On the news they’ve recommended drinking a large glass of water every hour, and even show a picture of what a big glass looks like – though it doesn’t look like the glasses we own. Here in the village no two houses have the same glasses, and you can use glasses to make yourself different from the others. We use the ones that used to have mustard in them. In turn we drink water from a Coke bottle that Dad fills the glasses with. The bottle wasn’t rinsed properly, giving the water a Coke taste, lukewarm from the sun. My nose itches from the dust that was whipped up by the haymaking. When I pick my nose the snot comes out black. I wipe it on my trousers, and don’t dare eat it, afraid I’ll get ill and return to dust. The hay-bales lie around me like bars of green soap in the field. I don’t want to think about my dad’s finger in me, and take a bite of the doughnut he’s just given us. I can barely manage another soggy doughnut: they’re coming out of our ears as the baker’s hardly had anything else recently. I take a bite all the same, even if only to feel connected to Obbe and Dad: three people sitting on a hay-bale eating doughnuts need some kind of connection. Its soggy skin sticks to my teeth and the roof of my mouth. I swallow without really tasting it.
‘God’s knocked over his pot of ink,’ Obbe says as he stares at the darkening sky above our sweaty heads. I grin and even Dad smiles for the first time in ages. He gets up and wipes his hands on his trouser legs as a sign we should get back to work. Soon he’ll start getting nervous that it will rain on the bales and they’ll go mouldy. I get up too and pluck a handful of dried grass to protect my palms from the string around the bale. I take another quick peek at the smile on Dad’s face. Look, I think, we only have to make sure that the ropes don’t leave impressions behind, then everything will come good with us, and we don’t have to be afraid of the Day of Judgement descending on our parents at any moment like a jackdaw on its prey, or that we sin more than we pray. As I pick up a new bale, my coat sticks to my sweaty skin. Even now it’s boiling hot I don’t take it off. I throw the bales onto the hay-cart so that Dad can arrange them in neat rows of six.
‘We have to hurry up before the sky breaks open,’ Dad says, staring at the ever-darkening sky above us.
As I look up at him I say, ‘Matthies could lift two bales of hay in one go; he stuck his pitchfork into them as though they were chunks of nettle cheese.’ Dad’s smile immediately sinks into the skin of his face until nothing is left. There are people whose smiles are always visible even when they’re sad. The smile lines can no longer be erased. It’s the other way round with Mum and Dad. Even when they smile they look sad, as though someone’s put a set square next to the corners of their mouths and drawn two lines pointing down.
‘We don’t think about the dead, we remember them.’
‘We can remember out loud, can’t we?’ I ask.
Dad gives me a penetrating look, jumps from the hay-cart and sticks his pitchfork in the ground. ‘What did you say?’
I see the muscles in his upper arms tense.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Nothing what?’
‘Nothing, Dad.’
‘That’s what I thought. How dare you talk back to me after ruining the entire supply of beans when you unplugged the freezer.’
I stare up at the sky because I don’t know what to do with myself. For the first time I notice that I’ve tensed my muscles too, and that I’d like to push Dad’s head into the ink like a fountain pen before writing an ugly sentence with it – or one that’s about Matthies and how much I miss him. My thoughts startle me immediately. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ And straight away I think: and hopefully the days on the other side, not just here in this stupid boring village. Obbe grabs the Coke bottle from the ground and greedily drinks the last bit without asking me if I want any more. Then he gets up to continue with the hay.
The last round goes slower. It’s my job to steer the tractor and Obbe’s to throw the bales onto the cart so that Dad can stack them. Dad keeps shouting that I have to speed up or slow down. Now and then he suddenly tears open the tractor door and pushes me roughly from the seat, before tugging hard at the wheel to stop us from driving into a ditch, sweat dripping from his forehead. As soon as he’s back on top of the stack, taking bales from Obbe, I think: if I accelerate hard, just once, he’ll fall off the cart. Just once.
*
After the haymaking, Obbe and I lean against the back wall of the cowshed. He has a piece of straw sticking out through the gap between his front teeth. In the background you can hear the buzzing of the cow brushes that spin across their backs to stop them itching. It’s long before feeding time so we’re free for a while. Obbe chews on his straw and promises to tell me the password for The Sims on the computer if I help him with his mission. With the password you can get stinking rich and make the avatars French kiss each other. A shiver runs through my body. Sometimes when Dad comes to wish me goodnight, he sticks his tongue in my ear. It’s not as bad as the finger with green soap, but still. I don’t know why he does it. Maybe it’s just like the lid of the vanilla custard that he licks clean every evening with his tongue, as it’s a waste otherwise, he says – and the same with my ears as I often forget to clean them with cotton buds.
‘Not something to do with death, is it?’ I say to Obbe.
I don’t know if I’m strong enough to meet death now. We’re only allowed to appear before God in our Sunday best, but I don’t know what the rules are for death. I can still feel Dad’s anger weighing down on my shoulders. At school I don’t take sides when there are fights. I watch from a distance and support the weakest person inside my head. When it comes to death, I can hardly stick up for myself, as I’ve never learned how to. Even though I sometimes try to look at myself from a distance, it doesn’t work, I’m stuck inside. And the incident with the hamster is still fresh in my memory. I know how I’m going to feel afterwards, but this doesn’t outweigh my curiosity to see death and understand it.
‘There’s always the risk of running into him.’
Obbe spits the straw out from between his teeth, and a white splatter lands on the pebbles.
‘Do you get why we’re not allowed to talk about Matthies?’
‘Do you want the password or not?’
‘Can Belle join in too? She’s coming over in a bit.’
I don’t tell him she’s mainly coming for the neighbour’s boys’ willies, because I’d been boasting about them and said they looked a bit like the pale croissants we sometimes had at hers for lunch, made from dough her mother got out of a tin and rolled up before putting them in the oven and baking them brown.
‘Sure,’ Obbe says, ‘as long as she doesn’t start blubbering.’
*
A little later Obbe gets three cans of Coke out of the basement, hides them under his jumper and gestures to me and Belle. I know what’s going to happen and feel calm. So calm that I forget to clamp my zip between my teeth. Maybe it’s also to do with the fact that Lien next door and her husband Kees have complained. They think the way I cycle along the dike with my sleeves pulled over my fingers and my zip between my teeth is dangerous. Mum and Dad had waved away their concerns like a low bid for a calf at auction.
‘Yes, she’ll grow out of it,’ Dad said.
But I won’t grow out of it – I’m actually growing into it and getting stuck, and no one will notice.
When we open the door to the rabbit shed, Belle is talking about the biology test and Tom, who sits two rows behind us, has black hair down to his shoulders, and always wears the same checked shirt. We suspect he doesn’t have a mother, as why else does no one wash his clothes or make him wear something else? According to Belle, Tom’s stared at her for at least ten minutes, which means that at any moment tits could start growing under her T-shirt. I’m not happy for her but I smile all the same. People need small problems in order to feel bigger. I’m not desperate to get tits. I don’t know if that’s strange or not. I’m not longing for boys either but for myself, but you must never reveal that, just like how you keep the password to your Nokia secret so that no one can break into you unexpectedly.
It’s warm and dark in the rabbit shed. The sun has shone down on the plasterboards of the roof all day long. Dieuwertje lies stretched out in his hutch. Mum took yesterday’s soggy leaves out of his hutch and replaced them with fresh ones: she forgot sweets for the sweets tin, but not the leaves. Obbe slides the manger from the wood and puts it on the floor. He takes a pair of scissors from his pocket: there’s a bit of tomato sauce sticking to the edges from when Mum cuts open the tops of the Heinz packets. Obbe makes a cutting gesture, and sunlight falls through the chinks in the shed wall momentarily and reflects off the metal of the blades. Death is giving a warning signal.
‘First I’ll cut off the whiskers, as those are the sensors, and then Dieuwertje won’t know what he’s doing.’ One by one he cuts off the whiskers and lays them in my outstretched palm.
‘Isn’t that bad for Dieuwertje?’ asks Belle.
‘It’s about the same as if we burn our tongue and then taste less. It’s pretty harmless.’
Dieuwertje darts into all the corners of his hutch but fails to dodge Obbe’s hand. Now that all the whiskers are gone, he says, ‘Do you want to see them mating?’
Belle and I look at each other. It’s not part of our plan to cut off the whiskers and see whether they grow back, but the worms have returned to my belly. Since Obbe showed me and Hanna his willy, Mum’s worm drink has been going through me even faster: I deliberately complain about having an itchy bottom. Sometimes I dream that worms as big as rattlesnakes are coming out of my anus: they have lions’ jaws and I’ve fallen into the hollow in my mattress like Daniel in the lion pit and have to promise that I trust in God, but I keep seeing those filthy hungry faces with their snakes’ bodies. It’s not until I’m crying for mercy that I awake from the nightmare.
Obbe nods at the dwarf rabbit in the hutch opposite Dieuwertje’s. I think of Dad’s words: never let a large rabbit cover a small one. It’s wrong: Dad’s two heads taller than Mum and she survived when she gave birth to us. This must be possible too then, and that’s why I press the little rabbit into Belle’s arms. She hugs it for a moment, then puts it in Dieuwertje’s hutch. We watch in silence as Dieuwertje carefully sniffs at the dwarf rabbit, hops around it, begins to stamp its back feet on the ground and then first jumps onto the front before jumping onto the back. We can’t see his willy. All we can see are his heated movements and the look of fear in the little rabbit’s eyes, the same look I saw on the hamster.
‘Desire without knowledge is not good – how much more will hasty feet miss this way!’ Dad sometimes says when we get too covetous about things we want, and at that moment Dieuwertje lets himself fall sideways off the little animal. I briefly wonder whether Dad lets himself fall the same way each time he’s done it. Perhaps that’s why his leg is deformed and always hurts. Maybe the story of the combine harvester was invented because it’s more believable and free from shame. Just when we want to take a breath of relief, we see that the dwarf rabbit is dead. There’s nothing spectacular to look at. It closed its eyes and departed. No convulsions or cries of pain; not a glimpse of death.
‘What a stupid game,’ Belle says.
I see that she’s going to cry. She’s too soft for this kind of thing. She’s like the whey cheese is made of, while we’re already further in the process with a plastic layer around us.
Obbe looks at me. There are pale downy hairs growing on his chin. We say nothing but both know that we’ll have to repeat this until we understand Matthies’s death, even though we don’t know how. The stabs inside my belly become more painful, as though someone’s poking a pair of scissors into my skin. The soap still hasn’t helped yet. I put the whiskers in my coat pocket with the shards of the cow and the cheese scoop, pull the tab from the can of Coke and put the cold metal to my mouth. Over the edge of it I see Belle looking at me expectantly. I have to fulfil my promise now. Jesus had followers too because He always gave them something that made Him seem credible. I have to give something to Belle so that she doesn’t turn from a friend into an enemy. Before I take her to the peephole in the yew hedge, I tug at Obbe’s sleeve and whisper, ‘What’s the password then?’
‘Klapaucius,’ he says, grabbing the little rabbit from Dieuwertje’s hutch and putting it under his jumper where it must still be cold from the Coke cans. I don’t ask what he’s going to do with it. Everything that requires secrecy here is accepted in silence.
*
Belle is sitting on a fishing chair on the other side of the yew hedge. I curl my little finger in front of the peephole.
‘That’s not a willy,’ Belle cries, ‘that’s your little finger.’
‘It’s not the right weather for willies. You’re out of luck,’ I say.
‘When’s a good day then?’
‘I don’t know, you never do. Good days are rare here in the countryside.’
‘It’s all just a pack of lies, isn’t it?’
A lock of Belle’s hair is stuck to her cheek – it had dangled into the can of Coke. She burps behind her hand. At that moment we hear laughter behind the hedge, and see the boys next door jumping into the inflatable paddling pool and floating on their brown backs, like raisins being soaked in brandy.
‘Come on, let’s ask if we can play at theirs.’
‘But how are we going to get to see the willies?’
‘They always have to pee at some point,’ I say, with a conviction that makes my chest swell. The idea that I’ve got something someone else is longing for makes me bigger. Side by side we go next door. My belly is full of bubbles. Will the worms inside me survive the Coke?