‘This is an initiation,’ I say to Hanna, who is sitting cross-legged on my new mattress. There’s a Barbie’s head on the front of her pyjamas. It’s got long blonde hair and pink lips. Half of the face has worn off, just like the Barbie dolls on the edge of the bath. We scrubbed off their smiles with a scourer and a bit of soap. We didn’t want to give Mum the impression there was anything to smile about here, especially not now the cows are sick.
‘What’s that? An “initiation”?’ Hanna asks. Her hair is in a bun. I don’t like buns – they are much too tight and people call us ‘black stockings’ even more then, because the buns of the women in the church look just like balled-up socks.
‘A ritual to welcome someone or something. My bed is new and this is its first night here.’
‘All right,’ Hanna says, ‘what do I have to do then?’
‘Let’s start by welcoming it.’
I sweep my hair behind my ear and say loudly and clearly, ‘Welcome, bed.’ I lay my hand on the bottom sheet. ‘And now for the ritual.’
I lie down on my belly on the mattress with my head sideways under my pillow, so that I can still look at Hanna and tell her that she’s Dad and I’m Mum.
‘Sure,’ Hanna says.
She lies on her front next to me. I pull the pillow further over my head, pressing my nose into the mattress. It smells of the furniture shop where Mum and Dad bought it, of a new life. Hanna copies me. We lie there for a moment like shot-down crows; neither of us speaks, until I take away my pillow and look at Hanna. Her pillow is moving softly up and down. The mattress is a ship, our ship. ‘For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.’ For a moment I’m reminded of the lines from Corinthians. I turn my attention back to Hanna and whisper, ‘From now on this will be our operating base, the place where we are safe. Repeat after me: Dear bed, we, Jas and Hanna – Mum and Dad – are pleased to initiate you into the dark world of The Plan. Everything said here and longed for here stays here. From now on, you’re one of us.’ Hanna repeats the words, even though it’s more like muttering because she’s lying with her face in the mattress. I can hear from her voice she’s finding it boring, that it won’t be long before she’s had enough and wants to play a different game. Even though this isn’t a game, it’s deadly serious.
To give her an idea of the seriousness of all of this, I rest my hand on the pillow covering the back of her head, then take both ends of it and press down hard. Hanna immediately begins to twist the lower part of her body, which means I have to use more force. Her hands thrash around, clawing into my coat. I’m stronger than her; she can’t get out from under me.
‘This is an initiation,’ I repeat. ‘Anyone coming to live here has to feel what it’s like to almost suffocate, just like Matthies, to almost die. Only then can we become friends.’
When I remove the pillow, Hanna begins to sob. Her face is as red as a tomato. She greedily tries to take air. ‘Idiot,’ she says, ‘I almost suffocated.’
‘That’s part of it,’ I say. ‘Now you know how I feel every night, and now the bed knows what can happen.’
I snuggle up to the sobbing Hanna and kiss her cheeks dry, the salty fear.
‘Don’t cry, little man.’
‘You’re frightening me, little woman,’ Hanna whispers.
I slowly begin to move against my sister, as I often do with my teddy bear, and whisper, ‘Our days may be longer if we show daring.’
My body gets hotter and hotter from my movements; my coat sticks to my skin. I only stop when I feel that Hanna is about to fall asleep. We don’t have time for sleep now. I sit up in bed again.
‘I choose the vet,’ I say suddenly, trying to make my voice sound decisive. There’s a moment’s silence. ‘He’s kind and he lives on the other side and he has listened to lots of hearts, thousands,’ I continue.
Hanna nods and the Barbie’s head does too. ‘Boudewijn de Groot is much too ambitious for girls like us,’ she says.
I don’t know what she means by this – girls like us. What actually makes us who we are? How can people tell by looking at us that we’re all Mulders? I think that lots of girls like us exist, it’s just we haven’t run into them yet. Fathers and mothers meet each other one day too. And since everyone has a parent inside them, they can finally get married.
It’s still a mystery how our parents found each other. The thing is, Dad’s hopeless at looking. When he’s lost something it’s usually in his pocket, and when he goes to do the shopping he always comes back with something different than what was on the list: Mum’s the wrong kind of yoghurt, but one he was happy enough with and vice versa. They’ve never told us about how they met – Mum never thinks it a good time. There are rarely any good times here, and if we have them we only realize afterwards. My suspicion is that it was exactly like with the cows, that one day Granny and Grandpa opened my mum’s bedroom door and put Dad in with her like a bull. After that they shut the door and hey presto: there we were. From that day on, Dad called her ‘wife’ and Mum called him ‘husband’. On good days ‘little man’ and ‘little woman’, which I found strange, as though they were worried they’d forget each other’s sex, or that they belonged to each other.
I fibbed to Belle about how they met. I told her they bumped into each other in the Russian salad section of the supermarket and they’d both picked the beef version, their hands touching briefly as they reached for the tubs. According to our teacher, eye contact isn’t necessary for love, touch is more than enough. I wondered then what you should call it when both of them are lacking: eye contact and touch.
Even though I think there are girls like us, I nod at Hanna. Maybe they don’t smell of cows all the time, or of Dad’s anger and cigarette smoke, but there’s probably something you can do about that.
I briefly press my own hand to my throat. I can still feel the impression of the rope in my skin, and I think about earlier, the wobbly kitchen stepladder and the crash, and then the rope seems to be a bit tighter, a double knot under the larynx. Everything seems to stop just below the throat, just like the strip of light from Dad’s tractor headlights on my duvet. We can hear him outside, spreading cow manure across the fields. He has to do it secretly because no one’s allowed to muckspread any more, to reduce the chances of contamination. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do with it otherwise. The planks on the muck-heap you roll the wheelbarrow along have sunk away into the muck – there isn’t room for any more. Dad said that not a soul would notice if he spread it across the fields at night. There was even someone from the fallen stock company who came in a white suit, and brought dozens of rat boxes filled with blue poison to spread around the farm so that the rats couldn’t pass on the foot-and-mouth. Hanna and I have to stay awake. Dad mustn’t suddenly slip away from us. The strip of light moves from the foot end to beneath my chin and begins again from the bottom after a while.
‘Tractor accident or a fall into the slurry pit?’
Hanna squashes up close to me beneath the duvet. Her dark hair smells of silage grass. I breathe in the smell deeply for a moment and think about how often I have cursed the cows, but now they’re about to be killed, I’d like nothing more than for them to stay with us – that it will never become so quiet on the farm that we can only remember the sound of them, that only the crows in the guttering are left to keep an eye on us.
‘You’re as cold as frozen bread,’ Hanna says. She lays her head in my armpit. She isn’t joining in with the game. Maybe she’s worried that if she says something it will actually happen. That like in Lingo, we’ll be able to predict beforehand who is going to take the lucky green balls for the jackpot, and that we’ll be able to predict death too.
‘Better a frozen loaf than a defrosted bag of beans,’ I say, and we laugh with the duvet pulled over our heads so that we won’t wake up Mum. Then I move my hand from my throat to Hanna’s neck. It feels warm. I feel her vertebrae through the skin.
‘You’re closer to the perfect thickness than me, little woman.’
‘What for, my little man?’ Hanna plays along.
‘For a rescue.’
Hanna pushes my hand away. For a rescue you don’t need the perfect thickness – it’s actually the absence of perfection that means we’re fragile and need to be rescued.
‘Are we fragile?’
‘As fragile as a blade of straw,’ Hanna says.
Suddenly I realize what’s going on. Everything from the recent past falls into place, all the times we were fragile, and I say, ‘This is another of the plagues from Exodus, it must be. Only they’re coming to us in the wrong order. Do you understand?’
‘Well, you had a nosebleed which meant water changed into blood. We’ve had the toad migration, head lice at school, the death of the firstborn, horseflies around the muck-heap, a grasshopper squashed by Obbe’s boot, ulcers on my tongue from the fried egg, and hailstorms.’
‘And you think that’s why there’s a cattle plague now?’ Hanna asks with a shocked expression. She’s laid her hand on her heart, exactly above the Barbie’s ears, as though she’s not allowed to hear what we’re discussing. I nod slowly. After this, there’s one more to come, I think to myself, and that’s the worst one: darkness, total darkness, daytime eternally clad in Dad’s Sunday overcoat. I don’t say it out loud but we both know that there are two people in this house who long constantly for the other side, who want to cross the lake and make sacrifices there, whether Fireball gobstoppers or dead animals.
Then we hear the tractor cut out. I switch on the globe on my bedside table to combat the darkness now that the tractor lights are no longer illuminating my bedroom. Dad has finished the muck-spreading. I picture him in his overalls standing looking at the farm from a distance. The only light shining is at the front of the farm, the oval-shaped window that is lit up as though the moon has tumbled a few feet downwards half-drunk. When he looks at the farm he sees three generations of farmers. It belonged to Grandpa Mulder and he took it over from his father. After Grandpa’s death, many of his cows lived on. Dad used to often tell the story of one of Grandpa’s cows that also had foot-and-mouth and wouldn’t drink. ‘He bought a keg of herrings and forced it into the mouth of the sick animal. It didn’t just get some protein but also it made it very thirsty, so that it got over the pain of the blisters and started drinking again.’ I still think it’s a nice story. You can’t treat tongue blisters with herring any more; Grandpa’s cows will be put down too. Dad’s entire living will be taken from him in one go. That’s how it must feel to him – Tiesey but then times the number of cows, times one hundred and eighty. He knows every cow and every calf.
Hanna disentangles herself from me – her sticky skin slowly pulls free from mine. I sometimes feel as though she’s one of the celestial bodies on my ceiling that fall down from time to time, meaning that I’ve run out of wishes to make; although I’ve learned that the heavens aren’t a wishing-well but a mass grave. Every star is a dead child, and the most beautiful star is Matthies – Mum taught us that. That was why I was afraid on some days that he would fall and end up in someone else’s garden, and that we wouldn’t notice.
‘We have to get ourselves to the safe zone,’ Hanna says.
‘Exactly.’
‘But when then, when are we going to the other side?’
My sister sounds impatient. She doesn’t know much about waiting and always wants to do everything right away. I’m more cautious; that’s why so many things pass me by, because things can be impatient sometimes too.
‘You’re good at talking but not much comes of it.’
I promise Hanna I’ll try harder and say, ‘When the mice are away, love will play.’
‘Is that another plague? Mice?’
‘No, it’s protection for when the cat comes back.’
‘What’s love?’
I think for a moment and then say, ‘Like the eggnog Granny on the less religious side used to make that was thick and golden yellow: to get it to taste nice, it was important to add all the ingredients in the right order and the right proportions.’
‘Eggnog’s gross,’ Hanna says.
‘Because you have to learn to like it. You don’t like love at first either but it starts to taste better, and sweeter, with time.’
Hanna clamps on to me briefly – she holds me the way she holds her dolls, under my armpits. Mum and Dad never cuddle; that must be because otherwise some of your secrets end up sticking to the other person, like Vaseline. That’s why I never spontaneously give hugs myself – I’m not sure which secrets I want to give away.