Little Sister

by David Hewson

  Then the bird had lifted her beak, quacked something, and the tiny band had waddled from the lake side of the road to the dyke opposite.

  ‘That,’ said their mother as they watched the procession reach the weed-strewn water and happily clamber in, ‘is what mummies do. Look after their chicks. Always. And like good little chicks they do as they’re told.’

  In the back of the bus crossing Waterland Mia started to cry. Kim did too but not so much and then she wiped away her sister’s tears.

  Evening fell around them. The countryside slowly gave way to the city, to wide roads and highways, a new and alien environment of concrete and noise, heavy with the dusty dark smell of pollution. The bus slowed down with the traffic. Through the IJtunnel they went.

  The sisters sat more closely to one another. This place was busy and so strange. They’d barely visited Amsterdam as children and that was half a lifetime away. Mia had the map they’d been left in their room at Marken. She took it out to show her sister. So many streets. So many canals bigger than any dyke they’d seen.

  Finally they stopped at the terminus behind Centraal station, so shiny and clean it had to be new. Street lights were coming on everywhere, boats and ferries crossing the busy water.

  The driver scratched his head as they wandered to the front and asked if they were all right.

  ‘Of course,’ Kim answered. ‘We are sisters. Together we look after each other the way families do.’

  The man had dark skin and shiny black hair. He smiled at them and said in a foreign accent, ‘Enjoy your evening, ladies.’

  They didn’t smile back so he shrugged and opened the door.

  They walked through the vast station to the city side and bought two hot dogs and cans of soft drink from a stall. The map they’d been left had a route to a place with a heavy felt-tip asterisk against it. There was a street name, a number and a short message scribbled at the top: Go here girls. And be free.

  Ten minutes it took and with every passing second they felt the world was watching them, staring at them, judging them. Finally they wandered down the busy street of Haarlemmerstraat where gaggles of men and women, half-drunk, half-stoned, were going out for the night. The number was for a tiny narrow terraced house in Vinkenstraat behind.

  A cheery English woman who called herself Vera answered the door. She was expecting them, made welcoming noises and showed them inside.

  In the hallway Mia offered her money there and then. She’d no idea how these things worked.

  ‘No need for that now, love,’ the woman said. Her face was wrinkled and the colour of old wood. The sisters weren’t good at guessing ages. Perhaps she was fifty. Perhaps more. In spite of the tan she didn’t look well. Halfway up the steep and narrow stairs she had to stop to catch her breath, taking out an inhaler from her pocket, gasping at it before she could go on.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Mia asked.

  The woman laughed and said, ‘For now, kiddo. You Dutchies don’t half like to make steps difficult for an old bird like me.’

  Then she waited a while until she was steady and led them to a small room on the top floor. A couple of single beds sat either side of a narrow window that overlooked a dark courtyard where pigeons cooed.

  ‘You can work out where the bathroom is,’ she said. ‘I’m off for a lie-down.’

  They had scissors and hair dye, stolen from the staff quarters. Mia cut Kim’s hair first. She began to cry as the golden locks fell on the grubby terracotta tiles. Kim started gently weeping too. They stopped, hugged each other in their girlish clothes and carried on.

  After twenty minutes a yellow pile of locks sat in a heap on the dirty floor. They used their bottles of mineral water to dampen their hair then took it in turns to apply the dye. Black for Mia, a lurid shade of purple-red for Kim.

  A set of stick-on tattoos came from the handbag of a temporary night nurse. Dragons mostly. They stripped down to their underwear. Kim put a green one on Mia’s right shoulder. Mia did the same for her on her left, red this time.

  Inside the bag they’d got some different clothes stolen gradually over the months. Kim was bigger, more muscular, but not so much that the sisters couldn’t swap clothes. They spread out what they had on the table and decided who got what.

  For Kim, with her purple-red hair, a black fake leather jacket, green T-shirt and old ripped jeans. Mia went more conservative. Brown cotton trousers, a white T-shirt. A cardigan of red and blue zigzags.

  By the door was an ancient wardrobe with broken glass in the door. The sisters stood in front of it and stared at themselves transformed.

  ‘That works,’ Mia said.

  ‘It does,’ Kim agreed.

  Mia stretched out on the single bed nearest the window, lay back, hands behind her head. Kim did the same on the mattress opposite. They started to sing quietly then stopped.

  One of the phones they’d brought was making a noise. Not ringing. A short buzz for a message.

  Kim got it, stared at the screen and squealed with delight.

  Perfect, darling sisters. Now we begin.

  Love Jo

  9

  At nine the following morning Henk Veerman summoned Irene Visser to his office. She looked as if she hadn’t slept. Jeans, a crumpled shirt, short fair hair uncombed, a mess. Veerman was in his customary work suit, a heavy man, always dressed for the office. He didn’t like it when standards slipped.

  ‘The last thing I need in the present circumstances is you going to pieces,’ he told her as she came in and took a chair at the desk where, the day before, they’d interviewed the Timmers sisters, Simon Klerk nodding his assent to their partial release. ‘I’ve had his wife on the phone. She’s threatening to go to the police.’

  Visser rubbed her eyes. They were red. From crying. Tiredness. He’d no idea and didn’t much care.

  ‘She called me too. The woman’s hysterical. I talked her out of it. Don’t worry. We’ve got time.’

  ‘Jesus. This is a mess, Irene. I warned you about those girls—’

  ‘They passed every test! Every single criterion we use to measure their suitability for release. We couldn’t have kept them here anyway. Do you really not understand?’

  Veerman was sick of that refrain. It was true. But they could have handed the sisters over to an adult institution and kept them incarcerated somewhere else.

  ‘Do you have any idea where they are?’ he asked, trying to keep calm. ‘What’s happened to that idiot Klerk?’

  Visser leaned back in the hard office chair and stared out of the window. Another hot and airless day on the lake. Yachts in the distance. Gulls in the air.

  ‘They didn’t turn up at the halfway house. Simon never arrived home. He hasn’t been in touch with his wife since he texted her and said he’d be late.’ She closed her eyes, trying to think. ‘I don’t know why he did that. All he had to do was drop the girls off in the city. I didn’t get this wrong, Henk. Those girls are fine. Well, fine enough to release under supervision. If we could just get them acclimatized . . .’

  ‘That’s not really an issue right now, is it?’

  She glared at him.

  ‘Yes. It’s the only issue. We’re not here to incarcerate children. We’re here to make them better. Get them back into the real world so they can make something of their lives.’

  She gave him this lecture from time to time. Meant it too. He didn’t disagree with her sentiments. They just seemed irrelevant at that moment.

  ‘As I keep pointing out . . . they’re not children. And now you’re telling me one of our own nurses has run off with that pair?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened! I’ve no idea. I just got a call from his wife at ten o’clock last night asking where he’d got to.’

  Veerman was plotting an escape route from this mess already.

  ‘You had a duty to inform me the moment you knew those women were missing. I’m supposed to inform the police. They’re convicted murderers. It’s not even parole.’r />
  She gave him a black look.

  ‘I’ve spent all night on this. I thought . . . I thought perhaps they’d just gone off to a hotel or something and they’d show up this morning. I’m sorry.’

  ‘If they don’t turn up soon—’

  ‘Give me a couple more hours,’ she pleaded. ‘For the love of God . . . those girls haven’t set foot outside this place in a decade. Whether Simon’s with them or not they can’t survive—’

  ‘It’s not their survival I’m worried about.’

  She kicked the chair back from the desk and glared at him.

  ‘They won’t harm anyone. I guarantee—’

  ‘There are no guarantees!’ he screamed, losing it finally. ‘Those kids could destroy us. Where’s Klerk? Why hasn’t he called home? Even if he had . . . ideas. He wouldn’t just vanish like that. You should never have put them up for release.’

  That hit home.

  ‘If the police come hunting round here they’ll start digging,’ Visser warned. ‘Don’t think for one minute you’re going to offer them my head on a plate.’

  ‘Are you threatening me, Irene?’ Veerman asked.

  ‘No. I’m trying to cope. We need to be careful. Don’t we?’

  He turned to the window. The empty view out over the wood at the foot of the dyke, the grey expanse of the lake.

  ‘I don’t want the police crawling all over this place,’ Visser added. ‘Any more than you do.’

  He got up and walked to the filing cabinets by the wall and began to sift through the folders.

  ‘Best find them then. If you’ve nothing by eleven I’m calling the police. Amsterdam. Not the local clowns. I don’t have a choice.’

  10

  Waterland was the place Simon Klerk had taken the sisters. A verdant panorama of meadow criss-crossed by narrow dykes. The place seemed perfectly flat; nothing defined it except the far-off horizon and a low grassy dam by the lake.

  By rights this territory belonged to the ocean. The Zuiderzee, a vast shallow bay, once swamped the area, joining it to the wilful North Sea. Then, in the 1930s, the government acted against the recurrent threat of deadly floods, damming the mouth with the twenty-mile-long Afsluitdijk causeway from the tiny village of Zurich in Friesland to the north across the wild sea to Den Oever.

  The Zuiderzee vanished to be replaced by a lake called the IJsselmeer. Forty years later a second barrier, the Houtribdijk, was built further inland, from the old harbour of Enkhuizen to Lelystad, a new town built entirely on polder, reclaimed land that was once the floor of the Zuiderzee. The IJsselmeer was then split itself, spawning a smaller cousin, the Markermeer that stretched all the way to Amsterdam.

  The Dutch genius for engineering changed the land and saved countless lives. But it changed the people too. The remote island of Marken became a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a narrow causeway. The closest stretch of water to land was renamed the Gouwzee. Over the years the lake shifted from salt to brackish, turning the attention of Volendam’s fishermen from herring and cod to eel and perch until most of them accepted defeat and started trawling for the most valuable catch of all: endless streams of foreign tourists looking to find the sights and flavours of old Holland.

  Beyond the ancient towns polder silt and earth turned to rich grass pasture, feeding the cattle that provided the milk for the cheese that men still rolled to market in Edam, though principally for the visitors these days. It was, at first sight, a beautiful, natural landscape. Yet all of this was engineered. A complex network of locks and dykes and channels kept the floods at bay, from the towns and villages around the lake and, ultimately, from Amsterdam itself.

  That it worked at all was in part down to men like Tonny and Willy Kok, two brothers who lived in a ramshackle farmhouse outside Volendam bequeathed to them by their mother. In between raising chickens for the market, carrying out odd jobs, shooting ducks and rabbits for the pot, catching and smoking the occasional eel, the Koks took a small salary from the government for keeping the narrow dykes of Waterland clear of weed and other obstructions.

  They were strong men with ruddy, bucolic faces that spoke of long nights in the few taverns from which they weren’t barred. Tonny, fifty-three, and Willy, two years his junior, now laboured under hangovers that hadn’t improved even with their customary breakfast of eggs, cheese, ham and liver sausage.

  Still the council schedule was rigid and they needed the money. So at seven thirty that morning they started up their bright blue Fordson Dexta tractor, the one their late father bought new in 1975, hooked up a trailer and loaded their one working mini-digger on the back. Then, Willy at the wheel, Tonny behind in the seat of the mini-digger, they set out on a long, slow circuit of the dykes and drains that lay behind the road from Marken back to the city.

  After an hour they were in the single-track lane that ran beside a narrow channel of green water. Tonny had the worst of the headaches. So Willy was baiting him.

  ‘You should try eating the weed, boy,’ he called out from the cab as his brother dropped the digger scoop into the dense green mass blocking the waterway. ‘I heard that was good for a thick head.’

  The older man chuckled, let the scoop go deep, came up with a load of filthy slime that he dumped on the bank.

  ‘If that were the case, Brother, I’d have been feeding it to you ever since you learned to walk.’

  The bucket jammed on the bank, as it was wont to do at times. Maintenance was something the brothers performed themselves, not that they knew much about it. Willy got out and gave the thing a kick. Then he looked up the lane.

  ‘Oh Lordy,’ he whispered and forgot all about the digger and his brother.

  Tonny cricked his neck and spotted what his brother saw. He climbed out of the cab and followed him. The pair had worked these lanes and channels for twenty years. In all that time they’d seen six cars find their way into the dykes. The Kok brothers weren’t ones to wait around for the police to see what they contained.

  The rear end of a small saloon was just poking out of the green algae and duckweed on the surface of the drain. It was shiny yellow with a SEAT badge on the tailgate. The back window had smashed in the impact. Water and surface vegetation had poured inside.

  ‘I have taken three bodies from them things over the years,’ Willy declared. ‘Not this time, Brother. You always make me look first. Ain’t fair.’

  ‘You’re younger than me. More nimble.’

  ‘Yeah. And I get to see what the eels and the rats have done. Don’t go down good for when you want to sleep that, does it?’

  ‘Not for me neither,’ Tonny replied. ‘I see it too, you know.’

  ‘In that case best we ring the police and leave them to deal with it.’ The water covered everything apart from the back window and hatch. They’d no idea what was inside. ‘Maybe it’s empty.’

  ‘Only one way to find out, ain’t there? I’ll get the digger back on the trailer. You drive us down here. I’ll do some exploring.’

  Willy stamped his big foot on the ground.

  ‘I’m telling you, Brother. We should be calling the police.’

  Tonny grinned and said, ‘But we ain’t got phones, have we? And I’ll be damned if we’re taking the tractor back home just so’s we can call ’em and have ’em drag us back out here again. We have a look. If there’s no one there we amble off home once we’ve done and report the car.’

  A cocky duck swam through the green weed towards them, chest puffed out, quacking all the way. The bird looked at the crashed car blocking its path.

  ‘Mr Mallard . . . he don’t like having that thing there in his home,’ Willy said. ‘Don’t blame the gent either.’

  Then the duck eyed something and swam through the shattered back window. They watched its head go down, the white and brown tail go up. They’d seen this in Waterland a thousand times or more. But not what came next.

  The bird retreated tail first through the shattered glass, shaking its head, back into the open green
channel.

  There was something in its beak. Both men stared, wanting to make sure of what they saw.

  ‘Them’s men’s underpants,’ Willy said. ‘He’s thinking it’s for a nest.’

  His brother nodded.

  ‘I’ll get the tractor.’

  11

  The three-storey terrace house in Vinkenstraat was quiet at the front. But their room was at the rear and overlooked a coffee shop and kebab bar in the neighbouring tourist thoroughfare of Haarlemmerstraat. From the grubby window, across a soot-stained courtyard, they could see drowsy people smoking in a tiny, shady room. Quiet, tired-looking foreigners laboured in a kitchen behind the restaurant. People came and went all the time.

  In Marken they always felt close to home. There was the grey still water, the marine air, the squawks of gulls, ship’s horns across the lake. Here their senses were assaulted by unwanted and unfamiliar sensations. Even with the window closed it was impossible to escape the stink of traffic fumes, cooking and an occasional exotic waft of what had to be dope smoke, not that they could be certain. The noise – voices, car horns, music, distant trains – was constant. Their new short hair, black for Mia, purple-red for Kim, so exciting the night before, now felt odd and wrong.

  In the middle of the night Kim had got up and washed off the temporary tattoo. Then her sister did the same. After that the two of them sat on Kim’s single bed, hugging each other for an hour. Not crying. Not afraid. Just drained of everything.

  For years they’d dreamed of freedom and what it might bring. Now the moment was upon them it seemed a small and useless commodity. Marken possessed a kind of comfort in the daily routines, the sanitized, hands-off care the institution provided, the knowledge that their entire world was constrained by that high-security fence with its video cameras posted around, always watching, always recording.