’

‘We could use some of those ducks over there.’ She pointed at the ditch.

‘Those are moorhens, actually.’

‘So? We don’t have any of them yet, either.’

Strange, really, that after so many years, this single moment should remain etched so deeply in our minds. It’s been a long time since we were mud-spattered kids. The kind of thing we think about nowadays is whether or not to move in together, or whether or not to buy an affordable second-hand SmartCar. But if, on some rare occasion, late at night in bed, we allow ourselves to think about the events we set in motion, wincing with shame, we’ll have a glimpse of this one scene, when it all started: that innocent challenge down by the water.

‘Or don’t you dare?’ Lucy taunted. She was moving her hips as if about to start dancing. Her eyes shone.

‘He doesn’t dare!’ we all shouted in chorus.

‘Scaredy-cat,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s really shallow.’

Quick as flash Thomas unbuckled his belt, whipped off his trousers and, without a moment’s hesitation, slid down the bank into the ditch. Arms flailing, he waded through the murky water. The two moorhens immediately rose out of the water and whirred into the stand of rushes growing on the opposite bank.

We whooped and yelled.

Startled, Thomas lost his balance. He went under. He came up again, his hair matted with duckweed, water pouring out of his nose and ears. He was coughing and spluttering like crazy.

‘Hey, stupid!’ we jeered. ‘You should be on the other side. That’s where they’ve gone!’

Because he was so short, the water came up to his waist. The pelting rain was leaving bubbles as big as tennis balls on the surface. The moorhens quacked in the rushes. Then, suddenly, Thomas let out a yell and plunged head first in the water, throwing up fountains of spray. For a split second his striped shirt ballooned around his neck, then it, too, went under. We saw one foot kick in the air, then the other, and then they too were gone.

We waited.

After a little while we cupped our hands to our mouths. We shouted, ‘Hey!’

The water swirled and bubbled.

‘Hey, show-off!’

The moorhens re-emerged from the rushes. They paddled into view, their coal-black heads cocked as if to show they felt quite safe again, now that their hunter lay drowned at the bottom of the ditch. If his body was ever recovered, we’d be in big trouble! We just stood there, petrified.

‘Out of my way!’ screamed Lucy, running up with the bird-catching net in her arms.

Relieved, we stepped aside for her, then closed ranks again. We each picked up a corner of the net, regrouping this way and that since we couldn’t immediately agree on the best way to proceed—dredging, dragging, each had his or her own quite valid opinion about what to do, and clung to it stubbornly.

‘One two three … now!’ cried Lucy, jumping into the water with a huge splash. She landed safely, no more than knee-deep in the ditch, and without hesitating bent down and plunged her whole head underwater to reconnoitre, her little bum sticking up in the air.

At her Now! some of us had already started casting out the net, but others hesitated, so that the net wafted down in slow motion, entangling Lucy as she tried to stand up again. We were in such a tizzy that, without thinking, we began pulling it in. The net went taut, it cut into our hands, and Lucy went down. The water closed over her head.

We let go of the net. We were in a complete panic. We wanted to go home, we wanted to be in the kitchen watching Mummy shell peas with her steady hands. But we couldn’t move. We tried to think of water lilies and other nice things, and then about how great it was that we were going to learn to read, after the summer vacation! Once you knew how to read, our parents had told us, you could have all these vicarious experiences without having to live them yourself. Reading books let you have life doled out to you like homeopathic drops: diluted to the hundredth degree. Which was definitely a better option, sometimes.

Suddenly, with a great roar, Thomas shot up out of the water. Coughing his guts out, he flung something black up on the embankment. He panted, ‘A rat, quick, get a bucket on top of it!’

Just a few feet away from him, struggling furiously with the net, Lucy, too, was on her feet. Flailing wildly with her arms, her legs planted wide in the water, she finally managed to disentangle herself. Indignantly, she cried, ‘Wasn’t it a moorhen you were supposed to catch?’

The next day they each had a ring on their finger drawn in magic marker. If you dared so much as think ‘Thomas Water-on-the-brain,’ you’d get a vicious kick in the shins from Lucy. His name was now Thomas the Rat. He came up to her chin, and the work on the ark was abandoned.

Toward the end of that drenched summer, a few weeks later, we all received an invitation to the engagement party. At home there was some uncomfortable laughter when our folks tore open the envelope and read the card to us. You could tell Lucy had told her mum exactly what to write.

‘Should we give them a salt-and-pepper set?’ our own mums sniggered to our dads. ‘Or maybe a toaster?’ To us they said, waving their hands, ‘Oh, run off and play, for goodness’ sake,’ which made us prick up our ears, because we wanted to report back to Lucy later what they’d said. But Lucy was much too preoccupied with Thomas to listen to our stories.

Enviously, we wondered what those two could be up to. At Lucy’s house just about everything was permitted, as long as her mum wasn’t disturbed while at work in her studio. She didn’t pay any attention to the kids that came over. She didn’t expect you to sit and have something to drink with her in the kitchen first, either; you could just go ahead and do whatever, she didn’t care. Lucy’s announcement of their engagement was probably the first time her mum had even noticed Thomas.

Maybe the two of them were busy building a cabin in the rectory hallway; maybe they were even finding out where babies came from! The latter was a mystery that had become of increasing interest to us of late, especially since we never seemed able to get a satisfactory answer at home. You came out of your mother’s tummy, yeah, obviously, there were pictures to prove it, a whole album full. But the way you got into that tummy in the first place—that was such an unbelievably gross story that you knew right off they must be pulling your leg, no matter how serious their expression. We were sure it involved a completely different scenario, something to do with gravity, or something. Didn’t our fathers always tell us everything had a scientific explanation?

Without Lucy to play with, the days were long and tedious. Every time we started some game with high hopes, it always ended up getting horribly bogged down, now that Lucy wasn’t around to fine-tune the rules if necessary. Afternoons that should have been perfect for a game of Ali-Baba-and-the-Forty-Thieves ended in chaos and angry tears. All our treasure hunts, races, and dress-up sessions went sour. And every time we snuck over to Thomas’s house on Shepherd’s Close to try kidnapping him, we got there too late. He’d already gone off to play somewhere, said his mother.

She was a short, squat woman, with beady round eyes that looked as if she was about to apologize for something, and she always had a rag in her hand to polish our fingerprints off the door jamb. According to our mothers, who were past masters at sniffing out information on newcomers in record time, she was dirt-phobic. She never set foot outside, they said, except to shake out her dust mop.

Why on earth someone with that kind of problem would marry a groundsman, who tramped home every day with mud on his shoes, was the sort of thing they loved to speculate about. ‘Maybe he’s really good at it,’ they whispered, covering their mouths. At what, Mummy? What’s he so good at? Oh, child, that’s none of your business.

Sometimes we’d catch sight of the man who was really good at none of our business, maintaining the grounds of the housing estate, or on the village green. He wore a broad-brimmed yellow sou’wester on account of the rain, that hid his face completely. There was something about him that made you think of a buffalo, the way he charged at the wild roses and barberry bushes. The kids living on Pitchfork Hill had seen him with their own two eyes (cross their hearts and hope to die) pulling out great handfuls of stinging nettles without gloves on or anything! We were terribly impressed. We decided that if we upset Thomas even in the slightest, the nettle-man would break every bone in our body, and suck out the marrow, too.

The engagement party was set for Sunday afternoon. It was supposed to be an English tea party. We weren’t exactly looking forward to that part, because tea always gave us such a woolly tongue. But at four o’clock our mothers firmly parted our hair with a wet comb or else tamed it with a couple of festive barrettes, they gave us the thoughtfully selected presents to carry, and told us to have a good time ‘and mind your manners and don’t forget to say thank you at the end.’

At the rectory, the door was opened by the Luducos, dressed in black tails and bowties. Their sparse hair was slicked back with gel, which made their kindly faces look even more clueless than usual. ‘May we take your coats, sir, madam?’ they asked us.

We stared at them open-mouthed.

‘Today we are the butlers,’ Duco whispered. He was still wearing his stinky sneakers; that’s how we could tell it was him.

In the hall Lucy and Thomas were busy tickling each other to death, so we stepped into the living room. Our spirits immediately rose. Such a spread of pies, cakes of all kinds and all sizes, and white-bread finger sandwiches cut into triangles! We were allowed to help ourselves to as much as we liked, said Lucy’s mum, and if anyone didn’t like tea, there was orange squash, too. She was padding around on bare feet and had a bright-red scarf knotted around her head, which made her look even less like somebody’s mother than usual. You couldn’t imagine her ever sacrificing herself for Lucy, or becoming invisible or anything.

The news about the orange squash came as a huge relief. We completely forgot to shake hands. We fell upon the food, ravenous.

As we were stuffing our faces, Lucy and Thomas entered the room, their hair all messed up. ‘I had him begging for mercy,’ laughed Lucy. Lovingly, she started pummelling his big round head.

‘But you peed in your pants!’

‘Not true!’

‘Do try to leave your fiancé in one piece, darling!’ said her mother. ‘And now, let’s raise our glasses to you two, shall we? Does everyone have tea or squash? What about our butlers?’

‘We’re having iced tea,’ said Duco, with a grin. He raised his glass.

‘Cheers!’ Ludo, too, waved his glass. When he looked at Lucy, all these little laugh-lines appeared around his eyes. He nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say, ‘Ah, that Lucy!’ At home our daddies sometimes acted that way, too, if they were feeling particularly proud of you. It gave you the delicious feeling that you were capable of just about anything; fathers could do that just by gazing at you a certain way. That Ludo sure would make a great father one day. He sometimes gazed at Lucy’s mother with that same kind of look in his eyes—you know, the way mothers love to be looked at. Is that a new dress you’re wearing, darling? Have you done something with your hair? That colour looks great on you. No doubt about it: Ludo would definitely make the grade. Only he’d better get a move on with it. He was no spring chicken.

‘Right, my little turtledoves,’ said Lucy’s mother cheerfully. ‘Here’s to the two of you!’

We all cheered Hurray! at the top of our lungs.

Next came the opening of the presents. It was so embarrassing—our mothers had bought them things like a Barbie’s wedding gown, or toys for playing father-and-mother. There was also quite an assortment of Tupperware. Weird. We didn’t get it.

‘Oh you lucky things,’ said Lucy’s mother. ‘I’ll have to borrow those from you sometime. So tell us, Thomas, do you feel settled in yet? Do you like it out here?’

‘I didn’t, at first,’ said Thomas. ‘But now I do.’

‘You can tell your mum and dad that I’ll come over to meet them very soon. Oh blimey, I should have invited them, shouldn’t I!’

‘You can invite them to the wedding,’ said Duco.

Ludo asked, ‘And do your parents like living here too?’

‘Yeah, they do. Our house in Opzand wasn’t like here. Everything’s so new and clean here.’

‘Opzand?’ Lucy’s mother suddenly looked as if she’d sat down on a thumbtack.

‘Really? We used to live there too!’ said Ludo enthusiastically. ‘In one of those old cottages down by the dike. We used to say it was …’ He looked at Lucy’s mother for help, but she didn’t seem to notice. She downed her glass in two, three big gulps. She’d gone all white.

‘Idyllic,’ said Duco, ‘that was the word, Ludo. But I don’t remember any family by the name of The Rat.’

‘Silly,’ said Lucy fondly, ‘that’s not his real name.’

‘But isn’t that what it said on the invitation?’

‘My last name’s Iedema,’ said Thomas.

‘Iedema!’ cried Ludo. ‘You mean the florist?’

Duco snickered. ‘Well, well! What did your parents think of Lucy’s card?’

‘I didn’t let them see it,’ said Thomas. ‘No need for them to know I’m with her.’ He rolled his head in a gesture that took in the whole messy room, including the spider webs in the corners of the ceiling.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Ludo. ‘Lucy has snagged herself an Iedema!’

‘I still remember it like yesterday, the time your father …’ Duco started to laugh, his eyes crinkling with mirth.

Lucy’s mother stood up so abruptly that her chair nearly toppled backward. ‘I am really disappointed in you, Thomas.’ Her voice came out sounding throttled. ‘I don’t like sneaky children who do things behind their parents’ backs!’

There was a baffled silence.

‘But Mum,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s only because his mum gets so worried about him getting dirty. She was already in such a state the time he came home dripping wet …’

‘Dirty? Who’s dirty? Are you? Well, well, isn’t that a nice thing for a boyfriend to say!’

‘What’s got into you?’ asked Ludo, astonished.

‘I won’t have that little sneak in my house. I won’t have Lucy going around with the likes of him. If I’d known, I’d have …’

‘Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Duco. ‘We were having a party.’

‘Anyway, we’re already engaged, so there!’ cried Lucy. ‘Too late!’ She pulled a rude yah-boo face at her mum.

We were so agitated we couldn’t help going into hysterical laughter. The Luducos started laughing too; they didn’t have to set a good example, or raise anybody. The more everyone laughed, the more it felt as if Lucy’s mum must have been kidding.

We spent the rest of the afternoon playing up in the attic. We must have spent an hour playing the Monkey Game, and then The Duchess’s Visit. We played as if our lives depended on it. That was always the best solution, we’d found, if you didn’t understand what was bugging the grown-ups.