by Marion Pauw
I hesitated, scared. I wondered what my mother was up to. She prodded me in the back. “Hurry up.”
We stepped into a concrete hallway reeking of mold and sweat. There were slogans painted all over the walls. Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.
“What are we doing here?” I asked, my voice shaking.
My mother did not reply, but pushed me inside a dark room. It took a few seconds for my eyes to get used to the gloom. I saw someone lighting up. Then I realized that there were human shapes all over the floor. Stretched out on worn mattresses, with very little clothing to cover up their emaciated bodies. A shudder went up my spine.
A walking skeleton approached us. His eyes bulged out of their sockets. “Got some for me?” He stuck out his hand.
My mother shoved me forward. “Ask her.”
I was deeply shocked. My mother, who always worried about whether I’d washed my hands before a meal, was pushing me into the arms of a junkie.
The druggie came even closer. He stank.
“What you got? Give me what you got.”
I thought, What if he has a knife on him? What if my mother intends to leave me here?
“Mother,” I pleaded. She was holding me fast. She wasn’t leaving me any room to step back or turn around. I was fifteen, but my mother was still much stronger than me.
The junkie stretched out a hand toward me. To touch me or to dig into my pockets, I’m not sure which. I just saw that hand coming at me in slow motion. A vulture’s claw. “Mommy, please.”
When the skinny yellow hand was about to graze my face, my mother yanked me backward. She rummaged through her handbag and took out a twenty-five-guilder bill, which she tossed to the ground. “Here,” she said. “Have yourself a party. Shoot yourself up until you drop dead.”
The junkie dove after the money. My mother and I left the building.
“That was it,” she said as we walked back to the car, ogled by pimps, dealers, and the prostitutes at their windows. “That’s all I wished to say to you.”
I stared at the aquarium. At the coral that had been lovingly and patiently nurtured. It grew just a few millimeters a year, depending on the water quality. Ray had created a magnificent habitat for his fish. And then he had gone off and murdered his neighbor and her young daughter. It seemed a strange combination.
I picked up the logbook and started leafing through it. It had been kept meticulously. Ray never skipped a day. The ink was never smudged, and there were no food crumbs or spills. Until the year 2003, no one else had ever recorded anything in that book, but that year someone had written King Kong in a childish hand. King Kong, and then in Ray’s writing, January 25. The words took up three whole lines, as opposed to Ray’s own neat handwriting. A child. Ray had been with a child.
The letters the child had written were shaky, as if the child wasn’t yet able to hold a pen properly. How old? Four? Five? Six? I wondered if the handwriting had belonged to the neighbor’s little girl. The thought alone made me shudder.
CHAPTER 13
RAY
From that day on I brought Anna a madeleine every day. I was usually invited to come in. Then Rosita would make me a cup of coffee, and we’d talk for a while until she said I had to go. On other days Rosita would only open the door a crack to take the offering from me. “Not today, Ray.”
I asked my mother for advice. She explained that it was quite understandable that Rosita wouldn’t let me in every day. People don’t always have the time. It wasn’t anything personal. After all, my mother also had very little time for me these days. She came by once every other month. She’d always bring me something. A tablecloth and a stripy red duvet cover. Tall drinking glasses and a picture of a boat to hang on the wall. She thought it was important for my house to look nice.
I couldn’t think why. Apart from her, nobody ever visited me.
Rosita didn’t have visitors very often, either, but she did have them more frequently than me. The old man who’d helped her with the move came at least once a month. Rosita told me he was her stepfather.
“Where’s your mother, then?” I asked.
She told me her mother was dead. She had died of cancer shortly after marrying her second husband. Rosita said her stepfather had taken good care of her mother and so she’d always be grateful to him.
“Why does he come here?” I asked.
“He comes to talk. To fix things in my house. To see Anna.”
“Do you like that?”
“I like it better when you’re here; it’s more fun. He’s nice and all, and he’s a very good handyman, and that’s nothing to turn your nose up at if you’re a single mother like me. But do I enjoy his company? Not really. To be honest I think he mainly comes and helps me because he’s so lonely himself. Otherwise he’s just hanging around at home. He used to be very rich. He had a successful tulip-growing business, but he lost it all. Couldn’t stop drinking.” Rosita lit a cigarette and went on, “When he met my mother, he was sober. He said he had finally found happiness. But then my mother got sick. So he never really got what he wanted.”
The stepfather didn’t bother me. As far as I was concerned he could come as often as he wanted, and unclog the drain or paint the woodwork. It was the other visitor who bothered me: Anna’s father. He was married to another woman and refused to get divorced. That was why he couldn’t live with Rosita and Anna. But he did come by. Not on a regular schedule, like my mother’s visits to me, but at random.
“Only when it suits him,” Rosita had said, with an expression I couldn’t place. Angry? Sad?
“But what about Anna? He’s got to look after her, doesn’t he?”
“He has three kids with the other woman, and they’re married.”
“But doesn’t he want to live with you?”
“He’d like to, but he can’t. Want to know why?” Rosita sucked deeply at her cigarette and puffed out the smoke again almost immediately.
I really couldn’t think of a reason why anyone wouldn’t want to be with Rosita, no matter what it took.
“Because she was first. So here I am. In a house without carpeting on the floor, with his kid. While she lives with him in a fancy townhouse and can do as she pleases. Not because she’s better than me, or prettier, or smarter. And definitely not because she’s skinnier.” Rosita smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. “Not even because he loves her more than he loves me. But because she was first.”
“You need someone else,” I said. What I meant was: You need me. But of course she didn’t, really.
“You’re not cut out for having a relationship,” my mother always said to me. “No woman will ever stick it out with you, so you better stay away from them, before you get into trouble.”
“Of course I ought to end it,” Rosita replied. “But the problem is that I love him. There’s nobody else who even comes close. I want no one but him. Does that make sense?”
Anna’s father usually came in the middle of the night. But he was sometimes there when I brought Anna her madeleine. Then Rosita would ask me to watch the kid for a bit.
“We get so little time to be together, me and Victor.”
One time Victor came and stood next to her in the hall. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and gazed at me with his head on her shoulder. She looked so happy that it turned my stomach. As far as I could tell, Victor was nothing special. Maybe he was smart. And he drove the kind of fancy car we hardly ever saw on Queen Wilhelmina Street. But I looked right through him. He might act as if he had a right to be there, but I saw a man who was making the mother of his child live in a house without carpeting. That’s what I saw.
As Rosita went to fetch Anna from the living room, he tried to start a conversation with me. “So, you’re a baker.”
I did not respond.
“It’s nice to know someone’s looking after my girls when I’m not around.”
I looked down at my feet until Rosita and Anna stepped back into the corridor.<
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I took Anna home with me to look at the fish. She was the first person to ever come visit, apart from my mom. I told her their names, and she repeated them after me. “Hannibal, François, Maria . . .”
As she sat there next to me in the blue light of the aquarium, I tried not to think of Victor pulling off Rosita’s clothes. Caressing the hollow between her collarbones. Taking her boobs in his hands and kissing them. Lying on top of her and pumping away. Touching her naked privates and making them filthy.
“Chili, Saturn, Venus . . .” I went on, repeating the names of the fish to calm myself down.
Sometimes Anna and I would sit there looking at the aquarium until it got dark outside, the bed stopped creaking, and Victor’s car disappeared down the street.
I sat at the desk in my cell staring at an empty sheet of paper. Dr. Römerman had ordered me to write a letter to Rosita, but I had only one thing to say to her.
I’m still really angry at you.
CHAPTER 14
IRIS
“Lovely fellow,” said Binnie after I had told her the whole Ray situation. “Have you figured out yet how you’re related?”
We were sitting at the dining table. A mahogany antique that had been passed down in my father’s family for generations. Six months after he died, his sister had asked my mother for it. It was one of her family’s only surviving heirlooms, apparently. She even offered to buy my mother a new table. “Over my dead body,” my mother had snapped. There hadn’t been much contact with my father’s side of the family since then. Although the aunt in question had sent a teddy bear when Aaron was born.
“Maybe he’s your brother,” said Binnie.
“No way.” But at the same time I realized how little I knew of my mother’s life before she’d met my father. All I really knew was that she’d had me early in their marriage.
“Try and think. Your grandpa and grandma, let’s say. Could they have had another child late in life?”
I tried to calculate. My grandparents had died when I was still very young.
“Write it down,” said Binnie, thorough as always.
I picked up a pen and a blank sheet of paper. “My grandma’s year of birth, I’m guessing, anywhere between 1920 and 1930. My mother was born in ’48. Ray in ’70 and me in ’85.”
“If Ray is your uncle, your grandma would have been well in her forties when she had him. It’s possible.”
“But pretty late.”
“But within the bounds of possibility, although of course we don’t know the exact year your grandmother was born, so we may be barking up the wrong tree.”
“If he’s my brother, my mother could have had him when she was twenty-two.”
“Totally possible.”
“He would have been around fifteen when my mother had me. Where would she have kept him all those years? Maybe he was my mother’s cousin or something.”
“I think he’s your brother,” Binnie said decidedly. She took a big gulp of wine. “Why else would your mother go to so much trouble to keep it a secret? And why be so touchy about it? Your grandparents died ages ago. Surely there must be a statute of limitations on the obligation to preserve family secrets?”
I topped off our wineglasses and took a long drink. “True, Ray could be my older brother.” I felt myself grow dizzy at the prospect.
“Let’s go and look around the study.”
I giggled, the wine starting to take hold. “We can’t.”
“If you have a brother, Iris, your mother has been keeping your own flesh and blood from you. You’ve told me often enough you were lonely growing up. I think you have every right to know the truth.”
“I don’t know.”
Binnie was already on her feet. “Oh, stop acting all scared of your mother.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Do you know how to jimmy a lock?”
“Of course not.”
“Come on, you’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”
“And you’re a journalist. So?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never had to break into a locked office or hidden library in order to get your hands on some secret file.”
“That only happens in the movies. Besides, I’m the most law-abiding girl in the world. Don’t you know that?”
Binnie took out a hairpin and began fiddling with the lock.
“As if you’ll get it open that way.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Let’s find the key,” I said, finishing off the last of my wine.
My mother hadn’t hidden the key to the study as thoroughly as I’d expected—probably because, living alone, she no longer had to guard against a nosy daughter or curious spouse. It was in one of the kitchen drawers, with the rubber bands, tweezers, and paper clips. It was that simple.
I turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. My heart was pounding. I had been conditioned all my life to stay out of this room.
Her study looked exactly as it had on my first and last foray some twenty years ago. The same cherrywood desk. The large armoire, which was shut. The black desk chair.
“Go on in,” whispered Binnie.
“What are you whispering for?” I stepped inside the Holy of Holies. Cautiously, as if my mother might jump out from behind the door at any moment. It smelled a bit musty, as the windows were probably seldom opened.
Binnie flung open the armoire. The shelves were groaning with files, stacks of magazines, and boxes. I pulled out a file at random and found a pile of telephone bills from 2000. “Who the hell saves all this stuff?”
After half an hour of snooping, we hadn’t made much headway, other than finding eight years’ worth of women’s magazines, two decades of household accounts, and a stack of yellowed crossword puzzle booklets.
“Doesn’t your mother have any hobbies?” asked Binnie.
“Can’t you see? She collects paper.” I pulled a faded blue pocket folder out from beneath a box of recipe clippings.
“Should I start on the desk?”
“Go ahead.” The folder was labeled Ray. I stared at the three letters for a few seconds, to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. “Jesus, Binnie, take a look at this.” I opened the folder. There was nothing inside. “Oh,” I said, disappointed.
“Give it to me,” said Binnie, so I handed it to her. Opening it, she started waving it around. A photo fell out of one pocket.
I picked it up from the floor. My hands were shaking. The photo showed a boy of around five with tousled brown hair. He was sitting on a little red bike, smiling faintly.
Binnie put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“It’s the spitting image of . . .” I began.
“Aaron!” Bennie exclaimed. “That hair, that look in his eyes, and just look at those legs!”
We both stared at the boy’s skinny legs emerging from a brown pair of shorts.
“I bet he’s your brother.”
I shook my head. If Ray was my brother, why had my mother kept me in the dark about him? Where had he been all those years? It just couldn’t be true.
“What are you going to do?” asked Binnie. “Go visit him? He’ll no longer be this young, of course, and definitely not this cute.”
“Ray B., the Monster Next Door,” I said, more to myself than to her. I looked at the boy in the picture again. His knee had a big bandage on it. “When or where did it all go wrong? What do you think happened?”
“I’m doing my best not to make any unpleasant observations about your mother right now.”
“Totally.” I stared at the photo, hoping to find some clue. But the sidewalk behind Ray’s bike could have been any place. There was a bush of rose hips in the background, but that didn’t tell me much more.
“It doesn’t help a child’s development, of course, to be abandoned. How old did you say he was by the time you were born?”
“Fifteen, I think.”
“Do you think your father knew about him?”
“Your mother must have kicked that boy out when he was very young. There’s no other explanation.”
“Maybe he was violent and unmanageable.”
“But why the secrecy? Why keep him hidden?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I do know that I want to meet him.”
CHAPTER 15
RAY
I was starting to get used to the rhythm of my new surroundings. Wake up at seven. Shower, get dressed. Breakfast, therapy, lunch, work, dinner. Lockup and lights-out at eight. I tried to be as invisible as possible. The other patients scared me. They were loud. They were nosy. They bragged about their crimes. The less attention they paid to me, the better.
The only person who really bothered me was a guy named Rembrandt. He was a short little black fellow who’d been there only three weeks, but for some reason had everyone at his beck and call in just a few days.
Whenever he walked into a room, they’d all turn around and yell out in unison, “What’s up, bro?” With anyone else, it was just “Hey, you.”
Then he’d strut into the room, chewing gum or dangling a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. Like some cowboy sauntering into a Wild West saloon.
“What a shithole, man,” he’d say.
Even the social workers tended to leave him alone. I saw that Mo was keeping an eye on him, but he didn’t say anything to me.
“So I was just talking to that fat-ass shrink, and she asks me what I’m feeling when I’m offing someone.”
Rembrandt flopped down on the couch. All the others crowded around him, except for Ricky and me. Ricky was sitting on the floor talking to the television, and I was standing by the window staring at the gray brick wall, my back to the others. In the window’s reflection I could see what was happening in the room without having to be a part of it.
“So I say, ‘What do you feel when you boil an egg for breakfast?’ She just looks at me like the stupid bitch she is. ‘Sugar baby,’ I say, ‘that’s the way to look at it. For me, wasting someone is easy, like farting or watering the plants.’ ”
