The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  The squash lady smiles crookedly, and fetches a Milky Way for each of us from her coat pocket. I accept it out of politeness and, when she’s not looking, take it out of its wrapper and drop it into the bucket of toads: toads never get tummy ache or stomach cramps.

  ‘The three kings are OK,’ I say.

  Since the day Matthies didn’t come home, I’ve been calling us the three kings because one day we’ll find our brother, even though we’ll have to travel a long way and go bearing gifts.

  I wave my lantern at a bird to drive it away. The candle wobbles dangerously, and a drop of candle-grease falls on my welly. The startled bird flies up into a tree.

  *

  Wherever you cycle through the village or the fields, you see the dried-up reptilian bodies like little tablecloths. With all of the children and volunteers who have come to help, we carry our full buckets and lanterns to the other side of the verge which runs down to the lake. The water looks so stupidly innocent today and in the distance I can see the outlines of the factories, the tall buildings with dozens of lights and the bridge between the village and the city, like Moses’ path when he stretched out his hand over the sea like the Bible says: ‘Then the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.’

  Hanna stands next to me and peers across to the other side.

  ‘Just look at all those lights,’ she says. ‘Maybe they have a lantern parade every single night.’

  ‘No, it’s because they’re afraid of the dark,’ I say.

  ‘You’re afraid of the dark.’

  I shake my head but Hanna is busying emptying her bucket. Dozens of frogs and toads spread across the surface of the water. The gentle splashing sounds make me feel dizzy. I suddenly notice that the fabric of my coat is sticking to my armpits. To waft away the heat I flap my arms like a bird that wants to take off.

  ‘Do you ever want to go to the other side?’ Hanna asks.

  ‘There’s nothing to see there; they don’t even have any cows.’ I block her view by standing in front of her, and drawing the left side of her safety vest to the side with the Velcro and pressing it hard so that it sticks.

  My sister steps to one side. She’s put her hair in a ponytail that gives her an encouraging pat on the back with every movement. I really want to pull the elastic out. I don’t want her to think that anything’s possible, that she can put on her ice skates one day and disappear.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it’s like there?’

  ‘Of course not, you blockhead. You know that …’ I don’t finish my sentence, but chuck the empty bucket into the grass next to me.

  I walk away from her and count my footsteps. By the time I reach four, Hanna is walking next to me again. Four’s my favourite number. A cow has four stomachs, there are four seasons, a chair has four legs. The heavy feeling I just had in my chest pops, like the air bubbles in the lake that float to the surface and go their separate ways.

  ‘It must be boring there without any cows,’ she says quickly.

  In the candlelight you can’t see that her nose is crooked on her face. She has a cast in her right eye; it’s as though she’s continually adjusting her gaze to focus on you, like a camera’s shutter speed. I wish I could put in a new roll of film to be sure she’ll see well enough to stay safe. I hold out my hand to Hanna and she takes it. Her fingers feel sticky.

  ‘Obbe’s talking to a girl,’ she says.

  I look back. His lanky body suddenly seems to know how to move better; he makes a few exaggerated gestures with his hands and laughs with sound again, the first time in ages. Then he squats down at the lakeside. Now he’s probably telling a nice story about toads, about our good intentions, but not about the water, barely warmed by the sun, where the toads are now swimming and at the bottom of which our brother lay a year and a half ago. He walks back along the dike with the girl. After a few yards we can no longer see them; they’ve dissolved into the darkness. All we find is his half-burned lantern on the tarmac. The little green candle lies next to it, stamped flat like a goose dropping. I scrape it up with my spade. We can’t just leave it here alone like that after a whole evening’s faithful service. When we get back to the farm, I hang it on a branch of the knotted willow tree. The trees stand in a row with their heads bent towards my bedroom, like a group of church elders listening in on us. I suddenly feel the toads moving in my coat pocket. I lay my hand over them protectively. I turn ninety degrees and say to Hanna, ‘Don’t say anything to Mum and

  Dad about the other side, they’ll get even more upset.’

  ‘I won’t say anything. It was a stupid idea.’

  ‘Very stupid.’

  We can see Mum and Dad through the window, sitting on the sofa. From behind, they look just like the candle stubs in our lanterns. We use some spit to put them out.

  2

  Mum is getting the amount of food on her plate wrong more and more often. As soon as she’s sat down after dishing it up, she says, ‘It really did look like more than that from above.’ Sometimes I’m worried it’s our fault, that we’re nibbling away at her from the inside, like what happens to a black lace-weaver spider. The teacher told us about them during a biology lesson – once she’s given birth, the mother gives herself to her young. The tiny hungry spiders devour the mother: every last bit of her, until not even a leg is left. They don’t mourn her for a second. Mum always leaves a bit of her chicken cordon bleu on the edge of her plate, ‘leaving the best till last’, saving herself until the end of the meal just in case we, her young, have not yet filled our bellies.

  I gradually start looking down at our family from above, too, so it’s less noticeable how little we amount to without Matthies. The empty place at the table now only has a seat and a chair-back that my brother can no longer casually set his weight against, causing my dad to roar, ‘Four legs!’ No one’s allowed to sit on that chair either. I guess that’s in case he comes back one day. ‘If Jesus returns, it will be a day just like any other. Life will go on as usual. Just like when Noah built his ark, people will be busy working and eating, drinking and getting married. Matthies will be as entirely expected as He is, when he returns,’ Dad had said at the funeral. When he comes back, I’ll push his chair in so much it touches the edge of the table, so that he won’t spill his food or slip away without a sound. Since his death, we’ve been eating in fifteen minutes. When the big hand and the small hand are standing upright, Dad gets up. He puts on his black beret and goes to do the cows, even if they’ve just been done.

  ‘What are we eating?’ Hanna asks.

  ‘New potatoes and beans,’ I say after I’ve lifted one of the pan lids. I see my pale face reflected in the saucepan. I cautiously smile at myself, just briefly, otherwise Mum glares at you until the corners of your mouth go down again. There’s nothing here to smile about. The only place we sometimes forget about that is behind the covering shed, out of the sight of our parents.

  ‘No meat?’

  ‘Burnt,’ I whisper.

  ‘Again.’

  Mum slaps my hand, I drop the lid and it falls, leaving a damp circle behind on the tablecloth.

  ‘Don’t be so greedy,’ Mum says, closing her eyes. Everyone copies immediately, even though Obbe, just like me, keeps one open to keep an eye on things. There’s never any warning that we’re about to pray or that Dad’s going to say grace, so you just have to sense it.

  ‘But may our souls not cleave to this transient life but do everything that God bids us and end up finally by Him. Amen,’ my father says in a solemn voice before opening his eyes. Mum fills the plates one by one. She has forgotten to turn on the extractor fan – the whole house stinks of charred fillet steak and the windows have steamed up. Now no one can look in from the street and see that she’s still in her pink dressing gown. In the village people s
tare in through each other’s windows a lot, to check what kind of hours they work and how the family keep each other warm. Dad is sitting at the table with his head in his hands. He’s held it high all day long but at the table it falls down; it has become too heavy. From time to time he lifts it again to put his fork in his mouth before letting it droop again. The little stabs inside my belly get worse, as though holes are being pricked in the lining. No one says anything, just knives and forks scraping on plates. I pull the cords of my coat even tighter. I wish I could squat on my chair. My stomach, which is swelling, would hurt less then and I’d have a better view. Dad finds that position irreverent and taps his fork on my knee until I’m sitting on my bottom again. Sometimes there are red stripes on my knees, like a tally of the days without Matthies.

  Suddenly Obbe leans towards me and says, ‘Do you know what an accident in an underpass looks like?’ I’ve just pricked four holes in a string bean with my fork – the juice is seeping out and now it’s a recorder. Before I can reply, Obbe has opened his mouth. I see watery mashed potato dotted with bits of beans and some apple puree. It looks like vomit. Obbe laughs and swallows the casualties. There’s a pale blue line on his forehead. He butts his head against the edge of the bed in his sleep. He’s still too young to worry about it. Dad says children can’t have worries because they only come when you have to plough and grub your own fields, even though I keep discovering more and more worries of my own and they keep me awake at night. They seem to be growing.

  Now that Mum has got thinner and her dresses baggier, I’m afraid she’ll die soon and that Dad will go with her. I follow them about all day so that they can’t suddenly die and disappear. I always keep them in the corner of my eye, like the tears for Matthies. And I never switch off the light globe on my bedside table until I’ve heard Dad’s snores, and the bedsprings creaking twice. Mum always rolls from right to left to right before she finds the right fit. Then I lie in the light of the North Sea, waiting for it to go quiet. But when they go to visit friends in the village in the evenings and Mum shrugs when I ask what time they’ll be back, I lie for hours staring at the ceiling. Then I imagine how I’ll cope as an orphan and what I’ll tell the teacher about the cause of their deaths. There is a list of the top ten causes of death. I once Googled them at break time. Lung cancer was number one. I’ve secretly put together my own list: drowning, traffic accidents and slipping in the cowshed are at the top.

  After I’ve figured out what I’m going to tell the teacher and stop wallowing in self-pity, I press my head into my pillow. I’m too old to believe in the tooth fairy but too young not to still long for her. Obbe sometimes jokingly calls her ‘the tooth bitch’ because she just stopped paying him one day and his back teeth, roots and all, were under his pillow. They left a bloody mark behind because he never rinsed them. If she comes to visit me one day, I’ll flatten her. Then she’ll have to stay and I’ll wish for new parents. I’ve still got my wisdom teeth to use as bait. Very occasionally I go downstairs when they’re not back yet. I sit in the dark in my pyjamas on the sofa, my knees together, hands folded, and I promise to God that I’ll take another bout of diarrhoea if He brings them home safely. I expect the phone to ring at any moment and to hear they lost control of the wheel, or the handlebars of a bike. But the phone never rings, and usually I get cold after a while and go back upstairs where I continue my wait under the covers. They’re not brought back to life until I hear the bedroom door and the shuffle of Mum’s slippers. And then I can fall asleep with peace of mind.

  *

  Before we have to go to bed, Hanna and I play a bit. Hanna sits on the carpet behind the sofa. I look at my socks pulled up high, the tops folded twice. I rub them flat. My sister is sitting next to the Thunderbirds island. It used to belong to Matthies, and we often played with it together. We’d fire rockets into the sky and fight with the enemy – we could choose who that was ourselves back then. Obbe is lying on his chest across the sofa, headphones over his ears. He looks down on us. There’s a mayonnaise stain in the shape of France on his grey T-shirt.

  ‘I’ll let anyone who breaks the trees on the drive listen to the new Hitzone for ten minutes on my Discman.’

  Obbe lets his headphones sink from his ears until they’re around his neck. Almost everyone in my class has got a Discman, except for the squares. I don’t want to be a square and that’s why I’m saving up for a Discman: a Philips one with an anti-shock system so that it doesn’t keep cutting out on my way to school over the bumps in the fields. And a protective jacket the same colour as my coat. I don’t have to save up much more. Dad gives us two euros every Saturday for helping on the farm. He hands it over solemnly: ‘Put this in your bottom drawer for later.’ The thought of the Discman allows me to forget everything around me, even the fact that Dad is hoping we’ll move out.

  The island’s trees were once olive green, but they’ve faded over the years and the paint has chipped off. As though someone’s urging me on, I’ve broken off a whole row of plastic trees before I know it. I hear them snap between my fingers. Anything you can break with just one hand isn’t worth breaking. Hanna starts to yell at once.

  ‘It was just a joke, you idiot,’ Obbe says quickly.

  He turns around as Mum comes out of the kitchen and puts his headphones back over his ears. Mum has tied the belt of her dressing gown tight. Her eyes dart from Hanna to me to Obbe. Then she sees the snapped-off trees in my hand. Without a word she pulls me up by my arm, digging her nails into my coat – which I don’t even want to take off indoors any more – which press through the fabric. I try not to react and most of all not to look at Mum so that she doesn’t get it into her head to take my coat off me, without mercy, the way she peels potatoes. She lets go of me at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Go and fetch your piggy bank,’ she says as she blows a lock of blonde hair away from her face. My heartbeat quickens with every step. For a moment I think of the proverb from the Book of Jeremiah that Granny sometimes quotes when she’s reading the paper, licking her thumb and first finger so that the world’s problems don’t stick together: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, yes, and desperately wicked: who can know it?’

  Nobody knows my heart. It’s hidden deep beneath my coat, my skin, my ribs. My heart was important for nine months inside my mother’s belly, but once I left the belly, everyone stopped caring whether it beat enough times per hour. No one worries when it stops or begins to beat fast, telling me there must be something wrong.

  Downstairs I have to put my piggy bank on the kitchen table. It’s a china cow with a slot in its back. There’s a plastic stopper in its bum hole so you can take money out. There’s duct tape over it so that I have to get through two barriers before I spend my money on rubbish.

  ‘Because of your sins He keeps Himself hidden and He no longer wants to hear you,’ Mum says. She is holdig a claw hammer – she must have been waiting for me with it. I try not to think about the Discman I want so much. My parents’ loss is much worse – you can’t save up for a new son.

  ‘But there’s a hole …’ I try.

  Mum presses the side of the hammer you use to get nails out of wood – they look like two metal rabbit’s ears, reminding me briefly of what I sacrificed to keep Dieuwertje alive – gently against my swollen belly. I quickly take the hammer. Its handle feels warm. I lift it up and let it fall onto the piggy bank with a big smack. It breaks into three pieces. My mum carefully fishes out the red and blue notes and a couple of coins. She gets the dustpan and brush and sweeps up the pieces of the cow. I grip the handle’s hammer so tightly my knuckles turn white.

  3

  My head full of black-and-white images, I lie on top of my dinosaur duvet cover. I keep my arms stiff alongside my body, my feet slightly parted, like a soldier at ease, my coat as armour. At school today we did the Second World War and we watched a film about it on School TV. I get a lump in my throat again instantly. I see the images of Jews, lying on top of each other like bra
ising steaks, the bald-headed Germans in old cars. They looked like the plucked bums of our laying hens, pinkish with black stubble, and once you get an outbreak of feather pecking amongst them, they won’t let anyone escape.

  I raise myself half up on my mattress and scratch a fluorescent star from the sloping roof. Dad has already taken away a few, which he does whenever I come home with a bad grade and it’s his turn to tuck me up at night. Dad always used to make up a story about little Johnny who was up to no good. He was always doing something that wasn’t allowed. Now Johnny’s a good boy so he doesn’t get punished – either that or Dad keeps forgetting to tell me about him.

  ‘Where’s Johnny?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s tired and crushed.’

  Then I knew right away that Dad’s head is tired and crushed inside because that’s where Johnny lives.

  ‘Is he ever coming back?’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ Dad replied in a dejected voice.

  When he takes off a star he leaves behind the white Blu-Tack: each bit stands for a question I got wrong. I stick the pulled-off star on my coat at heart height. When the teacher was telling us about it, I wondered what it would be like to kiss a tash-face like Hitler. Dad only has a moustache when he drinks beer. He gets a line of foam along his top lip. Hitler’s was at least two fingers thick.

  Under the desk, I’d put my hand on my belly to calm down the tickling insects. I got them more and more often in my belly and crotch. I could also make them start by thinking that I was lying on top of Johnny. Sometimes I thought that was why he was crushed, but as long as Dad’s head was still round and on top of his body, I didn’t take that seriously. I rarely asked questions – they just didn’t occur to me. But this time I’d raised my hand.