The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  ‘It’s just a poor egg,’ Dad says. His voice is lower, the sign he’s waiting for a disagreement; sometimes even when there isn’t one, he changes the other person’s mind. He sniffs as he continues to inspect the piece of omelette. The tension makes me poke my little finger up my nose and hook a piece of snot. I glance at the yellowish ball and then put it in my mouth. The salty taste of snot makes me feel calm. When I move my hand back up to my nose, my father gives my wrist a tug. ‘Just because it’s the day of prayer it doesn’t mean you should start the harvest.’ I quickly move my arm back down, push my tongue back into my throat as far as it can go and snort. It works. Snot fills my mouth so that I can swallow again. Mum turns around. She looks tired.

  ‘I’m a bad mother,’ she says.

  She fixes her gaze on the light bulb above the kitchen table. It’s time for it to be covered by a lampshade. With or without floral motif. Whenever we mention it, she says it’s no longer worth the bother, that she’s old and it’s only more work for us when we have to divide up the lampshade and all the furniture after their death, just like all the other things she no longer wants to spend money on with an eye on the Day of Judgement. I quickly stand next to her with my plate in my hand. When we play football at school it’s about getting the positions right. Someone has to be captain, be an attacker or defender. I put too big a piece of egg in my mouth.

  ‘It’s a perfect egg,’ I say, ‘not too salty, not too watery.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hanna says, ‘and there’s calcium in the shell.’

  ‘Listen to that, Mother,’ Dad says, ‘you’re not that bad.’

  He smiles for a moment and lets his knife glide across his tongue, which is dark red with a blue stripe on the underside – a moor frog at breeding time. He gets a muesli roll from the bread-basket and studies it from every side. Every Wednesday we fetch bread from the baker’s in the village before school. All the bread is past its sell-by date and actually supposed to go to the chickens, but we mainly eat it ourselves. Dad says, ‘If the chickens don’t get ill from it, neither will you.’ I still get worried sometimes that mould will grow inside me, that one day my skin will turn blue and white, like the spiced buns Dad slices the mould off with a big knife before serving to us, and that in due course, I’ll only be good as chicken feed.

  The bread usually tastes nice though, and the trip to the baker’s is the best one of the week. Dad proudly shows off his haul: glazed currant buns, egg cakes, sourdough bread, spiced biscuits, doughnuts. Mum always takes out the croissants, even though she finds them too greasy. She looks for the best ones, and it gives her peace of mind if we want to eat them. The rest go to the chickens. I think we feel happy for a brief moment then, even if Dad says that’s not for us, that we weren’t made to be happy, just like our pale skins can’t be in the sun for more than ten minutes so we always long for the shade, for darkness. This time we had a feed-bag of extra bread. Must be for the Jews in the basement. Maybe Mum makes good omelettes for them and cuddles them, making her forget to hold us, really tightly the way I sometimes hold Lien next door’s cat – I feel the ribs through its fur against my belly, its little heart beating against mine.

  *

  We always sit in the front pew of the Reformed church on the dike – in the morning, evening and sometimes in the afternoon too for the children’s service – so that everyone can see us coming in and know that despite our loss we still visit the House of the Lord, that despite everything we still believe in Him – even though I’m beginning to have more and more doubts about whether I find God nice enough to want to go and talk to Him. I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves. I think I’ll belong to that second group. My Sunday clothes are tight around my limbs, as though they were measured for the old version of myself. Granny compares going to church three times with tying your shoelaces: first you make a flat knot, then a noose and tie them, and last a double knot to be sure they’re securely tied, and in the same way we won’t remember the message properly until after the third time. And on Tuesday evenings, Obbe, a few old classmates from primary school and I have to go to catechism at Reverend Renkema’s house in preparation for confirmation. His wife gives us orange squash and a slice of Frisian gingerbread. I like to go, but more for the gingerbread than for God’s word.

  During the service I secretly hope that one of the oldies in the last pew – who sit there so they’ll get home first – will faint or feel unwell. This happens regularly, and you’ll hear the loud bang of an oldie folding in on themself like a prayer book, and if someone has to be carried out of the church, a wave of distress rushes through the congregation, distress that unites us more than all the words in the Bible. The same wave that often rushes through me. But I’m not the only one. Our heads half turned, we watch the fallen until they’ve disappeared around the corner, before starting on the next psalm. Granny is old too but she’s never been carried out of the church. During the sermon, I fantasize sometimes that she’s collapsed and that I’m the one who will carry her outside like a hero, everyone turning their heads for me. But Granny is still as fit as a young heifer. She says that God is just like the sun: He always stays with you, however hard you cycle away from Him. He always travels with you. I know she’s right. I’ve sometimes tried to lose the sun by being quicker, by playing hide and seek, but it stays visible behind my back or in the corner of my eye.

  I look at Obbe who is sitting next to me on the bench. He’s closed his hymn-book: its thin pages remind me too much of my mother’s skin, as though with each psalm we turn her over and forget about her. He is picking at a blister on the palm of his hand. Now summer’s coming, the stalls have to be mucked out so that they’ll be spotless for the winter. We never really live in the seasons as we’re always busy with the next one.

  In time, the blister’s soft membrane will become rock hard and you roll it off between your thumb and forefinger. We are constantly renewing ourselves – apart from Mum and Dad. Just like the Old Testament they keep repeating their words, behaviour, patterns and rituals, even if we, their followers, are moving further and further away from them. The pastor asks us to close our eyes and to pray for the fields and the crops. I pray for my parents: for Mum to get the silo out of her stubborn head and not to notice the rope hanging from the beam when she’s dusting my bedroom. I think about her every time I make a loop in my exercise book or tie a knot in a bread-bag, because the clip never gets put on top of the bread-bin now. I suspect Dad’s been putting them in the pocket of his overalls. And sometimes, when I’m lying on my belly on my mattress, moving on top of my bear, I fantasize that we have a little machine in the kitchen like the one they have on Stoepje’s market stall that seals the bread-bag with a red plastic ribbon. Then it won’t matter any more if we lose the clips and Mum will no longer be sad.

  I peek through my eyelashes at my dad. His cheeks are wet. Maybe we’re not praying for the crops but for the harvest of all the children in the village, for them to grow big and strong. And Dad’s realized that he hasn’t paid attention to his own fields and he’s even allowed them to become flooded. Apart from food and clothes we also need attention. They seem to keep forgetting that. I close my eyes again and pray for the toads underneath my desk, hoping for the mating season that might encourage Mum and Dad too, and for the Jews in the basement, even though I don’t think it’s fair they’re allowed cornflakes and hot dogs. I don’t open my eyes until I feel a roll of peppermints pressing into my side.

  ‘Only people with a lot of sins pray for a long time,’ Obbe whispers.

  5

  The side of Obbe’s forehead is blue like bread mould. Every few minutes he feels for his crown and smooths the hair around it flat with three fingers. Mum says we all have difficult skulls. I think it’s because we all miss the pressure on our foreheads since Dad stopped laying his hand on our heads and just keeps his hands stiffly in the pockets of
his overalls. The crown is the starting point from which we have grown, where all the separate bits of skull have come together. Perhaps that’s why Obbe keeps touching his, to make sure he exists.

  Mum and Dad don’t see our tics. They don’t realize that the fewer rules there are, the more we start inventing for ourselves. Obbe thought we should get together and talk about it, so after the service we’ve all gathered in his room. I’m sitting on the bed with Hanna who is leaning on me listlessly. I tickle her neck gently. She smells of Dad’s restlessness, the smell of his cigarette smoke in her cardigan. There are little cracks in the headboard of Obbe’s bed where he bangs every night or thrashes from one side of his pillow to the other, making a monotonous sound. Sometimes I try to guess the tune through the wall. Sometimes it’s singing but more often just humming. He doesn’t do psalms, which I’m glad about because they make me miserable. When I hear him banging, I go to his room and tell him to be quiet otherwise Mum will lie awake worrying how we’re going to sleep in a tent in a campsite, if we ever get to go on holiday. It helps for a while but after a few minutes the banging starts up again. Sometimes I’m worried the wood won’t split but his head, that we’ll have to sand him and varnish him again. Hanna bangs too, which is why she’s been sleeping in my bed more often, so I can hold her head until she falls asleep.

  Downstairs we hear Mum vacuuming the front room. I hate that sound. Mum vacuums three times a day, even when there are no crumbs, even when we pick up all the crumbs from the carpet in our hands and carry them to the door and throw them into the gravel.

  ‘Do you think they still kiss?’ Hanna asks.

  ‘Maybe they French kiss,’ Obbe says.

  Hanna and I giggle. Kissing with tongues always makes me think of those slimy, purplish-red cooking pears that Mum makes with cinnamon, blackcurrant juice, cloves and sugar, all tied up with each other.

  ‘Or they lie on top of each other in the nuddy.’

  Obbe gets his hamster out of the cage next to his bed. It’s recently been renamed Tiesey. It’s a little desert hamster. Its wheel is yellow from caked piss and there are sunflower seed cases everywhere. First you have to move your finger in the sawdust before you get him out of his nest, otherwise he’ll be startled and bite. I want to be approached with the same caution, because every morning I’m dragged from Matthies’s hollow by my dad who pulls the duvet off me and says, ‘Cow time. They’re mooing with hunger.’ It’s easier to get into a hollow than to come out of one.

  The hamster walks along my brother’s arm. Its cheek pouches are round and full with food. It reminds me of Mum: but no, hers are the opposite – sunken. She can’t be saving food in them to nibble away at later in the evening – although I did catch her licking out a yoghurt carton yesterday after dinner. She’d torn it open along the fold. She spread a bit of blackberry jam over the sides. I heard her finger keep disappearing into her mouth, the gentle plop, a string of saliva. Once a week the hamster gets a beetle or an earwig that we get from the cows’ straw. But it’s not enough to live off. Mum has to start eating again.

  ‘Tiesey? That’s short for Matthies,’ I say.

  Obbe gives me a big shove in my side; I fall off his bed and land on my funny bone. I try not to cry, even though it hurts and a light electric shock runs through my body. It wouldn’t be fair not to cry about Matthies but then cry about myself. It still takes me some effort to hold back the tears. Maybe I’m becoming as fragile as Mum’s dinner service and over time I’ll have to be wrapped up in newspaper when I go to school. Be brave, I whisper to myself. You have to be brave.

  All of a sudden Obbe acts kind, he makes his voice gentle. He touches his crown briefly. With fake cheeriness he says he didn’t mean it like that – I don’t know how he did mean it then, but it’s not wise to go into it. Hanna looks nervously at the door. Dad sometimes gets so angry when he hears us arguing that he chases you around the farm, even though it looks more like hopping because he can’t run on his gammy leg. If he does get hold of you, he gives you a kick up the backside or a slap against the back of your head. The best thing to do is run to the kitchen table. After going round and round a few times, he gives up, getting more oxygen to his brain, absorbing it like the butterflies do through the holes in the cottage cheese box where Obbe keeps them captive in his desk drawer. When a silence falls you can hear their wings beating against the plastic lid. They’re for an important school experiment about the lifespan of a certain type of butterfly, he told us. Dad keeps his leg hidden. He never wears shorts, not even when it’s boiling hot – I sometimes imagine that his legs are just like a twin-stick ice lolly, and that one day they’ll break loose from each other and we’ll throw away the bad leg, or let it melt in the sun behind the covering shed.

  ‘If you don’t cry, I’ll show you something amazing,’ Obbe says.

  I breathe in and out deeply and pull my coat sleeves right down to my knuckles. They are beginning to fray at the seam. I hope they don’t slowly get shorter until I’m totally exposed. It’s not good to pick open the cocoons in the back garden before the butterflies have hatched. Crippled butterflies might come out and I’m sure they wouldn’t be allowed to take part in Obbe’s experiment.

  I nod as a sign that I’m not going to cry. Being brave starts with holding back the tears.

  My brother lets Tiesey go inside the collar of his pyjamas, pulling up the waist of his boxer shorts when the hamster reaches his belly. I can see his willy lying there with black curls around it like Dad’s tobacco. Hanna begins to giggle again.

  ‘Your willy’s doing something strange, it’s standing up.’

  Obbe grins proudly. The hamster runs down along his willy. What if it bites or wants to burrow?

  ‘If I pull at it, white stuff comes out.’

  Now that sounds painful to me. I’ve already forgotten about my funny bone. I get a brief urge to touch his willy, to stroke it like Tiesey’s fur. Just to see what it feels like, what material it’s made of and whether you can move it, maybe to tug at it gently. If you do that to a cow’s tail, they look back for a moment, except if you keep on doing it and then they kick back at you.

  Obbe lets go of the waist of his blue and white striped boxers. We see the bulge moving around, like a wave in the ocean.

  ‘Tiesey might suffocate,’ Hanna says.

  ‘My dick doesn’t suffocate, does it?’ Obbe says.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Isn’t he going to stink of pee?’

  My brother shakes his head. It’s a shame I can no longer see his willy. I can feel the tickly insects tickling inside my belly, though that should be impossible because since the incident with the bear, Mum has been giving me a big spoonful of some syrupy stuff that tastes of liquorice every evening. It says on the label on the bottle: To treat worms. I hadn’t told her I had been thinking about Johnny and Dieuwertje Blok, though mainly about Dieuwertje. Then she’d probably have a row with Dad because Mum doesn’t like made-up things, because stories in your imagination often leave out suffering and Mum thinks it should be part of things. She can never take a day off from thinking that because she’d feel guilty; she believes that everyone should bear their sins like lines for punishment in an exercise book.

  Obbe wiggles his leg and Tiesey rolls out onto the duvet. His black eyes look like match ends, there’s a black stripe along his back, and his right ear is folded double. It doesn’t matter how often you stroke it flat, the ear just curls back. Hanna’s just settling in against me when he picks up the glass of cloudy water from his bedside table. There’s a pile of milk caps next to the glass. They’re covered in sand. They used to call him the Flipper King at primary school. He beat everyone, even the cheats.

  ‘I was about to show you something, right?’

  ‘Wasn’t that it already?’ My mouth suddenly feels dry, and it’s hard to swallow. I keep picturing the white stuff that Obbe was talking about. Is it like the filling in the piping bag we use to make stuffed eggs on birthdays? Mum ke
eps it in the basement otherwise the whole house stinks of it. It must be difficult for the Jews not to secretly eat it, not to flick out the yellowish goo with green bits of basil with their fingers like I’ve secretly done sometimes. I left the egg whites, as there was no point to them without the filling. When Matthies was still here, they said, ‘It’s that time of year again, the egg-eaters have been busy,’ and I’d smile and get the second piping bag out of the fridge which they’d kept back just in case. Now they no longer celebrate their birthdays and Mum has stopped making stuffed eggs.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m only doing it now.’

  He drops Tiesey into the glass of water, covers it with his hand and begins to move it slowly back and forth. I can’t help laughing, it looks funny. Everything you can turn into a maths sum has a reassuring solution – I bet he’ll need to breathe again after one minute. The hamster moves faster and faster from one side of the glass to the other, its eyes beginning to pop out, its legs kicking about wildly. It’s only a few seconds before he starts to float like a grey air bubble in a spirit level. No one speaks. All we can hear are the butterflies flapping their wings. Then Hanna begins to cry with great sobs. There are footsteps on the stairs almost immediately. Startled, Obbe quickly puts the glass behind his Lego castle where the enemy is holding a ceasefire.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dad pushes open the door and looks around in irritation. My cheeks are red. Hanna is lying in a ball on the grey bedcovers.

  ‘Jas pushed Hanna off the bed,’ Obbe says. He looks me in the face. Nothing noticeable in his eyes. No air bubble being kept level. They’re as dry as a bone. When Dad’s looking the other way, Obbe briefly opens his mouth and pushes his finger in and out as though he needs to throw up. I quickly slide off the bed.

  ‘Right,’ Dad says, ‘off to your bedroom, you, and pray.’

  His shoe hits my bum; the poo stuck up it might have shot back up into my intestines now. When Mum learns the truth about Tiesey she’ll get depressed again and won’t speak for days. I glance at Hanna and Obbe one last time, then the Lego castle. My brother is suddenly busy with his butterfly collection. He probably just beat them out of the air with his bare hands.