The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  ‘Nothing what?’

  ‘Nothing, Dad.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. How dare you talk back to me after ruining the entire supply of beans when you unplugged the freezer.’

  I stare up at the sky because I don’t know what to do with myself. For the first time I notice that I’ve tensed my muscles too, and that I’d like to push Dad’s head into the ink like a fountain pen before writing an ugly sentence with it – or one that’s about Matthies and how much I miss him. My thoughts startle me immediately. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ And straight away I think: and hopefully the days on the other side, not just here in this stupid boring village. Obbe grabs the Coke bottle from the ground and greedily drinks the last bit without asking me if I want any more. Then he gets up to continue with the hay.

  The last round goes slower. It’s my job to steer the tractor and Obbe’s to throw the bales onto the cart so that Dad can stack them. Dad keeps shouting that I have to speed up or slow down. Now and then he suddenly tears open the tractor door and pushes me roughly from the seat, before tugging hard at the wheel to stop us from driving into a ditch, sweat dripping from his forehead. As soon as he’s back on top of the stack, taking bales from Obbe, I think: if I accelerate hard, just once, he’ll fall off the cart. Just once.

  *

  After the haymaking, Obbe and I lean against the back wall of the cowshed. He has a piece of straw sticking out through the gap between his front teeth. In the background you can hear the buzzing of the cow brushes that spin across their backs to stop them itching. It’s long before feeding time so we’re free for a while. Obbe chews on his straw and promises to tell me the password for The Sims on the computer if I help him with his mission. With the password you can get stinking rich and make the avatars French kiss each other. A shiver runs through my body. Sometimes when Dad comes to wish me goodnight, he sticks his tongue in my ear. It’s not as bad as the finger with green soap, but still. I don’t know why he does it. Maybe it’s just like the lid of the vanilla custard that he licks clean every evening with his tongue, as it’s a waste otherwise, he says – and the same with my ears as I often forget to clean them with cotton buds.

  ‘Not something to do with death, is it?’ I say to Obbe.

  I don’t know if I’m strong enough to meet death now. We’re only allowed to appear before God in our Sunday best, but I don’t know what the rules are for death. I can still feel Dad’s anger weighing down on my shoulders. At school I don’t take sides when there are fights. I watch from a distance and support the weakest person inside my head. When it comes to death, I can hardly stick up for myself, as I’ve never learned how to. Even though I sometimes try to look at myself from a distance, it doesn’t work, I’m stuck inside. And the incident with the hamster is still fresh in my memory. I know how I’m going to feel afterwards, but this doesn’t outweigh my curiosity to see death and understand it.

  ‘There’s always the risk of running into him.’

  Obbe spits the straw out from between his teeth, and a white splatter lands on the pebbles.

  ‘Do you get why we’re not allowed to talk about Matthies?’

  ‘Do you want the password or not?’

  ‘Can Belle join in too? She’s coming over in a bit.’

  I don’t tell him she’s mainly coming for the neighbour’s boys’ willies, because I’d been boasting about them and said they looked a bit like the pale croissants we sometimes had at hers for lunch, made from dough her mother got out of a tin and rolled up before putting them in the oven and baking them brown.

  ‘Sure,’ Obbe says, ‘as long as she doesn’t start blubbering.’

  *

  A little later Obbe gets three cans of Coke out of the basement, hides them under his jumper and gestures to me and Belle. I know what’s going to happen and feel calm. So calm that I forget to clamp my zip between my teeth. Maybe it’s also to do with the fact that Lien next door and her husband Kees have complained. They think the way I cycle along the dike with my sleeves pulled over my fingers and my zip between my teeth is dangerous. Mum and Dad had waved away their concerns like a low bid for a calf at auction.

  ‘It’s temporary,’ Mum said.

  ‘Yes, she’ll grow out of it,’ Dad said.

  But I won’t grow out of it – I’m actually growing into it and getting stuck, and no one will notice.

  When we open the door to the rabbit shed, Belle is talking about the biology test and Tom, who sits two rows behind us, has black hair down to his shoulders, and always wears the same checked shirt. We suspect he doesn’t have a mother, as why else does no one wash his clothes or make him wear something else? According to Belle, Tom’s stared at her for at least ten minutes, which means that at any moment tits could start growing under her T-shirt. I’m not happy for her but I smile all the same. People need small problems in order to feel bigger. I’m not desperate to get tits. I don’t know if that’s strange or not. I’m not longing for boys either but for myself, but you must never reveal that, just like how you keep the password to your Nokia secret so that no one can break into you unexpectedly.

  It’s warm and dark in the rabbit shed. The sun has shone down on the plasterboards of the roof all day long. Dieuwertje lies stretched out in his hutch. Mum took yesterday’s soggy leaves out of his hutch and replaced them with fresh ones: she forgot sweets for the sweets tin, but not the leaves. Obbe slides the manger from the wood and puts it on the floor. He takes a pair of scissors from his pocket: there’s a bit of tomato sauce sticking to the edges from when Mum cuts open the tops of the Heinz packets. Obbe makes a cutting gesture, and sunlight falls through the chinks in the shed wall momentarily and reflects off the metal of the blades. Death is giving a warning signal.

  ‘First I’ll cut off the whiskers, as those are the sensors, and then Dieuwertje won’t know what he’s doing.’ One by one he cuts off the whiskers and lays them in my outstretched palm.

  ‘Isn’t that bad for Dieuwertje?’ asks Belle.

  ‘It’s about the same as if we burn our tongue and then taste less. It’s pretty harmless.’

  Dieuwertje darts into all the corners of his hutch but fails to dodge Obbe’s hand. Now that all the whiskers are gone, he says, ‘Do you want to see them mating?’

  Belle and I look at each other. It’s not part of our plan to cut off the whiskers and see whether they grow back, but the worms have returned to my belly. Since Obbe showed me and Hanna his willy, Mum’s worm drink has been going through me even faster: I deliberately complain about having an itchy bottom. Sometimes I dream that worms as big as rattlesnakes are coming out of my anus: they have lions’ jaws and I’ve fallen into the hollow in my mattress like Daniel in the lion pit and have to promise that I trust in God, but I keep seeing those filthy hungry faces with their snakes’ bodies. It’s not until I’m crying for mercy that I awake from the nightmare.

  Obbe nods at the dwarf rabbit in the hutch opposite Dieuwertje’s. I think of Dad’s words: never let a large rabbit cover a small one. It’s wrong: Dad’s two heads taller than Mum and she survived when she gave birth to us. This must be possible too then, and that’s why I press the little rabbit into Belle’s arms. She hugs it for a moment, then puts it in Dieuwertje’s hutch. We watch in silence as Dieuwertje carefully sniffs at the dwarf rabbit, hops around it, begins to stamp its back feet on the ground and then first jumps onto the front before jumping onto the back. We can’t see his willy. All we can see are his heated movements and the look of fear in the little rabbit’s eyes, the same look I saw on the hamster.

  ‘Desire without knowledge is not good – how much more will hasty feet miss this way!’ Dad sometimes says when we get too covetous about things we want, and at that moment Dieuwertje lets himself fall sideways off the little animal. I briefly wonder whether Dad lets himself fall the same way each time he’s done it. Perhaps that’s why his leg is deformed and always hurts. May
be the story of the combine harvester was invented because it’s more believable and free from shame. Just when we want to take a breath of relief, we see that the dwarf rabbit is dead. There’s nothing spectacular to look at. It closed its eyes and departed. No convulsions or cries of pain; not a glimpse of death.

  ‘What a stupid game,’ Belle says.

  I see that she’s going to cry. She’s too soft for this kind of thing. She’s like the whey cheese is made of, while we’re already further in the process with a plastic layer around us.

  Obbe looks at me. There are pale downy hairs growing on his chin. We say nothing but both know that we’ll have to repeat this until we understand Matthies’s death, even though we don’t know how. The stabs inside my belly become more painful, as though someone’s poking a pair of scissors into my skin. The soap still hasn’t helped yet. I put the whiskers in my coat pocket with the shards of the cow and the cheese scoop, pull the tab from the can of Coke and put the cold metal to my mouth. Over the edge of it I see Belle looking at me expectantly. I have to fulfil my promise now. Jesus had followers too because He always gave them something that made Him seem credible. I have to give something to Belle so that she doesn’t turn from a friend into an enemy. Before I take her to the peephole in the yew hedge, I tug at Obbe’s sleeve and whisper, ‘What’s the password then?’

  ‘Klapaucius,’ he says, grabbing the little rabbit from Dieuwertje’s hutch and putting it under his jumper where it must still be cold from the Coke cans. I don’t ask what he’s going to do with it. Everything that requires secrecy here is accepted in silence.

  *

  Belle is sitting on a fishing chair on the other side of the yew hedge. I curl my little finger in front of the peephole.

  ‘That’s not a willy,’ Belle cries, ‘that’s your little finger.’

  ‘It’s not the right weather for willies. You’re out of luck,’ I say.

  ‘When’s a good day then?’

  ‘I don’t know, you never do. Good days are rare here in the countryside.’

  ‘It’s all just a pack of lies, isn’t it?’

  A lock of Belle’s hair is stuck to her cheek – it had dangled into the can of Coke. She burps behind her hand. At that moment we hear laughter behind the hedge, and see the boys next door jumping into the inflatable paddling pool and floating on their brown backs, like raisins being soaked in brandy.

  I tug at Belle’s arm.

  ‘Come on, let’s ask if we can play at theirs.’

  ‘But how are we going to get to see the willies?’

  ‘They always have to pee at some point,’ I say, with a conviction that makes my chest swell. The idea that I’ve got something someone else is longing for makes me bigger. Side by side we go next door. My belly is full of bubbles. Will the worms inside me survive the Coke?

  12

  My fascination with willies must have come from when I played with the naked little angels when I was ten. When I took them out of the Christmas tree, I felt the cold porcelain between their sturdy legs like a bit of seashell in the chicken grit, and laid my hand on top like a twig of mistletoe, at the time protectively and this time out of an endless longing that has mainly nestled in my underbelly and is growing in there.

  ‘I’m a paedophile,’ I whisper to Hanna. I feel my breath travel across the hairs on my arms and try to lie back against the edge of the bath so that I don’t feel it. I don’t know what makes me more nervous: feeling my breath on my skin, or the idea that one day I’ll stop breathing and that I don’t know which day that will be. However I rearrange myself, I still keep feeling my breath. The hairs on my arms stand up; I dip them into the water. You’re a paedophile, you’re a sinner. Obbe taught me that word after he saw it on TV at a friend’s house. They’re not on Nederland 1, 2 or 3 because no one wants to see their faces on TV. Obbe said that they touched little boys’ willies, though from the outside they look like normal people with normal lives who are older than us. There are five years between me and the boys next door, a whole hand’s worth. It must be the case that I’m one of them, and that someday I’ll be hunted down and driven into a corner like the cows into the racks when we want to move them to a new bit of field.

  After eating, Mum had passed around a damp flannel for us to take turns cleaning our ketchup mouths and sticky fingers. I didn’t want to take it. Mum wouldn’t forgive me if I wiped my sinful fingers on the same flannel she pressed her lips to – she hadn’t eaten any macaroni with ketchup at all but still scrubbed her mouth clean. Maybe it was a veiled attempt to give us an advance goodnight kiss on our mouths – she was coming to give us one less and less often. I went upstairs myself now and pulled the duvet up to my neck, the way I’d seen in a film at Belle’s house, and then someone always came and tucked the duvet under the main character’s chin, which never happened to me, and sometimes I woke up shivering from the cold, pulled up the duvet myself and whispered, ‘Sleep tight, dear main character.’

  Before the flannel got to me, I pushed my chair back and said I felt the urge. The word ‘urge’ made everyone around the table look up hopefully: maybe I’d finally have to poo at last. But on the toilet, I waited until I heard all the chairs being shunted back, until my bottom grew cold and I’d read the birthdays on the calendar above the sink three times. With a pencil from my coat pocket I drew very faint crosses after each name, so faint you could only see it from close up, with the biggest cross after my birthday in April, and I wrote A.H. after it for Adolf Hitler.

  The boy next door’s willy had felt soft, like Granny’s meatloaf I had to roll sometimes on Sundays on the counter, sprinkled with herbs. Only meatloaf is greasy and rough. I wanted to keep holding on to the willy but the stream grew thinner and stopped. The boy moved his hips back and forth, making his tinkle jig around, and splashes ended up on the grey tiles. After that he pulled up his boxers and jeans. Belle watched from a distance. She was allowed to do up his jeans. You always have to begin from the bottom with an important job – from there you can grow to the top. Belle won’t be able to forget the dead rabbit in a hurry, but this calmed her: I’d kept my word. I’d grabbed her finger and pushed it against the boy’s willy, saying unnecessarily, ‘This is a real one.’

  *

  ‘I’m a paedophile,’ I repeat. Hanna squeezes a bit of shampoo from a bottle and rubs it in her hair. Coconut. She says nothing but I know she’s thinking. She can do that, think before she speaks; with me it’s the other way around. When I try it, my head suddenly empties out and my words are like the cows that lie down in the wrong place in the shed to sleep, where I can’t get to them.

  Then Hanna begins to giggle.

  ‘I’m serious!’ I say.

  ‘You can’t be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Paedophiles are different. You’re not different. You’re like me.’

  I let myself sink back into the bath-water, pinch my nose shut and feel my head touch the bottom. Underwater I can see the hazy contours of Hanna’s naked body. How long will my sister keep believing that I’m no different from her, that we form a unit, while there are enough nights when we lie separate from each other in bed and sometimes she can no longer keep up with my train of thoughts.

  ‘And you’re a girl,’ Hanna says as soon as I resurface. There’s a crown of bubbles around her head.

  ‘Are all paedophiles boys then?’

  ‘Yes, and much older, at least three hands, and with grey hair.’

  ‘Thank God.’ I may be different but I’m not a paedophile. I picture the boys in my class. Not one of them has grey hair. According to the teacher, only Dave has an old soul. We’ve all got an old soul. Mine is already twelve years old. That’s older than the neighbour’s oldest cow and he says she’s ready for the scrap-heap – she hardly produces any milk.

  ‘You can say that again – thank God,’ Hanna says loudly and we giggle, get out of the bath and dry each other, before pulling our heads into our pyjama tops like snails in search of protectio
n.

  13

  The warty skin hangs loose around the skeletons. Every few seconds they puff out their cheeks, as though they are gathering air so they can say something but keep changing their minds. For a moment I want to cut open the warts to see what’s inside them, but instead I rest my arms on my desk and lay my chin on my hands. They’ve hardly eaten anything since the toad migration. Maybe they’ve joined the resistance like Mum, although I wouldn’t know what they were rebelling against. In the Second World War, resistance was always against others – now it’s only directed at ourselves, like with my coat, which is a rebellion against all the illnesses listed in the radio requests on The Musical Fruit Basket. I’m more and more scared of all the things you can catch. And sometimes, I even imagine that during gym I’ll look at the queue waiting to jump the pommel horse and my classmates will start throwing up one by one – the vomit like porridge around their ankles and fear riveting me to the linoleum – my cheeks as hot as the heating pipes in the ceiling. As soon as I blink, the vision disappears again. To curb my fear, every morning I break a few peppermints into four on the edge of the table and keep them in my trouser pocket. When I feel sick or think I’m going to throw up, I eat one. The mint flavour makes me calm.

  The headmaster won’t let me leave early. ‘There’s usually a deeper underlying issue with children who are off school sick for a long time,’ he said, looking past me as though he could see Mum and Dad’s faces behind me, and the thing that could happen any moment, namely that absent-minded thing called Death who always took the wrong person or, the other way round, let them live.

  ‘As long as you don’t start spitting,’ I say to the toads, taking two earthworms I got from the vegetable patch this afternoon before Belle came round out of a paper handkerchief. The earthworm is one of the strongest animals because it can be cut in half and still carry on living. They’ve got nine hearts. The worms wiggle around a bit as I hold them in a pincer grip above the head of the fattest toad; its eyes move back and forth. Their pupils are stripes – a slotted screwdriver, I think to myself. Handy to know if I have to take them apart one day to find out what’s wrong with them, the way I did with the toasted sandwich maker that was covered in melted cheese. The toads refuse to open their mouths. I rub my legs together a bit – the knickers from school are itchy. I’ve been wetting myself a lot recently and hiding the wet knickers under my bed. That’s the only good thing about grief: Mum’s nose is constantly blocked so she doesn’t smell the knickers when she comes to wish me goodnight.