Dad squints to figure out how high the silver-plated skates should hang. He has three screws clamped between his lips in case one falls, and he’s holding an electric drill. Mum stands, damp-eyed, watching from a distance, the vacuum cleaner hose held aloft. I look at her white vest which is visible because the belt of her dressing gown has come loose, and I can see her saggy breasts through the thin fabric. They look just like two egg meringues, the kind Obbe sometimes makes and sells in the playground in freezer bags, four at a time. If the egg is too old the white gets thinner and this makes the meringue soggy. Dad climbs down the kitchen steps and Mum turns off the vacuum cleaner, making the silence seem silver too.
‘They’re crooked,’ Mum says then.
‘They aren’t,’ Dad says.
‘Yes, they are. Look, from here you can see they’re crooked.’
‘Then you shouldn’t stand there. Crooked doesn’t exist, they hang differently from every angle.’
Mum pulls her dressing gown belt tight, hurries out of the living room, pulling the vacuum cleaner along with her by its hose – it follows her around the house all day like an obedient dog. Sometimes I’m jealous of that ugly blue beast – she seems to have more of a relationship with it than with her own children. At the end of every week I see her cleaning its tummy with great love and putting a new hoover bag in it, while mine is about to burst.
I look at the ice skates again. The insides are lined with red velvet. They’re not hanging straight. I don’t say anything about it. Dad has gone to sit on the sofa and is staring ahead glassily. There’s a bit of dust on his shoulders. He’s still holding the drill in his hand.
‘You look like a scarecrow, Dad,’ Obbe, who has just come in, says in a challenging tone. I hadn’t heard my brother come back until about five in the morning. I lay waiting, my heart pounding, analysing every sound: the slaloming of his footsteps, the way he felt along the wall, forgot to skip the creaking steps – the sixth and the twelfth. I heard him hiccuping and not long after that he threw up into the toilet in the bathroom. This has been the pattern for a few nights in a row. My pyjamas are constantly soaked in sweat. According to Dad, vomiting is an old leftover sin the body needs to get rid of. I knew Obbe erred by killing animals, but what he did wrong by going to barn parties, I didn’t understand. What I did know was that he kept putting his tongue in different girls’ mouths. I could see that through my bedroom window – he stood there in the light of the stable lamp as though he was Jesus, surrounded by a heavenly glow, and then each time I’d press my mouth to my forearm and use my tongue to run circles on my sweaty skin. It tasted salty. This morning I didn’t say much to Obbe, so as not to inhale any bacteria that would make me throw up too. It reminded me of the first and last time I’d been sick, when Matthies had still been alive.
It was a Wednesday – I was about eight – and I’d gone with Dad to fetch bread from the bakery in the village. On the way back, he gave me a currant bun, an extra-large one. It was still deliciously fresh, without blue and white spots. When we arrived at Granny’s – we always dropped her off a feed-bag full of bread – I started to feel nauseous. We walked around the back because the front door was more for decoration, and I’d thrown up onto the soil of her vegetable patch, the currants swimming in the brownish puddle like swollen beetles. It was the spot where Granny planted her carrots. Dad had quickly kicked a layer of soil over it with his boot. When the carrots were pulled up, I expected Granny to get sick at any moment and die because of me. At the time I wasn’t yet afraid I would die myself, because that only came when Matthies didn’t come home, when the incident in the garden became multiple versions of itself. In the worst version, I’d escaped death by the skin of my teeth. I sometimes wondered whether the girls pushed their tongues so far down Obbe’s throat that this was why he threw up, like when you stick a toothbrush too far into your mouth and it makes you gag. Mum and Dad didn’t ask where he’d been or why he kept stinking of beer and cigarettes.
*
‘Shall we go for a bike ride?’ I whisper to Hanna, who is sitting behind the sofa, drawing. None of her figures has a body, only a head, reflecting the way we’re only focused on other people’s moods. They look sad or angry. She has her overnight case clenched under her right arm. Since she came back from her sleepover, she’s been carrying her case around all over the place, as though she wants to hang on to the possibility of escape. We’re not allowed to touch it or even comment on it.
‘Where to?’
‘To the lake.’
‘What do you want to do there?’
‘The Plan,’ is all I say.
She nods. It’s time to set our plans in action – we can’t stay here any longer.
In the hall Hanna puts on her anorak that hangs on the blue coat peg. Obbe’s is yellow, mine is green. Next to mine there’s a red peg. The coat isn’t missing but the body that should be wearing it is. Only Mum and Dad’s hang on wooden hangers, which are warped from the damp of rain showers in their collars. They were once the only reliable shoulders in the house but are now sagging more and more.
I suddenly think of the time that Dad took hold of me by my hood. Matthies had only been dead a couple of weeks. I’d asked Dad why we weren’t allowed to talk about him, and whether he knew if there was a library in heaven where you could borrow books without getting a fine if you were late taking them back. Matthies didn’t have any money with him. We forgot to return our books so often – particularly the Roald Dahls and the Angry Witch series, which we read in secret because our parents said they were godless books. We didn’t want to entrust them back to the librarian. She was never nice to us. Matthies said she was afraid of children with greasy fingers and children who folded over the corners of the pages. Only children who didn’t have a real home, a place they could always return to, made dog-ears – this was why they had to keep a record, the way I would later myself even though mine were more like a mouse’s ears. When I asked Dad that question, he’d picked me up by my hood and hung me from the red peg. I dangled around a bit with my feet swinging but I couldn’t get myself free. The ground had disappeared from beneath my feet.
‘Who asks the questions around here?’ he said.
‘You do,’ I said.
‘Wrong. God does.’
I had a good think. Had God ever asked me a question? I couldn’t remember one, though I thought of lots of answers to questions people could potentially ask me. Maybe that was why I didn’t hear God.
‘You can hang there until Matthies comes back.’
‘When’s he coming back then?’
‘When your feet are back on the ground.’
I looked down. From my earlier experiences of growing, I knew this could take quite a long time. Dad pretended to leave but came back after a few seconds. My coat zip was digging into my throat painfully, breathing was difficult. I was set back down on the floor and never asked another question about my brother. I deliberately built up a big fine at the library and sometimes read the stories out loud under my duvet in the hope that Matthies could hear them in heaven, ending with a hashtag the way I did when using my Nokia to leave a message for Belle about an important test.
*
I cycle along the dike behind Hanna; her case is on her cargo rack. We pass our neighbour Lien halfway. I try not to look at her son who is sitting on the back of her bike, even though I know I’m not a paedophile. There’s something angelic about him with his blond hair and I love angels, whether they’re older or younger than me. But Granny says you should never leave the fox to watch the geese. Granny doesn’t have a fox or any geese, but I can imagine it not going well if you left the two together. Lien greets us from a distance. She looks worried. Now we have to smile back cheerfully so she doesn’t ask any questions, not to us or our parents.
‘Pretend to be happy,’ I say quietly to Hanna.
‘I’ve forgotten how to.’
‘As though it’s for the school photo.’
‘Oh, right.’
Hanna and I smile our broadest grins, and the corners of my mouth pull. We pass Lien without any difficult questions. I glance back for a moment at her son, suddenly picturing him dangling from the rope in the attic – angels always have to be hung up so that they can spin on their own axis and offer everyone around them the same support. I blink a few times to get rid of the horrible image and think about what Reverend Renkema said last Sunday during the service. It was from Luke: ‘Evil does not enter us from the outside but from the inside. Therein lies our ailment. The tax collector beat his breast and prayed. He beat his breast as though to say: here is the source of all evil.’
I press my fist to my chest for a moment, so hard that all of my body tenses and I begin to lurch on my bike, whispering to myself, ‘Forgive me, God.’ Then I put my hands back on the handlebars to be a good example to Hanna. She’s not allowed to cycle no-handed. When she does, I tell her off, just like how every time a vehicle wants to pass us, I cry ‘Car!’ or ‘Tractor!’
There’s a gap between Hanna’s front teeth like a planting machine. I feel more air enter my tense chest momentarily. Sometimes it’s like there’s a giant sitting on me, and when I hold my breath at night to get closer to Matthies, he sometimes watches from my desk chair, with big eyes like a newborn calf. He encourages me, saying, ‘You have to hold on for longer, much longer.’ Sometimes I think that the Big Friendly Giant has escaped from my book because I once left it open on my bedside table and fell asleep. But this giant isn’t friendly, more angry and domineering. He doesn’t have gills and yet he can hold his breath for ages, sometimes all night.
When we reach the bridge we throw our bikes onto the verge. There’s a wooden sign at the start of the railings that has the following painted on it: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ It’s from Peter. There’s an empty chewing gum packet in the grass. Someone wanted to get to the other side with fresh breath. The lake is calm, like a pious face in which no lies can be found. There’s already a thin layer of ice here and there at the water’s edge. I throw a pebble at it. It lands on top of the ice. Hanna steps onto one of the boulders. She puts her case down next to her and stares at the other side, her hand sheltering her eyes.
‘I’ve heard they hide themselves away in pubs.’
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘Men. And you know what they like?’
I don’t reply. Seen from behind, my sister isn’t my sister but someone who could pass for anybody – her dark hair is getting longer. I think she’s deliberately let it grow so long so that Mum has to plait it every day, meaning Mum has to touch her every day. My hair is always fine as it is.
‘Chewing gum that doesn’t lose its taste.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I say.
‘You always have to be sweet and stay sweet.’
‘Or they should chew less.’
‘In any case you mustn’t be too sticky.’
‘Mine always loses its taste really quickly.’
‘But you do chew like a cow.’
I think about Mum. Her jaws chew so much each day, there must be increased tension, and increased tension is a reason to jump off a feed silo, or to break the thermometer Mum uses to measure the temperature of the cheese and swallow the mercury – Dad has been warning us about mercury since we were very small: it would be a fast death, he said. It taught me that you die fast or slowly and that both things have their advantages and disadvantages.
I stand behind Hanna and lay my head against her anorak. She is breathing calmly.
‘When do we leave?’ Hanna asks.
The cold wind blows right through my coat. I shiver.
‘Tomorrow after the coffee break.’
Hanna doesn’t reply.
‘The vet said I was complete,’ I say then.
‘What does he know of those things? He only sees complete animals – the incomplete ones get put down.’ Hanna’s voice suddenly sounds bitter. Is she jealous?
I put my hands on either side of her hips. One push and she’d just topple into the water. I’d be able to see then how Matthies got underwater, how it ever could have happened.
And then I do it. I push her from the boulder into the water and watch her as she gets a ducking before coming back up again spluttering, her eyes wide with fear like two black fishing floats. I shout her name, ‘Hanna, Hanna, Hanna.’ But the wind beats my words onto the boulders. I kneel at the water’s edge to pull her out by her arm. After that nothing is the same any more. I lie on top of my wet sister with my entire weight, repeating, ‘Don’t die, don’t die.’ We don’t get up until the church bell tolls five times. Water drips from my sister from every side. I take her hand and hold it tightly, squeezing it as though it’s a wet dish-cloth. We’re as empty as the Queen Beatrix biscuit tin on the breakfast table we once won on the Postcode Lottery: no one can fill us up. Hanna picks up her overnight case. Her body is shivering as much as the red and white wind sock blowing next to the bridge. I’ve almost forgotten how to cycle, how we’re ever going to get home. I no longer know where we’re going. The Promised Land on the other side has suddenly become a drab postcard.
I shake my head, hold my fists to my temples and force my knuckles into the skin.
‘Yes, I did,’ Hanna says, ‘that’s the story.’