Shit

The woman who thinks she’s responsible for the cemetery leans on her worktop with both hands to look out through her kitchen window and across her back garden at the hedge around the cemetery. The hedge is some kind of conifer and thick, except directly across from her back garden, where a section suddenly turned light brown two years ago. After which, council gardeners removed quite a few conifers. Without replacing them. Besides the hole and the headstones, the woman can’t see a thing. She takes her hands off the worktop and shuffles through to the living room, glancing at the calendar on the way past. It’s one she bought late last year with paintings by Ada Breedveld. Not that she’d ever heard of Ada Breedveld: the paintings just appealed to her. Herm dinner is written under today’s date.

There are newspaper cuttings spread out over the coffee table. The light in the stifling-hot through room is yellow; she made sure to lower the awning early this morning. Apart from a bra, she’s not wearing anything on her upper body at all. She sits down in one of the easy chairs and shuffles the clippings. She doesn’t need to read them, she knows perfectly well what they’re about. ‘Yes, Benno,’ she tells her dog. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Next to the clippings is the framed photo of her husband. ‘We’ll go over there again later,’ she tells the dog, which is enormous, with a broad head and lots of fur. ‘Have they gone completely mad?’ Shit: that’s what the clippings are about. Cow shit. And about ‘an unidentified vandal or vandals’ and ‘an investigation that has been launched’. She hasn’t seen a single police officer over there once. Now she stops to think about it, she never sees any police anywhere, not even cycling or driving past.

The dog, which has been staring out the window lethargically, walks over to the woman and starts to lick her knees. She pulls her skirt up a little and tucks the fabric into the waistband. ‘Good boy,’ she says. ‘Your mistress is boiling.’ She slips a thumb under a bra strap to wipe away the sweat. Just when she’s about to get up to turn on the radio, she sees a woman passing on a bike with a child on the back. A red-headed girl who, judging by her mouth, is talking nineteen to the dozen. She’s wearing a small rucksack. She doesn’t know the woman; there are so many people she doesn’t know in the village. She only moved back from Den Helder after her husband died, mainly because he wanted to be buried here. If it had been up to her, she would never have come back. People have left, died, been born, moved, disappeared. She has no desire to start over again. There are all kinds mixed up together on the new estate, even a Negro and a family of Muslims, though she doesn’t have a clue what country they’re from. She’s standing there in her bra, her thumb now under the other bra strap, and she sees the woman and the child both look up at the front of her house. I’m virtually naked, she thinks to herself, only just realising. I’m standing here on display for the whole neighbourhood. Next thing, that Negro will come walking past! She tries to think of nasty things about Negroes – sneaking into other people’s houses, stealing, lying, that little black kid, is he the Negro’s son? – but doesn’t get very far; she doesn’t want the word ‘rape’ in her head, even if that’s nasty too, but it’s the one that sticks. She hurries into the hall and, from the hall, upstairs to put on a blouse.