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Tench

Page 14

by Inge Schilperoord


  He bent over to pick a shell out of the soft, sandy indentation between two paving stones and put it in his pocket, where he gripped it tight. Something to hold on to. All at once he could have cried. How could he ever explain how beautiful she was? How he felt about her? What they had together?

  “Look, these are the club’s first rules!” From where she was sitting, she showed him the exercise book again. The first few pages were covered with writing. “Do you want to hear them?”

  He nodded. Of course he wanted to hear them. He wanted to stay sitting here for ever. See time disappear, running away through the cracks between the paving stones. But he looked at his watch and saw that it was getting late. Almost quarter to four. When he’d left home it had just gone three. Time had caught up with him again.

  “Quickly, then,” he said, tapping his watch. “I have to get going.” His heart was racing.

  She crawled over to within a metre of him and sat down at an angle to get into his shade. She was breathing lightly and looked at him with what he took for a questioning, almost proud expression. She stared at her own words, paused for a moment and began. “Listen,” she said in a solemn voice. She cleared her throat. “The members of the club have to be nice to each other all the time. They mustn’t ever be mean. They’re not allowed to push each other. They’re not allowed to say that they stink. And if there are games, everyone’s allowed to join in.” She looked at him and continued: “They’re also not allowed to swear, drink or shout. And when they’re asleep they don’t bother each other. At night they are not allowed to go into each other’s rooms.”

  When she’d finished reading, she stared ahead for a long time, biting her lip and frowning. He felt the heat surrounding them.

  He couldn’t decide whether he should stand up now or wait a little longer, until she looked completely relaxed again, with a smooth forehead. He moved his feet awkwardly a couple of times and then jumped up. There was a rumbling in his head. A dark, rolling noise like thunder in the distance.

  “Don’t go,” she said, standing up as well. She gave him that look again. “I don’t know what to do. I want to be with Mum and Dad. But I want to stay with you too. I don’t want to go away.” She craned her neck, tilted her face a little and looked up at him with wide, bright eyes.

  He could feel it in the pit of his stomach. Something inside his head was collapsing. Nothing, he thought. There was nothing he could do for her. He was helpless. He looked at her standing there. Her narrow shoulders and hips, her thin ankles. All of her. He felt proud to be together with her, but sad too. The skin of her arms, a slightly lighter strip on her wrist where she must have worn a bracelet or watch. He hadn’t noticed it before and that felt terrible.

  He wanted to leave, but couldn’t get himself moving. And could he leave her in a state like this? Her eyes, he saw something in her eyes, the light, a gleam, the sparkle of moisture. But maybe it was all just the heat on the square. The afternoon heat, that scorching, unbearable heat.

  “I have to go now,” he said and heard how strange his own voice sounded.

  “That’s no fun,” she said, pouting. She stood up and wobbled from one foot to the other.

  “I have to cook,” he said. “For my mother. And I need to feed the fish. And Milk too. Come on, Milky.” His tense fingers ploughed through the dog’s hair, which hung over his eyes in lank wisps. “Come on, boy, we’re off.” He smiled a pained smile. “But we’ll see each other again tomorrow, won’t we? That will take a lot of time to organize, going away, you’ll see.”

  Now she came straight up to him and he held his breath, bottling the air up in his lungs. She raised a hand and touched him very briefly on the chest. He swallowed. It was between his breastbone and his shirt collar, which had a point of stiff fabric. Not so very far from the bone in his throat that was making it impossible for him to swallow, the bone whose name he didn’t know and would never know. She moved the back of her hand over to his collar, gripped it and straightened it with a short, quick tug, as if he was the child, not her, and she said, “I think you’re nice. I think you’re reaaallllly nice.”

  At home he fled into his bathroom, pulled his belt open and wrung his hand down into his trousers. Furious, he started tugging and squeezing, squeezing hard. He squeezed until he couldn’t bear the pain. Then his fingers slid down, feeling their way over his skin and he simply held himself. He began stroking softly and briefly did what he liked the most, but soon pulled his hand away again. And again that squeezing, even harder, even angrier. Then stroking again, caressing, pressing. Over and over. He wanted it and he didn’t want it. He tugged harder and harder. Pressed his nails into his skin. Pictured her as he’d just seen her. Sitting in front of him: the back of her neck, her thighs, perfect, the shadow behind her knees, the hems of her shorts against her skin. His dick was so hard now. Part of him was still trying to hold it back, but his hands were moving of their own accord, faster and faster. Then he slowed down again, wanting to stop, but he had no choice. All his muscles were tensed. He closed his eyes, tears under his eyelids. Bastard, he said, why are you such a bastard? The tears stung. But it had to happen, there was no alternative. Again he accelerated his hand movements, tensed his jaw, holding on to the side of the washbasin with his left hand. Suddenly it went faster than expected. Images of her. Her half-open mouth, the stain on her shorts. A warm glow from the bottom of his backbone straight up to his head. He squeezed his eyes shut, shuddered a couple of times and then collapsed on the floor. He felt the tears coming.

  He stayed there like that for a long time, with his back against the wall, slumped over, his hands wet with his nastiness and feeling more helpless than ever. Eyes closed. Not good, was all he could think. This is not good. Not good at all. He thought of the relaxation exercise and the exercises about protective factors, tension reduction. He’d done them all so faithfully. All those hours.

  A muscle in his jaw started to tremble. He tried to calm it, pushing his lower jaw forward. More tears welled up but he held them back, wiping them away from the corners of his eyes with his sleeve. It didn’t fail, he thought. It hasn’t failed.

  He couldn’t let himself lose heart. Sex was normal, he told himself. You just had to replace the pictures, unlearn them, replace and…

  But he couldn’t follow his own train of thought. He couldn’t remember it all and his body was so heavy. He pulled his legs up, wrapped his arms around them and leant over to one side, his head against the bottom of the washbasin. Calm down, calm down. His knuckles were pressing into his eye sockets. Calm down. You just have to order your thoughts. It will be OK. You haven’t done anything to her and you’re not going to either. She doesn’t have a clue. She’s innocent—she’ll stay innocent. He saw her eyes, her irises.

  “Jon!” his mother called from downstairs. “Jon! Yoo-hoo!”

  No, he said softly to himself. “No,” he whispered. “Not now.” He had to be alone, writing in his exercise book, thinking about what had happened.

  “Jon!” she called again, a little louder.

  Everything gone, he thought. Couldn’t everything around him and in him just disappear. Sinking into the hole he so often found in his thoughts.

  “Jon!” she called again, annoyed now. “Do you know what time it is?”

  What if he didn’t react? For a moment he felt like the rest of the world would not exist if he kept his eyes shut. That he could just keep sitting here with his arms around his legs and his hands clasped together, eyes shut, and wait until he had crumbled into little pieces. It wouldn’t take long. Inside his head it had already started.

  “Jon, hurry up!”

  “Yes, I’m coming,” he said now, but so quietly he knew she wouldn’t hear him.

  She’d come out of the living room and was now standing in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice was too close.

  “I’ll be there in a sec,” he called, loud enough now. He rubbed his eyes for a while with the back of his hand, as if wiping
away his thoughts, got up and gave his hands a long, thorough wash, face averted from the mirror. Now his horniness was gone, everything was different. He only found the girl sweet again and thought of her young face. The way she asked for crisps, with a little whistling sound at the end, as if she was trying not to show how much she wanted them. The way she talked. “Tinca tinca.” She liked to say it twice. It tinkled. He thought about how she’d walked away, her awkward ponytail, animal book in one hand, pen and exercise book in the other.

  Suddenly he felt a stabbing pain in his stomach. A stomach ache. And he had to go downstairs, otherwise his mother would come and call him again.

  Get up, he thought. Come on. You idiot. You can’t help it. You’re an idiot. But make up for it. You have to cook, clean, walk Milk. Early to bed. Do an extra exercise or two. Three. Redo them. Do all of the exercises all over again. Leaning on his elbows, he pushed himself up.

  Vacantly, he mashed some potatoes into his gravy. It had been quiet for quite a long time. It was ten past seven and they were still sitting at the table.

  He felt his mother watching him. Now and then she rested her knife and fork on the side of her plate to stare at him in an attempt to force him to look up at her. He avoided her and kept his gaze on his food as if it was nothing to do with him, as if he wasn’t involved in anything, a complete outsider.

  “Son, are you listening?”

  For a moment his mother’s voice raised him up out of the murky, formless thoughts he’d sunk into and he turned his head towards her.

  “You’re not going to make it like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The move. It’s only five days now. These last few days you haven’t done any packing at all.” She shook her head, bit her lip, patted her eyes dry with her serviette and continued. “Just so you know, I’m not going to stay here. I can hardly breathe.” To emphasize her words, she took a deep but strangled breath. She looked at him from under half-lowered eyelids. “If necessary I’ll pay someone to help me pack. We’re leaving here no matter what. You understand that, don’t you?”

  He nodded without looking up, scarcely noticing how he was dragging his fork over a crack in the rim of his plate. The tines automatically followed the bumpy edges, scraping off coarse grit.

  “And don’t scratch like that.”

  He was completely gripped by an absurd hope that somewhere there was someone or something who could tell him what to do, who could give him a sign. It filled his head. Should he call that psychology clinic after all? Could they help him? Or would it only make things worse? He’d heard about that before. Them hearing from your voice that something was wrong, and then coming by or sending a probation officer after you. The girl had been at the door a few times in the last couple of days—should he stop letting her in? That no longer seemed possible. He couldn’t even imagine getting through the days without her any more.

  He tried with all his might to disentangle his thoughts and create a space in which he could assemble his sentences and answer his mother.

  But suddenly she pushed her plate away and looked at him with her eyes wide and her nostrils flared. “Don’t let that girl in any more and concentrate on what you have to do. If you keep this up, you won’t leave me any choice.”

  Now he raised his head in fright. No, this isn’t happening, was all he could think. This isn’t happening. It’s not possible. Not my mother. She’s on my side. She would never report me, she would never betray me.

  “I want to see you the way I’ve always seen you, as my dear sweet boy, but I don’t know if that’s possible.”

  Just then the dog barked and raised himself up on his long, unsteady legs. He stood for a moment, his hocks twisting. Jonathan looked at him, at his thin neck, his back, the bare spots in his coat. Scratches and bites where he’d tried to get at an itch; he was covered with those wounds, but Jonathan only noticed them now. They were shocking. What was strange though was that what he could see here before his eyes seemed much realer than what his mother had said. Whimpering quietly, the dog slowly lowered himself back down to the floor, reminding Jonathan of the fish upstairs, which was still floating half-dead in the tank and eating next to nothing. The graph of his weight had fallen under the one-kilo line; if that kept up much longer he’d soon be dead.

  Jonathan was staring at his plate again and still hadn’t said a word. His stomach felt as empty as it had before tea. But he had to go upstairs, and straight away. When he said so, his mother just looked at him without a word.

  He withdrew to his room, closed the curtains and lay down on the narrow bed without pulling the sheet over himself. The fan was moving the warm air around and he thought of the girl again; her face was so small and familiar, right now she seemed more familiar than anything at all in this house, even his own mother. He longed for her presence, for her calming effect. He jumped up and looked out through the gap between the curtains, but the yard was empty.

  He lowered himself down onto the floor. For a long time he sat staring at the water in the aquarium, wondering what he should do. Was it his duty to take the fish back to the pond? He could hardly bear to look at it any more; it was in such a state, and it was his fault that it was living here in such confined quarters.

  But it was all too hard to understand and he couldn’t decide what to do. Of course, it was his fault that the fish was floating here in his tank, but it had also been weak the first time he saw it. He was sure it wouldn’t have survived in its natural environment without his help. He looked to see if he could discern any vitality or strength in the fins and the tail but there weren’t any signs of life. No matter how hard he struggled to grasp what had happened, there was only room in his head for a single unyielding, stubborn thought. He couldn’t take the fish back. Strangely enough, he felt that very strongly. It was like the two of them were facing a task they had to complete together. As if it wasn’t just that his fate was linked to the fish, but as if the bond between them stood for something greater, something awesome he didn’t really understand.

  That night he hardly slept and in the morning he couldn’t shrug off the feeling that everything was going in the wrong direction. He’d already decided that he was going to take a sickie and had sat up until long past three, bent over his workbook and trying hard to let the words sink in. At half-six the light woke him up. Tuesday. The sky was on fire again. The fish was floating half dead in the muddy water. Anxiously he studied the thermometer: 33 degrees. And the humidity was worse than ever. Breathing in, the air scalded his throat.

  “Hey!” He tapped the glass with a fingernail. “Hey! Pull yourself together.”

  The fish hadn’t eaten any of yesterday’s dry food, which was turning into slush at the bottom of the tank. He lifted the fish out to weigh it, slipping it into the bucket on the hook of the scales. It didn’t even resist. No more than 975 grams. He put it back in the tank and sat there fretting about it for a while. Then he gave it some bread and some of Milk’s dry dog food, which he cut down to size first, but it wouldn’t eat.

  When he’d finished changing the water in the aquarium and had scrubbed some algae out of the joins, he went downstairs to cook some sweetcorn in the kitchen, but his mother was already there, kneeling on a mat in front of the statue of Mary to pray. He hurried back upstairs and sat down again in front of the tank, peering into the thin, pale light. Then he stood up again to look into the girl’s yard. Tomorrow. He had to let her in again, one more time.

  He went back downstairs in his underwear and pool sandals. His mother was lying on the sofa and had fallen asleep again; a quiet, rasping snore was rising from her throat. He cooked some sweetcorn in the kitchen and took it upstairs. With what looked like a tremendous effort, the fish worked its way up to the surface and gulped at the sweetcorn before sinking back down to the depths again almost immediately. Jonathan knelt down in front of the glass and waited.

  As if part of a sinister plan to break him, the letter he’d been dreading the w
hole time arrived from the public prosecutor’s office around noon. He read that the case was being reopened. It said something about valid reasons for restarting the investigation, but he screwed the letter up before finishing it.

  It didn’t bear thinking about. In the hall he slumped down on the floor and tore the sheet of paper up into the smallest possible pieces, before sweeping them into a tidy little pile with his hands. Confetti, he thought. A tiny mound left over from a celebration. Even if there was nothing to celebrate. It was the very opposite. This letter announced the end of his life. Three steps from table to door, three steps back, a window, a locked door, fear. He was still squatting in the hall with his back to the wall. He felt the steady, ongoing beat of his heart and tried to think.

  Somewhere inside there was still a part of him that wanted to act, to call his lawyer or do something, anything. But a mist had also formed in his head and was cutting him off. “Ring him up,” he mumbled, thinking of his lawyer’s blue tie. “Go on, ring him up. Get some help, you moron.”

  A copy of the letter had been sent to his lawyer. He’d start preparing the case immediately, looking for solutions and finding them. Wouldn’t he? Surely? But Jonathan couldn’t get his legs to walk.

  Finally he made it upstairs and reached for his workbook, a few pages of which were coming loose from the binding. He leafed through it. Searching for his lawyer’s number between the loose sheets with notes, the memory aids, the tension graph. But before he’d found it, he’d already lowered the workbook to his lap. There was no point.

  It was over. He felt as if everything was already in place. He heard footsteps in the corridor that led to his cell block, the footsteps of big burly men. There were four of them, maybe five. But they were coming on behalf of more. They were coming on behalf of the whole ward, the whole hospital.

 

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