Tench

by Inge Schilperoord

  INGE SCHILPEROORD

  TENCH

  Translated by David Colmer

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  …this confrontation between the human need

  and the unreasonable silence of the world.

  ALBERT CAMUS, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

  (translation by Justin O’Brien)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Tench

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  NOW I HAVE TO PAY attention, thought Jonathan. Now. It’s starting now. He laid his trembling hands on his lap and rubbed the middle of his left thumb with his right in the hope that it would calm him down. It was his last morning in jail. Like always, he was alone in his cell. The cell the others, the guards, called his room. He was sitting on the bed waiting, staring at the wall. He didn’t know what time it was. It was early, he knew that much. The first strip of sunlight had just forced its way through the split in the too-thin curtains. Half-five, maybe six o’clock. It didn’t make any difference to him today. I’ve got time, he thought. From now on I’ve got plenty of time. They’ll come when they come. When they think it’s the right time, they’ll come. I can’t do anything about that. No earlier, no later. I’ll see.

  Until they came he would watch the morning light push further into his cell and slowly, imperturbably, move across the walls in its own orbit, ignoring everybody. It had been ages since he’d known exactly what time it was. The first night here he’d immediately fiddled the batteries out of the wall clock. He couldn’t stand the ticking. Plus the clock didn’t tell him anything that was any use to him. Day activities weren’t compulsory and he didn’t sign up for any of them. Walking in circles, education, sport. Work. If you didn’t smoke, eat sweets or buy expensive clothes, you didn’t need any money here.

  He preferred to watch the position of the sun, the fullness of the light, the way it caught the clouds drifting over the watchtowers. That told him how much longer it was going to last, how long till dark. How much longer he’d have to put up with the racket: men’s voices creeping up from the exercise yard, music through the walls. Shadows across the floor of his cell, across the bed and the small table. But now it was going to be different. “Everything will be different,” he whispered.

  He waited. It was still quiet outside. After a while he stood up, walked from the bed to his table, from the table to the window, stood there for a moment and went back to his bed. He sat down again, knees creaking quietly, then stood up once more. He paused in the middle of his cell, then went back to the table and looked down at it. On it were his therapy workbook, his exercise book, pencils and pens. The bookmark his mother had sent him. He sat down at the table again, his back straight, and opened the exercise book. A beautiful, blank page. He used both hands to smooth it out, arranged it in the exact middle of the table, unscrewed the lid of his pen and thought for a moment. After what seemed like ages it turned out he couldn’t think of anything sensible to write. He nibbled at the inside of his cheek. Why not? Why should he run dry today?

  He stood up again and clenched his fists. Walked from his table to the window, from the window to the table and back again. He sat down on the chair. “Nothing,” he wrote. And then, “Never.” Followed by, “No!” He banged the exercise book shut. The rest would come tonight when he was back home. He’d do the next therapy assignment then. A little later he opened the exercise book again, stared at what he’d written and crossed it out. “Different,” he wrote beneath it, then drew a line through that too. “Better.”

  He rolled up the exercise book, picked up his pens and pencils one at a time and put them in his pencil case, and slipped the workbook into his bag with the rest. Then he sat down on the bed, hands trembling on his lap, and waited for the moment when the guard would unlock the door.

  Now I have to pay attention, thought Jonathan. Now. It’s starting now. He was sitting next to the last window, at the back of the bus to the village. There weren’t any other passengers, but he’d still walked past the empty seats. There was quite a bit of morning left to go: the sun was still rising, but it was already terribly hot. A drop slid out from his hair, slowly, down his neck. All the way to the small of his back. He shifted on the seat. He had his bag on his lap, holding it close. He was sweating under his arms too. The bag was heavy on his knees. He would have preferred to put it down on the floor, but somehow it seemed safer like this, his fingers tightly intertwined. He sighed.

  Between him and the world was the glass and behind the glass the coastal landscape. The most beautiful country he knew. The place where he had crawled out of his mother’s womb on a nondescript Sunday morning some thirty years ago. A place he would never leave. He looked at the landscape with brand-new eyes. Not a single detail escaped him. He saw the tops of the pine trees and the way the sun was very precisely spotlighting the last row of sandhills, the grass on the side of the road and the water of the small pools in the distance. The light slid along the road with the bus, heating the asphalt. It was so hot it wouldn’t have surprised him to see the tar bursting open in front of him, starting to crack and melting from the inside out. Soft, sticky lumps like mud on the soles of his shoes.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, reopened them and looked at the sky again. The light was almost painful, such a glaring white.

  Past the water tower, the bus curved off and down to the right before slowly climbing again after the next bend. He knew it all by heart, able to predict every twist and bump in the road. Just a couple of minutes to the harbour, he thought, and then the village. He could smell the slight stink of the sea air through the open roof hatch. Fish, oil, decay, seaweed. Rope.

  This afternoon he would be out walking in these dunes, maybe within an hour. At last. People didn’t like him; they never had. But nature accepted him as he was. He squeezed one hand with the other, held it like that, then stretched the fingers one at a time until he heard the knuckles crack. His mother would be home waiting for him. Sitting on the sofa, where else, watching morning TV. He could almost hear the sound of the set that had been about to give up the ghost for years now. All those nights sitting next to her on his regular chair, the smell of the dog in the room. Her hands clasped together and resting just under her bosom. Often he’d be reading Nature magazine but unable to keep his mind on the words, the TV voices stabbing into his thoughts. Then he’d let the magazine slip down to his lap and watch her watch TV.

  He thought about the little things, the things he knew so well. The way the fingers of her right hand curled together and slowly, absently reached for the thin chain of her necklace, the way she took the silver cross between thumb and index finger and began to rub it. That meant that something on TV had aroused her interest and she was about to draw his attention to it. The way she let the rosary beads glide through her fingers when she was praying at night.

  His hands were clammy. He felt the warmth of the engine rumbling away inside the bus. Now and then he looked at his nails, tugging at little bits of skin. Sometimes he raised himself up slightly to get a better look into the distance, squinting against the glare, then sitting down again.

  He watched the seagulls gliding through the sky with their beaks open. Sometimes they hung motionless for a moment as if frozen in place. He thought of the birds whose flight he had watched through his cell window. As long as he could. The powerful beating of their wings. When they sailed past close to his window, he imagined he could hear the wind whooshing across their quills. In the back of his exercise book he kept a list of unusual birds. Kittiwake gulls, lesser black-backed gulls, fulmars, a guillemot. Tallying them gave him some peace of mind amid the racket, the endless suffocation. It was unbearable. Especially the proximity of all those men. The n
auseating smell of food.

  But it was over now, as suddenly as it had begun. Despite everything it had felt sudden. Last week was the umpteenth hearing: the whole day in the docks, his lawyer’s words going straight over his head like always.

  And yesterday afternoon the official letter from the court arrived. He had been acquitted on appeal. After all. Despite his worst fears. That cancelled out everything: the prison sentence, the therapy, the psychiatric hospital. There wasn’t enough evidence. They hadn’t been able to find the T-shirt on which, in the words of the prosecutor, incriminating traces could be found according to the victim’s statements. “The prosecution can still appeal,” his lawyer explained, “but I don’t expect them to.” The case would only be reopened if they could dig up some more evidence. But that was anyone’s guess. For the time being he was free.

  He swallowed painfully. As if there was something hard and sharp, a fish bone, caught in his throat. He coughed, sighed, closed his eyes and flared his nostrils. He concentrated on his breathing to try to stop his shoulders tensing up. That was what he’d learnt in pre-therapy, as they called it. Or “individual offender therapy”, therapy that started in prison and was meant to prepare him for treatment in the hospital. It had begun a few weeks ago with the prison psychologist. Phase one.

  “Take a calm breath,” he whispered to himself, looking at the vague silhouette of his face in the window, the sharp chin and high cheekbones, his forehead. “In through the nose.” He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again. “Hold it, and then slowly, slowly, out through the mouth.” He repeated this ten times, always ten times. “In this way we relax the diaphragm and let all stress fall away. Feet on the ground.” He kept whispering, even though he was still the only passenger on the bus. He felt his diaphragm relaxing, his breath growing calm, and meanwhile he massaged his tense and painful neck muscles with his knuckles.

  The bus rounded the last bend before the village. Clustered around the long main street was the new estate he’d heard so much about, the houses silent in the morning light, their windows reflecting the sunbeams straight back at him, dazzling him, as if deliberately. He averted his eyes: looking down at his feet, at his bag and off to the side instead. The estate had been tacked onto the old village in the past few months and, in a few weeks, he and his mother would come to live here too. She’d written about it all the time in her letters. New neighbours, a new house: she was so happy (“new faces for a change, a bit of life on the streets, people to talk to”). Not him. He didn’t like change.

  What he saw was worse than he had imagined. Rows and rows of narrow, identical houses. Short shadows between the roofs. They would be living in each other’s pockets, here even more than in the old streets he was used to. Their own neighbourhood, the oldest part of the village, was earmarked for clearance months before Jonathan left. But the council was so slow nobody believed it was really going to happen. Then, while he was in jail, things had picked up speed after all. The first residents left during his second month and the rest followed in dribs and drabs. His mother was now the only one left and the other houses had all been knocked down. In her letters she had written that her asthma had grown worse over the last few months and she was too weak to organize the move by herself.

  He pressed the button and a little later the bus stopped and the doors sighed open. He focused on his breathing again and then on the road, stretching slowly ahead. This was what he had looked forward to all these months. The enormousness of the sky, empty except for a few wisps of cloud. He looked straight up and let his eyes wander without any bars, bricks or towers to stop them. Long beams of sunlight on the road. He looked at the fishermen’s cottages that had been spared as yet, their roofs and gardens, the top of the church tower. Here and there he could see fishing rods and baskets, small upturned boats against the front walls. Behind them, trees.

  It was a clear day and oppressively humid. Much too hot for the time of year. He thought about the Nature magazines his mother had sent him faithfully every month with one of her letters. Always with the same sentence written on the label in her angled cursive: “For my boy, and may he come home soon.” A few weeks ago he had read that the persistent heat had led to the first nests of brown-tail moth caterpillars being spotted in the sea buckthorn, much too early. Maybe the wood small-reed had already started flowering as well. “See,” he’d mumbled to himself in his cell while sliding the magazine into the therapy folder he kept under his mattress. “See, it’s not right. You can’t even count on nature any more. Everything’s out of kilter.”

  *

  Their house was small, even smaller than he remembered it. It now stood with just one other house on the edge of a bare expanse. Apart from a few withered shrubs, some bricks and the odd bit of building debris, there was nothing here at all. The entire block of fishermen’s cottages next to theirs had simply disappeared. The high-rises were gone too. The two blocks of flats had disappeared into thin air as if they’d never even existed. As if his memory of them wasn’t real. But he could still picture it all, every last detail. Elizabeth lived on the third floor of the second block. The whole neighbourhood called her Betsy. Him too. But never out loud.

  He could still see her hanging over the railing of her balcony to wave at people passing by. He heard her thin, high voice. “Hello, Frank—Hello, Mum—Hello, Jon.” He stared at a spot in the silent, shimmering air and for a second it was like she was walking there. With her big awkward head bobbing gently, as always. Her round face and sweet smile. Her mouth always slightly open.

  He looked around, as if she might still be wandering somewhere among those dry stubby shrubs. She was long gone, of course. After what happened, she and her parents had moved to the city. He stayed standing there awhile, squinting in the blazing sun. There was a glitter to the light and, for a moment, the emptiness around him seemed to give off a strange murmur. He felt a chill of fear at the sight of their house surrounded by a wasteland of demolition. As if it was all wrong. As if he didn’t belong here. As if he belonged somewhere completely different. But he didn’t have a clue where that might be or how to find out.

  Between the brick walls of their squat house it was, if possible, even hotter than outside. His mother was waiting for him in the steaming-hot kitchen, wearing the summer blouse she had owned as long as he could remember. It was small and stretched tight around her bosom.

  “There’s my boy.”

  “Mum.”

  He smiled a bit; she smiled, but he didn’t greet her the way he had hoped, the way he’d intended. Not even the way he’d nervously, expectantly imagined these last few days by the window of his cell. He was too cautious, too hesitant.

  “You’re back.” Her eyes gleamed. He smiled again, a little shy, uncomfortable in this situation. Her boy. He sniffed, as if he was still ten and not thirty. He needed to give her a big grin; that was what he’d decided beforehand. But his face muscles felt stiff and weren’t cooperating. He tried again. She had been alone all this time, he thought, and he was to blame. Now he needed to make it up to her. The least he could do was be a little bit friendly.

  They stood there silently facing each other in the small room under the gaze of the earthenware statue of Mary that had been standing there on a shelf since his childhood. Quietly, with her hands folded and her eyes half closed, she looked down at the ground. As if searching for something she’d lost. Like always her glance passed them by. No matter how much his mother prayed to her and lovingly dusted her feet, she had never turned her eyes upon them.

  They stood there like that for a while, the sweat running down his back. The air in the room was almost unbreathable. The house seemed to have got damper. He’d noticed the wallpaper in the hall peeling and blistering and the lino was starting to curl up along the joins.

  “Jonny, at last. Thank God. I thought you’d never…” She didn’t finish her sentence. He could hear a rustling in her voice.

  “I’m here now.”

  She had
n’t visited him once in all those months. He hadn’t wanted her to: it would have been too much. He couldn’t have borne seeing her there in that echoing visiting hall with all those other people. For a while she’d tried to insist, but in the end she gave up.

  He wiped the sweat from his neck and out of his eyes with his sleeve and turned more towards her to see her better. For a moment he thought something was changing in her face. The muscles around her mouth tightened; he was scared she was going to cry. But nothing happened. She just raised her necklace between her thumb and index finger, then gently released it so it fell back against her throat.

  He could tell that her asthma had taken a toll. Her skin had lost some of its elasticity and was covered with fine, almost invisible crazing, shallow lines over her face that came together in a slight frown above her nose. She hoped, as he knew from her letters, that it would get better again in the new house, which she was expecting to be less damp. But now he’d seen how hurriedly and cheaply the new homes had been thrown together, he knew it would be just as bad there as it was here.

  Silence filled the room, with just the quiet hum of TV reaching him from the living room. He cleared his throat and wondered if he should hug her after all. His arms around her shoulders, her familiar smell. But he didn’t; his muscles froze at the thought of it. He just reached out to her, with one hand moving towards her arm—hesitant, unsure—then he pulled it back again.

  “Did you have a good trip?” she asked. “How did the trip go? Did you have enough money on you?”

  “You already know that.” He twisted the corner of the hankie he’d pulled out of his pocket, used it to wipe his throat and, without looking at her, repeated himself. “You already know that. They gave me a ticket. I already told you.”