by Helen Grant
Maybe, thought Veerle. Maybe it’s all true and Kris really does just stay at the flat as a friend, sleeping on the other side of the room in his sleeping bag. She chewed her lip, thinking. Or am I being a complete idiot to even think of believing that?
There seemed no point in questioning Hommel any further. Either she was telling the truth or she wasn’t; Veerle might as well have flipped a coin. So she said nothing, simply put out her own hands and covered Hommel’s good hand with them, and she and Hommel sat in silence, waiting for Kris to arrive.
45
Kris arrived at 4.45 p.m.
Veerle had spent most of the preceding hour sitting in front of another empty coffee cup, watching the slow progress of the minute hand around the dial of her wristwatch and trying not to panic.
Three hours, he said. He has to be here soon.
If she had left school promptly at the end of the last lesson, and walked back to the flat on Bijlokevest at a brisk pace, she would have been home for half an hour by now. Anneke would have called Geert, Veerle was absolutely certain of that. If the school had phoned the flat to report her disappearance, Anneke might have called him two or three hours ago.
At 4.15 she had wondered briefly whether she could just go home, leaving Hommel in the burger bar to wait for Kris. But she had looked across the table at the other girl and known she couldn’t do that. Hommel was leaning against a pillar next to the table, with her eyes closed and a taut expression of pain on her angular features.
When Veerle said, ‘Hommel?’ in a tentative voice, Hommel hadn’t reacted at all. It wasn’t clear whether she was asleep or simply sealed into a capsule of her own pain.
Veerle had a view of the top of the stairs from where she sat. Periodically she glanced up from her gloomy perusal of the passing minutes, hoping to see Kris appearing.
Come on, come on, she thought. The feeling of bright panic was sliding into a queasy and fatalistic dread. There was trouble ahead, looming large on the horizon, and it was solidifying into a hideous certainty with every moment that passed.
Sometimes she looked out of the window, through the distorting streaks of rain, her gaze flickering over the rooftops opposite. She was beginning to feel very tired now – tired of fretting about the row ahead, tired of thinking. Nothing seemed to make sense. There was no pattern to any of the things that had happened, other than the vague impression of some ill-perceived and brutal malice, recurring like the sweep of a great pendulum.
The brutal assault on Marnix. The attempted attack on Bram. Daan De Moor, and that other guy, the one Bram knew – Luc. And now this attack on Hommel. She was certain that the person who had killed Marnix was also the person who had tried to attack Bram, maybe even Daan De Moor, but as for the others, Luc and now Hommel . . .
Maybe this is just city life, Veerle thought wearily. There was always some murder in the news, some of them truly horrible. There was that girl Marie De Smet, burned to death in the fire that had also claimed the politician and his girl-friend. And then there was that priest whose house had been torched with him inside; they still weren’t one hundred per cent sure whether he had been dead or dying when the flames took him.
The thought of it, so much violence and blood lust and cruelty, made Veerle feel sick to her soul. She looked at the rain running down the window, turning the city lights into streaks, and she wondered how the people out there lived with it, these horrors happening practically under their very noses. Maybe they thought it only ever happened to other people.
I know different, she thought. Absently she pushed back her sleeve, rubbing at the fading scar on her forearm. The knowledge set her apart from other people – it turned her into a Cassandra, a prophet of doom whom nobody else believed. The girl who saw a dead man. It sounded like a bad joke.
Veerle looked at her watch again, and then she looked up and there was Kris at the top of the stairs, looking around for her.
She had been so determined not to react to seeing him, so determined to drown any residual feeling she had for him in the foaming mill race of her anger. And now it was only that anger that enabled her to show him a cool, unmoved exterior. As he came towards her she stood up, and her heart was thudding guiltily, as though she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
Kris was wearing jeans and the black leather jacket he had worn for most of their night-time excursions with the Koekoeken; because he had walked bare-headed through the rain his dark hair was plastered to his forehead. Drops of water ran down his face like tears. His expression was sombre but not unfriendly.
He came up close, much closer than she expected. His gaze flickered briefly over Hommel, who was still leaning against the pillar with her eyes shut. Then he was looking at Veerle, his dark eyes serious. When he spoke, it was in a low voice and Veerle realized that he was trying not to rouse Hommel.
‘Veerle, thank you for doing this.’
‘That’s—’ Veerle began to say, That’s OK, but she stopped abruptly. It wasn’t OK, not really. She was still annoyed at Kris for presuming on their past to persuade her to do this. She was annoyed at herself for being persuaded, and for the effect he still had on her. And there was trouble on an unimaginable scale waiting for her at home. OK? No.
She couldn’t hold his gaze. Warmth had come into her face; she was afraid that the colour had come into it and that he would see it. She glanced away, towards the watercolour blur of the window.
‘I’m sorry for asking,’ Kris was saying.
Veerle shook her head. ‘You’d better get her to a doctor, Kris,’ she said gruffly. ‘That hand is a mess. I’m pretty sure it’s broken.’
Kris glanced past her. ‘Shit. Where?’
‘I don’t know. There are hospitals in the city – one of them must have an emergency room. I have to go, Kris.’
Actually, now that he was here, she would have liked to ask him a million questions herself, nibbling at the edges of the wider situation in an attempt to get closer to the one issue that was really on her mind: had Hommel been telling the truth about him or not? But she could feel the coming trouble like the building pressure before a storm. It was dragging her into itself, nagging her to get moving before things became significantly worse. To get home at five o’clock would be bad; by six Geert might be home and that would be truly catastrophic.
‘Now?’ said Kris, taken aback.
‘Yes, now.’ Veerle looked him in the eye then, forcing her-self to keep her expression neutral. ‘I told you I couldn’t get away that easily. I’m going to be in serious trouble anyway. I can’t make it worse. I have to go.’
She glanced at Hommel, but the other girl hadn’t moved.
‘I’m sorry, Kris,’ she said, and hoisting her school bag onto her shoulder she began to push past him.
‘Veerle, wait a minute—’ Kris caught her arm. ‘Look, can I phone you later?’
Veerle sighed. ‘Kris, you could have called me at any time over the last three months.’
She pulled her arm free. Catching a movement out of the corner of her eye, she looked at Hommel again and saw that she was stirring. Kris followed her gaze, and when he turned back to Veerle she was halfway to the stairs.
Veerle didn’t look back. She hurried down, her school bag bouncing on her shoulders. A turn of the staircase, and she was out of sight anyway. She reached the ground floor and ran for the door, the brightly lit counter a golden blur to her right.
It was almost dark now and the lights of shops and restaurants were reflected in slick wet pavements. Veerle saw a cluster of pedestrians at the tram stop by the church, people heading home at the end of the working day. In an hour Geert would be home too. She began to run for the flat, weaving in and out of the evening strollers, swerving to avoid a bicycle.
She had turned two corners and the burger bar was far behind her before she automatically brushed at her eyes and realized that she was crying, and swore under her breath. Veerle hated crying.
46
Ve
erle stood in Bijlokevest, a little way up from the flat, looking at the building’s façade and the balcony and her own window. The rain had stopped but it was cold; her breath was visible on the air like some strange ectoplasm. Everything seemed very clear and sharp: the memory of tears prickling at her eyes, the dull gleam of fallen rain on the pavement, the weight of her school bag on her shoulders. She felt as though she were saying goodbye to something, taking a long last look before she left, memorizing everything. Maybe this was how people felt before they went into prison, she thought; as though you could capture that last moment of freedom, bottle it and take it with you.
It was no use standing here for ever; every passing second was making her later. Veerle began to walk towards the flat. She kept scanning the street ahead as she went, looking for any sign that Geert was home already or that either he or Anneke was looking down from the flat. Nothing. Trouble was lurking inside, like a scorpion under a stone. That, at any rate, was one small piece of good fortune to set against the avalanche of woe that she suspected was even now sliding towards her with unstoppable force. She let herself into the block and began to mount the stairs with all the enthusiasm of a condemned aristocrat climbing the scaffold towards the grim silhouette of the guillotine.
Even when she was standing outside the closed door of the flat she hesitated, wanting to savour one last moment of uncertainty before the reality of trouble solidified into a fact. Then she took out her key and opened the door.
She wasn’t particularly surprised to see Anneke standing in the hallway, with the telephone receiver in her hand. There was no sign of Geert.
Veerle came right into the flat and closed the door behind her. Then she stood there in the middle of the hallway waiting to see what Anneke would say. She kept her expression deliberately neutral; at this stage of the game there was nothing to do except take whatever was coming and flinch as little as possible.
She was aware of the gaze of Anneke’s grey eyes but she stared past the woman, blank-faced, like a soldier preparing to deliver name, rank and serial number.
There was a small click as Anneke put the telephone down on its cradle. She had not said a word since Veerle entered, no Goodbye or I’ll call you back, or even, Here she is. It crossed Veerle’s mind that perhaps Anneke had been waiting for her to arrive, that she had simply posed with the phone in her hand, having made the call long since but wanting Veerle to know that she had done so.
The silence stretched out for so long that eventually Veerle said, ‘I know. I’m very late.’
She swung her school bag off her shoulders and put it on the floor.
‘Have you called Dad?’ she asked, keeping her voice as even as possible. She felt slightly sick. Her pulse was racing but she struggled to maintain her composure.
‘No,’ said Anneke quietly. She still had her hand on the receiver; now she tapped it gently with her fingers, as though considering.
‘Well, go on, then,’ said Veerle heavily. ‘Or are you going to wait till he gets home?’
Anneke looked at her with an expression that was almost thoughtful. ‘Actually,’ she said, after a pause, ‘I’m not at all sure that I’m going to tell him about this.’
‘Anneke,’ said Veerle levelly, ‘I’m late.’
‘I know.’
Veerle bit her lip. What does she want? Does she want me to beg her to call Dad and tell him?
‘Don’t you want to know where I was?’
‘I know where you weren’t,’ Anneke told her. ‘The school rang me this afternoon.’
Great. Veerle wanted to sink to the floor and put her head in her hands. She made herself meet Anneke’s eyes.
‘Look, Anneke, a friend had an emergency. I can’t tell you anything more than that . . . but it was a one-off.’
‘I hope so,’ said Anneke. She let go of the phone and clasped her hands in front of her, against the blue fabric of the rather prim dress she wore. A little colour had risen to her thin features. After a moment she said: ‘Geert is going to be late back. He has a meeting. So I think we should take this opportunity to talk.’
‘OK,’ said Veerle warily. She could not imagine what she and Anneke had to talk about – nothing good, anyway – but if that was what she had to go through to avoid being reported to Geert, well . . .
She followed Anneke into the kitchen, and sat at the tiny table.
‘Do you want a coffee or something?’ Anneke asked her.
‘No,’ said Veerle.
Anneke leaned against the kitchen cupboards and looked at her.
‘You don’t like me much, do you, Veerle?’ She smiled wryly at Veerle’s startled expression. ‘Well, that’s OK, because I don’t like you all that much, either.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s nothing personal. When I met Geert I knew he had a daughter from a previous marriage, but I didn’t think she’d ever be living with us. That room you’re in, it was supposed to be Adam’s. The money we’re spending keeping you while we wait for that house to sell, that was supposed to be spent on baby things, or saving for when he’s older.’ Anneke looked away from Veerle, gazing at the corner of the ceiling, considering. Then she looked back at her. ‘In fact, you know, it is personal. You keep upsetting Geert. This was supposed to be the time when he thought about me and Adam, not worried himself sick because you keep bunking off school all the time.’
Veerle had been listening to Anneke with wary equanimity – Anneke wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already heard being shouted through the bedroom wall, after all. Now, however, she felt a sudden and terrible longing for her mother, so sharp that it was like an actual physical pain. Her sorrow for Claudine was always there in the background, a dull dragging ache that followed her wherever she went, but now she felt the absence as though she had had a hole blown through her, as though the grief were a shrieking hurricane wrenching chunks of her away with savage force.
Veerle looked at Anneke, at her thin face with its small cold eyes, the skin slightly rough and reddened as though she lived in a perpetually chilly environment. Anneke must love Geert; certainly she must love Adam. Still, if there was anything soft inside her, it was as completely sealed inside that cold carapace as the pulpy insides of an insect are encased in chitin. Veerle could not imagine communicating to Anneke how she felt, why she had started running away from school in the first place: the blind need to get away from a life that felt wrong, from the kindly interest and curious questions that threatened to make it all real. She had run away from the requirement of ever saying, My mother is dead; I live in Ghent now.
She could not tell Anneke any of this. They had no common currency; there were no words that she could hand over in exchange for understanding. Instead she looked down at her own hands, studying the familiar lines, the scar on the back of the left one, a remnant of her fall from the castle the previous summer. There seemed to be little that she had carried from the past into the present other than her own self; even Kris, whom she had known since they were both children, had virtually gone.
Anneke was silent for a few moments too, but hers was a speaking silence: it radiated disapproval like the glow of an isotope. At last she said, ‘I’m not going to tell Geert you bunked off school again today because frankly he doesn’t need the worry. And I’m not going to ask you where you went, because either you won’t tell me or you’ll lie.’
Veerle’s head jerked up at that and she stared mutinously at Anneke. Her temper was rising, but she wanted to know what Anneke was going to say, where this was leading, so she bit it back.
‘This is what I’m going to do,’ Anneke went on. ‘I’m going to pretend the school never rang me, and that you came home exactly when you were supposed to. If you bunk off again, it’s up to you to make sure that Geert doesn’t find out. If the school ring me again and say you’ve done it, I’ll keep quiet about it. You know when he gets home. As long as you’re back here before then, I don’t care what you do with your time. Go to school and study for your diploma or bunk off and h
ang around with that ruffian who called at the flat before Christmas – it’s up to you.’
Anneke unclasped her hands; now she stood with them held tensely at her sides as though she thought she might have to fend off an attack from Veerle.
‘And here’s what you have to do,’ she told Veerle. ‘At the end of the school year, you leave. You’re eighteen now; nobody can make you stay on, even if you fail the year. If you’ve got any sense at all you’ll work for the diploma and then you can go to university somewhere. But if you fail, you go anyway. Understood?’
Anneke’s chest was heaving; her thin face was flushed. She was waiting for Veerle to reply, but Veerle was simply staring, trying to digest what Anneke had said to her.
She’s telling me to go to hell, she thought. Go away to study, or go away and work in some crumby unskilled job, just as long as I go away.
‘Veerle?’ There was a nervous tremor to Anneke’s voice, as though delivering the ultimatum had excited her. Her grey eyes had a slightly feverish sparkle.
Is she enjoying this? thought Veerle.
She nodded. ‘Yeah, I understand.’
‘Hopefully it’ll be university,’ said Anneke, though her tone implied that she thought this unlikely. ‘If not . . .’
‘I go anyway,’ finished Veerle heavily.
‘I want to make sure we both understand this,’ Anneke told her. ‘It’s quite possible that Geert will feel he should offer to support you while you re-take the year. If we both work on him, he’ll agree to let you move out.’
Veerle wasn’t entirely convinced of that; an image flashed through her mind – of Geert standing outside the school for hours, stolidly enduring the elements, ensuring that she was really inside, where he thought she ought to be. There was a steadfastness in Geert; she didn’t believe he’d throw her over-board as readily as Anneke seemed to think. The memory was a fish-hook in a tender part of her, a painful and insistent tugging that could not be ignored. Now that Veerle found herself on the outside, with the cold iron of closed gates at her back, she began to wish that she had built something different with her father: trust, understanding.
