Tench

by Inge Schilperoord

  Jonathan and his mother clinked glasses without a word. She smiled and he smiled back, but still felt like he needed to say something. He mumbled “Cheers” and it sounded strange to him, awkward. He wanted to try again and repeated it, “Cheers,” a little louder this time and now she too said, “Cheers. Lovely, son.” She dealt.

  The bitter beer tingled faintly on his tongue and cooled his mouth. Almost immediately the alcohol went to his head and he noticed his muscles relaxing. A mist rose between him and his thoughts like a protective haze. He leant back, the wickerwork of the chair creaking softly. Things were going well.

  “Jon,” he heard her say after a while. “Your turn.”

  The cards in his hand were soft, warm and smooth. Half-faded pictures: jack, queen, six of clubs. No ace, no joker. He never got aces. He’d had a pack in his cell too, sent by his mother, but he hadn’t played a single game. Sometimes he did shuffle them before spreading the cards out evenly on the table in front of him, then picking one by random just to see what it was, as if that would somehow reveal what fate had in store for him. But he’d never been able to discern any meaning or pattern.

  “Goodness, it’s getting exciting,” she said. “You’re taking so long, I’m getting very curious…”

  For a moment he took in the look on his mother’s face. That teasing smile and expectant expression: he saw them often when they were playing cards together. He searched her features, listening to the ticking of the clock and the television noise from the living room. Unwanted thoughts began blowing through his mind. Suddenly he wondered if she’d noticed that the girl had been here a couple of days earlier. Or that he’d sat out on the square with her that afternoon.

  And if she knew, what did she make of it? He studied her. The way she was bending over the cards, her small, weary face, her grey hair. Her crumpled collar and restless fingers. For a second he felt like he’d swallowed a handful of earth and couldn’t get it out of his throat. What right did he have to disappoint her so badly? If things had turned out differently with the evidence in court, she would have been alone for a very long time. He could never let that happen again. But it wasn’t going to happen again—did he need to tell her that, explaining that this was different?

  A ship’s horn in the distance distracted him and he returned his attention to the cards, picking out a few. He put on a bright expression and laid them out.

  “Oh, that’s an easy one,” she chuckled, using the tone of voice she always adopted when she thought she was about to thrash him.

  “Just you wait,” he replied, laughing along. He tried to block out the strange mixture of ease and agitation he always felt during their games. Familiar yet painful.

  Neither of them spoke. It was quiet for a while. She was thinking, letting the chain of her necklace glide quickly through her fingers. He heard her drink, swallow, breathe. Quietly he chewed the inside of his cheek. I’m a good son, he told himself. I clean. I cook as well as anyone. I play cards with my mother. But at the same time he pictured her sitting here alone at the table for all those months, under the bare bulb that gave off a pale, hard light in the wintry dark. She dabbed her face and throat with her hankie. They played on until the outside light began to fade. She won three times.

  Towards eight, when it was almost time for him to take Milk out for a walk before doing the exercise he’d neglected that afternoon, his mother said, “Come on, I’ll show you where we’re going to be living. The letter from the council arrived. There are still a few empty houses.”

  She stood up, got a map of the new estate out of the kitchen cupboard, spread it out on the table and took some time to smooth it out with both hands. Now she was leaning over the table, he saw once again how small she was, so much smaller than him.

  “Look,” she said, “there’s still three vacant houses in Rogstraat.” She tapped the map with her nail. “If we move into number 47, we’ll be right on the corner, next to the garage, then we won’t have anyone next door. If we take number 12 we’ll have neighbours on both sides. We get to choose.”

  Deep in thought, she stared at the map. He only glanced at it. The change, the adaptation that would soon be required of him didn’t bear thinking about. He knew it would take months before he felt comfortable again. His gaze moved between his hands, motionless on the tabletop, and the crucifix he had once nailed to the door frame. Next to Mary, her eternally dying son, whose feet too were carefully dusted every single day. Sometimes he heard his mother quietly whispering to the statue while she was at it.

  Once, just before he was arrested, he’d walked into the kitchen and found her standing in front of the statue with her eyes closed and her hands pressed together, saying, “Oh, Holy Mary, forgive us, let us…” He couldn’t make out the rest. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. He crept away before she heard him.

  He only did a quick circuit with the dog. His footsteps were dancing; he was feeling light-headed from the beer. But he was still on schedule. He decided to get started with packing the first boxes. His planning was tight; he had to do it right away, then he’d still have enough time for his exercise.

  He began with the cellar. As the alcoholic haze in his head slowly cleared, he removed piles of rubbish bags, cigar boxes and shoeboxes from the shelves. Old hymnals and exercise books full of songs from when his mother was still a member of the fisherwomen’s choir. Letters from him he preferred not to revisit. Two old Bibles. He quickly leafed through them, just to hear the yellowed pages rustle under his fingers. He kept at it until he’d filled four boxes; the sweat crept up under his hairline, causing an itch he couldn’t scratch away. He estimated that at four boxes a day he’d be finished next week.

  In the slowly extinguishing daylight, he stood by the upstairs window and looked down into the neighbours’ yard. It was empty. The space hopper was gone. Gradually the light changed colour. He watched pigeons take off, flutter around and land again as they searched for somewhere to spend the night. There were a couple hunched over in the gutter with their heads bent forward under their feathers. It was already ten o’clock when he walked back to his table. He wanted to do another exercise, but the beer had worn him out and he could only leaf through the workbook listlessly, trying to find where he was up to. His mind was a blur.

  He sat down in front of the aquarium and looked at the fish. Tonight’s exercise was about emotions. He had to fill in four words for anger in order of intensity. Irritation was the first—they provided that in the book, but he had to come up with the others himself.

  “Do you know one?” he asked the fish. It stared past him for a long time and then, hardly opening its mouth, released a stream of bubbles with a weary sigh. As if it was trying to tell him something. Jonathan crept closer to the tank and studied its round, bulbous head. He saw the slow movement of its gills. It floated motionless in the water for a moment, then tensed its body and turned away, its swishing tail towards Jonathan. This isn’t going to work out, he told himself. He stood up, flicked the dust off the legs of his jeans and felt a gust of warm air from the window brush over his skin. It was no good. It was much too hot to think anyway. He’d just have to do an extra exercise tomorrow. He made a new calculation in his exercise book: one extra tomorrow would be enough to get him back on schedule.

  He sat down on the side of the bed, pulled off his jeans and peeled his drenched T-shirt off his body. For a moment he could smell himself. A heavy, dark smell. He then stretched out on his back on the mattress, whose springs creaked under his weight. The sun had set, but it wasn’t dark yet. He fell asleep almost immediately, but not for long. When he woke up there was still a narrow band of light over the rooftops.

  He shot up but didn’t make a sound, his whole body tense. His heart was a dull pounding in his throat. The shreds of a dream were still stuck to the back of his eyes. Betsy. He’d dreamt about Betsy. He couldn’t summon up just what he’d seen, but the short, high-pitched sounds the child had made were still floating around in his head. Firs
t cooing laughter that changed into an unbearable, short, almost bestial whine. Then the silence before she started crying. “Mummy, I want my Mummy…”

  The pressure of his memories of her was building and the tears welling up in the swollen corners of his eyes seemed to be coming from a place inside him that had been covered over for a long time. Now torn open by the storm of images in his dream. Why now? he asked himself, but it was like he was asking someone else. He took his head in his hands and pressed hard on his temples with his index and middle fingers.

  He wanted to curse himself, to hit himself in the face in front of the mirror, slapping his cheeks as if they were someone else’s. But he thought about the self-image exercise. It was important for him to go easy on himself, be mild, that was what he’d learnt. But how, how were you supposed to do that? The thought of reaching for the workbook was too much for him. Let it go for now, he told himself quietly, and straightened his back. There’s nothing you can do about it. Next time it will be better. He wrapped his arms around his legs and pulled his knees up against his chest. Again that animal smell from his own body. But he still couldn’t stop the train of thought from starting off again, building up steam and rattling along on its creaking, worn-out tracks.

  How could he have let it happen? He thought about the moments immediately before, before the offence, as they’d called it in court. He had been the same person then as he was now, he thought, what else, but he was still completely different. They’d looked for shells, razor clams and cockles. Folded them up in his green-checked hankie. He’d brought squash with him. They drank it together straight from the bottle, in the shade of a pine with long radiating branches.

  He’d spread their finds out again, praising them and telling her about them. She’d stared at them in admiration before stepping over to him and kissing him on the cheek. “Beautiful,” she whispered. At first he didn’t budge. But her face was so close to his. And she gave him another kiss, patted the dog on the top of his head and went to sit down closer to him. Up against his crotch. Never before had he had a soft creature like her so close to him. She was so light.

  The judge had ruled that he had abused her. But for him it was like there was something big, immeasurable, something unspeakable outside him that had abused him. That was something he would never be able to explain or even put into words. But there was something that had suddenly weighed down that incredible lightness he had felt inside him, just like that, without his being involved, behind his back. He had never been able to tell the psychologist—he would have thought he was a justifier, that he was “externalizing”, as they called it, that he wasn’t taking responsibility for his actions. But that was still exactly how he’d experienced it. How could that be bad?

  He didn’t have an answer and he shrank, hung his head against his chest and forced himself to stop thinking about it. “Now,” he said out loud. “Now.” He had to focus on the present. Everything was different now. He was different from how he’d been then and this girl was different too. Again he thought about how calm he’d been in her presence. He’d never experienced anything like it before. His getting to know her was actually a blessing. As long as he didn’t get too close to her, he could practise. And wasn’t that the very thing he needed to do?

  When he was standing at the window again a little later, he saw the girl appear in her yard. For a moment he was disturbed by her being up so late, but that thought was soon displaced by what he saw. She was wearing a skirt. It was the first time he’d seen her in a skirt. She was tossing a tennis ball high against the wall. Every time the ball bounced back, she’d spin around quickly and clap her hands before catching it. With each spin he caught a glimpse of her thighs. His hands gripped the windowsill, the blood drained out of his knuckles. Yes, this was a good exercise. He could train himself like this. You could know everything in theory, he reasoned, and do exercises until you dropped, but in the end, you had to apply it. You had to know what to do in practice. So he kept on watching. The whirling of her skirt, her thighs in the glow of the dim outdoor lights, and still he managed to stay calm. As if the glass separating them was also a protective wall between his thoughts and his body.

  After watching for a while, he noticed something else. She seemed to look lost. But before he could think about that, she suddenly stopped throwing the ball—as if someone had given her a signal—turned and disappeared into the house.

  “She’s alone,” he told the tench. He sat in front of the tank for a while. The fish let a bubble escape from its half-open mouth and stared past him, as always. The blades of the fan were turning slowly and casting weird, warping shadows over the glass. “She wants to be with us,” he said. In reply, the fish fluttered its pelvic fins almost imperceptibly and sank deeper into the mud. Its eyes were dull. We’re all tired, he thought.

  “She doesn’t have anyone,” her wrote in the back of his exercise book. And, under it: “I’ll let her in. Tomorrow at three o’clock, when my mother’s asleep.”

  He sat down at his table and did a self-control exercise. It went well. Then he stood up and looked out of the dark window. The tennis ball was lying on the paving stones. He walked back to the table, read a few more lines, then closed the exercise book and sat there for a while, holding it. Finally, he slipped it under his pillow, undressed and got into bed.

  He’d fallen asleep easily, but woke up with a shock a couple of hours later from a dream about prison. The loud, echoing voices coming closer, radio music, the distant yelling of men in the yard. Footsteps in the corridor. He imagined himself shouting, his mouth as far open as it would go, but no sound came out; nobody heard him. Then that dry click—his cell door opening. The pressure of another body on his, wrestling, heat on the back of his neck, an arm around his throat. He had to break free of his dream, but couldn’t calm his thoughts.

  For hours he lay stretched out on his bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the water pump. He tried his breathing exercises, and again, but only calmed down when he thought the girl into the scenario. She was sitting in a corner of the room with her legs crossed, just in front of the aquarium. She was breathing quietly and it was like the air streaming in and out of her lungs was trembling gently through the room. His own breathing now adopted the right rhythm too—in, out, in, out—and she just sat there in front of the tank. That was a sign. He was sure of it: the best thing was to let her in. He took his exercise book and wrote at the bottom: “When inside, she must maintain a distance of two metres.”

  “LOOK.” She had her exercise book with her. On the front she’d written “PRIVAT!!” in big block letters. The spelling mistake warmed his heart. On the inside cover it said “The Club.” It was Wednesday afternoon and they were in his room; she came over and stood in front of him. He saw that she’d written the names of the members on the first pages in felt-tip. With numbers next to them: “1. Tinca, 2. Milk”, and under that: “Me”. She said, “I think I can put you there too.”

  Jonathan flared his nostrils and straightened his back. He’d given his plan a lot of thought and written it out neatly. He’d adjusted his daily schedule. She could come from three to four. With the weather this hot, his mother had an afternoon nap every day at three o’clock and he woke her up again an hour later. The girl was always out on the square around three. If he passed by with the dog he only needed to call her and she’d come with him right away, he’d noticed that. He saw it all before him. Them, cleaning the aquarium together. Her, happy and laughing again, grateful. All thanks to him.

  Just then, when he suggested she come with him to help with the fish, she’d jumped up from the game she was playing. She had a doll lying on the paving stones and a length of clothes line tied to a lamp post as a skipping rope, and had been turning the cord lethargically.

  She’d followed him in past the living room where his mother was asleep on the sofa and quietly climbed the steps, all thirteen of them.

  “Look,” she said again.

  “Yes, I’m look
ing.”

  She flicked through to the page about Tinca, where she’d written down all the facts he’d told her in small, neat handwriting. “Latin name: Tinca tinca. Real name: tench. Or: doctor fish. Does not like it hot. 18 degrees is the best. More than 23 degrees is very bad, hard for the fish.”

  He could hardly believe his eyes. All those details—she must have a really good memory. Just like him. As if there was a computer chip in there, hidden somewhere in the wiring of her brain.

  “Did you just remember all of that?”

  “Sure.” Her face at an angle, her hair in that cropped, crazy ponytail. Now she was smiling at him, revealing her broken front tooth. The sharp, chipped corner, the tip of her tongue resting on her lower lip.

  He could tell she looked up to him. Light sparkling in her eyes, minuscule droplets on the bridge of her nose. As if to draw attention to them, she puckered her nose a couple of times, just for an instant, a wrinkling, a quiver of her nostrils. “I had a dream about Tinca last night,” she said. Immediately his own dream popped into his thoughts. Did she have that too? Dreaming so vividly that she still saw the colourful, moving images before her in the morning? He would have liked to tell her about his dreams, but couldn’t think of any that were appropriate. Last night’s, the one about Betsy, definitely wasn’t.

  “What did you dream?” he asked.

  “She was sick.”

  He looked at her face from the side. She sighed. He thought he could detect fear, but he wasn’t sure. Should he ask her? If she was scared? Again he thought of his psychological assessment. According to the psychologist he wasn’t good at recognizing other people’s emotions. And when he wasn’t sure, he shouldn’t guess: he should ask. That was a way of learning more about how people worked. But was it necessary now? He frowned. His stomach started to rumble, as if he’d eaten something dodgy. What would happen if he asked her? Would she answer honestly? And if she really was scared, what should he do? He looked at her, engrossed in her exercise book. The moment had already passed; it was too late. He bit his lip and didn’t speak. Her pen scratched over the paper.