by Helen Grant
‘How?’ asked her father, so Veerle told him.
She told him about the way her mother worried excessively about herself and Veerle. The probing, anxious questions she was always asking. The rows they had had. The way Claudine tried to stop Veerle going out, to the extent that she had finally locked her in her bedroom.
She did her best to describe it all as dispassionately as she could. She knew that Claudine would view Veerle’s phoning her father to tell him all this as some kind of terrible betrayal akin to wartime collaboration. She wanted to be sure that she was at least being fair to her mother, so she tried to keep her feelings out of it, to bite back the hot indignation that threatened to pour out of her in torrents of angry words whenever she thought about that evening spent under lock and key, unable even to phone Kris.
All in vain. Her father listened to it all carefully and patiently, she had to give him that. But at the end the first thing he said was, ‘Look, it’s bound to be difficult. She’s in her fifties now, and you must be . . . sixteen now, right?’
‘Seventeen,’ said Veerle heavily.
‘It’s normal not to get on with your parents when you’re seventeen,’ her father went on. ‘You want to go out, she wants to know where you’re going, you don’t want her poking her nose in . . . It’s normal, believe me.’
He’s not taking me seriously.
Veerle pressed a hand to her forehead. ‘She locked me in my room,’ she said, and then to her horror she heard her father actually chuckle.
‘My father once tried to do that when I was a youngster,’ he was saying. ‘I climbed out of the window and jumped onto the shed roof, and tore the backside out of my jeans doing it.’
Dad, Veerle wanted to say, but it felt too strange. The blood tie between them had long since shrivelled up and fallen away like an umbilical cord. She hesitated, and then she said, ‘Geert.’
In the startled pause that ensued she said, ‘It’s not like that. The way she goes on – it’s not normal. It’s—’
‘Veerle,’ said her father, and there was an edge to his voice that she had not noticed before, although whether it was annoyance or concern or bitterness she could not tell. ‘I know your mother can be difficult. It must have been annoying, not being able to go out when you wanted to. But that’s all, isn’t it? She’s not physically hurting you, is she?’
Veerle closed her eyes in frustration, drawing in a great breath. It was the same story as it had been with the doctor. Is she a danger to you or yourself?
‘No,’ she said tightly.
‘There’s really not much I can do,’ continued Geert, and already Veerle could hear from his tone that he was disengaging, dropping away from her like an escape capsule jettisoned from a spaceship. Leaving empty space where there had been contact. A trail of smoke.
She heard him telling her that it was not worth him trying to talk to Claudine, that she wouldn’t listen to him anyway, that Veerle must realize that.
He doesn’t understand, thought Veerle dismally. She wasn’t as bad when he left, nothing like as bad, and now he just doesn’t see it.
Eventually Geert must have realized that his words were dropping into silence, like pebbles tossed into a well.
‘Veerle?’
She roused herself. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m pleased that you called me . . .’ Geert hesitated and then he said, ‘I used to send cards and presents, you know. But your mother always sent them back.’
So you gave up.
‘I’d like it if you called me again – as long as it won’t make things difficult with your mother.’
She won’t know about it if I do, thought Veerle. ‘OK,’ she said non-committally.
‘Maybe you could come and see me and Anneke in Ghent one of these days.’
‘Maybe.’
Veerle didn’t listen to any more. She let the hand holding the mobile fall to her side. After half a minute or so she touched the red END CALL icon without bothering to check whether Geert was still on the line or not.
She slid the phone into her jeans pocket and went over to the window. The street below was deserted; there was no sign of Claudine returning yet. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass and let out a long sigh.
36
BY RIGHTS, EGBERT should have lain undisturbed in the wood until he seeped and finally crumbled away into the dense soil. The stretch of woodland where he lay was so rarely disturbed by the sound of human voices. It was not unknown for a year to pass without a single person walking through here; the last time anyone had done so was the day of Egbert’s burial.
Even when foxes attempted to dig out the body, scraping the earth away from the dome of the forehead so that it appeared from the dark soil in a repulsive parody of birth, the head crowning out of the mud, still it might have remained undiscovered by human beings. A young dog fox trotted away from the mauled remains with part of Egbert’s left hand in his mouth; he actually crossed the track while still carrying it, secure in the knowledge that there were no people about – his ears and nose told him he was alone. When he had gnawed all that was edible from the hand he left the bones lying in the undergrowth, where they remained, as though grasping ineffectually at the earth, long after Egbert’s disintegrating remains had been laid on the autopsy table.
The unfortunate person who discovered the rest of Egbert was eleven-year-old Alexandre Lambert. Alexandre was a skinny, thin-faced, rebellious boy who bore something of a resemblance to Kris Verstraeten at the same age, although where Kris’s hair was dark, Alexandre’s was the colour of dirty straw. Alexandre was a member of a local French-speaking Scout troop, which he hated – at least, he hated it today. The troop had met in the forest to play a wide game, but in the first five minutes Alexandre had managed to get into a fight with two of the other boys. The Scout master had broken it up, but Alexandre could see in the other boys’ eyes that the affair was not yet at an end; once the troop had dispersed in the woods, he was dead meat. The other boys were bigger than he was; it was probably madness to have started something with them but he just couldn’t seem to keep his mouth shut.
There were, he decided, two options available to him once the broad blue shoulders and large denim-clad rear of the Scout master had vanished into the forest. He could stay and fight, which probably meant lying in the muddy undergrowth with his arms wrapped around his head and his knees up protecting his balls, or he could make himself scarce for the entire ninety minutes of the wide game. He opted for the latter just too late. They had seen him, and were making their way towards him with grim determination.
Alexandre thought about it for a split second, and then the desire to survive the next hour and a half with his most sensitive parts unbruised won out over the desire not to appear yellow. He turned and ran.
He was not entirely surprised when he heard them crashing after him through the undergrowth. They were making so much noise that an image floated unbidden into his head, of a pair of rhinos crashing through the forest after him. He felt a wild desire to laugh. He was pretty confident he could outrun them; they were taller than him, but also a lot fatter. He hurdled a log and sprinted onwards, threading his way between the trees.
Merde, but they were persistent. Alexandre kept running, and they weren’t catching him up, but they weren’t giving up, either. From the whoop he heard behind him, he guessed that they were enjoying this a whole lot more than he was.
He ran out of the undergrowth and onto a path, and now he could see a notice board ahead, one of those ones with a map on. He knew that he had reached the outer rim of the area allowed for the game. The Scout master had been pretty firm about that; the forest went on for kilometres and he didn’t want anyone getting lost. He had described the territory they had to keep to, and the path with the notice board marked the border on this side. They all knew it; every one of them was a local boy. Any further than the notice board and you were off limits, and in deep trouble.
Alexandre passed the notice board
at a sprint. It occurred to him that he was going to have difficulties making it back to the meeting point at the agreed time. He was getting further and further away from the start. He could have doubled back, but he wasn’t entirely sure where his pursuers were. Sound was deceptive in the forest; you could hear a crack or a rustle and you couldn’t pinpoint the source of it at all. He put his head down and kept running. As he ran, he touched his pocket, checking for his mobile phone. If he ended up too far away at the end of the ninety minutes, he’d have to call someone and face the music for overstepping the boundary. If, that was, the two boys didn’t catch him and smash the phone along with most of the rest of him. He was committed now.
Eventually he had to slow from a sprint to a trot, and from a trot to a walk. He had a stitch in his side and he was breathing heavily, and his straw-coloured hair was stuck to his face in sweaty strips. He kept to the path for a bit, where the earth was soft and there were fewer leaves to rustle or sticks to crack and give away his position. He was exhausted and he wished he had brought something to drink with him. Mostly he was desperate to stop moving for a few minutes, to flop down somewhere and catch his breath. He didn’t dare stop in the middle of the path, so he listened for a moment to be sure that no one was close enough to hear him, and then he left the path and pushed his way through the undergrowth, looking for a place to lie low.
If he had been a little less weary, or a little more interested in the time-honoured Scouting activity of tracking, he might have noticed the footprints of the fox here and there in patches of mud. He might even have noticed a lone human boot print. But Alexandre didn’t notice it at all; as he picked his way through the undergrowth, the mix of burgeoning spring green and the rot of the past winter, he managed to tread right in the boot print, turning his foot a little in the mud as he did so, obliterating it completely.
He paused, listening, but all he could hear was the wind in the trees and the cry of a bird. Gratefully he sank to his knees, head down, the damp ends of his hair hanging over his eyes. Slowly his breathing and heart rate slowed. The unpleasant feeling of tightness in his chest subsided. His fists, clenched on his thighs, relaxed. He closed his eyes for a long moment, then he shook back his fringe and raised his head.
At first he thought that what he was seeing was some sort of smooth rock breaking the surface of the earth. That was what it looked like, in a superficial sort of way, if you didn’t study it too closely. A rock, or the dome of a great fungus pressing up through the earth, except that he had never seen a puffball that big. It didn’t exactly invite the eye; there was something ominously suggestive about it, something strangely tainted, as though whatever it was belonged on a rubbish dump. Now that he came to think about it, there was a subtle odour on the air too, a whiff of something less than pleasant.
His gaze traced the shape of it, the two circular depressions below the hemisphere, the outline of the other shapes breaking the surface of the earth like the spars of a wrecked ship protruding from a black sea. He stared and stared, and then suddenly it was as though he were viewing one of those weird pictures, a stereogram, where you looked at a pattern and suddenly you saw something in it, in three dimensions, something you couldn’t see at first glance.
A body.
The thought passed through Alexandre’s mind like a blip on a cardiogram, and all of a sudden he was scrambling to his feet, his heart thumping and his eyes wide with shock, and he was brushing at the thighs of his jeans with frantic hands as though he might have got some of that disgusting taint on himself, because it smelled, it really smelled, and that meant there were tiny particles of the thing in the air he was breathing.
He backed away, and then he turned, and then he ran, no longer caring whether he met the boys who had been pursuing him. He fled back to the path, inadvertently leaving another print from the sole of his trainer on the smear of mud where the single boot mark had been, and then he ran on, wide-eyed and revolted, until the yellow of his hair and the patch of blue that was his Scout shirt and the dark shapes of his jean-clad legs, opening and closing like scissors, were swallowed up by the forest.
37
AFTER SCHOOL, INSTEAD of taking the bus back to her village, Veerle walked into Tervuren. She had a scrap of paper in her pocket with the address of the hairdresser scrawled on it. She knew the town well but she wasn’t familiar with the name of the salon, and when she found the street where it was located she knew why; it was the sort of place you could easily miss – so nondescript that your eyes slid past it, looking for something more interesting. There was a shiny awning, faded to beige, and a large window full of sun-bleached studio shots of models with big hair. KAPSALON read the letters on the awning, which was just as well, because otherwise you might have taken the place for a funeral parlour.
Veerle stopped on the other side of the street and looked at it. The moment she had laid eyes on the place, she had decided one thing: she wasn’t making an appointment there just to speak to Hommel’s mother. She didn’t want to risk coming out looking like one of Claudine’s friends.
I have to have a reason for going in, though, she reminded herself. Kris said Hommel’s mother just works in the salon, she doesn’t own it. If the owner’s in there, she probably won’t take kindly to stray girls coming in to question the staff.
I’ll buy a bottle of shampoo. She glanced doubtfully over at the salon again. Or maybe a packet of hair grips.
She crossed the street and approached the salon door. Even before she opened it, she could see that the place wasn’t exactly heaving with customers. There was a single old lady seated at the back of the shop; a stout middle-aged woman with a great confection of back-combed hair dyed an improbable shade of dark brown was putting dozens of little curlers onto the old lady’s head, rolling the grey strands tightly, as if aiming for a face-lift, reeling in the flaccid skin along with the hair. The dark-haired woman was clearly not Hommel’s mother; Kris had described her as blonde.
As Veerle entered the shop she saw that there was another woman inside, but just as the salon itself tended to blend into the buildings around it, so she seemed to be doing her best to melt into her surroundings. She was sitting behind the little reception counter, and when Veerle came in she did not look pleased to see a new customer; rather, she appeared full of trepidation, as though Veerle were likely to make some unreasonable demand. She got to her feet, and Veerle realized that she was half a head shorter than herself; evidently Hommel got her height from her father. There was some family resemblance there in the faded face that might once have been pretty; Hommel’s mother was fair too, but the blonde had turned to salt-and-pepper.
‘What can I do for you?’ she asked Veerle, and out of the corner of her eye Veerle saw the dark-haired woman turn slightly. Listening, probably.
On impulse she decided to forget about buying anything and get straight to the point. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before the other woman came over to interfere, and it was Hommel’s mother she wanted to talk to, not her. Veerle recognized a cast-iron harridan when she saw one. Time was short.
‘Are you Mevrouw Coppens? Homm— I mean, Els’s mother?’
The woman started, and that told Veerle that she was Hommel’s mother, but she didn’t admit to it, not immediately, and the look she gave Veerle was odd, nervous, almost afraid.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m Veerle.’ She didn’t give her surname; if there were any trouble it was as well to provide as little information about herself as possible. ‘I’m a friend of Els’s,’ she said.
Mevrouw Coppens leaned forward over the counter. Her shoulders were hunched in a permanent cringe; Veerle suspected that she was also anticipating interference from the other woman.
‘Is she all right?’ she asked Veerle in a low voice. ‘Did she ask you to come here?’
‘No.’ Veerle saw the woman’s face fall and found herself wishing she could have said yes. She lowered her own voice. ‘Look, I haven’t seen her
for a while and—’
‘Can I help?’ said an acid voice behind her.
Heart sinking, Veerle turned round and was unsurprised to see the dark-haired woman standing there. She actually had her hands on her hips; the effect was so pugilistic that Veerle half expected to see a curler in one of those fists, with grey hair still attached to it.
‘Do you want to make an appointment?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to buy something?’
Veerle looked her directly in the eyes. ‘I don’t think so.’ It was tempting to add something tart simply to annoy the woman, but she had a feeling there would be fallout for Mevrouw Coppens if she did that, and Hommel’s mother looked so timid that Veerle hadn’t the heart to drop her in it. Instead she simply glanced at Mevrouw Coppens and said, ‘Thanks anyway,’ and then she left the salon.
As she closed the door behind her she checked the opening times. It closed at five p.m. today. She put her chin up and walked away up the street.
I’ll be back at five.
She went to the local library in the intervening time, and attacked her school work, but it was hard to keep her mind on it. There were so many questions she could have asked about Hommel, but the main one had been answered.
Is she all right? Mevrouw Coppens had asked.
So she doesn’t know where her daughter is, doesn’t know whether she’s OK or not.
Veerle thought about Hommel’s mother, about the way she looked so cowed and downtrodden. She’s completely under his thumb, Kris had said, meaning Hommel’s stepfather. It looked as though she was pretty much under the thumb at work too. She didn’t look like the sort of person who would wade in to defend her daughter if it came to a confrontation. You could imagine her standing on the sidelines wringing her hands and looking agonized, but not actually doing anything.
Hommel could have run away, you know. Especially if it’s that bad at home.