Tench

by Inge Schilperoord

  “Shall I make you a cuppa?”

  She took a step towards him and spread her hands, presenting her empty palms like a sign of appeasement, a promise that she wouldn’t ask him any difficult questions. Ever. Or at least, not yet. Before he could say anything, she continued, “Was the bus on time? Did you have something to eat with you?”

  “It’s not far, Mum. Half an hour at most. You know that.”

  She was just asking to have something to ask. Like in her letters. She never asked him about the case. And he never said anything about it either. She couldn’t not know what he’d been convicted of, and acquitted. But her letters were about moving, the weather, Bible quotes. And he wrote to her about things he’d read in Nature, about the birds he’d seen.

  “Would you like some squash instead? A nice glass of squash?” She bent down towards the low fridge, drawing his gaze to the worktop. Although it was already quite late in the morning, it was still cluttered with the mess from breakfast. By the looks of it the cutlery and dishes from the previous evening hadn’t been washed up yet either.

  “I’m going to the dunes.”

  “Already?”

  “I have to get out for a bit.”

  “Have a drink first.”

  He felt the tendons in his neck tighten as the tension returned to his muscles. He stretched his head back and heard a dry click when his neck cracked. He combed the sweaty hair away from his forehead with the fingers of both hands. He was suddenly desperate to be alone.

  “Has Milk been out yet? Otherwise I’ll take him with me.” There was a moist layer on his throat and back. “There’s no air in here.” He moved his hands as if defining the area the air was being sucked out of. At the same time he heard his own words and realized that his voice didn’t sound friendly. Picking at the collar of his shirt, he tried again. “I’m going out for a little walk—you can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Yes, of course, just go ahead, son. He hasn’t been out yet, just in the yard.”

  He found the leash hung over the door handle like always and saw through the open door how messy the living room was. There were playing cards in crooked piles in the most unlikely places, scraps of paper, brochures, a rosary, her Bible.

  He sighed and his stomach shrank. Something for later, he thought. One step at a time. I’ll tidy up soon. I’ll make it all spic and span. I’m a champ at that. But first, outdoors.

  Restlessly he ran the leash through his fingers and called the dog with a short, sharp whistle. “Milk!”

  “You won’t be late back, will you?”

  He said he’d keep his eye on the time. It flashed through his mind that she talked too much. He’d never been able to stand it, but now he wasn’t used to it at all. He liked to keep words to a minimum. All too often they only caused trouble.

  Again she told him to drink enough. Again he said yes. She turned, took a plastic bottle out of the kitchen cupboard and filled it with water. “You can top it up at the pump in the dunes.”

  He could almost feel her squeaking, laboured breathing in his own lungs. Although he didn’t want to, he thought about prison. The looks the other men gave him whenever he left his cell to get something to eat. The constant fear that the guards would be distracted for a moment. Waiting for the inevitable. Never before had he been so scared. Terrified every single day. The unrelenting fear that he wouldn’t be able to stand it any longer. But still the time kept slipping past.

  Through the television voices he heard the soft click of nails approaching from behind the half-open door to the living room. The old dog strolled up to him on his crooked legs, tongue lolling out.

  “Milk,” he said softly. Unexpected tears leapt to his eyes like tiny needles. To keep them back he cleared his throat, and again, and squatted down. The dog stopped for a moment and held his head at an angle, as if to see him better, then walked up to him, stretched out his neck and began licking him on the face with big long slurps, tail wagging.

  “Oh, boy. Down, boy,” he laughed. He gave the dog a good scratch all over and heard a deep growl of satisfaction. Then pressed his cheek against the dog’s warm, glowing flank, while moving his hands quickly over his short, wiry hair. He grabbed both his ears. “You coming out with me, buddy? You coming?” Milk gave a short, high bark and sauntered along behind him.

  He quickly took his bag upstairs first, standing motionless in the middle of the small room of hardly ten square metres where he had lived his entire life. It looked gloomier than he remembered. The angled rafters, the low light. The empty aquarium below the window in the corner. He had to fill it as soon as possible; it made him nervous straight away. He knew he wouldn’t really feel at home until there were fish in the tank.

  He’d always had fish. His mother was completely indifferent to them, but they calmed him down. Their slow, placid circling, the way their fins glided through the water. It was like they were gulping away chunks of time for him, reducing something he’d never known what to do with. As far back as he could remember he’d had that vague anxiousness about how to get through the day, how to fill the hours. From the moment he got home from work, the period until it was time to go to bed seemed like an unbridgeable void.

  “Don’t dawdle,” he told himself. “Come on, get outside now you finally can.” He put his bag on the bed, but a moment later he’d knelt down in front of the aquarium. It was filthy. He couldn’t leave it like that.

  He fetched a bucket and washing-up liquid from the tiny bathroom next to his bedroom and scrubbed the greasy spots off the glass as best he could while the dog circled restlessly on the carpet, whining under his breath.

  “Lie down, boy,” he said. And when there was no reaction: “Down!” But the dog refused. Jonathan looked at him, at his funny drooping ears, his quivering nose. All at once it was like his limp had got worse. With one hand on the dog’s back, he gently pushed him down onto the floor. He stayed there but kept up his quiet whimpering.

  Jonathan used his scraper to quickly scratch the algae away from the edges, washed out the bottom of the tank and checked his old pump to see if it still worked. He connected it and used his pocketknife to scrape off some rust spots while he was waiting. Eventually the pump coughed and spluttered and began blowing a feeble but steady stream of bubbles through the dirty water.

  He put the dog on the leash and left through the back door, walking quickly with his shoulders hunched and his head down. Although he couldn’t see anyone out on the street, he felt like he was being watched. He hurried past the back gardens of the houses on the edge of the village in the direction of the sea. The sun was still beaming down in an otherwise empty sky, weighing down on the earth. Soon he was wandering through the sandhills he’d been visiting his whole life and the dog was trotting along obediently behind him, though panting heavily.

  It had been so long since he’d been here and he could feel how much he would have been enjoying it if not for his thoughts about jail. He tried to shake them off, moving his head gently. Every now and then he stopped for a moment on the path through the dunes, under the empty dome of the sky, to breathe in the smells of the earth, and cautiously, gradually, he managed to stop brooding.

  In the corner of his eye he saw the dog looking up at him expectantly, hoping that he’d throw a stick or take him swimming in a pond or just lie down for a nap somewhere, like so often before. “Soon, boy,” he said, “soon.”

  He kept looking up, tilting his head, peering into the endless sky. “Look, Milk,” he whispered, “look.” The sun was fierce, aiming its merciless heat at the earth with an intensity he was no longer used to. The perspiration dripped from his cheeks. He pushed further and further into the dunes, relishing everything, every smell, every little rustling sound, as if he was brushing against it all, reminding the things around him who he was, that he was back. The jagged hawthorn branches silhouetted against the sky, the special smell of the pines, the sand, the water of the small ponds.

  He lay down in a hollo
w next to a small pool, closed his eyes and almost immediately opened them again because he thought he’d heard something. There was nobody there. He felt a slight breeze on his skin, heard the reeds rustling behind his back. This was the dry quiet. What he’d been waiting for through every filthy second of those endless days and nights. To be back here in familiar territory, alone with the dog. He took his water bottle, raised it to his lips, then poured some into a cupped hand for the dog, feeling the rough tongue on his skin. After drinking, Milk lay down next to him. He reached out and scratched him on the head, then stayed like that for a long time, enjoying every moment in that dome of warmth.

  He felt a ridiculous urge to pray, to do something to show his gratitude, but he couldn’t believe in any of that, despite his mother’s best efforts. He thought of the sign of the cross she’d made just before he left. She’d traced an imaginary cross on his forehead. He sniffed. Even before they’d locked him up, he’d lost his faith. Nobody could prove that any of it was true. It wasn’t scientific like the programme of treatment he was participating in. That was based on data, statistics.

  Since the pre-therapy started more than a month ago, he’d had a weekly session with the prison psychologist. And every day he did an assignment from his workbook. Even if he didn’t understand all of the psychologist’s explanations, the terms he used were promising: relapse-prevention plan, early-warning system. The programme they’d given him was full of boxes with short explanations of how he had to behave. What was good and what wasn’t; where the risks lay. Thanks to this programme he was in the middle of a process of fundamental change.

  “You really are doing your best, Jonathan. You are so motivated,” the psychologist said. “I don’t get many like you.” And he’d looked straight at him with his pale eyes.

  At first Jonathan had been uncomfortable in his presence. It had been a long time since someone had called him by his first name and been so friendly to him.

  Fortunately, he’d been allowed to take his therapy book home with him to carry on by himself. He thought about the telephone call from his lawyer, just over a week ago. There wasn’t enough forensic evidence, he said. Inconsistencies in the story. The victim hadn’t been able to tell them very much. “Victim”—that word stung every time he heard it. He didn’t want to think about it.

  “You’ll be on provisional release,” his lawyer said, and before he knew it he was out on the street. After getting up this morning, he had stood for a while in front of the black-speckled mirror over the sink in his cell, staring at himself in disbelief, his head spinning from all the things he was thinking. All the things he was feeling but couldn’t name.

  When Jonathan began walking again he concentrated on the strength he felt in his body. In his fibres, his muscles, thighs and back. Like a child he ran part of the way up a sandhill. He wanted to feel elated, but it kept getting hotter and his limbs grew heavier. He kept wiping new beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  He walked on for a long time, until the sun started to exhaust him, then napped for a while in a dip in the dunes with the dog before deciding to go past the old sandpit on the way back. He’d been going there his whole life to fish. It was the only pond in the dunes with brackish, almost fresh water. Home to perch, rudd and eels. If you were lucky, even a carp or a pike.

  A few low, raggedy clouds had appeared in the sky. They were reflected in the water as they floated over. For a moment he thought he heard something and pricked up his ears. Was something rustling in the marram grass? He kept quiet and looked around but there was nothing. In the sky only seagulls slowly gliding past. Their shadows sweeping over the water.

  He walked over to the bank, pushing aside reeds that pricked his arms and scraped over his shirt. With the dog behind him he cleared a path to the water’s edge, where he leant forwards to get the sun behind him so he could see through the water. After peering at the bottom for a while, he moved even closer and saw some movement. Dark spots drifting slowly over the bottom of the pond, bigger than anything he’d ever seen here before. They had to be fish, but what kind? While he stared at them intently, he felt his heart trembling with excitement. The large shadows slid slowly back and forth, left and right over the bottom. From the corner of his eye he saw that the dog had walked a few metres away and was snuffling around a clump of grass close to the water’s edge before disappearing back into the reeds. The splash told him that he had jumped into the water and was now in the pond.

  Jonathan turned his attention back to the dark shapes. “Hey,” he said, hearing his own voice again after what felt like ages. “Hey, who are you?” Pushing the reeds further apart with his elbows, he bent even lower. A line of tiny bubbles was winding up out of the depths. “Hey, where have you come from?”

  They were big fish, that was clear, but he couldn’t identify them. Maybe carp stirring up the silt in search of food, but he was too far away to be sure. He’d always wanted carp in his aquarium. Just the idea of it made him want to go straight home to get his rod, but from the position of the sun he guessed it had already gone half-three and he’d promised his mother he’d do the shopping: meat, potatoes, bread, wine. She’d given him some money. Could he run home, fetch his rod, catch a fish and set up his aquarium this evening? He quickly did the calculations: home at four, half-four back here, wait, catch, walk back, five o’clock, no, half-five—that’d be too late. He clenched his fists and heard the words of his psychologist: “You’re someone who acts first and thinks later. We’re going to reverse that.”

  He straightened up and stood there for a moment. Now I have to pay attention, he thought. Now. It’s starting now. He breathed out with little puffs. Tomorrow morning. I have to do it tomorrow morning. It’s Sunday, I don’t have to work until Monday. If he used his biggest rod he should be able to manage it.

  *

  With long strides he hurried back to the village by way of the highest sandhill, stopping for a moment on the top. In the distance was the sea, a motionless expanse, with a few lonely container ships here and there on the horizon. In front of him he could already see the rooftops looming up. Houses, people, all the streets identical, every face the same. He lowered his head down between his shoulders and concentrated on the sound of his own breath. He counted his steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one, two, three, four. Now and then he glanced up for a second, before returning his gaze to the paving stones.

  He couldn’t bear people. They didn’t talk to him. They didn’t know him. They went by the whispers in the alleys. Even the roofs of the houses seemed to be leaning towards each other like conspirators, as if they too were enjoying the gossip. The streets were entangled, with the biggest all ending at the square with the church, whose meddlesome tower and spire looked out over everything. Fortunately, nobody was out on the streets right now.

  Just outside the village, at the supermarket in the harbour, where it was always busy and he could avoid the villagers, he bought some bacon and the rest of the shopping. Then he sat down on a bench for a moment. He thought about the therapy that was going to turn him into a different person. Module 1 was finished; four more to go. A different person. A new person. He pondered it. Could he become new? He had never felt new. His shoulders were aching as if he’d been lugging heavy baskets of fish offal around the factory. He looked at his hands, lying on his knees. The fingers, short and bent, were tense, the skin tight, small wounds here and there. Now there was the scar above his lip as well. He’d have to make do with this body for years to come, trying to keep out of trouble.

  Soon he’d stick his key in the lock and hear the murmur of the television. Sitting across from his mother at the table, too close. A game of cards, listening to her mumbling the scores to herself, the words of the verses she reads in her old Bible. Watching TV, making some coffee. He stayed sitting there a little longer, picking at the quick of his nails.

  He was in the kitchen standing at the worktop. His mother was sitting on a chair
by the window and playing cards against herself. Patience. It was almost half-four and as hot as when the sun had been at its highest. The window was open. Not a breath of wind. The back of his shirt was stuck to his skin.

  The worktop was still a mess. Cutlery everywhere, glasses with greasy stains and the dregs of wine. He filled the sink with suds, gave everything a good scrub and put the shopping on the freshly scoured worktop. The bread, the bag of potatoes, the meat. He laid the sharpest knife and spatula out ready, then cleared out the kitchen cupboards, washed and dried them, refilled them and started to peel the potatoes.

  Now he was back home, he would cook every day again. He liked that: fixed activities, fixed times. And he was good at looking after other people. When he’d had to write down his strengths in the workbook, he’d considered this one of his best qualities. Caring for others.

  He thought back on the IQ test he’d done for the psychologist. They’d explained that in some areas he was a bit weaker than average. But in others his mind was actually very well developed. His eye for detail, for instance. That was useful now. Sunk in thought like this he’d almost forgotten his mother; now he felt her presence again. Occasionally she would mumble something or hum a quiet, almost monotone tune. Putting cups or plates away in the cupboard, he saw her wipe the sweat from her face with a hankie in her left hand while keeping score with her right. He tried not to let her presence disturb him too much. After a while she took the dog into the living room with her, stretched out on the sofa and called out, “Jon, why don’t you come in here?”

  Taking the pan with him, he sat down on a stool across from her. The TV was on, like always. With short, quick movements back towards his body, he peeled the potatoes with the knife. With a splash the smooth, naked spuds landed in the pan one after the other. His mother was so close he had to sit at an angle to avoid bumping knees. He slid back a little.