Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  A mother pushed a buggy straight out in front of Veerle, who almost fell over it. She stumbled, catching the woman’s eyes; she saw outrage there but she didn’t stop to apologize.

  Look where you’re going, she thought, but she didn’t stop to say that, either. Her gaze flickered back to the street ahead and for several seconds she couldn’t pick out Hommel at all, couldn’t see her anywhere. There were half a dozen other people in black or dark-coloured jackets. Veerle set off again, but she was slower than before, confused, her gaze scanning the street ahead.

  Then she saw her: at the intersection of Magelein and Bennesteeg. Hommel had made the mistake of pausing to look back, to check whether Veerle was still following her, and Veerle had a glimpse of the pale oval of her face before she ducked to the right, into the side street.

  When Veerle rounded the corner herself Hommel was still visible, perhaps thirty metres ahead. Bennesteeg was quieter than Magelein. It was narrow and shady, with one or two silvery puddles from the previous night’s rain; running along it was like sprinting down a damp and lonely canyon. With no one to dodge round, Hommel had increased the distance between them. Veerle raced after her, the slap of her shoes on the stones echoing off the walls.

  I can’t lose her, I can’t.

  Veerle tried to step up the pace but she was tiring, she could tell. Another intersection was coming up, and this time Hommel turned left without hesitation.

  Veerle followed, her breath rasping in her throat. As she came to the corner she glanced right, orienting herself, and saw the great bulk of the Sint-Niklaaskerk at the end of the street.

  She’s leading me around in circles.

  No time to think about that, though. She turned her back on Sint-Niklaas and pelted down the street after Hommel, who was already at the next junction. They were running along tramlines again, between glass-fronted shops.

  With a sinking feeling Veerle saw Hommel turn right. She couldn’t remember the name of the street Hommel had taken, but she knew it was lined with shops. If Hommel managed to get inside one of them before she, Veerle, had rounded the corner, that would be the end of the chase.

  Veerle felt sick with exertion and her school bag was a lead weight on her back. She stumbled round the corner after Hommel, and there she was: she hadn’t gone into one of the shops after all; she was still racing down the road as though the demons of hell were on her heels. The pavements were peopled with slow-moving strollers – tourists and window-shoppers – so Hommel simply ran down the side of the road.

  I know this street, thought Veerle. She’s heading for the bridge.

  She could see the bridge now in fact: the two central struts of grey-blue metal and the perforated crossbar were distinctive, forming a gigantic letter H. It spanned the smooth green waters of the canal that ran north–south through the old part of the city.

  Veerle ran on towards the bridge, her chest tight and her heart thumping. She looked at the fleeing figure and she was pretty sure that Hommel had widened the gap again.

  I’m not going to catch her, she thought.

  When Hommel ran onto the bridge, Veerle was perhaps forty metres behind her. She had her gaze fixed on the other girl, watching to see which way she would go when she reached the other side of the canal: left along the road that edged the canal or straight ahead down the shady Zwartezustersstraat with its decorative façades and elegant balconies. Veerle was so busy watching Hommel that she didn’t see the bicycle until it was too late. There was a rank of them parked on the pavement, and this one had fallen over. Half of the back wheel was lying in the road. Veerle ran straight into it.

  As the pavement came up to meet her she thought, My arm . . .

  Instinctively she held up the arm she had broken, but came down on her shoulder instead with a thump that forced the breath out of her.

  For a moment she lay in the road, aware of the bulk of her school bag digging painfully into her shoulders. Then she rolled onto her stomach, head up, eyes desperately scanning the bridge.

  If I can just see which way she goes—

  ‘Are you all right?’ said someone close by.

  It was no use. Hommel had vanished.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Veerle unconvincingly.

  She got to her feet a little gingerly, brushing herself down. She was aware of the concerned passer-by hovering at her elbow but she didn’t look round. She couldn’t help staring at the bridge, as though by some miracle Hommel might change her mind and come back into view; as though she might say, That wasn’t fair, you falling over, so I’ll wait for a minute and then we can start again.

  Veerle walked down to the bridge, walked right over it in fact, scanning the waterfront on the opposite side, but she couldn’t see anyone who looked like Hommel.

  I could walk back to Bijlokevest from here, she realized. She didn’t call it home. She gazed south down the canal, the smooth façades of the riverside buildings reflected upside down in its green water. Where has Hommel gone? she wondered. Maybe she was just running anywhere, just trying to throw me off the track. But then wouldn’t she have ducked into one of the shops back there? Why keep running on the open streets, unless she was aiming for something specific? But what, and where? She chewed her lip, considering. What if she’s staying somewhere on this side of the city? She might be in the next street to Bijlokevest and I didn’t even know it.

  There were bigger questions than those to consider, though. Veerle went over to the railings at the side of the canal, swinging her school bag off her shoulders. She dumped it on the ground and leaned on the metal railings, gazing into the glossy water as though it might provide some answers.

  When she’d started running after Hommel she’d had no thought in her head other than to catch the other girl before she vanished again. Then she’d been absorbed in the chase, in the aching of her limbs and the tightness in her chest and the urgent need to keep up with someone who had a head start and who really, really wanted to get away from her. Now other questions were crowding into her head.

  Hommel isn’t dead. That was the first thing, and that was the big one, that was the one that she was still struggling to get over. Well, thought Veerle, we never had any proof that she was dead. We just assumed that whatever happened to Vlinder and Egbert and the rest of them happened to her too. Maybe she did just run away, to get away from that klootzak of a stepfather of hers.

  Which brought her to the next thing.

  Why did she run away from me?

  Veerle thought about that for a while, turning the question over and over in her mind, but she couldn’t make any sense of it.

  It was her, she thought. There wasn’t any mistake about that. She recognized me too. So why did that put her in such a panic?

  There was no way of answering that question without speaking to Hommel herself, and Hommel had vanished into the streets beyond the waterfront.

  There was one other thing. I have to tell Kris. She drew out her phone, but she didn’t call immediately. She held the phone in her hands, looking down at the tiny screen.

  I haven’t spoken to him for a week. I can never get through, and he never calls me back.

  Whatever that meant, it wasn’t likely to be good.

  He’ll have to call me back if I tell him this, she thought. But was she ready to hear what he had to say?

  She was very much afraid she knew what that would be. They had spoken every day in the weeks and months since Veerle left hospital and moved in with Geert and Anneke, in spite of her father trying heavy-handedly to put a stop to it. Every day – until a week ago.

  The first few times she had tried and failed to reach him, Veerle had shrugged it off. Busy. Working. Hung over. Now she had an ominous feeling inside her, a hard, dry, brittle feeling, as though some soft essential part of her had been mummified. She thought of Kris hearing his mobile phone ringing and looking at the display, seeing her name come up and pressing the OFF button. She thought of how he might describe what he was doing: moving on,
the same way as people called dying passing away or falling asleep. She could feel the snapping of the last thread that bound her to her old life in the village south-east of Brussels, the life with her mother, Claudine, and her old school, and the places and people she had grown up with.

  I knew him when I was seven, she thought. If it all ended now it would be like scribbling The End across an unfinished story. It would be like taking that book she had loved so much when she was a kid, the one about explorers, and hurling it into the canal, watching it sink inexorably into the opaque green water, condemning it to pulp.

  In the end, though, she had to call. Someone was alive, after all, someone whom they had both thought dead. Someone Kris had been close to. He had a right to know.

  She was not sure whether it was a disappointment or a relief when Kris’s phone went straight to voicemail again.

  7

  Veerle walked back to Sint-Baafsplein. It wasn’t even lunch time; she couldn’t go back to the flat in Bijlokevest, and she had no intention of going back to school. What she thought of as the tourist part of town was as good a place as any to hang out; it was always packed with people, and most of them were foreign visitors who had no idea who she was and wouldn’t have cared anyway. All the same, she kept a wary eye out for Mevrouw Taelemans. When she found herself back at the corner of Sint-Baafsplein and Magelein she scanned the square before launching herself out into the open.

  The bench Veerle had occupied before was taken now, so she went and sat on the steps outside one of the pavement cafés on the north side of the square. She liked to watch the groups of tourists going in and out of the cathedral. The way they moved together in a group, separate but somehow synchronized, and sometimes even dressed the same, reminded her of shoals of fish. She could imagine attaching herself to one of those shoals and simply darting away when they did, moving on to wherever they were going. It’s not like I belong here, any more than they do, she thought. She shaded her eyes with her hands and watched a group of them milling around the cathedral door like coralfish clustering around a reef. Germans, she guessed. Every single one of them was dressed in a matching red shell suit.

  ‘So you can run as well as climb,’ said a voice very close to her.

  Veerle looked up and saw a green shirt, a shock of blond hair.

  Bram.

  She didn’t reply, didn’t give him any encouragement at all, but that didn’t stop him settling himself comfortably on the steps next to her, the skateboard still tucked under his arm, his suntanned knees protruding from his shorts.

  ‘So what was that, a race?’ he went on.

  Veerle opened her mouth to tell him to mind his own business, that she was really quite happy sitting here all on her own, thanks, when a thought occurred to her. She turned and looked at him, and was only mildly irritated to see a gratified smile spread across his face.

  ‘Did you see the other girl, the one I was following?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’ He shook strands of sun-bleached hair out of his eyes. ‘Couldn’t miss her. She nearly knocked me over.’

  ‘Did you get a good look at her?’

  ‘I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘What, did she steal your wallet or something?’

  ‘No . . .’ Veerle hesitated. ‘It’s kind of difficult to explain. I know her and I really need to talk to her, but . . .’

  Bram laughed, showing even white teeth. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you, right?’

  ‘I guess not,’ said Veerle. ‘Look, are you here a lot – the cathedral square, I mean?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’

  ‘Well, have you seen her before? That girl.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve seen her. She’s here pretty often, lunch times.’

  Veerle stared at him and she could feel excitement sparkling in the pit of her stomach. ‘You’re sure? That it’s her, I mean?’

  ‘Yeah. Hard to miss. Good-looking but snotty.’

  ‘Snotty?’ She hasn’t changed, then.

  ‘Doesn’t speak to anyone. Marnix tried to chat her up once and she cut him dead.’

  ‘Marnix?’

  ‘He’s someone I know.’

  ‘Is Marnix here today?’

  ‘Nope. He’s probably working.’

  Veerle rubbed her face with her hands, thinking. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I really do need to talk to her. This guy Marnix – he actually spoke to her, then?’

  ‘He tried. I think it was all one way.’

  ‘But she didn’t actually run away, like she did from me?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘So it was really me she was trying to get away from.’ Veerle let out a long sigh. ‘I suppose I could sit here every day and wait for her to come back, but if she wants to avoid me that much she probably won’t.’

  ‘Probably not,’ agreed Bram amiably.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Look,’ said Bram, ‘if it’s such a big deal, I could talk to Marnix when I see him. Ask him if she said anything that would help. It’s a long shot, but . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ finished Veerle. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and meant it. She felt her conscience pricking her; she’d been short with him earlier and now he was helping her. She gave Bram a tentative smile.

  ‘Her name is Els. Els Lievens. I guess it’s too much to hope that he got her number, but if he can tell me anything – anything at all . . . Like if he’s seen her anywhere else but here in the Sint-Baafsplein.’

  ‘What if he asks me why?’

  Veerle let out a long breath. ‘I was afraid you were going to ask me that.’

  Bram didn’t say anything and she realized he was waiting for her to go on.

  ‘Look, it’s difficult.’ She glanced away from him, towards the ornate façade of the Belfort tower.

  What can I tell him? We didn’t even tell the police the half of it.

  Eventually she said, ‘I used to live in a village in Vlaams-Brabant. I knew her when I lived there. She’s not really a friend, more of . . . a friend of a friend. All of a sudden she just disappeared, and nobody knew where she’d gone. We thought maybe something had happened to her. You know, something bad. There are people who’d still like to know where she is,’ added Veerle. She looked at Bram. ‘At least, to just know she’s OK.’

  Bram had his head on one side. ‘It sounds like she doesn’t want to be found,’ he commented.

  ‘She doesn’t get on with her family,’ said Veerle reluctantly. She felt uncomfortable talking about Hommel’s private life.

  ‘OK,’ said Bram. ‘And what if Marnix wants to know who’s asking?’

  ‘You can say Veerle.’

  ‘Veerle?’

  ‘Veerle De Keyser.’

  ‘And how do I get hold of Mevrouw Veerle De Keyser to tell her what I’ve found out?’ Bram was looking at her slyly.

  ‘I’ll come back here,’ said Veerle.

  ‘When? I’ll need a few days. I don’t see Marnix every day. He works, I study. Archaeology.’

  ‘Friday?’ said Veerle. Then she thought, Not Friday. If Geert finds out I’ve bunked off school again today he’ll probably step up the security – start sitting next to me in lessons or something. Then I won’t be able to get away to meet anyone on Friday. ‘No – Saturday,’ she said. ‘How about Saturday morning?’

  Bram grinned at her. ‘It’s a date,’ he said.

  8

  Veerle lay on her back on the bed in the small second bedroom of Geert and Anneke’s flat and listened to the raised voices coming through the wall from the room next door. It was only nine-thirty in the evening but Veerle was pretending to be asleep. Instead she lay looking at the stripe of yellow light from the streetlamp outside her window bisecting the narrow rectangle of ceiling. There were shutters but Veerle never put them down, though Anneke nagged her to. The room was very much smaller than her room in the house on Kerkstraat had been, and with the window blanked out it was almost claustrophobic. A car passed by in the street outside, and brighter light sw
ept across the ceiling.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Geert was shouting.

  Veerle could hear every word quite clearly through the wall.

  ‘Nobody wants to buy that old place. She hadn’t done a single piece of work on it for years. We can’t rent it out like that, either. Not without investing a packet in renovating, and we don’t have the money, you know that.’

  ‘Well, how are we supposed to manage when the baby comes?’ That was Anneke.

  ‘We’ve been over this. The baby will have to share with us for the time being.’

  ‘When he’s tiny. But what about later? He needs a room of his own.’

  ‘Anneke, what do you expect me to do?’

  ‘We had plans, Geert.’

  ‘Keep your voice down. I know we had plans, Anneke.’

  ‘I wanted to decorate that room for the baby – decorate it properly. Not just shove the cot in a corner of our room.’

  ‘Look, it’s not for ever. It won’t be long—’ Perhaps Geert De Keyser realized that he had been speaking at the top of his voice, because suddenly his voice dropped to a murmur and Veerle couldn’t make out the words any more. All the same, she could guess the gist of them. It won’t be long before Veerle leaves. We just have to wait until she’s eighteen, until she’s finished the last year of school. Just a little longer, and then she’ll be gone.

  It hurt, knowing that they were thinking like that, that they were just waiting until she was off their hands; it gave her a tight silvery feeling in the throat, as though tears were about to come, even though her eyes were dry. The trouble is, she thought, I can’t blame them. I don’t want to be here, either, and we all know it. Veerle could see no solution to the problem, though, any more than Geert and Anneke could. No solution other than to get through her final year at school, pass her qualifying exams and move out.

  Veerle’s gaze roamed restlessly around the darkened room with its bare walls and dull furnishings. There was still that third box in the corner, the one with the rabbit, waiting to be unpacked. Somewhere she had posters and a couple of framed pictures, and she hadn’t put those up, either. She couldn’t summon up the energy to personalize the room. It wasn’t home.