The Discomfort of Evening

by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

  ‘Do you really want to die?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but pay no attention, I’m a lousy mother.’ She turned on her heels and carried the peelings basket to the shed.

  I was frozen to the spot for a moment and held my hand out to Obbe. His nose was bleeding. Obbe batted my hand away. ‘Shit-pants,’ he said.

  *

  Belle and I are sitting in the sperm barn on the dusty stone floor. In the middle of the barn there’s a dummy cow consisting of a metal frame with a piece of hide on top that’s supposed to drive the bulls crazy. Beneath the hide are metal rails with a black chair on them. The chair is made of leather. You move it forward and back to be able to catch the sperm. The hide is torn in places. It’s called Dirk IV and is named after a famous bull that sired hundreds of calves. They made a bronze statue of him and put it on a pedestal in the middle of the village square. I interrupt Belle in her argument that sadness always begins on a small scale and then expands. She knows life the way tourists know a village: they don’t know how to find the dark alleyways, the path forbidden to trespassers. I say, ‘Lie down on Dirk.’ Without asking why, Belle climbs up onto the dummy cow. I sit on the black leather chair beneath her. The hide is hollow on the inside where it’s reinforced with a tube. Belle’s feet dangle down over the sides – the toes of her All Stars are covered in mud, her shoelaces grey.

  ‘And now move your hips like you’re riding a horse.’

  Belle begins to move. I lean to the side to have a look. She’s taken hold of the top of the hide for a better grip.

  ‘Faster.’

  She goes faster. Dirk IV begins to squeak. After a few minutes she stops. Panting, she says, ‘This is boring and I’m tired.’

  I adjust the chair so that I am sitting exactly beneath her hips. I can go four holes further.

  ‘I know something exciting we could do,’ I say.

  ‘That’s what you always say, but this is totally dumb.’

  ‘Give it a chance.’

  ‘Pretend the cow’s Tom. You can do that.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Move again.’

  ‘What’s supposed to happen?’

  ‘In the end you’ll see wonderful colours, like a Fireball that keeps changing, and you’ll get to the other side of the bridge where there’s no sadness, where your guppies are still alive and where you’ll be in charge.’

  Belle closes her eyes. She begins to move back and forth. Her cheeks grow redder, her lips moister with saliva. I let myself sink back in the chair. Maybe I should put together a presentation for Mum and Dad, I think. I’d give it on toads and I’d explain how they’re supposed to mate. It’s important that Mum lies on top of Dad – her back is as fragile as a gingersnap. And that’s the only way Mum is going to start eating again, so that Dad will have something to hold on to. We should organize a toad migration through the farm. We’d put Dad at one side of the room and Mum on the other side and have them cross. We could also fill the bath so that they could swim together, just like the day when we got the new mint green bath-tub – it was two days before that day in December, and Mum and Dad had gone in it together. ‘Now they’re totally naked,’ Matthies had said and we’d giggled so much, picturing two apple fritters plunging into the frying fat. They’d come out golden brown, towels wrapped around their waists like paper napkins.

  The dummy cow’s hinges squeak even louder. Dad was proud of Dirk IV. He always patted the creature on its fake flank after using it. I suddenly feel my throat burning, my eyes stinging. The first snow of the year falls early, descending into my heart. It feels heavy.

  ‘I can’t see any colours.’

  I scramble up from the chair and stand next to Belle whose eyes are still closed. I quickly put on Dad’s pale green raincoat that was hanging over a chair next to the work counter in the shed. Then suddenly the door opens and Obbe pokes his head around it. His gaze goes from me to Belle and then back. He comes in and closes the door behind him.

  ‘What are you playing?’ he asks.

  ‘A stupid game,’ Belle says.

  ‘Get lost,’ I say. Obbe can’t join the game otherwise he’s sure to do something mean. He’s as unreliable as the weather here in the village. He’s still got blood on his nose from when he was pushed onto the kitchen floor.

  Some part of me feels sorry for him. Even though I’m not feeling it as much now he’s started swearing – and what’s more, he often steals food, or money from the holiday tin on the mantelpiece, reducing the chances of us going camping to nil, and ruining Dad’s savings for his bottom drawer. Now the most he’ll be able to buy is a toaster and a drying rack. One day he’ll steal Mum and Dad’s hearts too. He’ll dig a hole for them in the field, like one of the stray cats holding a cormorant it has caught in its mouth.

  ‘I know something fun,’ he says.

  ‘You’re not allowed to play.’

  ‘I don’t mind if you do. Jas only thinks of boring things.’

  ‘See, Belle says I can,’ Obbe says, taking some silver-coloured AI guns from the cupboard above the work counter and a box of Alpha sheaths. These are long sticks with coloured tips. They’re used to inseminate the cows that have failed to get pregnant. Obbe hands me a pair of blue gloves. When I don’t want to look at him I focus on the stubble on his chin. They feel like the cumin seeds that Mum sometimes has me stir into the curd. He started shaving a few days ago. I follow all his movements tensely.

  ‘You can be my assistant,’ he says.

  Again the cupboard bangs open. This time he takes out a little bottle containing some kind of gel. He smears some on the gun. ‘Lubricant’ it says on the label.

  ‘Now you have to take off your trousers and lie on your front on top of the cow.’ Belle follows his instructions without complaining. I suddenly realize she hasn’t been talking about Tom much recently, more about my brother. She wants to know what his hobbies are, his favourite food, whether he prefers blondes or brunettes and so on. I don’t want Obbe to touch her. What if the aquarium broke? What would we do then? Once Belle is lying on Dirk IV, I have to hold her buttocks apart, exposing her bum hole like the fountain pen holder at school.

  ‘It won’t hurt, will it?’ Belle asks.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I say with a smile on my face, ‘you are worth more than many sparrows.’ It’s from Luke, and Granny had once said those words when I was staying the night and got scared I’d die in the night.

  Obbe stands on an upturned feed bucket so that he can see better, aims the gun between Belle’s buttocks and pushes the cold metal into her without warning. She screams like a wounded animal. I let go of her buttocks in shock.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Obbe says, ‘otherwise it will hurt even more.’ Tears pour down her cheeks, her body shakes. I think feverishly about my leaky fountain pen. The teacher said I should leave it standing in cold water for a night, and then rinse it and blow it dry the next day. Should I lay Belle in cold water too? When I look at Obbe worriedly, he nods at the container in the corner where the straws of bull sperm are kept in nitrogen. Dad forgot to lock up the container. I’m guessing Obbe has had the same idea – rinse. I unscrew it, take out a straw and pass it to Obbe. The gun is still sticking out between Belle’s buttocks.

  ‘You’re the best assistant in the world.’

  The ice is beginning to melt a little. What we’re doing is good. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices that aren’t that nice, like when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and he finally gave him an animal. We also have to try different things before God is satisfied with our attempts to meet Death and leave us in peace.

  Now Obbe pushes the straw into the gun. There are so many alternatives and still we do it, without knowing that the nitrogen will burn her skin. I feel cowardice making my legs heavier when I run out of the sperm barn with Obbe hot on my heels. We both fly to the other side of the farmyard. ‘And lead us not into temptation but save us from evil,’ I whisper to myself, as I see Hanna l
ean her bike against the side of the farmhouse. Her pillow is clamped under her luggage binders. She’s carrying her overnight bag in her hand. When she hasn’t been to Granny’s for a long time, it gets full of silverfish. We crush them between our thumbs and forefingers, rubbing them to dust, then blow them from our fingers.

  ‘Come with us,’ I say, running ahead of her to the stack of hay-bales behind the rabbit shed. We crawl between a few bales of hay so that we’re out of sight of Dad, the crows and God.

  ‘Will you hold me?’ I ask.

  I try not to cry about Belle’s screams that are still ringing in my ears, her eyes opened wide, burst like half-full fishbowls.

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ Hanna gives me a worried look. ‘You’re shaking all over.’

  ‘Because … because otherwise I’ll burst,’ I say, ‘just like that hen of Dad’s when the egg was too big and was sticking half out of its bum. If Dad hadn’t killed it, it would have burst into pieces and its innards would have flown everywhere. I’m about to burst like that.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Hanna says, ‘that poor creature.’

  ‘I’m a poor creature too. Won’t you hold me now?’

  ‘I’ll hold you.’

  ‘You know,’ I say, as I press my nose into her hair which smells of baby shampoo, ‘I do want to be bigger, but not for my arms to grow too. Right now you fit in them perfectly.’

  Hanna is silent for a moment, then she says, ‘When they get too big, I’ll just wrap them around me twice, like my winter scarf.’

  7

  That night I dream about Belle. We’re in the woods at the edge of the village, just by the ferry, and we’re playing the Fox Hunt game. I don’t know why, but Belle’s wearing my mum’s Sunday overcoat and her Sunday hat with the kind of gauze over it and a black ribbon on the side. The seam of the coat drags along the ground, picking up sticks and mud; it rustles as she walks. Only then do I notice that Belle and the fox have fused into something part human, part animal. We walk further into the woods and end up lost between the tall, thin trees that resemble upright boot-jacks in the dark. Wherever I walk, Belle appears with her rusty red fox’s body.

  ‘Are you the fox?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘get lost before I eat you up like a fresh chicken.’ She raises her chin disdainfully and tosses back her hair.

  ‘Moron,’ she says, ‘I’m the fox. Now I have to ask you a question and if you can’t answer it, you’ll throw up or get the runs and you’ll die a premature death.’ Her nose and ears have suddenly become pointed. Everything sharp has extra value: teeth to bite through food, hearing to listen to sounds. The fox’s body suits her. Each time she takes a step forwards, I take one back. I’m expecting her to let out an eerie scream at any moment like in the barn, that her eyes will open as wide as those of a pike caught on a hook. Helpless.

  ‘Is your brother really dead or is Death your brother?’ she asks at last. I shake my head and study the toes of my shoes.

  ‘Death has no family, that is why he keeps looking for new bodies so that he won’t be lonely. Until that person is under the ground, then he looks for a new one.’

  Belle reaches out her hand. In the dream I suddenly hear what the pastor once said: ‘The only way to combat your enemy is to make him your friend.’

  I look back to take in a breath of fresh air, one without any germs in it, and ask, ‘What would happen if I gave you my hand?’

  Belle moves closer. She smells of burning flesh. Suddenly her bum is covered in sticking plasters. ‘I’d eat you up in a flash.’

  ‘And if I didn’t give you my hand?’

  ‘I’d eat you up slowly, that would hurt more.’

  I try to run away from her but my legs turn to jelly beneath my body, my wellies are suddenly too big for my feet.

  ‘Do you know how many voles in the belly of a fox would mean he no longer had to fathom his own emptiness?’ When I finally run away from her, she calls after me with an inbuilt echo effect, a voice for playing hide-and-seek. ‘Dear vole, vole, vole.’

  8

  Dad squints to figure out how high the silver-plated skates should hang. He has three screws clamped between his lips in case one falls, and he’s holding an electric drill. Mum stands, damp-eyed, watching from a distance, the vacuum cleaner hose held aloft. I look at her white vest which is visible because the belt of her dressing gown has come loose, and I can see her saggy breasts through the thin fabric. They look just like two egg meringues, the kind Obbe sometimes makes and sells in the playground in freezer bags, four at a time. If the egg is too old the white gets thinner and this makes the meringue soggy. Dad climbs down the kitchen steps and Mum turns off the vacuum cleaner, making the silence seem silver too.

  ‘They’re crooked,’ Mum says then.

  ‘They aren’t,’ Dad says.

  ‘Yes, they are. Look, from here you can see they’re crooked.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t stand there. Crooked doesn’t exist, they hang differently from every angle.’

  Mum pulls her dressing gown belt tight, hurries out of the living room, pulling the vacuum cleaner along with her by its hose – it follows her around the house all day like an obedient dog. Sometimes I’m jealous of that ugly blue beast – she seems to have more of a relationship with it than with her own children. At the end of every week I see her cleaning its tummy with great love and putting a new hoover bag in it, while mine is about to burst.

  I look at the ice skates again. The insides are lined with red velvet. They’re not hanging straight. I don’t say anything about it. Dad has gone to sit on the sofa and is staring ahead glassily. There’s a bit of dust on his shoulders. He’s still holding the drill in his hand.

  ‘You look like a scarecrow, Dad,’ Obbe, who has just come in, says in a challenging tone. I hadn’t heard my brother come back until about five in the morning. I lay waiting, my heart pounding, analysing every sound: the slaloming of his footsteps, the way he felt along the wall, forgot to skip the creaking steps – the sixth and the twelfth. I heard him hiccuping and not long after that he threw up into the toilet in the bathroom. This has been the pattern for a few nights in a row. My pyjamas are constantly soaked in sweat. According to Dad, vomiting is an old leftover sin the body needs to get rid of. I knew Obbe erred by killing animals, but what he did wrong by going to barn parties, I didn’t understand. What I did know was that he kept putting his tongue in different girls’ mouths. I could see that through my bedroom window – he stood there in the light of the stable lamp as though he was Jesus, surrounded by a heavenly glow, and then each time I’d press my mouth to my forearm and use my tongue to run circles on my sweaty skin. It tasted salty. This morning I didn’t say much to Obbe, so as not to inhale any bacteria that would make me throw up too. It reminded me of the first and last time I’d been sick, when Matthies had still been alive.

  It was a Wednesday – I was about eight – and I’d gone with Dad to fetch bread from the bakery in the village. On the way back, he gave me a currant bun, an extra-large one. It was still deliciously fresh, without blue and white spots. When we arrived at Granny’s – we always dropped her off a feed-bag full of bread – I started to feel nauseous. We walked around the back because the front door was more for decoration, and I’d thrown up onto the soil of her vegetable patch, the currants swimming in the brownish puddle like swollen beetles. It was the spot where Granny planted her carrots. Dad had quickly kicked a layer of soil over it with his boot. When the carrots were pulled up, I expected Granny to get sick at any moment and die because of me. At the time I wasn’t yet afraid I would die myself, because that only came when Matthies didn’t come home, when the incident in the garden became multiple versions of itself. In the worst version, I’d escaped death by the skin of my teeth. I sometimes wondered whether the girls pushed their tongues so far down Obbe’s throat that this was why he threw up, like when you stick a toothbrush too far into your mouth and it makes you gag. Mum and Dad didn’t ask where he’d be
en or why he kept stinking of beer and cigarettes.

  *

  ‘Shall we go for a bike ride?’ I whisper to Hanna, who is sitting behind the sofa, drawing. None of her figures has a body, only a head, reflecting the way we’re only focused on other people’s moods. They look sad or angry. She has her overnight case clenched under her right arm. Since she came back from her sleepover, she’s been carrying her case around all over the place, as though she wants to hang on to the possibility of escape. We’re not allowed to touch it or even comment on it.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To the lake.’

  ‘What do you want to do there?’

  ‘The Plan,’ is all I say.

  She nods. It’s time to set our plans in action – we can’t stay here any longer.

  In the hall Hanna puts on her anorak that hangs on the blue coat peg. Obbe’s is yellow, mine is green. Next to mine there’s a red peg. The coat isn’t missing but the body that should be wearing it is. Only Mum and Dad’s hang on wooden hangers, which are warped from the damp of rain showers in their collars. They were once the only reliable shoulders in the house but are now sagging more and more.

  I suddenly think of the time that Dad took hold of me by my hood. Matthies had only been dead a couple of weeks. I’d asked Dad why we weren’t allowed to talk about him, and whether he knew if there was a library in heaven where you could borrow books without getting a fine if you were late taking them back. Matthies didn’t have any money with him. We forgot to return our books so often – particularly the Roald Dahls and the Angry Witch series, which we read in secret because our parents said they were godless books. We didn’t want to entrust them back to the librarian. She was never nice to us. Matthies said she was afraid of children with greasy fingers and children who folded over the corners of the pages. Only children who didn’t have a real home, a place they could always return to, made dog-ears – this was why they had to keep a record, the way I would later myself even though mine were more like a mouse’s ears. When I asked Dad that question, he’d picked me up by my hood and hung me from the red peg. I dangled around a bit with my feet swinging but I couldn’t get myself free. The ground had disappeared from beneath my feet.