‘Where?’ I asked.
‘You look in the street,’ said Muulke. ‘And I’ll go and look inside.’
I was horrified. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘What else can we do?’
‘You know perfectly well the only place where we’re allowed is the schoolyard. Not outside it, and certainly not inside the building.
Muulke glared.
‘Maybe she’s just still inside,’ I tried. ‘Maybe there’s nothing at all wrong. Maybe it’s a joke.’
‘And maybe if you wash coal for seven months it’ll turn white,’ Muulke snarled. Then she turned and, without looking back, walked to the school entrance, peered left and right, and then slipped back inside the building.
I heard Jess’s voice before I was even outside the schoolyard.
‘It’s none of your business.’
I walked past the outer brick wall. I already knew what I would see on the other side. I had been secretly worried about just this.
Jess was surrounded by Fat Tonnie’s group. Although she was at least a head shorter than the rest, she looked annoyed rather than scared.
Somehow, that gave me courage. ‘Leave my sister alone,’ I said calmly.
They turned to me.
‘Aha, another one from outside the walls,’ said Fat Tonnie in her slow, drawling voice. She smiled. She had yellowish, pointy teeth. ‘Keep your shirt on, Boon. We just wanted some information.’
‘Leave my sister alone,’ I said again.
‘So you said,’ said Fat Tonnie.
‘She must have swallowed a parrot,’ one of the other girls jeered.
The others in the group doubled over with laughter, but Fat Tonnie shut them up with a look.
‘So she’s the new Virgin Mary,’ said Fat Tonnie. She put her hands on Jess’s shoulders. Big hands she had. And her arms were muscular. I now saw that Tonnie’s nickname wasn’t quite right – she wasn’t so much fat as solid. They should have called her Tonnie the Bear.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘What is it to you?’ asked Jess.
In one smooth movement, Fat Tonnie wrapped her arms around Jess. She did it with a smile. It could have been a game, if the faces of the other girls hadn’t suddenly become so greedy and excited.
I felt all my calm ebb away.
‘We’re just curious,’ said one of them.
‘Very curious,’ said Fat Tonnie. All this time she was holding Jess, who was trying to wriggle out of her grip, but was no match for Tonnie.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
Fat Tonnie nodded at a girl standing at the back. ‘Do you think she’s pretty?’
I stared at her, quite confused.
‘Do you think she’s pretty?’ she repeated.
I nodded.
‘Prettier than your sister?’
‘Let her be,’ the pretty girl said suddenly. She spoke softly.
Fat Tonnie ignored her. ‘Prettier than your sister?’
I could feel myself growing hot and cold at the same time. Jess was looking at me imploringly, but what could I do? The important thing was to gain time, and I wasn’t going to achieve that by giving the wrong answer.
When I answered, I didn’t dare look at Jess. ‘Yes.’
‘So she is prettier?’ said Fat Tonnie.
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘Yes!’
I had expected Tonnie’s group would all burst out laughing, but instead they became really quiet, and in a way that was a hundred times worse.
‘And your sister is uglier.’
‘What do you want now?’
‘Answer.’
I saw her arms tighten around Jess.
‘Yes,’ I burst out. ‘She is uglier.’
‘She was going to be the Virgin Mary,’ said Fat Tonnie, indicating the pretty girl.
‘I don’t mind,’ the girl said. ‘Really.’
Fat Tonnie was looking at Jess, her face becoming thoughtful.
‘Newcomers never play the Virgin Mary. So why her? You said yourself she’s ugly. And she’s too small for a Virgin Mary. Anyway, Mary’s always a sixth-grader.’
She laughed, baring her big yellow teeth. ‘Perhaps her beauty is all on the inside.’
I realised instantly what she was planning to do.
‘Don’t do that!’ I yelled.
The group surrounded me, separating me from Jess. I wanted to resist, but my arms were as limp as a piece of string. Unlike Muulke, I wasn’t a fighter – I was no threat, no savage soldier, no all-devouring monster. I wasn’t even much good at playing the part of a house in Threatened Treasure.
Where was Muulke, for God’s sake?
Then Jess started screaming.
squeak-creak
There was no one in the kitchen. Or in the living room, or the bedrooms, or the attic. Muulke and I walked around to the workshop. The door that used to be a window was standing wide open. The workshop was hazy with smoke.
Our brothers greeted us as if we had been away for a year. They sat behind tankards of beer. We were rather surprised to see that Oma Mei was there, too. Behind a large tankard, her face somewhere between surprise and bewilderment. If I hadn’t been feeling so terrible, I would have laughed.
‘How about a beer?’ called Piet.
‘Get something for those girls,’ called Eet.
‘If a button-chewer nicks your brandy,’ called Sjeer with a thick tongue, ‘you have to think of something else.’ He looked at us through eyes bloodshot from smoke and alcohol.
‘We had a miracle-worker among us and we never knew it,’ said Krit.
At the workbench, his eyes unfocused, sat Oompah Hatsi. With amazing speed and precision, he was turning one cigar after the other.
‘As straight and tight as the Juliana Canal,’ said Piet.
‘What else do you expect if you have your father’s hands?’ said Eet.
They watched the button-chewer’s busy little hands.
‘Why bother mechanising if you have an Oompah Hatsi?’ said Nol, who was there, too. His voice sounded almost jealous.
Had Oompah been making cigars at the institution? Was it because he had mended clothes all his life, work that was just as precise? Did the monotonous work calm him down – was that why he was concentrating so hard? We didn’t know, we would never know, but the fact was that the button-chewer could single-handedly turn out cigars faster than the Dad and our brothers together. He rumbled and hummed like a well-oiled car engine.
‘Is Jess here?’ I asked.
Our grandmother looked up with a start. ‘Jess?’
‘We thought she was here,’ said Muulke.
The swivel-eye swung to the right. ‘What would she be doing here?’
‘Err . . . Jess got out earlier than us.’
‘And why was that?’
‘We . . . uh . . . had to stay behind,’ I said.
‘Stay behind? Why?’
‘A fight,’ Muulke said casually.
‘Muulke Boon,’ Oma Mei burst out. ‘How often have I told you not to fight!’
‘They were pestering Jess,’ I said.
Muulke explained. How Fat Tonnie and her group had taken Jess behind the outer wall. How they tried to undo her clothes so they could see her straightener. I was more than happy for Muulke to do the telling; my legs were still shaking.
‘Kwatsj!’ said our grandmother disbelievingly. ‘How would those girls know about her straightener, for God’s sake?’
Muulke shrugged. ‘Perhaps they overheard you talking with the headmistress. Or they may have figured out for themselves what’s wrong with Jess.They knew, anyway. And then we argued because they were angry that Jess was going to be the Virgin Mary, and then we had to see the headmistress.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we had to stay behind,’ said Muulke. ‘Sister Angelica sent Jess home, to be on the safe side.The straightener had come undone.’
‘She must have gone t
o see Fie,’ said Sjeer.
‘You lost her,’ said Oma Mei. ‘So you can go and find her.’
Fie’s mother opened the door. Muulke and I walked up the familiar steep stairs to the small landing. It was dark and stuffy there. I had never noticed that before.
‘Is Jess here?’ I asked.
Fie’s mother was peeling potatoes now. Her hands were red.
‘I don’t know, leeveke. I’ve just come home. Maybe she’s up in the attic with Fie.’
The second staircase was even narrower and steeper. It was more like climbing than walking up a staircase. The attic was really just a large dormer window. There, behind wire netting, Fie’s father kept his prize pigeons. We saw Fie with a pigeon on her head.
She was not surprised to see us. That was strange, or ought to have been strange, because during the last few months we had barely seen her. But just the way Jess was Jess, and Muulke Muulke, so Fie was Fie. For a moment I had a feeling of loss.
Fie laughed.
‘Hi,’ we said.
‘Hi.’
‘Have you seen Jess?’
‘Jess? No.’
The pigeon pecked at the grains Fie kept putting on top of her head. She had to move very carefully.
Muulke pulled me along.
‘I’ll drop in again soon,’ I said to Fie.
When we came through the tiny kitchen again, I saw our old window across the street. It suddenly seemed a very long time ago that we had lived there. As if it wasn’t only a year that had passed, but a century. A colander stood on the windowsill. Somewhere a woman was singing, but nobody was to be seen.
It was no longer our house.
When we came home Nine Open Arms was deserted, apart from Oompah Hatsi in the workshop.
The small stack had become quite a stack. Straight, well-formed, firm cigars.
‘Where is everybody?’ we asked.
Oompah didn’t look up.
We sat on the fence and waited.
‘We should have listened to Jess more carefully,’ I said.
‘If she was upset all she had to do was open her mouth,’ said Muulke.
‘She did open her mouth,’ I said. ‘She said she wanted to go back to our old house.’
‘Jess says that every time we move.’
‘She said she hated the school.’
‘I say that all the time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But when you say it, it doesn’t mean anything.’
We were silent. It was a windy day. Sand blew up in gusts. Since we’d moved here I couldn’t run my hand through my hair without sand falling out.
Some days that never-ending wind made me so tired! This was one of those days – a day when you wished you had no ears, and no skin to feel everything.
‘This wouldn’t have happened if Jess wasn’t forever being told not to do this and not to do that,’ said Muulke.
‘It’s because she’s got that wreckbone,’ I said.
‘Yes, so? She can’t spend the rest of her life doing nothing just because her back sometimes—’
‘Muulke, last year she had to lie flat on her back for a whole month!’
‘Most of the time she’s alright.’
‘Because she’s careful.’
‘Because she’s not allowed to do anything. Nothing at all!’
‘As long as she’s careful, nothing happens.’
‘That time at school, all she wanted to do was tie up her shoelace.’
‘You don’t know what she’d done before that.’
‘You sound just like Oma Mei.’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Muulke. ‘It isn’t true. You all think it’s like that, always caused by something she’s done wrong, but I think you’re just making her worse. If everybody fussed about me like that, I’d get a wreckbone, too!’
I looked at her in a daze.
‘Jess just needs to be left in peace,’ she said.
‘The way you leave everyone in peace, I suppose,’ I snarled. ‘It was your fault she got the wreckbone curse that time after the cemetery.’
‘You let her drag those tubs, not me.’
‘That’s mean!’ I shouted. ‘I didn’t even know she’d loosened her straps.’
‘It was on your little list, though, to do them up tight,’ Muulke said triumphantly.
Angrily, I leaped off the fence. I walked down the road. My dress was flapping in the wind. I let myself be blown along. Behind the hedge, where Van Wetsels’ field began, I stopped.
At times I could have murdered Muulke. It was mean of her to say it was our fault. Nobody could help Jess’s back. The doctors said that very few children had a loose vertebra. And how were we supposed to know what to do to fix it if the doctors themselves didn’t know? Our grandmother might have been very strict, but she only acted that way to protect Jess. Didn’t she? Sometimes, the doctors said, a child could grow out of it. When that child grew up, the vertebra slipped back into place by itself and stayed there. Sometimes. In the meantime, the important thing was to make sure the bone didn’t move. And that was why Jess wore the straightener. And that was why she slept in a special bed. And that was why she had to be careful about what she did. It wasn’t true that she wasn’t allowed to do anything. That was kwatsj!
A flapping noise interrupted my thoughts. I turned.
The little shed in the field looked more weather-beaten and fallen-down than ever. The door blew open and slammed shut again.
That was when I heard it. Between the opening and the closing of the door. Very soft, but unmistakable. A sound I could recognise anywhere.
‘Jess?’
I walked through the field.
‘Jess?’
Of course. We should have known. Here, she would be close enough to the house to feel safe, but far enough away to make a point. I stopped the door from shutting again and went inside.
I couldn’t see a thing, but there was no need.
‘It’s only me,’ I said as relief filled my mind. I was already holding out my arms to hug her scared little body and hold her close.
I didn’t need to see – all I had to do was listen.
I had never been so pleased to hear that sound.
Squeak-creak, squeak-creak.
disappeared
The kitchen was a hive of activity. The Dad was trying to brew coffee and making a shambles of it. Our brothers dragged chairs about, knocking over anything in the way. Oma Mei would have had a heart attack if she’d been there.
‘She wasn’t in any of our old houses,’ said our brothers.
‘And not in her old school, either,’ said the Dad.
‘Where were you all this time?’ said Muulke.
I wanted to tell her, but somehow couldn’t get out a sound. So I just showed her.
‘What?’ said the Dad.
‘How did you get hold of that?’ asked Piet.
‘It was in the little shed in the field,’ I managed. ‘She’d hung it up on a nail. I heard it squeaking in the wind. I thought it was Jess.’
They all stared at the straightener. Without Jess, it was even more monstrous a thing – an instrument of torture from the Middle Ages.
I looked at Muulke out of the corner of my eye, wary of her triumphant look. But she only looked worried, and when she saw me looking, she winked. I’ll never understand Muulke.
We heard the gate opening and closing and crowded outside.
It was Oma Mei.
She looked excited. For a moment, we thought she had found Jess.
‘She’s gone off to Maastricht,’ she called, panting.
Oma Mei had gone to see the doctor, who’d told her Jess had visited him a week ago. She’d wanted to know if there were other straighteners for sale, and where one could buy them.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She’s been talking about that.’
‘Other straighteners?’ Krit wondered.
‘Ones that don’t squeak-creak,’ said Oma Mei.
‘Blast and damn!’ shouted Sjeer.
‘All that way!’ yelled Krit.
‘Without a straightener!’ cried Eet.
‘And it’ll be dark soon, too,’ the Dad muttered.
As usual, our grandmother was the first to come to her senses.
‘Piet, Krit and the Dad can take the bus to Maastricht. She may be walking along the main road. If that is the case, you should be able to spot her soon enough. Otherwise, wait at the bus station in Maastricht. Eet, Sjeer and I will take the back road.’
‘I would like to walk, too,’ said the Dad.
‘I know the way better.’
‘Won’t that be too tiring for you?’
She glared at him. ‘I can still walk the socks off you, Antoon Boon. Every day, if I have to.’
‘And us?’ asked Muulke and I.
‘You stay here,’ said Oma Mei.
‘But . . . ’ ‘You stay here. In case she changes her mind, or we miss her.’
They made sandwiches, took a bottle of water each and set off.
The last thing we saw was our grandmother walking past Eet and Sjeer, or rather trotting past them, in the reddish light of the late-evening sun.
‘No running, and stay together,’ said Muulke, but I couldn’t manage a laugh.
in a tangle of
arms and legs
The worst thing that night was the waiting. We had no idea how long everyone would be away. I sighed and sighed, until Muulke glared at me angrily.
‘Stop it,’ she snarled. ‘That sjiethoes will be back alright.’
But a single look at her pale face was enough to tell me she wasn’t so sure herself. Poor Muulke. She had invented so many stories full of calamity, murder and bloodshed all her life that now she couldn’t stop doing it. ‘Tell me it’ll be alright,’ she said miserably. ‘Tell me it’ll be alright, or I’ll . . . or I’ll . . . ’
For the first time ever, her imagination failed her.
‘It’ll be alright,’ I said.
I tidied up the workshop, washed the dishes. I brought sjlamm up from the cellar and peeled potatoes, scraped the beetroots. We cooked and ate without talking.
How often had I wished I could be by myself, without the constant slamming of doors, without the creaking of staircases, without the sound of squabbling coming through the walls and cracks .. . but now those sounds seemed like the loveliest sounds in the world.
Nine Open Arms Page 16