Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  Too late, she thought. There was no way ahead of her that led back to that. If she didn’t agree to move out at the end of the year, Anneke would certainly tell Geert that she had played truant again.

  She gazed at Anneke, deliberately keeping her own expression neutral. Probably Anneke would think she was indifferent, or defiant. Veerle told herself that she did not care what Anneke thought, but her inner voice lacked conviction. Anneke had moved between her and Geert with the finality of a chess piece sliding into the checkmate position. She had won.

  ‘OK,’ said Veerle evenly. ‘I agree.’

  47

  The weekend passed slowly. Veerle wondered what had happened to Hommel – whether Kris had managed to get her injured hand treated without too many of the inevitable questions. Had he persuaded her to speak to the police? She was not optimistic about that. Even if he had, it was hard to see what would come of it other than aggravation for Hommel.

  She also spent a lot of time thinking about what Hommel had said to her about Kris.

  Kris and I . . . we’re not together.

  It was finished a long time ago. Before you.

  Kris is a good person. He’s helping me as a friend.

  The thing was, she wanted to believe it. And that was the very thing that made her distrust Hommel’s words.

  Veerle wondered what she would say if one of her friends came to her with a similar story – I didn’t hear from my boyfriend for ages, then I went to his ex-girlfriend’s place and he was there; he’d spent the night. He says nothing went on. Should I believe him?

  If another girl had said that to her, Veerle’s immediate reaction would have been, It stinks to high heaven, don’t believe it.

  Veerle lay on the bed in her narrow little room, staring at the ceiling. She held her mobile phone in her hand, turning it over and over in her fingers. She might as well have been playing with a stone: the phone remained obstinately silent.

  You could have called me at any time over the last three months.

  It seemed that Kris had taken her words to mean that it was too late now. But was it? Veerle remembered the time before, the night Kris had turned up under her window in the small hours, his upturned face sallow in the lamplight. She had climbed down to him, full of bitter emotion, wanting to hear what he had to say. That time, it had ended with him turning and walking away.

  And if he came back now? She wondered whether there was anything either of them could say that would lead to a different outcome. She wished at least that they could try. But the phone remained silent all through Saturday, and when at last it burst into trilling life on Saturday evening, Veerle looked at the screen and saw that the caller was Bram.

  She hesitated for a moment, then pressed the green button to accept the call.

  ‘Hi, Bram.’

  ‘Hi. How’s it going? Any sign of your dad backing off yet?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘He’s kept this up for a long time,’ said Bram.

  ‘Well . . .’ Veerle sighed. ‘He’s pretty angry.’

  ‘This is crap. At this rate you won’t get out until you’re an OAP.’

  The exaggeration gave Veerle a sudden impulse to laugh in spite of her woe. ‘Will you wait for me?’ she asked mischievously.

  ‘Sure.’ She heard the grin in Bram’s voice.

  ‘Bram,’ said Veerle, her mood tilting back to sombre, ‘I did get out yesterday. Only – it wasn’t good. Something’s happened.’ She hesitated. She didn’t want to talk to Bram about seeing Kris, but she’d thought about this: Bram had to know what had happened to Hommel.

  There was no sense in what was happening in the city – no pattern that she could see. Someone falling from a rooftop. Someone else purposely cut down on another rooftop. A stalker who had tried murder in a crowded street. Did these things even mean anything in a city where someone had torched a priest’s house with the priest inside? Sometimes Veerle thought that she could feel Ghent shrinking around her, tightening into a maze of Gothic towers and narrow cobbled streets and heavy stone walls, a grim labyrinth inhabited by one or many minotaurs.

  But she had to warn Bram – although against what, she had no idea.

  ‘Look,’ she said carefully, ‘you remember Hommel, the girl who works in Muziek City?’ She waited for Bram’s assent. ‘I had a call yesterday when I was at school. Someone had tried to kill her. They tried to push her under a tram.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I’m not joking. You know someone was following her? Well, it seems like they caught up with her.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Bram, horrified.

  ‘Whoever it was stood behind her at the tram stop, and when the tram came – he just shoved her. She’d be dead if someone standing next to her hadn’t grabbed her just before she fell.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah. She hurt herself, though. She hit her hand on the side of the tram and it’s probably broken.’

  ‘Did she call the police?’

  ‘No.’ Veerle took a deep breath. ‘She called Kris. And Kris called me.’

  For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line.

  ‘OK,’ said Bram slowly.

  Veerle’s heart sank. She could almost hear him thinking, You can’t ever get out to meet up, but Kris calls and somehow you manage it.

  ‘He didn’t have anyone else to call,’ she told Bram hurriedly. ‘He doesn’t know anyone else in Ghent and he couldn’t get up here himself for hours. She’d just crawled off into the Sint-Niklaaskerk on her own. So I bunked off school again and went to find her. I took her over the road to that burger place, and waited for three hours while Kris came up from Overijse. As soon as he got there, I went. Dad doesn’t know I bunked off, not yet anyway. Anneke covered for me.’

  ‘That was nice of her.’

  ‘Not really.’ Veerle sighed. ‘The point is, the guy who’s been following Hommel, well, at first she seemed to think it was something to do with her stepfather, Jappe. But apparently it wasn’t him.’

  ‘Well, who else could it be?’

  ‘I suppose it could be anyone. A stalker, or some psycho who gets their kicks trying to push strangers into traffic. But here’s the thing. He’s always wearing some kind of dark coat with a hood, so you can’t really see his face properly.’

  ‘Well, I’d do that if I was going to go around pushing people under trams.’

  ‘Bram, doesn’t it remind you of anything?’ asked Veerle. ‘The guy who attacked Marnix, he was dressed like that. And the guy who was down in the yard that time you were climbing down the ladder. Maybe it’s the same guy.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Bram doubtfully. ‘But look, Veerle, half the criminals in Flanders probably have a hood or a scarf or – I don’t know – a balaclava on. And anyway, it’s January. Everyone has a hood or a woolly hat or something.’

  ‘I know,’ said Veerle resignedly.

  ‘If there was some other way to identify him . . .’

  The hoarse voice, thought Veerle, but she didn’t say it aloud. Being a heavy smoker didn’t narrow it down much.

  ‘Look,’ she said eventually, ‘I’m just saying – take care. Especially if you go – you know – up there.’

  ‘I’m not going up on the rooftops at the moment anyway,’ said Bram. ‘Look, are you sure you can’t get away, just once?’

  ‘Bram . . .’

  ‘Come on, there must be some way.’

  Climb out of the window again.

  ‘I probably can,’ said Veerle cautiously. ‘But it has to be the right time. I can’t risk Anneke catching me out again, Bram. She covered for me this time because she wanted something. She made me agree to leave when I’ve finished the school year – even if I fail it.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Bram. ‘She really is a piece of work.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to give her anything else she can hold over me. Look, just give me some time. I’ll work something out.’

  After she’d ended the call
Veerle stood for a long time by the window, staring down at the darkened street below, her mobile phone still clasped in her hand. She could hear Geert and Anneke moving about the flat, and once she heard a little shriek from Adam. She had a very strong sense of the three of them carrying on their lives without her, as they would be doing in some months’ time.

  I could tell Dad the truth.

  Veerle examined that idea for the hundredth time. The trouble was, she knew where that would lead. He’d dis-couraged her from seeing Kris after she moved to Ghent; now he’d probably ban her from seeing Bram. On the whole it was probably better to wait, keep her nose clean and hope Geert’s anger wore down with time. If she managed to persuade him that she was staying out of trouble and concentrating on her school work, he might decide to forgive and forget. Then Anneke’s scheming might go for nothing. She could hardly threaten to tell Geert next August that Veerle had bunked off school for a single afternoon in January.

  Perhaps she really is doing it for him, thought Veerle. You never know, she might soften up a bit and stop being such a cow if she thinks I’m not causing him aggravation any more. But somehow she didn’t believe that.

  She wished she could have gone out with Bram, right now, this instant, in spite of the chill winter dark. They could get away from everyone – maybe even go up to the rooftops again, to move about unseen by the pedestrians below, their faces gilded by the streetlights as they peeped over parapets at the streets laid out before them.

  But, thought Veerle, we may never do that again. Not after Marnix.

  She kept the phone with her all evening, and when she fell asleep that night it was sitting on her bedside table, but it didn’t ring again.

  48

  Afterwards, Veerle tried to trace the moment when it started, the event that was the seed of all the subsequent events, the spark that followed the long fuse to the powder keg. If she had confided in Geert – if she had given Bram a different answer – if she had suggested a different meeting place . . . the possibilities for averting the final outcome were endless, when you considered them. They ran back through past events and past decisions like a pathogenic disease moving from vector to vector, spreading its net ever wider, contaminating everything. All of them were interdependent; you could have plucked any one of them out of the air and said, That was it, that was the moment when it started.

  It need not have been the moment when she decided to go into the cathedral to shelter from the rain; it might have been the moment when Anneke’s oldest friend, now living two hundred and seventy kilometres away in the Dutch city of Zwolle, decided to stop procrastinating and send Anneke an email, inviting her and Geert and Adam to visit for the weekend, so she and Anneke could catch up and she could admire the baby. She didn’t think of inviting Veerle, of whom she was only dimly aware, and Anneke didn’t suggest it, thus making another decision whose outcome contributed to future events, as a tributary flows into a river. Anneke was taken with the idea of visiting Zwolle. It meant a weekend of showing off her partner and her new baby, and forgetting about the not-quite-stepdaughter whose presence was such an irritant, who had loomed like an albatross over her first Christmas with Adam. When Geert suggested mildly that they might ask if Veerle was invited, Anneke squashed the idea; the visit was over a weekend anyway, so the girl could hardly bunk off school.

  Geert told Veerle solemnly that he was expecting her to behave responsibly, and to continue to observe the curfew he had imposed on her.

  ‘Do I need to telephone you every hour?’ he asked her.

  ‘No,’ said Veerle, looking him in the eye. She meant it too, observing the curfew. She didn’t want to aggravate Geert any further.

  All the same, a whole weekend alone in the flat that didn’t feel like home was a grim prospect, one that didn’t get any more attractive the closer it loomed. And then there was Bram . . .

  I’ll work something out, she’d said when he pressed to see her. And here was an opportunity, the working out practically done for her. Geert and Anneke would both be away, and there’d be no school to bunk off, nothing anyone could really complain about.

  Dad can’t object if I go out for an hour. Supposing I went to the bakery or something?

  Still she hesitated, thinking that Geert might well object; a curfew was a curfew, and going out even for an hour to meet someone he didn’t know certainly counted as breaking it.

  Maybe Bram could come here for a couple of hours, Veerle thought. Geert hadn’t expressly forbidden her to invite anyone over.

  She slept on that idea, and on the Thursday she called Bram. She was expecting him to accept her suggestion; instead he took her aback.

  ‘Let’s spend the whole weekend together.’

  Veerle had been wandering around the bedroom with her mobile phone to her ear, glancing idly out of the window at the grey street outside, but when he said that, she stopped pacing.

  ‘The whole weekend?’

  ‘You could come here, to my place,’ said Bram’s voice in her ear.

  ‘You mean . . . stay over?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Bram sounded almost amused, as though he was surprised she had to ask the question.

  ‘Bram,’ began Veerle slowly, ‘Dad’s told me to stay here. If he catches me going off again—’

  ‘What’s he going to do? You’re not a little kid. If he says he rang and you didn’t pick up, tell him you had your headphones on and didn’t hear the phone. Or tell him you ran out of something and had to go out to the shops. Come on, when are you going to get another chance to get out again? Once your dad’s back home you’ll be back under his thumb.’

  Bram must have read the hesitation in Veerle’s silence because he started to try to persuade her.

  ‘We’ll have a great time. We can go to the wall again if you want – or, I don’t know, the cinema, the pizza place – anywhere. Whatever you like. And you can . . .’

  ‘Stay over,’ finished Veerle flatly.

  ‘Why not?’ A warmth came into Bram’s voice. ‘You know I love you, Veerle.’

  The way he said it, so easily, took the wind right out of her sails. She couldn’t say anything at all. Memory skipped back, lightly and treacherously, to the first time she had heard Kris say that, the day she had met him in the café and told him about her mother, about Claudine’s terrible anxiety and the problems it was causing. They had had a bare half-hour, and then they had parted on the pavement, and as they embraced he had murmured those words into her hair. I love you. She had carried them away with her, like something precious.

  Now Bram was silent; he was waiting for her to say the words back to him, and she wished she could do it as easily as he had, she really did.

  As the moments stretched out excruciatingly, Veerle said haltingly, ‘Bram, it’s— I’m not . . .’ She put up a hand and pushed back the strands of dark hair that fell over her brow. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready.’

  In the silence that followed she began to pace again, biting her lip. At last Bram said, ‘Just come. I’m not going to push you into anything.’

  ‘I know,’ said Veerle. She believed him too. The problem was not that she didn’t trust him; it was that she didn’t trust herself. Her life had become an empty room, populated by ghosts: her mother, Kris, the father Geert might have been if Claudine hadn’t pushed him away and Anneke claimed him. Bram cared about her, and she cared about him, only perhaps not in the right way, or not enough, or not enough yet. But once they were alone at his place, if he started kissing her again the way he had before, slowly and passionately, kind of softly but hard at the same time . . .

  ‘Please, Veerle.’

  ‘Bram – can I think about it?’ She didn’t give him time to interrupt; she went on, ‘Let’s arrange to meet anyway. Look, Dad was saying something about phoning me every hour to see whether I’m still here at the flat or not, and I’m not a hundred per cent sure he was joking. Let me see if I can really get away for longer than an hour or two, and just . . . let me think
about it, OK?’

  At the other end of the connection she heard Bram sigh. ‘OK. I guess.’

  ‘They’re not going until late on Friday,’ she told him. ‘After Dad gets back from work. So Friday night might be difficult. How about Saturday lunch time? If Dad does try ringing I can say I had to go out to buy bread or something.’

  ‘If he doesn’t ring—?’ began Bram.

  ‘Then I’ll think about staying.’

  ‘OK. Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘What about Sint-Baafsplein at twelve? And if it’s raining I’ll go into the cathedral and wait.’

  On the Saturday, it did rain; it began to rain about the time that dawn was seeping slowly up the sky, and then it settled down into a drizzle that lasted all morning. Veerle looked out of the window at pavements that shone like sealskin, and endless grey broken only by the taut span of a bright red umbrella passing along the street below. Geert hadn’t telephoned, except once to say that he and Anneke had arrived safely in Zwolle.

  There was nothing, Veerle realized as she looked at the raindrops that slid like tears down the window, to stop her from staying with Bram all weekend, if she wanted to. But did she want to?

  While she was getting ready to go out she was still thinking about it, as though thinking about it would make it any clearer. In fact it made things worse.

  If it’s right, shouldn’t I just know? she thought.

  All the same, she took a small backpack, and put a few more things in it than she would have needed if she were just popping out for an hour or two. Just before she let herself out of the flat she almost took the backpack off and left it, but in the end she took it with her.

  She was going to be early; the incessant inner debate had made her restless and impatient, and the rain was so unpleasant that she hurried along, keen to get to her destination. When she got to Sint-Baafsplein there was still half an hour to kill.

  The square was almost deserted; nobody wanted to be out-doors in the chill and wet, it seemed. As Veerle approached the cathedral a group of tourists came out, perhaps twelve of them, dressed in identical thin orange rain ponchos, and scuttled miserably across the cobblestones, heading for the shelter of a café. Veerle waited for the last of them to come out, and then she went in through the right-hand door.