Something between his thumb and index finger. Round. Small, white. Not a bead.
“How did you get this?”
Yes, he’d wanted to tell me sooner. But now that the time had come, he didn’t do it himself, he switched on the presenter. And he said that they were his. That he had kept them in his classroom all this time.
First in the cabinet above the sink. But Kalim found them there. Then in the drawer of his desk. But Yuri found them there.
So now they’re in the box of the Memory game: two full pill bottles, of the five there’d been in total. He’d picked them up the Friday before the bang and hadn’t slept at home since.
“What was her name?”
“Sasha.”
Her name was Sasha and I didn’t have to ask about the rest. Because there he was: the presenter, back once again. Reading from the teleprompter or a piece of paper in a studio with headphones on. A voice-over accompanying his hands, now lying on my knees. It sounded very far away and crackly.
* * *
I first got them in North Dakota. The cold there, that eternal darkness: It would make anyone go crazy. Back in Holland I kept taking them. It just made me more even-keeled. Made sure that I kept smiling when they followed me at the supermarket, that I didn’t lose my patience when they came to get my autograph. And that I could keep long hours without starting to believe that I could walk across the canal in my Nikes. It kept me balanced, in a way: Things were no longer horrible or wonderful, only ‘too bad’ or ‘just fine.’ That was good. It made it so I could keep doing what I wanted to do.
And then came that bang.
I saw the fear in the others, the way they grew hysterical and worried. Those that felt the most lost it first. Me, I still hardly felt a thing. No fear, no sadness. Everything stayed “too bad” or “just fine.” Until that one night.
Remember? The first night after Kaspar and Natalie left? The first night you stayed over. When I saw you lying next to me that morning, the bumps of your spine, your hair frizzy and tangled, only then did I feel something. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time. And something I realized I’d been missing.
And boom, there I went. As soon as I saw you, every moment I spent with you, I wanted to go on, and on I could. Without this too.
Something between his thumb and index finger. Round. Small, white.
You, Merel, you became what kept me going. But now I miss you. You’re disappearing, can you tell?
It’s just hard, this, here, everything. So maybe you could give this a try.
Not a bead.
Just a little while, ‘til you’re doing better.
“I don’t want any.”
Come on, Merel, don’t you think I can see you’re not doing well?
“I’m just fine. I feel better. Good almost.”
What you did to Kalim…
“The perpetrator. He was a danger to us and the baby.”
Yes, so I’ve been thinking about that as well. Can I ask you something?
Questions off a cue card. The presenter’s cue card.
How did you actually find out about the baby?
But watch out for trick questions.
“It’s in Melissa’s diary.”
Ok. And when do you write that entry?
But watch out for trick questions.
Can you check?
“It was a month ago.”
That was while Barry wouldn’t come out of his classroom. Barry gave up and then you decided that there was to be a child.
Trick question, trap door. If you see a booby trap, stay stock-still.
Our first night was two months ago. My sister only started to feel her baby after sixteen weeks.
His sister only started to feel her baby after sixteen weeks.
* * *
And I feel something warm come up and run down my chin.
Shit, you ok?
It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work at all; things no longer match up because the presenter’s stories are wrecking mine.
A Memory game with three cards: two princesses and one perpetrator. Cinderella is the cleaning lady; Sleeping Beauty just keeps sleeping. So which one should I turn over to make a pair?
A new wave up through my esophagus, pink lumps over my knees, speckles on his hands: a puddle of curdled custard on the floor of the gym.
Shit.
“Give me a spoon!”
A spoon, a spoon is what I need. It goes better with a spoon. Eyes shut, custard this is not. It’s oatmeal porridge like the lady next door made it, a little sourer maybe. Another bite, keep scraping up the chunks, off the floor, into my throat, chewed-up muscles, chewed-up blood, proteins, meat from a perpetrator who perhaps wasn’t a perpetrator, exactly that’s why we must keep eating, it can’t have been in vain, besides: It’s oatmeal porridge. And we have to finish all of it.
Merel!
“Help me, eat!”
Yes, we have to finish all of it.
“Eat it!”
And he does, he eats. Spoon up the lumps; don’t let the porridge get hard. Scrape, chew, swallow, eat.
Turn over the Memory cards. Forget.
Because what you no longer know, doesn’t exist. What doesn’t exist, you have to create yourself.
Day 145
Let me tell you about North Dakota.
North Dakota is a big state, seventy-one thousand square miles almost. There are hills and meadows, rocks and glaciers, forests full of bears and deer. There just are not that many people. Because North Dakota is not always a nice place to live. That’s because of the climate. Or actually: because of the winters.
In January the temperature sometimes dips below 0° Fahrenheit. If you go outside, your eyelashes freeze, and an ordinary gust of wind feels like a serrated knife scraping across your forehead. If you stay out too long, it’s very likely you’ll get snowed in.
There is only one solution for North Dakota’s winters. Stay in until they’re over. So that’s what I’m doing. For days, weeks, months I’ve been sitting at the fireplace, the red blanket around me, close to the flames; only then can I see what I’m writing.
Although I think that this is the last time. That I’m sitting here. But also that I’m writing to you.
When I wake up, you’ll be there. And once you are, I no longer have to tell you about all there is, because then you’ll be able to see it with your own eyes: the house, the winter garden, the fireplace, the guest cottage, the other wing, the tool shed, my study, the four-poster bed that Leo made. Although he no longer sleeps in it himself.
Leo, he loved me. You too, I think, and definitely this house, because he helped build it. We had it good here. Told each other stories, made meatloaf in the oven. If I was in my study, then he was in the messy tool shed. On Sundays we drank mimosas.
But one morning Leo said, “Today’s Monday. I’m going to the office.”
I tried to convince him that he had it wrong, that it was Sunday and the winter far from over. But Leo didn’t want to listen.
He said, “Merel, just be realistic.” And, “If I don’t go, neither of us will make it.”
“All three of us,” I said. Because he meant: All three of us.
When he left, I was in the four-poster bed. I only heard the door open and shut. Two nights, he’d said. Then he would come back, regardless of what was or wasn’t outside. That was eight days ago.
Leo is still gone.
He took all his things: his coat, phone, keys. Even pocketed his wallet with the passport picture. The only things that prove he was ever here are five bottles. Five empty pill bottles. Because I took everything there was at once.
Now we’ll definitively sleep well, long and deep and in any case until summer. Only when the ice has melted and the bears in the forests come out of their dens will we wake up.
We’ll head outside, into the sun, hands above our blinking eyes.
At the gas station we buy hotdogs and Snapples, then we drive over the hill, through the mead
ows, to the forest. There, in the clearing beside the creek, I put you on the red blanket. I make a boat out of an empty hotdog tray; we dip our feet in the water from melting glaciers far above us. In the afternoon I tell you why little spiders aren’t scary, and in the evening, at twilight, we get back in the car.
I put you on my lap, turn the key, together we glide over highways, my hand around your waist, through the dark, past roadside restaurants and neon lights on poles: yellow McDonald’s arcs, red Texaco logos, and strings of a hundred thousand lights laid along the road. A foot on the gas pedal and the lights become golden stripes: strands of trembling light. Woolen dice dance; a little dog on our dashboard, his head bobbles when you tap it.
We cross North Dakota. Off the highway, into the mountains, at first the houses below are lights and then dots, higher and higher, the road ever more narrow and dark, but we drive on, on until the top, until the forgotten lookout. Once tourists came here, now only coyotes.
Here we park the car.
No one who can hear us, no one who can see us, I crank open a window, let the crisp evening fog come in, you reach for the steering wheel, I put your little hand on the horn, together we press it, yes, we honk; we honk a few times in a row.
And then I take your hand. And point out the stars through the windshield.
First published as Alles wat er was in the Netherlands in 2013 by Uitgeverij Atlas Contact
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Hanna Bervoets, 2013
Translation copyright © 2015 by Florian Duijsens
The moral right of Hanna Bervoets to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911420149
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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