The Melting

by lize Spit

  MY CROTCH IS numb. To keep it from breaking open or bleeding again, I bike home standing up. Even after I’m out of sight of the butcher shop, I can still feel the sting of their eyes.

  In the field across from our backyard are a couple of cows from Pim’s farm; they don’t look up as I pass by. Cows are never aware of the evil around them. Maybe Laurens is right: they’re nothing but millions of threads.

  But what about humans, aren’t we just spun together too? Every pore could be the back of a button, like a navel. That could explain why my limbs are numb. While I was being knocked around by Laurens and Pim, my threads must have come loose.

  As I turn down my street, I hit the brakes in time to glance over the hedge to make sure the coast is clear.

  Pim’s bike is nowhere in sight. The grass, dry as straw, is swaying in the summer breeze. The swing rocks gently back and forth. The Christmas trees are the only ones that are still bright green, like Playmobil trees. The dog is lying on the ground licking herself. Her leash is tied to the stand of the closed umbrella. Tessie is sitting at the plastic patio table in the sun, her back towards me. She’s just unfolded the Monopoly board.

  I stand at the edge of the garden with the bike frame between my legs.

  Tessie starts carefully counting the money. She arranges the orange bills into a pile, keeping count under her breath. Then she takes each pile with both hands and taps it on the edge of the table until there are no corners or edges sticking out. She lays out the money in neat rows. Then she distributes the start capital for two players; each one gets thirty thousand francs.

  Just as she finishes setting up the game, she stops to scratch her head. One of the ten-thousand-franc bills blows away. Tessie sees it too. She jumps out of the chair, plucks the slip of purple paper from the grass and sinks to the ground. She lands in the middle of the yard like a beetle on its back. The hand clutching the bill falls open but there is no wind now, the ten thousand francs doesn’t move. For a few seconds, she seems unconscious.

  Then she crawls to her feet. Back at the table, she takes a sip from her glass of water. Without a trace of regret, she dumps all the venture capital back into the bank, along with the other money, and starts counting everything out all over again. She forms the same stacks, first orange, then blue, then beige. Everything is tapped down to the same size on the edge of the table.

  Maybe she was waiting for the itch, for that sigh of wind to send the money fluttering. Maybe this is not preparation for a game, maybe this is the game.

  The sun is burning down on my skin. As long as I’m watching, her behavior seems less harmful. I’m the audience that makes these steps seem sort of justified.

  I keep watching until she has finished counting, but again, something goes awry. She starts over. The longer I stand at the edge of the yard watching her repetitions, the less it seems like this is really happening. Is this still the same day it was this morning? Is this still the same sun? Is this really my house, my sister, my backyard? Nothing has changed, but nothing is the same either.

  I lean my bike against the wall of the garage, heading for the patio so I can slip through the sliding door and into the house.

  Without stopping what she’s doing, Tessie follows me with her gaze. I can tell by the way her eyes move that I’m walking strangely. I try to move differently, but the harder I try, the wobblier I become.

  Tessie stops counting and waits for me to pass.

  “What are you doing in Laurens’s T-shirt?” she asks right before I slip through the fly ribbons. I keep moving. Her eyes sink to my crotch.

  For the first time, she doesn’t ask if I want to play Monopoly with her.

  Mom is asleep in the armchair. All I can see is a tuft of hair sticking out over the back. The cat tries to play with it.

  Obviously, mothers would never choose someone else’s kid over their own. That’s why they’re mothers.

  I go into the bathroom, fill up a cup from the faucet and drink it empty. The water tastes like toothpaste. I drop into the chair with Dad’s shirt hanging on the back, my shoulder blades pressing back against the breast pockets. There’s a pack of cigarettes in each one. Now that I’m seated, the pain shoots through my lower abdomen in quick bursts.

  Without taking off Laurens’s T-shirt, I look down at the big black letters on the front: JAMAICA. Beside them is a colorful palm tree. Laurens wore this shirt a lot this summer. Over the carnival weekend. The day he left for France.

  My mouth is filling up with saliva again. Mom always told us we weren’t allowed to throw up in the bathtub because it would clog the drain. I lean over the tub with my mouth open. There’s nothing left, nothing but water, bile and tears. Teeth chattering, I take off the T-shirt, wipe my lips and pull the shirt on the chair over my shoulders. It smells too much like Dad. I shrug it off.

  As long as I don’t know what I’m going to do, there’s no point in getting off this chair. I can’t go to the doctor. Who knows, maybe Laurens and his mom are already at the hospital waiting to have Laurens’s forehead stitched up. And even if they aren’t, I can’t just walk in and tell the nurse what happened. I’d have to confess everything that happened this summer. Then the doctor would examine me with a light and stick yet another tool inside me to assess the damage.

  I push down the stopper in the bathtub and turn on the water.

  I lower my pants until I can open my legs wide enough. The bloodstains are brown and dry. I can only partly see how battered it looks, I need a mirror. Pink flakes of dried wallpaper glue flutter down on the bathmat. I take a washcloth, run it under the water, and gently lay it between my legs.

  All of a sudden, I’m exhausted, too tired to wash. As tired as three people combined. I can’t close my eyes. This body, these arms, these legs, I can’t just take them off and leave them hanging on a chair for other people to use.

  There’s a sound in the hallway. Before I can do anything to stop him, Jolan enters the bathroom. I’m startled, but he’s even more startled than I am. He lets go of the door handle and catches a glimpse of the wet washcloth between my legs, of the blood in the pants around my ankles. I quickly pull them up and cover my bare chest with Laurens’s shirt.

  Jolan isn’t sure whether he should leave or not, but now that I’m covered and he’s released the door handle, leaving would only make things even more awkward. He decides to finish what he started. Eyes glued to the floor, he walks past me, opens his drawer and grabs a pair of socks folded by Mom.

  From the black outer sock, a white one emerges. Jolan sighs, annoyed. He puts the mismatched pair on anyway. I follow his quick, almost routine movements; he could move slower as far as I’m concerned, I’m already regretting that he’s going to leave soon.

  “Everything okay?” Jolan asks, still not looking at me. He closes the drawer.

  “Period problems,” I say.

  He nods gravely, as if he knows exactly what I’m talking about. “Do you want to borrow a pair of shorts?” he asks.

  I don’t respond at first. I wring out the washcloth between my legs and put it back on the edge of the tub. Then I nod. He hands me a pair of his shorts from the closet full of clothes that have been worn but still aren’t dirty enough to be washed. They smell like grass.

  Jolan picks up my blood-soaked pants and hangs them on the edge of the tub. It’s already filled up with more than twenty centimeters of water, much more than what Dad usually allows. Jolan squeezes a bit of shower gel and shampoo into the bath.

  “Then you don’t have to scrub,” he says. “That’s what I always do.”

  He walks back to the door.

  “Wait,” I say.

  He stops. “What?”

  When I don’t respond, Jolan sits down on the edge of the tub.

  “Do you want me to call Mom?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  Someone walks down the hall. We sit and listen to the tapping on the keyboard. As long as Tessie is within earshot, we don’t say a word.
Instead of talking, Jolan rummages around in his back pocket and pulls out an Ikea pencil and a little notebook. He hands it to me. I flip through it. At the top of each page is a header—“Croquettes”, “Back door”, “Calendar”—and under it a list of gestures, tallied movements, with exact times and a few corrections here and there. Halfway through the book is a crossed-out sketch of our vegetable garden, with the arrangement of plant species and their seasons.

  I recognize all the rituals. I search the pocket of my pants for my own notes. They’re still in there. I unfold the paper and pass it to Jolan. For the first time, he looks me straight in the eyes. Then he reads, his face expressionless. Slowly he starts shaking his head. Obviously, I don’t have to tell him what he’s reading.

  Tessie leaves the hallway.

  “It’s getting worse,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “What are we going to do?”

  The bath is full, the excess water is sucked down the little hole to keep the tub from overflowing. The drain chokes and makes a loud gurgling noise. Jolan turns off the water.

  “She needs to see a doctor. Better today than tomorrow,” he says. “I’ve been doing some research these last few weeks. We could take her to the emergency room in Lier. You don’t have to pay there right away.”

  “Today?” I ask.

  “Go ahead and take your bath first. An hour won’t make any difference. When you’re done, we’ll go.”

  I nod. My hands are shaking. I sit on them. Suddenly, the foaming hot bath looks terrifying. The soap and shampoo will sting in my wounds. The hospital waiting room is the best option for both Tessie and me—and it certainly beats waiting on this chair in the bathroom for Laurens or Pim to call.

  “Shouldn’t we wake up Mom?”

  “Can you see her crawling behind the wheel in her state? We’ll be faster on our bikes.”

  “All right,” I say. “Can you pack a few things for her? Toothbrush, comic books.”

  Jolan takes Tessie’s toothbrush out of the half-built wall and walks out of the bathroom.

  I pull myself out of the chair and drain the bathtub. I search the medicine cabinet for the bottle of Betadine and compresses to disinfect the external wounds. I shouldn’t let them get infected. Most of the pain is coming from my lower abdomen, at a depth of about ten centimeters. That’s going to be harder to reach. I dab some disinfectant on a fresh compress and wrap it around a couple of cotton swabs. Then I try, very carefully, to insert it into my vagina, just two to three centimeters. I swab the edges and dab away some of the sand. Better a bit of pain now than an ulcerating infection later.

  I change clothes but don’t put on clean underwear, the elastic would rub too hard against my skin. Not once do I look at myself in the mirror.

  Tessie looks up when Jolan and I come outside. I’m wearing his shorts, which actually don’t look that bad on me, though I did have to put a belt on to hold them up. Maybe she can tell by the way we’re marching towards her that we won’t tolerate any protest. Jolan is carrying her backpack, which contains a toothbrush, a pair of pajamas and two Gaston comic books. He walks up to her and hands her the jacket and shoes he’s picked out for her.

  “Tessie, put these on and go get your bike.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to get help.”

  Without any further questions, as if it were some kind of game, she gets up, puts on her shoes and heads to the garage. Jolan and I wait on our bicycles next to our neatly planted vegetable garden.

  Tessie spits on her bike seat and polishes it with her sleeve until the leather shines. Then, she rings the bell three times. She turns the front of the bike in the direction we are going to leave in and stands with her legs on either side of the frame. With her calf and shin, she maneuvers the pedals left and right with the precision of someone baking a cake, weighing everything down to the nearest gram.

  Jolan nods affirmatively in my direction. These movements have all been meticulously recorded in his notepad under “Bicycle”.

  “Ready?” he asks once she’s got her pedals equidistant from the ground.

  “Wait.” Almost without shame, she performs the ritual again in front of the garage door. She knows that this might be the last time she’ll be able to carry it out undisturbed.

  She rings her bell again, three times, and works the pedals into position.

  Nanook, still tied to the swan-shaped umbrella stand, starts jumping up and down from all the bell ringing. She drags the concrete swan behind her to the edge of the patio, until the untrimmed grass makes it too hard to pull the thing any further. She whines, begging.

  She didn’t choose to become this family’s pet.

  Jolan tries to calm her down. “She’s going to wake up Mom.”

  The dog stops whining and pulls harder. Her leash is so tight that a bird could cut itself on it in a dive.

  We ride down the street. Behind the hedge I see the closed umbrella rocking back and forth.

  Tessie takes off, pedaling hard. Before we’ve even turned off our street, she takes the lead, which she holds for a long time. Jolan and I don’t pass her. We cycle next to each other in silence, Jolan sitting, me standing on the pedals. We reach the row of pollard willows that I rode past an hour ago on my way to the butcher shop. My calves are still tight, every muscle in my body aches, but all I can think about is Tessie—all of these movements are for her and therefore take less effort.

  The closer we get to the canal, the stronger the headwind. It fills Tessie’s jacket, making her look stronger than she really is. I can see my panties from a distance. They’re standing upright in the wind. Tessie cycles by them first, without even noticing them. Jolan practically runs them over.

  I could point them out to him. Tell him that they’re my panties, explain how they got here, but I decide to wait until we’re on our way back, until Tessie is in good hands.

  We turn down the steep slope on the side of the bridge and reach the canal. The wind is fickler down here. It’s a straight shot from here to the hospital—no more need to think.

  A storm is coming. Dark clouds are spreading across the blue sky like a drop of ink in a glass of water. It’s hard to say whether it’s headed in our direction. For the first time, the thought of the same rain falling on everyone in town is no longer reassuring.

  Jolan and Tessie pick up the pace. I’m in the back now.

  I try not to think about what Laurens and Pim are doing, what they’re going to eat tonight, whether it’ll be better than whatever we’ll get. Whether a doctor is tending to Laurens right now, carefully disinfecting his wound with compresses.

  It starts to pour. The rain is just in time to wash the scoreboard off the cemetery wall. Elisa’s days as top scorer are over.

  We stop and take cover under the bridge across the Albert Canal. Heavy gusts of wind whip between the piers from all directions, leaving us hardly a dry spot to stand in.

  “You want to see something?” Jolan asks. He parks his bike and motions for us to follow. In one giant swoop, he wraps his bike lock around all three of our bike frames. Then he leads the way up the steep side of the pier, his mismatched socks moving in small, shuffling steps.

  Climbing is difficult, the squatting stretches my labia. I can’t imagine any movement that wouldn’t hurt right now.

  At the top is a narrow ledge with enough space above it to crawl into. The bridge is hollow. We find ourselves in a half-meter-high crawl space between the surface of the road and the bottom of the bridge.

  It’s dark and muggy inside. The air is denser in here than outside, the thunderstorm sounds miles away and close by at the same time. The thunder we hear is mixed with the sound of cars driving across the tarred joints in the asphalt overhead. The sounds swell up, like they’re going to hit us, then fade.

  I can barely make out Jolan’s profile in front of me. I follow his one white sock. It’s the only thing that stands out in the dark.

  Was this the hiding spot h
e ran away to at the age of ten, when he left home carrying a bundle of supplies—underwear, matches, rope, scissors, a juice box, all wrapped in a kitchen towel on a bamboo pole slung over his shoulder—determined never to return? I was too little to stop him, to chase after him on my bike. I did count the pairs of underwear in his drawer though—there were no more than three missing, so I knew he wouldn’t be gone too long. He found his way home a little after dark and disappeared into his room, disappointed that nobody had called the police.

  We waddle down the tunnel like geese. Shards of glass crunch under my shoes. Up ahead, there’s light. That must be where we’re going. Tessie stays close behind me, clinging to the hood of my jacket. I keep following Jolan. Crouching like this eases the burning between my legs, or maybe it’s just the fact that both Tessie and Jolan are nearby. When was the last time I was so close between them like this? It must have been some time when we were playing a game, forming trains.

  A few meters ahead, we come to the opening in the floor where the light is coming from. Below us is the big canal, its water open and wild.

  Only here, in the lulls when no cars are passing overhead, can you clearly hear the thunder outside. The flashes of lightning reflect on the dark water.

  “You can see straight down into the ships from here,” says Jolan. “Look.”

  We stick our heads out over the hole. A few seconds later a wide freighter passes under the bridge. First the bow, then the deck, then the cargo hold carrying a mound of sand, the control cabin, a car, a bicycle, a couple of flower boxes, the living quarters. On the back are two giant propellers churning up ferocious waves. Jolan leans dangerously far over the edge.

  “That ship is probably going to France. Or Dubai. Or Turkey,” he says.

  We nod, our eyes on the water, which remains choppy long after the ship has disappeared.

  “Where exactly are we going to get help?” Tessie nudges a stone over the edge. It disappears into the waves.

  “Sacred Heart.” Jolan’s voice sounds decisive as it echoes down the tunnel.

  Tessie’s whole body shrinks. “Or maybe we could just go bowling,” she says, “that would do me good. And you guys would have fun too.”