It began with a scent that seemed familiar, even though I hadn’t smelled it for years and couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Together with the smell came the sensation of cold. Had I left a window open? I lifted my arm, searching for the light switch. A hand grabbed hold of my arm and pushed me back down on the bed. I gasped. There was someone with me in my bedroom. I tried to push myself halfway up, but I was immediately pushed down again. In the two seconds I sat upright, however, I had discovered a number of shocking things.
I wasn’t lying in my bedroom. There was not one person standing next to me, but several people. I was not lying on a bed, but on something that could be best described as an operating table. The familiar smell that I couldn’t put my finger on was the smell of incense. The man, who held my arm, was wearing a cassock. With all my might, I tried to pull myself loose.
‘Help me!’ shouted the priest. ‘Hold her down. The devil is inside of her!’
Someone came to aid him. It took a while before I recognized his face. ‘Just relax, Carine. This is for your own good. We have to get the devil out of you. This negativity. Then we can be together again.’
I wanted to shout at him, that I didn’t want to be together with him again. I wanted to shout that they had to let go of me. That they were all mad and that the devil was not inside of me. But it seemed as though I could no longer speak Dutch, as if I spoke some strange language that I myself didn’t even understand.
The priest bowed over me, his eyes wide with fear. ‘Aramaic! She speaks Aramaic! God save us!’ He sprinkled water on me while he murmured incomprehensible things. It sounded like Latin. His fingernails cut deeply into the skin of my lower arm. I wanted to scream that they had to let go of me, but instead, an unearthly sound came out of my throat, which echoed through the room. Koen and the priest recoiled. Finally I could get up. I was in the kitchen of my parental house, although it looked different than my memory of it. My parents were standing behind Koen and the priest. Maggy was there as well. She wore the red dress that I hadn’t seen her wear since the day of her sixteenth birthday. She didn’t look much older than sixteen either. She looked straight at me and suddenly my parents, Koen and the priest were gone and I was alone in the kitchen together with Maggy. Her arm was red with blood. She came walking towards me and reached out her hand. Blood was dripping from her fingers. Just before she touched my cheek, my phone rang.
Maggy. I read the letters on my screen, but it took some time before I was able to comprehend what it meant.
‘Maggy.’
‘Carine.’
We were silent. My radio clock displayed in large, red numbers that it was 2:33am. I switched on the light to drive away the last remnants of the nightmare. Lately I had been dreaming really intensely, but I had not yet had a nightmare. And then this dream just now. About Maggy.
‘Where are you?’
‘At the quays.’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘Watching the water.’
‘Okay.’ I rubbed my eyes. It wasn’t the first time that Maggy had called me during the night. Sometimes she had been standing at a railroad, or on a bridge across the highway. I just had to keep her talking. Until the moment was over. ‘What do you see?’
‘That the water is dark. It’s probably cold. Really cold.’
I felt how the hairs on my arm suddenly stood on end. I saw the image from my nightmare before me again, how she stood there in that red dress. The last time she had worn that dress, was at her sixteenth birthday. Her mother had forced her to throw a party and invite her entire class. Maggy didn’t like celebrating her birthday. When she was nine, she told me that she did not understand why people celebrated the fact that they were one year closer to death.
The entire afternoon we had gossiped, eaten crisps, drunk Bacardi Breezer – the only alcoholic beverage Maggy’s mother allowed us to drink – and played on the Nintendo. And laughed really hard about the jokes Maggy kept making. When everyone had gone home, Maggy and I retreated to the tree house that her father had built for us when we were seven.
‘What a bunch of brainless idiots,’ Maggy sneered, while she was busy carving in the wood with a knife. ‘And they laughed with all my stupid jokes.’
I had laughed about her jokes as well. Yet I didn’t feel addressed. I looked through the window of the tree house – which, in fact, was not much more than a big hole – at the fields that lay behind the garden. The corn stood nearly a meter tall. As a child, Maggy and I had often run through the corn. I tried to remember what had been so much fun about it. Probably the fact that her parents didn't allow it and the risk of getting caught by the farmer. And because her mother always claimed that corn was full of earwigs and we both did not want to admit we were afraid of them.
I watched how a bird of prey flew really low across the corn field, looking for a prey. Then I turned around and saw how Maggy cut her wrist with the knife. Her entire lower arm was red with blood. I could not utter a word. She stared at me with a dazed look in her eyes. ‘Peculiar, a thin, blue vein like this, which can determine the difference between life and death.’
The blood was dripping on the wooden floor. It took me a few more seconds before I moved. I screamed. Nearly fell, when I clambered down the weathered ladder. I will never forget the face of Maggy’s mother when I stumbled into the kitchen where she was busy doing the dishes and stammered: ‘It’s Maggy. Her wrists. Blood. Blood everywhere.’
Later that night, the emergency doctor would tell us that we were lucky that she hadn’t sliced in the direction of her veins. She also said that we were lucky that I was there with her. Maggy’s parents said that she didn’t really want to die. Then she would not have done it while I was there. I wasn’t so sure about that.
It was not going to be her last attempt. She took an overdose of pills. She jumped off a bridge. She slipped through the eye of the needle a few times. And every time, I was furious at her. With every attempt, it seemed as though she distanced herself more and more from me. In the end, it was me who distanced herself.
The past years she hadn’t undertaken any attempts, although she did call me every now and then during the night, when she felt the urge rising. The last time had been about a year or two ago by now.
‘You don’t really want to jump.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Her voice didn’t sound determined at all.
‘As you just said yourself, that water is ice cold right now.’
‘That’s exactly what I want.’
‘Says the woman who didn’t even dare to go into the sea when it was twenty degrees.’
She laughed. She had not forgotten about it yet. Our trip to Portugal when we had just graduated. It was exceptionally cold that week, especially according to Portuguese standards, and the beach was nearly deserted, but I wanted to go into that clear blue water at all costs. Maggy refused to put more than her ankles in the water, screaming that the water was ice cold and that I was bonkers.
We talked for a while longer and after she had assured me that she was on her way home again, I hung up. I sank back down into the pillows, but I could not catch any more sleep that night.