by lize Spit
The sharp, penetrating stench of cow shit overpowers the smell of chlorine. Pim’s father is driving the full manure spreader across the property, and every time it hits a bump, some of the slurry escapes from the nozzle. He waves at me and steers the rig towards the other side of the farm.
I take one hand off the pitchfork to wave back, and when I do, my weight shifts and the right prong slowly punctures the plastic. There’s no pop, I just feel something sighing against the leg of my pants. The air that comes out smells like waking up next to Pim in a very hot tent. The dolphin’s grin slowly fades.
I keep waving and smiling until the prongs of the pitchfork hit solid ground and Pim’s dad is out of sight. Why do tractors move so slowly? Why do farmers suspect so little?
I climb back up the ladder with my head held high and take a seat next to Laurens and Pim. I pull the four fifty-euro bills out of my pocket, smooth them out and lay them in Pim’s lap.
“The water’s too gross to swim in.”
Pim picks up the money and gives it back to me. He pats me gently on the knee and leaves his hand there. I can feel the blood pumping in his fingertips through the fabric of my pants. Three heartbeats. Three sorrys.
Suddenly we hear voices outside the barn. He pulls his hand back. I jump up and look out through a hole in the roof. Two girls are parking their bicycles next to ours. One is Evelien, who was a year behind us in primary school. But over the last two years, I haven’t seen her, I’ve just heard other people’s stories about her. People say she’s got an eating disorder—that there’s always this sour smell around her. Still, she was always surrounded by a flock of girls at school. They all wanted to be close to her, as if they hoped her skinniness was contagious.
Rumor had it she was in some kind of rehab in Lier, but that might be an exaggeration, because today, from where I’m standing, she doesn’t look like someone who’s been through treatment.
Hesitantly, their shadows pass by the silage mounds. They stop for a moment, maybe trying to figure out exactly where Jan died. That’s not so easy though: the police tape, the flowers, the candles—Pim’s mom got rid of it all right away.
A few seconds later, the barn doors slide open, their wheels groaning under the weight of the iron.
“Pim?” a girl’s voice calls.
“Up here! We’re in the hayloft.”
Laurens and Pim stare at the top rung of the ladder, their eyes full of expectation.
Two small hands appear, then a face. Not Evelien’s. This girl is small and chunky, with a round head, narrow blue eyes and a wide grin. She’s carrying a swim bag on her back, the straps digging into her shoulders. She hoists her leg over the final steps and climbs up onto the platform. She’s wearing tight leggings with an op art pattern that reminds me of a screen saver. They’re all out of shape from climbing the ladder, the crotch is hanging halfway down her thighs. She spreads her legs wide and hikes them up as high as possible. A camel toe forms at the top. Laurens and Pim exchange glances. The girl keeps smiling.
Evelien arrives at the top of the ladder. She looks as waifish close up as she does from afar. She’s wearing a jean jacket with long sleeves and boots with the laces loose around her narrow ankles.
“This is my cousin, Nelle,” Evelien says. “I’m supposed to keep an eye on her today. She loves swimming. I heard you’ve got a pool now, Pim.”
Nelle’s older than we are. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was going on thirty.
“I work at Mivas in Lier. I have three cats at home. I love swimming.” Her voice sounds hoarse, and every “I” has a different tone, as if she’s referring to three different people.
“Mivas is a special-needs workshop,” explains Evelien.
“I pack LU cookies,” Nelle says. “Dinosaur cookies, and other cookies. A lot of them get messed up. You can order a whole bag of messed-up cookies from me for two euros.”
Pim gives her a faint smile. Then he turns to Evelien.
“We were just about to play a game. You in?”
“You want to play, Nelle?” Evelien asks.
Nelle nods.
Pim explains the rules to Evelien—for the first time, apparently. He doesn’t look at Nelle, hoping they won’t apply to her.
Evelien listens in silence. Then, she puts her hand on Nelle’s shoulder.
“Did you hear that, cuz?” she says. “Two hundred euros! We could ride roller coasters at Bobbejaanland, buy a ton of popcorn.” She takes off her jean jacket and ties it around her waist. The sides flap down over her narrow hips.
“Yeah, or a swimming pool even,” Pim says.
“Can we work together?” Evelien asks.
Laurens looks at Pim, waiting for him to answer.
“We only have two hundred euros. You can team up, but you’ll have to share the prize money.”
I count their layers of clothing. There’s at least ten between the two of them. They’ve got the best chances of anybody yet.
I recite the riddle.
Why didn’t I come up with something simpler and less serious, something like “it’s green and slides down a mountain” or “what’s black-white-black-white-black-white-boom”? A skiwi, a nun falling down the stairs—answers that aren’t impossible to figure out. Then the girls would at least stand a chance.
“Now you can ask questions and try to figure out the answer,” I explain.
“Okay. Did the guy slip on something and fall?” Evelien ties the sleeves of her coat around her waist again, tighter this time.
“No,” I say.
“Damn.” She gestures at her cousin and points at her shoes. Nelle bends down and pulls them off. Evelien doesn’t give her a chance to ask the next question.
“Was there a second person involved who left the room?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
Evelien helps Nelle take off her jacket.
“Did he drown?”
“No.”
Nelle pulls her sweater over her head. Underneath is a boxy gray T-shirt.
“Was his death his own fault?”
“Yes.”
Pim presses his fingernails into his palm impatiently. Evelien points to the next item of clothing Nelle has to remove—her pants. Nelle immediately does as she’s told, pulling down her leggings with a smile. Maybe she’s used to Evelien bossing her around. She stands there in her T-shirt, the downy hair on her thighs standing on end.
“Does the water in the room have anything to do with his death?”
“Yes.”
Once Nelle’s T-shirt comes off, you can see her overall composition. Her upper body is a lot narrower than her lower body, yet both parts meet nicely in the middle.
Nelle puts her hands on her hips and wiggles them around like a lady in a shower-gel commercial.
“She would’ve been good for that game where you draw half a picture and pass it on,” says Pim. Nelle lowers her hands. Evelien isn’t laughing.
“Come on, Nelle, that’s enough. Time to go.” Evelien unbuttons her jean jacket from her waist and uses it to shield her cousin.
“What about the swimming pool?” Nelle protests. She takes off her underwear and tosses it over Evelien’s shoulder. “Here you go, guess again.”
The floral cotton panties land on the floor in front of us. Laurens tries not to look at them.
“Put your clothes back on, I have to pee.” Evelien pushes the pile of clothes into her cousin’s arms. Nelle looks down and hurries to get dressed. She doesn’t dare to fetch her underwear. She puts her leggings on backwards. The seat of the pants, which is stretched to the shape of her behind, sags in her lap.
“We never would have figured it out, I take it?” Evelien asks, looking only at me. I catch a whiff of that sour smell. It reminds me of Tessie.
“You guys still have five chances!” Pim says. “Don’t give up now.”
I shake my head.
“Bye, Eva,” Evelien says.
She snatches up the panties, stuffs them in her coat
pocket and climbs down the ladder ahead of Nelle. Once her head is out of sight, Pim sinks down on a hay bale, thoroughly pissed. He pulls out a few pieces of straw and throws them over the edge of the platform. They swirl down to the ground.
“There’s something wrong with the rules,” Laurens says. He sits down next to Pim, hawks a loogie and spits it behind the straw.
“Why do they always give mongols bowl cuts?” Pim crosses his eyes and sticks out rabbit teeth. “Makes them even uglier. I’m never eating dinosaur cookies again, by the way.”
Suddenly I remember very clearly the intention I’d set for myself at the start of high school: at my new school, I would be someone new, someone better, a different Eva. What intention had Pim set for himself when he found out he wasn’t going to be stuck with Laurens and me all day? Who was he trying to become?
“Nelle, Evelien, wait!” I shout. Nelle stops at the door, about ten meters from the foot of the ladder.
I stand up and pull the cash out of my pocket.
“Don’t, Eva!” Pim moves between me and the edge of the loft and watches me fold the four bills together. “Okay, okay fine. Give her one. Fifty’s more than enough.”
I throw down the entire wad of cash.
“What the hell are you doing?” Pim roars. He gives me a shove. I stumble to the side into a hay bale.
Laurens leans recklessly over the edge of the loft.
“Don’t just stare at it,” Pim cries. “Do something!”
Judging by the slow speed at which Laurens shuffles through the straw to the ladder, Nelle has already picked up the money. Before he’s even touched the ground, the cousins have left the farm.
“You didn’t owe them anything! That was all we had!” Pim shouts, spit spraying from his mouth. “Why did you do that?” He pushes me again, but I’m already seated. I don’t have an answer for him.
Laurens kicks over an upright bale half-indignantly. The dust makes all three of us sneeze.
When I get home, Tessie’s done playing Monopoly. I don’t ask who won.
Millennium Bug
THE MILLENNIUM BUG was all over the news. Even at Laurens’s butcher shop, they hung a sign in the window weeks before the end of the year that read DUE TO MILLENNIUM, NO CARDS!!, out of fear that every cent they had would evaporate into thin air.
“Better safe than sorry,” I heard Laurens’s mom say to customers before they left the store with change rattling in their pockets. She didn’t say anything to me. Maybe she wanted to prevent me from being sorry—not that I was all that safe at home anyway.
At the table on New Year’s Eve Jolan finally explained in layman’s terms what a “bug” was. To him, “layman’s terms” just meant that after every question he paused to flip his meat on the griddle.
“When computers were first invented in the sixties and seventies, they were much slower and had almost no memory. Right?”
Tessie and I hummed in agreement. But Jolan wanted to make eye contact with Dad.
“So there wasn’t much space to store data. To keep the costs down, all the dates were recorded in six digits, which turned out to be a pretty stupid idea.”
“Really? Why?” I asked.
“It was then, at that moment, that the bug became possible. Tonight, when everything switches to the twenty-first century, the computers are going to think that we’re back at nineteen hundred. Get it?”
Tessie cast a worried look at the computer in the corner of the room.
Dad, who had given no indication whatsoever that he had any idea what Jolan was talking about, suddenly interrupted in a booming voice.
“When the clock strikes twelve, nuclear power stations will explode, chemical companies will release clouds of gas, nuclear missiles will shoot off automatically—and, I hate to tell you this, but those rockets in the Eastern bloc, they’re aimed straight at us. Thermostats will jam, planes will fall out of the sky, respirators and other medical equipment will fail: in short,” he said, like a minister reading from a script, “at least one percent of all companies will go bankrupt.”
He took another sip of wine. “Eva, will you pass the pearl onions?”
Tessie put down her fork and passed him the jar because she was closer to it. Jolan removed his carefully grilled filets and offered one to Dad, but he turned it down.
“What about our computer?” Tessie asked softly. Mom took the jar of onions after Dad. She fiddled around in the vinegar with her little fork. The yellow whites of her eyes glistened. I came to her rescue, placing three little onions on the edge of her plate.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Dad said. He refilled his own glass, no one else’s.
“How much longer, Jolan?” I asked.
Jolan kept a close eye on his new waterproof G-Shock watch, which was sitting in a glass of water in front of him on the table.
“Thirty-five minutes and thirteen seconds. Twelve seconds. Eleven.”
For days, Jolan had been saying he wasn’t going to eat with us this New Year’s Eve. Mom didn’t raise any objections until she came home from the supermarket this morning with other people’s ideals.
“No child should spend New Year’s Eve with a watch and a diving mask in the bathtub,” she declared. “This is family time.”
Jolan tried to resist. Didn’t she understand? This was the only chance he would ever have to experience the turn of the century under water with his G-Shock. He had to seize the opportunity.
“I gave you that watch. I get the last word,” Mom declared.
Jolan opened his mouth to retaliate but stopped short and turned around.
I knew what he wanted to say. Anyone who goes to bed claiming that a chicken can lay three eggs a day doesn’t get to wake up the next morning and suddenly get the last word.
Fortunately, Jolan knew how to handle disappointment. By noon, he had a new plan. He spent hours synchronizing his watch with the world clock online, down to the second, timing how long it took to walk from the kitchen table to the backyard so he could tell us exactly when we had to go out to catch the fireworks or the first crashing planes.
At eleven o’clock, he carefully lowered the watch into the glass of water so he could still have his submerged countdown.
After Dad’s Millennium bug explanation, Tessie didn’t touch her food anymore. She just kept looking anxiously at the computer in the living room.
Nobody said anything, but we all knew it. She was fond of the thing. Or maybe “fond” wasn’t the right word, it was more sickening than that. In the months following the air salesmen’s visit, her strange back-door ritual became more elaborate.
She developed a little door-opening routine for every room in the house, a few innocent, barely noticeable steps, like tapping the little iron swing figurine on the sideboard in the hallway or turning over the soap in the bathroom.
In the living room, the most important thruway in the house, the ritual involved the computer: every time Tessie walked by it, she had to type something on the keyboard. Most of the time it was just a few quick keystrokes, sometimes more. She did it every time, whether the computer was on or not. In the morning, when no one was using it, it wasn’t such a problem. It seemed harmless and, most of the time, no one saw it. But after school, when the computer was in use, she’d take a detour around the veranda to avoid the living room.
A few weeks ago, I locked the veranda door and spent the entire morning on the computer. Not to trap Tessie, but in the hope of understanding her. If she was going to stick to her ritual, she’d have no choice but to walk through the kitchen and type on the keyboard.
During my thirteenth game of Minesweeper, I finally heard her coming down the stairs. She entered the living room, saw me sitting there, and immediately turned back into the hallway without setting foot in the room. She softly closed the door behind her. Then I heard her rattling the door handle to the veranda nervously. A few minutes later, she was back in the living room, waiting in the corner.
“Do you know whe
re the key to the door in the hallway is?”
“No,” I reply.
The shame of having to admit that she needed to borrow the computer keyboard was greater than her haste. I lost my game again, opened a new twenty-by-twenty minefield with only three mines and clicked around at random because I didn’t know the rules.
“Are you done, Eva?”
“I just want to win one game,” I say.
Tessie took a few steps closer so she could see the screen.
“The numbers tell you how many mines are bordering the square.”
Tessie took over the mouse for a moment. She clicked three times, which set off a chain reaction, safe area revealed. She smiled.
I looked down at her bony hand; her skin was almost as gray as the mouse. “Look. Like this,” she said. “Maybe try it with flags. They help in the beginning.” Then she retreated to a corner of the room and waited for me to leave.
“Do you need the computer?” I asked.
“No, you can finish,” she said.
After a few minutes, her presence became more compelling. She cleared her throat, sniffed, paced back and forth. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, the keyboard was neatly placed in the center of the table, and Tessie had disappeared into the kitchen.
In the days that followed, I kept my eyes and ears open, hiding in the living room in the hope of deciphering what she typed when no one was looking. I counted more and more keystrokes, more than the letters in her name but not enough for a whole sentence. I didn’t ask questions. Maybe it was like with the door: as soon as she knew someone was watching, she’d have to start all over again.
“Time for the countdown,” Jolan announced. “We’ve got five minutes and thirty seconds to assume our positions in the backyard, so if anyone needs to pee, now’s the time.”
“Who cares about peeing when there are nuclear missiles on the way?” Mom mumbled.
She stood up and gripped the back of the chair.
