Renate Dorrestein

The Darkness that Divides Us

Translated from the Dutch by Hester Velmans

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

Copyright © Renate Dorrestein, 2003

English translation copyright © Hester Velmans and World Editions, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Millennium Images/Hollandse Hoogte

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Het duister dat ons scheidt in the Netherlands in 2003 by Contact, Amsterdam

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-042-4

No part of this publication may be reproduced and/or published by means of printing, photocopying or by any means, without the permission of World Editions bv, Breda, the Netherlands. Phone: +31 (0)76 523 3533. Internet: www.worldeditions.org.

A is for Abacus

We must at some point have made up our minds never to exchange another word with her, because, as if by prearrangement, there was always a deathly silence the moment she came into view. We’d clamp our lips shut and look the other way when we saw her coming into the schoolyard or when we passed her in the street, playing hopscotch or marbles all by herself.

When had it started? It must have been the year we learned to read, in Miss Joyce’s class. So long ago, anyway, that it was as if a ring, faint but unmistakable, had gradually been drawn round her, marking the spot where she was standing, walking, or sitting: a sign that she had been singled out as a target. As the scapegoat.

Our silence did not mean we didn’t have anything to say to her. We wanted there to be no mistake about that, and that’s why we often lay in wait for her after school. Four of us, or six, or, if there was nothing else going on, a bunch more.

We’d hide in the shrubbery on the old village green, behind the hornbeam hedge whose leaves in spring were the colour of chocolate. In front of the hedge stood a bench overgrown with brambles. In the old days, when the green was still being maintained, it was a popular spot for courting couples. Now it was mostly deserted. But it wasn’t considered particularly unsafe, since it was overlooked by all the houses surrounding the green; anybody could see what was happening out there, unless everybody happened to be looking the other way at the exact same time.

Elbowing one another in the ribs, we hid behind the hedge. The moist earth was crawling with spiders that tried to scramble away on buckling legs when you held a match to them. They made a popping sound as they burned; the shrivelled little ball gave off a measly puff of smoke.

As soon as we saw her coming, we put away our matches and ducked. We were packed so close together that we were just one big huddle of quivering muscle and flaring nostrils.

On the other side of the hedge we heard her pace slacken. Her footsteps slowed until she came to a sudden halt. She was weighing her chances, probably: her after-school tutoring session had run a little longer than usual, dinner smells were already wafting out of the open windows, the street was empty; all the kids had been called inside. Maybe today was her lucky day. She started fidgeting, her fingers plucking at a hem, as if trying to find something to hold on to. Her clothes were always a muddy colour. It was only to be expected of those Luducos, our mothers said, shaking their heads. Men didn’t know how to do the laundry, nor did they have a clue about dressing a little girl properly. ‘The poor child,’ they said.

We stared at each other, our cheeks bulging with excitement. Nobody wanted to go first, or worse, last. That thought spurred us to leap out, all together at the same time, to block her way. Arms crossed, legs planted wide, chins raised. A human barricade.

Her mouth and eyes rounded into perfect Os, her face grew so pale that the freckles looked like ants crawling across her nose, and her carroty plaits, which she had grown long again just to annoy us, sprang loose from the shock.

There was a total silence all around. No sound of telephones ringing in any of the houses. No pan clanging on any cooker. No baby even dared to start crying. No housewife was chatting with a neighbour over the hedge. Even the brambles stopped growing as we thrust the scrap of paper with our latest ultimatum at her, at eye level so that she could read it. She had trouble working out what it said. But we had plenty of time. We gazed at her, relaxed, as drops of sweat welled on her upper lip. When she was finally done deciphering our message word for word, we stuffed the piece of paper down her throat to make sure it wouldn’t be used against us. Obediently she chewed and swallowed it. She kept her eyes down, but we were only too aware how blue they were, as blue and brazen as ever, despite her cowering demeanour. The picture of innocence, she was. Oh, she was good. We gave her a shove, sending her stumbling across the deserted square with our promise churning in her gut: ‘We gonna get you, scumbag.’

The moment she disappeared from view we were overcome with the urge to shake ourselves like dazed, wet dogs. Suddenly we felt a pressing need for noise. We started making a racket, yelling whatever came into our heads, to convince ourselves we had every right to put her on notice that for the rest of her days her life was going to be a living hell. Tomorrow we would make her pay. Or, better yet, a few days from now. Just as she began to think she was safe again, we’d give it to her good, we would. This year was our last chance: soon we’d be turning twelve, and at the end of the summer vacation we were all going to different schools. At home they had already started gazing at us sentimentally, reminiscing about our happy childhood, which, they said, was very nearly over.

All of us—most of us, anyway—were born here, in the sole modern housing estate of a sleepy little town that would have fallen off the map long ago if a stretch of no-man’s-land squeezed between canal and motorway hadn’t appealed to a bunch of builders as a prime piece of property.

Our fathers smugly declared they had been the very first residents to move here. Pioneers of sorts, they were. In those days there wasn’t another housing estate anywhere else in the whole entire country, I kid you not! The national TV news had come to film the prime minister inaugurating the first house—at least that’s what our mothers told us, their eyes still glowing with pride. They’d lost no time spiffing up the place, planting bamboo and embellishing their yards with droll garden ornaments. Then they were off to the salon to have their hair highlighted.

Your dad did have to earn good money if you wanted your own little plot of split-level property here, but in relative terms the prices were a joke. For a similar chunk of dough in Amsterdam, you’d be in a third-floor walk-up with no view. And here you had all that fresh air into the bargain.

That first summer on the housing estate, our parents barbecued up a storm. The whole neighbourhood joined in; after all, pioneers have an obligation to eat well, they have to set an example! Our mums made potato salad by the bathtub, our dads tied on aprons and sharpened their carving knives. In winter everyone pitched in to erect a colossal Christmas tree in the new shopping-mall square, where the wind howled so fiercely that they’d needed gallons of mulled wine not to get blown off their feet. And by the time summer came round again, we were born, one after another, in dribs and drabs, but pretty close in age all the same, as if the bank had threatened to foreclose on the mortgage unless a baby was produced by a certain date.

Back in those days we had no idea how that worked, babies getting born. We had no concept of all that’s involved, or of the possible consequences. We simply appeared out of nowhere, from one moment to the next, to our parents’ immense joy. They leaned over our cribs, they cradled us in their arms—carefully, because we were such precious little darlings—and showed us that we really had the best of both worlds: bathrooms with all mod cons and hygienic stainless-steel kitchens, but also the countryside outside our back doors, brimming with cow parsley in bloom and mud that would ooze into our wellies when we were a little older, squishy and delicious.

We sucked air into our lungs and screeched with delight. We hollered so loudly that we could hear one another right through the walls right and left of us and across the street. This, too, was part of the deal: little friends our own age, thrown in for free. What fun it would be to grow up together—first steps, first words, first tooth, first bloody lip. And we’d ride our tricycles together! Where else could you ride a tricycle as safely as down our lane?

We had it made. We were in clover. As if the whole world knew exactly what we deserved.

The heart of the original village consisted of four narrow streets around a central square. It was there that our mummies headed every day to do their shopping.

Shaking their highlighted curls, they parked our pushchairs inside the musty-smelling greengrocer’s; the man’s fingers were so swollen with arthritis that he had trouble wrapping the crisp fresh lettuce in newspaper, and if you didn’t have the exact change on you, you had to slip behind the counter and help yourself from the till. No place else in the world had such tasty vegetables, our mothers assured him, I really mean it, Mr De Vries. They squatted down in their tight jeans and handed us carrots to suck on. Then they dawdled for a while longer, hoping for a chat; it wasn’t as if they had that many people to talk to, but Mr De Vries just went on silently weighing the split peas, and, suddenly embarrassed, they fled from the gloomy shop, needing to put distance between themselves and old age and aching bones and hard work—out, out!

Once safely outside, they collected themselves. They bent down and with flushed cheeks made shushing noises into our perambulators. You could tell how glad they were that we, even more than they, were helplessly dependent on things beyond our control. After all, they didn’t need anyone to wipe their little bums. They stuffed the lettuce firmly into the pushchair’s shopping net, and once again we felt ourselves going bumpity-bump over the cobblestones. Overhead we could see blue skies with the odd cloud here and there that looked like an elephant, or a chicken. Then we’d pop our thumbs into our mouths, because nobody was asking our opinion anyway.

The butcher’s. Meat slaughtered on the premises.

The baker’s. A country brown loaf.

When our mums were done with their shopping, they’d gather on the village green across from the former rectory. We lay dozing on plaid blankets, snuggled against their hips. Their tanned, pale, or freckled faces glistened in the sun; they dabbed their necks, their voices brayed. Even in our semi-comatose state it made us uneasy, we got itchy, we began to whinge for no reason, just to get their attention. Their panic was understandable. To be twenty years old, far from the big city, banished to a brand-new housing estate in some itty-bitty backwater no one’s ever heard of, left to cope all by yourself in this suburban Wild West while your husband was stuck somewhere out there in a traffic jam—but then they would shake themselves, grabbing their painted toenails or the ends of their bleached hair and then tugging as hard as they could, and they were off again, shrieking with hysterical laughter. There was always something to gossip about. There was always some scandal you could freely dish the dirt on, even in the presence of infants. And there were always good snacks, too, to be shared around.

The summer we first opened our astonished eyes, the treat was often strawberries: it was a great year for them, they were as big as duck eggs, the whole world reeked of their sweet, cloying aroma. With their tapered fingernails our mothers pinched the stems from the berries, they bit them in half and gently prodded the pieces into our drooling mouths. The juice ran down our chins, staining our baby knits.

‘Watch out for wasps,’ Lucy’s mother cautioned.

In the sea of maternal bodies she was the only one you could have picked out blindfolded. That was because she smelled of patchouli, whereas our mothers all smelled of Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris. Because our mummies had our daddies, they had real husbands who could afford to buy them perfume recommended in Avenue magazine, and a closet full of sexy summer frocks besides.

Lucy’s mum, in her slinky, home-made, invariably black dresses, with her sleek black hair, was the exception in more ways than one, because she was the only one who lived in the old village. Oh, not very long, she replied when asked how long she’d been there, and laughed. Even though our mums couldn’t find out as much about her as they’d like, they were fond of her. She was the merriest of them all and could always be counted on to come up with a solution to any problem. She could tell your fortune with the help of a deck of Tarot cards. There was no point looking back, she would say, you should always look ahead at what was next. ‘Look, this is the Three of Cups. The card of friendship,’ she told our uprooted mothers. ‘That’s the most important card in the deck.’

In unison we burped and in unison we produced stinky nappies. We slept, we had the colic, we learned you were supposed to chortle if someone cooed ‘ta-ta’ at you, we stuffed things into our mouths, we grew. We grew like cabbages. At first we reconnoitred the world on our hands and knees, but soon we started walking and pulling breakables off tabletops. We explored electric outlets and discovered the stairs. We said ‘Mama’ for the first time and were practically hugged to death. Every new milestone was recorded for posterity by video cameras. As far as we knew, the world revolved around us, and every so often we got to blow out another candle on our birthday cake.

Our daddy gave us a brightly coloured abacus, so that one day we’d be able to do sums, to calculate the costs and the benefits, credit and debit and all the rest, or, alternatively, a doll with eyes that shut and real hair, to prepare us for a role no less important. With his heavy daddy-hand he ruffled our hair. He squeezed us close. He rolled around the bathroom floor with us. His face was set in a har-dee-har expression. He sprayed us with the garden hose. On Saturday afternoons we washed the car together, each armed with our own scrub-brush, for the rims. On Sundays we dug in the garden. We planted bulbs and raked leaves. ‘Is this paradise, or what?’ Daddy asked. But then he’d gaze over our head at the spindly elms poking up in the flat polder landscape, and let out a deep sigh.

At night, when they thought we were asleep, our mummy would snap at our daddy, ‘But who insisted on moving here in the first place?’

‘Oh, not you, I suppose!’

‘And now you’re home late for dinner every night.’

‘What did you expect? Did you think my office would open a branch out here in the boondocks?’

‘You’re away all day long, while I’m trapped here, cooped up with the kids!’

Through the walls we heard how mad our mummies were. They wanted a chance to show who they were—to the universe, to our fathers, perhaps even to us. They were special, goddamnit; they had talent and potential, far greater than your average Jane! After one of these outbursts you could bet your boots that the next morning we’d find them buttering our bread with a resentful glint in their eyes; it was we, after all, who were tying them down hand and foot. It was because we had to grow up in a place where the air was pure and the cow parsley grew that they were now stuck out here. We were their cross to bear—day in, day out.

We kept quiet as little mice, watching them muttering under their breath. When you realized that you were somebody’s cross to bear, it became hard to get the dry bread down, and your heart started pounding like mad. It seemed that your birth had set off an unanticipated chain reaction. Mummy had become invisible because of you! She was sacrificing herself for you! She had a whole laundry list of motherly grievances! Even hours later your hand wouldn’t stop shaking enough for your crayon to stay inside the lines.

When the day had had such an inauspicious start, we’d often spend the afternoon in the old rectory on the village green where Lucy lived with her mother and the Luducos.

It was a rambling, rather draughty house, with an old-fashioned doorbell pull, a panelled staircase and creaky wooden floors. Lucy’s mother, who didn’t believe in looking back at the past, had her studio on the second floor. Piles of books and papers lay scattered all over the floor. There were jam jars with dried paints on the windowsills, and the walls were papered with charcoal sketches for her picture books. Clara 13 was her most famous book, about a cow with a permanent streak of bad luck. All of us had a copy of it at home.

In the darkest corner of the room was a table topped with a green felt cloth. That was the Tarot table. Here your fortune was either made or lost. Here the Five of Wands made you war with yourself, the Wheel of Fortune turned everything topsy-turvy, and the Knight of Cups was known to turn up to save the day. Really, there was nothing supernatural about it, said Lucy’s mother, but hey, wait, look, here’s the Two of Pentacles, that amazing card that augurs a big change, plus the High Priest, the most protective card of all.

Eagerly our mummies saw their fortunes spelled out for them in the cards. They leaned over the fascinating pictures that told the story of their lives in cartoon-strip form. Meanwhile we stood there gaping at Lucy’s mum. She had a dimple in one cheek. Her eyes were cornflower blue. The buttons on her blouse were always half-undone, and when she crossed her legs, you could see a tanned limb through the long slit in her black skirt. Gazing at her, you’d feel so happy and dreamy inside that you couldn’t believe she could seriously be somebody’s mother. ‘Lucy is upstairs, kids,’ she’d say, glancing up from her cards. ‘Run along up and go play.’

We didn’t have to be told twice. We clambered up the staircase whose every tread let out a soft groan.

Since no one can make a living from picture books alone, Lucy’s mum had a couple of lodgers living on the third floor. The Luducos, as we called them, were two slow, amiable men of indeterminate age who were constantly on the phone. You hardly noticed their presence, except for their shoes lined up in the corridor. The ones belonging to Ludo were all black leather brogues; the ones belonging to Duco were sneakers in various stages of disintegration. We pinched our noses shut when we passed by.

Lucy’s domain was all the way upstairs in the attic.

Her room had a swing hanging from the rafters. There was always a bunch of fresh-picked pansies sitting in the dormer window. The floor was strewn with rugs and cushions. Lucy didn’t have a Minnie Mouse nightlight like ours, but an artistically swagged string of Christmas-tree lights nailed to the wall above the bed. On the wall opposite, her mother had painted a rainbow, with blue ocean waves underneath, and a ship filled with giraffes, zebras, and lions sticking out their perky heads.

We usually found Lucy sitting cross-legged on the floor when we came in, engrossed in some solitary activity that would immediately strike us as the only possible game anyone would want to play today; indeed, the game without which there wouldn’t even be a today. Eagerly we plopped down beside her and spat into our hands.

Under her Indian-cotton dresses Lucy’s knees were always a patchwork of scrapes and bruises; she had grubby toes sticking out of plastic sandals and the mud of half a riverbank under her fingernails. She was the exact same age as us, but she’d already experienced so much more. She had discovered a rusty treasure chest filled with gold ducats in the ruins of some old castle; she had battled sabre-toothed tigers; she had sailed a pirate ship, wearing a wooden leg and with a green parrot on her shoulder. She’d spilled hundreds of glasses of orange squash, too, without any dire fallout. Just watch us try that at home. At our house, spills always left telltale stains on the tablecloth.

We asked our fathers more than once for some clarification on those squash stains. Daddies always seemed to know everything. But even they had no good explanation. Besides, they would always get this funny look on their faces whenever we started on about the way things were done in the rectory, or explained that if something got spilled over there, Lucy’s mother just laughed it off. Then our dads would cough and leave the table to walk the dog—our dog King, Whisky, or Blondie.

Lucy told us our dads sometimes lingered on the green for hours, gazing up at the rectory’s lighted windows. They’d grab their groins and scratch down there for a while. And then they’d head home again. Back to their own wonderful, modern houses. Saved from the nuisances of living in a white elephant: crumbling concrete, dry rot, and sagging beams. You had to be completely nuts to want to live in a place like that in this day and age, our fathers thought—it’s cuckoo.

Lucy saw it all. Nothing escaped her, for she had not only a dormer window but also an eagle eye. She reported her findings to us in the rectory’s spacious, overgrown garden every afternoon. Seated on the rim of the sandbox the Luducos had built for her, we listened to her deductions. But when a grown-up came within earshot she’d go all dimple-cheeked, squinting up at them adorably.

‘Are you kids having fun?’

‘Yeah, we are,’ we’d babble, impatient.

‘What game are you playing?’

‘Eskimos,’ said Lucy.

Oh, those kids! The things they say—just this afternoon, for instance! So cute, the stuff they come out with!

And so we were able to exchange, unhindered, a wealth of information while losing our first baby teeth and learning to button our coats and telling our grannies what was going to happen when we turned four. ‘When I’m four I’m gonna go to school,’ we lisped earnestly. Thinking happily: And then I won’t fit in my old bed anymore. Oh boy, when you turned four! The morning of your birthday you’d wake up to find your legs sticking out a mile beyond the bars of your cot. Everyone knew that was what happened.

The nursery school was a few kilometres from where we lived. We walked the whole way there and back every day, stoic as seal hunters, and there we learned to snip, paste, and weave placemats. We also went on a school trip to Utrecht Cathedral. At the sight of the gigantic church organ, Lucy asked, thrilled, ‘Is that the Statue of Liberty?’

On the way back we belted out a Russian sea shanty.

We didn’t need any Tarot cards to see into the future, not even the Three of Cups. It was written in stone: our friendship would last forever.

B is for Beetle

The summer we turned six—one after another, in dribs and drabs, but pretty close to one another all the same—it wouldn’t stop raining. It rained so hard that our toes went mouldy inside our wellies and our fingertips were permanently wrinkly. It rained morning, noon, and night; it rained for every birthday party, right to the bitter end when our parents came to pick us up. Umbrellas on your birthday were a bad omen; everyone knew that. It meant something was hanging over your head, something bad was just waiting to happen.

Only in the night-time did it ever stay dry for a few hours, as if the elements were taking stealthy advantage of the darkness to gather fresh energy. But even then we didn’t get a break, because our sleep was still disturbed by the noise of water gurgling down the drainpipes. We dreamed that out in the meadow, where we went to play, the ditch overflowed its banks and swelled into a seething river. The water cascaded over the speed bumps and gushed down our streets. It sloshed against the front doors, it rose and kept rising. When we peered out our bedroom window, we saw bulging fish eyes staring blankly back at us. Alarmed, we dragged a chair over to the window so we could look out. In the moonlit waves we saw ruined lampshades bobbing by; pots that had once held lush houseplants; tablecloths whose colours, cross-stitched by our grannies, had begun to run; welcome mats; old newspapers; and the cushions of the living-room suite our daddies had worked so hard to pay for. Way out in the distance we even caught a glimpse of a cooker adrift, its pots and pans still rattling on top, and, not far behind, an entire family packed like sardines inside a giant enamel colander, paddling away like crazy. Not long now and we’d all be goners.

Upon waking up in the morning it was reassuring, to put it mildly, not to see fish scales plastered to the walls. We were so relieved that at breakfast we went a little wild. One fine day our mothers just lost it. Stop it! I can’t take it anymore! For Christ’s sake, go play outside, let off some of that steam! Their voices were at such a high pitch that we knew it meant trouble. Nervously we grabbed our macs from the peg, pulled on our boots, and got the hell out of there.

Your mother had to have the house to herself for a few hours every so often or she would go completely round the bend. Her own mother had felt the same, as had her mother before her; it couldn’t be helped, mothers as far back as the Stone Age all suffered from the same syndrome.

Heads tucked inside our mac hoods, we ran to our meadow to inspect the water level in our ditch. We hadn’t been there in all the weeks it had rained, and were surprised to find a crane and several backhoes parked there. When the summer was over they were going to start building a viaduct there. It had been in the newspaper; our parents had read it aloud to us, including all the pros and cons. So they were still intending to build that bridge? So you mean people thought that by the end of the summer, the world would still exist?

We were just debating amongst ourselves what we should do when Lucy came splashing along. Lifting her knees up high, she stomped down hard in puddle after puddle; at every splash her plaits would whip round her face and she’d shriek with delight. ‘Don’t you think we should build an ark?’ she called to us from a distance.

All the ominous thoughts were at once forgotten. We ran to Mr De Vries’s store for some vegetable crates. Then we raided our fathers’ tool chests for nails, nuts, bolts, saws, hammers, and pliers.

We worked in shifts, from early morning to late at night. Some of us sawed and hammered. The others had already started digging earthworms out of the mud, catching beetles, pill- and ladybugs, and trapping slugs so big and fat that they almost didn’t fit in the jam jars our mothers were kind enough to provide. You had to punch a hole in the lid to give them air; if they couldn’t breathe, they’d die. The toads, the slippery yellow-bellied salamanders, the tadpoles, and the sticklebacks were kept in buckets, with some duckweed. After the deluge, every crawling or swimming creature was assured of a safe future, if we had anything to do with it.

And on an afternoon when the clouds hung so low you could practically reach up and touch them without even standing on tiptoe, we started with equal verve on every flying creature there was.

Some way off, next to one of the idle backhoes, we spied the new kid watching us again. We’d noticed him lurking about for the past several days. He was all skin and bones, and his heavy blond hair made his head look at least three times too big for the rest of him. ‘Here comes Water-on-the-brain!’ we hissed, as soon as we caught sight of him. When he was around we found ourselves talking in louder voices and laughing more than normal. Noisily we bragged about our ark and our animals. We gave each other encouraging slaps on the back while out of the corner of our eyes keeping careful tabs on the new boy hanging out by himself, aimlessly kicking at clumps of grass.

But catching a bird by the tail with some stranger watching your every move was harder than you’d think. We finally plunked ourselves down at the water’s edge, panting heavily, for a powwow. Somebody suggested scattering breadcrumbs on the ground and then pouncing with salt and a net. Lucy said we could probably rustle up a net big enough in the rectory’s basement. We immediately took her at her word. In that basement anything we ever needed always seemed to be there for the taking, usually in plain view, as if helpful hands had put it out for us.

Waiting for Lucy to return, we were just lighting a bulrush cigar when Water-on-the-brain approached us. He gazed at us with his hands in his pockets. ‘So, how’s it going?’ he asked politely.

We glanced at our jars and buckets. We already had quite a trove.

‘How’re you gonna catch the pelicans? Or the zebras?’

We were rather taken aback for a moment.

‘I can help, if you want.’

To save face, we howled with scornful laughter. Oh, sure! Really? Maybe he knew how to catch a duck-billed platypus! And we didn’t have any dinosaurs yet; we’d welcome any suggestions. Yeah, right! We started shouting out the names of animals. We yelled elephant, we yelled lion, we yelled crocodile, we yelled and yelled, all excited at first, but then less so, as it dawned on us that now our ark would have to be at least ten times bigger and, come to think of it, we’d probably need cages, too, if we didn’t want to end up being mauled or devoured.

We were still yelling when Lucy returned, dragging a huge fisherman’s net behind her. She began spreading it out in the mud without deigning to look at the new boy. It was only when she was done wiping her hands on her jeans that she turned to him and asked, ‘And who are you?’ She was a head taller than him.

‘Thomas Iedema,’ he answered promptly. ‘I moved in last Monday, on Shepherd’s Close.’ He gestured at the cluster of houses in the distance. The rain had plastered his hair to his oversized skull.

We didn’t know whether to feel envy or mistrust. We had spent our wholes lives in one place. Here was a boy who had actually lived somewhere else, which meant he must have seen quite a bit of the world. But hadn’t we been told that moving house was for Gypsies? It only led to trouble, and broken crockery.

‘My father’s got a job here, with the Parks Department,’ he went on. ‘We used to have a shop, but it closed. So …’

Impatiently, Lucy asked, ‘So what do you want from us, exactly?’

Thomas Iedema shrugged. ‘I know about all the animals. My father has this book, it’s so cool! It starts with the amoebas. First you have to work through all the invertebrates and arthropods; you’re halfway through the book before you get to the mice and such. So if you want, I could …’

‘We could use some of those ducks over there.’ She pointed at the ditch.

‘Those are moorhens, actually.’

‘So? We don’t have any of them yet, either.’

Strange, really, that after so many years, this single moment should remain etched so deeply in our minds. It’s been a long time since we were mud-spattered kids. The kind of thing we think about nowadays is whether or not to move in together, or whether or not to buy an affordable second-hand SmartCar. But if, on some rare occasion, late at night in bed, we allow ourselves to think about the events we set in motion, wincing with shame, we’ll have a glimpse of this one scene, when it all started: that innocent challenge down by the water.

‘Or don’t you dare?’ Lucy taunted. She was moving her hips as if about to start dancing. Her eyes shone.

‘He doesn’t dare!’ we all shouted in chorus.

‘Scaredy-cat,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s really shallow.’

Quick as flash Thomas unbuckled his belt, whipped off his trousers and, without a moment’s hesitation, slid down the bank into the ditch. Arms flailing, he waded through the murky water. The two moorhens immediately rose out of the water and whirred into the stand of rushes growing on the opposite bank.

We whooped and yelled.

Startled, Thomas lost his balance. He went under. He came up again, his hair matted with duckweed, water pouring out of his nose and ears. He was coughing and spluttering like crazy.

‘Hey, stupid!’ we jeered. ‘You should be on the other side. That’s where they’ve gone!’

Because he was so short, the water came up to his waist. The pelting rain was leaving bubbles as big as tennis balls on the surface. The moorhens quacked in the rushes. Then, suddenly, Thomas let out a yell and plunged head first in the water, throwing up fountains of spray. For a split second his striped shirt ballooned around his neck, then it, too, went under. We saw one foot kick in the air, then the other, and then they too were gone.

We waited.

After a little while we cupped our hands to our mouths. We shouted, ‘Hey!’

The water swirled and bubbled.

‘Hey, show-off!’

The moorhens re-emerged from the rushes. They paddled into view, their coal-black heads cocked as if to show they felt quite safe again, now that their hunter lay drowned at the bottom of the ditch. If his body was ever recovered, we’d be in big trouble! We just stood there, petrified.

‘Out of my way!’ screamed Lucy, running up with the bird-catching net in her arms.

Relieved, we stepped aside for her, then closed ranks again. We each picked up a corner of the net, regrouping this way and that since we couldn’t immediately agree on the best way to proceed—dredging, dragging, each had his or her own quite valid opinion about what to do, and clung to it stubbornly.

‘One two three … now!’ cried Lucy, jumping into the water with a huge splash. She landed safely, no more than knee-deep in the ditch, and without hesitating bent down and plunged her whole head underwater to reconnoitre, her little bum sticking up in the air.

At her Now! some of us had already started casting out the net, but others hesitated, so that the net wafted down in slow motion, entangling Lucy as she tried to stand up again. We were in such a tizzy that, without thinking, we began pulling it in. The net went taut, it cut into our hands, and Lucy went down. The water closed over her head.

We let go of the net. We were in a complete panic. We wanted to go home, we wanted to be in the kitchen watching Mummy shell peas with her steady hands. But we couldn’t move. We tried to think of water lilies and other nice things, and then about how great it was that we were going to learn to read, after the summer vacation! Once you knew how to read, our parents had told us, you could have all these vicarious experiences without having to live them yourself. Reading books let you have life doled out to you like homeopathic drops: diluted to the hundredth degree. Which was definitely a better option, sometimes.

Suddenly, with a great roar, Thomas shot up out of the water. Coughing his guts out, he flung something black up on the embankment. He panted, ‘A rat, quick, get a bucket on top of it!’

Just a few feet away from him, struggling furiously with the net, Lucy, too, was on her feet. Flailing wildly with her arms, her legs planted wide in the water, she finally managed to disentangle herself. Indignantly, she cried, ‘Wasn’t it a moorhen you were supposed to catch?’

The next day they each had a ring on their finger drawn in magic marker. If you dared so much as think ‘Thomas Water-on-the-brain,’ you’d get a vicious kick in the shins from Lucy. His name was now Thomas the Rat. He came up to her chin, and the work on the ark was abandoned.

Toward the end of that drenched summer, a few weeks later, we all received an invitation to the engagement party. At home there was some uncomfortable laughter when our folks tore open the envelope and read the card to us. You could tell Lucy had told her mum exactly what to write.

‘Should we give them a salt-and-pepper set?’ our own mums sniggered to our dads. ‘Or maybe a toaster?’ To us they said, waving their hands, ‘Oh, run off and play, for goodness’ sake,’ which made us prick up our ears, because we wanted to report back to Lucy later what they’d said. But Lucy was much too preoccupied with Thomas to listen to our stories.

Enviously, we wondered what those two could be up to. At Lucy’s house just about everything was permitted, as long as her mum wasn’t disturbed while at work in her studio. She didn’t pay any attention to the kids that came over. She didn’t expect you to sit and have something to drink with her in the kitchen first, either; you could just go ahead and do whatever, she didn’t care. Lucy’s announcement of their engagement was probably the first time her mum had even noticed Thomas.

Maybe the two of them were busy building a cabin in the rectory hallway; maybe they were even finding out where babies came from! The latter was a mystery that had become of increasing interest to us of late, especially since we never seemed able to get a satisfactory answer at home. You came out of your mother’s tummy, yeah, obviously, there were pictures to prove it, a whole album full. But the way you got into that tummy in the first place—that was such an unbelievably gross story that you knew right off they must be pulling your leg, no matter how serious their expression. We were sure it involved a completely different scenario, something to do with gravity, or something. Didn’t our fathers always tell us everything had a scientific explanation?

Without Lucy to play with, the days were long and tedious. Every time we started some game with high hopes, it always ended up getting horribly bogged down, now that Lucy wasn’t around to fine-tune the rules if necessary. Afternoons that should have been perfect for a game of Ali-Baba-and-the-Forty-Thieves ended in chaos and angry tears. All our treasure hunts, races, and dress-up sessions went sour. And every time we snuck over to Thomas’s house on Shepherd’s Close to try kidnapping him, we got there too late. He’d already gone off to play somewhere, said his mother.

She was a short, squat woman, with beady round eyes that looked as if she was about to apologize for something, and she always had a rag in her hand to polish our fingerprints off the door jamb. According to our mothers, who were past masters at sniffing out information on newcomers in record time, she was dirt-phobic. She never set foot outside, they said, except to shake out her dust mop.

Why on earth someone with that kind of problem would marry a groundsman, who tramped home every day with mud on his shoes, was the sort of thing they loved to speculate about. ‘Maybe he’s really good at it,’ they whispered, covering their mouths. At what, Mummy? What’s he so good at? Oh, child, that’s none of your business.

Sometimes we’d catch sight of the man who was really good at none of our business, maintaining the grounds of the housing estate, or on the village green. He wore a broad-brimmed yellow sou’wester on account of the rain, that hid his face completely. There was something about him that made you think of a buffalo, the way he charged at the wild roses and barberry bushes. The kids living on Pitchfork Hill had seen him with their own two eyes (cross their hearts and hope to die) pulling out great handfuls of stinging nettles without gloves on or anything! We were terribly impressed. We decided that if we upset Thomas even in the slightest, the nettle-man would break every bone in our body, and suck out the marrow, too.

The engagement party was set for Sunday afternoon. It was supposed to be an English tea party. We weren’t exactly looking forward to that part, because tea always gave us such a woolly tongue. But at four o’clock our mothers firmly parted our hair with a wet comb or else tamed it with a couple of festive barrettes, they gave us the thoughtfully selected presents to carry, and told us to have a good time ‘and mind your manners and don’t forget to say thank you at the end.’

At the rectory, the door was opened by the Luducos, dressed in black tails and bowties. Their sparse hair was slicked back with gel, which made their kindly faces look even more clueless than usual. ‘May we take your coats, sir, madam?’ they asked us.

We stared at them open-mouthed.

‘Today we are the butlers,’ Duco whispered. He was still wearing his stinky sneakers; that’s how we could tell it was him.

In the hall Lucy and Thomas were busy tickling each other to death, so we stepped into the living room. Our spirits immediately rose. Such a spread of pies, cakes of all kinds and all sizes, and white-bread finger sandwiches cut into triangles! We were allowed to help ourselves to as much as we liked, said Lucy’s mum, and if anyone didn’t like tea, there was orange squash, too. She was padding around on bare feet and had a bright-red scarf knotted around her head, which made her look even less like somebody’s mother than usual. You couldn’t imagine her ever sacrificing herself for Lucy, or becoming invisible or anything.

The news about the orange squash came as a huge relief. We completely forgot to shake hands. We fell upon the food, ravenous.

As we were stuffing our faces, Lucy and Thomas entered the room, their hair all messed up. ‘I had him begging for mercy,’ laughed Lucy. Lovingly, she started pummelling his big round head.

‘But you peed in your pants!’

‘Not true!’

‘Do try to leave your fiancé in one piece, darling!’ said her mother. ‘And now, let’s raise our glasses to you two, shall we? Does everyone have tea or squash? What about our butlers?’

‘We’re having iced tea,’ said Duco, with a grin. He raised his glass.

‘Cheers!’ Ludo, too, waved his glass. When he looked at Lucy, all these little laugh-lines appeared around his eyes. He nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say, ‘Ah, that Lucy!’ At home our daddies sometimes acted that way, too, if they were feeling particularly proud of you. It gave you the delicious feeling that you were capable of just about anything; fathers could do that just by gazing at you a certain way. That Ludo sure would make a great father one day. He sometimes gazed at Lucy’s mother with that same kind of look in his eyes—you know, the way mothers love to be looked at. Is that a new dress you’re wearing, darling? Have you done something with your hair? That colour looks great on you. No doubt about it: Ludo would definitely make the grade. Only he’d better get a move on with it. He was no spring chicken.

‘Right, my little turtledoves,’ said Lucy’s mother cheerfully. ‘Here’s to the two of you!’

We all cheered Hurray! at the top of our lungs.

Next came the opening of the presents. It was so embarrassing—our mothers had bought them things like a Barbie’s wedding gown, or toys for playing father-and-mother. There was also quite an assortment of Tupperware. Weird. We didn’t get it.

‘Oh you lucky things,’ said Lucy’s mother. ‘I’ll have to borrow those from you sometime. So tell us, Thomas, do you feel settled in yet? Do you like it out here?’

‘I didn’t, at first,’ said Thomas. ‘But now I do.’

‘You can tell your mum and dad that I’ll come over to meet them very soon. Oh blimey, I should have invited them, shouldn’t I!’

‘You can invite them to the wedding,’ said Duco.

Ludo asked, ‘And do your parents like living here too?’

‘Yeah, they do. Our house in Opzand wasn’t like here. Everything’s so new and clean here.’

‘Opzand?’ Lucy’s mother suddenly looked as if she’d sat down on a thumbtack.

‘Really? We used to live there too!’ said Ludo enthusiastically. ‘In one of those old cottages down by the dike. We used to say it was …’ He looked at Lucy’s mother for help, but she didn’t seem to notice. She downed her glass in two, three big gulps. She’d gone all white.

‘Idyllic,’ said Duco, ‘that was the word, Ludo. But I don’t remember any family by the name of The Rat.’

‘Silly,’ said Lucy fondly, ‘that’s not his real name.’

‘But isn’t that what it said on the invitation?’

‘My last name’s Iedema,’ said Thomas.

‘Iedema!’ cried Ludo. ‘You mean the florist?’

Duco snickered. ‘Well, well! What did your parents think of Lucy’s card?’

‘I didn’t let them see it,’ said Thomas. ‘No need for them to know I’m with her.’ He rolled his head in a gesture that took in the whole messy room, including the spider webs in the corners of the ceiling.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Ludo. ‘Lucy has snagged herself an Iedema!’

‘I still remember it like yesterday, the time your father …’ Duco started to laugh, his eyes crinkling with mirth.

Lucy’s mother stood up so abruptly that her chair nearly toppled backward. ‘I am really disappointed in you, Thomas.’ Her voice came out sounding throttled. ‘I don’t like sneaky children who do things behind their parents’ backs!’

There was a baffled silence.

‘But Mum,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s only because his mum gets so worried about him getting dirty. She was already in such a state the time he came home dripping wet …’

‘Dirty? Who’s dirty? Are you? Well, well, isn’t that a nice thing for a boyfriend to say!’

‘What’s got into you?’ asked Ludo, astonished.

‘I won’t have that little sneak in my house. I won’t have Lucy going around with the likes of him. If I’d known, I’d have …’

‘Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Duco. ‘We were having a party.’

‘Anyway, we’re already engaged, so there!’ cried Lucy. ‘Too late!’ She pulled a rude yah-boo face at her mum.

We were so agitated we couldn’t help going into hysterical laughter. The Luducos started laughing too; they didn’t have to set a good example, or raise anybody. The more everyone laughed, the more it felt as if Lucy’s mum must have been kidding.

We spent the rest of the afternoon playing up in the attic. We must have spent an hour playing the Monkey Game, and then The Duchess’s Visit. We played as if our lives depended on it. That was always the best solution, we’d found, if you didn’t understand what was bugging the grown-ups.

C is for Crisis

It was only a matter of days now before we’d finally, finally, be learning to read and write. This milestone involved stiff, brand-new clothes, and also pencil cases, gleaming rulers, and big boxes of markers, pens, and coloured pencils. We sharpened our pencils to razor-sharp points. Lucy was the only one who wasn’t getting a new set; there were always plenty of pencils lying around her house—enough, anyway, to highlight important words in red or blue till kingdom come. They were big, fat, round sticks, those—the real thing, they were; our own thin, hexagonal pencils looked kind of mingy in comparison, even if they were now honed like daggers. And that was what really counted, we assured one another, for you never knew when you might need a weapon to defend yourself. Take Lucy’s mum, for instance.

She hadn’t set foot outside the house since the engagement party. That was because, Lucy reported, the Ten of Swords had suddenly turned up on the Tarot table—the dude with all the swords stuck through his gut, the card of catastrophe and ruin. Which was why her mother had wisely decided to stay indoors. Better safe than sorry; no need to throw yourself deliberately in danger’s path! Danger could be lurking anywhere, really—behind Mr De Vries’s counter, on any of the four streets of the village, or even out here on the green, right at her own front door.

We spread the word, increasingly concerned. Thomas was especially worried. According to him, the circumstances called for drastic precautions. But there was no need for him to go around acting as if putting the rectory on heightened alert had been his idea; we had all arrived at the same conclusion. Not long now, and we’d be at school all day; we could hardly be expected to keep an eye on things from there. When and if the danger foretold in the cards finally did show up, Lucy’s mother would have to face it on her own. What we had to do now was help her arm herself to the teeth. She’d be so grateful that she’d gather us up in a great big bear hug. Her shirt partly unbuttoned, the red scarf wound around her head like a brilliant flame. We would clamp our legs around her hips and get all woozy from the patchouli smell.

The trees in the rectory’s front garden were already turning colour. We were pelted with shiny chestnuts as we darted up the gravel path. Scattering in alarm, we ducked, prowling like tigers, keeping in touch by walkie-talkie. We looked left, right, and left again, because that’s what our mums had drilled into our heads, and, doubled over, sprinted to the front door—those heavy, banged-up, scratched double doors.

It was Duco who opened the door.

He wasn’t shaved.

He looked surprised.

So did we. Our fathers had been at the office for hours; they were probably sitting in an important meeting, or dictating a memo to give someone a good dressing-down. It worried us that Duco wasn’t at work; fathers were supposed to be in the office, but on the other hand, the Luducos weren’t fathers, they didn’t do real work, just something to do with stocks and shares or something. Once we had that straight, we felt right as rain again.

‘Have you come to play with Lucy?’ Duco asked in an unusually dull voice, as if he couldn’t take it any more.

For appearance’s sake, we nodded.

It wasn’t until we were inside that we could tell how right the Tarot cards had been. There was an uneasy atmosphere in the house that smacked of whining and moping, quarrels, sulks, and negotiations. In the corridor the pictures hung all askew, as if when nobody was looking they’d been trying to shake their way out of their frames, in case they had to beat a hasty retreat. Instead of the usual enticing aroma of the Luducos’ breakfast, the only smell coming from the kitchen was the sorry stench of cold ashes. Alarmed, we thundered up the staircase with the creaky treads.

Lucy and her mother were sitting in the first-floor studio among a jumble of papers, paint jars, and Tarot cards. The curtains were drawn and there were barely any lights on, which made the room seem murkier than usual. Even the cool drawing of Clara 13 over the mantelpiece looked as if someone had smudged mud all over it.

Lucy, seated on a stool at the drawing table, was just cajoling, ‘But Mum, why don’t you just stop reading the cards?’

‘As if that makes any difference,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t be silly.’ With an irritated sigh she rolled her eyes up at the ceiling festooned with plaster grapes and curlicues.

Our ceiling at home had designer fixtures, lighting fixtures that cost—well, our fathers said, don’t even ask, you don’t want to know. In our homes everything was different. And suddenly, out of the blue, we felt as if we had landed in a strange country with all sorts of edicts we didn’t know, where ornate plaster and darkness were the rule, not polished steel or halogen. Panicked, we all started talking at once.

Lucy’s mother stared at us, baffled. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘What about them, my pencils? Why do I have to sharpen my pencils?’

We were so excited, we were ready to burst. There was danger lurking right outside those drawn draperies! Skulking always, maddeningly, just out sight, which only made it even more chilling! But wait a minute, wait, slow down: what good was a pencil, actually, in the face of real danger? What had we allowed ourselves to be talked into? Only your little sister would fall for something this lame. ‘It was Thomas’s idea!’ we yelled, stammering with shame.

Lucy’s mother whipped around to look at Thomas. ‘Okay. I don’t get it,’ she said crossly. ‘What is this famous idea of yours exactly, what is this racket about?’

Thomas clasped his arms behind his back and puffed out his chest. Eagerly, he began: ‘Well, say you run into the enemy.’

‘What enemy?’ She stared at him as if he were one of the arthropods in his father’s book, one of the creatures that came way before the mice. ‘I thought you were talking about my pencils.’

‘I was,’ said Thomas, his big head wobbling from side to side. ‘’Cause, let’s say you don’t want the enemy to see you. Well, then all you do is, you poke him in the eye with your pencil. Then he’s blind as a bat, see? And then you make a run for it.’

It was brilliantly put. We had to hand it to him. We all looked at Lucy’s mum expectantly.

She seemed to be thinking it over, doodling on a piece of paper with a piece of charcoal. The marks on the paper kept getting darker and uglier.

Lucy stood up. ‘Well, we’ll just go up to the attic, then,’ she said uncertainly.

The charcoal snapped in two. ‘No you won’t,’ said her mother. ‘I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt, Thomas, but now it seems that you’re not only a little sneak, you’ve got a screw loose as well. You do come up with some sick ideas, don’t you, Thomas. Don’t you understand how dangerous that is? Why, it was just recently all over the newspapers, somebody was murdered that way! With a ballpoint pen in the eye!’

She was steaming mad now; we could practically see puffs of black smoke coming out of her ears. ‘I said to Duco just the other day, how can that happen? How is it possible—that an ordinary, everyday object like a ballpoint pen could actually kill someone?’ She looked back at Lucy. ‘Okay, that’s enough. I won’t have you hanging around with that little creep anymore, Lucy. Do you hear me?’

‘But Mum!’ Lucy started protesting.

We tried to look deeply preoccupied with pious, virtuous thoughts. Just remember, they used to tell us at home, life doesn’t come with a user’s manual. You could never tell what tomorrow would bring, but if things were going your way, you might as well make the most of it.

But nothing stands in the way of true love. That very afternoon we saw the two of them going off together, hand in hand. With her long, skinny legs and her shoulders indignantly hunched, Lucy looked just like a strutting heron. To keep up with her, Thomas had to take two extra skips for every one of her strides.

They made straight for Shepherd’s Close. There they installed themselves in the garden shed in back, where Thomas’s father stored his dirty work clothes. A sneak peek through the little window showed that they were sitting comfortably on a couple of overturned buckets and, with great gusto, were engaged in dismantling a potato crate with a pair of hedge shears.

At last the day dawned when our mothers were to take us to the big school. Since it was our first day, our teacher, whose name was Miss Joyce, allowed our mums to accompany us into the classroom, a room with tall windows that let the autumn sunlight in. It felt very solemn in there, like in church. Maybe that was why our mothers’ faces were graver than usual. As we hunted for a place to sit, they kept hooking their hair back behind their ears and licking their lips. The desktops were scored with angry, indecipherable marks left by children long ago.

Thomas was the only one of us escorted to school by his father. He was so very clean that he gleamed from head to foot, as if his mother had scrubbed him with disinfectant so he wouldn’t bring home any germs. His father’s head was bare, he wasn’t wearing his sou’wester, which made him look a lot less intimidating; he looked like someone you’d known all your life, like the Luducos. He stood in front of the classroom with his hands in his pockets, chatting with Miss Joyce in a loud, self-confident voice. He didn’t seem to mind that everyone could hear what he was saying. ‘Sadly, mine’s like a leaky sieve, you know, though one does learn to live with it,’ he said. ‘But I’m chuffed Thomas doesn’t seem to take after me in that department.’

We craned our necks to see that leaky thing of his. The thought that he might be wearing a nappy under his overalls made us collapse all over each other in hysterics.

‘Behave yourselves!’ our mothers hissed. But we paid no attention, because in here Miss Joyce was the boss, and she was talking to Thomas’s father matter-of-factly, as if that leaky thing of his weren’t in the least bit funny. If she was that open-minded, she probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if you asked her where babies came from. We were suddenly seized with a great fever for learning.

‘Perhaps you could give us a tour of the parks and gardens someday,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘We’d all enjoy that, wouldn’t we, boys and girls?’

‘Yeah!’ we cried. ‘Great!’ We drummed on the desks with our fists.

‘Okay, and now it’s time to say goodbye,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘because I believe we’re all here.’

That was when Lucy barged into the classroom. Her hair wasn’t plaited. She wasn’t carrying a backpack, either, or a yoghurt snack. She slid into the desk next to Thomas.

Our mothers were perturbed. They murmured, ‘Lucy, did you come all by yourself? Is something wrong? Your mummy isn’t ill, is she? We haven’t seen her for ages! Is there anything we can do for her? Come on, tell us!’

They were so insistent that it made us proud. We generally thought of mothers merely as people who ignored you when you said something sensible, but it seemed there was more to them, then, after all. Only, what were they thinking they could do for someone who was going to have to take on the Ten of Swords?

‘Ladies! You too, sir,’ Miss Joyce admonished them. ‘Out, please.’ She consulted the list that lay on her desk. ‘Was I supposed to have a Lucy? Was I?’ she muttered to herself.

The leaky father was last in the line of parents filing out. He gave Thomas a quick thumbs up. Then he, too, left the room.

Miss Joyce picked up a piece of chalk and listed our names on the blackboard.

If you recognized your name, you were entitled to come to the blackboard and draw a little star next to it with a piece of coloured chalk.

‘Thomas!’ He was the first to call out his own name. He jumped up clumsily. The chalk on the blackboard made a screeching, bird-like sound, which made us think of the egrets and sandpipers in our meadow. Thinking about all the stuff we already knew or had figured out for ourselves made us feel a lot better. We were going to be detectives when we grew up, or beauticians, and you didn’t need to know how to read or write to be those. We crossed our arms and leaned back.

‘So your father was right about you,’ said Miss Joyce with a smile. ‘It’s a good thing too, Thomas.’ Then she looked around the classroom, as if to say, ‘Who’s next?’

Barbara and Tamara guessed wrong, and so did Floris and Joris. Safranja, however, scored, and Sam with the shaved-chicken neck nailed his, too. Vanessa, at the blackboard, glanced triumphantly over her shoulder to see which of us dummies hadn’t been up yet, and then drew a silly little heart next to her name. Some people really had everything going for them. Because Vanessa also had a cat that had cancer of the ear. The vet had lopped off its ears two weeks ago and cauterized the stumps. So now the cat had a new lease on life, and Vanessa was the only kid in the whole wide world to have a cat that looked like a hamster.

‘Come on, children,’ said Miss Joyce, ‘who’s next?’ She tapped the floor with the tip of her shoe to encourage us. Across these floorboards, she told us, hundreds of children before us had taken their first steps in becoming readers; this floor had been here long before the polders were pumped dry, back in the time when most everything out yonder still lay beneath the endless sea; that’s how old our school was, as old as the hills—you could tell from the way its name was spelled: School of Ye Bible.

The Bible, we knew it well. It was God’s word. God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and then all the stars in the sky had lit up, twinkling as bright as can be.

‘What about me?’ Lucy suddenly cried. ‘Where am I?’

Thomas started reading off the rest of the list.

‘No, don’t help her,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘It doesn’t really matter if you know how to read or write your own name yet. It’s just to give me some idea.’

‘Lucy isn’t even up there,’ said Thomas.

Lucy squealed, ‘You see!’

‘Oh, child,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Of course you are.’ And she pointed.

Thomas’s lips moved. ‘That says Lucky.’ After a moment he added thoughtfully, ‘There’s no one here called Lucky.’

‘Aha,’ said Miss Joyce. Her face lit up, just like one of God’s stars up in the sky. Beaming, she went on and on about why the ‘why’ sometimes sounds like ‘ee’ and about how the ‘see’ in the ceiling looks like half a circle, or you’d have ‘keel’ and her own name would be ‘Joyk.’ It really made no sense at all. Letters, she said, could be tricky; they had a will of their own—one time they might sound like this and next thing they’d sound like that. But we could count ourselves lucky we weren’t in China: we had only twenty-six of them—letters, that is—and you hardly ever needed the q or the x; you could live to a ripe old age and never need to use x or q. ‘There’s nothing to it, really there isn’t,’ she promised, smiling at us somewhat damply.

It was true. One moment we were still ignorant know-nothings fidgeting in our hard seats, longing for some distraction, and the next we were reading about See and Spot, Spot and Dot, Spot and Dick. How did we do it? Had Miss Joyce unlocked a little shutter in our minds to release some fairy dust that magically gave us the power to decipher the letters, letters that, when strung together, formed whole words, even? Has she used some secret formula that made us—we, who never missed a trick—forget everything else around us? We no longer saw the worn floorboards or the faded walls of our classroom; we no longer even noticed the dead-carrion smell in the corridor.

‘Mmmmmmoon,’ went Miss Joyce at the blackboard, on which she’d drawn a gaily smiling moon.

‘Mmmmmmoon,’ we all hummed after her, intrigued.

‘And what if I took away the mmmmmm and put in an essss instead?’ Her arm, in the sleeveless checked blouse, came up. She erased the M. But we’d never forget it, never, that M. Coming from the mouth of Miss Joyce, that M just made you want to do your very best.

‘Sssoon!’ she said. ‘See?’

‘Sssoon!’ we agreed, in chorus.

We were her very first class because she’d only just finished her studies. That was why we had to be her little helpers, she said. Because everything was new to her. The chalk, the notebooks, the bell. And when she said that, she laughed, exposing her teeth—she was a bit buck-toothed, though, to her credit, she didn’t seem to mind. She went and sat down at her desk at the front of the classroom and looked at us hopefully. ‘Open your books,’ she said.

The Safe Way to Read was the method we followed.

The Safe Way Reader started you off on the word I. What a concept, using I as the foundation for learning to read, said Miss Joyce, all excited—wasn’t it a neat idea? And that little word I would lead you to all the other words! As soon as you could read I you had practically all the words in the whole entire world at your fingertips!

The Safe Way sometimes liked to have a little fun, too. For example, you’d get a picture of children armed with fishing rods pulling white bits of paper out of a pond. The balloons filled with letters coming out of the kids’ mouths showed which words were supposed to go on which scrap of paper. I fish hat. I fish rat. I fish sock. I fish fish.

I fish fish—that was a good one! Even the little boy in the picture thought it was funny. He had a mop of thick blond hair, just like Thomas’s. The girl fishing next to him was the spitting image of Lucy, with plaits and freckles. She wore a bright yellow jacket trimmed in purple, just the sort of thing the real Lucy always wore. The other children didn’t look like anyone we knew.

Miss Joyce had noticed the resemblance too. ‘What did Thomas fish?’ she asked.

‘Fish!’ we yelled at the top of our lungs.

‘And what did Lucy fish?’

‘Sock!’ we howled in chorus.

Clearly, immediately upon hearing of Thomas’s and Lucy’s engagement, the Queen had ordered all the old primers shredded and new ones printed with the right illustrations.

Every afternoon the lights in the classroom came on a little earlier, and when we walked home from school the leaves crunched beneath our feet. Long-forgotten scarves, mittens, and hats were dug out of hall closets. The bakery smelled of cinnamon and allspice, and Mr De Vries sold pumpkins and gourds, which our mothers displayed in the window in nice antique baskets. At night the temperature sometimes dipped below zero, and then the next morning the roofs were sprinkled with sugary frost, like gingerbread houses. On other mornings the fog was so thick on the way to school that if we hadn’t been holding on to the tips of one another’s woolly mufflers we’d have got lost in the fog. You had every reason to hold on tight, because if you were unlucky enough to disappear into the fog, you’d melt and dissolve right down to your last toenail, until a puddle was all that was left of you; everyone knew that. Every remaining drop of you would quickly have to be collected in a brass bucket and saved until an old crone who knew what to do about it came along, or else you were a goner, forget about it.

Every day, as we walked past the rectory, we saw that Lucy’s mother’s bedroom curtains were still drawn. She was in bed, said Lucy, because she had the flu. On the one hand that was good news, because that meant she wasn’t in any imminent danger. But the flu was such a commonplace thing that we really couldn’t get too worked up about it.

What made this flu unusual, however, was that it just went on and on. Weeks went by—in our reader we were already at ‘Dan in his Hut’—and still her fever hadn’t gone down. Our mothers would have been happy to go see how the patient was doing, but as long as there was still the possibility of contagion, Lucy’s mother didn’t want any visitors. Happily, talking on the phone was permitted, so our mothers were still able to find out what the cards had in store for them. Whispering, the receiver pressed to their ears, they protested—what about the well-disposed Page of Wands, or the generous King of Pentacles? But once they’d hung up, they would sit back, disappointed, and sigh that still, it was different, wasn’t it, to see the cards with your own two eyes, and besides, in some respects it was easy for Lucy’s mother to say, being a single woman with no husband and all.

Then, crushed yet still hopeful, they’d look up their horoscope, and as they leafed through their magazines we saw no end of words flip by which we hadn’t yet learned in our Safe Way Reader. It was hard sometimes not to lose heart. But Miss Joyce assured us on a daily basis that we were making great strides. Such a great job we were doing on ‘Dan in his Hut’! She was awfully proud of us.

‘Dan is at the gate.’

‘Dan picks up sticks.’

‘Dan carries sticks to the hut.’

‘Excellent,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Okay, Lucy, your turn.’

Lucy followed the words with her finger. The tip of her tongue protruded from her mouth. ‘To. The. Nut,’ she grunted.

‘The Hu-Hut!’ we cried, irritated. We were dying to find out how the story ended, and if there were any Red Indians in it. That Dan was such a slowcoach anyway; with Lucy and her bungling we’d never get there.

‘Hut?’ she repeated, perplexed.

Whereas we could see the words jumping off the page like brightly coloured marbles, each with its own meaning, Lucy had made no progress at all since the very first day of school; she could only tell what a word meant if there was a picture to go with it. She simply didn’t get it. Even though Thomas spent every afternoon after school practising with her, she still couldn’t even tell the difference between moon and soon!

It made Miss Joyce sad sometimes. As she handed back our first report cards, she glumly remarked when she got to Lucy’s desk, ‘You really should try a little harder, honey. Or else your folks will think it’s my fault.’

‘Oh they won’t, miss, don’t worry,’ said Lucy. She opened her report card and peered intently at the writing, frowning.

The sight of it made us throw up our hands in despair. What good was Lucy to us if she couldn’t tell the difference between rock and dock? If she was the dumbest of us all, who in future would come up with our projects, who was there for us to look up to and obey? If this went on, we didn’t stand a chance of discovering a chest of gold ducats in the ruins of an old castle; we probably wouldn’t even get in a decent round of Donkey Derby, ever again! It was enough to make you want to vomit. Maybe we ought to give her a good shaking, to get her brain up to speed. Hey, Lucy! We gonna get you, if you don’t watch out! If only she weren’t as strong as six gorillas. If only that dork Thomas would try harder in the daily tutoring sessions. Which gave us an idea, suddenly. What if Lucy’s mother found out that the two of them spent every afternoon together? She’d have a fit, she would. ‘Oh, you want to go play outside, do you? I know what you’re really up to …!’

Oh, you do, do you? Our own mothers were nuts about that expression. Oh, you do, do you? was usually followed, at the very least, with a smack upside the head, and a hissed, ‘That’ll teach you!’

Teaching, the Safe Way: that was what it all boiled down to.

As soon as school was out we gathered in the bicycle shed, armed with pen and paper. We couldn’t agree on the exact spelling of ‘shed,’ but we decided it should be clear enough to anyone reading the letter. Whoever read it would recognize at once that it came from some anonymous good Samaritan who only had everyone’s best interests at heart, even if it led to the shit hitting the fan.

Entering the front yard of the rectory, we snuck up to the front door as quietly as we could. We pushed the letter through the letter box. Just to make sure, we took turns peeking through the flap to see if it had landed squarely on the mat, in full view.

We ran all the way home, elated. There would be bangers- mash-and kale for dinner tonight—it was that kind of weather—and maybe our dads would give us a few euros as a reward for the excellent report card Miss Joyce had sent home with us today.

The next day was Saturday, so we had the day off. There was a stiff breeze; it was just the day for playing Titanic. We were standing around on the village green, in the process of casting the different roles, when Lucy came storming out of the rectory, her plaits blowing straight up in the wind. Cupping her hands to her mouth like a megaphone, she bellowed, ‘Crisis! Crisis!’

We immediately stopped what we were doing.

She flopped down on the bench over by the thorn bushes. ‘I’m cooked.’

‘You don’t say,’ we said evenly, poking each other meaningfully in the ribs.

She raised her hands. Her mum! Her mum was having such a hissy fit! Miss Joyce must have phoned her yesterday afternoon to prepare her for that shitty report card, because she’d been in a terrible state when Lucy got home. She’d been apoplectic, practically purple in the face. No one had felt like cooking; there’d been nothing for dinner.

It wasn’t until late at night that Lucy screwed up the courage to show her the report card. When she read it, her mother suddenly went icy calm. Or rather, it seemed to energize her. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Lucy,’ she said, in the tone of someone who has just had an idea that’s been a long time brewing, ‘I’m not going to sit back with my arms crossed and watch your future be jeopardized at that backward village school. You belong in a better school, in the city. Right away! We can’t afford to waste any more time, with you not learning a damn thing. I’m going to look into it at once.’

Lucy jumped down off the bench and started kicking the bushes right and left. ‘She says we’re going to move!’

We stared at her, nonplussed. ‘But she’s got the flu,’ we objected, ‘and there’s the Ten of Swords, too. Don’t tell us she …’

‘That only proves how serious she is,’ cried Lucy hoarsely. ‘But I’m not leaving, you hear? I’m going to stay here, watch me. I’ll just go into hiding. I’ll run away and go hide over at Thomas’s.’

We hastened to offer her our own basements, and then our attics, where it would be nice and snug for her because of the boiler being up there. We said we would sneak upstairs three times a day with a plate of sandwiches and a tangerine for her. We made it sound as comfy as we could, guiltily aware of the fact that Thomas’s house would be the first place they’d go look for her, thanks to our brilliant anonymous letter. Except that it was possible her mother might not have read it yet, with all this other stuff going on.

‘Lucy!’ Ludo called, standing on the rectory’s gravel path. ‘Come inside, I’ve made you a sandwich!’ With his hair blown back and his shirt collar flapping in the breeze, he cast a worried look up at the old chestnut trees in the front yard, which were creaking in the wind.

Lucy said in a low voice, ‘I’m running away tonight. When my mother thinks I’m asleep.’ Then she turned and ran inside.