The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  I mash the florets of broccoli on my plate. They’re just like mini Christmas trees. They remind me of the evening that Matthies didn’t come home, the hours I spent sitting on the windowsill with Dad’s binoculars around my neck. They were actually supposed to be for looking for the greater spotted woodpecker. I didn’t see a greater spotter woodpecker and I didn’t see my brother. The cord of the binoculars left a red stripe behind at the back of my neck. If only I could bring closer what was becoming increasingly far from us by just reversing my gaze, by looking through the big end of the binoculars. I’d searched the sky often enough with them – looking for the angels from the tree that Obbe and I had secretly got out of the box in the attic a week after our brother’s death. We’d rubbed them forcefully against each other (‘my juicy little angel’, Obbe had groaned affectedly, to which I’d replied ‘my sweet little piece of china’) before letting them fall out of his skylight into the gutter. The weather has turned them green. Some of them lie buried under leaves from the oak tree. Every time we go to check whether they’re still there, we’re disappointed. If the angels here lose the ability to fly after the most minor setback, how can they be with Matthies in heaven? How can they protect him and us?

  Eventually I twisted the lens caps back onto the binoculars and returned them to their case. I never got them out again, not even when the greater spotted woodpecker did return – their view will stay black forever.

  I take a big mouthful of broccoli. We always have a hot meal at lunchtime. Everything here is cold in the evening: the farmyard, the silence between Mum and Dad, our hearts, the bread spread with Russian salad. I don’t know how to sit on my chair. I shuffle around a bit to try to feel my burning bum hole, reminding me of Obbe’s finger, as little as possible. I mustn’t give anything away, otherwise my brother will make my rabbit as cold as the evenings. And I must have wanted it myself, right? You keep bulls calm by showing them your buttocks if you’re a cow.

  I can’t keep my eyes off the stethoscope lying next to the vet’s plate on the table. It’s the second time I’ve seen one in real life. I saw one once on Nederland 1, but you didn’t see the body because that would be too much nudity. I fantasize for a moment that the stethoscope is on my bare chest, that the vet lays his ear to the metal and says to Mum: ‘I think her heart is torn. Does it run in the family or is this the first time it’s happened? Perhaps she should go to the seaside where the air is clear. All that liquid manure gets into your clean clothes and the heart can get infected more quickly.’ I picture him taking a Stanley knife out of his trouser pocket, like the one Dad uses to cut the ropes of the silage grass packing – whoosh whoosh until it falls free of its shape. Then he’d draw lines on my chest with a felt-tip pen. I think about the Big Bad Wolf that ate the seven little goats and was cut open so they could be taken out alive – maybe a big girl would come out from inside me, freed of her fears, or someone who would be seen in any case, the girl who’d been hidden for too long beneath layers of skin and coat. When the stethoscope leaves my skin, he’ll have to lay his ear to my chest, and then just by breathing in and out, I can make his head go up and down so that he understands me. I’d say that it hurts everywhere and point to places where no one has ever been – from my toes to the crown of my head and everything in between. We could draw guiding lines between the freckles to give ourselves boundaries or to cut a figure out of me, just like those dot-to-dot pictures. But if he doesn’t hear my cry for help I’ll have to remove the metal from my chest, open my mouth as wide as possible and poke the round tip as far down my throat as I can. Then he’ll have to listen. Choking is never a good sign.

  Obbe elbows me in the ribs.

  ‘Hello, Earth to Jas, pass the gravy will you.’

  Mum hands me the jug. Its handle has broken off. There are globules of fat floating in the gravy. I quickly pass it to Obbe before he puts a downer on things by asking me what I was thinking about. He’d start listing all the boys at school, while the boy I do actually think about a lot has a memorial plaque at the place he always parked his bike. Things aren’t very cheerful anyway now the cows have gone and the vet is talking about the impact of foot-and-mouth on all the farmers in the village. Most of them don’t want to talk about it and those are the most dangerous ones, he says, most likely to be weighed down and end up doing something silly.

  ‘Hard to understand that,’ Dad says without looking at anyone, ‘you’ve always got your kids still.’

  I glance at Obbe whose head is almost touching his plate, as though he’s studying the structure of broccoli and seeing whether the florets can be used as umbrellas to hide ourselves under. I can see from his balled fists that he’s angry about what Dad said, or what Dad hasn’t said. We all know that Mum and Dad can be lead weights too, like the ones we use to keep the curtains hanging down in their place. I keep on watching the vet. From time to time he runs his tongue along the silver metal of his knife. It’s a handsome tongue – dark red. I think about the plants in Dad’s greenhouse, and how he uses a knife to cut across a vein before planting the cuttings with the leaves pointing upwards in the potting soil, then fastening them with a fence staple. I imagine the vet’s tongue touching my tongue. Will I finally uncurl then? When Hanna poked her tongue into my mouth a while back, I tasted that she’d eaten the last honey drop. I ask myself whether the vet’s tongue tastes of honey, whether that will calm the tickling insects in my belly.

  Dad sits at the table with his head in his hands. He’s no longer listening to the vet, who suddenly leans forward in a secretive manner and whispers, ‘I think your coat looks lovely on you.’ I don’t know why he’s whispering because everybody can hear, but I’ve seen people do that at other times, as though they want everyone to lean in a little, to prick up their ears, to be drawn towards them like a magnet and then to put everyone back in their place. It’s got something to do with power. I think it’s a shame that Hanna’s staying at a friend’s house. Otherwise she’d be able to hear that it won’t be much longer before we’re rescued. Maybe I should forget the incident with the cheese scoop. It did make me lose a bit of my belief in him, just like the time – I was in the fourth year of primary school – when Dad called me to the table. It was the first and last time we’d have a conversation at the table that wasn’t focused on the cows.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ Dad had said. My fingers felt for my knife and fork, to have something to hold on to, but it was long before dinner and the table hadn’t been laid yet.

  ‘Saint Nicholas doesn’t exist.’

  Dad didn’t look at me as he said it but stared at the coffee grounds in his cup, holding it aslant. Dad cleared his throat again. ‘The saint at school is our Tjerre, the regular milk customer, the bald one.’ I thought about Tjerre who sometimes rapped his head with his knuckles as a joke, making hollow sounds with his mouth. We loved it, every single time. I couldn’t imagine him with a beard and a red mitre. I tried to say something but my throat was as full as the rain metre in the garden. At last it overflowed and I began to sob. I thought about everything that was a lie: sitting in front of the open fire, singing Christmas songs in the hope he’d hear us, though at best only a coal tit had heard us; the mandarins we received in our left-out shoes that made our socks smell acidic. Maybe Dieuwertje Blok was fake too. The fact we had to behave, otherwise we’d be put in the saint’s empty sack and taken to Spain.

  ‘And Dieuwertje Blok then?’

  ‘She’s real, but the Saint Nicholas on television is an actor.’

  I looked at the pepernoten that Mum had put in a coffee filter for me. Everything we were given was carefully weighed, even these miniature spiced cookies. I left them untouched on the table, the tears kept on coming. Then Dad got up from the table, fetched a tea-towel and dried my tears roughly with it. He kept on scrubbing even though I’d stopped crying, as though my face was covered in boot polish – the polish that fed the illusion, the soot smears worn by the saint’s helpers. I wanted to pound on his
chest the way he’d pounded on the door for years, and then run away into the night and not come back for the present. They’d been lying all this time. Yet over the years that followed I tried to believe in the holy man just as determinedly as I believed in God – as long as I could picture them or see them on TV, and as long as I had something to wish or pray for, they existed.

  The vet puts the last broccoli floret on his plate into his mouth, leans forward again, and lays his knife and fork in a cross on his plate as a sign he’s finished eating.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Then you’re almost complete.’

  ‘Completely nuts, you mean,’ Obbe says.

  The vet ignores him. The idea that I’m almost complete and ready for someone makes me feel proud, even though it’s actually like I’m falling more and more apart – but I do know that complete is always a good sign. My collection of milk caps is almost complete; there are only three empty plastic cases, so at a certain point I’ll get the same feeling as when I leaf through my file and think about all the games I’ve won and lost. Though it must be harder to leaf through yourself, but perhaps you have to be a grown-up to do that, to stay at the same stripe on the door-post, no longer able to rub out your old height. And Rapunzel was twelve when she was locked up in a tower and rescued by a prince. Not many people know that her name is the German word for lamb’s lettuce.

  The vet looks at me for a long time. ‘I don’t know why you don’t have a boyfriend yet. When I was your age I would have known what to do.’ My cheeks get as hot as the sides of the gravy jug. I don’t know what the difference is, why he would have known what to do as a twelve-year-old but as an older man my father’s age he no longer does. Aren’t adults supposed to know everything?

  ‘Chance of rain tomorrow,’ Dad says out of the blue. He hasn’t listened to any of the conversation. Mum keeps on walking between the counter and the table so that no one will notice that she’s barely eaten a thing. I read in my nature book that ants have two stomachs: one for themselves and the other to feed other ants. I find this touching. I want two as well – then I could use one stomach to keep my mother at a reasonable weight.

  The vet winks at me. I decide to tell Belle about him tomorrow. Finally I’ve got someone to whisper about. I won’t tell her he’s got a lot of wrinkles, more than an unironed tablecloth, that he coughs like a calf with swine fever, that he’s maybe even older than my father and has got wide nostrils you could fit at least three chips in. I’ll tell her he’s even more handsome than Boudewijn de Groot. And that means something. After school, Belle and I often listen to his music in my attic bedroom. When we feel very sad – Belle can sometimes get very down when Tom doesn’t text her a big X at the end of a message but just a small one, even though when you type a full stop, the big one comes automatically and so he’s gone to the trouble to replace the capital letter with a small one – we say to each other, ‘There’s a drowned butterfly inside me.’ Then we simply nod, knowing exactly how the other feels.

  5

  Carrying the shovel that still has a bit of white paper from Obbe’s lantern sticking to it, and wearing my pyjamas, I go into the field behind the breeding stable we privately call the sperm barn. I dig a hole just next to the place where Tiesey is buried and where Obbe patted down the overturned earth with the back of the spade, and this time didn’t poke in a stick because it isn’t something we want to remember, that we want to look at. As I dig, the stabbing feelings in my belly get more and more intense. It makes me short of breath and I clench my buttocks tightly, whispering softly, ‘Wait just a little while, Jas, you can almost go.’ Once the hole is deep enough, I glance around quickly. Dad and Obbe are still asleep and Hanna is playing with her Barbies behind the sofa. I don’t know where Mum’s got to. She might even have popped next door to see Lien and Kees, who has just bought a new milk tank for when the new stock arrive – a twenty thousand litre one.

  I quickly untie the cords of my striped pyjama bottoms and drop them and my knickers to my ankles, feeling the ice-cold wind on my bottom, and then I squat and hover over the hole. In a last attempt to solve my poo problem by looking it up in the Bible yesterday evening, Dad came across a reference in Deuteronomy: ‘Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.’ He’d leafed on and closed the Bible with a sigh, meaning there was nothing useful for this problem there, but the lines had stuck in my head. It had kept me awake in the night. I tossed and turned in the dark and kept thinking of those three words, ‘outside the camp’. God must have meant outside the farmyard. Was that the only place I’d be able to poo? I didn’t say anything to my parents about my plan because not being able to poo is the only thing we still talk about, the only thing that makes them look up when I stand in front of them in the kitchen and lift my T-shirt, my swollen belly like an egg with a double yolk, feeling the same pride as when one of my silky fowl lays a massive white egg.

  I look back between my legs and feel the pressure in my bum. Whether it’s due to the olive oil or the Bible verses, it works. Only instead of a steaming brown trail descending into the earth like an enormous worm, a few droppings come out of my bum. I keep on pressing as the tears run along my clenched jaw and I feel myself grow dizzy. I have to go on and get everything out otherwise I’ll burst one day, and then I’ll be even further from home and from myself. The droppings look a bit like the ones my rabbit Dieuwertje does, but then one size bigger. Mini pasties. Granny once said that poo is healthiest when it looks like the greasy veal sausages she sometimes makes. My poo looks like anything but that.

  More and more steam comes out of the hole. I pinch my nose to keep out the smell, which is much worse than a stable full of crapping cows. When nothing else comes, I look around in search of leaves and suddenly notice that everything is bare or buried under a thin layer of frost. I don’t want to freeze shut like the plug in the bath-tub in the field which the cows drink water from in the summer. And so I pull my knickers and pyjama bottoms back up without wiping my bum, trying not to let the fabric touch the skin, otherwise everything will get dirty. As I turn around, I bend over the hole for a moment like an eagle hovering over its chicks. I look at the droppings lying there in a heap and begin to close the hole to cover the excrement. I flatten the earth with the shovel, stamp on it a few times with my wellies, and poke a stick in it so I’ll remember where I lost a piece of myself. I leave the field, put the shovel back among the other shovels and pitchforks, and think briefly about the boys next door who actually find in the toilet bowl all the things they’ve lost: a blue button, a Lego brick, plastic bullets from a gun at the fair, a bolt. For a moment I feel big.

  6

  Belle says, ‘Sadness doesn’t grow, only the space it takes up.’ It’s easy for her to talk. The space she’s talking about is only the size of a fish tank and came about when her two guppies died. Now she’s twelve and it has become an aquarium. That’s as far as it goes, while in my case it grows and grows and can no longer be stopped: at first it was six foot tall and now it’s as big as the giant Goliath from the Bible. I nod at Belle anyway. I don’t want the glass of the aquarium to break and for her tears to escape. I can’t handle people crying – I want to wrap them up in silver foil like my milk biscuits and put them in a dark drawer until they’ve dried out. I don’t want to feel any sadness, I want action; something to pierce my days, like bursting a blister with a pin so that the pressure is eased. But my thoughts keep straying to this afternoon when Mum had a shindy after the vet left. That’s what Dad calls everything we’re not to take too seriously: a shindy. Out of the blue, Mum suddenly said, ‘I want to die.’ She had simply continued clearing the table, filled up the dishwasher, and brushed the potato shoots that were on the chopping board into the peelings basket to give to the chickens.

  ‘I want to die,’ she repeat
ed, ‘I’ve had enough. If a car ran over me tomorrow and left me as flat as a squashed hedgehog, I’d be happy.’ For the first time I saw desperation in her eyes.

  Obbe had got up from the table. He pressed his fists into his crown. It didn’t calm him down. ‘Drop dead then, if you want.’

  ‘Obbe!’ I whispered. ‘She’s about to break.’

  ‘Can you see anyone breaking here? The only thing breaking is us.’ He’d thrown his mobile at the wall above the stove tiled in Delft blue, shouting, ‘Goddammit.’ His Nokia fell apart. I thought about the Snake game on there – the snake was probably dead now. Usually it only got tangled up in itself when it ate too many mice and started bulging out of the screen. Now it was broken.

  There was a deadly silence in which I only heard the tap dripping. Then Dad stormed in from the sitting room, his gammy leg bumbling behind him. He pushed Obbe roughly to the kitchen floor and held his arms behind his back.

  ‘Do it then – kill yourself – otherwise I’ll murder you all!’ my brother screamed.

  ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain,’ Dad cried. Mum squirted some washing-up liquid on a scouring sponge and scrubbed the oven dish.

  ‘You see,’ she whispered, ‘I’m a bad mother. You’d be better off without me.’ I’d clamped my hands over my ears until the screaming stopped and Dad let go of Obbe, until Mum opened the oven and pressed her wrist a few seconds to the still-hot baking tray to warm herself up inside.

  ‘You’re the best mother,’ I said, hearing in my voice that I was lying – it was as empty and hollow as the cowsheds. There was no life left in it. But Mum seemed to have forgotten what had just happened already.

  Dad raised his arms in the air. ‘You’re driving us mad, bonkers!’ he said, setting off for the wood store. Granny on the more religious side always said you had to nip arguments in the bud immediately. Were we the bud? And I thought, no, parents live on in their children, not the other way round – the madness lives on in us.