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SARAH 1997

It’s eleven o’clock at night and Sarah is standing in the tiny little shower stall of a seedy hotel in Palma de Mallorca. Palma de Mallorca is the frivolous final note to the school trip to Spain during the summer vacation.

Sarah has waited for everyone to be finished in the bathroom so she can shower undisturbed. Unlike her classmates, Sarah prefers to undress without an audience. She murmurs words of encouragement to the paltry stream of water while groping around in the soap dish. The bar of soap slides out of her hand. One minute she’s bending over to pick up the fallen soap, the next minute she’s stretching out her hand to break her fall. Fifty kilos is more than the rickety door of the shower stall can bear. The door falls out, followed by Sarah.

She lands on the cold tile floor of the bathroom, stark naked. Her three classmates come rushing in.

‘Small breasts,’ someone says. ‘Spindly legs,’ says someone else.

Emily asks if she’s okay, if she’s broken anything. The classmates stifle their laughter in cups of Batida de Coco. Sarah is certain that all her bones are broken and that she’s going to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Yet the shame is even greater. She’s never going to have girlfriends again. Never, she says to herself, just before her consciousness shifts down a notch. With vacant eyes staring at the grey-white ceiling, she returns to a scene from a few weeks ago.

Sarah was biking home in high spirits after a long day of eight periods at school. The physics teacher had demonstrated the existence of charged particles. This time Sarah had the feeling that she had really discovered something. Even from the furthest seat in the back she had been able to follow the lesson perfectly as the teacher rubbed a glass rod with a cat skin and then held the statically charged rod to the hair of Cindy, the outraged cat lover, so that it stood out straight. As soon as Sarah began biking up the driveway at number 7 Nightingale Lane her mood changed. It wasn’t that she had decided to be bad-tempered; it was just a thing that had been happening recently.

‘I know what you need,’ Mieke said in an attempt to cheer Sarah up. ‘A girlfriend party.’ Mieke had stopped browsing through Sweet Homes, her interior design magazine, and looked at her daughter expectantly. He reading glasses were balanced on the tip of her nose. ‘I’d like to see who you hang around with. That interests me as a mother … Gee, there’s less and less in these magazines. Why do I buy them, anyway? Look at this, I’ve gone through the whole thing and there are maybe two articles that I want to read, that’s it. Boxwood has to be insulated in the winter: even a little child knows that.’

‘They make it all up,’ Sarah answered.

‘Yes, I think you’re right. The two of us should write something like this someday, and this is a magazine.’ Mieke tossed the periodical onto the coffee table. ‘Seriously, Sarah, make a list of all the girlfriends you want to invite for your seventeenth birthday.’

‘Mama, I already had my birthday last month.’

‘Exactly. So it’s about time. Everyone is welcome here.’ Her mother didn’t mean a word of it, or she meant it but failed to see how she herself nipped potential friendships in the bud and chased everyone away. It all began with her nineteenth-century greeting: ‘Good day, young lady. Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’

Sarah distrusted her mother’s longing for her to have girlfriends. She did have girlfriends, but not the kinds of friends she herself would have chosen if she had had the final say. There were two of them, three if you counted Emily, but Emily didn’t count. She was almost family for Sarah. Emily’s increasing height was marked on the inside of Sarah’s closet with lines and dates. Emily was the one who automatically grabbed Sarah’s hand during those dreadful dancing lessons that were part of the gymnastics curriculum at their girls’ school.

The two other girlfriends had put themselves forward, oddly enough. They were girls whose names she probably wouldn’t remember later on. The girls had a great desire to be near her. Their round, innocent eyes followed her through the school corridors. Their wardrobes were even more appalling than hers. Each one had decided on her own to worship Sarah. It was exhausting to always have to distance yourself from them in public. One of the two sent Sarah an unvarnished declaration of love in an envelope with a swan on it. It contained a flowery description of friendship with frankly pornographic overtones. When the other girl found out, a war broke out between the two that so engrossed them that they forgot Sarah altogether.

‘You do have girlfriends, don’t you?’

‘I don’t want a birthday party, Mama. That’s for little kids.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Mieke said. ‘Not wanting a birthday party? It’s abnormal.’

‘I don’t like to invite girlfriends to do things.’

‘Are you ashamed?’

‘You don’t invite any of your girlfriends over, do you? The only ones who come here sometimes are Elvira and Ulrike.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Everything is different.’

‘You’re getting awfully fresh. Papa and I hope you get stricter teachers next year.’

‘I’m going on the school trip to Spain like a good girl, right?’ She could never explain to anyone the logic of living in a family headed by a dictator disguised as a slave.

Sarah is aware of the drops running down her eyelids. The shower head is still leaking. How long was she out? A second? A year? The shame, along with her consciousness, branches off at lightning speed, and her body fills up again. She reaches for a towel. The foaming shower water flows to the drain in the navel of the stall. Sarah sobs silently into a large bath towel that’s as stiff as cardboard. She doesn’t seem to fit into the time in which she’s growing up. Her parents are nothing like any of the other parents of the nineties. She has to watch out or she’ll get swept along into their world.

After jumping into her clothes she accepts the drink from Emily. Sickeningly sweet Batida de Coco: the only way she sees of getting through the evening without dying of the embarrassment she’s suffered. The bottle makes the rounds at a brisk tempo. Soon the world becomes one irresistible joke. Caught in a timeless no man’s land, she and Emily jump from one absurd thought to another until their roommates start yawning in turns and announce that they’re going to sleep. No sooner do they clamber into the bunk bed and turn their backs to Emily and Sarah than the two start imitating them.. ‘Shut up,’ shouts one of the girls. ‘That’s enough of that,’ shouts the other. Sarah can’t stop laughing. The more they mimic the girls’ speech, the more hilarious it gets. Halfway through ‘that’s enough of that’ they both bend over double.

The others get so annoyed that they threaten to call in the teachers. They whine that they just want to sleep, goddamn it.

‘If you swear like that, then I won’t be able to sleep,’ Sarah giggles.

‘Look, I’m really lying down now.’ Emily throws herself on the bed and drops her head onto the flat pillow. ‘Me, too,’ Sarah says. She lies down next to Emily. The bed linens are filthy. The air in the no-star hotel is so stuffy that you can hardly walk through it without coughing. Her mother would never set foot in a room like this. Sarah is still wearing her sweatpants, which in this heat is a bad idea. The pants stick and scratch her skin. She kicks off the down cover, sits bolt upright and looks around the room in the semi-darkness. It’s as quiet here as it is in the house at number 7 Nightingale Lane at night. The night paints a black edge around her thoughts. Cobain’s widow picks up her note pad and writes down the lyrics to a new song in the dark, grieving for someone she doesn’t yet know.

The next day they start the journey back by bus. As they board the bus, each of them is given a half-frozen donut. Sarah suppresses the urge to gag and offers her donut to Emily. ‘Oh, Montignac is going to be so angry,’ she says with a smile full of sadistic joy and powdered sugar. Today, a few centuries after Rubens, all normal women are too fat. At least that’s what the fashion world would have them believe. Heroin chic is in. But in Flanders, skipping a meal or pushing a piece of cake aside is simply impossible. It’s an insult to the host or hostess. For many well-mannered, overweight, desperate women, the knight in shining armour is Michel Montignac. He forbids carbohydrates, but he’s a boon to the butchers’ guild and the fat producers. Butter, cream, chocolate, bacon: all diet products, according to the revolutionary Montignac diet. An exemplary diet meal now consists of a juicy beefsteak with mayonnaise and Béarnaise sauce, all in unlimited amounts. The first doctors and beauty specialists approach the diet with scientific suspicion, but later they give it the green light and shovel in the food. Emily’s mother—a doctor’s wife, no less—is also a Montignac disciple. She’s glad there’s finally a sound diet that her daughter can follow.

Sitting next to Sarah on the threadbare bus seats, Emily claps the sugar from her hands. She’s dead tired. The plan is to cover the entire seven hundred miles back to the homeland in one go, with short breaks along the way. After forty minutes the toilet is overflowing. After forty-five minutes the toilet door is locked because Cindy has thrown up next to the commode.

‘She’s pregnant! By a Spaniard with a moustache!’ come the shrieks from the bus. Fifteen minutes later the bus is pulled over by the Spanish highway police. They have to stop at a highway restaurant and wait for a replacement for the driver. The man had already been driving thirty-eight hours straight. The girls are all given free drinks. The restaurant personnel are told in English to keep it alcohol-free, but it turns out they only understand Spanish. One of the employees disappears with Marijke, the biggest slut of the year. They go to a storage room in the back.

A couple of hours pass and no replacement has shown up yet. The quarrels and annoyances that have been smouldering between the classmates are ratcheted up into existential crises. Buckets of tears are shed and serious oaths of vengeance are sworn because of the treachery committed in the allocation of seats, and earlier in the allocation of rooms, and because they’re all worn to a frazzle. When the bus pulls out five hours later with the same driver, Sarah is suddenly stricken by raging homesickness. She’s desperate to be home and alone. She doesn’t want to invite any girlfriends over. The fact that no one ever comes to visit except Emily is her choice entirely.

Emily is lying next to her, sound asleep. Her mouth is hanging open. She keeps encroaching on Sarah’s half and exhaling her peanut breath into Sarah’s face. Emily wakes up with a start and snort when the bus makes a turn and suddenly stops. She discovers the spot of drool on her own shoulder and looks at Sarah reproachfully, as if she had been the one to slam on the brakes. The twenty-two-hour bus ride is torture.

The coup de grâce comes at their final destination, the Brussel Noord station. The girls stagger out of the bus. Crying and needling each other, they say goodbye as if they were being torn apart forever by cruel fate, personified by their parents. Through their tears the girls turn to their parents and nod: ‘Yes, those are my suitcases.’

Dead tired, ill-treated, evil-smelling, close to exhaustion: that’s how Sarah feels. ‘Oh dear oh dear. No staying up late tonight,’ says Mieke at her first glimpse of her daughter. Sarah hands her mother the dirty backpack and follows her to the car. ‘Carry your own backpack. Anyone who can go on a trip can also carry her own luggage.’

Sarah dumps her backpack in the trunk and pulls the back car door open. She sits down on the back seat and tries to stifle her tears.

The parents’ cars take off in all directions, driving through the acid rain of Belgium.

‘We’ve got to get up early tomorrow …’ Mieke pauses for a moment of dramatic silence to arouse Sarah’s curiosity. Her words evaporate into the void. Sarah is mute in her comatose twilight zone.

‘… tomorrow we’re leaving for America!’ Mieke announces exultantly.

A sniff is heard from the back seat, like the sound of a small dog. In the rear-view mirror Mieke can see Sarah’s entire sweaty, cumin-smelling body react with a jolt. There it is again, the sadness that flows beneath the surface of life and crops up in Sarah with a certain regularity.

‘Seat belt!’ Mieke says.

Sarah grabs the seat belt mechanically. She clicks it into the black slot. Although she wants to stop crying, she can’t. She isn’t cried out yet. Her body is tired. Otherwise everything is fine and dandy, except for the fact that she hates everybody, especially her unpredictable mother.

‘Boo hoo,’ Sarah blurts out.

‘What’s this? What’s with her?’ Mieke asks out loud to someone out of the picture. The windshield wipers make it hard to see. She’s bent way over the steering wheel in an effort to complete the journey home in safety. ‘Anybody else would be jumping for joy!’

‘I don’t want to go,’ sniffles Sarah.

‘We’re going.’

‘I just got back.’

‘I can’t make any sense out of you. You ridicule us because we hardly ever go anywhere … ’

‘I don’t like to travel.’

‘You ought to thank your father for working so hard for you. The merger is almost finished and he’s been given a bonus, so he’s insisting that we take a trip. He’s all happy and cheerful for once, and you’re going to sabotage the whole thing, right? I can’t believe this.’ Mieke brings her fighting spirit into play. ‘You are going!’

Why can’t she get over something as banal as being tired? Half the planet is walking around tired and the other half is dazed from malnutrition. But they haven’t just come back from a gruelling school trip. Sarah wants to roll up in a ball like a hedgehog, in the winter of her own pink bedspread. She’s a small child in adult packaging.

The next morning Sarah is sitting buckled up between her parents in the first class section of a Boeing 747. Together with four hundred other passengers they take off for the West Coast of the United States of America. When the airplane engines start rumbling and the plane lunges forward like a wild animal, leaping into the air, a primitive power awakens within Sarah. She’s never going to be like her parents. She’s never, ever going to get married. She’s going to move to a foreign country and perform everywhere there and get rich with her music. Uncle Jempy will be proud. Finally she’s reached clarity about what she wants to do and they’ve only just taken off. For the remainder of the flight she sleeps under the blue airline blanket.

They’re going to drive down the West Coast in a big rented car. While Stefaan and Mieke test the air conditioning in the parking lot and arrange the water bottles in the trunk, Sarah plays on her miniature guitar. She juggles with various chords until a new number slowly emerges. Back in the car she keeps on practising. After a couple of hours silence is imposed on her. Mieke takes the earplugs out of her ears in order to repeat the safety instructions in case fire should break out.

Stefaan shoves CDs into the CD player, and for the hundredth time he tells them about Bob Dylan’s religious period. He also knows a lot about the chemical industry in California. He’s virtually unstoppable. The stooped man who used to pace through the house is gone, and in his place is his energetic, silly-joke-telling twin brother. ‘We’ll let him get away with it, won’t we, Sarah, with a merger like that?’ says Mieke, laughing. Sarah even forgets to be irritated by him, just as she consistently strolls fifteen feet behind her mother on this continent so they won’t be seen together.

Without any outside observers they function just like a model family. The three of them are floating on a cloud of familial satisfaction. Mieke allows a twenty-minute margin into her schedule. Every time they take their seats in a restaurant and start leafing through the menu, Mieke sighs how wonderful it is not to have to do anything. ‘Enjoy this trip while you can,’ she exhorts her daughter. ‘Other children don’t get such a chance to see the world.’

On the beach at Carmel, Sarah writes a postcard to Emily. Emily is spending the summer in the south of France. Sarah writes about her mother’s nagging, the masses of cute, interested boys, and her plan to earn tons of money with her totally original, freshly composed songs.

Stefaan wants to have an adventure in the Grand Canyon, a three days’ drive from here, but Mieke has objections. There’s no way she’s going to risk her life in that horrible gorge, where it’s probably swarming with irresponsible tourists who are fighting each other for the best view so they can go back home with some trite bit of video. After a discussion that lasts for miles they strike a deal. Mieke agrees to visit the Grand Canyon with Sarah and Stefaan, but she’s not going on the adventurous hike in the small canyon farther on, the least touristically exploited canyon in the entire state. ‘Make sure you take two litres of water per hiker,’ Mieke reads aloud from the travel guide, which she consults several times a day. The air conditioning in the rented car is running full blast. Mieke also implores them not to deviate from the paths, not to pick any wild plants, not to touch any carcasses. ‘Helicopters cannot come to rescue you. Do me a favour and stick together.’ The guide has marked the hike as ‘simple’.

Stefaan and Sarah descend into the canyon. Chasms and fissures in the ravaged face of the earth give way to a deep red-brown wound, gaping and abandoned for centuries. Nothing is growing here, and it doesn’t seem possible that any animal could live here. This place knows no mercy. The sun underscores that with its most fluorescent yellow. Stefaan walks with his backpack in front, sun visor on his head. Sarah follows in his footsteps. She becomes hypnotized by the simultaneous thudding of their shoes in the sand. They walk on as the world of brown earth passes by.

‘Let’s take a break,’ says Stefaan after an hour. ‘We have to make sure we drink enough water.’

Stefaan and Sarah drink greedily. They let the water flow from the corners of their mouths like babies. ‘This is how Moses walked through the wilderness,’ says Stefaan cheerfully. He screws the cap back on the bottle and sets out again at a brisk pace. He’s almost running.

‘You wouldn’t be able to maintain that speed for forty years,’ says Sarah. Sweating profusely, she tries to keep up with him.

‘You would if you were running away.’

They haven’t met a single tourist or any other living soul. The deeper they penetrate the chasm the less likely that is to happen. Her eyelids begin caking together from the salt and sand. Her legs are filthy. Suddenly Stefaan stops dead in his tracks.

‘Listen.’

Sarah stops. There’s nothing to hear but her own heavy breathing. She stops panting and hears nothing. Less than nothing.

‘The big nothing,’ Stefaan smiles. ‘The deepest silence in the world. Nothing nothing nothing.’

Sarah doesn’t see what there is to smile at in this gothic environment. She dares not think what would happen if the light bulb of the sun were to be turned off and they were left standing here.

Stefaan starts singing. ‘Nothing nothing nothing.’

Is he serious with this chorale? ‘Papa, Jesus. Don’t be so childish.’

Sarah is dying of embarrassment, although it helps her to realize that there’s no one here to see them. She hears the wisps of sound blowing in the air, she notes the biting of the teeth on the ‘n’, the mighty bridge of the ‘o’, the cavernous formulation from tongue tip to throat in ‘thing’, and she feels the distance growing between herself and this man.

By the time the first of their two bottles is emptied they’ve already made quite some headway, Sarah walking in her father’s wake. He comes to a halt at a spectacular view: a hyperrealistic hologram of rocks and tufts of green. Like a large-scale landowner indicating the extent of his holdings, he waves his arms around with exaggerated sweeps. He points to the big rock in the distance, which is where he wants to walk.

‘Can’t do it, Papa. According to the map we have to go straight ahead here.’

‘Give me that map.’ He jerks the map out of Sarah’s hands. ‘From this point we’ll follow the grey stripe.’

‘No, we have to follow the blue path. That grey stripe isn’t a walking path.’

Stefaan rubs the tip of his shoe in the dust. ‘And what if we call this a path?’ he says with a smile.

‘No, I’m not going with you. You go, I’ll wait here.’

‘Saaraah, we promised your mother we’d stick together. Trust your papa just this once. We’re not going to die, you know,’ he hisses. ‘Those travel guides are always incredibly careful about making people like your mother feel that they’re being taken au sérieux.’

Stefaan descends the steep slope, past a thorny bush. Sarah follows him down the twisting path. He’s moving so fast, he’s so eager, that she feels like a little old grandma who can’t keep up. She totters down step by step and holds her arms out protectively to break her fall in case she should trip. ‘You have to bounce through your knees,’ she hears her father shout. Luckily there are nasty dry bushes growing close together that would break her fall. In her haste she slides and scrapes her leg against a piece of rock.

‘Papa, where are you?’ she calls.

Why is her father doing this? Why does he exasperate her so? Why is he pushing her over the edge? She could die here, she really could. This isn’t some little fantasy out of a book. Sarah calls her father and gets no response. She howls like a hyena. He’s just gone. The reality that descends on her is piercing: her father has left her here.

‘Papa!’ she hears herself shout again. ‘Papa!’

All the difficulties she had predicted multiply like lightning. It’s going to get dark. Birds of prey will smell their next meal. A bush shakes and is cleft in two by the figure of her father. He’s standing there grinning. ‘Found me.’

‘I hate you, Papa.’ She turns around and scrambles back up. ‘You always have to ruin everything.’

‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing.’ He keeps repeating this the whole way back, to calm himself more than her. Her father is demented. A normal father would never do such a thing, right? ‘Don’t say anything to Mama, okay?’ he says imploringly when they walk into the lobby of the Grand Inn, a hotel in the park.

The next morning they drive, air conditioner lowing, from the monumental desolation of the canyon to the fata morgana of Las Vegas, a one-day journey. For the first time during the entire trip Mieke does not take out her can of spray disinfectant upon entering the hotel room of the MGM Grand. In every hotel they visit she normally cleans the toilet seat, the telephone receiver, and any other breeding ground of fatal illnesses. The floor is covered in wall-to-wall shag carpeting. Mieke squats down and strokes the carpet like a newborn lamb. ‘Feel this, Sarah. This is what not having to do anything feels like.’

On the way to Los Angeles, with Las Vegas disappearing behind them like a sketch in the rear-view mirror, Mieke insists that she’s glad to be leaving that madhouse of decadence, although she doesn’t sound entirely convincing.

One day later they park the car outside Los Angeles in a much too spacious parking lot along a strip, where the outlet stores are lined up like multicoloured blocks played with by giants. The mega parking lot is almost empty. No grand tour of the West Coast of the States is complete, Stefaan thinks, without a visit to a mammoth Walmart supermarket. Mieke has barely set foot in the Walmart when she claims to have become physically sick. She’s going to look for a toilet somewhere else and then drop into the Le Creuset shop farther down the strip.

Sarah follows her father into a Walmart as big as an airplane hangar. She lets herself be carried along past the wreckage of Western civilization. Jeans so big you could re-stitch them into hot-air balloons; terrifying stuffed animals that are bigger than people; sets of pots and pans you could start a restaurant with; sixty different kinds of pasteurized, deathly-pale cheeses; greeting cards for domestic pets, fewer debts, and amicable divorces; seven million pairs of purple-flecked rubber boots; teabag dryers; buckets of chicken bouillon; billions of packages of baking powder, butter, Béarnaise sauce, baloney, butterscotch, beans. Stefaan takes her along with him to the drugstore, all the way in the back of the supermarket. There her father questions the head pharmacist about the brands of medicines he stocks.

‘Listen to that, Sarah. They sell the entire line of medicines produced by my company.’

Sarah wants to escape from this insane, oxygen-depleted biosphere. The pharmacist invites them up to the roof, where the view is unique.

Followed by the red-ringed eyes of washed-out Walmart employees, they climb the metal stairs to the roof. The view is no less than astonishing: a plain trampled flat by the giants of Walmart and turned into a canvas that the sun uses to test all its tints of yellow and red.

The manager’s beeper goes off. He has to leave. ‘But you’re both welcome to stay and enjoy the view.’

Sarah and Stefaan walk carefully to the edge of the asphalt roof the size of a soccer field. Down below they see Mieke walking to the car with a big cardboard box in her hands.

Here we stand, all of us together on a roof in faraway America. We join Stefaan and walk over to his daughter.

‘I hear you’ve made enormous progress with your music lessons.’ His hesitant attempt at conciliation.

‘I’m writing my own songs now, and when we get back home I’m going to ask Emily if she wants to form a group.’

‘That sounds like a good plan.’

Do it, Sarah, we say encouragingly. We’re big rock ‘n’ roll fans.

‘I want to stand on a stage as big as this roof, with thousands of people at my feet. As soon as I play the first note, they’ll all start screaming.’

‘That’s a nice dream. Go for it, never give up,’ Stefaan urges his daughter.

Never give up sounds rather defensive to us. If there’s one sentence that typifies us it’s this: at every setback we step on the gas.

Back downstairs, Stefaan and Sarah hear music coming from a lonely pickup truck in the parking lot. Behind the steering wheel is a man slumped down in his seat and smoking a cigarette.

‘Sometimes you have to admit that it’s bad, or at least that it’s not so good,’ says Stefaan cautiously.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think Bob was drinking back then. Every time he releases a new CD everybody says it’s his worst, but in this case it’s really true, I’m afraid. Down in the Groove from 1988. I even feel a little embarrassed for him. What do you think? Do you think this is any good?’

‘I’d rather listen to grunge and electro,’ says Sarah.

‘But after that he had a comeback,’ says Stefaan, as if she needed to be comforted. ‘Bob never gives up.’

On the way to school on the first day of the term, Emily gives a flippant description of her vacation in France. They had rented a house there with a swimming pool. Suddenly her voice drops an octave. ‘It happened,’ says Emily in a whisper. She went to bed with a good-looking surfer. He lives in the coastal town near Nice where her parents had rented the house. One morning her parents had gone out for croissants, but three hours later they still hadn’t come back. The surfer came to the door. He offered his services to clean the swimming pool. She let him in. As he began cleaning the pool, she sat and dangled her feet in the water. He carefully put his equipment on the ground and came to sit behind her to give her a massage. And that’s how it happened. On a deck chair next to the swimming pool. In the full sun. Then she took a shower and he went on to the next villa. Fortunately her parents stayed away long enough at the outdoor cafe where they were hanging out. Sarah dishes up an adventurous version of her trip to America and holds forth on the five songs she completed.

The legendary duo of Marie-Hélène and Suri are in Sarah’s class this year. Marie-Hélène is from a noble family and an insufferable bitch besides. Sarah can see this at a glance. Suri is a mysterious Asian who walks around with a parasol to protect her from the sun. Marie-Hélène and Suri are inseparable.

If you’re going by physical appearance, Suri is by far the more striking of the two. It’s not just her angular face with her light blue eyes (coloured lenses). She’s also very small and delicate. You’d easily overlook her if she didn’t radiate such a relentless beauty and if she didn’t have such a striking wardrobe, which consists of a mixture of rags dragged out of the gutter and sleek designer clothing.

Marie-Hélène is the one with the big mouth. During every lesson she makes her lack of interest perfectly clear right from the first minute. She’s the type who is thought to be too clever to ever amount to much, because she’ll probably end up making a big mess of things along the way on account of her nonconformity. When Marie-Hélène is asked to come up to the blackboard to solve a matrix equation, for instance, she writes out a whole new problem that even the teacher has to wrestle with.

Sarah is having a very hard time getting herself psyched for the new school year. As a girl you’re expected to be full of admiration for the miracle of nature, but according to Sarah there’s a lot not to admire. Her body has lumps, her nipples hurt, and she had to lie on her back in bed to fasten her jeans. At the most unexpected moments her body will give her a blood red indication of her unfertilized condition. You can’t appear in public with such a body, but it’s impossible to make her mother understand this. They never talk about bodies. Every day she gets up with hope in her heart. She can only hope that an extra vacation day has been added for the death of Lady Di, that the underground atomic testing has gone terribly wrong, or that an unlikely flood has hit Nightingale Lane and the water has come right up to her window. But Nightingale Lane is not in Bangladesh. After this she hopes for some kind of physical defect, a vague pain in the stomach, maybe a virus that would keep her out of school, an imaginary migraine attack. Sarah’s body refuses to go along with her plans, however; it does not break down. In fact it frustrates her at every turn by insisting on being in perfect health, despite a freezing cold shower, seven tablespoons of coarse mustard, and an onion under her armpit.

Sarah avoids the mirror more and more. She hates the bulges that are appearing all over the place. She wants to be the way she was before. She’s jealous of her younger self. It looks at her from a photograph: wiry, in full action, tennis racquet in hand. Mieke says she’s finally there, and that every day she’s a little bit more of a woman. A young version of Granny, that is. Something within her that’s ready and waiting, pushing outward like a branch of a tree.

Sarah goes with Emily to the back of her garden. Behind the big chestnut tree they share a cigarette and smoke it as fast as they can. Flocks of birds rise up from the cornfield that borders on the garden. A few children are chasing each other, screaming and pelting each other with unripe ears of corn. A batch of new families has moved into the housing estate recently. Emily tells Sarah about the invitation from Marie-Hélène and Suri. They’ve asked them to come to their music studio for a jam session. Two children’s heads pop up among the cornstalks and duck back down when they see they’ve been discovered. Emily puts out the cigarette and buries the butt.

Marie-Hélène and Suri heard Emily and Sarah play at the school party last year. They threw together a provisional group that included Mireille, who is a horrible bore but who can sing surprisingly well.

‘Don’t expect too much of this,’ says Emily, handing Sarah a King peppermint. ‘Tomorrow at five at Marie-Hélène’s. Oh, yeah, we’re supposed to say MH.’

Sarah hurries home. Chances are she won’t be able to go. Mieke’s house rule is that appointments must be made at least two weeks in advance. If they aren’t, Mieke doesn’t recognize them and they don’t get entered in her big appointment book.

Mieke’s current reading matter is lying on the kitchen table: Emile Zola’s Germinal. Old writers don’t use dirty words. Sarah browses through today’s newspaper, which was already folded up and stacked on the old paper pile. Sarah’s words are lost when Mieke opens the door of the dishwasher. Hot steam hits her in the face. Mieke unloads the white plates. She sets the table for breakfast early tomorrow morning.

‘No, Mama. There’s no hidden agenda here. I’m just going to play music tomorrow with Emily.’

‘I have to wonder what you’re keeping from me. Why don’t you tell me anything? Why is this whole house laden with secrets? You’re just like your father. He doesn’t talk about anything, either. Why not, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Because all my life I haven’t been allowed to do anything!’

‘Now what are you saying?’

‘It’s true. I’m never allowed to go anywhere. I always have to stay at home.’

‘All you need is the wherewithal. If you let me know two weeks ahead of time you can do whatever you want. Everyone has a right to their own lunacy. You can do anything.’

‘I can never do anything.’

‘What a fresh mouth,’ says Mieke as she takes the glasses out of the dishwasher and polishes them again with a dry cotton towel. ‘Where did you learn that? Did you learn it at school? I should have known. My mother warned me. It’s my own fault. I should have had you tutored privately at home. I should have listened to her.’

‘So you used to be disobedient?’

‘A private tutor,’ Mieke continues, following the same track. ‘That would have been best.’ Something else she can sincerely blame herself for.

‘And then lock me up in a cellar somewhere.’

‘You know what the problem is?’ Mieke asks, more to herself than to Sarah. ‘I raised you too liberally. That’s it. I would never have spoken to my parents that way or I would have been sent straight to the cellar. Oh, well, no use thinking about it. You’ve had it much too easy, that’s it. Everything was handed to you on a platter.’

‘I work too, don’t I?’

‘If you do, you’re darn good at hiding it.’

‘We’re going to Marie-Hélène’s house to make music.’ A strategic argument.

‘Ah, Marie-Hélène, the daughter of the count who was killed in that accident. So you’re going to her house?’ Mieke’s voice shoots up.

‘Yes, tomorrow from three to nine at her house.’

‘The poor girl, losing your parents just like that. What kind of a girl is Marie-Hélène?’

‘I don’t know. Just normal.’

‘Now that’s what I call beautiful, that someone from a noble family can act normal,’ says Mieke without a hint of irony. ‘There, you see, people with standing have the simplest way of acting. They don’t need to be showy, they just act normal. Distinguished. You don’t have that with all those nouveaux riches.’

‘I’ll find out tomorrow. If I can go, that is.’

‘It’s fine, as long as your grades don’t suffer. That would be the end of all this going out.’

A couple of weeks ago, Ulrike the neighbour lady revealed the whole story of the castle while Sarah was within earshot. Everyone in the village and on the mountain knows that the count’s children have moved back into the castle. The castle is located in a secluded part of the woods between two villages on a large estate that’s completely walled in. Noble families are the butt of many jokes in the nineties. Almost all of them are flat broke, and they stopped having servants or maintaining their bastard children a long time ago. They can barely afford hay for their horses, and they give the animals away to manèges. Valuable antiques and china services that have been in the family for centuries are auctioned off. Whole families cluster around one heater in one room in the castle. Sad. Most of them have pulled down the shutters on their castles and fled to apartments in the capital or left for Switzerland with their hoarded treasure. No one even looks at the castles anymore.

That impoverishment does not apply to the higher classes sitting on large family fortunes, and it certainly doesn’t apply to the nobility who are still very active in businesses where there’s good money to be made. The modern count helped lay the groundwork for the compact disc and thus amassed a huge fortune, but he also must have had unimaginable capital and connections. A celebrated architect was called in for the swimming pool and for general modernization. He was the only one who succeeded in reconciling the modern and the historic during the seventies. The architect used sustainable materials. He more or less restored the old castle to its former glory, but the dusty windows suggest that the count never actually lived there. Most of the time he shut himself up in the caretaker’s lodge in the garden, which had been converted into a music studio. Endless nightly recording sessions took place in the lodge. Limousines drove back and forth. Legendary musicians were spotted in the village cafe. The large caretaker’s lodge had a nasty reputation. The police from the neighbouring city had already broken in a couple of times with sniffer dogs, and the dogs had barked their heads off, Ulrike added.

Then in Switzerland the count met the woman who would become his wife and who gave him three children. They all lived together in the castle until ten years ago. Then one day there was a death notice in De Standaard. The count and his wife had ‘unexpectedly passed away in Tibet’. No one in the village or on the mountain knew what he was doing in Tibet. There were some who wanted to give the impression that they were buddy-buddy with the count, but none of them was sufficiently convincing, their only evidence being smudged black-and-white clippings from the newspaper. Everyone knew that the count had been an eccentric, decadent society figure. He was always headed for someplace else, gallivanting all over the world. People are only too glad to fill in the blanks and make insinuations. He was ahead of his time, and had even taken a course in Tibet with the Dalai Lama, or he travelled back in time there once with George Harrison for the recording of a new CD. Anything was possible, according to the lore kept alive by the neighbours. In any case, after the death of their parents the two girls moved in with a distant aunt and the boy was sent to an institution. Now that the oldest girl is twenty-one, she can act as the official guardian of the two younger children. The three of them live together in the castle.

Every villager and every resident of the housing estate has had at least a glimpse of the castle. A pair of brothers who own a little private plane fly over the village every year to make aerial photographs. The photos are eagerly snatched up by the inhabitants of the villas on the mountain who have just had swimming pools installed. You can see in the photos how large and well maintained their domains are. The brothers also take annual photos of the castle and its grounds, which are then hung in the town hall among the pictures of the other pearls of the area. The photos show that behind the castle there’s also a swimming pool, a large caretaker’s lodge, a pond, and a gigantic garden house. In the fantasy of some of the village women this is a huge closet with seven thousand pairs of shoes. Not true, Ulrike says, who is no gossipmonger.

Mieke wants to take Sarah to the castle by car. Then afterwards they can have a lengthy discussion of the tiles in the entrance hall, the fragrance of the flower garden, and the painting of the gutters.

‘Suri’s mother is taking us, it’s all been arranged,’ Sarah says.

‘Don’t make it too late,’ says Mieke as she stores the vacuum cleaner away in the utility room. ‘And not now either. It’s time for bed. I’m going upstairs myself. No use waiting up for your father. By the time he’s finished pottering around, or whatever he’s doing in his shack, I’d be sound asleep anyway, so I might as well go up now.’

When the noises in the bathroom die out, Sarah goes upstairs in her stocking feet to listen to music in the attic. There are plenty of other rooms in the house where she could listen to music, but in the attic she feels most at ease. It takes at least ten minutes to climb the steel fold-out steps without making any noise.

At the far end of the large attic, in a sea of fibreglass, there’s an old wicker cradle, lampshades, and couple of boxes full of notebooks and photographs. On a small table are Sarah’s collection of scribbled song lyrics. She kneels down next to the spherical radio-CD player. It glistens in the semi-darkness like the eyeball of a fly. Tethered to the six-foot cord of her headphones, like a goat grazing in circles in the musical meadow, Sarah listens to a compilation CD. After half an hour she gives up. It’s hopeless. There’s no way she’s going to be able to brush up her musical knowledge in one evening. Suri and MH are undoubtedly walking musical encyclopaedias. She’s going to have to do her best to hide her limited knowledge of grunge. If she survives one round with MH and Suri she can consider herself lucky.

On the roof of the hobby shed she sees a point of light. Her father is standing in the solitude of the housing estate, smoking a cigar. Ever since they stood together on the roof of the Walmart he has become withdrawn and silent again. He’s that strange, distracted man who irritates the hell out of her, especially when he eats, or rather: when he noisily dumps the food into his cavernous maw. Sarah knows that at his work he’s a man of authority and prestige, but at home she never sees any sign of this. Whether it’s the dissatisfied building contractor, the tax inspector, or his very own daughter, he always lets Mieke do the dirty work. He’s a coward, a gutless bastard who does weird things in his hobby shed. What does he ever do for her? Does he help her in any way? He takes her to music lessons, he pulls up his chair at the table, and they pass each other in the house, but that’s it. She even has serious doubts that he’s her real father (that dry cough, that shy, shifty smile, those bad table manners). Maybe she was switched with another baby in the hospital, or her mother had an affair and all those childhood photos were simply doctored.

The next day during the second period after lunch everyone is sitting at their desks dozing in the autumn sun. The voice of the French teacher is grating. Last month she didn’t waste much time on words of welcome. After two introductory statements in broken Dutch she switched to elegant French. Since then she has spoken French exclusively and expects her pupils to do the same. Today they’re discussing the passé simple, a totally overlooked tense reserved for archaic and literary texts. The French teacher asks if anyone has heard of Jules Laforgue, a decadent writer. His favourite tense was passé simple, as the teacher would have them believe. She asks if anyone knows what decadent means. For the first time in her school career MH raises her hand. MH says in flawless French that she is inspired by the Decadents and by Gainsbourg.

‘Gainsbourg comes later,’ says the teacher in French. ‘Much later.’

‘But Gainsbourg wrote a song about it,’ MH protests. Twenty-five mouths begin to chatter. ‘“Décadanse.” 1972. About anal sex.’ She has most of the class braying with laughter. With the triumphant nonchalance of someone who knows everything, she begins scribbling in her new notebook while telling her neighbour what the rest of the song is about: a woman who is made to bend over. The chaos in the class increases. The teacher calls a couple of names. MH turns to Sarah: ‘Emma says you’re coming tomorrow.’

‘Emily, you mean,’ says Sarah flatly. ‘Yeah, yeah.’ The first commandment says that overly tempestuous joy should always be tempered. You must beat the exclamation point down to a bland announcement.

‘Sarah et Marie-Hélène, dehors!’

They stand up and go outside. MH is wearing a white lace dress, the very picture of decadence. There’s an enormous tear yawning in the bodice. A lace bra is peeking out at the daylight, and at curious eyes. Mrs. De Decker, the homeroom teacher, already warned her about it this morning. If she wears that dress tomorrow she’ll be suspended.

‘Bass guitar?’

‘No, regular guitar.’

MH’s hand disappears into a pocket of her dress. She takes out a little metal box and walks away toward the grotto, the former place of pilgrimage for the nuns and now the clandestine smoking den for the pupils.

Whenever school closes unexpectedly early, Emily and Sarah like to bike into town to hang out and do a little shopping. Sarah always has to rush like crazy in order to get home on time. Today they go to a second-hand shop where Emily talks Sarah into buying a dress for next to nothing. To her surprise, the Victorian children’s dress of black velvet fits Sarah like a glove. Emily encourages her to make the purchase.

The next morning Sarah wears the new dress to the breakfast table. Mieke, loudly clearing her throat, makes it all too obvious that she has decided not to react to her daughter’s velvet dress.

‘Wow, that’s tight,’ says Stefaan, with the subtlety of a man at the head of a company. After years of carrying out efficient policy without any flirting and with a profound fear of sexual intimidation, delicacy has gone by the wayside. ‘A little too warm, wouldn’t you say?’ Sarah could strangle him.

Emily and Sarah make their way cautiously down the muddy driveway, Sarah with her guitar on her back and Emily clutching a case containing her drumsticks. They have great expectations with regard to the castle in the distance: a forest of lilies at the entrance gates, burning candles with immense wicks on the steps, a butler who waits for visitors day and night, polishing the brass lions’ heads until he can see himself in them, a coach house with a fleet of antique cars, and everywhere the impassive busyness of garden personnel and lackeys. It becomes increasingly clear that what she is walking toward is a big, dilapidated facade. The castle strikes her as languishing and sad. The houses in the housing estate are nowhere near this big, but not a single villa is so neglected. The gutter is sagging, and green streaks made by copper pipes are running down from the roof. There are large damp spots on the outer walls, and plastic is flapping in the battered eye sockets of the window frames.

An eye-catching, bright yellow sports car is parked facing the crumbling stairs. It’s a classic English Bentley, with lots of glistening chrome and a gleaming little horse on the trunk lock.

Emily rings the doorbell. She looks around somewhat uneasily in the gathering autumn darkness. It’s a good thing they waited in the woods for half an hour. You should never arrive exactly on time; it isn’t cool.

Footsteps are heard in the castle passageways. There’s a stiff breeze. It’s as if the double, wooden entrance doors had been opened by a single gust of wind. Before they quite realize it they’re being piloted into the house by a blonde woman.

‘Jules,’ she says, introducing herself. She is obviously related to MH, but this woman has climbed higher out of the gene pool. A top model from the nineties: lean and tall as a giraffe, hollow-eyed, at home in another world of gruesome fairy tales.

‘We’ve come for Marie-Hélène,’ says Emily.

‘She’s in her studio in the garden.’ She has a rasping, sleepy voice that betrays lots of cigarettes and long nights. ‘Come with me.’

There are large bags filled with rubbish in the entrance hall. They look up at a very large painting of an important man from long ago. He’s wearing tight white riding breeches and a blue velvet jacket with gold buttons. His fingers grasp a walking stick. He looks despondently around the room as if he could step out of the frame at any moment. He could be one of those men who die of grief, just like her grandfather. They enter a ballroom. The late afternoon light is streaming in on two sides of this ship, which is being propelled into an endless garden. Rising from the parquet floor is a grand piano and the four curled legs of a massive oak dining table with only one chair beside it. Three other chairs are lying on their sides like wounded soldiers and are connected by pieces of cloth, kitchen towels, and bath towels. The tent camp is held together by clothes pins and is pitched in the middle of the heated, airy space.

‘Xavier!’ Jules calls, and she looks under the sheets.

Lying on a mountain of pillows near the double patio doors are magazines and a book with a cracked spine next to a bottle of red wine and a bag of Cheetos. An extremely expensive wall tapestry is hanging askew on the wall. Damsels dance stiffly around a squirrel, in brown autumn colours. Below the tapestry is a can of red latex paint with its lid off. Mieke would kill for a tapestry like that.

The music is turned up so loud that the gigantic crystal chandelier in the ballroom is almost singing along. The good-looking woman drops onto the mountain of pillows and immerses herself in a glossy magazine, Les Inrockuptibles. She makes annotations in a CD review with a red felt-tip. Sarah isn’t sure if she’s deliberately pretending not to see them, or if she’s just the type of person who lets the whole world go down the tubes while she concentrates on whatever it is she’s doing. She doesn’t even look up when an older, heavyset woman comes in with the hose of a vacuum cleaner draped around her neck, the way her mother does at home.

From now on Sarah is one small, trivial, but nevertheless significant step ahead of her mother by entering the world of the true aristocracy, the aristocracy who don’t care a whit about status.

‘Very ordinary people,’ she’ll say to her mother. ‘Very normal. They also have a housekeeper. And their rooms are quite a bit larger than ours, of course.’

They have to wait a very long time. Emily has already lit a cigarette, as has the good-looking woman. The cigarette is almost finished when the woman suddenly looks up from her magazine and says, ‘Marie- Hélène is in the studio, the building behind the swimming pool and the garden. You’ll find it.’

Jules sits up. Her head is nodding to the music. Squatting down next to the towel tent, she pulls one of the towels away and shouts, ‘Come on, Xavier, you’ve been sitting in there long enough. Come on out, lovely boy.’ Suddenly her voice takes on a cheerful tone. Whoever or whatever is hiding in there is not going to get punished.

Sarah and Emily go into the garden to look for MH. The back of the castle is as luxurious and well-cared-for as the front is dilapidated. It’s as if the front were turning away from curious distant glances and showing off its ugliest side. The caretaker’s lodge is quite a distance behind the swimming pool, next to the large pond. It looks like an enormous country house from a southern state in America, one of those houses that overlook the vast expanse of a cotton plantation. The door of the caretaker’s lodge is open. A whole row of framed golden records are hanging in a place of honour in the entrance hall. Sarah and Emily walk cautiously toward a room from which the monotonous drone of a vacuum cleaner is issuing.

The enormous studio is packed with musical instruments and a disorderly hodgepodge. A sitar is seeking support from the pleated skirt of an accordion, seven classical guitars are all lined up and ready for use, a triangular guitar with flames drawn on it has hung itself by its own ribbon from a nail on the wall. Stacked on top of several layers of carpets and animals skins are some Mexican suitcases, an enormous silver candlestick with one arm missing, animal skulls, and a tower of vinyl records with Howie B. on top. Lying in a chaise longue right next to a speaker from which the monotonous sound of Daft Punk is booming is MH. As soon as she sees them an unintelligible sound escapes her lips. Then from behind an armchair on the other side of the room, Suri pops up. She nods. She’s drawing Arabic-looking letters on the wall with a brush full of orange paint. MH reaches into a nearby bag and takes out a handful of breadsticks, which she shoves into her mouth like little swords.

After the tepid reception, Sarah takes her guitar off her back. When MH rolls a joint, Suri comes over to sit beside her on the sofa. Suri snuggles up to MH, who gently strokes her black hair. Sarah sits down on the floor just as she does at home, where she prefers to avoid the chairs. The chance that one of them might get dirty, and that mother’s nerves might snap, is greater if you sit in them. For at least an hour MH then cross-examines Sarah and Emily with regard to their musical influences. Titles of albums and bizarre groups fly back and forth. Suri comes up with the strangest names. After a dispute between Suri and Marie-Hélène over the singer from Massive Attack, they decide to jam.

Suri straps on a massive bass guitar that almost throws her off balance. MH shuffles to the middle of the group and snarls something into the mic. What is expected of Emily and Sarah? Communication is reduced to gestures, shrugs, and chords. Sarah breaks into a spontaneous smile when she plugs her guitar in and rams along as background accompaniment to the scraps of Rimbaud that MH is singing, alternating with a couple of blood-curdling shrieks and a hand-knitted, one-word scarf of pure emotion. She has an outstanding voice for the kind of music they’re making.

Somewhere in the distance a church bell rings over and over again. In a flash of paralyzing panic, Sarah imagines her mother now swinging into action. She looks at Emily urgently and taps her wrist, where there is no watch. Emily stops drumming and lets the others know that she has to leave.

‘Yeah, let’s go,’ says Sarah. ‘I’ll let you hear my new numbers the next time.’

‘We’ll see,’ says MH. Suri has already tuned in to The Real World on MTV and is no longer responding.

Their heads spinning, Sarah and Emily wander through the evening air. Sarah gratefully accepts the King peppermints that Emily offers. She gives Emily a poke.

‘We,’ she says with a laugh, ‘are going to make it.’