Tench

by Inge Schilperoord

  He dried his sweaty palms on his jeans and walked to the window. The space hopper was gone. In the roof gutter a pigeon was having a bath in a grimy puddle, its feet scratching over the zinc. A small feather that could come loose at any moment was stuck to the tip of its right wing. Suddenly he saw that the neighbours’ back door was open. Quietly he crept out onto the landing.

  “I thought you already knew you didn’t have to come any more?” He could tell from her voice that his mother wasn’t at her ease.

  “Can I take Milk out for one more walk?” The other voice seemed to come from further away.

  “No, sweetie, my son’s back home now. You don’t need to any more. I’ve already told you that so many times.”

  He stood motionless on the top step for a few seconds. Then moved closer.

  “Couldn’t we do it together?” he heard the girl ask. “Or take turns?”

  He checked his breathing—inhale slowly, slowly exhale—went down the last steps and pushed open the hall door.

  “There he is. My son,” his mother said, glancing at him in passing.

  The child was standing at least half a metre back from the doorstep. She looked up at him shyly through a lock of hair that had fallen down in front of her eyes. “Hi, I’m Elke.” She pushed her lower lip out a little and tried to blow the hair out of the way. It immediately flopped back down in the same place.

  “Hurry up now, Jon,” his mother said through the hall door, “it’s high time.” He could hear the dog somewhere behind him.

  His mother walked off, looking back a couple of times over her shoulder. The girl stayed where she was. She was trying to look past him, searching for the dog, of course, he thought. Meanwhile his mother’s footsteps moved further down the hall. He heard her coughing in the kitchen. “Come on, hurry up, you. Outside,” she growled at the dog.

  The child was still standing there.

  He kept his head down, but studied her through his lashes.

  She was small, only up to his chest. Dressed in a faded top and cheap flip-flops. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a short ponytail held together with an elastic hairband. It wasn’t actually long enough to tie back properly and a lank lock was hanging down the side of her face. She scratched at a graze on her elbow.

  She studied him carefully. “Are you going to take Milk out for his walks now?” She was pouting a little.

  “Yes. Yeah. From now on I’ll be walking him again.” He hoped his voice sounded as determined as he’d intended.

  The girl took another step back but stayed there on the pavement, slowly wobbling from one foot to the other. They stood opposite each other without speaking. He tried to look past her but his eyes were drawn towards her. Somehow he felt compelled to look at her again.

  She was very young, he thought, not ten yet. He could still see a little down on her throat. She had small, sweet, endearing ears. Don’t, he thought. Don’t think like that. Before you know it, you’ll have thoughts that aren’t good. Cognitive distortions. Or justifications. Or something else. For the moment he didn’t know what exactly, but he’d look it up.

  Just when he was about to call him, Milk came shuffling out of the hall and appeared by his side. Maybe he’d recognized the girl’s voice, because he went up to her with his tail wagging. She grabbed the dog’s head with both hands—“Milky!”—knelt down and wrapped her arms around his neck, whispering things in his ear that visibly calmed him. Milk sank to the ground and, growling softly, pushed his muzzle against her cheek. The girl got down even lower, stretched out and began patting him all over. With her fingers curled, she scratched his coat quickly, hurriedly, just like Jonathan always did.

  A lot of people found Milk disgusting. He was old and scrawny, with chafed spots on his sides. After you’d touched him, your fingertips smelt like him and gleamed from the greasy film on his coat. Even Betsy from the flats hadn’t wanted to touch him. “Yuck,” she’d say, shaking her head slightly. “He’s dirty, he needs a bath.”

  Despite his best intentions his eyes followed her fingers over the folds of skin around the dog’s head. Milk’s eyes were closed. Then Jonathan noticed her nails. They were chewed and neglected. He still found it endearing.

  “I know exactly what he likes,” she said. “Look. You have to rub his ears like this, and then, what’s it called, like this around his neck. Look. Here. Like this.” And again he watched her two hands at work. She had her chin raised slightly and kept her eyes fixed on Jonathan’s face, while her fingers went over Milk’s wiry coat once again.

  He needed to walk away, he knew that, but he stayed put. This is the practice, he thought, trying to remember a sentence he’d read in the introduction to the workbook. The interventions were investigated with a follow-up period six months after treatment and, how did it go again, they measured the percentages after six months too—he wasn’t sure of the exact figures, but they were promising. Or did they use a different word? He shouldn’t dwell on it.

  “Here, boy,” he said, interrupting his own train of thought. “We’re going.”

  She looked up at him for a moment with a frown, then resumed talking, ignoring what he’d just said. “He’s not very good-looking, but he’s the sweetest animal I know. We get on really well.” She stayed where she was, patting Milk and talking to him in a low voice. She wiped the hair out of her eyes again with the back of her hand and again it fell back down. “And I know everything about animals. Do you want to see what I can do with him?” She fell silent and looked up expectantly. She seemed to be hoping for his approval.

  He really wanted to leave now, but still stayed there with his hands clenched tightly in his pockets. And the child stayed where she was too, as if gathering her courage. She held her fingertips in front of the dog’s snout. Milk stretched out his scrawny neck and gave them a good sniff. Then she moved her face so close to the dog’s open mouth that she could surely feel his rank breath blowing out over it. She shot him a look of triumph. “Are you brave enough to do that?”

  He listened to the dog’s soft panting and stared at her lips, which were slightly parted. Her teeth were showing. They were a little too big for her mouth. When she gave a cautious smile, slightly crooked, he noticed that a piece of her right front tooth was broken off, a chip. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He automatically ran his tongue over his own front teeth. She saw the look in his eyes. “What happened to your front tooth?” He’d already said the words. He nodded quickly at her mouth.

  She let go of the dog and stood up. She deliberately pushed her lower lip forward, sniffed and frowned, as if it was something she needed to think deeply about. Her knees were turned slightly inward. “Nothing special.” She looked up at the sky for a second, then added, “Fell over.” She shrugged as if racking her brain even more and wondering how exactly it had happened. “I slipped at the swimming pool.”

  He looked over the top of her head at the expanse of bare sand. A breeze had come up and was now pushing at a light branch on the ground. With short teasing nudges it began to roll it along ahead of it.

  He was overcome by a vague sense of tension. The warning-sign chart lit up in his head. “Phase one: you are relaxed.” Was he relaxed? No, he thought, but he never was really. Did that mean that this was already phase two? That couldn’t be right either. That was when he was thinking the wrong things, and what else was it? The wrong thoughts, anyway. And he wasn’t having them. Later, after Milk’s walk, he’d go through the chart again. The main thing now was to get away as fast as possible, before his head got even fuller.

  “Come on, boy.” He gave Milk’s collar a cautious tug, but the dog didn’t budge.

  The girl scratched her right calf with the partly detached trim of her other flip-flop. “It was at the swimming lesson,” she continued. “When I fell over. And then I was too scared to swim any more.”

  He clipped the leash onto the collar. He felt like she was coming closer. “Nasty. Well, we have to get going.”

  He
thought of his mother, looked back for a moment but couldn’t see her. “Come on, Milk,” he said as brightly as he could. “Come on.”

  “I was the only one in the class without a badge,” she said. While studying him through her hair, she plucked at the material of her top with her thumb and index finger. It had an embroidered flower on it. He saw that there was a light glow floating in her right eye, a copper-coloured stain that covered part of the iris, as if her two eyes were each a different colour. It gave her an air of mystery. He looked away from it at once, as if someone had jerked his head back from behind.

  “Come on, boy,” he repeated, pulling the leash.

  She started talking again. “I’m going to learn how to swim, really. I’m not stupid, in case you think so. Or do you not believe me? I was actually allowed to skip a year. I was in a, what’s it called, a special class, but when Dad still lived with us, he didn’t want that. At my new school, after the holidays, I’m going to get all my badges. Bronze, silver and gold. In a really big swimming pool, because we’re going to have to move again. We’re not allowed to stay here too long, but I’m not allowed to talk about that. Mum’s working really hard to make enough money. Then we’re leaving.”

  He nodded, not really listening. He wanted to hear what she had to say, but at the same time he didn’t. Her voice was lovely, a soft murmur. Meanwhile he looked at the sun and realized it was getting late. If he wasn’t careful, things would start to slip. He had to keep a tight schedule. He heard her saying something about her mother’s job.

  “A really stupid job at that bar; she works all day. The only people who go there are men who drink way too much, and then they just sit there staring at her boobs.”

  He was shocked. But couldn’t stop his gaze from descending to hers, which were still flat. He could very vaguely make out the shadow of her breastbone through the material. Ashamed of himself, he looked away, pulled back his shoulders, breathed in and out deeply and cleared his throat. Then he took a step past her, pulling the dog along behind him.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “The dunes.” He’d wanted to stick to a small circuit of the empty neighbourhood, but that wasn’t possible now. This made it easier to shake her off. He gave a half-hearted nod in the direction of the dunes.

  “Can I come?”

  “No. From now on, I’ll be taking Milk out for his walks again. Alone.” He gave another tug on the leash. When Milk ignored him again, he bent over, patted the loose skin behind his ears and pulled gently on the leash. Finally, the dog got up.

  With the uncomfortable heat on his neck, he walked off. He thought about moving and everything he had to do. He’d make a list, a timeline. Get some boxes, do the dusting, sort things out, pack, write the change-of-address cards.

  Just when he’d built up a retaining wall of his own thoughts inside his head, he heard her voice a few steps behind him. “Do you know what my mum said?” Her voice was louder now. He turned. She had her eyes screwed up and he couldn’t place her expression. “My mum says I can play anywhere I like as long as I don’t come here.”

  Suddenly he stopped. Without wanting to, he stared at her. She was holding her head at an angle and looking at him through her hair. She blew it out of her eyes and it fell back down again. She was studying him carefully. “She says you’re not nice at all.”

  “Come on, Milk,” he urged. “Get a move on.” The back of his neck was now burning so badly it felt like the little hairs were being scorched. He looked around one last time. She was pushing the tuft of hair back behind her ear.

  Later that evening he stood at his bedroom window. It was still so hot it was almost unbearable. In the distance the sun was setting behind the roofs. He cautiously touched the skin of his face. His cheeks, his stubble, his chin, the scar over his lip. I am good, he thought, and repeated it, quietly whispering to himself, I am good. He tried to remember the sentences from the introduction he’d discussed with the psychologist and read in the workbook yesterday. He squeezed his eyes shut, searching his memory. Eventually they came back to him. “It’s not about me,” he said out loud. “It’s not about me, but about my actions, about…” He hesitated. “It’s just my behaviour.”

  He stepped over to his table, picked up the book, sat down on the bed and leafed through it until he found the passage. “In this therapy we discuss offences and behaviour that are transgressive.” Oh, yeah, that was it. He went back to the window. “It is our actions and offences that are transgressive,” he said quietly to the window, in which he could see his own vague reflection. “We learn to control that behaviour.” He read on, repeating the last sentences over and over again: “The offender is not bad as a person; it is the acts that are transgressive. Here we learn how to control those acts.”

  AFTER WAKING UP, Jonathan lay motionless in bed for a while. He clamped his eyes shut and raised a hand to his forehead to block out the light that was already streaming in. It was quarter past six, as he’d just seen on his alarm clock. Sunday. Lukewarm air was drifting into the room through the open window and gently rippling the curtain. He sighed, tired from the long day yesterday. But he still got up and walked to the small bathroom attached to his room. I have to go to bed earlier, he thought while washing at the sink. Real life has started. Things are tiring. The heat gets to you.

  At exactly half past, he started on his first circuit with Milk. The sun had only been up for an hour and the light in the streets was still pale, but it was already warm.

  He’d heard his mother doing rounds of the yard in her slippers earlier in the morning. He knew that she sometimes went outside at the crack of dawn to try to get more air. I have to help her, he thought, and again it felt like everything was his fault. The heat, the shabby house, the equally humble home they would soon be moving into.

  He shook off the thought with all his strength, like a dog driving raindrops out of its coat. In the kitchen he made a large jug of squash with ice cubes, which clicked quietly against each other as he carried them outside. His mother had sat down on the bench against the back wall, her face in the shade from the house. While she drank, he set to work. He shook out her sheets, hoovered the dust particles out of her mattress, wiped the surfaces in the living room and bedroom down with a wet sponge, made some sandwiches and fed the dog. Then he took her the pack of cards. It was nine o’clock.

  But before he’d let himself go to the dunes, he had to sit down at his table for a while; he did a thought-stopping exercise and repeated his daily schedule out loud to himself a few times in an attempt to learn it off by heart.

  Now and then he stood up to look through the split in the curtains at the house next door. He wondered where the girl was. But he kept forcing himself to concentrate on the task at hand. He pictured the psychologist’s face before him while he was doing it. As if they were once again sitting opposite each other at his big desk. The way the man relaxed with one elbow on the desktop and his other hand resting on Jonathan’s dossier. He also saw the muscles in his big, broad jaw tensing and his pupils contracting a little while he listened or waited for Jonathan to answer one of his questions.

  “Today I’d like to discuss the results of the psychological evaluation with you, Jonathan.” Always that look he found so hard to interpret. A verbal flood followed. Numbers, numbers, numbers. In no time his head was spinning. The psychologist told him his IQ, having already explained all kinds of things about it. But no matter how attentively Jonathan had listened, he’d already forgotten most of it. His score was lower than average, that much he remembered; it wasn’t nice to hear. But it turned out there were other things he could do very well, better than other people. Doing a neat job, being diligent and persistent, concentrating for a long time on one subject.

  He was also given a rating on a scale for psychopaths: that was low, but there were other reasons why the therapists thought there was a significant chance of his doing something like it again. It was only because the prosecutor hadn’t been ab
le to get the evidence together and he couldn’t be convicted on the victim’s statement alone, his lawyer had explained. Otherwise he would not just have a sentence still to serve, but also be under a hospital order.

  “We estimate a high likelihood of a repeat offence with crimes like yours.” Jonathan fitted a profile, the psychologist had explained, an offender profile, and he’d quoted percentages that had washed out of Jonathan’s brain as fast as he’d heard them. They’d only left vague traces, shallow gullies, bird prints in the sand.

  In his cell at night he’d lain on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He ran his hands over his body, rubbing his chest, throat and face. Even though he knew it was nonsense he was looking for something under his skin, a thickening, a hollow, something that explained the percentages in that profile. Something that matched the things he’d heard that day. Was that really him? It was a frightening yet reassuring idea that the experts seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

  That hospital order could last a long time, the psychologist had told him; he had to take that into account. It could be followed by a restriction order. That was why it was so important for him to apply himself as best he could now. There were still no guarantees of quick results, and the treatment could be extended every year, theoretically for ever, until the psychiatrists and psychologists at the hospital judged him to be cured.

  A hospital order—he’d seen folders from that hospital. Twelve men on a ward, thin-walled cells on either side of a narrow corridor. It would be too much for him. He wouldn’t be able to bear the constant proximity of the others. Year in, year out, their smells, their noise, their bodies. As soon as the other men found out what he was in for, they’d get him, that was inevitable. One way or another, he wouldn’t come out alive. He sighed. As horrific as that hospital order had seemed, he would have liked to have carried on longer with the pre-therapy with the prison psychologist. But that was all cancelled once he was acquitted. Now he could only sign up voluntarily. There was a centre in the city. The psychologist had given him the telephone number, but he knew it was a step he would never dare take.