‘You have to keep your buttocks as wide apart as possible.’
I’m lying on my side on the brown leather settee like a breech calf, looking back at my father. He’s wearing his blue skipper’s jersey, which means he’s relaxed and the cows have been nice to him today. I’m anything but relaxed. I haven’t been able to poo for days, which has made my belly hard and swollen under my coat, like the Bundt cake my mother sometimes lets rise under a striped tea-towel. The three kings were given Bundt cake on their way back from Bethlehem, and their turbans were used as a mould, which is why it is ring-shaped. I mustn’t let go of my poo before we find the star, though even sitting hurts. I can’t imagine travelling for hours.
‘What are you going to do, Dad?’ I ask.
He says nothing, just unzips his skipper’s collar a little further. I see a chunk of bare chest. Using his thumbnail, he breaks off a chunk of the bar of green soap he’s holding. In panic, I run through the last few days in my head. Have I said a blush word without Lingo being on? Have I been mean to Hanna? Before I can think about it any further, Dad has shoved the chunk of soap deep into my bum hole with his index finger. I just manage to smother a scream in the cushion under my face. I sink my teeth into the fabric. I can see the pattern on the cover through my tears. Triangles. For the first time since Matthies’s death, I cry. The lake inside my head empties. Dad pulls out his finger as fast as he’s pushed it in. Again he breaks a chunk of soap off the bar. I try to stop crying by imagining that we are playing ‘land grab’, a game I sometimes play in the village with a couple of classmates. You throw a stick into the opponent’s area, and Dad’s finger is the stick, it’s no more than that. And still I clench my buttocks and look nervously over my shoulder at my mother who is sitting at the kitchen table, sorting out the ear tags of the cows that have died – blue with blue, yellow with yellow. I don’t want her to see me like this but there’s nothing to hide myself with, though my blushes of shame cover me as heavily as a horse blanket. She doesn’t look up from her work, even though we always have to be economical with the soap and the fact it’s disappearing inside me, chunk by chunk, must affect her. An ear tag lands on the floor. She bends down, her hair falling in front of her face.
‘Open wider,’ Dad roars.
Still sobbing, I pull my buttocks further apart with my hands, as though it’s the mouth of a newly born calf that has to be held open when it refuses the bottle. The third time Dad sticks his finger inside, I no longer react. I just stare at the sitting room window which has been covered with old newspapers, which is crazy because they like to talk about the weather and now there’s not much to see of it. ‘To stop Peeping Toms,’ Dad said when I asked about it, and actually I could say that about him now, with my buttocks like two open curtains. But according to my father, soap in your bum hole is a tried and tested method that has been used for centuries on children – in a couple of hours I’ll be able to shit again. The last time Dad picked up the bar of green soap, Mum looked up briefly and said, ‘Number 150’s missing.’ She’s wearing her reading glasses, and everything far away from her is suddenly close up. I try to make myself as small as Hanna’s Playmobil doll, which Obbe once sat on the edge of the settee with another doll right behind it, pushed up to its bum. I didn’t understand what he found so funny about it and why he swiped them off the sofa when the elders came to visit. Making myself smaller doesn’t help as I only feel bigger, more conspicuous.
Then Dad tugs at the hem of my pants as a sign that the procedure is finished, that I can get back up again. He wipes his finger on his skipper’s jersey, and then uses the same hand to take a slice of gingerbread from the dresser before taking a large bite. I get a pat on my lower leg. ‘It’s only soap.’ I quickly pull my trousers back up and raise myself on my knees to close the stud. Then I drop back down onto my side like a cow collapsing on the slats, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the palms of my hands.
‘Number 150,’ my mother says again. Now she takes off her glasses.
‘Shipping disease,’ Dad says.
‘Poor creature,’ Mum says.
Number 150 falls into the tray with all the other dead cows. For a moment I want to see that number which tumbles, tarnished and lonely, and will soon disappear into the filing cabinet never to be seen again. The cabinet gets locked, and the key hangs on a hook on the side of the cupboard: it’s about the gesture, closing something off so that a stall comes free in their heads. I can still feel my father’s finger inside. Not long afterwards, the bar of green soap is back in the metal tray on the sink in the toilet. No one will worry about the broken-off chunk that is now roaming about my body somewhere.
When I look at the bar of soap as I’m peeing, I hear Obbe’s words about how the unrolled wall of the small intestine has the surface area of a tennis court. When Obbe wants to tease me, he no longer just makes vomiting noises but now acts like he’s about to toss up a tennis ball. I feel sick at the idea that a tennis competition could be held inside me and that I’m made up of more space than I actually take up. From time to time, I picture a little man smoothing out the gravel of the tennis court with a dragnet so that a new game can take place inside me and I can poo again. Hopefully the little man won’t get green soap in his eyes.
*
On the table next to the new ear tags, my pale blue swimming costume lies lifelessly across my rucksack, a packet of ready salted crisps and a carton of strawberry yoghurt drink next to it. Sometimes there are crisps on the floor in the swimming pool, and the wet bits stick to your feet like soaked-off blisters and you have to flick them off with the corner of your towel. Later you see them hitching a ride under other people’s feet.
‘The giraffe is the only animal that can’t swim,’ I say.
I try to forget the piece of green soap roving about my body, like I tried to forget my father’s finger.
‘Are you a giraffe?’ Mum asks.
‘Now I am.’
‘You only have one part of the diploma left to do.’
‘But it’s the most difficult part.’
I’m the only person my age who hasn’t passed their swimming proficiency test, the only one who freezes when I have to go ‘swimming through a hole’: it’s important you can do this, as the winters are harsh here in the village. And even though Dad burned my strap-on wooden skates after that day in December, and it’s now mid-May more than a year later, a time will come when I will have to brave the ice again. The holes in the ice are now mainly inside our heads.
‘If God hadn’t wanted people to be able to swim, He wouldn’t have made us this way,’ Mum says, putting my swimming costume and the packet of crisps into my rucksack. There’s a box of plasters at the bottom. I mustn’t forget to put one over my belly button, otherwise the green pin will be visible through my cozzie. Everyone will know then that I never go on holiday, otherwise I’d long for foreign countries, for beaches so white they look like they’ve been covered in sun cream.
‘Maybe I’ll drown,’ I say cautiously, searching my mum’s face in the hope she’ll be startled, that more lines will appear in her skin than when she’s crying for herself, that she’ll stand up and hold me, rock me back and forth like a cumin cheese in a brine bath. My mum doesn’t look up.
‘Don’t be so daft. You’re not going to die.’ She says it as though she’d begrudge it me, as though I’m not clever enough to die young. Of course she doesn’t know that we, the three kings, are trying to meet death. We caught a glimpse of him with Tiesey, but it was too brief, too fleeting. Besides, if you aren’t prepared for it, you don’t know what you should watch out for. Good preparation makes the man – God knew during creation that we’d need a day to rest from everything we’d created during the week.
‘And we can’t go on holiday until you’ve got your diploma.’
I sigh and feel the pin stick into my navel. The skin around it has turned light purple. Last week they’d put a white tarpaulin across the pool with holes in it, and the divers hung on to the side. The swimming teacher had told us that panic and hypothermia were our greatest enemies. The divers had ice-piercers around their necks to make it look more real. That day at Christmas, Matthies had forgotten his steel-tipped pin for breaking the ice. It was on the little table beneath the mirror in the hall. No one knows that I saw it there, that I considered running after him, but that my anger at not being allowed to go along held me back.
*
In the swimming pool, Belle pokes me in my side. She’s wearing a pink swimming costume; there’s a fake Pokémon tattoo on her right arm, the kind you get with two packets of chewing gum and that slowly disappears from your skin, bit by bit. She passed her diploma years ago, and now she’s allowed to swim on her own in the pool and jump from the high diving board and go on the big slide.
‘Eva’s got tits.’
I glance furtively at Eva who is standing in the queue for the big slide. At the start of the school year she whispered to me that I must have got ‘spunky’ and ‘funky’ mixed up. Of course she was referring to my coat. Eva’s two years older than us, and they say she knows a lot about the things boys like about girls and how to behave. As the end of the swimming lesson, she’s always got the most frog sweets in her bag though we all started with the same number. One tip about boys costs two frogs. She’s the only one who showers apart. I think it’s because of her verrucas, which she says don’t exist but I can see them on the sides of her foot, like the mucous glands on my toads, both full of poison.
‘Will we ever grow some?’ Belle asks.
I shake my head. ‘We’ll stay tit-less forever. You only grow them if a boy looks at you for longer than ten minutes.’
Belle looks around at the boys who are getting ready to dive through the hole. We’re not being looked at, only observed, which is something quite different.
‘Then we’ll have to make sure they see us.’
I nod and point at the swimming teacher. His hand is feeling for the whistle around his neck. My words seem to get stuck, just like the children who choke up the slide – only the odd one shooting into the water now and again – until it’s a train. My body begins to shiver, and the drawing pin rubs against my swimming costume.
‘Panic is not an enemy but a warning, the teacher said. That leaves just one enemy,’ I say. And just before I get up onto the starting block, I see Matthies before me. I hear the clatter of his skates, the gurgling of the air bubbles under the ice. The divers said that your heartbeat increases underwater, but I haven’t even dived in yet and my heart is beating against my chest like my fists against the ice in my nightmares. Belle wraps her arm around me: we are taught how to rescue people from under the ice, but above water we don’t know how to keep someone on dry land, so it’s not strange that Belle’s arm is heavy and awkward. Her swimming costume is stuck to her body, and I can see the narrow line between her skinny legs. I think about the verrucas on Eva’s feet, the way they’ll burst open and fill the pool with green poison that will change the divers one by one into frog sweets, croaking.
‘Her brother,’ Belle tells the swimming teacher.
He sighs. Everyone in the village knows about our loss, but the longer Matthies is away from home, the more people get used to there being just the five of us. Those who are new to the village don’t even know any better. My brother is slowly fading out of various minds, while he moves more and more into ours.
I free myself from Belle and escape into the changing rooms, where I put my coat on over my costume and lie down on the bench. It smells of chlorine. I’m convinced the water’s going to start bubbling with soap-suds from the chunk of green soap in me. Everyone will point at me and then I’ll have to tell them what’s wrong inside. I carefully begin to make swimming movements lying on my belly. Eyes closed, I do the butterfly stroke and let myself sink into the ice hole. Soon I realize that my arms have stopped and I’m only moving my hips up and down. The divers are right: an increased heartbeat and accelerated breathing. It’s not hypothermia but imagination that is the enemy.
The bench creaks beneath my belly like black ice. I don’t want to be rescued now, I want to sink. Deeper and deeper until breathing starts to become difficult. In the meantime I chew the frog sweets into tiny bits, taste the gelatine, the reassurance of sweetness. Hanna’s right: we have to get away from this village, away from the cows, away from death, away from life in its original form.