by Helen Grant
If Claudine could have been induced to watch this particular film – which was impossible; the mere suggestion would have horrified her – Veerle thought that she would have recognized the world she knew, a world where circumstances combined in baroque ways to try to get you. Being cheerful and confident, or indeed happy, or hopeful, or young, just seemed to Claudine to be asking for trouble, daring the massed forces of darkness to finish you off in some unimaginably nasty way.
If it had been possible to talk to Claudine about it in a rational manner, if the discussion would not inevitably have led to a venomous row, Veerle would have told her, No, I can’t accept your view of the world, I can’t live in a place that feels like a vast grey labyrinth with traps waiting round every corner. I can’t spend my whole life worrying about stuff that might never happen. I want to do, and see, and be. I want to be free.
So she let the horrors on the screen wash over her, she turned her shoulder to them and put her arms round Kris’s neck and kissed him back, not just because she knew she loved him, but in defiance of Claudine and everything she stood for.
34
WHEN THE FILM was over they went upstairs and wandered through the expensively decorated rooms. There was little they could do for the house; everything appeared to be recently decorated and superbly maintained. Eventually Veerle opened the enormous American-style refrigerator and discovered that the owners had forgotten to clean it out before they went away on holiday; she removed the mouldering head of lettuce and the tomatoes, which were so soft and rotten that they were bursting open, and put them in the compost bin in the garden.
When she went back inside, Kris was leaning against the heavy marble worktop in the kitchen. He said, ‘Did you do anything about your mother?’
Veerle didn’t reply right away. She went to the sink and began to wash her hands under the gleaming chrome mixer tap.
‘I tried seeing the GP,’ she said. She looked at the water running over her hands, how clear and sparkling it was, like liquid diamonds, and wished she didn’t have to keep thinking about Claudine.
‘And?’
‘It didn’t really help.’ She turned off the tap and shook her hands over the sink. ‘She said she’d really need to see my mother. She said if Mum was depressed she could help her get treatment.’ Veerle sighed. ‘She suggested I try to persuade her to make an appointment.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘I’ve tried, but . . .’ Veerle shook her head. ‘She’ll go when she thinks she’s actually ill – you know, physically; in fact she’s never out of there, thinking she’s got this or that. But she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the way she’s behaving. She still thinks she was right to lock me in my room. She says it’s for my own good.’
‘Shit.’
‘I knew she’d be like that. I told the doctor it wouldn’t be any use. Then she started asking me all this other stuff, like did I think I was in any danger, or did I think Mum was a danger to herself.’
‘What did you say?’
‘No.’
‘Veerle, she locked you in your room.’
‘I know . . . but she didn’t hit me or anything.’
‘You said she tried to stop you leaving the house once before, and shoved you.’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t in any danger.’
‘Look . . .’ Kris thought for a moment. ‘What about your dad?’
‘I haven’t seen him for years, and anyway, she wouldn’t listen to him. He’s the last person.’
‘I mean, if she gets a lot worse. Could you move in with him?’
‘I don’t even know him any more,’ said Veerle. ‘And anyway, he lives in Ghent.’
Kris shrugged. ‘Ghent – it’s not the moon. And it would only need to be for another year or so, until you finish school.’
Veerle was silent.
‘You don’t want to leave her,’ said Kris, ‘do you?’ He came over, put his arms around her. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘she’s going to lose you in the end anyway. Unless you stay there for the rest of her life she’s going to have to cope without you in the end.’
Veerle leaned against him. ‘Sometimes . . .’ she said. Sometimes . . .
I hate her.
She didn’t like the feeling that was churning up inside her. She didn’t even want to be having this conversation.
If I spend my whole time with Kris going over what has happened in the past and what my mother might possibly do in the future, I’ll be as bad as the people who own this house, living in luxury but always wanting to be somewhere else. I want to be with him, really with him, enjoying what’s happening now.
‘Sometimes what?’ asked Kris.
‘I don’t know,’ she lied. ‘Look, I’ll think about calling my dad. I’d have to find his number somehow, and I don’t think she’ll listen to him even if he agrees to talk to her, but I’ll try to call him.’
She nuzzled in close to him, brushing her lips against his skin, hoping that he would kiss her again, that they could recapture the feeling she had had while they were watching the film – of a defiant joy so intense that it was almost savage.
When Kris didn’t immediately respond she was slightly piqued.
He put his head back, looking at her very gravely. She could tell that he was going to say something serious.
No, she thought. I don’t want to talk about her any more.
But he didn’t want to talk to her about Claudine.
‘Veerle . . .’ He paused. ‘We need to talk about Hommel.’
Oh God. He might just as well have thrown a bucket of icy water over her. Veerle took a step back, staring up at him, her face a blank mask, waiting to go one way or the other, follow the signposts to anger or upset or – please God – relief, because he wasn’t going to say he was back with her.
He must have seen the thoughts that were darting through her mind, as swift and spiked as venomous fish.
‘No . . .’ he said. ‘I mean, she’s still missing.’
Still missing. Veerle had no love for Hommel but Kris’s words sent a chill through her. Missing. Like Egbert was missing . . .
‘How do you know?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice neutral, not wanting to believe it.
‘I tried to contact her. Look, it’s not just me. Other people have been trying to get hold of her. Nobody seems to know where she is.’ Kris shook his head. ‘Something’s wrong. I thought at first it was me; that she was pissed off at me. But something is wrong. The other person who’s trying to get hold of her, Koen – he wants to get a key back from her. Some place over in Wezembeek.’
Veerle was conscious that Kris was no longer trying to hug her; he was holding her by the upper arm, holding her quite firmly as though he didn’t want her to get away – as though he really wanted to persuade her of something.
‘Veerle, she took the key to go over to this place and that was the last anyone heard of her. Koen wants the key and he’s been trying to contact her for ages. He’s tried the web forum and she’s not replying to anyone, so he got in touch with one of her other contacts who knows her personally – not me, someone else. He got her mobile number and he called that, and she never answers. It doesn’t even ring, it goes straight to the messaging service, and she never calls back.’
‘Email?’
‘She’s not replying to that either.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t want to be contacted,’ said Veerle doubtfully.
‘She’d still have returned the key,’ said Kris. ‘She knows Koen’s never going to stop pestering her for it if she doesn’t.’
Veerle looked at him very carefully. ‘You have her landline number, right? Why don’t you call her at home?’
‘I tried,’ Kris told her. ‘I even went round. Her klootzak of a stepfather wouldn’t tell me anything.’ His face clouded with anger. ‘He just told me to fuck off. He wouldn’t let me in, either, so there’s no way of knowing if she was there or not.’
‘Well, maybe she was,’ said
Veerle. ‘Maybe she didn’t want to see anyone.’
‘Or maybe she’s gone, and he’s just so glad to see the back of her that he doesn’t want to ask why and where,’ said Kris. ‘They don’t get on, mainly because he’s such an eikel.’
‘Surely he wouldn’t just ignore it though, not if she’d disappeared,’ said Veerle. She was a little shocked.
‘She’s over eighteen,’ said Kris. ‘It’s not like she’s still studying or anything. There’s nothing to stop her going, not if she wants to.’
‘Well, maybe she has just gone off,’ suggested Veerle.
‘She would have said something.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to tell him where she was going, if she hates him that much.’
‘Him, yes, she wouldn’t tell him, but she would have said something to the rest of us.’
To you, you mean.
Veerle looked away from him, as though she had taken a sudden interest in the pots of utensils on the work surface, or the expensive chrome coffee maker. It was tempting to feel angry about Kris’s concern for Hommel; she was aware of the subtle pull of indignation, plucking at her like the current that leads more and more urgently into the centre of the whirlpool.
But what if something really has happened to Hommel – something bad? That was the thing, wasn’t it? It was the terrible thing, the elephant in the room, the stinking corpse under the floorboards. She thought of Vlinder, suspended in the icy water. She thought of Clare, whose hand she might – or might not – have seen. An image flashed across her mind, of the rotten tomatoes breaking open as she dropped them into the compost bin, spilling their soft innards, and she felt a tinge of nausea. We can’t ignore this. She thrust the beginnings of anger aside as though she were kicking away a nipping dog.
She said, ‘Is there anyone else we can ask, who might know where she is?’
‘There’s her mother,’ said Kris. He sighed, leaning back against the marble work surface. ‘But I can’t call her at home in case the klootzak picks up the phone, and I can’t really catch her at work.’
‘Why? What does she do?’
‘She’s a hairdresser. Women only. But it’s not just that. She’s completely under his thumb. It’s one of the reasons Hommel hates him. He’s got her totally cowed, creeping around like a mouse. There’s no way she’s going to talk to me, especially if she knows he’s already told me to get lost.’
‘Hmmm.’ Veerle knew what she was going to say even as she was still appearing to think about it. This was going to mean crossing another barrier, this time actively interfering in the life of another Koekoeken member, but recently she had stepped over so many barriers that she was beginning to feel like a monster in a movie, brazenly rampaging its way through cities, knocking down everything in its path.
‘I suppose,’ she said to Kris, ‘that I could talk to her.’
35
BEFORE VEERLE WENT to see Hommel’s mother, there was another difficult conversation she had to have.
It had not taken her long to get hold of her father’s address and telephone number. She had planned to search for him online in the White Pages, or go through Claudine’s little bureau in the dining room, looking for divorce papers, or perhaps call older relatives or friends of her mother’s to see if anyone knew of Geert De Keyser’s whereabouts. She was not very optimistic about the last of those options since she’d had no contact with any of her father’s relatives and she suspected that Claudine’s family in Namur would feel much the same about Geert as her mother did.
All the same, she had picked up Claudine’s address book from the hall table, where it always lay next to the telephone, and flicked through it. Veerle rarely handled the address book; all her own friends’ details were stored on her mobile phone or her laptop. The book struck her as terribly old-fashioned and also highly reminiscent of its owner. It was bound in artificial brown leather and had a kind of dog-eared, run-down, apologizing-for-itself look about it. It even smelled a little musty and unloved.
She looked under D and K, and even finally G, but there was no entry for Geert De Keyser, and she was about to put the book down again when she noticed that there was a piece of paper in it, folded in two and inserted between the last page and the back cover. On impulse she pulled it out of the book and opened it, and discovered with a tiny thrill of surprise that it was a letter from her father – a short and businesslike one, something about sending documents – with an address and telephone number in Ghent at the top. Evidently Claudine had saved it for future reference, but had not wanted to commit herself so far as to give her former husband his own entry in the address book. It was a small gesture of repudiation, a way of relegating Geert to the outer darkness beyond the wall she had built, keep-like, around herself.
Veerle looked at the date at the top of the letter; it was eight years old.
He might have moved by now, you know.
There was no harm in trying, though. She copied the telephone number into the address book in her mobile phone; if she used the landline and the call came up on Claudine’s Belgacom bill, she could imagine the scene that would ensue. Then she waited for an opportunity to call. She could not imagine doing it in a snack bar or, worse, in the park, where she would have to shout against the sound of the wind and distant traffic and dogs barking. Instead, she waited for Claudine to go out.
Now, for once, her luck was in, and Claudine had gone out, departed for an appointment with her French-speaking dentist. It was late enough in the afternoon that Geert De Keyser might reasonably have arrived home from work. Veerle went upstairs to her room, and even though she knew that Claudine was out, wouldn’t be back for at least an hour, she closed the door. She was not sure what she felt about what she was about to do. She was purposely making herself not think about it too carefully, because if she did that she might talk herself out of calling at all, or she might dial the number, and then, when Geert answered, find herself entirely unable to say a word to him. She wasn’t even sure what she was going to say, but simply hoped that the right words would come at the time.
She sat on the bed and began to tab through the names in the mobile’s address book, but before she had even got as far as D she was on her feet, restless, pacing about in the limited space between the bed and the desk.
De Keyser Geert, she read. She hadn’t shortened it to Pa or Papa because she wasn’t sure yet whether that was what he really wanted to be. He might tell her that he wasn’t interested, that he couldn’t help. He might be resentful at the intrusion, or angry because she had never contacted him before; or if he was the bastard Claudine made him out to be, he might be shockingly rude and dismissive. She touched the green CALL icon and waited, trying to quell the unpleasant fluttering in her stomach.
The phone rang seven times before she heard the click of someone picking up at the other end.
A female voice said, ‘Met Janssen.’
‘Um . . .’ For a moment Veerle almost hung up. Then she said, ‘I’m trying to contact Geert De Keyser.’
She half expected the brusque-sounding female voice at the other end to berate her for being stupid; she’d said Janssen after all, and Veerle was asking for De Keyser.
Instead there was a pause and then the voice said, ‘Who is speaking, please?’
‘It’s Veerle.’
‘Veerle who?’
‘Veerle De Keyser.’
This time there was a longer pause. ‘Wait, please.’ There was a clunk as whoever it was on the other end of the line put down the receiver.
Veerle bit her lip. He’s there. The anticipation was almost more than she could bear. She felt uncontrollably jittery; she couldn’t stop herself roaming the room. She turned and saw that Claudine had replaced the stuffed rabbit on her bed. Veerle went over, swept it up with one hand and shoved it into her wardrobe, still keeping the mobile phone clamped to her ear.
‘Geert De Keyser,’ said the phone in her ear.
Veerle jumped so hard that she almost drop
ped it.
‘Hello?’ said her father. Veerle was surprised at how unfamiliar his voice sounded. She had no proper recollection of it, and yet . . .
I thought I’d recognize it.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s Veerle.’
‘Veerle? From Kerkstraat?’
‘Yes. Veerle, your . . . Claudine’s daughter.’
She heard him draw in a breath.
‘Has something happened?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Veerle. ‘Nothing’s happened.’
Again there was silence on the other end of the phone, a silence so complete that Veerle wondered momentarily whether her father had simply set down the phone and tiptoed away.
Finally he said, ‘I’m sorry. This is so unexpected. I don’t know what to say. How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Veerle.
‘And Claudine? I mean, your mother?’
‘She’s . . . I don’t know how she is,’ said Veerle. She put up her free hand and smoothed down her dark hair with it. She said, ‘I feel funny doing this. Calling you.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Who was it who answered the phone?’
‘That was Anneke, my girlfriend.’
‘Your girlfriend,’ repeated Veerle. Now I really feel weird. He has a girlfriend. She couldn’t imagine her mother ever having a boyfriend.
‘Yes.’ Her father paused. ‘Are you sure nothing’s happened? Is Claudine there?’
‘No, she’s out. I waited until she’d gone out before ringing.’ Veerle took a deep breath. ‘It’s about her. I didn’t know who else to ring.’
‘Is she sick?’
‘No . . . well, at least, she isn’t ill exactly, but it’s the way she behaves. She’s been kind of . . . weird, and I think it’s getting worse.’