Tench

by Inge Schilperoord

  He saw her from behind, as he’d so often seen her, but now everything seemed changed. She crawled towards the tank, like yesterday, but it was like she was being lit up by a different, strange light from outside. She was wearing her running shorts and the pale top that must have once been yellow. The piece of chalk in her back pocket, her short ponytail, her thighs, her ankles, her toes in her broken flip-flops. She didn’t know what she was doing, what she was doing to him with her movements. But still. He saw her movements as lines, as gossamer threads tying them together, a tight, finely woven web. And he wasn’t the heavy, vengeful spider waiting in the middle. He was the tiniest little fruit fly, wrapped up and left dangling on a sticky shivering thread, waiting now for the devastating gust of wind that was bound to come.

  He had to put it behind him, he thought. He had to do it. From her ankles, he imagined his gaze rising, following the line of her calves, past the warmth of the backs of her knees, her skin almost glowing against the palm of his hand, and he continued to her thighs, trying to imagine grabbing her around the waist, but at the same time he felt sick from his own fantasy.

  He was lying on his back on the mattress with his eyes open, following his breathing in and out, trying to calm his diaphragm. He concentrated on a patch of light on the ceiling. He let time pass without moving.

  Finally he walked from the bed to his table, sat down with his hands on his lap, rubbed the middle of his left thumb with his right and waited for salvation that didn’t come. He let more time pass, stood up, walked from the table to the window, then back again. And again. The yard was empty. And it stayed empty. He stood there a long time. The space hopper hadn’t moved.

  Sweating, he went down to the kitchen, where it was even hotter than upstairs. The air was so thick here he thought he’d suffocate. He had to leave the house. He had to go outside. To do what he was apparently predestined to do.

  In the living room his mother was lying on the sofa softly groaning. “Jon? Where’s my inhaler? Have you seen my inhaler? Could you get it for me?” He turned on the spot. It was too much; he couldn’t cope with this too. In the kitchen he turned on the tap, splashed some water onto his face and rubbed it over his neck.

  “Jon!” she called weakly.

  But he turned the tap up full blast and put his head all the way under, letting his ears fill up with water so he couldn’t hear her any more. There she was again, her voice coming through after all. “Jon? Are you in the kitchen?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and squashed his thoughts together so long and so hard until he’d shut out everything. He realized that if he just thought about her absence long enough, he could make her disappear. And himself too. It was like he was tumbling away, falling into darkness, but then inside, into himself. He felt his heart beating in his throat, as frantically as when he’d seen his own face lit up in the glass of the aquarium. Looking at that man in that reflective glass, at himself, who was that man, but also seemed to be someone very different. That man in the glass was going to do something he didn’t have anything to do with. Briefly, that thought calmed him down. And together with an unreal relief, he felt a strange power growing within him. He had to leave, he had to go to her, there was no time to lose. He looked for the dog, whistled, walked down the hall and back to the kitchen, and found him in the yard. Asleep and quietly wheezing with his head on his front paws. When he whistled a second time, the dog raised his head for a moment, then lowered it again. “Come on, boy, come on now.” He walked over to him. The sky above was gradually growing overcast. The weather was turning. Was it going to rain? He’d heard the forecast on the radio. Rain and squalls.

  “Come on.” Milk didn’t respond at first; he just stayed lying there on the paving stones, then slowly raised his eyelids and had a scratch with his right hind leg. He twisted his head back and tugged at a scab with his teeth. “Come on, boy, let’s go!” While making soft clicking sounds with his tongue and scratching the top of the dog’s head furiously with the fingers of one hand, he used the other to attach the leash. It was already very windy. Above him wisps of cloud were joining together and racing across the slate-grey sky. In the distance a flock of seagulls was being scattered in the wind. Still no rain. Only heat. Heat that seemed like it would never go away, heat that pressed him down to the ground day after day.

  He was smouldering on the inside too. The heat of his blood, boiling, his head broiling. It was punishment, he thought. Nature was punishing him. Or God. Jonathan didn’t believe in God, but it still made sense that He would punish him. For what he was, for his thoughts, for his feelings.

  “Now it’s really going to happen,” he said, shuddering. “It’s time.” Everything he’d wanted, everything he’d resisted for so long with all he had, now it was going to happen. And for the first time in ages he felt like there was only a now. No more past, no more future. As if time had swollen up, solidified and come to a standstill. As if nothing else would ever happen except this.

  Tomorrow, maybe even this evening, the police would come to pick him up, he knew it. But no matter how much that scared him, he knew too that he wanted to reconcile himself to every thing that was going to happen. The wheels will turn and they’ll come for me, he thought. He’d fought and lost. Now all he could do was obey what was inside him.

  Jonathan walked on without looking back and stopped just behind next door’s. “You have to pee first,” he told Milk. The dog relieved himself hastily in the sand behind the house and immediately walked on. The back door was ajar. They were still there. He had to act now. He could feel it in his breathing, high in his chest, fluttering, the tips of restless flapping wings, and saw himself going on, pulling the dog along behind him. Upstairs, he thought, just go straight up, don’t stop to think. And you don’t need to be scared of her mother. If you bump into her, he thought, you can just say something. Even though he didn’t have a clue what he would say or how he would react, the thought of encountering her was no longer frightening. What could she do to him? She hadn’t even looked after the girl properly; he’d like to tell her off. Where did she get the nerve?

  Softly he pushed the door open and stepped into the utility room. He stood there for a moment and then walked further. Through the kitchen and into the hall. It was quiet. And empty. He stepped into the living room. He knew that the girl and her mother didn’t have a lot of stuff, but this was worse than he could have imagined. Just like their house, but as if someone had taken away everything they owned and replaced it with junk. An old table made of unvarnished wood, a sofa covered with a stained bedspread. And everywhere the smell of damp. Dirty yellow rings on the walls. Piles of boxes stacked up in the corners. Dust floating in the beams of light. He walked through the low hall, with the same small panes as in their house, saw his own shadow, and continued up the narrow staircase.

  “Hello?” he called. No answer. “Where are you?” It stayed quiet. In his thoughts he heard his own voice echoing briefly, then listened to the murmur of his blood in his temples. He quickened his pace. As he climbed the stairs it began to rain outside. The drops were tapping on the roof with a dull, steady rhythm and he stood still for a moment to listen. Rain with squalls, he thought, just like the forecast. He clenched his fists; his mouth was dry. It had to rain more. Roaring thunderstorms, gales tugging at him, at his body and limbs, shaking him in all directions, that was what suited how he felt, the fury inside him. But the falling of the drops, the tempo at which they splashed down, remained soft and calm. He bit on the inside of one cheek and then the other, made some chewing movements and felt more saliva appearing in his mouth, then climbed the last steps. At the top, he stared at the trembling dust particles floating in the light. They seemed to come out of nowhere, without any purpose. It was still so quiet that he realized he wouldn’t find anyone. He walked on.

  He stopped on the landing and looked around in the dim light, letting his eyes adjust before taking it all in. Bare walls, unpainted wood, a kitchen chair in the corner next to
the door that must lead to her bedroom. An environment that told him nothing: anyone could live here, or nobody.

  He found it hard to believe this was her house, the place she went back to every afternoon after they’d been together. Where she slept at night. He kept staring. There was something about the abandoned scene that bothered him: the longer he looked at it, the more he got the strange feeling that there was something the surroundings were keeping hidden from him, that there was something he wasn’t allowed to see. As if the things, the shapes and the dust had made up their minds not to be caught out, as if they were holding their breath, waiting until he’d walked on, to only then show their true nature.

  He listened to his own breathing. Studying the room, he flared his nostrils, but the smell he hoped to catch also stayed hidden. Her smell wasn’t lingering anywhere. Now, when he was longing for her so intensely it hurt, she was further away than ever. Somehow he could only picture her in fragments too, in details. That smile, her tooth, her lips and the way they didn’t entirely close, the fleck in her eye, the side of her neck when the late afternoon sun was shining on it. But these things wouldn’t combine to form a whole. He had to go into her room, he thought. That was where she would be closest to him.

  Her bedroom was small, just like his. Although hers seemed even smaller. The air inside was just as warm and muggy. Here too he could pace the length of the room in seven steps and the breadth in three. Half an arm’s length up to the rafters of the ceiling. Where his table stood, there was a plastic box full of toys. The arm of the doll he’d seen so often before was sticking up over the side, together with one end of her skipping rope. Where he had his bed, she had a small desk. And where he had his aquarium, there was a mattress on the floor.

  Jonathan walked over to it, got down on his knees and ran his hands over the slightly greasy surface. He took the sheet that was draped over the mattress by the corners, held them together and brought them up to his nose. Yes, now, now he could smell her. He was immediately hard again. Sweat leapt out of the pores along his hairline. He wiped it away with the corner of the sheet.

  Suddenly he felt an overpowering urge to have a wank—here, with all her things around him. The mattress on which the impression of her body was still almost visible, her table, her doll, her skipping rope. Just when he was about to unbuckle his belt, another memory shot off like a spring that had come loose in his head. She was sitting across from him with her eyes screwed up, and he heard her voice as she began to read the story she had just written. He was overcome by shame. It was too much. The blood was surging through the arteries in his head, swelling and stretching them. His skin was going to burst. No, he shouldn’t wank here, it wasn’t meant to be like that, he needed her with him, he wanted her, warm and sweet, against him. He pressed his eyelids with his fingertips and held them there, breathing very slowly through his mouth. “Where are you?” he whispered.

  He wanted to leave but couldn’t, not yet. After sitting still for at least a minute, he stood up, only to sink back down onto the floor almost immediately. He smelt the sheet and crawled over to the desk in the corner of the room. The exercise book she was always writing in was right there, open and arranged neatly in the middle of the table, surrounded by crayons, pencil stubs, a felt tip. The seat of the chair was covered with sheets of paper with writing on them. He pushed them over to one side to sit down.

  He stroked the cover of the exercise book, which was opened at a page titled: “The secret mision. The club.” In big, awkward block letters she’d written: “What we have to do to save Tinca.” Under it there was a summary: “Water not more than 23 degrees, enough mud, quiet and snails (bythinia), that’s her favourite food. You find them in the lakes in the sand dunes.”

  That was where she was. Of course. How could he have been so incredibly stupid not to think of it? Of course, she’d gone to get the snails.

  He listened to the rain tapping on the roof. He pictured her in her shorts with a raincoat on over her top. Her limp, wet ponytail. She was wearing her wellies. In his imagination she made her way from the path to the edge of the lake, quietly talking to herself. Maybe she’d taken a bucket from home. Bending forward carefully, she poked a branch into the muddy water by the bank, scared to go too close.

  Was the rain stopping? He wanted to see an opening in the clouds, pale hesitant sunlight caressing her face. He remembered how beautifully the light had shone on her throat and cheeks that afternoon at the swing and how she half closed her eyes while he pushed her. He could almost taste the greasy crisps he’d fed her, almost feel the oppressive heat, her eyes on him, the soft, parted lips he almost touched with each crisp, the movement in the dimple at the bottom of her throat when she swallowed. His heart was thrashing again and he put the film on pause, but it started rolling again almost immediately, opening, unfolding.

  Her soft, parted lips. Him feeding her. And then he saw it happening. Very close. He grabbed her hair. As if to save himself from the whirlpool of his own thoughts. As if he could save her from the fire that was raging in him, around him, sucking everything in and burning everything to a cinder. But how could he ever insist that it was her safety he was after, because in his thoughts he was pushing her down on the ground. His fingers curled up, clawing. He smelt the cheap shampoo so deep in his nose he couldn’t escape it. And there was the next moment. She was naked—he didn’t even think about how he’d undressed her—in his thoughts she was already naked. He saw her legs and between them a shell of immaculate flesh. Now the film slowed down. He was kneeling before her and she was lying on her back with her head turned to one side. His tongue left a track along the inside of her calves; he pushed her legs apart. There was the pinkness and he touched it very cautiously, and he’d never felt anything like it, softer than everything else. Inside his head the film kept playing in slow motion. Silent but with vivid moving pictures. So vivid that he could feel her beneath him. He’d never permitted himself to go this far before, to see it in such detail, to feel it and not let the calmness inside him be interrupted by anything, as if it was all coming together.

  He was inside that warmth, that softness. He changed position and wriggled his hand in under his belt, as if that way it wouldn’t be him who was doing it, as if it would be her. He only had to move his hand a couple of times and he could already feel the driving warmth surging up from deep in his balls. But he squeezed and stopped it. Not yet. Not here.

  He wanted to get up, but there was no stopping it. Not with her smell wafting through his brain, and the heat, and another inescapable surge came. She didn’t look at him, just kept vaguely smiling. In his imagination she had the same distant look in her eyes as when she was reading. She was there, but at the same time she wasn’t. She didn’t see him. Not while he was inside her. She didn’t make a sound. It was like he didn’t exist. Suddenly angry he pushed deeper into her, spread her legs high, pushing them apart with his hands, thrusting and thrusting again and staring at her face, waiting for a twist of her mouth, something to show that she felt him, that he existed. But she kept stubbornly looking the other way. Almost crying with rage, he kept tugging at her in his thoughts. Surely in his fantasies he could at least get her to do what he wanted?

  Look at me, he thought. Lift up your head. He tried to raise the girl’s chin but she resisted. Her neck muscles stayed tense. He heard a rhythmic sound, the slap of flesh against flesh, as if this wasn’t just in his head. Finally, she turned her head towards him. She smiled, but her eyes were gleaming sadly. And despite the victory of finally controlling her, he again felt a short, sharp pang of disgust. He ran his fingers through the child’s sweaty hair and looked down at her again. Now she was looking at him from behind her exercise book. He thought of her head pressing against his shoulder, her mouth open, a faint smile, and he saw her blonde hair, her skin, everything that was so beautiful and perfect about her, the quiet little noises she made when she was writing. He gulped to swallow the snot and tears, but in his mind it was her eyes t
hat were full to overflowing and the tears were starting to roll down her cheeks and chin. He stroked her throat and trailed his fingers over her cheek. “Hush now,” he soothed.

  The ceiling seemed to be lowering. He could see her sitting across the room, a silhouette, motionless. “Turn around,” he said, but in this room all sound seemed to disappear into a strange silence. It couldn’t end like this, him alone in this barren, godforsaken desolation—he had to break out of it. Alone. He had to get away from here, to her.

  Suddenly he was outside again, in the steady rain, and he started running, the dog behind him. Jogging, but going as fast as he could, he skirted the village. Along the gravel path, the long dune path, climbing until a stab of pain in his heaving chest forced him down onto his knees. The wet sand and broken shells scraped his palms. Milk came round in front of him and started panting into his face. “Stop it.” He pushed him away, spat a big gob out on the ground, coughed, wiped the moisture away from his neck, scrambled back up and started running again. Now through the small wood. The pines surrounding him reached up into the grey sky with their gently swaying branches. They were close together, cutting him off, no room to get through between the trunks. Sometimes he felt like someone was watching him; the next instant he was running towards freedom. The wind blew through the treetops, the murmuring rain drowned out the pounding of his blood. Branches snapped under his feet, he was kicking up pebbles, and sometimes he couldn’t tell where the sounds were coming from, if he was making them himself. He tried to think, to follow a straight line in his head and through the wood, the shortest path to where he wanted to be. But he was thinking of everything at once and sometimes his thoughts stopped altogether, sinking in dark silence to the unreachable depths of his mind. Just before the clearing where he would get the first view of the pond, with less than five minutes’ jogging to go, his lungs had had enough. He sat down for a moment on the pine needles, his back against a tree trunk. He rubbed his face, pressed his forehead and eyes, and thought once again about what was going to happen when he saw her, the fear of what he was about to do gnawing away at him.