‘Damn it, bloody case.’
‘Come in first,’ Elisabeth says. Coco heaves the heavy case over the doorstep.
‘Come in for a sec,’ Elisabeth says again. She’s coming in for a sec, she thinks, Coco’s just coming in for a sec. ‘A sec’ is nice phrase. Coco rolls her case down the corridor to the stairs at the back. Elisabeth wants to help her daughter, she has to want to.
‘Just pop it upstairs,’ she says, ‘just pop it in your old room and then…’
‘And then we’ll see,’ Coco says.
‘Yes, we’ll see about it later.’
Elisabeth watches Coco pulling the case upstairs, step by step, grinding it against the wood, as though the house needs breaking. A lot of weight is going upstairs but Elisabeth watches it in the way you watch something falling, something out of your control. A glass that isn’t broken but soon will be.
When Coco is no longer visible on the stairs, Elisabeth turns to the gold-framed oval mirror on the wall. She looks at her own face and hears Coco’s footsteps on the landing, in her old bedroom, back on the landing, now the bathroom. In the hairdresser’s mirror her face is longer than here at home.
Her daughter was once one of those waiting clients, one of those witnesses who doesn’t appear to be causing you any trouble yet still makes everything uncomfortable. The older her daughter got, the more obviously she appeared to be observing things, as though there was something special to see. The older her daughter got, the stranger Elisabeth got. Her daughter made her strange.
Now it is as though the client waiting in the hairdresser’s has had enough of the small talk, of all the politeness so he makes a fuss of putting down his paper and says, ‘So, back to what you were saying just now …’
She hears her daughter coming down the stairs, and with every step she takes Elisabeth grows more afraid of her daughter’s words. Her shoulders tense, as though the words were already pressing down on them. No daughterly words please, no hairdresser’s words. She can do it, her daughter can do it, she sounded brisk and light yesterday, didn’t she? Just a matter of finding that tone, hitting the right key.
‘Sandwich?’ she tries.
‘Yes,’ Coco says.
Good. A sandwich is good. Abracadabra, Elisabeth thinks, think light words now, just a sec, a sandwich, abracadabra.
It’s not easy, people taking turns to poke their knife into the butter tub and the same jam jar. The sound of knife against glass, knife in jam. She misses the sounds of the framing shop, the dull thud of the cutting machine, the puffing of the underpinner.
After she was no longer able to work, she had wanted to say goodbye properly, but to the sounds in the household, the smells from the kitchen. She had wanted to put a bed in the shop and say: now it’s done, now I don’t ever have to go home again, now it’s over at last and I will stay with the wood and the paint and the glue, surrounded by paper and glass.
‘Are you afraid?’ her daughter asks.
Areyouafraid Areyouafraid Areyouafraid, Areyouafraid Areyouafraid Areyouafraid.
‘Yes,’ Elisabeth says, ‘I’ll have a little think about that.’ She knows if she answers too quickly her daughter won’t believe her. Areyouafraid. Areyou Areyou Areyou. Of death of course. Ofdeath. Ofdeath. Or has she misunderstood again? Happens a lot. Just ask. A sec. Abracadabra.
‘Afraid of what?’
‘… of dying.’
‘Yes—so I was right!’
‘What did you think then?’
‘I thought: maybe I was thinking the wrong thing, so I’d better ask. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, but what were you thinking about when you said you’d have a little think?’
‘I was just having a think.’
‘And what would it sound like if you did that out loud?’
Elisabeth opens her mouth, but doesn’t say: Areyouafraid Areyouafraid Areyouafraid Areyouafraid Areyouafraid Areyouafraid.
Over the past year, her daughter’s questions have got worse, ever since she got that boyfriend. Elisabeth might not see her daughter very much, but she always calls if there’s something about Russia on television. She underlines it in the TV magazine.
‘It’s difficult for me,’ Elisabeth says.
‘I understand that.’ Her daughter’s eyes are shining now and she smiles cautiously. Elisabeth said the right thing.
She says it again. ‘It’s difficult for me.’ Her daughter nods. Elisabeth nods too.
She repeats, ‘difficult,’ and pulls a troubled face.
‘I told Dad.’
‘Oh?’ Elisabeth says. ‘When did you tell him?’
‘Wednesday.’
Three days. Wilbert has already known for three days that she’s dying and she hasn’t heard from him. He loves her, if he didn’t love her he would have called her, that’s what people do, that’s polite. He isn’t polite, he loves her.
‘The poor man,’ she says and then in response to Coco’s confused expression, she adds, ‘Is he still working so hard?’ He had the shop before Coco was born. He always talked about it in a worried way. If it was too busy, he definitely had to be there. If everything was just running normally, it was better that he was there. When Coco was in hospital, after her fall from the window, he found it difficult to find time to visit her. Elisabeth had adopted his worried tone.
‘Where is your husband?’ the doctor had asked.
‘Own shop, you know,’ Elisabeth had said, as though it was a very serious matter.
‘What kind of a shop?’ the doctor had asked.
‘What we sell,’ Elisabeth, who never sold anything, had begun, ‘are all the things you need for the kitchen but that you don’t see on the table. So we have big knifes, but not normal cutlery. We have pans but no dishes. Chopping boards but not plates.’
‘A kitchen shop?’ the doctor asked.
‘No, a cookery shop.’
#
Coco had asked Hans whether he would take her to her mother’s. Her case was too big for the bike or a tram. They were sitting in a restaurant when she brought it up. They were eating ‘tomatoes cooked five ways’. He said he wouldn’t drop her off because he didn’t agree with her decision. ‘A misguided urge to rescue someone’ is what he had called it earlier. He didn’t think it would be good for her, he refused to help.
‘Do you understand?’
She nodded. It sounded reasonable.
‘I wouldn’t give a robber a lift to the bank, would I?’
She felt insulted that he was fobbing her off with such a bad example. She decided to win this argument. Not because she thought she was right but because she wanted to win it, and because she didn’t feel like getting on the tram with her luggage.
She tried to stay calm, opening with, ‘This tomato mousse is delicious,’ and only then, ‘You’re arrogant.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘You can’t only help your friends when they do things your way, can you? It’s not like you’d say: I won’t help you to move house because I don’t like the look of the house you’re moving into, or the man you’re moving in with isn’t to my taste.’
‘You would say that if the man was violent.’
‘My mother isn’t violent and I’m not about to rob a bank, we’re not talking about extreme circumstances or psychiatric cases and I’m not one of your clients.’
He ate with his mouth open and she knew she’d say something about it if she didn’t win the argument. He changed his mind faster than she’d expected.
Even before the second course had arrived, he said, ‘You’re right. I’ll drop you off. It is arrogant. Thank you for pointing that out to me.’
He looked so very smug, she said, ‘You shouldn’t eat with your mouth open.’ She regretted it at once. His injured look was unbearable. It was like he could make his eyes glisten at will. The way the eyes of pregnant women or wounded animals glistened, the ones needing the flock’s protection (her optician had told her that once when she needed
new lenses). Hans did nothing to conceal his vulnerability and she hated him for it. For god’s sake, you should be able to tell your boyfriend not to eat with his mouth open. Why couldn’t he just take it on the chin? Why was he eating with his mouth open in a Michelin restaurant? And she hated herself for being so blunt.
‘Sorry,’ she said again and only later asked him whether he could do tomorrow afternoon. He could, but he didn’t have much time.
‘I’ll drive you over but I’ll have to drop you and run.’
Coco is lying on her bed, in her old bedroom, she calls Hans. She asks whether he’d like to come and have lunch with her and her mother.
‘Let’s eat somewhere else,’ Hans says.
‘Will you pick me up?’ she asks. ‘Then you can meet my mother.’
Silence. He doesn’t want to meet her mother.
‘Why don’t you want to meet her?’
‘Oh, I don’t mind meeting her … if it’s important to you.’
‘Why don’t you want to meet her?’
‘You’re reading too much into it. She simply doesn’t interest me.’
She’s heard him say this before about people. It’s the worst thing he can say about anyone, Coco thinks. She suspects that it’s his greatest fear, that someone might say that about him, but Coco knows Hans will dismiss this as Freudian nonsense. She feels stupid when he calls her insights ‘Freudian nonsense,’ so she often holds her tongue and pretends she’s in a relationship with an extremely balanced man. Sometimes she really believes it.
‘You don’t want to meet her.’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I’m not interested in your mother.’
She doesn’t believe him. What she does believe is that she won the previous argument and that he’ll win this one. She’s not sure which of them is right, but she does know that it’s a competition and that they are adversaries.
They are sitting in the Holland Bakery on the corner of her mother’s street, at the long table in front of the window, side by side. Coco has ordered a cervelat sandwich because she wants to know what cervelat is. Hans wants a croquette sandwich without butter. Coco presses her fingers to her temples.
‘What’s the matter?’ Hans asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you tired?’
‘Why?’
‘What’s up?’
Coco is quiet for a minute. The waitress brings coffee. ‘Headache,’ Coco says.
‘You couldn’t say that right away?’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘Have you drunk anything yet?’
‘Huh?’
‘You always forget to drink.’
‘Oh well.’
‘Have you drunk anything yet today? Do you know how much a person should drink?’ Hans gets up and goes to the counter to ask for a glass of water. He passes her the glass.
Coco is annoyed but feels thirsty when she sees the water. She takes it and drinks it.
‘You were thirsty.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you notice then? When you’re thirsty? How does that work?’
‘Don’t seem to,’ Coco says.
‘That’s odd.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Why are you apologising?’
‘Shut up,’ Coco says, ‘shut up.’ She stares mutely into the distance. A truck stops outside. Large crates of meat are unloaded. ‘Shall we go to a matinee?’ she suggests.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to study at your mother’s?’
‘Want to come?’
‘I’ve got a client this afternoon.’
‘Cancel them.’
‘I can’t. And I wouldn’t want to.’
‘You didn’t have to say that last bit.’
‘I don’t want to cancel my client.’
The waitress arrives with the sandwiches.
‘I know you don’t want to,’ Coco says, ‘and I’m pretty sure I know why.’ She says it as though there’s something shameful about it. ‘It’s because your job gives you so much satisfaction.’ The tone of her voice alarms her. The disdain, the disgust. She quickly takes a bite of her sandwich. ‘It’s a kind of salami,’ she says about the cervelat, ‘but then without the herbs, without the garlic, and it’s softer.’
‘How bad is your mother’s health now?’
‘You don’t have to stay with me just because my mother’s ill.’
‘How can you say a thing like that?’
‘You can think it, can’t you?’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘It’s nice,’ Coco says, ‘that we can be so totally open.’ Then Coco sees her mother.
She’s walking very slowly along the opposite side of the street towards the paper-recycling container with a small plastic bag. Coco notices how thin she is. A small pile of paper emerges from the bag, she throws it into the container, and after that she folds up the plastic bag. The precision and seriousness of the operation is painful to Coco. These are the important events in her mother’s life now. This isn’t just what happens in between, it counts.
‘You know, it wouldn’t matter,’ Hans begins, his voice is gentle, caring, ‘if you changed your mind. I get that you want to give it a try, but don’t be embarrassed to change your mind.’ He strokes her cheek with the back of his hand. She looks at him and then at her mother. Her mother crosses the street again, agonizingly slowly. Now she should say it. That’s my mother.
‘You’re such an arrogant bastard,’ she says, laughing.
‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ he says, ‘not even as a joke.’
His reasonableness makes her furious. His damp eyes make her equally furious. A hidden, sensitive soul that mustn’t be offended. Cloaked in that eternal arrogance, the perfect double-edged sword for keeping her captive.
She watches him cycle away, one leg of his new jeans in his sock. He cycles off without looking back. A middle-aged man on a racing bike with a job that gives him satisfaction. It’s easy to think scornful things about him when the eyes aren’t there.
‘You and your fucking clients,’ she whispers. She eats the last mouthfuls of her cervelat sandwich.
She doesn’t know whether the cervelat tasted nice. It tasted of water, the bread did too. And the milk.
She orders freshly-squeezed orange juice. The juice tastes of water too.
She orders a sandwich with warm beef and satay sauce. Everything is water. She tastes it and she understands it. Of course. We have to invent the flavours ourselves, we have to do it ourselves.
#
‘Coco,’ Elisabeth says in the morning as she sits down on her daughter’s bed, ‘I think I’m getting ill.’
Coco doesn’t respond.
She says it again, ‘I think I’m getting ill.’
Coco sits up and looks at her now, her eyes popping, as though she’s just been given some important piece of information.
‘Didn’t you understand me?’
‘You think you’re getting ill?’
When she woke up, Elisabeth realised at once that she wasn’t alone in the house. It was like when she used to feel her husband’s body next to hers, someone she only had to roll over and face, someone she could start to speak to, or continue to speak to, as if following a brief hiatus. The night seemed a mere detail, a brief moment. She liked people she could talk to. The people didn’t necessarily have to listen to her, that wasn’t the point, but they should be there. She didn’t talk to herself, she wasn’t weird. In the final years of their marriage, Wilbert began to complain that she told him things more than once: twice, three times, four times even.
‘But I’ve known you for ten years now,’ she once said, ‘I can’t keep on inventing new things, can I?’
‘You talk to me, but it’s like you could be talking to anybody.’
‘I like to talk to you.’
‘But you’re not interested in my reac
tion.’
‘But I’m not interested in anyone else’s reaction either.’
‘It’s not right.’ He said that quite often.
Something wasn’t right. They weren’t right together. She wasn’t right. She learned to hold her tongue, to think before she said anything to him.
But when she’d woken up this morning, after her sleep had been repeatedly disturbed by an extremely unpleasant feeling in her throat and she’d realised at once that she wasn’t alone in the house, she’d felt her old enthusiasm returning. Having someone to talk to was a wonderful thing.
She had got up at once, her eyes barely open, shuffled across the landing, knocked on the door of the children’s bedroom. She hadn’t waited for an answer, opened the door, asked, ‘Coco, are you awake yet?’ and sat down on the bed.
It was strange, how standing had become difficult one day. It’s like the time comes when you’re no longer a child and you no longer run, and the time comes when you’re a grown-up and you prefer not to stand. At her work, she’d pulled up a stool and then it had become difficult. The frames were too big to do the work sitting down.
The large daughterly body in the bed rolled over, the eyes opened, and Coco immediately covered them with her hand. Elisabeth shrank back as though she was a lamp shining too brightly in her daughter’s eyes.
‘You think you’re getting ill?’ Coco asked again.
‘Yes, I think I’m getting ill. I’ve got that thing you get when you’re getting sick. It always happens in the same order. First indigestion and then a sore throat, and then coughing, after that I get a cold, and then I get hoarse. Or the other way round. But it’s always the complete works. And still you think—maybe it will only be this bit, but it never is. I’ve got indigestion and a sore throat. Do you know if it’s going around?’
Coco slowly shakes her head, so minimally that it’s almost undetectable, that you can’t accuse her of doing it, and still it makes everything uncomfortable.
‘Why are you acting so strangely?’ Elisabeth asks. Because why couldn’t the child be the reason? Why can the child never be the guilty party? All those years when life was normal, the child’s been here for less than a day and everything has gone weird again.
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