She was watching a quiz show that only bored him and had already poured herself some wine. Every now and then she’d reach over to the side table. A couple of rectangular ice cubes were floating just below the rim of the glass.
By five he had everything prepared and a half-hour left to do an assignment. That was enough. In prison he’d done one a day, now he wanted to do two. He felt himself glowing from within at that resolution. “You’re a hard worker,” the psychologist had said, and hard work was extra important now.
He went upstairs. The old steps creaked under his feet. He could feel the splintering wood through his socks. He sat on the bed with his back to the wall and his arms wrapped around his legs, took a deep breath and stared ahead for a moment, before taking his workbook out from under his pillow and clamping it between his legs. He looked around the room: his bed, the chair, the small table, the aquarium. On the bedside cabinet there was a pen tray with two pens, a pencil and a rubber, a lamp, a box of tissues and a travelling alarm clock with a luminescent face. Nothing on the walls. In prison other men had pinned up posters and photos from magazines on the walls of their cells. Not him. Even as a child he’d loved emptiness and hated clutter. He’d always put all his money into fishing gear. He listened to the silence for a moment, then opened the workbook and began.
The first assignment was called “First-line help with anger and tension” and featured a chart with solutions to help “escape stressful situations”. “Leaving and doing a relaxation exercise,” he read, “asking for help, going for a walk.” He had to add a few solutions of his own. “Taking the dog for a walk,” he wrote. “Cleaning the aquarium.” “Cooking.” Then he couldn’t think of any more.
He slid the curtain to one side and looked out. Nothing but sand, cobblestones, some building debris. He could also see down into the yard of the house next door, which was empty when he went away. Lying on the ground there was now a child’s bike with broken handlebars.
A little before half-five he heard the living-room door open and close, followed by his mother’s slow footsteps in the hall. Very hesitantly she climbed the stairs. His muscles tensed. She almost never came upstairs. He drew the curtain, grabbed his workbook, leafed through it for a moment and read a few sentences without paying attention. Then the door opened slowly and his mother came in without so much as a word. She sat down on the end of his bed and he quickly put the book back under the pillow.
“It’s so lovely to have you back again, son,” she said after a while. He could hear her breathing. She smiled and glanced at him. Her gaze slid over to the unfilled aquarium and back to her lap. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing for a while and then started talking about the bacon and how cheaply he’d been able to pick it up, and about the meal he was going to make. Then he was silent again. Suddenly he felt himself growing terribly tired. Part of him wanted her to stay, to keep sitting there quiet and motionless, but another part wanted her to go away. He knew she’d come to talk.
She kept her hands clasped together on her lap, one thumb over the other. Then she started to fiddle with her necklace. She changed position and stared ahead. With a slow gesture, she wiped some perspiration off her neck.
“You’re a sweet boy, Jon,” she said, “but you’re…” She was searching for words… “You’re always so alone.”
He didn’t say anything in reply, concentrating instead on his breathing. Slowly inhale, hold for a few seconds, exhale. Ten times. What could he say? Should he tell her that she didn’t understand him? That he was different from other people? That he didn’t need much? She must know that. He looked at her for a second. Her face looked tired. She smiled at him.
“You know what I always say, Jon. People aren’t made to be alone so much. We’re not animals. People need people.”
He didn’t know how to respond and kept quiet. Again he wondered exactly what she knew about what had happened.
“Loneliness can do funny things to people, Jon. There’s good reasons for the Bible saying we need each other. You were alone too much too. Always occupying yourself with all those animals. That’s sweet, but it’s not enough.” A worried frown passed over her face and her hands drooped down to her lap.
“It is for me,” he said, and when she kept looking at him, he averted his eyes. “I’m not like you, Mum.”
“I know how you feel about it. You’re shy. You prefer being outdoors. But there’s more to life.”
He noticed her bosom moving every time she gestured with her hands. The necklace with the cross was draped over her collar and trembling slightly to the rhythm of her breathing.
“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” she went on. “The boy who used to live up the street, Herman, you remember, from number seven. Nice lad, but a bit too thirsty.” She mimed someone knocking back a glass. “He was always alone too. He started going to weekly Bible meetings in town. He didn’t want to at first either, but he’s completely perked up. I’ll ring up for you, if you like.”
The material of her blouse was taut around her breasts. He focused on a sunbeam angling through the room and said, “That’s not necessary, Mum.” His stomach contracted. She wasn’t listening. He wanted to tell her about the therapy, the workbook, the exercise book, the numbers that proved that what he was doing worked and that he was going to make it, but he knew she wouldn’t understand. He imagined the way she’d look at him with her eyes screwed up and her mouth pressed tight. She wasn’t interested in science. She didn’t believe in the power of psychology. And it was complicated, he thought. Besides, how could he ever explain what had happened? Or all the things he was working on? What mattered were “coping mechanisms” and “stress regulation”, that’s what they’d taught him. He didn’t fully understand it himself yet either. He felt under his pillow for the exercise book, considering reading a bit to her. But what if she asked questions about it and he couldn’t explain?
“With scientific methods, you can investigate them, but religion…” he began, despite knowing better, but she was already talking over him.
“I’ll ring up and find out when they have those meetings, just so we know.”
They were sitting across from each other, eating from plates with different patterns. His was chipped. It was already half-six, but it was still stifling inside.
“This will be one of the last times we sit in our old kitchen,” his mother said. “The letter from the council arrived this week, but I already wrote to tell you that, didn’t I? In three weeks we can move in.” She smiled. “I’ll show you in a bit which house will be ours.”
He nodded absently. “How do you like the bacon?”
“Beautiful, son. Nobody fries it up like you do.”
Usually they mostly ate fish, which he could bring home cheap from the factory, but the slices of bacon he’d fried smelt so fantastically savoury his mouth was watering. He pushed the point of his knife into the crispy fat, cut, tasted. And again. He was almost ashamed of how hungry he was. But the salty, smoked meat was the most delicious thing he’d tasted in months. His mother smiled at him cautiously, reached for the bottle of wine on the worktop and unscrewed the cap.
“Would you like a glass too? To celebrate being back home together?”
He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. He wasn’t supposed to drink, it weakened your inhibitions. That’s what it said in the workbook. It was a “disinhibitor”. It could make you impulsive, get you doing things you didn’t actually want to do. Fortunately, he didn’t even like the sweet white wine she drank. He watched her bosom vibrating slightly while she poured herself a glass, turned away and looked through to the living room in search of Milk. He clicked his tongue. “Where are you, old feller? Come here.” The dog came through to the kitchen and stood in front of him wagging his tail. “Here.” Jonathan cut off a chunk of bacon and placed it invitingly on the palm of his hand. The dog sat down next to him, sniffed at it with flared, trembling nostrils, licked it a couple of times, then gulped i
t down in one go.
His mother broke the silence. “Hopefully there’ll be a club there where I can play cards. The council’s spread the old neighbourhoods out all over town. It’ll be a lot of new people living there. I just hope they’re not too snooty. I’ll never see the old neighbours again.”
He nodded. It was his fault. For a second he felt a stabbing pain behind his eyes. If he’d behaved better, she might not have been left here alone all these months. He wondered if she could forgive him.
His mother sighed, took a sip and topped up her glass. He dished up a second helping. In the breaks between her mouthfuls he could heard the tightness of her breathing. She started to cough and kept coughing. Worried, he asked if he should fetch her inhaler, but she said it was all right, took a couple of large gulps of the water he’d poured for her, and calmed down.
“It’s the heat, it’s so close in here. It’s a good thing we’re leaving.”
He decided not to waste any time before getting boxes from the supermarket to start packing. I’ll give myself a week to settle in, a week to pack and a week to clean up. Then they could move.
The next strip of bacon was already impaled on the tines of his fork. He chewed, swallowed and stabbed his fork into a piece of bread, which he dragged through the gravy until it was saturated. It had been a long time since he’d had a decent meal; in prison the food was always bland and overcooked. His stomach was a gaping, apparently unfillable, hole.
“New people have moved in next door, after all,” his mother said after a while. “Temporary. It’s cheap, of course, a house that’s due for demolition.” She kept her face bent over her plate. “A mother and a girl.”
For a second he thought she was studying him and made sure not to meet her gaze. She stopped eating and rested her knife and fork on the side of her plate. In the corner of his eye he saw her looking round the kitchen. He was just about to dip another piece of bread in the gravy when she resumed talking. His hand hung over his plate.
“The girl took Milk out for a walk for me every evening. Just once around the square. Not all the way to the ponds, that’s way too dangerous for a child like that.”
He nodded. Under the table he tossed the dog some more bacon. It sucked it up with a slurping sound.
“Stop it, Jon. Don’t feed the dog like that. That girl always used to bring sausage for him too. I kept on telling her, no feeding.”
He smoothed out his hankie and folded it up, then took another mouthful so he could focus on chewing. Slowly he ground it all up into a fine paste, his lips clamped shut. Then a stain in the middle of a flower on the plastic tablecloth caught his eye. He spat on his fingers and started to rub.
“Now you’re here, that won’t be necessary any more, thank goodness. You can just take Milk out for a walk yourself.”
Often it was like her words were forcing their way into his head via secret routes and slowly building up the pressure. He took his hankie and wiped his throat with his eyes closed.
His mother put down her fork and breathed out before saying, “The mother’s working in that new bar, Storm, down at the harbour. She leaves that girl to fend for herself. It’s hard to fathom, a woman in her position leaving her child alone all day.”
He’d picked a sponge up off the worktop and started his meticulous wiping of the tablecloth. His mother sipped her wine and he heard her sniff a couple of times. Suddenly, he was overcome by exhaustion and felt a pain in his back. And, to his own annoyance, this time it was her silence he couldn’t bear. For a moment he had the impression she knew more than he thought she knew and that was possibly the reason she’d consented so readily to not coming to visit him, but he refused to give in to the feelings that brought. Instead he asked if she was finished with her plate. Sitting at the table together made him too nervous. He quickly stacked the plates and pans, filled the sink and put a pan of milk on the stove while waiting for the water to drip through the coffee filter.
“Shall I bring the coffee through to the living room, Mum?”
“Lovely, son,” she said. “Nice.” She struggled up onto her feet.
After doing the washing-up, he beat the dust out of the blanket they used as a cover for the sofa, mopped the kitchen floor and aired his mother’s bedroom. He used the narrow nozzle of the vacuum cleaner to get down into the cracks between the living-room floorboards and sucked up the accumulated dust. Then he withdrew to his room to do another exercise. He’d worked out that if he did two a day, he’d have the workbook completed in exactly three weeks. By the time they moved he’d be back to his old self and as strong as ever. He’d have been through it all and could start again at the first exercise. Repetition was important, according to the psychologist. He’d also said that some people learn more easily than others. Everyone retains information in their own way: some by reading, some by doing.
“For you, Jonathan, repetition is important, a lot of repetition.” The psychologist had explained something about his short-term memory. “But you’re very good at remembering details for a long time.” He’d explained that to get the total overview he had to do things over and over again. That wasn’t a problem. Jonathan liked writing these things down and that was to his advantage. He could reread it all whenever he liked. He imagined it as the needle of the old-fashioned record player his mother still had in the cupboard. Every time he played that same record, the grooves would get deeper.
There were still annoying stripes of sunlight on the wall. He closed the curtains, but because they didn’t meet properly, even after he’d pegged them together, light still glared through the gaps. He’d have to ignore it.
He sat down at his table, took his workbook from the bed, opened it, raised his pen and looked down at his hands. He glanced at the clock, which was ticking softly. Twenty-eight minutes past seven; he’d start at seven thirty. Downstairs he heard his mother turn a tap on and then off while singing a sad-sounding song. She was singing to the dog through the TV buzz.
He read the assignment. “Your solutions,” it said at the top. “Protective factors.” That was what it was about. He read the page quietly to himself.
He thought about it for a while, then stood up, walked over to his bed, sat down on it for a second, stood up again and went over to the window. He opened it and looked down at the neighbour’s yard. It was quiet outside. Just bare paving stones, the child’s bike. Now there was a big orange space hopper next to it. Not a single noise from inside the house.
He thought about the fish he’d seen swimming over the bottom of the pond this afternoon. They’d been so beautiful in their simplicity. A human could never be that perfect. A muscle in the corner of his eye started to vibrate. He sniffed and forced his eyes back to his assignment: an overview of how he could structure his life in the period ahead.
The window was still open and noises from further afield were drifting into his room. A ship’s horn, the screech of a gull. “Work and free time,” it said. “Daily schedule and structure.” Structure: he knew that was an important word. He started with his daily schedule, writing it in pencil first with his rubber ready for action. Behind him the fan was on. It was still hot. A drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto the page. He used a hankie he’d just got out of his wardrobe drawer to carefully soak it up. Then he wrote down his schedule, with short interruptions now and then to wipe the sweat from his face. His mumbling lips formed the words. He kept writing until he’d filled the whole day, hour by hour. Then he started to trace the words in pen. He managed to stay calm. He wrote:
Get up at 5 a.m.
Walk Milk at 5.30 a.m.
The 6.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. shift at Pronk Fish Processing
3 p.m.: walk Milk second time. Ask my mother if she can let him out in the yard in between times.
From 3.30 to 5.30 p.m.: clean the house, help my mother
From 5.30 to 6 p.m.: do first assignment
From 6 to 6.30 p.m.: cook
6.30 p.m.: eat
From 7.30 to 8 p.m.:
do second assignment
8 p.m.: walk Milk third time
8.30 to 10 p.m.: drink coffee with my mother.
When he had time, he thought, he could play a game of cards with her. And go through the two assignments again. He wrote that down too.
10.00 p.m.: go to bed.
He decided against making a separate daily schedule for the weekend.
When he was finished he stood up, crossed the room and stared into the empty glass tank. He sat down again. “Space for notes and your own thoughts,” he read. He thought about it, took the cap off his pen and wrote “Better,” below the heading. “I’ll get better.” That was all he could think of. He underlined it and added a series of exclamation marks.
After that he waited for a while to see if he had any more thoughts of his own. He gazed pensively at the paper. The sound of the TV reached him through the floor. He tried to encourage himself: “You can do it.” And: “You’re a hard worker, Jon.” But every time he thought of something, it blurred again in the noise from downstairs. The television, his mother, the dog’s barking and whimpering. He’d forgotten how noisy it was here. His thoughts all seemed silly anyway, too trivial to remember.
He needed some earplugs, he thought. And it was almost time for Milk’s walk. He went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Between the toiletries and the make-up his mother had long stopped using, he found a remnant of a packet of cotton wool. He picked some off, rolled it into a small hard ball between his fingers and popped it into his mouth to wet it. A few threads came loose. He sucked on the ball to turn it into a smooth plug he could push into his ear, then made another.
Just when he’d sat down again, the doorbell rang. And then a second time straight away. He sighed and pulled the plugs out of his ears. Who could that be? The neighbourhood was empty. Through the sound of the TV, he heard his mother shuffling out of the living room and opening the hall door.
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