-

SARAH 1998

From now on everything happens retroactively. Banal youth has suddenly come to a horrible end; glorious graduation has taken place in a minor key. During the past few weeks at home Sarah keeps hearing the same noises: the daily, pointless vacuuming, the humming of the dishwasher, the hairdryer that loosens paint, now and then a scant word from her mother. The noise outside the house pours into her empty head with overwhelming force.

Sarah is standing on the lawn of the castle and watching Jules’s party, which is getting nicely underway. About a hundred people are scattered among the bushes. The air is quivering from the booming racket, and even the flies are vibrating. She bounces her head up and down to the rhythm of ‘Black Steel’, Tricky’s latest hit. This kind of nodding is really dancing with your head. It’s supposed to indicate how relaxed you feel: you can lose yourself in the music.

More and more people are trickling out of the castle through the open patio doors and gathering around the swimming pool. One couple are horsing around at the pool’s edge, holding each other in a judo grip; old acquaintances fall into each other’s arms. People are enticed by the bright blue water and the mysterious sight of the jagged dark bushes surrounding them in the night. Sarah is standing behind a statueless pedestal, mustering up her courage, when Suri and Emily come walking up to her from the castle as if they had spotted her from behind the tall windows. The nods they exchange in greeting are barely visible. Suri takes a fat Cohiba cigar out of her metal smoking box. The heavy cigar smoke drifts for miles, out to the woods and into the sleeping village, where the last of the roll-down shutters descends at ten o’clock. That’s also when the shutters on the mountain are closed and the curtains drawn.

Then around the corner, down the muddy driveway, and right across the carefully trimmed lawn comes a red sports car. The woman behind the steering wheel is roaring with laughter. A young man in a kind of CHiPs police uniform is lying on the roof, holding on to the edges for dear life.

‘Come on, Ladies,’ says Sarah with exaggerated excitement, ‘let’s party.’ Suri and Emily stare daggers at her. She lights up a Camel.

‘Where’s the other Lady?’ asks Suri.

‘I just saw her in the library,’ Emily answers.

The library’s double door is open. The walls, which are full of crumbling, ancient books, look as if they were leaning more and more toward each other. Sitting in a translucent inflatable chair is Marie-Hélène, murmuring into a telephone receiver with a bare-chested man beside her who is not Barend. He has a body like a snake, white and thin. He places one arm around her and kisses her neck. ‘Yes, darling, I understand,’ she says into the receiver. She’s wearing her standard uniform of heavy combat boots and a minuscule lace dress. When MH sees them, she motions to them to go away.

The guests are converging at the outdoor bar. As Suri worms her way through the crowd to get a bottle of champagne for the Ladies, Emily searches the large, rice cracker-like tiles for something she’s not finding, something to talk about. Suddenly she starts conversing at high volume about Lars. Sarah caught a glimpse of Lars ages ago in the smoke-filled cafe across from the school, hanging from his bar stool like a wilted houseplant. Sarah isn’t sure whether she should ask about the demo they cut without her, but in fact she doesn’t really want to know. The Ladies all felt bad when Jules announced a couple of weeks ago that this time Scott really was going to come over to record the demo. Sarah wasn’t able to leave the house the first few weeks after her father’s death, but she insisted that the others cut the demo without her. But then it won’t be a Lady Di demo, Suri objected. Sarah said they shouldn’t let the chance slip away.

The Ladies came to the funeral, even though Sarah hadn’t sent them invitations (except for Emily). Her mother had sent notices to all the neighbours. The funeral was also the first meeting between her mother and the other Lady Di’s. Jules and Xavier weren’t there. According to MH neither one of them can deal with funerals, Jules least of all. The sight of the three Ladies sitting in a pew in church had made her wince. It was totally out of place. They didn’t have anything to do with her father. They should have stayed away, good intentions or no. Besides, her mother couldn’t understand why Suri had come to the funeral in a garbage bag. Did that girl do it to make fun of her husband? Disrespect for the deceased, Mieke decided, that was what it was: a slap in the face. You don’t go to someone else’s funeral to focus all the attention on yourself.

‘I’m going to the bathroom.’ Sarah can’t come up with a better excuse for escaping from the consequences of Emily’s eulogy on her great love. Lanterns are hanging all over the castle. Profusely coloured ribbons are raining down from the high ceilings. In the hallway leading to the regally appointed bathroom there are record sleeves glued to the marble walls. Sarah gasps for breath in the seclusion of the little room. Before going back to mingle with the guests, she smokes a cigarette. It’ll be just fine, the words her father always said to her when dropping her off at school on the day of a test. It’ll be just fine.

Sarah scans all the bodies in the semi-darkness of the ballroom. She sees big burly guys, each with a dangerous edge, brash ladies who butt in on other people’s conversations, emaciated goths who stare at the herringbone pattern in the parquet, ordinary girls in flowery dresses, a heavily tattooed black man with a mouthful of gold, recording executives in super sleek suits, Mafiosi with gel in their hair, fanatics who let themselves be coaxed to the pond full of koi fish, only to do an about-face at the halfway point and make for the cocktail bar to hit on a female producer or a businesswoman from Beirut.

No one looks at her, except for a guy squatting next to an amplifier and rooting around in the spaghetti of cables. He asks if she’d mind stepping aside, she’s standing on a cable. The guy must have scratched some pimples open when he was younger, seeing from the pinpricks that remain. Sarah takes two serious tokes from the joint the guy offers her.

No one at this party has yet to ask her how she’s doing or has given her a spontaneous hug, not like the few times she went outside the house in recent weeks. Four times, to be exact, each time to do some shopping. She went on foot from the mountain to the village with a Big Shopper bag to stock up on a few provisions from the grocer’s, all neatly written down in a list by her mother. It was important not to forget anything or her mother would get upset.

At the grocer’s in the village a woman spontaneously gave Sarah her place in line. She heard the people thinking, she filled in the text balloons herself. ‘There she is, that girl,’ ‘That must be so awful.’ Another woman took her elbow between thumb and forefinger and asked, ‘Are you doing all right?’ ‘I’m all right,’ Sarah smiled obediently. When she realized that she was smiling her father’s smile, she felt like smashing herself against the counter. He was inside her.

Her mother is making every effort in the world to keep her life at home on track. She’s doing this to make a place among the day’s worries for the death of her husband, which had descended on number 7 Nightingale Lane so suddenly and without warning. She’s working her way through the banalities at top speed: the rugs are being soaked, the living room walls are being stripped, steamed, washed, and re-hung with new wallpaper, and on the side of the fireplace they’re being painted over. She loves keeping herself usefully occupied. Sarah knows she shouldn’t begrudge her mother this work. The facade is a diversion, a survival strategy. Every generation has its walls, and those of her mother’s generation, her small one-person generation, are impenetrable.

‘You can keep it,’ says the guy with the old pimples. She jumps. Lost in thought, Sarah has let the whole joint burn down between her fingers. She blows on the red tip and takes one last toke on the thick stub. She rubs it against the wall until sparks fly and the butt is extinguished.

An arm reaches around her shoulders. MH has come over and is propelling her in the direction of Jules’s entourage. There are about as many people gathered outside as there were at her father’s funeral. His body lies buried in the small cemetery at the foot of the mountain. The name of his widow, Mieke Vandersanden-De Kinder, is already carved into the marble gravestone beneath his name. It’s a sinister foreshadowing, done not out of stinginess but as a sign of intense grief. To some extent her mother wants to bury herself with him. Sarah feels her heart pounding in her body. It’s a virus that is spreading and will not stop until it has possessed her. She stands among Jules’s friends and laughs meekly at jokes that get lost in all the racket. She exchanges tepid handshakes with the red-pupilled, gothic zombies and lets herself be hugged by Jules’s enthusiastic little friends. They’re world famous producers and recording executives who are not much older than the Ladies and whom Sarah has never heard of.

A man in a three-piece suit carrying a dish is wandering from group to group. On the dish are strips of powder. Finally, Sarah says to herself. Months ago, when she took her first hit from a joint, she had thought that the rest would quickly follow, that every possible drug would soon be coming her way. Sarah steps up, takes the long, narrow tube from the waiter, leans forward, and snorts a line from the cool silver. She doesn’t even blink her eyes.

‘Top quality,’ MH says to Jules, who has come to join them. Sarah looks around timidly, at herself, at her feet, and realizes that she is still inhabiting planet earth. She squeezes her nostrils between her thumb and forefinger to make sure her nose isn’t bleeding. There are lots of stories going around about ground glass in cocaine.

‘Ladies,’ says Jules with a thick voice, almost slurring her words, ‘don’t disappoint me. Don’t keep it clean, whatever you do.’ She’s standing between Emily and Sarah with a hand on each shoulder. She gazes at them intently, first Emily, then Sarah. Then she pinches Sarah’s shoulder and says, ‘We’ll talk.’

A producer who knows Eddie Vedder personally comes up to Sarah and spontaneously introduces himself. His hands draw figures in the air around her while his eyes are fixed on her face. As he talks she notices that his hands are playing with her. They’re warm hands, sturdy but not rough. During his manoeuvres she tries to think of the frontman from Pearl Jam, but this clean-shaven beanpole is absorbing all her attention. An image of two entwined octopuses looms up before her. The image of the octopuses makes her want to extricate herself from his embrace. He’s nothing at all like her: too old, too hot-blooded, too untrustworthy. Because the subtle approach doesn’t seem to work—explaining to him that she’s not charmed by his advances and therefore isn’t interested in fucking at this point in time—she pushes him away and shouts, ‘Cut it out!’ It’s the coke that’s doing the work for her and making her take an assertive distance. The aggressive producer glides on to a red-headed woman, deathly pale and dressed in a pink catsuit. Someone claims it’s Tori Amos.

Maybe it’s the cocaine, or maybe it’s her aversion to doing any more listening, but Sarah wants to move. Next to the swimming pool is a tall tower of beverage and beer crates. Without even thinking about it, Sarah starts climbing the tower. The construction totters, but she keeps climbing until she’s above the heads of the partygoers. The water in the swimming pool ripples below her. She looks down. There’s a terrible bitter taste in her throat.

‘Hey, Sarah, what’re you doing?’ MH shouts. The partygoers turn their heads, nudging each other until everyone is looking up at her. For a moment she’s the centre of attention. She stretches herself out on top of the shaky tower, takes a deep breath, and pushes off. For half a second she hangs weightless in the air. In that brief opening in time we jump with her into the deep, thoughtless pause in which all movement freezes. The billions of drops of water stand still, the back doors of time open up, and we hurtle through the universe. The next minute Sarah feels the fabric of her clothes fluttering. She feels herself burst apart on the surface of the water like a flower that has opened at lightning speed. After swimming to the side of the pool, she sees MH follow her example and jump in after her. It’s a child’s game, a chance to let themselves live it up. Sarah and MH scramble out of the pool, grab Suri (who’s standing at poolside with a glass in her hand), and pull her into the water. A few more partygoers jump in spontaneously after them.

Sarah looks around in the bracing water, proud of what she has set in motion. Couples blend together in the pool, which is becoming more and more congested. Clothing and cigarette butts are floating in the water, and bottles of liquor are passed from hand to hand. A couple of limber young men climb into the trees. Soon bodies are falling from the treetops like giant raindrops in a fairy-tale cartoon. Someone shouts from the roof of the castle and drops burning strips of toilet paper, which flutter back and forth in the dark yellow light. An owl turns his head a hundred and eighty degrees in order to fall asleep, which he normally doesn’t do at this hour, but there will be no hunting for him tonight. Bats dart through the blackness like charred shreds.

Gradually the swimming pool fills up. Sarah pushes herself against the side of the pool and climbs out. The other Ladies are already sitting in the prickly grass. The guests use tablecloths and curtains to dry themselves off. Sarah hears the chattering of her own teeth, like the up-and-down movement of a sewing machine. She notices that all the little hairs on her arms are standing on end, but it doesn’t get through to her, she doesn’t experience it.

Male bodies and female bodies, dressed and undressed, at peace or filled with desire, dripping or rubbed dry, are lying every which way on the grass and staring up at the dark puffs of cotton in the sky. The guy from the cable company comes over to talk to her and asks her endless questions about The Lady Di’s. The guy strongly advises her to keep the group’s name. Their basic principle sounds incredibly good. Music at the crossroads between old punk and trip hop, that’s the music for these new times, everybody from London to New York agrees with her.

Sarah congratulates herself on her acting talent. She can’t even think about rehearsing with the Ladies. She wants to go away, away from her life on the mountain, away from everything bursting with references to her father.

All at once there’s a dull thud behind them. A tidal wave bursts up from the swimming pool, a wall of water that rises several feet and smashes against the tiles in billions of fragments. The group of people standing around the pool in a semicircle are suddenly soaking wet, their cigarettes extinguished on the way to their mouths. The red sports car is sinking into the water. After a frozen moment of total silence the world breaks open again. The onlookers laugh themselves silly. A woman worms her supple body through the car window and flaps like a mermaid to the edge of the pool. The woman gives a shout and is fished out by a couple of he-men rushing to her aid.

Many short-lived friendships and many shared glasses and cigarettes later, Sarah is lying next to the cable guy behind a couple of bushes. She thinks he’s good-looking, and that’s all. Timidly she wraps her arms around him. It’s nice to cuddle up and feel his body on hers, but suddenly it feels as if a net had been thrown over her. Even though he’s taken the necessary precautions, this is how babies are made; it’s how she herself came into the world. Some day she’ll be the daughter who makes babies, just like that, so that those babies, too, can die. She pushes this thought from her mind and holds the guy tight.

All right, we whisper in her ear. This is what you want. All that sadness is a waste of time. You have to melt it down into something else. From loss to profit, the most natural progression in the world.

She and the guy fall into a deep, euphoric sleep. When she wakes up, she sees from the corner of her eye a dog’s tongue licking the dregs of wine from the glasses. In the swimming pool a ladder is trembling beneath the undulating water. A few articles of clothing and an inflatable shark are floating like silent witnesses on the water’s surface. She’s frozen to the bone. The coke has worn off. She had expected more from the hard drug, just as she had expected more from the death of her father. Like being out of commission for a specific period of time and then being able to get on with her life. But that’s not what happened. It’s been a drawn-out, lingering, endless bad trip. It’s a torment that she can’t explain to anybody. Normally your parents are in the background. But this background keeps pushing itself into the foreground. Will there ever come a time when she can calmly say that her father is dead? No, never, not here. She’s suffocating in this country. All she can do here is walk around with that stupid smile on her face, the way her father used to do. She doesn’t want to be like that. She refuses to be the daughter of a dead man with a dead brother and a dead father. She will not be a pawn on a battlefield where the slain are periodically brushed from the game board.

Morning light is quickly approaching, as if the lid were being lifted from a big box containing the whole earth. Sarah goes indoors. There are party guests lying in corners all over the castle, like in a Baroque painting in which you keep discovering more and more people. From the depths of the castle she hears momentary laughter, then a long period of silence. She cuts across to the library. The Ladies are sleeping in the armchairs, Suri with her head on the lap of MH, who’s lying with her head on the lap of Emily. Sarah won’t begrudge them the blissful ignorance that she herself no longer believes in. She blames her father not only for the stupid way his life came to an end, but also for the fact that in his crash her own plans were torn to shreds.

The first beams of morning light come streaming in. Someone has folded a film poster into a crane and placed the bird on top of the piano. Jules is reclining on a chaise longue and paging through a book about animals of the North Pole. Sarah plops down beside her.

Jules asks her how she’s doing. She looks sincerely interested. She wants to hear an answer. Sarah shrugs her shoulders. She has no answer, only a handful of facts and the echo of a last phone call. The objective version she tells Jules is a simple sentence, with her father driving the wrong way as the subject and death on a highway exit ramp in Sri Lanka as the predicate.

Jules is one of those people who throws her back on herself, on the Sarah she’s stuck with, for better or worse. The Sarah who drags a ton of troubles behind her so it’s harder and harder to make any headway. The third person who looks at her and wonders, who are you in my life?

Jules asks Sarah if she knows what her plan is.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘That’s important,’ Jules nods. ‘Go for it.’

Sarah turns her back to Jules and slips out through the crack of the open door without touching anything. The sunlight pierces the interior through the tall windows and slices the castle into pieces.

‘Go for it.’ The words resound in Sarah’s head. She feels the warmth of the sun penetrate her clothing. At every step she feels herself growing. She goes to the caretaker’s lodge and picks up her bag with all her things. Over the months she’s been with The Lady Di’s she’s left more clothes and notebooks here than she realized. Everything has to go; she doesn’t want to leave a single trace behind.

At the edge of the swimming pool she sees Xavier, who spent the night with the Polish cleaning woman because parties are more than he can handle. Xavier closes his eyes and absorbs all the sounds around him. His feet are as big as buoys.

‘Xavier.’ She likes to pronounce his name. The sounds collide with each other. It’s a rough name that suits him to a T, the rudimentary, unfinished idea of what a human being is.

As soon as he sees her he gives her a big hug, overjoyed, like a little kid hugging his mother after a ride on the merry-go-round. She puts her hands around his neck, which is too wide to completely encircle. She’s sure he hasn’t missed her. Now that she’s standing right in front of him again, he may vaguely remember or realize that she hasn’t been there in weeks. He keeps hugging and stroking her. His raspy voice tries to convey a message. His swollen eyelids tell her he didn’t sleep much last night either.

‘Bye, castle,’ she says as she walks down the driveway with Xavier at her side. The blackberry bushes have already shaken the early dew from their leaves and point to the driveway in large, untamed tufts.

It’s her last time here. The mirage has burst apart. A miserable pile of stones, an anachronistic castle in a state of decay, are all that remain. Every step takes her farther away from that crumbling world. She will never be famous with The Lady Di’s, she doesn’t want to hear a word about the demo, the producer, the release. There’s still a small air bubble of music inside her. It’s so small and vulnerable that she can’t show it to anyone.

Xavier walks beside her, carrying her bag. He follows her without question, like a house pet, trudging along without pausing or turning to look back. Together they make their way through the village. The cousin of the grocer, a man in jeans and a moustache curled at the ends, is sitting on a chair at the door to his shop. A woman like Granny is sitting a couple of houses farther on, washing her wrinkled face in the pure summer light. Xavier waves to them all.

A couple of children are playing in the sunken road at the foot of the mountain. They’re steering a remote-controlled truck up the embankment, but it’s so steep that the monster truck keeps overturning and tumbling back down. They don’t give up. This is part of their game, over and over again. She and Xavier stop and watch until Xavier can no longer control himself. He drops the bag, and without even looking at her he climbs up the embankment of the sunken road like a clumsy ape. He grabs hold of the exposed tree roots and unyielding bushes. She lets him climb, watching as he reaches the top and knocks the dirt from his pants. Then he runs all the way out of her field of vision: Xavier, the boy who feels no pain. She sits down and gazes for a long time at the village below.

Just before noon she rings the bell at number 7 Nightingale Lane. She waits for an eternity, until the thumping at the top of the stairs rolls all the way down.

Mieke, in a pair of white overalls, pulls the front door open. She looks out with screwed-up eyes, as if she barely recognizes her daughter. Then she drags Sarah and her stinking bag of clothes into the house. She zips open the bag in the utility room and stares at the knot of clothes with a face full of disgust. One by one she pushes the garments into the open eye of the washing machine. Only after pouring powdered detergent and fabric softener into the little compartments and setting the machine on boiling does she turn her face to Sarah, who is watching the laundry ritual in a daze.

‘I’ll go get a piece of beef from the freezer. It’ll be thawed out in fifteen minutes, a thin slice of meat like that. But first go take a shower, dear,’ she says emphatically. ‘Please go take a shower. And then come and eat. It’ll be ready in half an hour.’

The house has changed. The smell of paint and white spirits greets her at the top of the stairs. A stepladder is lying full length on the floor to flatten a piece of protective plastic sheeting, brushes wave like seaweed in old canning jars. She goes into the bathroom. She’s come back to this house as an outsider. It bears only a vague resemblance to the house of that family with the father who was a deliberate wrong-way driver.

Just when Sarah is about to step out of the shower, just when she’s begun to feel that the quicklime has been washed from her bones, her mother comes into the bathroom and pulls the shower curtain back, without any warning. After Sarah was born, mother and daughter never saw each other naked or partially clothed. The liberating message of the sixties fell on barren soil in Mieke’s case. It’s the record of a generation that got stuck in its groove. Even accidentally walking in on someone in a toilet or bathroom is a crime, and crimes don’t take place in this house.

Sarah stands before her mother, stark naked.

‘Look at how scrawny that child is!’ exclaims Mieke from behind the shower curtain, which Sarah has pulled closed with a jerk. In the past she would have called Stefaan as a witness. He would have stormed up and stood in the doorway, averting his eyes from his naked daughter.

‘That can’t be healthy!’

‘But Mama,’ Sarah whines.

‘Why are you doing this? Why won’t girls eat properly these days?’

‘I eat,’ says Sarah, and she reaches for a towel from behind the curtain.

‘Oh, no you don’t,’ says her mother, shaking her head in denial. ‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

‘I don’t want to be a fat slob like Shana from Servranx the butcher.’

‘You’d have to eat the backside of a cow every day to get that big, and I don’t see you doing that anytime soon,’ says Mieke. ‘You’re just being contrary, that’s all. But I’m not going to let that happen. Get dressed and we’ll talk more downstairs.’

Her mother leaves her standing in the bathroom. It strikes Sarah how banal her rage is. She goes into her old room with the pink wallpaper. It’s the room she lived in until she was thirteen, before she got an even bigger room, and it’s where her mother does the bookkeeping now. To play for time, Sarah looks at the class photos her mother has hung up here. On the desk are a stack of ironed Dujardin T-shirts and a calendar for the year 1990 with illustrations of birds of prey and regional dishes. Otherwise there are new bookshelves with large loose-leaf binders and books on art and architecture. There’s a package of letterhead next to the new printer and envelopes bearing the logo of the foundation and the crown of the royal house.

Finally Sarah goes downstairs. She sees the new rugs rolled up in the entrance hall. She knows her mother is going to keep on decorating this homemade hell forever. She walks into the living room, ready for the confrontation.

‘You think you can bring Papa back this way?’ She knows the boomerang is going to be thrown back at her.

‘I’ll have no more of that nonsense!’ Mieke shouts. ‘I’ve been waiting here for half an hour. How long have we been standing here?’ Mieke is addressing Stefaan, her off-screen husband. ‘Half an hour, I’m not exaggerating. I want to know what the plan is.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ Sarah misses the fight between her parents that this should have been. The fights where she always lit the fuse, and that always ended the same way. Fights so predictable she can dream them.

‘Is this how we brought you up?’

‘Aaaaaaa.’ Sarah lets out a long, drawn-out cry. She herself is startled.

‘Oh dear oh dear,’ says Mieke, shocked. ‘What’s wrong with her? She’s losing her mind!’

‘Yes, I’m losing my mind! I can’t stay here anymore, Mama.’

They cannot console each other. The most they can do is avoid each other, as they’ve been doing all along in such an exemplary fashion. ‘I know, dear, I know,’ Mieke admits.

‘I have to get out of here.’

‘We can deal with this.’

‘I have to get out of here, Mama. I have to get out of here.’

‘Do you want your own apartment? That’s no problem. That’s fine with me.’

‘I have to get out of here, out of this country.’

‘Out of this country? And what about your girlfriends?’

‘They’ll make their own plans.’

‘What’s wrong with me? Everyone is leaving me.’

‘It’s not about you, it’s about me.’

‘No, that’s not going to happen.’ Mieke shakes her head in total disbelief. ‘Your father would never approve.’

Silently, Sarah makes her way through the bowl of hot, unsalted zucchini soup. Somehow she forces the steak with mashed potatoes and steamed spinach down her throat.

‘Eat up. It’s very lean meat,’ says her mother. ‘There’s not a bit of fat in it. Don’t be frightened. Come on, now, just a little.’

After Mieke has washed the plates and the silverware and stacked them in the dishwasher, the widow sends her only daughter upstairs. ‘Go up and get some sleep.’

‘I’m going to help you,’ says Mieke the next morning. She’s peeling a banana and slicing it into chunks. ‘I called Aunt Lydia. I’ll let you go to America for a year, and your Aunt Lydia will help you there. On one condition: that you go back to eating normally. I don’t want my daughter doing herself in. No, that’s not going to happen. I won’t allow it.’

Mieke takes a large container of full-fat quark from the refrigerator. She scoops a white cloud of quark onto the banana and adds pine nuts and a big curl of honey. A breakfast that Mieke herself would never eat.

‘Mama, I’m going to eat. I’m going to eat normally.’ She’s made up her mind.

‘That’s a good girl.’

The click that Sarah makes in her head is so loud that over the coming weeks she occasionally goes to the opposite extreme and attacks every bit of food like a person who was starved during the war and has finally been released, so that Mieke even has to restrain her. Sarah has chosen life.

Mieke does credit to her obsessive nature and throws herself into this project with an avidity that astonishes everyone. With the help of her sister Lydia, or mostly her brother-in-law Christopher, she makes it possible for Sarah to go to America and arranges for a student visa. She appoints Lydia chaperone so the eighteen-year-old won’t be left to fend for herself in the gigantic, life-threatening city of New York. Mieke gives Sarah a rundown of all the different fields of study at the city’s top universities, and she keeps having to admit that Sarah is right: it’s a brilliant idea to guarantee herself a gold-plated future by studying at an international genius factory like, say, Columbia.

When Sarah asks her mother why she’s helping her so much, Mieke says, without batting an eye, that it’s going to be hard enough to keep her own head above water in this neighbourhood.

‘Maybe it’ll work out well for you, too. One of the last things Papa told me was that you wanted to send me away.’

‘Well, now you can make him say whatever you like,’ says Mieke. For the first time in months their laughter reverberates through the redecorated house.