‘You think you’re getting ill?’ her daughter repeats.
‘I know I am,’ Elisabeth says.
‘Shall I call the GP?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘So that I know what’s going on. What I should do.’
‘Oh, they can’t do anything, you know, if there’s anything new they’ll let me know.’
‘The GP will?’
‘The oncologist.’
‘But now you think … that you’re ill … getting sicker.’
‘I’m only talking about having a cold, don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.’
Coco closes her eyes.
‘It was either the bronze paint or the thinner. I didn’t like to wear those masks. That would have had an effect in the end, wouldn’t it?’
Coco doesn’t open her eyes.
‘Are you tired?’
‘Not really,’ Coco says.
‘You look it though.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘I was asleep.’
‘Oh, you were still asleep, I didn’t realise.’ Elisabeth struggles to her feet. ‘I just wanted to know whether it was going round.’ She walks to the door.
‘It’s always going round, Mum, I’ve never been sick and then someone went, “How can you be? It’s not going around.” It’s always going round.’
‘And yet it isn’t,’ Elisabeth says, leaving the bedroom.
Later that evening, there is a wet towel over the back of one of the wooden kitchen chairs. Elisabeth looks at her daughter on the other side of the table.
Coco says, ‘So you don’t work anymore?’
‘I wouldn’t have a problem working if my hands didn’t shake so much.’
‘Do they?’
‘Look.’ Elisabeth holds out her hands, looks at her shaking fingers for an instant, turns her head and looks at the wet towel hanging over the chair. The chairs are old, the varnish is no longer as tough as it used to be. Damp is disastrous. She thinks this as though it’s part of an advertising campaign. Damp Is Disastrous.
Sometimes a customer drinks coffee in the workshop and then walks close to her desk with his coffee mug. It feels like someone threatening to lay a hand on your buttocks and you have to hold steady, you have to protect your body. But her desk at work is large, she can’t screen it off, guard it, wrap her arms around it. Sometimes it’s a shame that there are customers.
‘Are you getting disability benefits then, or how does it work?’
‘Martin’s sorting that all out, he’s fixing it.’ Martin, her boss, has increasingly taken over more of her work, her responsibilities—because they weren’t getting done and someone had to do them. It had begun during the divorce. Back then they’d already started keeping her away from the paperwork at work.
‘Let her do her work,’ Martin had said, ‘and nothing else.’ She worked more quickly than anyone else, but she couldn’t fill out a form. If she started on something it was enough for her to remember that she needed the pink piece of paper, the job ticket.
‘You mustn’t do anything without a ticket,’ Martin always called out.
Elisabeth would take a pink form and give it to a colleague who would fill everything in.
Sometimes Elisabeth would take paperwork home with her. Tax forms, insurance stuff. During the divorce the paperwork increased. In the end, Martin did everything.
Elisabeth looks at the wet towel on the wooden chair. A familiar feeling of resignation comes over her. The thing she’d once called motherhood. Being a mother was looking on as the child tarnished everything in the house, bit by bit, and letting it happen. Early on in life Coco seemed to take pleasure in moving things that didn’t want to be moved. Bread amongst the puzzles, cheese spread on books, beads in the seams of the couch. Coco licked windowpanes, cupboard doors, and chair legs, rubbed slices of gingerbread cake along the walls as though using a sponge. Elisabeth was the road-sweeper’s truck. Tidying up, rescuing what still could be rescued. She didn’t know how to steer the child, what she did know was how to put everything back in place as fast as possible.
When Wilbert came home, she wanted the house to be clean and for herself to be clean and for herself to be his girl and for him to be able to get a bottle of beer from the fridge blindfolded, because they were always in the same place, restocked with punctuality, always cold.
He would drink his beer as she stood by the counter and, she might, she still remembers, use a finger to stir a green earthenware pot in which raisins were soaking in hot water. It wasn’t necessary, what she was doing with her finger, but she had to stand there, with her buttocks jutting just a little too far out, so that he’d be compelled to touch them, to grasp them.
Then he would come and stand behind her and say: ‘Oh Jesus,’ always just ‘Oh Jesus,’ as though he were a victim of the buttocks. She wore a skirt that he could easily lift up. He would grip her hips firmly with both hands and tilt them, in an almost technical way, just as he would skilfully open a beer bottle with a lighter, or demonstrate kitchen equipment in the shop. A handy-man, she thought then, not really a salesman. He should do something with his hands. She rested her forehead against the kitchen cupboard, both hands on the counter. She felt his cock against her buttocks. He pushed her panties aside, and she peeked back over her shoulder and saw how he bent his knees slightly, how strong his legs were, how he got everything at exactly the right angle. She observed it all with intense concentration. She paid attention. She paid close attention and she heard the child in the sitting room, allowed to watch episodes of the Daily Fable at this time of day. She had recorded a whole series of them. Hello there, Mr. Owl, what’s happening today in Fable Land? More news from our Fable Land. And then his cock, which was strong and tireless, found its way into her. She tipped her hips a little more and smiled, so friendly and loving. She felt good, like a lovable person, a nice woman, a good mother, and there was nothing wrong with her. Everything fit.
He fucked her and said, ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, that ass. Oh Jesus,’ and she thought: aaba and then she knew he’d been drinking, because he only spoke in aaba rhyme schemes when he was drunk. As well as feeling lovable and good and normal, she also felt strong if she kept her balance as he thrust harder into her. And when he ejaculated in her it felt warm, and only then did she think about what the child had soiled that day, about jam and milk and chocolate spread, about spit and snot.
His head rested on her shoulder and he said, ‘What are you doing with me? What are you doing with me? I’m no good. What are you doing with me?’
She said, ‘You, you, you are my love, you.’
And he answered in the perfect form: ‘I’m no good for you, I’m no good for you, Elisabeth, I’m no good for you.’
And if he was very drunk, she said, ‘You, you, you are my dog, you.’
She fed husband and child, took the child to bed, spent a long time afterwards clearing up the traces, and poured him drinks. The bottle of jenever in the cupboard above the fridge was never empty either. He would sit there and watch snooker or football. She refilled his glass. It was impossible not to want to quench his thirst. They were equally tired when they went to bed at ten o’clock.
But one day, Elisabeth was already tired at three o’clock in the afternoon. She watched Coco once again spreading pools of orange squash with the palms of her hands over the same kitchen table they were sitting at now, with a high-pitched moan as though this was causing her to suffer too and she hoped that someone would rescue her from this activity. It was then that Elisabeth realised it wasn’t giving her daughter any pleasure. Her daughter was not creating something but destroying it. She soiled, broke, and tore.
If this behaviour brought her daughter so little pleasure and she herself had so much to gain if the child stopped it, it was reasonable to insist that her daughter change her behaviour. Or, at the very least, she could limit it to one room.
Long before the child was two years old, El
isabeth would shut it up, just in the bedroom. It didn’t cry any louder, nor longer, than when it was with its mother. Elisabeth had checked.
She stopped shutting her daughter up when she was two and a half. Elisabeth knew that people can remember experiences from that age onwards. Although her daughter wasn’t unhappier in her room than with her mother, Elisabeth understood that it was important for her daughter’s happiness to be able to believe later on that her mother had preferred to have her at her side. She didn’t begrudge her daughter this thought.
When Wilbert came home and asked where Coco was, she’d say, ‘In her room.’ In the period when he was still drinking, he didn’t go and look, he just walked straight to the fridge. Sometimes he didn’t ask a thing. He didn’t seem to notice that when he fucked her Mr. Owl was no longer singing.
But one day he stopped in the kitchen doorway and said, ‘I’m not happy.’
‘Do you want a beer?’ she asked.
‘Miriam,’ he said—Miriam was the new permanent employee at the shop, she’d taken a lot of work off his hands, an enormous help—‘Miriam is worried about my drinking.’
How dare she, Elisabeth though, how dare she, she doesn’t have the right. How dare she, she thought, in a perfect aaba scheme.
He didn’t drink that evening. They didn’t fuck either. He wanted to talk.
#
When Coco goes into the hall, she sees her mother sitting halfway up the stairs. A short while ago her mother had said she was going for a lie-down.
‘What are you doing?’ Coco asks.
‘I’m on my way upstairs.’
‘Can you manage it?’
‘I’m having a little rest.’
Coco leans against the doorpost. ‘Crazy, isn’t it? Me here.’
‘Yes?’
Her mother seems to be panting, as though talking is an effort. Coco considers how to formulate the question, of whether her mother finds it bothersome that she’s here. How can she ask it so that she gets an honest answer? Or how can she ask it so that she gets a believable answer? Then her mother coughs, in the way people only do in films to show they are seriously ill and Coco thinks: it doesn’t matter whether we enjoy being here together, under a single roof. I’m here because it’s necessary. This is a pleasant thought, she must remember it.
‘Would it be better if your bed was downstairs?’ she asks.
Her mother looks downstairs and says, ‘Downstairs is just as far away as upstairs.’
‘I’ll help you up.’
‘I’m all right now.’
Her mother stands up slowly. Coco follows her up the stairs now, like you’d follow a child that wants to go upstairs on its own, ready to catch it. She follows her mother like a shadow, all the way into the bedroom. She lifts up the covers for her. Puts them back over her mother’s body without touching it.
‘Night-night.’
‘Sleep tight,’ her mother says.
Coco goes to her own bedroom without thinking. It is three in the afternoon.
Coco lies on the bed. The air in the radiator bubbles so loudly it sounds like a deep fat fryer. Like she is sinking into the oil with the croquettes, that’s how heavy her body feels on the mattress.
‘Sleep tight, little fish,’ her mother used to say to her.
Every Wednesday afternoon, her mother would pick her up from school. One night a week she slept at her mother’s house, the house where she’d been born. Her mother had started working more, her stepmother less. Everything had been figured out—by Miriam, who was good at figuring things like that out. It was good if the mother—and at the end of the day she is your mother, Miriam said—got to see the child once a week, picked up the child from school, fed the child, put the child to bed, woke up the child, took the child to school. All of this in a clearly defined short space of time. The child experienced the mother, the mother couldn’t do much serious damage. Nothing that the father and the stepmother couldn’t repair between Thursday afternoon and Wednesday morning.
‘It was the best setup for everyone,’ Miriam said later.
She was six when one Wednesday afternoon she was sitting at the table with her mother, eating a rusk with brown sugar. For her it was an unusual delicacy. Only years later did she understand that it was a lunch which required no preparation. Rusks and brown sugar, her mother had large stocks of them in the cupboard.
That morning in the playground, one of the older girls had talked about ‘the fishwife.’ This was a new word. A strange word. Something that fit her mother. Since she was ‘the little fish’ herself, they must be talking about her mother.
That afternoon she asked her, ‘Mum, are you the fishwife?’
Her mother looked at her, astonished, intrigued. She felt she had her attention.
All of a sudden her mother smiled, an overwhelmingly joyous smile and said, ‘Yes, I’m the fishwife.’
Coco felt special. The fish and the fishwife. Suddenly they belonged together.
In the evening her mother said, ‘Sleep tight, little fish.’
‘Good night, fishwife,’ the fish said.
On Thursday afternoon, Miriam said that she should never call her mother a fishwife again.
Coco awakes with a start when the doorbell rings. Her mother’s slow footsteps echo downstairs on the old, creaky, herringbone parquet. They must have slept for a long time. Coco gets up, goes from her bedroom to the stairs and stops when she hears Hans’s voice.
‘I’ve come for Coco.’
‘She’s upstairs.’
‘I’m Hans.’
‘Then you’re the one with the Mercedes. Matt-grey. You don’t see that colour very often.’
Coco hears her mother going back into the sitting room.
‘I’ve come for Coco,’ Hans repeats.
Her mother says, ‘Yes, so you said, yes.’
Coco sits down on the top step.
‘She’s upstairs?’
‘Will you close the door?’
Her mother’s voice sounds further away, presumably she’s gone back to sit in her chair at the window.
‘If there’s a draught and the connecting door upstairs is open,’ she says, ‘it slams so hard. Sometimes it’s the front door that slams, other times it’s the door upstairs. There used to be a connecting door downstairs, maybe that’s why, you can see it at the neighbours’, they’ve got one of those connecting doors with engraved glass, but that’s a rental house. We bought this, my husband and I, a long time ago, though. We paid the equivalent of forty thousand euros for it. Ninety thousand gilders, but that was a lot of money at the time.’
Coco holds her breath and listens. She’d forgotten that her mother could do this too: lose herself in language in the company of strangers, forget the other person. She’d learned to control herself in her daughter’s company. Their discomfort had hindered normal speech for so long.
‘Now you might say I should have bought the entire street, but no one does that now either, even if you ought to…’
Coco feels how familiar this noise is, her mother’s babbling. Something she must have heard a lot as a child.
‘My mother always said,’ her mother says now, ‘“A De Wit doesn’t rent, a De Wit buys.” So when Coco came along, we bought a place. At first we were still looking at renting, but my mother wouldn’t have that, so then they bought and we paid them back.’
‘We,’ her mother says, as though they’ve been transported back twenty years.
‘Coco ought to buy too, but it’s not that easy anymore. Of course she’ll inherit this house if anything happens to me, it’s in my name, Wilbert didn’t want anything of it…’
Coco smiles because Hans is standing in the doorway to the sitting room at her mercy, no doubt he has a clear goal in mind, but he has been waylaid by sentences that just won’t end.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘because what would a house like this cost these days?’
‘Eight hundred thousand. There was one in the street sold for almost a mill
ion recently, but that was a whole house, they didn’t have any upstairs neighbours, we do, the top two floors don’t belong to us. We’ve got the basement, the ground floor, and the first floor. We’re in a housing corp. with the upstairs neighbours, but actually it doesn’t mean much. If we meet once a year that’s a lot. We do have a joint account for…’
But Hans soon gets the measure and when she pauses for breath, not even at the end of a sentence, he butts in, ‘In her room? Coco is in her room?’
‘Yes, in her room. Upstairs,’ as though it’s only a matter of reminding him where Coco’s room is.
‘Up the stairs?’
‘Yes, if you want to go upstairs you have to use the stairs.’
Hans says, ‘I don’t know where Coco’s room is.’
Then there’s silence. Coco rests her head on the banister. She forgets that there are other people there, Coco thinks, that people exist who don’t know where the bedrooms are.
But her mother says, ‘ Of course you don’t know where Coco’s room is. You’ve never been here before. You need to turn right at the top of the stairs, and then it’s the left-hand bedroom at the front of the house.’
A balding middle-aged man is sitting on her bed in her childhood bedroom. Coco thinks: so this is the man I love. It amazes and amuses her. But of course the man doesn’t see himself sitting on the bed in her childhood bedroom and it doesn’t amuse him at all. He sits on the edge, his hands in his lap, taking up as little space as possible.
‘I thought you didn’t want to come here.’
‘We have to talk.’
‘If people say we have to talk, they’ve usually come to tell you something.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you want to tell me?’
‘It’s not going well. Us.’
It has come sooner than she’d expected. She becomes alert instantly. No, not instantly. For a brief moment she panics, terrified that he is going to leave her now, now already. The fear is so great she can’t bear it. She stays calm, there’s no visible shaking, no sign of nerves. But right under the surface of her skin, everything is trembling.
Craving Page 5
