My fascination with willies must have come from when I played with the naked little angels when I was ten. When I took them out of the Christmas tree, I felt the cold porcelain between their sturdy legs like a bit of seashell in the chicken grit, and laid my hand on top like a twig of mistletoe, at the time protectively and this time out of an endless longing that has mainly nestled in my underbelly and is growing in there.
‘I’m a paedophile,’ I whisper to Hanna. I feel my breath travel across the hairs on my arms and try to lie back against the edge of the bath so that I don’t feel it. I don’t know what makes me more nervous: feeling my breath on my skin, or the idea that one day I’ll stop breathing and that I don’t know which day that will be. However I rearrange myself, I still keep feeling my breath. The hairs on my arms stand up; I dip them into the water. You’re a paedophile, you’re a sinner. Obbe taught me that word after he saw it on TV at a friend’s house. They’re not on Nederland 1, 2 or 3 because no one wants to see their faces on TV. Obbe said that they touched little boys’ willies, though from the outside they look like normal people with normal lives who are older than us. There are five years between me and the boys next door, a whole hand’s worth. It must be the case that I’m one of them, and that someday I’ll be hunted down and driven into a corner like the cows into the racks when we want to move them to a new bit of field.
After eating, Mum had passed around a damp flannel for us to take turns cleaning our ketchup mouths and sticky fingers. I didn’t want to take it. Mum wouldn’t forgive me if I wiped my sinful fingers on the same flannel she pressed her lips to – she hadn’t eaten any macaroni with ketchup at all but still scrubbed her mouth clean. Maybe it was a veiled attempt to give us an advance goodnight kiss on our mouths – she was coming to give us one less and less often. I went upstairs myself now and pulled the duvet up to my neck, the way I’d seen in a film at Belle’s house, and then someone always came and tucked the duvet under the main character’s chin, which never happened to me, and sometimes I woke up shivering from the cold, pulled up the duvet myself and whispered, ‘Sleep tight, dear main character.’
Before the flannel got to me, I pushed my chair back and said I felt the urge. The word ‘urge’ made everyone around the table look up hopefully: maybe I’d finally have to poo at last. But on the toilet, I waited until I heard all the chairs being shunted back, until my bottom grew cold and I’d read the birthdays on the calendar above the sink three times. With a pencil from my coat pocket I drew very faint crosses after each name, so faint you could only see it from close up, with the biggest cross after my birthday in April, and I wrote A.H. after it for Adolf Hitler.
The boy next door’s willy had felt soft, like Granny’s meatloaf I had to roll sometimes on Sundays on the counter, sprinkled with herbs. Only meatloaf is greasy and rough. I wanted to keep holding on to the willy but the stream grew thinner and stopped. The boy moved his hips back and forth, making his tinkle jig around, and splashes ended up on the grey tiles. After that he pulled up his boxers and jeans. Belle watched from a distance. She was allowed to do up his jeans. You always have to begin from the bottom with an important job – from there you can grow to the top. Belle won’t be able to forget the dead rabbit in a hurry, but this calmed her: I’d kept my word. I’d grabbed her finger and pushed it against the boy’s willy, saying unnecessarily, ‘This is a real one.’
*
‘I’m a paedophile,’ I repeat. Hanna squeezes a bit of shampoo from a bottle and rubs it in her hair. Coconut. She says nothing but I know she’s thinking. She can do that, think before she speaks; with me it’s the other way around. When I try it, my head suddenly empties out and my words are like the cows that lie down in the wrong place in the shed to sleep, where I can’t get to them.
Then Hanna begins to giggle.
‘I’m serious!’ I say.
‘You can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Paedophiles are different. You’re not different. You’re like me.’
I let myself sink back into the bath-water, pinch my nose shut and feel my head touch the bottom. Underwater I can see the hazy contours of Hanna’s naked body. How long will my sister keep believing that I’m no different from her, that we form a unit, while there are enough nights when we lie separate from each other in bed and sometimes she can no longer keep up with my train of thoughts.
‘And you’re a girl,’ Hanna says as soon as I resurface. There’s a crown of bubbles around her head.
‘Are all paedophiles boys then?’
‘Yes, and much older, at least three hands, and with grey hair.’
‘Thank God.’ I may be different but I’m not a paedophile. I picture the boys in my class. Not one of them has grey hair. According to the teacher, only Dave has an old soul. We’ve all got an old soul. Mine is already twelve years old. That’s older than the neighbour’s oldest cow and he says she’s ready for the scrap-heap – she hardly produces any milk.
‘You can say that again – thank God,’ Hanna says loudly and we giggle, get out of the bath and dry each other, before pulling our heads into our pyjama tops like snails in search of protection.