Nine Open Arms

by Benny Lindelauf

  ‘Three times three makes nine,’ said Jess.

  There were nine of us.

  ‘Isn’t that a coincidence,’ I said.

  But Muulke said it had nothing to do with coincidence. ‘I think . . . ’ she said.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Jess. She stared at Muulke with a look I knew only too well. Her eyes looked greedy and scared at the same time. I knew what was coming.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said.

  ‘I think . . . ’ said Muulke.

  Of the five houses we had lived in over the past four years, three had been cursed and the other two had at least ‘contained traces of a tragical tragedy’. Or that was what Muulke had reckoned.

  ‘Something to do with a gruesome murder,’ Muulke said this time. ‘With knives and blood and all that.’

  Jess poked her fingers into her ears. Muulke shaped her hands into a horn and yelled that those holes above the front door were evidence enough. They were bullet holes, of course. And the graveyard wasn’t so close by for nothing.

  Oma Mei sailed into the room, gave Muulke a smack and sent us off into town to buy wallpaper for the living room.

  ‘Did you have to do that?’ I asked once we were on our way.

  ‘At least I say what I think,’ said Muulke, still holding her hand over her cheek.

  ‘Blabbermouth,’ I threw at her.

  ‘Iepekriet!’ she threw back. Shrew.

  We walked down Sjlammbams Sahara. Jess was nine, Muulke was ten and I, Fing, was eleven.

  ‘Do you think Oma Mei will unpack the Crocodile this time?’ asked Jess.

  Muulke nodded. Without looking, she held out her arm to me and we automatically linked arms. Just in case it did depend on us, the three of us chanted to the rhythm of our footsteps, ‘Unpack, unpack, unpack.’

  We looked back at the house. We could hear the carpet-beater Oma Mei was using to attack the carpets. The wind had dropped a bit; we could even hear a blackbird.

  When we entered Mr Walraven’s paint shop, he asked us how much wallpaper we needed. We stared at each other blankly.

  ‘Miljaar!’ said Muulke. Blast!

  ‘We forgot to measure it,’ I said.

  Jess didn’t even blink. ‘That one will do.’

  ‘But how much?’ Mr Walraven wanted to know.

  Jess replied without hesitating. ‘Nine open arms.’

  ‘You’re a genius,’ said Muulke, and the three of us roared with laughter at Mr Walraven’s mystified face.

  ‘We’ll show you,’ I said.

  We started at the back of the cramped little shop, among the rolls of wallpaper and tins of whitewash. Three times three in a row. Arms spread wide.

  Mr Walraven measured, shaking his head, pencil behind his ear, until we stood outside between the milkman’s float and a dog cart.

  And Mr Walraven, who liked a joke, wrote on the invoice:

  Wallpaper for house, nine open arms @ fl. 0.45 per arm.

  And that’s how the house got its name.

  gruesome treasure

  So, at the end of Sjlammbams Sahara there stood a house. We went to live there and gave it a name: Nine Open Arms. That must have been the right name, because the house gave us something in turn. Or rather, it gave Muulke something.

  ‘Why her?’ Jess complained. ‘That name was my idea, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Stop being so touchy,’ said Muulke. ‘You would have dropped dead on the spot with fright, anyway.’

  Two months had gone by when Muulke made her discovery. The living room had been wallpapered. The Belgian potbelly stove with the shutter (the one Muulke insisted used to belong to a witch who burned babies in it) stood scrubbed and polished in the back of the room. Oma Mei was on her knees with dustpan and broom, trying to brush sand out of the cracks between the floorboards, but the minute she’d brushed it out of one crack and try to sweep it onto the dustpan, it would disappear into the next crack. She looked hot and bothered, her neck red, her knuckles white.

  ‘Go get some sjlamm,’ she told Muulke.

  ‘But I had to do it yesterday, too.’

  ‘Muulke . . . ’

  ‘Can’t Fing do it?’

  ‘She’s in the garden.’

  ‘And Jess?’

  ‘The bucket is in the hall.’

  ‘Jess never has to do anything,’ Muulke spluttered.

  ‘I could box your ears,’ Oma Mei threatened. She shifted and the sand crunched under her knees.

  Muulke picked up the bucket, lit the kerosene lantern and descended the ramshackle wooden stairs that led beneath the house.

  Nine Open Arms had three cellars. The first was the storeroom. That was where the potatoes and onions were kept. There were also two sets of shelves holding preserved vegetables and fruit. The bright-blue preserving jar with cherries in brandy had a lonely spot on the top shelf. The second cellar was for storing coal and sjlamm. The third cellar, right at the back, was forbidden territory. We girls had only ever been in there once, when we were inspecting the house.

  ‘Don’t ever let me catch you going in there,’ Oma Mei had warned.

  Behind a rusty iron door lay a random collection of stuff: stacks of horse blankets, crates of big-bellied green bottles, an armchair with three legs, a sour-smelling beer barrel. Things were stacked higgledy-piggledy, often covered with horse blankets.The Dad had promised at least ten times to clear it out.

  That fateful day, Muulke passed under the stone archway where the second cellar began. There lay the sjlamm, like an enormous black pudding on a bed of wood shavings.

  ‘What if that mouse hadn’t been there?’ Jess often said later.

  ‘What if it had been there,’ I would reply, ‘but it hadn’t run over Muulke’s foot?’

  ‘Or if I had worn closed shoes instead of open sandals?’ Muulke would say.

  ‘Then you wouldn’t have felt that mouse.’

  ‘Then you wouldn’t have been scared to death.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have dropped that bucket.’

  ‘Then maybe nothing would have happened at all.’

  It’s amazing how close some stories get to never being born at all.

  If you drop a bucket on top of a heap of old sjlamm it doesn’t matter much, because that sjlamm will be rock-hard. But that morning it was fresh from the coalman: a soft, thick mush. The bucket made a fat blob of it splatter onto Muulke’s dress. Muulke groaned. If there was one thing Oma Mei couldn’t stand it was dirty clothes. Particularly on Tuesday, because it meant she had to wash again after just having spent all of Monday at the washtub.

  There was nothing Muulke could use to clean up her dress in the first or second cellars.

  Carefully, she opened the iron door of the third cellar. At the back there were two small arched windows. There was no glass in them, so the air wasn’t as musty as in the second cellar. Muulke looked around. The spooky atmosphere didn’t come so much from the actual things stored there; it really came from all those things being covered in blankets – strange shapes, with lots of bits sticking out, lots of hollows and lumps.

  The bottles in the crates were empty. She considered the horse blankets.

  ‘To wipe off that lump of sjlamm,’ she said later.

  The nearest blanket covered a large, flat object. When she touched the blanket, it instantly slid down, as if it had been expecting this touch for years. Because the blanket turned out to be much heavier than she’d expected, it slipped through her fingers and hit the floor. When the dust had settled, she saw it.

  She saw what the house was giving us.

  ‘Believe me,’ Muulke said whenever Jess started going on about it not being fair, ‘you would have pissed your pants three times over.’

  The rest of the family was still half-standing at the kitchen table, petrified by Muulke’s scream, when she came hurtling up the steps and stormed into the kitchen.

  ‘A tombstone!’ she screamed. ‘A tombstone!’

  We held our breath. Oma Mei pressed one finger to th
e lid of her wildly fluttering swivel-eye and stared at Muulke, in her dirty and torn dress, without a bucket of sjlamm.

  ‘Maria Catharina Alfonsa Theodora Boon, haven’t you forgotten something?’

  Her voice had a soft, dangerous tone, but Muulke wasn’t one to take notice of tones.

  ‘I knew it!’ She wriggled between Jess and me and cut herself a piece of bread. ‘A tragical tragedy, didn’t I tell you? A tombstone in the cellar! You must see it!’

  ‘That isn’t a tombstone,’ said Oma Mei.

  ‘It is so,’ said Muulke with her mouth full. ‘A stone with skulls and everything! In our cellar! Come and see!’

  ‘Nobody goes anywhere,’ Oma Mei snapped.

  ‘I can feel a sermon coming on,’ Eet muttered to Sjeer.

  We knew better than to contradict our grandmother. ‘Thank God the Mam never had to bring you up herself,’ said Oma Mei halfway through her rant. Our dead mother belonged in her sermons the way a brass band belongs in a parade. ‘What would have become of you all? She always had a heart as soft as a rag doll.’

  As always, her eyes filled with tears at these words.

  We tried to comfort her, Muulke most of all, but Oma Mei resisted all patting on the back, stroking and kissing. Yet she was a little bit gentler afterwards. Not that she would allow us to go and look in the cellar. ‘Nobody has any business in there,’ she said.

  That afternoon, Jess, Muulke and I were outside in what once upon a time had been a veggie garden. Now it was covered in weeds. Here and there we found overgrown leeks and sprouting onions.

  The sky was covered in thick clouds. It had been like that for days, but there still hadn’t been a drop of rain. Through the gate we could see Sjlammbams Sahara. The road looked grey and miserable. I bent over and pulled at a weed that wouldn’t come out.

  ‘Oma Mei is a sourpuss,’ said Muulke, pulling with me.

  ‘She’s just having a terrible day,’ I said.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ said Jess.

  ‘No,’ said Muulke and I together.

  ‘But I know how you should do it,’ said Jess.

  ‘Don’t whinge,’ I said in a friendly voice.

  Jess leaned angrily against the gate.

  ‘And – she – just – doesn’t – like – moving,’ said Muulke while she and I kept pulling.

  With a dry crack the weed came away, and we nearly fell over backwards. We had a look. The roots had stayed behind.

  ‘Miljaar!’ said Muulke.

  ‘If you’d let me do it, it would have come out properly,’ said Jess.

  ‘Anyway, it isn’t true that she dislikes moving,’ I said.

  ‘Have you forgotten about the Crocodile?’ asked Muulke. ‘And have you forgotten how she carried on to the Dad?’

  ‘That was because she hates going away.’

  ‘But that’s what moving is, isn’t it?’ asked Muulke.

  ‘That’s one part of it,’ said I. ‘The other part is arriving somewhere, starting over.’

  My sisters looked at me.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it that way,’ said Muulke.

  I hadn’t either. Sometimes I said things before I understood them.

  ‘I still don’t see the difference,’ said Jess.

  ‘Oma Mei doesn’t dislike making a fresh start,’ I said. ‘Whenever we’ve moved, she’s always been the first to pick up the thread. Don’t whinge, she says, then . . . ’

  ‘Just think of Oompah Hatsi,’ Muulke and Jess completed.

  Oompah Hatsi had lived across the road from us three houses ago (when the Dad had bought a quantity of wicker baskets to trade, all of which turned out to have rotting bottoms). Oompah was an elderly dealer in buttons and other haberdashery. He was turned out onto the street when, yet again, he couldn’t pay his rent.

  Oompah didn’t take it lying down. He turned the street into his home – at first as a form of protest, then later because that protest had no effect and he had to live somewhere.

  Fortunately he was evicted in June, and the days were already getting warm. His bed stood in the covered dead-end alley next to the butcher’s shop. He washed in the water bucket of the milkman’s horse. And he always took great care with his appearance, his reddish-grey hair combed back tightly and his chin and cheeks ‘smooth as a pebble from the river, just have a feel’, as he would say.

  One day, Oompah hung up pictures on the walls of the alley – or rather picture frames, because the pictures were all gone from them. What you saw were framed pieces of wall. A framed crack, a hole in the wall. It was as if you suddenly had a completely new view of the street you lived in. When he realised we liked it, he started moving the frames around so that he had something new to show us all the time.

  ‘Jess, Fing, Muu-huulke! Sleeping Spider in a Web.’

  ‘Jess, Fing, Muu-huu-huulke! Speckled Mushroom in the Wall.’

  ‘Jess, Fing, Muu-huu-huulke! Have a good look! Look really hard!’

  Jess said he sounded like a wolf when he cried ‘Muu-huu-huulke’.

  For a while, all went well. From his spot in the alley, Oompah repaired clothes for money, and with his nimble fingers he managed to make something wearable from any old rag.

  When summer passed and the weather turned cold, though, Oompah Hatsi started drinking. He was what people call a nasty drunk. At night, he kept the whole neighbourhood awake with his yelling. He was thrown out of the cafe he always went to because he sneakily cut buttons off other customers’ coats. One night, he ate the buttons. The police came and took him away to the madhouse.

  ‘Totally deranged, the poor soul,’ Oma Mei said when it happened, her hand over her mouth. ‘Ready for the asylum.’

  We had no idea what ‘deranged’ meant, or what an asylum was, but we figured it must have something to do with Oompah Hatsi eating buttons, and his terrible screaming afterwards that night, his tongue bleeding hideously from chewing the buttons. For a whole month after that, Jess had nightmares about being chased by a large wolf with a bleeding tongue howling, ‘Jess, Fing, Muu-huulke! Have a good look! Jess, Fing, Muu-huu-huulke! Look really hard!’

  Muulke and I worked on in silence. A bunch of weeds broke off at the root. I had blisters on my hands.

  ‘We need a spade,’ we told the Dad.

  ‘A spade? What for?’

  ‘Oma Mei told us to pull out the weeds.’

  ‘You can pull out weeds for the rest of your life.’

  ‘But Oma Mei said . . . ’ I grumbled.

  ‘Stop blabbing,’ said Muulke, quickly dragging me away.

  The rest of the afternoon we played Threatened Treasure. One of us was the house, another the treasure hidden inside, and the third the threat. I was usually the house, because Muulke had no talent for standing still. That afternoon, she was first a savage soldier, then an all-consuming fire, and then an all-devouring monster. In the end, she became all of these at once. She danced furiously around the house (me!). Her hands were at once flames and claws, but she couldn’t get at the treasure, I made very sure of that.

  ‘You’re a dead-boring house,’ Muulke complained.

  ‘And you cheat,’ objected Jess, who was hanging onto my dress between my legs, her eyes squeezed shut. ‘You can only be one threat at a time.’ She wanted to change parts, to show how it really should be done.

  ‘You can’t be the threat,’ said Muulke.

  ‘Can so.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Can.’

  ‘A threat must be able to sneak up, you know that.’

  ‘I can sneak up perfectly well!’ shouted Jess.

  ‘But you have to be able to do it really quietly.’

  ‘I can do that!’

  ‘You squeak and creak.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘I can hear it.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Creak. Squeak. Creak. Squeak.’

  ‘Fing! She says that I squeak-creak.’

  It was hard work calming them both
down. I managed, but it meant the end of the game. We climbed up on the fence in front of the house. Jess wanted to know what sort of rags the Mam’s heart was made of.

  ‘You know perfectly well what Oma Mei meant.’

  Jess swore solemnly she didn’t know. It nearly brought tears to her eyes. I gave her my hanky. Of course she knew, but she never passed up a chance to hear something about the Mam.

  ‘Oma Mei means she had a gentle character,’ I said.

  ‘That she couldn’t say no. That she went along with everything,’ said Muulke.

  ‘Everything?’ said Jess.

  ‘Everything,’ I said.

  ‘Everything creak, everything squeak,’ said Muulke.

  ‘Fi-hing!’

  ‘Now stop it, both of you!’

  A million years ago, we’d had a mother. Oma Mei said she was so nice that everybody who knew her still came close to tears when they thought of her.

  She’d died three months after Jess was born. Oma Mei said it was her heart. ‘A rag-doll heart doesn’t last long in this world,’ she said. ‘That isn’t hard to see. You have to be hard in this world. It isn’t for nothing that heart and hard sound so similar.’

  We heard whistling. Our four brothers were coming outside. Each of them had a cigar in his mouth. When they got closer to us we saw they were fake cigars, made out of leftover bits of the wallpaper from the living room.

  ‘Need any big brothers?’

  I showed them my blistered hands and complained that they could have come a bit sooner, but Muulke sadly shook her doll’s head. She said she had just been murdered by the witch of the Belgian potbelly stove and it was too late to be rescued.

  Our brothers wept crocodile tears, and with their strong hands they carried her ahead of us, high above their heads. The murder victim peered through her doll’s eyelashes to see if we were watching, but of course we made sure we weren’t.

  That evening, when we were in our bedroom, we could hear the Dad and Oma Mei’s muffled voices. We crept out of bed and pushed aside the rug in the middle of the room, where there was a narrow crack in the boards. Light from the living room below shone through it. The crack was too narrow to see through, but big enough for us to hear their voices clearly.