‘Child,’ her mother says.
When he’s gone, she lies down on the sofa.
‘I had too much to drink.’
‘Your father drank too much too, but I never minded.’
‘Who are you?’
…
‘I’m your mother.’
‘Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I’d make a good mother?’
‘Of course,’ her mother says kindly.
Coco smiles. ‘Thank you.’
‘When you were lying next to me in bed, just after you’d been born, I thought: who is this?’
‘And then?’
‘It stayed, that’s what’s so nice about it. That it stays.’
‘Nice.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve heard say,’ Coco begins, ‘that what women actually think is: oh, so you’re it?’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Never heard that.’
‘No?’
‘Can’t be true.’
‘So if you’ve never heard it, it can’t be true?’
‘They all think of themselves. They see themselves and recognise that. They only think of themselves, but they don’t realise it—that they only think of themselves.’
‘How many of those morphine plasters have you got on?’
‘You’ll have to ask Martin, he keeps a note of everything.’
‘I can’t undo these ties on my blouse.’
‘Come here.’
Coco lets herself slide off the sofa and crawls to her mother. ‘They’re really fiddly.’
Her mother’s hands shake.
‘It’s a Chinese blouse.’
‘Yes, Chinese. I don’t know if I can do it.’
‘We’re in no hurry.’
‘One of them is open but that second one is tighter.’
‘I gave a stranger a blow job in the pub.’ Her mother continues to fiddle with the second tie. ‘Behind the bar.’
‘Do you have an open relationship? You and Hans?’
‘Very open, yes.’
‘Can’t do it. Why do you wear such complicated clothes?’
‘It’s a nice blouse. Tell me it’s a nice blouse, Mum.’
‘It’s a nice blouse.’
‘Thank you, it’s a Chinese blouse. I got it from Hans.’
‘I’ve never been good at jealousy.’
‘Good at jealousy?’
‘Or always too late. A person has to be jealous. Right?’
‘Has to be?’
‘He held it against me. “You didn’t know where I was,” he said. I wasn’t interested in where he was. I wasn’t there, was I? How can something interest me when I’m not there? Should I open your belt for you too?’
‘Can do it myself.’
‘Belts are difficult. I always had to help your father with his belt. Drunk people always pull the buckle the wrong way.’ Her mother loosens her belt. ‘Just pull your blouse over your head. That knot is too tight. I’m shaking too much.’
‘There are mothers and daughters who hug each other,’ Coco says.
‘Do you want that?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘If you don’t want it,’ her mother says, ‘we won’t do it.’
Coco stands up. ‘You live in a fun neighbourhood, all those pubs.’
‘Yes, it’s a shame you don’t go into them that much.’
‘Hmm.’ Coco takes two steps. ‘I think I need to throw up.’ She hurries to the kitchen, just making it to the sink in time.
When she wakes up, long before daybreak, and remembers the day before, there’s no shame. On the contrary. The thought that she can do everything endures and she knows it’s just as easy to carry on conversations with her mother this drunk. Nothing is stopping her now: no embarrassment, no fear, no love.
#
There she goes again. She hears the parquet flooring creak. She opens her eyes briefly. It’s not even light yet. It’s that same thing again, it always happens. She’s had it since the first day. Coco wasn’t even an hour old. Elisabeth had taken a shower, sitting on a wooden stool with a plastic bag over it. The midwife had supported her as she walked back to her bed. She had only just laid down in it, turned her head and started. There was the child, she’d already forgotten about it. It wasn’t a horrible shock to find the baby there, but it was a big surprise.
‘Right, we need to have a little talk about it,’ Coco says.
Elisabeth jumps again. ‘What time is it then?’ she asks.
Coco doesn’t answer, she comes closer. She sits on the foot of the bed, her legs crossed. She pushes her legs.
‘Shove up.’
Elisabeth gets up then and pulls her legs up towards her. ‘It’s still dark.’
‘About the fall,’ Coco says. ‘We need to talk about the fall.’
Elisabeth understands what her daughter means straight away.
There’s nothing about the fall that Coco doesn’t know, but she seems to sense that there are conclusions, thoughts connected to it, which have never been expressed. And yet Elisabeth is not afraid of anything. She knows what to say. Eight years of practice, then you have your story down to a tee. She is tired. Sitting begins to weigh on her.
She closes her eyes and speaks like the voice-over in a documentary: ‘You had just turned five when you cycled through the sunroom window. You fell, keeping your hands on the handlebars.’
Coco says the last bit with her: ‘… keeping your hands on the handlebars.’ For a moment, Elisabeth hopes that Coco likes the familiar construction and isn’t looking for any new words—the way you keep reading a child the same story and they want you to stick to the text in the book. But when she opens her eyes, she sees that Coco doesn’t want a story. She won’t leave until they’ve recreated the memories together, until they have uncovered new meanings, as yet unused words, fresh combinations forming unexpected sentences. She closes her eyes and lets her daughter fall again, shards of glass behind her.
She was in the garden and had already heard her daughter’s bicycle bell. The stabilisers had just been taken off. The bike was in the hall. Coco knew only too well she wasn’t allowed to cycle in the house. Elisabeth was standing with her back to the house when she heard the glass breaking. It sounded like a bang, a shot. When she turned around, her daughter was there, in the air, between shards and bike—making real what Elisabeth feared. She had been right. Tick.
Elisabeth observed the scene and let Coco, the glass and the bike hang frozen in the air and took a deep breath and exhaled. After five years she breathed in and out again. So this is what it is, she thought. Here is where it ends. She has fallen at last. Her relief had nothing to do with happiness, but at the same time it did—she hadn’t ever wanted to explain this to anyone.
She opens her eyes. She doesn’t bother to avoid Coco’s gaze. They look at each other, like two cats in a face-off.
‘I saw you fall,’ Elisabeth says.
‘I know.’
‘I mean, I saw you die.’ Coco doesn’t say anything. ‘I’ve seen you die twice. Once in the air and once in room 14.’
When the child landed on the gravel paving stones, instead of the silence and settlement she expected, there was screaming and blood. Suddenly the beautiful moment in which shards and Coco hung so silently in the air was over. The peace, the exhalation, and the inevitable ending with all its unavoidable pain, lay on a path that she shouldn’t have taken. A wrong turn. She had thought it was over, but it wasn’t.
Coco becomes hazy. Elisabeth’s vision is getting steadily worse. She knows her daughter is sitting close to her, but getting to her seems impossible. The foot of the bed is too far away.
She talks to the hazy child, ‘I was sent to room 14. The door was open a chink. Wilbert had to be there somewhere. He had gone in the ambulance while I sorted things out at home. They never forgave me that. Clearing up the glass.’
&n
bsp; ‘They?’
‘I cut open some bin bags and taped them to the window frame with masking tape. I’d already called a glazier. He was called Herman. He was going to see whether he could come that same day.’
Elisabeth knows how she and Wilbert talked about it later—that she must have been in a real panic. She must have been so shocked that she concentrated on something manageable. They said: Some people shine in an emergency; other people’s weaknesses come to the fore.
‘I let Herman in, he came much earlier than expected.’
‘Herman.’
‘Herman Siezen. Like the newsreader. But then Herman rather than Harman.’
‘That you still remember that.’
‘I know. I was very clear-minded. Very calm.’ She doesn’t tell her about the sound the bin bags she’d taped to the window made. ‘And then I got a tram to the hospital.’
‘Why didn’t you take a taxi?’
Elisabeth would like to stretch out her legs but Coco’s in the way.
‘Why didn’t you take a taxi?’
‘I must have been in deep shock.’
‘You just said you were very clear-minded.’
‘You remember the strangest things, yes.’ Then she stretches out her legs carefully, a little, but feels Coco already, so pulls them back up again.
‘You took a tram.’
‘There was a direct line.’
‘Why not a taxi? Why not faster? Didn’t you want to be with me?’
‘I must have been in deep shock.’ Coco is silent. What more does she want? Ugly words then. ‘Survival strategy,’ she says. ‘It must have been a survival strategy.’ She no longer has a clue what she is saying when she adds more strangeness like: repression, inhibition, projection. She is just babbling. There is an infinite number of ugly words. If Coco wants them so much, she’s going to get them. She looks at the blot at the foot of the bed. ‘I was sent to room 14,’ she says. It does seem as though a blot hears less than a clearly outlined daughter.
‘That’s where I was,’ the blot says.
‘No,’ Elisabeth says, ‘you weren’t.’
‘I was in room 14.’
‘No. I looked inside and you weren’t there. There was only an injured child. It was dark, the curtains were closed and that child was badly injured. I saw that, and it had its eyes closed.’
‘Me?’
‘Not at the time. Not yet. You weren’t … a nurse was standing behind me and she … She didn’t push me, but … she stood so close to me, as though she wanted to prevent me from going back, So I took a step forwards into the room on my own and then I turned around to the nurse and I said, “That’s not her.”
“Yes, it is,” the nurse said again and took a step, so that I had to take another step, because otherwise she’d be standing too close to me. She chased me into that room.’
‘“Just go inside,” she said and so I did that, out of politeness really. But once I was there, it was you after all.’
Elisabeth remembers how her stomach had filled with stones, like the wolf in the fairy tale. She walked into the room with leaden steps and the injured child became her daughter. Just like that. Wham. No, bam. No. A slurping sound. Something that takes everything away, sucks it in, eats it up.
The image of her girl slid of that of the injured child and stayed there. She felt it falling into place. It fit so perfectly that right away you could no longer see that what you were looking at consisted of two images. The child opened her eyes. She was what they call weak.—How is she? Weak.—There were only a few spaces and only a few words fit into them. It was just light enough to be able to see each other. No light or sound was wasted here.
‘Hello, little girl,’ she said to her.
‘Mummy,’ the girls said. The first words were easy. Now wait calmly until she knew which ones should follow.
‘Daddy was frightened,’ she said.
‘Is Daddy angry?’
‘Daddy isn’t angry.’
‘And you?’
‘You’re my girl. You’re going to sleep now,’ and the girl smiled and closed her eyes. Walk away now. Elisabeth smiled too. Now it was over. That was how you said the last words.
But after the last words the girl just came back again.
‘I thought you were dying,’ Elisabeth says.
‘I find it strange you should say that.’ Coco sounds calm. Elisabeth knows that she hasn’t lied, not about this.
‘I swear, I thought you were dying.’
‘I had a broken leg and some cuts, you don’t die of that.’
‘I thought it!’
‘Why did you think it?’
‘When you crashed through the window …’
‘Yes, I understand that, that you might think that then. But why in the hospital?’
‘Shards of glass in the neck can be very dangerous.’
‘Come on, you already knew I wasn’t bleeding to death, that’s rubbish.’
‘I don’t understand. What do you want? I don’t understand.’
‘No, you do know, Mum, you know very well. I know about your memory. And still you act all vague.’
‘I thought that, because … Because we were so …’ It’s impossible to tell the truth. That it was a lovely and acceptable ending and that she had reconciled herself to that ending. So she says, ‘I must have been in deep shock.’
#
Her mother is just lying there now, her eyes closed all of the time. She doesn’t say anything anymore. She doesn’t sleep. Her mouth is tense.
‘Mum?’ Coco thinks about the wooden box full of blocks she had as a child. You had to put a triangle, a square, and a star into it, through holes with the same shape. You had to take the whole lid off to get them out again. It’s too long ago but Coco still thinks she remembers not opening the lid but holding the box upside down and shaking it until the blocks fell out. It didn’t work, however hard she shook it. She’d been shaking her mother that way for years and she still felt like she was the stupid one, someone who doesn’t know that there’s a much easier way: a loser, a baby. It got light. The paleness of her mother’s arms and hands became less noticeable than in the darkness, but her thinness more so. Yet it is theoretically possible that if you keep on shaking, a block will fall out. If you could shake for infinity, if you were inexhaustible. Coco smiles.
‘Mum? … Mum?’ The doorbell rings. ‘Hey, Mum.’
‘The door,’ her mother says.
‘Mum,’ she says, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum,’ as though Mum isn’t a word but a sound, as though it mimics the shaking of the blocks.
‘Mumumumumumumumumumumum.’
‘The door, Coco!’
‘I’m relieving you,’ says Martin.
She’s standing at the door in her pyjamas.
When he’s inside, he repeats, ‘I’m relieving you. You’re free.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Coco says and goes upstairs to get dressed, comes back down and puts on her coat—as though Martin had given her an order: You’re free, go.
Coco exits the street but doesn’t know where she’s going. Hans will be impressed that she provoked her mother like that.
He said once, ‘It seems like you’re afraid of her.’ She wants him to see her, to see what she is capable of, what she dares to do. There’s a bench next to the tram stop, she sits down on it.
‘Speak Russian,’ he’d said to her the first time they were out together. She spoke Russian.
‘What did you just say?’
‘I was quoting from that book.’
‘What did you say then?’
‘Her hair hangs in pretzel-shaped plaits over her ears, and she has ribbons and bows in her hair: black ribbons, or blue ones, or white, or brown; Fima has a lot of ribbons. Seryozha wouldn’t even have noticed but Fima asked him herself, “Have you seen how many ribbons I have?”’
‘That’s why you decided to study Russian? To be able to translate that?’
She said, ‘Have you seen how many ribbons I ha
ve?’
He looked a little bewildered, as though he hadn’t yet decided whether he found this quite stupid or quite extraordinary.
When the tram that goes to her house arrives, she gets in. Her mother’s words, which she has known for so long, reverberate around her head: Must have been in deep shock. Must have been in deep shock.
I’m going back to university, Coco decides. I’ve been asleep for part of this year, but now I’ve woken up.
When she gets out, she sees him sitting in the Coffee Company, opposite the tram stop, at a table in front of the window with a woman who must be Laura. She knows they meet there a lot—in the morning before the first consultation. There’s a lot to do for a conference like that. She has dark curls, she’s slender, she’s pretty, much older than Coco. She sees lines around her mouth. Laura likes to smile. She talks.
Coco carries on standing there and looks at the two people. They don’t touch each other. They don’t do anything strange, but she sees that Hans is happy. So that’s what that looks like? When your boyfriend’s happy. So that’s what it looks like.
She sits down on the bench next to the tram stop and looks at the happy man. Hans leans forwards and looks at Laura. It seems like he is listening to her. He listens. He smiles. So that’s what that looks like. When he listens. When he smiles. When he’s happy.
All of a sudden she can’t figure out whether she’s seen this before or not. Has he ever looked at her in that way? Like that? She thinks about her mother with Martin, who embraced her and it looked natural. She thinks about her mother at the frame shop. She’s been there a few times, not many. She has seen her mother’s hands stroking wood. She was around seven. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the fingers. The fingers slid very gently over the wood, looking for irregularities. She didn’t pay attention to anyone around her. You could see that this was all she needed.
Laura gets up and goes to the counter. Hans watches her.
Coco gets up too and walks in the direction the tram came from. She knows that nobody is watching her.
So that’s what it looks like. It rumbles on. Just like that other sentence. Must have been in deep shock. Must have been in deep shock.
Craving Page 12
