Читать книгу The Darkness that Divides Us - Renate Dorrestein - Страница 12

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C is for Crisis

It was only a matter of days now before we’d finally, finally, be learning to read and write. This milestone involved stiff, brand-new clothes, and also pencil cases, gleaming rulers, and big boxes of markers, pens, and coloured pencils. We sharpened our pencils to razor-sharp points. Lucy was the only one who wasn’t getting a new set; there were always plenty of pencils lying around her house—enough, anyway, to highlight important words in red or blue till kingdom come. They were big, fat, round sticks, those—the real thing, they were; our own thin, hexagonal pencils looked kind of mingy in comparison, even if they were now honed like daggers. And that was what really counted, we assured one another, for you never knew when you might need a weapon to defend yourself. Take Lucy’s mum, for instance.

She hadn’t set foot outside the house since the engagement party. That was because, Lucy reported, the Ten of Swords had suddenly turned up on the Tarot table—the dude with all the swords stuck through his gut, the card of catastrophe and ruin. Which was why her mother had wisely decided to stay indoors. Better safe than sorry; no need to throw yourself deliberately in danger’s path! Danger could be lurking anywhere, really—behind Mr De Vries’s counter, on any of the four streets of the village, or even out here on the green, right at her own front door.

We spread the word, increasingly concerned. Thomas was especially worried. According to him, the circumstances called for drastic precautions. But there was no need for him to go around acting as if putting the rectory on heightened alert had been his idea; we had all arrived at the same conclusion. Not long now, and we’d be at school all day; we could hardly be expected to keep an eye on things from there. When and if the danger foretold in the cards finally did show up, Lucy’s mother would have to face it on her own. What we had to do now was help her arm herself to the teeth. She’d be so grateful that she’d gather us up in a great big bear hug. Her shirt partly unbuttoned, the red scarf wound around her head like a brilliant flame. We would clamp our legs around her hips and get all woozy from the patchouli smell.

The trees in the rectory’s front garden were already turning colour. We were pelted with shiny chestnuts as we darted up the gravel path. Scattering in alarm, we ducked, prowling like tigers, keeping in touch by walkie-talkie. We looked left, right, and left again, because that’s what our mums had drilled into our heads, and, doubled over, sprinted to the front door—those heavy, banged-up, scratched double doors.

It was Duco who opened the door.

He wasn’t shaved.

He looked surprised.

So did we. Our fathers had been at the office for hours; they were probably sitting in an important meeting, or dictating a memo to give someone a good dressing-down. It worried us that Duco wasn’t at work; fathers were supposed to be in the office, but on the other hand, the Luducos weren’t fathers, they didn’t do real work, just something to do with stocks and shares or something. Once we had that straight, we felt right as rain again.

‘Have you come to play with Lucy?’ Duco asked in an unusually dull voice, as if he couldn’t take it any more.

For appearance’s sake, we nodded.

It wasn’t until we were inside that we could tell how right the Tarot cards had been. There was an uneasy atmosphere in the house that smacked of whining and moping, quarrels, sulks, and negotiations. In the corridor the pictures hung all askew, as if when nobody was looking they’d been trying to shake their way out of their frames, in case they had to beat a hasty retreat. Instead of the usual enticing aroma of the Luducos’ breakfast, the only smell coming from the kitchen was the sorry stench of cold ashes. Alarmed, we thundered up the staircase with the creaky treads.

Lucy and her mother were sitting in the first-floor studio among a jumble of papers, paint jars, and Tarot cards. The curtains were drawn and there were barely any lights on, which made the room seem murkier than usual. Even the cool drawing of Clara 13 over the mantelpiece looked as if someone had smudged mud all over it.

Lucy, seated on a stool at the drawing table, was just cajoling, ‘But Mum, why don’t you just stop reading the cards?’

‘As if that makes any difference,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t be silly.’ With an irritated sigh she rolled her eyes up at the ceiling festooned with plaster grapes and curlicues.

Our ceiling at home had designer fixtures, lighting fixtures that cost—well, our fathers said, don’t even ask, you don’t want to know. In our homes everything was different. And suddenly, out of the blue, we felt as if we had landed in a strange country with all sorts of edicts we didn’t know, where ornate plaster and darkness were the rule, not polished steel or halogen. Panicked, we all started talking at once.

Lucy’s mother stared at us, baffled. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘What about them, my pencils? Why do I have to sharpen my pencils?’

We were so excited, we were ready to burst. There was danger lurking right outside those drawn draperies! Skulking always, maddeningly, just out sight, which only made it even more chilling! But wait a minute, wait, slow down: what good was a pencil, actually, in the face of real danger? What had we allowed ourselves to be talked into? Only your little sister would fall for something this lame. ‘It was Thomas’s idea!’ we yelled, stammering with shame.

Lucy’s mother whipped around to look at Thomas. ‘Okay. I don’t get it,’ she said crossly. ‘What is this famous idea of yours exactly, what is this racket about?’

Thomas clasped his arms behind his back and puffed out his chest. Eagerly, he began: ‘Well, say you run into the enemy.’

‘What enemy?’ She stared at him as if he were one of the arthropods in his father’s book, one of the creatures that came way before the mice. ‘I thought you were talking about my pencils.’

‘I was,’ said Thomas, his big head wobbling from side to side. ‘’Cause, let’s say you don’t want the enemy to see you. Well, then all you do is, you poke him in the eye with your pencil. Then he’s blind as a bat, see? And then you make a run for it.’

It was brilliantly put. We had to hand it to him. We all looked at Lucy’s mum expectantly.

She seemed to be thinking it over, doodling on a piece of paper with a piece of charcoal. The marks on the paper kept getting darker and uglier.

Lucy stood up. ‘Well, we’ll just go up to the attic, then,’ she said uncertainly.

The charcoal snapped in two. ‘No you won’t,’ said her mother. ‘I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt, Thomas, but now it seems that you’re not only a little sneak, you’ve got a screw loose as well. You do come up with some sick ideas, don’t you, Thomas. Don’t you understand how dangerous that is? Why, it was just recently all over the newspapers, somebody was murdered that way! With a ballpoint pen in the eye!’

She was steaming mad now; we could practically see puffs of black smoke coming out of her ears. ‘I said to Duco just the other day, how can that happen? How is it possible—that an ordinary, everyday object like a ballpoint pen could actually kill someone?’ She looked back at Lucy. ‘Okay, that’s enough. I won’t have you hanging around with that little creep anymore, Lucy. Do you hear me?’

‘But Mum!’ Lucy started protesting.

We tried to look deeply preoccupied with pious, virtuous thoughts. Just remember, they used to tell us at home, life doesn’t come with a user’s manual. You could never tell what tomorrow would bring, but if things were going your way, you might as well make the most of it.

But nothing stands in the way of true love. That very afternoon we saw the two of them going off together, hand in hand. With her long, skinny legs and her shoulders indignantly hunched, Lucy looked just like a strutting heron. To keep up with her, Thomas had to take two extra skips for every one of her strides.

They made straight for Shepherd’s Close. There they installed themselves in the garden shed out back, where Thomas’s father stored his dirty work clothes. A sneak peek through the little window showed that they were sitting comfortably on a couple of overturned buckets and, with great gusto, were engaged in dismantling a potato crate with a pair of hedge shears.

At last the day dawned when our mothers were to take us to the big school. Since it was our first day, our teacher, whose name was Miss Joyce, allowed our mums to accompany us into the classroom, a room with tall windows that let the autumn sunlight in. It felt very solemn in there, like in church. Maybe that was why our mothers’ faces were graver than usual. As we hunted for a place to sit, they kept hooking their hair back behind their ears and licking their lips. The desktops were scored with angry, indecipherable marks left by children long ago.

Thomas was the only one of us escorted to school by his father. He was so very clean that he gleamed from head to foot, as if his mother had scrubbed him with disinfectant so he wouldn’t bring home any germs. His father’s head was bare, he wasn’t wearing his sou’wester, which made him look a lot less intimidating; he looked like someone you’d known all your life, like the Luducos. He stood in front of the classroom with his hands in his pockets, chatting with Miss Joyce in a loud, self-confident voice. He didn’t seem to mind that everyone could hear what he was saying. ‘Sadly, mine’s like a leaky sieve, you know, though one does learn to live with it,’ he said. ‘But I’m chuffed Thomas doesn’t seem to take after me in that department.’

We craned our necks to see that leaky thing of his. The thought that he might be wearing a nappy under his overalls made us collapse all over each other in hysterics.

‘Behave yourselves!’ our mothers hissed. But we paid no attention, because in here Miss Joyce was the boss, and she was talking to Thomas’s father matter-of-factly, as if that leaky thing of his weren’t in the least bit funny. If she was that open-minded, she probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if you asked her where babies came from. We were suddenly seized with a great fever for learning.

‘Perhaps you could give us a tour of the parks and gardens someday,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘We’d all enjoy that, wouldn’t we, boys and girls?’

‘Yeah!’ we cried. ‘Great!’ We drummed on the desks with our fists.

‘Okay, and now it’s time to say goodbye,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘because I believe we’re all here.’

That was when Lucy barged into the classroom. Her hair wasn’t plaited. She wasn’t carrying a backpack, either, or a yoghurt snack. She slid into the desk next to Thomas.

Our mothers were perturbed. They murmured, ‘Lucy, did you come all by yourself? Is something wrong? Your mummy isn’t ill, is she? We haven’t seen her for ages! Is there anything we can do for her? Come on, tell us!’

They were so insistent that it made us proud. We generally thought of mothers merely as people who ignored you when you said something sensible, but it seemed there was more to them, then, after all. Only, what were they thinking they could do for someone who was going to have to take on the Ten of Swords?

‘Ladies! You too, sir,’ Miss Joyce admonished them. ‘Out, please.’ She consulted the list that lay on her desk. ‘Was I supposed to have a Lucy? Was I?’ she muttered to herself.

The leaky father was last in the line of parents filing out. He gave Thomas a quick thumbs up. Then he, too, left the room.

Miss Joyce picked up a piece of chalk and listed our names on the blackboard.

If you recognized your name, you were entitled to come to the blackboard and draw a little star next to it with a piece of coloured chalk.

‘Thomas!’ He was the first to call out his own name. He jumped up clumsily. The chalk on the blackboard made a screeching, bird-like sound, which made us think of the egrets and sandpipers in our meadow. Thinking about all the stuff we already knew or had figured out for ourselves made us feel a lot better. We were going to be detectives when we grew up, or beauticians, and you didn’t need to know how to read or write to be those. We crossed our arms and leaned back.

‘So your father was right about you,’ said Miss Joyce with a smile. ‘It’s a good thing too, Thomas.’ Then she looked around the classroom, as if to say, ‘Who’s next?’

Barbara and Tamara guessed wrong, and so did Floris and Joris. Safranja, however, scored, and Sam with the shaved-chicken neck nailed his, too. Vanessa, at the blackboard, glanced triumphantly over her shoulder to see which of us dummies hadn’t been up yet, and then drew a silly little heart next to her name. Some people really had everything going for them. Because Vanessa also had a cat that had cancer of the ear. The vet had lopped off its ears two weeks ago and cauterized the stumps. So now the cat had a new lease on life, and Vanessa was the only kid in the whole wide world to have a cat that looked like a hamster.

‘Come on, children,’ said Miss Joyce, ‘who’s next?’ She tapped the floor with the tip of her shoe to encourage us. Across these floorboards, she told us, hundreds of children before us had taken their first steps in becoming readers; this floor had been here long before the polders were pumped dry, back in the time when most everything out yonder still lay beneath the endless sea; that’s how old our school was, as old as the hills—you could tell from the way its name was spelled: School of Ye Bible.

The Bible, we knew it well. It was God’s word. God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and then all the stars in the sky had lit up, twinkling as bright as can be.

‘What about me?’ Lucy suddenly cried. ‘Where am I?’

Thomas started reading off the rest of the list.

‘No, don’t help her,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘It doesn’t really matter if you know how to read or write your own name yet. It’s just to give me some idea.’

‘Lucy isn’t even up there,’ said Thomas.

Lucy squealed, ‘You see!’

‘Oh, child,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Of course you are.’ And she pointed.

Thomas’s lips moved. ‘That says Lucky.’ After a moment he added thoughtfully, ‘There’s no one here called Lucky.’

‘Aha,’ said Miss Joyce. Her face lit up, just like one of God’s stars up in the sky. Beaming, she went on and on about why the ‘why’ sometimes sounds like ‘ee’ and about how the ‘see’ in the ceiling looks like half a circle, or you’d have ‘keel’ and her own name would be ‘Joyk.’ It really made no sense at all. Letters, she said, could be tricky; they had a will of their own—one time they might sound like this and next thing they’d sound like that. But we could count ourselves lucky we weren’t in China: we had only twenty-six of them—letters, that is—and you hardly ever needed the q or the x; you could live to a ripe old age and never need to use x or q. ‘There’s nothing to it, really there isn’t,’ she promised, smiling at us somewhat damply.

It was true. One moment we were still ignorant know-nothings fidgeting in our hard seats, longing for some distraction, and the next we were reading about See and Spot, Spot and Dot, Spot and Dick. How did we do it? Had Miss Joyce unlocked a little shutter in our minds to release some fairy dust that magically gave us the power to decipher the letters, letters that, when strung together, formed whole words, even? Has she used some secret formula that made us—we, who never missed a trick—forget everything else around us? We no longer saw the worn floorboards or the faded walls of our classroom; we no longer even noticed the dead-carrion smell in the corridor.

‘Mmmmmmoon,’ went Miss Joyce at the blackboard, on which she’d drawn a gaily smiling moon.

‘Mmmmmmoon,’ we all hummed after her, intrigued.

‘And what if I took away the mmmmmm and put in an essss instead?’ Her arm, in the sleeveless checked blouse, came up. She erased the M. But we’d never forget it, never, that M. Coming from the mouth of Miss Joyce, that M just made you want to do your very best.

‘Sssoon!’ she said. ‘See?’

‘Sssoon!’ we agreed, in chorus.

We were her very first class because she’d only just finished her studies. That was why we had to be her little helpers, she said. Because everything was new to her. The chalk, the notebooks, the bell. And when she said that, she laughed, exposing her teeth—she was a bit buck-toothed, though, to her credit, she didn’t seem to mind. She went and sat down at her desk at the front of the classroom and looked at us hopefully. ‘Open your books,’ she said.

The Safe Way to Read was the method we followed.

The Safe Way Reader started you off on the word I. What a concept, using I as the foundation for learning to read, said Miss Joyce, all excited—wasn’t it a neat idea? And that little word I would lead you to all the other words! As soon as you could read I you had practically all the words in the whole entire world at your fingertips!

The Safe Way sometimes liked to have a little fun, too. For example, you’d get a picture of children armed with fishing rods pulling white bits of paper out of a pond. The balloons filled with letters coming out of the kids’ mouths showed which words were supposed to go on which scrap of paper. I fish hat. I fish rat. I fish sock. I fish fish.

I fish fish—that was a good one! Even the little boy in the picture thought it was funny. He had a mop of thick blond hair, just like Thomas’s. The girl fishing next to him was the spitting image of Lucy, with plaits and freckles. She wore a bright yellow jacket trimmed in purple, just the sort of thing the real Lucy always wore. The other children didn’t look like anyone we knew.

Miss Joyce had noticed the resemblance too. ‘What did Thomas fish?’ she asked.

‘Fish!’ we yelled at the top of our lungs.

‘And what did Lucy fish?’

‘Sock!’ we howled in chorus.

Clearly, immediately upon hearing of Thomas’s and Lucy’s engagement, the Queen had ordered all the old primers shredded and new ones printed with the right illustrations.

Every afternoon the lights in the classroom came on a little earlier, and when we walked home from school the leaves crunched beneath our feet. Long-forgotten scarves, mittens, and hats were dug out of hall closets. The bakery smelled of cinnamon and allspice, and Mr De Vries sold pumpkins and gourds, which our mothers displayed in the window in nice antique baskets. At night the temperature sometimes dipped below zero, and then the next morning the roofs were sprinkled with sugary frost, like gingerbread houses. On other mornings the fog was so thick on the way to school that if we hadn’t been holding on to the tips of one another’s woolly mufflers we’d have got lost in the fog. You had every reason to hold on tight, because if you were unlucky enough to disappear into the fog, you’d melt and dissolve right down to your last toenail, until a puddle was all that was left of you; everyone knew that. Every remaining drop of you would quickly have to be collected in a brass bucket and saved until an old crone who knew what to do about it came along, or else you were a goner, forget about it.

Every day, as we walked past the rectory, we saw that Lucy’s mother’s bedroom curtains were still drawn. She was in bed, said Lucy, because she had the flu. On the one hand that was good news, because that meant she wasn’t in any imminent danger. But the flu was such a commonplace thing that we really couldn’t get too worked up about it.

What made this flu unusual, however, was that it just went on and on. Weeks went by—in our reader we were already at ‘Dan in his Hut’—and still her fever hadn’t gone down. Our mothers would have been happy to go see how the patient was doing, but as long as there was still the possibility of contagion, Lucy’s mother didn’t want any visitors. Happily, talking on the phone was permitted, so our mothers were still able to find out what the cards had in store for them. Whispering, the receiver pressed to their ears, they protested—what about the well-disposed Page of Wands, or the generous King of Pentacles? But once they’d hung up, they would sit back, disappointed, and sigh that still, it was different, wasn’t it, to see the cards with your own two eyes, and besides, in some respects it was easy for Lucy’s mother to say, being a single woman with no husband and all.

Then, crushed yet still hopeful, they’d look up their horoscope, and as they leafed through their magazines we saw no end of words flip by which we hadn’t yet learned in our Safe Way Reader. It was hard sometimes not to lose heart. But Miss Joyce assured us on a daily basis that we were making great strides. Such a great job we were doing on ‘Dan in his Hut’! She was awfully proud of us.

‘Dan is at the gate.’

‘Dan picks up sticks.’

‘Dan carries sticks to the hut.’

‘Excellent,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Okay, Lucy, your turn.’

Lucy followed the words with her finger. The tip of her tongue protruded from her mouth. ‘To. The. Nut,’ she grunted.

‘The Hu-Hut!’ we cried, irritated. We were dying to find out how the story ended, and if there were any Red Indians in it. That Dan was such a slowcoach anyway; with Lucy and her bungling we’d never get there.

‘Hut?’ she repeated, perplexed.

Whereas we could see the words jumping off the page like brightly coloured marbles, each with its own meaning, Lucy had made no progress at all since the very first day of school; she could only tell what a word meant if there was a picture to go with it. She simply didn’t get it. Even though Thomas spent every afternoon after school practising with her, she still couldn’t even tell the difference between moon and soon!

It made Miss Joyce sad sometimes. As she handed back our first report cards, she glumly remarked when she got to Lucy’s desk, ‘You really should try a little harder, honey. Or else your folks will think it’s my fault.’

‘Oh they won’t, miss, don’t worry,’ said Lucy. She opened her report card and peered intently at the writing, frowning.

The sight of it made us throw up our hands in despair. What good was Lucy to us if she couldn’t tell the difference between rock and dock? If she was the dumbest of us all, who in future would come up with our projects, who was there for us to look up to and obey? If this went on, we didn’t stand a chance of discovering a chest of gold ducats in the ruins of an old castle; we probably wouldn’t even get in a decent round of Donkey Derby, ever again! It was enough to make you want to vomit. Maybe we ought to give her a good shaking, to get her brain up to speed. Hey, Lucy! We gonna get you, if you don’t watch out! If only she weren’t as strong as six gorillas. If only that dork Thomas would try harder in the daily tutoring sessions. Which gave us an idea, suddenly. What if Lucy’s mother found out that the two of them spent every afternoon together? She’d have a fit, she would. ‘Oh, you want to go play outside, do you? I know what you’re really up to …!’

Oh, you do, do you? Our own mothers were nuts about that expression. Oh, you do, do you? was usually followed, at the very least, with a smack upside the head, and a hissed, ‘That’ll teach you!’

Teaching, the Safe Way: that was what it all boiled down to.

As soon as school was out we gathered in the bicycle shed, armed with pen and paper. We couldn’t agree on the exact spelling of ‘shed,’ but we decided it should be clear enough to anyone reading the letter. Whoever read it would recognize at once that it came from some anonymous good Samaritan who only had everyone’s best interests at heart, even if it led to the shit hitting the fan.

Entering the front yard of the rectory, we snuck up to the front door as quietly as we could. We pushed the letter through the letter box. Just to make sure, we took turns peeking through the flap to see if it had landed squarely on the mat, in full view.

We ran all the way home, elated. There would be bangers, mash and kale for dinner tonight—it was that kind of weather—and maybe our dads would give us a few euros as a reward for the excellent report card Miss Joyce had sent home with us today.

The next day was Saturday, so we had the day off. There was a stiff breeze; it was just the day for playing Titanic. We were standing around on the village green, in the process of casting the different roles, when Lucy came storming out of the rectory, her plaits blowing straight up in the wind. Cupping her hands to her mouth like a megaphone, she bellowed, ‘Crisis! Crisis!’

We immediately stopped what we were doing.

She flopped down on the bench over by the thorn bushes. ‘I’m cooked.’

‘You don’t say,’ we said evenly, poking each other meaningfully in the ribs.

She raised her hands. Her mum! Her mum was having such a hissy fit! Miss Joyce must have phoned her yesterday afternoon to prepare her for that shitty report card, because she’d been in a terrible state when Lucy got home. She’d been apoplectic, practically purple in the face. No one had felt like cooking; there’d been nothing for dinner.

It wasn’t until late at night that Lucy screwed up the courage to show her the report card. When she read it, her mother suddenly went icy calm. Or rather, it seemed to energize her. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Lucy,’ she said, in the tone of someone who has just had an idea that’s been a long time brewing, ‘I’m not going to sit back with my arms crossed and watch your future be jeopardized at that backward village school. You belong in a better school, in the city. Right away! We can’t afford to waste any more time, with you not learning a damn thing. I’m going to look into it at once.’

Lucy jumped down off the bench and started kicking the bushes right and left. ‘She says we’re going to move!’

We stared at her, nonplussed. ‘But she’s got the flu,’ we objected, ‘and there’s the Ten of Swords, too. Don’t tell us she …’

‘That only proves how serious she is,’ cried Lucy hoarsely. ‘But I’m not leaving, you hear? I’m going to stay here, watch me. I’ll just go into hiding. I’ll run away and go hide over at Thomas’s.’

We hastened to offer her our own basements, and then our attics, where it would be nice and snug for her because of the boiler being up there. We said we would sneak upstairs three times a day with a plate of sandwiches and a tangerine for her. We made it sound as comfy as we could, guiltily aware of the fact that Thomas’s house would be the first place they’d go look for her, thanks to our brilliant anonymous letter. Except that it was possible her mother might not have read it yet, with all this other stuff going on.

‘Lucy!’ Ludo called, standing on the rectory’s gravel path. ‘Come inside, I’ve made you a sandwich!’ With his hair blown back and his shirt collar flapping in the breeze, he cast a worried look up at the old chestnut trees in the front yard, which were creaking in the wind.

Lucy said in a low voice, ‘I’m running away tonight. When my mother thinks I’m asleep.’ Then she turned and ran inside.