Indignant about the verdict—surely a terrible miscarriage of justice—our mothers immediately started circulating petitions. If it had been their daughter, they said, they would have done the exact same thing as Lucy’s mother. Now that the motive for the murder was known, they had only one thing to say, and that was that they, too, would have stabbed the living daylights out of Thomas’s father with whatever object happened to come to hand.
Our fathers scratched themselves somewhat uneasily behind the ears. They’d never realized they were married to women who approved of murder and homicide under certain conditions. In a reasonable voice they tried to object, saying the law did exist for a reason. The woman could have filed a complaint against Thomas’s father—that’s the way these things were handled in a law-abiding society. If not, democracy would soon become a free-for-all. Civilized society would go to hell in a handbasket. Taking the law into your own hands was contrary to the principles of international human rights. Every person had the right to a fair trial; the legal recourses were perfectly adequate.
Our mothers placed their hands on their hips. Oh yeah? Oh yeah? And what if it had been our own Vanessa, our Safranja, or our Sara? What if it had been our little girl? Poor Lucy, only six years old and already damaged goods! Jesus Christ, surely no punishment was harsh enough for that kind of atrocity! And besides, why should the taxpayer be saddled with the cost of feeding and housing a pervert like that? To have him enjoy a nice long holiday in some cushy cell?
But now she was sitting in that cell, our fathers demurred.
Our mothers stamped their feet. Precisely, it was a gross injustice and it had to be put right! Why was Lucy’s mother languishing in Bijlmer Jail? Because some man hadn’t been able to keep his hands and the rest where they belonged for a change, that’s why! You couldn’t turn on the television or open the newspaper without having your nose rubbed in it over and over again! Always the same story! And this one was a father himself, as well! Oh, sorry, we mean had been! Their eyes flashing with fury, they slammed the door behind them and took their petitions to the mall to make the most of the Saturday crowds.
When they hadn’t come home by six o’clock, Daddy made us crackers with cream cheese. All well and good, he said, but there was no need to take it so personally.
Too late: our mothers had discovered sisterhood.
They no longer had the time to come and sit on our beds when we’d had a bad dream. They were no longer available for sore throats or scraped knees. Their meetings went on until late in the night. They pored over the newspaper articles and editorials, comparing and contrasting them until they had reconstructed the statement Lucy’s mother had presumably made in court, from beginning to end. Where the accounts conflicted, our mothers simply split the difference. When a question came up that even the prosecutor hadn’t been able to resolve, they hit upon the answer. That was because they were able to fill in every hole in the story straight from the gut; they didn’t need anyone telling them what it meant to be a mother.
Their conclusion was that it had been an emotional chain reaction. There had been no premeditation on Lucy’s mother’s part; she’d had no plan, she hadn’t known what she was going to do. There had been no time. She hadn’t even put on a coat. She had simply dashed out of the house, driven by her maternal instinct.
They couldn’t check with her if they’d hit the nail on the head, naturally. But according to the explanation they’d cobbled together, and which they managed to turn into a convincing story through sheer force of imagination, it must have happened as follows: their friend had been about to turn in when she’d heard a strange noise outside. It sounded like the moaning of a dog that had been hit by a car. Startled, she’d gone to check it out. She didn’t see anything unusual out on the road. But as she strode back up the garden path, she heard it again. She debated whether she should wake the Luducos. And then she spotted Lucy.
Her little girl, whom she’d thought tucked safely into bed, was lying rolled up in a little heap under a privet bush. She was clawing at the earth as if trying to dig a hole she could sink into and disappear. She was whimpering pitifully.
Horrified, she had carried the traumatized child inside. There, not knowing what else to do, she had run a hot bath. But Lucy had refused to take her clothes off. She’d stood in the middle of the bathroom, teeth chattering, stiff as a board, hugging herself. And then the whole story had come pouring out.
Lucy’s mother knew she had to stay calm. That only a calm and composed reaction from her could make the world bearable again for Lucy. So she had gently lowered her into the bath, sponged her back, and quietly sung to her. And after that, she had put her to bed with a sleeping pill. The child had almost immediately nodded off from sheer exhaustion.
Pulling the attic door shut behind her, she was still intending to wake up the Luducos; it was her turn to weep and groan and get it out of her system. But the next thing she knew, not really realizing what she was doing, she was already out of the house, spurred on by some primitive urge further inflamed by bitter self-reproach. Could she have failed more drastically as a parent? Her little girl had run away from home! She had to put things right, fix it, undo the damage.
Assaulted by someone the kid had run to for shelter! A great wrong had been done to Lucy, an injustice of the worst kind. She had a red haze swimming before her eyes. She thrust her hands into the pockets of her cardigan, but found nothing there except a couple of pencils and crayons.
She had already left the centre of the old village behind, she felt sand crunching underfoot, she was running up to the new housing estate, stumbling and cursing. The wind blew paper and other debris into her face, she had to halt for a second to wipe the tears from her eyes, and then she spotted him, in the orange glow of the construction floodlights. He was standing in the lee of one of the piers of the new overpass, smoking a cigarette.
She thought, coolly, Sure, out for a breath of fresh air to get rid of the smell of sex! Slowly she walked up to him. She raised her arm. And just as she was about to tap him on the shoulder, he turned round.
He didn’t even have a chance to register surprise or alarm. The moment his eyes met hers, he was done for. His were the eyes that had lusted after her child.
Afterward she went home, drained. She decided she would cook up a special breakfast in the morning. Pancakes for Lucy and scrambled eggs for the Luducos, who had no inkling, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, as always, their shoes lined up neatly in the corridor like good boys and girls.
Our mothers felt as if they had been there themselves. They seethed with indignation and solidarity, and at home the sisterhood was now a presence at every meal, like an uninvited guest who doesn’t have the decency to keep quiet. There was a fair bit of fist-banging and dish-rattling. Grim slogans like Dictatorship of the prick were bandied about, and when it was time for the washing-up, we’d hear protest songs coming from the kitchen along the lines of Bollocks to balls!
It was all making us more and more anxious. If we understood correctly what was meant by ‘emotional chain reaction,’ then it looked as though soon there would be nothing for us to eat but cream-cheese crackers. We’d have to stuff our own clothes into the washing machine and work out which knobs you had to push. We’d come home from school every day with a latchkey on a string around our necks, back to a house with not a single pumpkin in the window. There’d be nobody to clap her hands in admiration of our drawings, or to praise us for how fast we could read an entire page from top to bottom!
Our mums had completely flipped out on behalf of a mother who—admit it—had never really understood how a mother was supposed to behave. We remembered the way she would coolly stay at her drawing table even when we were in the process of reducing the place to rubble. Her bare feet. The tea that was never offered. The dirty dishes in the sink. The dust along the mouldings. The skirt with the slit up the side. The purple lipstick. The long, sweet-smelling hippie hair.
‘And don’t forget those Luco boys of hers,’ said our fathers, cross-eyed with spite. ‘Lodgers, my foot! And with a child in the house, too.’
‘Please! Where did you get that idea? It just goes to show you’ve got a one-track mind!’ our mothers bitched back, in their it’s-always-the-same-story-with-you-isn’t-it voice.
‘Simple. I know human nature. You sit there yakking your heads off, but what do you really know about her? Did you ever ask her what happened to Lucy’s father? Well? Isn’t it possible she helped that one into his grave as well?’
Oh, everyone’s life will have a few loose ends, our mummies remarked, this time a bit less stridently, because they had to rid themselves of the pesky thought that it was true that Lucy’s mother had never been very forthcoming about her past.
Our mothers couldn’t get to sleep at night. They paced up and down in their dressing gowns, then sat down at the kitchen table with pen and paper. They made notes and lists of priorities. They drew little arrows up, down, and sideways. They tried to plot a course for themselves through the minefields of the patriarchy. Sure, the scales had fallen from their eyes. But that didn’t mean that a whole new world order had suddenly emerged, or that they were ready to change course. They had only their sisterhood to cling to. And even that wasn’t without its problems, because when all was said and done, sisterhood was supposed to include all women—including the filthy pervert’s wife. Who—to look at it another way—was herself a victim, surely. In a different sense, perhaps, but none the less tragic for that.
They remembered how in the winter she had come to watch the ice-skating. Had her awkward silence really been a scream for help?
To everyone’s astonishment, Thomas’s mother showed up right on time to the coffee to which, for appearance’s sake, ‘the whole neighbourhood’ had been invited. Her neck was covered in red blotches, she was lugging a large handbag and wearing rubber gloves that everyone politely pretended not to notice. After all, her germ phobia had now acquired a new, symbolic significance.
Love, our mothers thought glumly, was a funny business, wasn’t it? They stirred their coffees while working up the nerve to say something.
She, too, was visibly struggling in that unfamiliar living room. She seemed on the verge of tears, like a little kid who realizes too late that she’s come out without boots or mittens when the weather turns nasty.
Our mothers’ hearts went out to her. Timidly, they asked her if she was doing all right now.
‘It’s a nightmare,’ she burst out. ‘A complete nightmare. For Thomas it’s even worse, of course. To lose your father that way—so suddenly, too! They used to sit together, you know, every night, with their noses buried in their nature books, and then, all of a sudden … You have to know that my husband was seriously dyslexic, couldn’t do much more than look at the pictures, so he was especially proud of our Thomas being such a good reader, he told me once, he said …’ Tears were streaming down her cheeks. ‘He said, “Thomas is a new and improved version of me.”’
Our mothers put their cups down. They noticed their hands were shaking.
‘Such a wonderful father, he was! Nothing was too much for him. On the first day of school, he took Thomas to school just so he could see what kind of clothes the other kids around here wore. So that Thomas wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. I get out of the house so rarely, I really can’t take care of that sort of thing.’ She wagged her yellow gloves helplessly. ‘What’s to become of him now? I told him he can have goldfish. But a boy needs his father. How are we going to manage when he gets older? Or do you think I should have promised to get him a dog, for him to wrestle and play with?’
For a moment she seemed just as taken aback by her own loquaciousness as our mothers were. But now that the silence was broken, there was no stopping her. ‘He’s so ashamed. He’s afraid people will believe the stuff in the newspapers about his father. Surely the poor kid doesn’t deserve that? That, on top of everything else? He keeps asking me if we can’t move, if we can’t go somewhere where nobody knows us. And I keep telling him, “If we left now, it would only make people think that what they said about Daddy in the papers is true.” All those lurid, sensational articles.’ Leaning down, she pulled a stack of newspaper cuttings from her handbag.
Outside, we hopped up and down, trying to see inside. We recognized who was in there. We ducked down again when Thomas’s mum began reading out loud. She read in the same rushed, vapid monotone as Thomas. Finally it was quiet; she’d finished reading the whole lot. We hoisted ourselves up again to peek under the venetian blind.
Our mothers sat there as if this was the first time they’d heard those newspaper stories. With downcast eyes they were pushing back their cuticles, or just staring at their knees.
Thomas’s mother stowed the cuttings back inside her handbag and said, ‘The fact that it now seems that her whole story was based on lies and fabrications—that’s easy to miss, isn’t it? Thank God the court didn’t fall for it, but in the meantime her version was reported in all the rags, all of it. It’s what’s “in” these days, it’s what they like to write about, that kind of story. You know, sexually abused children and all that. Of course she was clever enough to jump on that bandwagon. But my poor little boy at home, he reads everything! Tommy, I keep telling him over and over, the things it says there, nothing as nasty as that ever happened, I swear, Tommy. Tomster, my husband used to call him, “Hey, Tomster, how’s it going?” But if I say Tomster now, he gets cross with me, so I just say Tommy-dear, just listen, listen to Mummy now: they never found anything on that little girl, any DNA evidence … How am I supposed to explain those things to him, I so did want to spare my child all that filth, six is much too young, he still believes in the stork and everything …’
‘Oh, but so do ours,’ said our mothers gratefully. ‘At their age—they’re still little kids!’
The second round of coffee was poured.
‘They didn’t find any DNA evidence,’ she repeated emphatically. ‘And the little girl’s testimony wasn’t very convincing, either. She was just making it up as she went along. Her story was just full of holes. Thank God they called me as a witness as well. I know my husband, don’t I? I knew him, I mean. Of course he wasn’t always the most faithful of husbands, but there it is, women found him attractive, he couldn’t help it.’
Our mothers remembered they used to speculate he must be good in bed, and they blushed.
‘He often gave me cause for jealousy; but then I, in turn, didn’t always do right by him, either. Ours wasn’t a perfect marriage, but he did love me, he always came back to me in the end. If he’d had these kinds of … cravings, I’d have known about it. He always told me everything. So I also knew right away when he started having an affair with her.’
Our mothers looked at each other, nonplussed.
‘Didn’t you know? That bitch, that murderess, used to live near us, in our former village. May God forgive me for telling the judge about it, but I felt I was obliged to. She’d been hell-bent on stealing my husband. When she found out she couldn’t have him, she came and yelled obscenities through the mail slot, and more than once, too. It was a relief when she moved away, let me tell you. If only we’d known where she’d gone, because if we had, we would never have moved here, and Thomas would still to this day have a father.’ When she’d finished, she stood up, brushed off her skirt, and said goodbye, shaking everyone’s hand with her squeaky canary-yellow glove.
We ducked just in the nick of time before she stepped outside.
On the other side of the window it was quiet for quite a while, even after she’d long disappeared from sight. Our mothers just sat there, crestfallen. They’d been ready to put everything on the line for the cause of justice; they had even put their domestic harmony at risk. Had they bet on the wrong horse?
Miserably, they remembered what our fathers had said. You thought you knew someone, but deep down, what did you really know about her? All those happy hours in the rectory, all those intimate tête-à-têtes, when they had poured out their heart and soul to her. Hadn’t it been a true friendship, then? Had she been fooling them for all these years? They started giggling nervously. What did they care, really, what may or may not have happened long ago? Even if it were true that Lucy’s mother had once been dumped by a man, which they didn’t think very likely—not on this planet, anyway—wouldn’t she have taken her revenge right then and there? Why wait and do it years later, when by pure coincidence the guy who rejected her—yeah, the hell he had!—crossed paths with her again? No, they couldn’t see any logical connection between what happened back then and what had happened now, nothing to set off this sort of chain reaction.
Our mothers could appreciate that Thomas’s mother would leave no stone unturned to clear her husband’s name, if only for the sake of that poor boy of hers. For that reason alone, her words carried pitifully little weight. Yes, that was right, wasn’t it? Didn’t the facts speak for themselves, after all? Little Lucy had confirmed the facts under oath. Okay, so maybe the child’s testimony hadn’t been completely consistent, but what did you expect? Because how would someone her age find the right words? As a mother, you could only fervently hope that your child would not be able to come up with the right words for this sort of outrage!
Just look at that poor little girl, so pale and withdrawn these days; if that didn’t prove it for once and for all! It just broke your heart, it did, to see her trudging through the village clutching Ludo’s or Duco’s hand. A recent article in Parents Today had stated that abused children are often haunted by the notion they are responsible for what was done to them. Just think how guilty a little tyke would feel if her mother wound up in the slammer on account of what had happened! Especially a little girl with an imagination as lively as Lucy’s. A fertile mind, while extolled by educators everywhere, could also be a terrible cross to bear.
‘We’d better keep an eye on her, it may all prove too much for her,’ our mothers urged one another, because here at least was something practical, something to sink their teeth into. The more steeply Lucy went into decline, the more reason they had to believe in her mother’s innocence—to believe in their friend, who would not be going barefoot in the grass for the time being, who was looking at twelve years behind bars. How was it possible, for God’s sake, for a complete innocent like her, with no prior convictions, to get sentenced to twelve years?
They had no idea, none of them.
But the longer they stewed over it, the more the question dug in its heels and then threw itself back in their faces. How, indeed? Chagrined, they recapitulated what they knew. Lucy’s testimony, the lynchpin around which it all revolved, turned out on closer inspection to indeed be a little shaky, a bit muddled. It hadn’t struck them that way before, but that may have been because all their attention was focused on their friend’s predicament. They would have to reconsider everything.
Outside, we children had run out of patience. We began banging on the window and pulling funny faces.
Sighing, they said, ‘Ah, there they are, our little brats.’ They forced their lips into a smile and waved at us to come inside.
We climbed into their laps, we tugged at their hair, we squished their cheeks between our hands and squealed that it made them look like guinea pigs.
‘Must you always demand so much attention?’ they complained. ‘You’re little terrors, the lot of you!’ And as soon as the words were out of their mouths, everything suddenly fell into place, and they could see the entire drama, clear as glass.
The mother, always at her drawing table, wholly absorbed in her work.
The child, frequently left to her own devices for long stretches of time.
The mother who just had to finish that picture.
The child who consequently was free to watch TV programmes the other children weren’t allowed to see—like the news, showing one sleazy sex scandal after another.
The mother, feverish with inspiration, working on behind her closed door.
The child with the lively imagination, bored to death downstairs, pining for attention.
The thought of it sent our mothers into a complete tailspin; they stared at one another in consternation. They had always considered Lucy such an unusual child, even when she was very young, so strong-willed you couldn’t distract her like other babies, and those eyes of hers, always brimming with schemes and wild stories.
And as a mother, you always believed your child without question; that was something they knew from experience.