Silent Saturday

by Helen Grant

  They were approaching the tram stop at Oudergem Woud; Veerle could see the twin bronze figures facing each other across the intersection as though guarding it. A glance down the track showed a tram in the distance; Veerle thought that it had stopped at the next station down the line. All the same, it couldn’t be more than a very few minutes before it reached them.

  She wished they had longer together. What happens now? she thought. She remembered Kris plucking the mobile phone right out of her hand. What do you think you’re doing? You can’t call anyone, he’d said. The memory gave her a cold sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Supposing he decided that she was too much of a risk, too prone to losing her head and doing something stupid like alerting the authorities to their presence on someone else’s property?

  Then there was the troubling question of what he would have wanted to do if there had been no doubt that someone was lying inside the house, hurt or sick.

  Would he really have walked away, saying that we shouldn’t have been there anyway? Saying that the person inside hadn’t lost anything by our refusing to call for help, because officially we weren’t there?

  She imagined him striding away from the window on his long legs, melting into the darkness, and herself standing there by the illuminated circle, looking from the window to Kris’s retreating back.

  Would I have run after him, or stayed and made the call?

  ‘Hey,’ said Kris, seeing her serious expression. ‘I told you, that’s the first time that’s ever happened. I’ve been in dozens of houses and there’s never been anyone at home before.’

  Veerle looked at him. She didn’t want to ask him what he would have done. ‘I’m not worried,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and slid his arms around her. ‘Next time it will be somewhere special.’

  Next time, she thought with relief, and when his lips met hers she pushed away the thoughts that had been troubling her. She put her arms around Kris’s neck and kissed him back, closing her eyes. Next time.

  20

  ON SUNDAY EVENING Veerle logged on to the Koekoeken website and found a cluster of new messages waiting. Claudine had gone to mass – not in the Flemish Sint-Pauluskerk opposite their house, but at a French-speaking church in a district some twenty minutes’ drive away. She had made a number of bitter remarks to the effect that she could not imagine what her daughter would get up to while she was gone, but in the end she had gone, pulling her sober-looking best coat tight around her skinny body. Veerle could work on her laptop undisturbed, which was just as well because when she opened the last of the new messages she actually gasped, something that would have brought Claudine running in an instant, ears twitching.

  First there were a few messages mourning the passing of Vlinder, as sorrowful as bouquets placed at the site of an accident. Someone had posted a set of dates and an address in Sterrebeek. Kris had posted a message about the house he and Veerle had visited. Avoid, it said, and was signed Schorpioen. He didn’t give the reason.

  The last message was also from Schorpioen and it was specifically for Veerle; the subject heading was For Honingbij.

  It’s your turn, Honingbij, read the message. You find the next location. Tell me when and where.

  Veerle sat and stared at the words on the screen.

  No. He has to be joking.

  She read the message again.

  Me? I don’t have any ‘locations’. I can’t do this.

  She felt an almost sickening mixture of panic and apprehension, as though she were a nurse assisting at an operation and the head surgeon had suddenly handed her the scalpel, saying, Here, you do it.

  I can’t.

  She closed the laptop without logging out of the site, then got up and began to pace about the room. I can’t, I can’t, she kept telling herself, but she knew that that was not good enough. It wouldn’t get her off the hook.

  It was the obvious development, she should have seen it coming. No one could be admitted to a group like the Koekoeken if they didn’t contribute something. Kris had stuck his neck out for her – the first two houses he’d taken her to had been the most luxurious she had ever been inside, houses whose owners would certainly have pulled every string they could to get the maximum penalty applied to Kris if they ever found out what he had done. The last one had been just as palatial, and while they hadn’t actually made it inside, they’d come closer to being caught than ever before.

  He’s taken insane risks.

  She bit her lip.

  Now it’s my turn to prove myself.

  She knew that was the way it worked. Otherwise Kris ran all the risks and she just went along for the ride.

  But I don’t have keys to any luxury houses; I don’t have a cousin who runs a maid service; I don’t have a talent for picking locks. There’s no way I can come up with somewhere for us to meet.

  Restlessly, she paced the room.

  So forget it then, she told herself savagely. Tell him you can’t come up with anything.

  She made another circuit of the table, glancing at the closed laptop as though it were an unexploded bomb.

  Don’t see him again. That’s what it means. Stop seeing him.

  She surprised herself with the sharpness of the pain that idea gave her, a pang so acute that it was almost physical.

  I can’t do that. I can’t give him up. Not now.

  It was an impossible conundrum. Eventually she sat down and opened the laptop again. She re-read Kris’s message and then she typed a reply.

  I’ll let you know.

  It was very much later that evening that the idea came to her. Claudine had returned from mass, exchanging the sober coat for one of her limp-looking cardigans, and had cooked a meal for the pair of them. Afterwards, she stood at the kitchen sink washing the dishes by hand, and Veerle dried them. They said little to each other. Claudine passed the occasional remark about this or that person she had seen at church, but Veerle couldn’t think of much to say in return. Her head was too full of Kris and the challenge he had set her. She stood shoulder to shoulder with her mother, polishing the plates, and looked at the kitchen window, the view of the street outside hidden by a blank wall of roller shutters. Veerle had never been able to understand why Claudine would prefer to look at a stack of roller slats instead of Kerkstraat and the outline of the Sint-Pauluskerk jutting skywards. Now she wondered whether her mother disliked the view, whether she looked at the church and the bell tower and thought about Silent Saturday, all those years ago.

  There was a heap of papers lying on the kitchen work surface close to the draining board – publicity for local supermarkets – and the uppermost one was for a chain of pet stores. There was a picture of a little white dog on the front, its head on one side, its eyes bright.

  It looks just like Toulouse, Veerle thought. I wonder who’s looking after him, and it was then that it came to her – the answer to the question of where to take Kris.

  Toulouse was Tante Bernadette’s dog. Tante Bernadette was not really Veerle’s aunt; she was Claudine’s aunt, Veerle’s great-aunt. She was in her eighties, a spry, skinny, active old woman; at any rate, she had been, until she had suffered a stroke. Now she was in a nursing home somewhere and it was doubtful whether she would come home again. Toulouse, presumably, was in the care of a kennels or a friend of Tante Bernadette’s; meanwhile, the old lady’s flat on the edge of Brussels stood empty, awaiting either its owner’s return or the auctioneer’s hammer.

  We have the keys.

  Veerle’s gaze slid to the little row of hooks screwed to the wall by the kitchen door. As well as her own keys and Claudine’s there were a few others: one for the garden shed, a spare set of car keys, and a couple of keys on a fob decorated with a fragment of Brussels lace sealed in clear plastic, the sort of thing you could buy in any of the tourist traps in the city. Those were the keys to Tante Bernadette’s apartment. Claudine had had them for years, just in case the old lady should fall ill and need someone to come in.

/>   Veerle stared at the keys hanging there. They were so close that she could have reached out with her right hand and plucked them from the hook.

  Are you serious? asked a voice at the back of her mind. You’d take those keys while its owner is lying in a nursing home, recovering from a stroke, and you’d go into her home without permission?

  The voice droned on, but Veerle would have been more inclined to listen to it had it not had a distinct hint of Claudine’s disapproving, complaining tone in it. She chafed under it, restive as a penned animal.

  Claudine finished washing the last of the cutlery and let out the water. Then she went out of the room, bearing the two glasses they had used back to the cabinet in the sitting room, and Veerle put out her hand and took the keys. She held them in her palm, looking at them, at the worn metal of the keys themselves and the discoloured plastic of the fob with its scrap of lace suspended inside. Then Claudine was coming back; Veerle heard the scuff of her slippers on the tiles in the hallway, and without thinking she stuffed the keys into her pocket.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked her mother, peering at her.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ said Veerle calmly.

  ‘You had a strange look on your face,’ Claudine told her.

  Veerle shrugged. ‘I’m fine,’ she said as cheerfully as she could.

  As soon as possible, she escaped, on the pretext of going upstairs for a bath. With the bathroom door closed and the hot water thundering into the tub, she felt she could effectively shut Claudine out. She could think.

  She took the keys out of her pocket and put them on the end of the bath, where she could see them.

  Is it really so bad, going to Tante Bernadette’s flat? she asked herself. She’s never going to know you were in there, not if you’re careful – and anyway, why shouldn’t you be? You’re her great-niece. You might be checking the pot plants, making sure the heating is turned up enough to stop the pipes freezing. An image flashed across her mind at that moment, of herself and Kris in the old woman’s apartment, Kris moving about amongst the spindly and fussily feminine furnishings like an invading soldier prowling a museum, and she felt a sudden pang of guilt. All the same, some reckless part of her, the part that wanted above everything else to be with Kris again, kept on arguing relentlessly for the idea. Tante Bernadette was young herself once, wasn’t she? If you could ask her permission, maybe she’d be amused by the idea. She was supposed to have been gorgeous when she was young; she must have had admirers of her own once.

  Veerle got into the bath and lay in the hot water, eyeing the bunch of keys as though it were some live and dangerous thing, a poisonous creature that might bite her. Just a couple of little pieces of metal, a few centimetres long, worn and tarnished, nothing magical about them at all, and yet they had so much power. They could open doors into two possible futures: one in which she returned them unused to their hook in the kitchen, and walked away from Kris and his dangerous games; and one in which she used them to let the pair of them into Tante Bernadette’s flat, thus stepping not only into someone else’s property but over another kind of line.

  When she had finished in the bathroom she slipped the keys into the pocket of her dressing gown. She had no intention of leaving them lying anywhere where Claudine might see them, might be reminded that they had the keys. When she got into bed at last, she slid them under the pillow, where she could easily touch them in the night, reassure herself that they were still hidden there.

  Kris, Kris . . . she thought, and then: What am I going to do?

  She lay awake for a while, gazing into the dark; she thought that when she finally went to sleep the presence of the keys might disturb her, that she might sleep as badly as the princess in the fairy tale who had a pea under her mattress. But when sleep came it was deep and dreamless.

  21

  VEERLE ALLOWED HERSELF twenty-four hours in which to consider the question. On Monday morning when she took the bus to the high school, the key to Tante Bernadette’s apartment was in the pocket of her padded winter jacket. The pocket was deep, but still Veerle had to keep putting her gloved hand down inside it to check that the keys were still there, that she still had the opportunity to return them to the hook in the kitchen if she decided to do so.

  The day dragged by. Veerle found her attention drifting away from the lessons.

  All she could think about was Kris; Kris and the question of Tante Bernadette’s apartment. At lunch time she went to the canteen with the usual crowd from her class, but she was conscious of a new barrier between herself and the others, as though there were a thick sheet of glass between them.

  If they only knew . . . But she couldn’t tell them.

  Lisa, who was a friend of Veerle’s, dug her in the ribs with an elbow and said, ‘What are you dreaming about?’ but Veerle shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Nothing.’

  If I tell her about Kris she’ll want to know all about him, and then she’ll want to know how we met, and worst of all she’ll want to meet him.

  She tried to imagine introducing Kris to some of her school friends and she simply couldn’t do it.

  Anyway, how would I do it? She glanced around the table – at Lisa, who had turned to say something to someone else, and Lisa’s boyfriend Matthieu, who was talking animatedly through a mouthful of chips, and all the others. She couldn’t take them all to meet Kris, not even if it were somewhere relatively safe like the old castle. Certainly not to anyone’s actual house. You only had to look around the table at all those phones, all those thumbs dodging about the tiny buttons sending texts back and forth, think about all those inbuilt cameras. If any of her friends got so much as a sniff of what she and Kris were up to, it wouldn’t be a secret for more than a nanosecond.

  The other option, of course, was to bring Kris to meet them somewhere neutral like the snack bar where they sometimes congregated in the late afternoon. Veerle knew she wasn’t going to do that either. Aside from the inevitable questions and the need to construct baroque lies to conceal the truth, she just couldn’t imagine meeting Kris in such a normal setting. He didn’t belong in this world – the one filled with coursework and routine and people you saw every day, doing the same old things. If Lisa or anyone else asked her what she was thinking about again, she’d say the same as she just had. Nothing. Because that was the only thing she could say.

  That feeling came over her again – of there being an invisible but insurmountable barrier between her and everyone else. Sometimes she could feel the drag of her normal life, trying to pull her back in like an undertow. Sitting in the canteen with its chipped tables and scuffed plastic chairs and the curling posters on the walls and all those familiar faces, she could still have been the old Veerle, the Veerle of six or seven weeks ago, trailing around the high school with the rest of them and dreaming of her next trip to the climbing wall.

  Things aren’t really the same any more though, are they? I can’t just sink back into the old routine, not properly, not today. I’ve got a decision to make.

  She could feel Tante Bernadette’s keys in her jeans pocket, digging into the top of her thigh. She had transferred them there from the pocket of her outdoor jacket, feeling some superstitious need to keep them close, as though letting them out of her sight might somehow endanger her secret.

  What am I going to tell Kris? she wondered. But she already knew.

  That evening when Claudine was in the sitting room watching television, Veerle went back on to the Koekoeken website and posted a message for Schorpioen. Friday, she suggested. 9 p.m., Montgomery. At the tram stop. She didn’t post the actual address; at some future point she supposed she would have to supply the details of a location open to everyone, but she would worry about that later. There was no way she was going to make Tante Bernadette’s home public property.

  But those places you and Kris have visited, those are people’s homes too, objected the voice in the back of her mind. She did her best to quash it.

  Friday, 9 p.m., she thoug
ht.

  22

  ‘NO,’ SAID CLAUDINE. She was trembling, but her voice was firm.

  ‘What?’ said Veerle. She could hardly believe her ears.

  ‘You can’t go out.’ Claudine stood in the hallway of the house on Kerkstraat, with her arms folded and her cardigan – it was a pale mint-green one this time – pulled close around her body as usual, as though she were trying to swaddle herself against the harsh atmosphere of life in general. Her face was pale, surrounded by its corona of short-cropped greying hair, but there was a vivid intensity to her faded eyes. She meant business.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Veerle. She tried to push past Claudine to the door, and found herself being pushed back.

  ‘Ridiculous?’ repeated Claudine, her voice rising.

  The two of them glared at each other. Now Veerle was trembling too, with annoyance and shock. ‘I’m going out,’ she said.

  Claudine appeared not to have heard her. ‘Ridiculous?’ she said again. ‘You think I’m ridiculous?’

  Veerle could envision the great swell of indignation that was building up inside Claudine, as though it were some vast rolling wave, a towering tsunami of emotion that was curling high above her head, waiting to crash down on her with savage force.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. But Maman, I’m going out. You can’t stop me.’

  ‘I’m your mother.’

  ‘I know. But I’m not a little girl. I’m nearly eighteen.’

  ‘You live in my house—’

  ‘Not for much longer,’ snapped Veerle angrily, before she had time to think about what she was saying. She felt a terrible stab of guilt as she saw her mother’s face crumple. In spite of the grey hair, the tired face, Claudine looked like a terrified child. How can you do this to me? said that look, and it went straight to Veerle’s heart.

  It wasn’t just the fact that she thought Claudine would have some sort of collapse, it was the knowledge that her mother really was almost helpless without her. She had never learned Flemish, she couldn’t read official letters or conduct her own business at the administrative centre in Tervuren. Leaving her would feel like abandoning a small child in a strange town.