Dad likes crows’ funerals the best. Sometimes when he finds a dead crow in the muck-heap or in the field, he hangs it upside down with a rope from one of the branches of the cherry tree. Soon a whole flock of crows turn up and spend hours circling the tree to pay their last respects to their fellow. No other creature mourns for as long as a crow. Generally there’s one that really stands out, a bit bigger than the others and fiercer too, and it crows the loudest of all of them. That must be the flock’s pastor. Their black-feathered cloaks contrast beautifully with the pale sky, and Dad says crows are intelligent animals. They can count, remember faces and voices, and hold a grudge against anyone who treats them badly – but after a crow has been hung up, they hang around the farmyard. They stare down from the guttering searchingly as Dad walks between the house and the cowsheds, like cardboard hares at a shooting range, their black eyes boring into his chest like two shot holes. I try not to look at the crows. Maybe they want to tell us something, or they’re waiting until the cows are dead. Granny said yesterday that crows in a farmyard are an omen of death. I think that either Mum or I will be next. There must be a reason Dad asked me to lie down in the farmyard this morning so that he could take the measurements for a new bed, which he is making from pallets and oak and the leftover planks from Obbe’s chicken coop. I lay down on the cold flagstones with my arms alongside my body and watched Dad unfold a tape measure and lay it from head to toe, and I thought: if you saw off the bed legs and take away the mattress, you could easily turn it into a coffin.
I’d like to be laid facing down in it, with the viewing window at the height of my bum so that everyone could say goodbye and look at my bum hole, since that was where the entire problem was located. Dad folded his tape measure back up. He had insisted I stop sleeping in Matthies’s bed as ‘little Johnny can’t bear it any more’. And over the past weeks I’ve looked so pale that Lien from next door has started bringing around a crate of mandarins every Friday evening. Some of them are wrapped like me in jackets, made of paper. I keep holding my breath all the time not to inhale any germs, or to get closer to Matthies. It’s not long before I collapse to the floor and everything around me fades into a snowy landscape. Once I’m on the floor, I regain consciousness quite quickly and see Hanna’s worried face. She holds her clammy hand to my forehead like a flannel. I don’t tell her that fainting is nice, that in that snowy landscape there’s more chance I’ll meet Matthies than there is of meeting Death here on the farm. The crows circled above me when I was lying out in the yard and Dad was noting down the centimetres in his accounts book.
*
Mum has put a clean fitted sheet over the new mattress and shaken up my pillow. She presses her fist twice into the middle of the case, where my head will come to lie. I look at my new bed from my desk chair. I miss the old one already, even though my toes touched the end and it seemed like I was lying in a thumb-screw that turned me tighter and tighter. It was a safe feeling at least, as though something was setting boundaries so I didn’t grow any more. Now I’ve got so much room to wiggle around and I can lie diagonally. I’ll have to dig a hollow to be able to lie in it now Matthies’s shape has gone. His measurements are nowhere to be found any more.
Mum kneels on the edge of my bed, her elbows resting on the duvet that smells of liquid manure because the wind was blowing the wrong way, which it is doing more and more often. It won’t be long before the smell of cows doesn’t get into anything, before it disappears from even the inside of our heads and all we can smell is longing and each other’s absence. My mum pats the duvet gently. I get up submissively and crawl under the sheets, lying down on my side so that I can still see Mum’s face. From here my blue striped duvet cover makes her seem miles away from me. She’s somewhere on the other side of the lake, her body as skinny as a moorhen frozen in an ice hole. I shift my feet to the right so that they end up beneath Mum’s folded hands. She moves them immediately as though I’m electric. There are dark rings under her eyes. I try to gauge how the news of the foot-and-mouth has affected her and whether the crows have come for me or for her.
‘Do not allow yourselves to be beaten by evil, but beat evil with good,’ Reverend Renkema preached in the morning service. I was sitting with Hanna and some other children from the village, next to the organ on the balustrade. From up there I suddenly saw Dad rising from a sea of black hats which, from above, looked like the yolks of rotten eggs that were speckled with black because no one had collected them from the nest. Some of the children around me had been in the nest too long as well, and sat there with sleepy faces staring into space.
Dad glanced around him, ignoring Mum’s little tugs at the seam of his black overcoat, and cried out, ‘The pastors are the cause of it.’ There was deathly silence in the church. Everyone looked at my father and everyone on the balustrade looked at Hanna and me. I let my chin sink further into the collar of my coat and felt the cold zip against my skin.
To my relief I saw the organ player feel for the white keys and start on Psalm 51, causing the congregation to rise to their feet, and Dad’s protest fell away among the villagers like a lump of butter among egg yolks, and in between that the soft hissing of the gossips. Not long after that, we saw Mum flee the pew with a wet nose, the hymn-book clamped under her arm. Belle had poked me in the side: ‘Your dad’s not right in the head.’ I didn’t reply but thought about the foolish man in the children’s song who built his house on sand – the rain streamed down and the floods came and the house collapsed with a plop. Dad was building his words on sinking sand. How could he blame the pastor? Maybe it was our own fault? Maybe it was one of the plagues – and a plague here is never a natural phenomenon but a warning.
Mum began quietly to sing, ‘Higher than the blue skies and the stars of gold, abides our Father in the Heavens; Matthies, Obbe, Jas and Hanna he beholds.’ I don’t sing along but turn my thoughts to the bucket under my desk. Mum thinks toads are dirty, unpleasant creatures. She sometimes sweeps them up with a dustpan and brush from behind the boot-jack and carries them to the muck-heap like a pile of potato peelings. The toads aren’t doing too well either. They look a bit peaky, their skin is getting drier, and they spend a lot of time sitting with their eyes closed – maybe they’re praying and they don’t know how to round it off, the way I don’t with conversations. I just start shuffling my feet and staring ahead until someone says, ‘OK, bye then.’ I hope the moment won’t come that I have to say ‘bye’ to the toads, but if they don’t eat soon, that’s going to happen.
After she’s stopped singing, Mum puts her hand into the pocket of her pink dressing gown and takes out a little parcel wrapped in silver foil. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘What for?’
‘For the stars, for this evening. It’s because of the cows, the shock of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
I take the parcel. It’s a crumpet topped with cumin cheese. The cheese is warm from her pocket. Mum watches me take a bite.
‘You’re just so odd, you and that funny coat of yours.’
I know she’s only saying this because Lien from next door mentioned it again when she came round to find out how the cows were doing, and therefore us too. Even the vet brought up the subject of my coat with Mum. When she came in a bit later after feeding the calves, she got up in the middle of the kitchen, on the stepladder she normally only unfolded to get down the spider’s webs. To every web with a spider in it, she’d say, ‘Be off with you, old spinster.’ It’s the only joke Mum tells, but we still cherish it like an insect caught in a jam-jar. This time she didn’t climb the stepladder to get rid of a spider but to get me out of the web she’d spun herself.
‘If you don’t take off your coat immediately, I’ll jump.’
She stood there high above me in her long black skirt, her arms folded in front of her chest, her lips a bit red from the cherries – one of the few things she still eats – like the body of a spider squashed on pristine white wallpaper. I gauged the fall. Was it enough for Death? According to the pastor, the devil was afraid of the village because we were mightier than evil. But was that true? Were we stronger than evil?
I pushed my fist into my belly to calm the excruciating stabbing feeling that had arisen, and clenched my buttocks in a reflex, as though I was trying to keep in a fart. It wasn’t a fart but a storm, a storm that raced through me. Just like the hurricanes on the news, mine also had a name. I called it the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost raced through me and my armpits stuck to the fabric of my coat. I would get ill without my protective layer. Frozen to the spot, I continued to look at Mum, at her polished mule slippers, at the steps on the ladder that had splatters of paint on them.
‘I’ll count to ten: one, two, three, four …’
Her voice slowly faded away, the kitchen grew hazy, and whatever way I tried to bring my hand to the zip, I couldn’t manage it. Then I heard a dull thud, bones hitting the kitchen floor, a crash and a cry. All of a sudden the kitchen was filled with people, with lots of different coats. I felt the vet’s hands resting on my shoulders as though they were the heads of two calves, his voice calm and guiding. Slowly my vision became sharper and zoomed in on Mum, who was lying in the wheelbarrow Dad had used to take the beans to the muckheap. Obbe pushed her across the farmyard to the doctor in the village. I only saw some crows fly up – they looked like streaks of mascara through my tears. Dad refused to take her in the Volkswagen. ‘You don’t take rotten mandarins back to the greengrocer’s,’ he said. Meaning it was her own fault. It wouldn’t be much longer, I thought, before we’d wheel her away for good. And Dad didn’t say a single word for the rest of the evening. He just sat there flat out in his overalls watching TV, a glass of genever in his hand, smoking a cigarette. He was getting more and more holes in his overalls from the burning cigarette ends he laid on the edge of his knee for want of an ashtray, as though being here was suffocating him and he needed more air holes.
The vet, who has been here constantly since the news, had taken me and Hanna for a drive around the village. Sitting in the car is the nicest way to sit still: everything around you moves and changes and you can see it without having to move yourself. We drove to the rapeseed fields and sat on the bonnet and watched the combine mowing the plants out of the ground. The black seeds ended up in a big container. The vet told us that they would make lamp oil, cattle feed, biofuel and margarine from them. A flock of geese flew over. They were headed to the other side. For a moment I expected them to fall from the sky like manna from heaven and land at our feet, their necks broken, but they flew on, further and further, until I could no longer see them. I looked at Hanna but she was deep in conversation with the vet about school. She’d taken off her shoes and was sitting on the bonnet in her stripy socks. I wished I could take off my green wellies too, but I didn’t dare. An illness could get in on every side, just like burglars, even though Mum and Dad underestimated their cunning – they only locked the front door when they left, assuming only people they knew would come in through the back.
We didn’t even mention once what had happened at home. There weren’t any words to take the edge off fear, the way the blades of the combine decapitated the rapeseed plants to keep only the bit you can use. We silently watched the sun go down and on the way back got a bag of chips from the chip man which we ate in the car, making the windows steam up, and my eyes too because for the first time I briefly didn’t feel alone: chips unite people more than any other type of food.
An hour later, we lie in bed with greasy fingers, smelling of mayonnaise, after an evening that was filled with hope despite the odds. But because of the chips, I don’t feel like eating the crumpet. Only I don’t want to disappoint Mum so I take a bite anyway. I keep seeing her lying in the wheelbarrow, her injured foot dangling over the edge. Obbe, who suddenly looked so fragile that I wanted to comfort him. In Romans 12, it says, ‘If your gift is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.’ I don’t know what my gift is – maybe my gift is to shut up and listen. And that’s what I did. I just asked him how his Sims were doing, whether they were already kissing. ‘Not now,’ he said, shutting himself away in his bedroom. The new Hitzone came out of his speakers so loudly that I could sing along to the lyrics under my breath. No one said anything about it.
Mum is growing limper, just like the frozen beans. Sometimes she just lets things fall from her hands and blames us. I said the Lord’s Prayer five times today. The last two times I kept my eyes open to keep watch on everything around me. I hope Jesus understands – cows sleep with one eye open so that they can’t suddenly be attacked. I can’t help being more and more afraid of everything that could take me by surprise in the night: from a mosquito to God.
Mum stares with hollow eyes at my fluorescent duvet cover. I don’t manage to swallow the bite of crumpet. I don’t want her to be unhappy because of me. I don’t want her to get out the kitchen stepladder again, because that way it would be easier to reach the rope or climb up the feed silo. She’d only have to kick the ladder away with her foot. Obbe says it doesn’t take long – it only takes time for the person hanging themself because they get a rush of things to contemplate. The contemplations in church last at least two peppermints. And if her fear of heights didn’t stop her this time, it wouldn’t stop her on the silo either.
My mouth full, I say, ‘It’s so dark here.’
Mum’s eyes look at me hopefully. I think about Belle’s friendship book. Mum had crossed out the answer to the question ‘What do you want to be?’ and replaced it with ‘A good Christian.’ It meant no one noticed I’d had a growth spurt at the question ‘What’s your height in centimetres?’ I wonder whether I am a good Christian. Maybe if I give something to my mum to cheer her up again.
‘Dark? Where then?’ she asks.
‘You know, everywhere,’ I say, swallowing my mouthful.
Mum turns on the globe on my bedside table and pretends to creep out of the room carefully, with her sore foot bandaged up and the belt of her dressing gown tied tight. It’s a game we used to play when Matthies was still alive. I couldn’t get enough of it.
‘Big Bear, Big Bear! I can’t sleep, I’m frightened.’
I peek through my fingers as she walks to the window, opens the curtains and says, ‘Look, I’ve fetched the moon for you. The moon and all the twinkling stars. What more can a bear want?’
Love, I think to myself, like the warmth in the cowshed of all those breathing cattle with a common goal – survival. A warm flank to rest my head against, like during the milking. All the love they can give consists of poking out their tongues now and again when you offer them a chunk of mangel.
I wait there until the stairs stop creaking and then I close the curtains, try to think of my rescuer so that the oppressive feeling around my stomach disappears, making way for a longing, a longing that birds can best express. I notice that my bed creaks with every movement and that this means my parents must know what I get up to in the night. I stand up on my mattress to put the rope hanging from the beam in the attic around my neck. It’s too loose. I can’t move the knot – it’s been tied for too long – but for a moment I wrap it around my neck like a scarf, feeling the rough fibres against my skin. I imagine what it would be like to slowly suffocate, to be a swing and to know which movements are expected of you, to feel the life glide out of me, the way I feel a little bit when I’m lying on the sofa butt-naked being a soap dish.