That night I couldn’t get to sleep. I could still hear the sound of my mother’s voice, and the cornflower blue of her eyes was burned onto my retinas. The way she had of raising one eyebrow, the forgotten but oh-so-familiar way she tucked her hair behind her ears … It was as if she were standing at the foot of my bed, large as life, in her denim shirt.
I didn’t really know what I felt, except confusion. The thought that the documentary had been on national TV, and had therefore also been shown in the Westlands, made my throat grow tight. On Monday, the people at the strawberry farm would no doubt still be talking about it. I’d have no choice but to overhear snatches of what they were saying. ‘That forewoman, didn’t you see her? What’s a pretty lady like her doing in prison?’ I wouldn’t be surprised if they even decided to ask me what I’d thought of it!
Even though no one knew she was my mother, now that she had been shown on television in the flesh, for some reason I could no longer ignore her existence. She had been right here in my room, as it were! With that sardonic look that seemed meant just for me. ‘What? You really mean you don’t understand how it is that I walk freely in and out of prison every day, while you’ve locked yourself away in your bedsit?’
By three o’clock, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got up, pulled on my knickers and a T-shirt, and opened the balcony door a little wider. What was so bad, really, about admitting you worked in the klink? She wasn’t actually locked up, she was paid a salary and she went home every night, just like everyone else. ‘Oh, so where does she live, then?’ People might ask me all kinds of questions about her, and it would soon become clear that I didn’t know a thing about my own mother. And one thing would lead to another, and before you knew it, I’d be trapped, with nowhere to turn.
No, I was definitely not going to the Westlands.
The decision lifted a big weight off my shoulders.
I navigated my way in the dark to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out the champagne. I managed to pull the cork and fill my beautiful new goblet without making too much of a mess. I carried it over to the pine table. The note from Lude and Duke was still propped against the phone. ‘To your new life! XXX, L & D.’
I drank to my new life, which no longer had a purpose, and I drank all by myself, just as they’d predicted. I drained my glass in one gulp and then filled it up again. If you just kept chugging it down, you’d soon start feeling a whole lot better. In the dark, I could just make out the way the bubbles in the champagne slowly drifted up to the surface, where they burst with a little pop. Just as the magic bubble that had been my life with the Luducos on Lewis had popped without warning, sometime between my departure from Stornoway and my arrival at Schiphol.
I felt like a cockle without its shell, a snail without its little house, exposed and defenceless. I started rocking back and forth, my arms wrapped around my torso. What was to become of me now, all on my own? What was I going to do, now that my studies, my strawberry field, and even the freedom to leave my room were hopelessly out of reach? I couldn’t stay here forever, could I, shut up in the dark, sitting and waiting … waiting for what? How would I ever regain my footing, so that I could get on with my life again? The future was banging on my door, and I didn’t dare let it in.
But wait: I remembered something Mr Klop used to tell us in History. If you wanted to know what the future would bring, all you had to do was look at the past. You had to carefully revisit everything that had happened before. After all, everything was cause and effect; the future arose straight out of the past.
Revisit what went before—oh, right! So memories were supposed to be the ground beneath your feet! Well, I knew better. I was raised with the understanding that it was best to be very wary of memories, just as you wouldn’t trust a watch that didn’t keep the time; you couldn’t depend on them. Besides, if you were able to remember everything that had happened, you’d have a constant headache. There was no point in looking back! Ludo and Duco had wound up having to throw my mother’s own dictum back in her face more and more often, in the end. It wasn’t until she had left that we’d been able to get on with our lives in peace. Our clock never ran slow, we had made sure of that; we kept it under a heavy glass dome, so that nobody could come and gum up the works. The two of them always assured me that forgetting was the best way to go.
I refilled my glass. The bottle felt considerably heavier than it had before, even though it was now two glasses emptier. Was this one of their magic tricks—a bottomless bottle that never seemed to empty? I stared at the little card that had come with it. Dazed, I thought to myself, X stands for a kiss, X is another kiss, and X is the third kiss. And suddenly, I had the feeling that all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. Half-petrified with fear, I stared at the floral sofa, the blue window frames, the goblet on the table. Their choices. Their things. With which they had chosen to surround me, now that I was out on my own—like sentries, or totem poles, or amulets, things that were supposed prevent the magic spell from being broken and the past from being exhumed.
I sat there, frozen, my fists pressed into my burning eye sockets. Were they just trying to protect me, as usual? Or was something else going on? The hair on my arms stood up. I thought I knew everything about them, everything, but who said? Could it be that they’d papered over the past because there was something they were keeping hidden from me? Did they know something I didn’t? Or was there something I wasn’t supposed to remember? And if so, why not? What kind of lie had they been trying to ram down my throat all this time?
I was overcome with despair. I gulped down what was left in my glass.
Outside, in a garden, a bird’s shrill cry suddenly ripped through the silence of the night. Gavin held that once you heard the first bird, the dawn wasn’t far behind. You could always count on one plucky little bird, yearning for the new day, to drive off the dark.
I sat up. I wasn’t a little kid anymore, damn it, watching open-mouthed as the lemonade changed colour or twenty cents mysteriously turned into a euro. I wasn’t going to let them pull the wool over my eyes like a six-year-old anymore! Granted, my mind might be a bit like the airtight bulkhead in a ship’s hull, but that didn’t mean the memories weren’t lurking in there somewhere, like stowaways. I knew that as soon as I finally hauled one out on deck, the rest were bound to follow. And if they mutinied, I always had the option of throwing them overboard. But if I didn’t make at least an attempt to face them now, I’d spend the rest of my life cowering behind the barbed-wire barricade Ludo and Duco had erected before me, biting my nails in despair.
My head was throbbing, now that I found myself teetering on the forbidden threshold of the past. But I had no choice. It did seem to me that I really didn’t have all that much to lose anymore. All right. Just do it! I took a deep breath. I poured myself another glass, just in case. Okay, the storm. Yes, I remembered it clearly. How the wind had been howling that night! And suddenly I remembered, so vividly that it startled me, how even the streetlamps had been swaying in the wind that night. In spite of the terrible weather, I’d climbed out of the window and onto the roof, undaunted. It must have been incredibly scary.
In order to concentrate better, I clenched my eyes shut. Look! There I was, shuffling along the gutter, my arms carefully spread wide to keep my balance. The wind at my back felt like a big hand that was intent on pushing me over the edge. Remembering it gave me such a physical jolt that I had to grab hold of the table. The blood pounded in my ears. Okay, calm down, calm down.
Now I was clinging to the rainspout, but a wet strand of ivy whipped me in the face, and I let go and fell. I didn’t dare scream, fearing they’d hear me inside. But there was little chance of that happening, for I had barely scrambled to my feet in the garden before I heard the unfamiliar sound of angry voices coming from the rectory, a door slamming. My mother and the Luducos were fighting as I’d never heard them fight before. I stood there listening a moment, my heart in my throat. But something told me I would overhear things I really didn’t want to know. I turned and ran.
In the street, the wind gusts sent me lurching and reeling along. It took some effort to stay on my feet. Once out in the open field, it was even heavier going, but it was the shortest way to where I had to go.
It definitely wasn’t the kind of weather in which you’d want to go out for stroll before bed, so I was startled to see a figure standing under the orange floodlights of the new viaduct’s building site. But I recognized him immediately. Of course, a little wind wouldn’t faze someone like him; he was used to working outdoors, rain or shine. He’d go outside whenever the mood struck him, storm or no storm.
He was just crushing his glowing cigarette under his boot when he noticed me. ‘Hey, there!’ he cried. ‘Yes, I mean you over there, little scamp! What in hell are you doing out so late, all by yourself?’
I shrank back. If I pretended I hadn’t heard him, would he come after me? My whole plan would be ruined! The wind, taking advantage of my hesitation, suddenly walloped me in the back, sending me staggering helplessly into the arc of the floodlights. In the lee of the support columns there was a lull, and I came stumbling to a halt.
‘Well now,’ he said slowly, something hard in his voice all of a sudden, ‘if it isn’t Thomas’s little girlfriend.’
I felt put on the spot. He had caught me in the shed with Thomas more than once, poring over our reading book. I’d always quickly scooted out of there. Thomas’s dad always stared at me with a queer look, probing, yet also furtive. He must have asked Thomas about the stupid kid who couldn’t even learn to read; but I knew Thomas’s father had trouble with reading too, so that was no reason for him to dislike me. We had a lot in common, actually.
‘Well?’ he said, bending down with obvious reluctance. ‘What are you doing here?’ The orange light gave his face a creepy cast. Behind him, the new cement was already defaced with graffiti.
‘My kitty’s run away,’ I blurted out. I hoped my words hadn’t given the game away! What if he thought I’d said, ‘Lucy’s run away?’
Again he looked me over from head to toe with his peculiar stare. Then he said in a bitter voice, ‘Cats always find their way home eventually. Sometimes they’ll turn up on your doorstep years later. Just when you thought you were rid of them.’
A blast of wind that swept unexpectedly round the pier made me totter. I heard a chain rattling that had come untethered from some crane or backhoe somewhere close by, the sinister clang of metal on metal.
‘You’ll get blown off your feet if you’re not careful,’ he said, a little more kindly. ‘All right, then, run along home, kid. You’ll see, your kitty’s probably already been found. Off you go!’
And suddenly, I had a great idea. Home—home, indeed. Home—but of course! After all, Mum and the Luducos knew the guy from before I was born; they’d talked about it at my engagement party. So what were we doing standing out here in the cold? For someone who’d only lived somewhere for a short time and didn’t know too many locals, a spontaneous invitation to visit old friends would probably be greatly appreciated. And while the adults talked about old times over a glass of wine, I’d slip out of the house unnoticed a second time, and run away to hide at Thomas’s house in Shepherd’s Close.
He bent down closer. ‘Why are you still here? Go home!’
When Duke invited someone over, he’d say, ‘So, want to come over and have a few drinks tonight?’ But in this case, faced with inviting someone who was already so critical of me, I thought it best to phrase it as politely as possible. ‘My mother’s still up, and I’m sure she would love it if you …’
He took a step back in the sand. ‘Don’t tell me your mother has sent you after me.’
‘It’s very close by,’ I said. ‘Right around the corner.’ I waited a moment, then threw down my trump card. ‘She baked a batch of peanut biscuits today, specially.’ Our Ludo was addicted to those biscuits. He was known to whine for them like a dog begging for a bone. They were crispy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.
He grabbed me so violently by the wrist that I nearly lost my footing.
‘She isn’t going to start again, is she?’ he snapped at me.
Alarmed, I tried to wriggle out of his grip.
He shook me. ‘Listen, young lady, I’ve got a message for your mother. If she’s going to start getting things in her head again, I’ll tell the whole world what she’s like, and I’m not kidding. Just tell her that, the horny bitch. I won’t let it happen again.’
‘What?’ I asked, shocked.
‘I won’t stand for her hysterics again!’ His voice rose, bouncing off the viaduct’s colonnade. Again-gain-gain-gain. It kept reverberating, like the incessant ringing of a telephone that nobody wants to answer, and that just goes on and on ringing in the middle of the night, ever louder, ever more desperate.
‘I wouldn’t think of letting myself fall into her clutches all over again! No matter what she tries this time, it’s leave-me-the-hell-alone, return-to-sender, and that’s final!’
I couldn’t help picturing a mountain of letters, torrents of letters cascading through the letterbox at once. Letters written in blood, but which would never receive a reply. Letters like the sound of hollow footsteps following you down a dark alley. Wherever you might go, you’d never get rid of those letters, you’d never shake those footsteps coming after you. And suddenly, it hit me like a bomb—I knew who he was. So he really did exist! He wasn’t just a character in a story that some mothers whisper into their babies’ ears. I yanked myself free and stared at him open-mouthed.
He stamped his foot impatiently. ‘There’s no need for you to understand it, little miss smarty-pants. As long as she gets it. If she starts up again with that nonsense—you hear me?—she’ll have to face the consequences, because I’ll go straight to Ludo and Duco and tell them everything. Can you remember that?’
‘I can,’ I said, as convincingly as I could. Was he going to tell on Mum? But so what, anyway? It was ancient history. The past was the past, in any case, and this was way in the past, even before I was born. Except—why had Mum always kept it a secret? She probably knew something only grown-ups understood. She knew it would be simply dreadful if this secret ever came out, even a hundred years from now. So dreadful that the Luducos would leave us if they ever found out.
My throat was parched with horror. Mum couldn’t get by without Lude and Duke! If they weren’t there, she’d never be surprised with a kiss in the neck, ever again, as she sat bent over her work. Without them, her cold feet would always stay frigid at night. Without them, she’d have nobody to dance the tango with up and down the long corridor. Without them, she’d have no reason to wear her red scarf, or give her hair an egg rinse to make it shine. Without them, her pencils would be drained of colour, her drawings would be bad; the pages of her sketchbook would remain blank, without them.
‘We’re moving,’ I cried. ‘Mum is making me go to another school; we’re leaving.’ My head was spinning with relief. It was so simple. He wouldn’t have to tell on her because we were leaving anyway, the four of us, because we always did everything together, we belonged together, that’s just the way it was. I wanted more than anything to run home right away and start packing. I gazed up at his orange face hopefully.
He clucked sceptically. ‘Ha, right in the middle of the school year, I suppose?’
‘Right, because I’m just not learning to read, here.’
Something about his eyes suddenly changed. It was the look people get when they gaze at little puppies. That’s the way he looked at me: as if I were a whole litter of newborn puppies. He squatted down, stretched out a hand, and patted me awkwardly on the cheek. ‘That’s right, Thomas told me. It must be hard on you.’
And, for one confusing second, I sensed we shared a secret that was so big that there were no words to describe it. There was no language for what he and I had in common. I took a few steps back, into the vicious wind.
He, too, seemed alarmed by what had just passed between us. He stood up straight and put up his collar, so that his face nearly disappeared. ‘So, do you remember what you’re supposed to tell your mother?’ he called out to me.
The cheek he had just fondled stung as if I’d been slapped. Was this really no concern of mine, just some feud for grown-ups, or had I, in some mysterious way, just been pulled into it, too?
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ He started coming toward me impatiently.
All of a sudden, I was so petrified that I stuck my hand in my pocket. You never knew—you might meet an enemy anyplace, anytime.
‘You did understand what I just said, didn’t you? If I notice her stalking me again, if I so much as catch a glimpse of her, that’s it, she’ll regret it.’ A length of construction plastic had wrapped itself around his legs, and he leaned down to pull it off. ‘So you’d better make sure I never set eyes on her again, ever.’
I closed my fingers on the pencil.
My arm went up.
I nearly started to scream.
The silence in my room was so unreal that I had to shake my head, dazed. The first grey daylight was worming its way in through the window, but there was no sign of life anywhere, indoors or out. The landlord and all the neighbours were sleeping the sleep of the innocent. It felt as if the entire block of flats were gently rocking up and down to the rhythm of their tranquil breathing.
The Luducos’ bottomless bottle still had some champagne left in it. Laboriously, I topped up my glass. What if the dreaded taboos returned, now that I’d started raking up the dangerous past? I felt hounded, persecuted; I was in a complete state. And the other thing was, I thought I caught a whiff of patchouli. If I turned my head, I might well find my mother standing at the foot of my bed, hands on her hips, head cocked to the side, as if she were expecting something of me.
Had I really had only her welfare in mind? Was my intention purely to make sure he wouldn’t harm her? So that, late at night, I’d still be able to hear her hollering a cheerful ‘olé!’ and be reassured, up there in my attic room, that she was, at that moment, stepping on Duco’s toes while Ludo patiently waited for his turn to tango?
She always said we were lucky to be loved by two good men. But I did sometimes find it a problem—you couldn’t sit on two laps at once, could you, and someone always came up short; you were always worried that one of them would take it into his head that you liked the other one better. You were constantly trying to share yourself as fairly as possible. It was a quandary I’d often brooded about. If only I didn’t have to go to school every day! Then I’d be able to run after Dukie and Ludikins with outstretched arms from early in the morning to late at night, to convince them that I adored them both equally. Because what other means did I have to make them love me? For as long as I could remember, I’d lived with the nagging doubt—did I actually have any right to their love? I was never completely certain I did—and yet my life had been filled with their love.
So perhaps the truth was this: I had grabbed that pencil in order to safeguard my own little life. And perhaps my mother, too, had known it all along.
I glanced around furtively. The room was empty.
I staggered unsteadily to my feet. The alcohol had done a number on me, even more so since it was on an empty stomach. Clumsily, I fiddled with the balcony door latch. Blinking at the light, I stepped outside, where I fully expected to find her standing now, a sprig of honeysuckle tucked behind her ear, making her look like someone in a movie. So, Lucy, have you finally emerged? Tell me, how do you like it, out in the open?
The morning breeze gently caressed my legs. It was still a bit cool out, but all the signs pointed to another gorgeous day. Slowly it dawned on me that I was standing on the balcony in my knickers—alone. Befuddled, I thought to myself, How does she always manage it?
When I went back inside, I left the doors wide open.
In my room, I nearly tripped over my half-unpacked suitcase, parked sideways next to the table. Underneath a pair of rolled-up socks I could just make out Clara 13’s cheerful cover. What did she think, anyway? That I needed her? That I wasn’t able to manage on my own? I bent down and grabbed the book Ludo and Duco had so carefully packed for me. I picked it up by one corner and with all my might hurled it against the wall.
For a moment, I thought I’d cracked the spine; pages seemed to be flying everywhere, like lies finally unmasked, like stories escaping the mute iron grip of the book’s binding. There was paper floating in the air. Something landed at my feet. But it turned out to be only an envelope that had been pressed between the pages. I was about to pick it up when I recognized what it was. I took a step back and let it lie there, just as I had once left it sitting unopened on the mantelpiece. Turn and run! That was definitely the easiest way out.
I sat back down at the table. I drank another glass. I tried not to look at the white rectangle on the floor. Maybe it was just the envelope. Thrifty Ludo saved the weirdest stuff for recycling, you couldn’t open a cupboard without finding … But was it the same envelope? It had seemed much larger, at the time.
I snatched it up from the floor. It wasn’t sealed shut; the flap had simply been tucked in. I gave myself a paper cut pulling it open. Sucking on my hurt finger, I managed to extricate the light-blue sheet of stationery, which immediately divulged its secret. Even before unfolding it, I could tell from the deep grooves, signalling determined pen strokes, that it was from my mother. From my mother, with whom, in the eyes of the law, I’d had nothing to do for years.
It was quite a short note. She must have said to herself, I’d better not use too many words, or Lucy won’t read it. I felt a sharp pang of triumph, because, for once, her carefully thought-out scheme had misfired. Every carefully weighed word had been a complete waste of time; I hadn’t even opened the letter. Now I began to read intently.
‘Dear Lucy,’ it said at the top. Underneath, in smaller script, ‘Dear Ludo, dear Duco.’
Unexpectedly, my eyes began to prickle. She hadn’t exactly been very lovey-dovey with us since she’d been out of the slammer. You might think they had set free the mother you’d always known, but instead you got someone who blithely said ‘My arse!’ if something wasn’t to her liking.
Even in this letter, despite the touching three ‘dears’ at the beginning, she didn’t mince words. She wrote that she was fed up with living with us. She wrote that what she couldn’t stand anymore was that, no matter how much she provoked or badgered us, we never seemed to give a shit. She wrote that she assumed we were also getting pretty fed up with her and her constant attempts at communication, which suited her just fine, because that way we could part and nobody would shed any tears. There, now it was out in the open. And just one more thing, because, incorrigible as she was, she needed to get something else off her chest, as well. At the time, she wrote, it had seemed the right thing to do, to take the blame for what happened. ‘After all, the entire tragedy was ultimately my fault. I could never have lived with myself if I had refused to take responsibility for it. But, looking back now, maybe I should have been wiser.’
I put the letter down. I was suddenly overcome with a strange, sick feeling. As if it didn’t add up, somehow. Had I missed something? Painfully, I perused the letter again. But I couldn’t put a finger on what was wrong. Maybe the alcohol was playing tricks on me. They were only words. It was only a letter. She hadn’t signed it, as usual. She’d drawn a smiley face instead. And, underneath that, a postscript for me: ‘P.S. Lucy, take a lesson from me: don’t ever sacrifice yourself for another. It’ll only turn you into a huge pain in the arse.’