Esther Gerritsen

Roxy

Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Esther Gerritsen, 2014

English translation copyright © Michele Hutchison, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Hollandse Hoogte/Millennium/Lotte Hansen

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

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

First published as Roxy in the Netherlands in 2014 by De Geus bv, po Box 1878, 4801 bw Breda

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

isbn 978-94-6238-073-8

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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#

There are two of them: a man and a woman. The man asks her if she is Roxy—a strange policeman saying her name in the middle of the night. Yes, she is. Can they come in? Roxy would rather they didn’t.

She assumes the worst: her husband could be dead. He’s always worrying about having a heart attack. He has the risk factors. This way, the news can only be better than expected. And the policeman will have already come out with it.

Roxy waits for the moment of relief, but her husband is dead and after that there’s nothing to be relieved about. She says, ‘Well, come on in then.’

She doesn’t like having strangers in the house. Half a day can be wasted on a washing-machine repairman. First there are the hours spent waiting for the stranger, then the house no longer belongs to her. When the man finally rings the bell and she opens the door, all the oxygen in the house escapes. She’s friendly to the washing-machine repairman—cracking jokes, making coffee, smiling a lot—she pays and gives him an appropriate tip. But it all seems to take place underwater; you can’t keep it up for long.

‘Sit down,’ Roxy says. She points at the bar stools. The bar was her idea. Arthur gave her permission. Arthur doesn’t like her saying he ‘allowed’ her to do something. The bar stools are for people who drop by, drink coffee for an hour and then leave. It’s rare anyone stays an hour.

The policeman and woman sit down and now it’s Roxy’s turn to talk, cry, ask questions, maybe even scream. She wonders what they are expecting. She has reluctantly allowed these strangers in, but she understands this can’t be dealt with quickly. She can’t nod politely, say, ‘thanks for the information’ and rush them out the door—this is going to take time.

She hasn’t realized she’s been holding her breath; now she gasps for air. But the only thing that goes in is water and she chokes, on stifled tears.

She tries to say, ‘I can’t,’ but of course she can and soon she is breathing in this world, just like the others. Okay, so this is going to take a while.

‘I’ll fetch my dressing gown.’

She goes upstairs and quietly enters her daughter’s bedroom. The child is lying on her stomach. Roxy lays her hand on her daughter’s back and waits until she can feel the life in the small body.

When she’s back in the kitchen, she realizes she’s forgotten her dressing gown.

‘My dressing gown.’ She goes back upstairs.

The younger of the two police officers—the woman—looks anxious. Roxy doesn’t envy her.

‘Have you had to do this before?’

The man nods.

‘And you?’

‘No.’ The policewoman smiles and Roxy is grateful because it’s the first time for both of them.

Their total lack of haste is remarkable; their calm says that everything has already happened.

‘Now what?’ She looks at the man.

‘You can go to him … see him. We’ll take you.’

‘He is dead, isn’t he?’ Roxy says, shocked, as though she hadn’t understood and was actually supposed to be hurrying.

‘Yes,’ the man says, ‘he’s dead. He died on the spot and was taken to the hospital mortuary. We can take you there.’

‘My daughter. She’s sleeping.’

‘How old is your daughter?’

‘Three.’

‘Can’t you ask a babysitter to come? Family member?’

‘My family live a long way away.’

‘Neighbours?’ She shakes her head and doesn’t say that the girl next door, an economics student, picks up her daughter and babysits her practically every day. She even has a key. Although all three of them are breathing in the same space, they remain strangers, and naturally she lies to strangers. It doesn’t occur to her to say she’d do anything except leave her daughter, wake her up, unsettle her.

‘Do I have to go to the hospital?’

‘Nothing’s compulsory,’ the man says.

‘You have to call someone,’ the woman says.

‘It’s late,’ Roxy says. ‘Everyone’s in bed.’

‘There are times when it’s all right to wake people up. You have to call someone, madam.’

‘All right.’ Roxy looks outside. ‘It’s almost full moon.’

It’s silent for a moment. Everyone looks outside and the young policewoman says, ‘Yes, almost.’

‘You’re the one who wrote that book, aren’t you?’ the man says.

Roxy knows which book he means. There’s only one book people know—her first—but she can’t resist saying: ‘Which book? I’ve written three.’

‘With the truck on the front.’

She nods.

‘Fancy that,’ he says.

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘We’ll wait here with you until you’ve called someone.’

Roxy feels a rush of fear. ‘You don’t have to leave on my account.’

‘Just make the call.’

‘My phone’s upstairs.’

‘We’ll wait here.’

She goes upstairs again. She doesn’t know who to call in a situation like this. She can’t think of anyone other than Arthur. She goes into their bedroom. The telephone is on her bedside table; she likes to have it within reach. She sits down on the bed, takes the phone and stares at it, a pointless thing now. She lets it slip through her fingers and waits until enough time has passed for her to have called someone.

She stands facing the two police officers in her kitchen. As soon as she says she’s called someone they’ll go. She shouldn’t have lied about the babysitter. She shouldn’t have been so silly about the book. The intruders have become her forsakers at an inconceivable rate of knots.

There’s a business card on the kitchen table.

‘Did you make the call?’

‘Yes, my … somebody … somebody’s coming.’

They get up.

‘Won’t you have a drink?’ They could be friends.

‘How did you meet?’ people would ask later.

‘Yes, it’s an unusual story,’ she’d say. ‘They were the ones who came to tell me about Arthur’s accident. They stayed the entire night afterward. They’d read my books—that was nice. We drank the wine that Arthur had stored right at the bottom of the rack in the basement, the expensive bottles.’

The man says, ‘My colleague will come and see you again early tomorrow morning. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Roxy says. ‘Lovely.’

Roxy doesn’t ask herself how you tell a three-year-old something like this—you just say it. She sits on the bar stool in the open kitchen and knows she’ll have to wait until her daughter wakes up before she tells her. Louise has a father for one last night.

The counter is spotless. It’s Wednesday; the cleaner has been. The espresso machine Roxy struggles with shines. All of this is belongs to just her now. The house has become alien in one swift blow. They’d never owned it together; she’d lived in his house.

She mentally runs through her possessions, beginning with the kitchenware, then the furniture, the house, the car (the Camaro was a total write-off of course, but she still has the SUV), the bank accounts. If you’ve never taken care of yourself, it’s a scary mystery how you accumulate goods. It’s inconceivable that you might have qualities, or be able to do things that people would pay good money for.

When she was seventeen, she left home carrying two weekend bags. She didn’t look back. Arthur would be waiting around the corner to pick her up. It was a golden ticket that left no room for doubts. Arthur arrived twenty minutes after the agreed time. That wasn’t right, she thought at the time—it was a bad sign. Like James Bond, she had to step from one flying aeroplane onto another—a perilous stunt but not impossible—but the plane you step onto can’t coolly turn up twenty minutes late.

Twenty minutes of freefall on the corner of Saint Vitus Street and the Molenhof.

Ten years later she falls even further. She sits calmly on the bar stool at three in the morning, wide awake, searching for ideas, comparisons. She has spent years of her life sitting in her study pondering these kinds of metaphors. She can spend an entire afternoon working on a sentence and be happy. Although, on those tranquil afternoons, she has an increasing sense that she won’t be able to get away with this much longer.

She has always known that she skipped something, took a short cut to adulthood. Now they’re coming to get me, she thinks. Now I have to go back, and of course she doesn’t call anybody. Not only to her daughter is Arthur not dead yet, but also to Roxy herself. Roxy is happy, one more night, one last hour.

The darkness does its work. She’s lying in bed; she has turned off the light but her eyes are still open and she is afraid. She screams into her pillow so as not to wake her daughter.

Before she falls asleep, she hears the birds. She is awoken by her daughter’s voice.

‘It’s morning,’ Louise cries, ‘the sun has risen!’ It’s a line she must have remembered from a story, a film. For the last few weeks, that strange, complete sentence has been coming from her daughter’s bedroom: It’s morning; the sun has risen.

#

They are in the kitchen when Liza, the babysitter, lets herself in. It’s Thursday, one of the days Arthur used to look after their daughter. Arthur insisted they share the childcare. He was proud that he was doing half of it, which meant that he arranged half of it. Liza came on his days with Louise.

‘Good morning,’ Liza says.

‘Daddy is dead,’ Louise says. ‘We’re eating pancakes.’

That morning she’d lifted her daughter out of bed, taken her into her own, and waited patiently until she was properly awake.

‘Daddy working?’ Louise was used to him being away a lot, yet she often asked after him.

‘No,’ Roxy said. ‘I have to tell you something. Daddy is dead. He had an accident in the car and now he can’t come back to us.’

The girl looked frightened and said, ‘Don’t be silly.’

The concept of death was brand new. She’d seen her father swatting flies; it had interested her—she’d wanted to look at the dead insects.

Later, she’d called out to her mother: ‘I will make you dead,’ and when that had been forbidden, she’d tried again: ‘You are dead,’ but that wasn’t allowed either. So on that morning, when her mother said that her father was dead, it was breaking all the rules.

Roxy said that it was true, honestly, and that you were allowed to say it. The child seemed to understand.

Then she asked, ‘How do we make him alive again?’ and Roxy had to say, ‘We can’t.’ Louise cried, her mother rocked her, kissed away the tears, and Louise asked whether they were going to have pancakes.

Roxy stands behind her daughter, who is sitting at the bar in a child’s high chair, trying to roll up a pancake.

‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘Arthur was in an accident.’

She strokes her daughter’s head and talks like in a children’s book. ‘And now he’s dead.’

The young student stares at Roxy and turns red; the news seems to have embarrassed her. Roxy’s words are meant for her daughter.

‘It’s very bad,’ she says, each word picked to take account of a three-year-old’s mind.

‘Last night the police came round—two of them. A policeman and a policewoman.’ She almost says: in blue uniforms.

She manages to cobble together an appropriate adult sentence. ‘It’s beyond belief.’

‘Jesus,’ Liza says. ‘Jesus.’

It’s not that Roxy wants to protect her child from her grief. She knows that wouldn’t be possible—it goes without saying.

Arthur wasn’t convinced she’d make a good mother, and she’d shared his concerns. She’d never felt offended that he hadn’t trusted her as a mother at the start, it all dovetailed so neatly with her own anxieties. For the past three years, she had observed with continuous amazement how easy she found it, adopting this role. But it remained a role—Daddy could intervene at any moment. Arthur had withdrawn slowly, he was around less and less. She became absorbed in the game with increasing dexterity. Today the game has become serious and she stands stiffly behind the child, stroking her hair incessantly.

‘I must be in shock.’

‘Of course.’

‘The police will be here again shortly.’

‘Jesus,’ Liza says again. ‘How terrible.’

‘Yes.’

‘Arthur … Jesus … What happened?’

‘Louise, dear, do you want to watch television?’

The Smurfs DVD is still in the machine. Roxy selects the option PLAY ALL EPISODES. She closes the glass doors separating the living room from the kitchen so that they can talk without being disturbed.

Liza has sat down next to her. ‘What happened exactly?’ Roxy wants to reply but she doesn’t know the answer.

‘I forgot to ask.’

‘But what did they say?’

‘They’re coming at ten o’clock.’

Liza is sitting there, all prepared, and now Roxy can’t give her anything. She’s got nothing at all to offer.

‘It’s not like me, you know,’ she says, ‘not asking. If someone’s committed suicide I always want to know how they did it. Arthur doesn’t. I get that it’s inappropriate, but I always want to look when there’s an accident on the motorway. I wish I was the kind of person who didn’t look. Arthur never looks but I can’t help it. It’s one of those things, like picking a scab. Do you look at traffic accidents?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

They stare at the remains of the breakfast the way you look at the empty glasses after a party.

‘And you don’t know … where?’

‘No.’

‘But where was he, then?’

‘He had a premiere, in Utrecht, I think.’

‘You think?’

‘I think so, yes.’

Roxy has spent almost an hour now with the babysitter; they’ve never spent this long in each other’s company before. She can’t send Liza away, she has to be there later, when things need to be done and Louise can’t be left on her own. She’ll have to do things with strangers more often now; she’ll need Liza for longer than just today.

‘Have you called your family already? Yes, of course—or friends … is anyone coming?’

‘I haven’t called anyone at all.’

‘No one?’

‘If I call people now they’re going to ask all kinds of questions and I don’t know anything yet, you see.’

‘Don’t you want to call anyone?’

‘Sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘That I told you so … first. It’s too much, isn’t it? It’s too much for you. Of course, I should have called someone.’

‘Should I take Louise?’

‘Where to? What do you mean?’ She sounds shocked.

‘Do you want me to go out for a bit with Louise?’

‘I’d rather she was here.’

‘Do you want me to stay today?’

‘Yes please. Is that okay?’

‘Of course.’

They are silent but it no longer feels awkward. By asking her to stay, Roxy has made Liza seem less of a stranger.

Roxy lays a hand on her belly; her period came yesterday. ‘I used to want seven children.’

‘Really?’

‘A long time ago, when I was a kid.’

‘And now?’ Liza blushes again.

‘I’m still young.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d forgotten about having wanted so many children. I only remembered it once Louise was born. As a child, I used to say it all the time and my mother would say, “You’ll have to marry a rich man then, a doctor or something.” Later I only remembered about having to marry a doctor but I’d forgotten why.’

‘Should I call someone for you?’

‘I’ll wait until I know a bit more.’

Liza seems to want to say something about this but doesn’t. She gets up and clears the kitchen table, carries the plates to the dishwasher. She knows her way around the house. She often does this when she’s alone with Louise, but Roxy has never seen it. She doesn’t come downstairs on those days.

‘You’ve got a boyfriend, haven’t you?’

‘No,’ Liza says, ‘not any more.’ She remains at the counter.

‘Did you break up?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Last month.’

‘Was it bad?’

‘So-so.’

‘How long were you together?’

‘Two years.’

‘Fairly long.’

‘And you?’

‘Ten.’

‘I think you should call somebody.’

Liza is wearing a floral wrap dress, the kind she’ll be wearing in thirty years’ time but then just below the knee rather than just above it, a respectable young woman who surely looks like her mother.

Roxy asks, ‘How old are you, by the way?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Only five years between us. We could have been at school together.’

‘We could have been at university together,’ Liza says.

‘I didn’t go.’

‘But it’s possible. You still could.’ Liza leans on the counter and then sits on it. Roxy imagines Liza’s house, the flat the three students share, its unquestionably small kitchen and the way they cook together. No one has ever sat on their counter before.

‘How did you meet, you and Arthur?’

‘At a talk show. He’d just produced a major film.’

‘And you’d written that book.’

‘Yes.’

‘You were really young,’ Liza says.

‘Too young to drive. My father took me to the studios in Hilversum in his truck. They loved that—they all did.’

‘He was a truck driver, wasn’t he?’

‘Still is.’

‘International?’

‘That too. That’s what my book was about.’

‘I haven’t read it.’

‘It’s a trashy book.’

‘My mother has.’

‘The end,’ Louise calls from the living room.

‘A new one will start on its own,’ Roxy shouts back.

Liza asks, ‘Did you like him right away—Arthur?’

‘I was mainly surprised that he liked me.’

‘Why?’

‘It was dreadful. After the broadcast, my father came up to us and began to tell a dirty joke.’

Silence.

‘What are you thinking now?’ Roxy asks.

‘What was the joke?’

‘Huh?’

‘Can you remember it?’

‘I’m no good at telling jokes.’

‘But you do still remember it?’

‘There’s a hunter and he’s trying to shoot a bear … I really can’t tell jokes.’

‘Just tell it.’

‘The hunter tries to shoot the bear but he misses and the bear says, “If you want to live you have to give me a blow job.”’

She pauses for a moment and looks at Liza, but this time Liza doesn’t blush. She smiles. ‘Carry on.’

‘Well, the hunter does it. Afterward he goes to the shop and buys a bigger gun. Back to the woods, misses again. The bear says again, “If you want to live you’re going to have to give me a blow job.” Blow job. Back to the shop, an even bigger gun, into the woods, misses again, blow job again … When my father tells it, it goes on a lot longer.’

‘Just carry on.’

‘Fine,’ Roxy says. She speaks louder. ‘The guy leaves the woods again, swearing his head off, fucking this, fucking that, back to the shop and buys a bazooka. Now I’ll get him. Goes back into the woods. All of a sudden there’s a tap on his shoulder. He turns around; there’s the bear again. The bear smacks the bazooka out of his hands.

The bear says, “Hey, have you come here to hunt or to give me blow jobs?”’

Liza is grinning from ear to ear. They can hear the Smurfs singing in the living room and then Liza laughs out loud, just for a moment, and then Roxy is laughing too. She knows the joke from her father’s telling it and later from Arthur too, but this is the first time it has made her laugh.

‘It’s quite good,’ Liza says, and right away Roxy thinks that maybe Liza’s dress isn’t all that bad.

‘My father could tell it better.’

‘And Arthur? Did he like it?’

‘Found it hilarious.’

‘What was so dreadful then?’

‘When anyone asks how we met, Arthur always tells that joke. Every time.’

‘Romantic.’

‘Yes. Three months later I’d moved in.’

‘Were your parents pleased? Not a doctor, but rich anyway.’

‘No,’ Roxy says because her parents weren’t pleased and ‘no,’ she says again, but that’s a no to the no, that’s not how it was. It wasn’t like that. She’d always considered herself a rebel, a girl who ran away from home when she was seventeen, for a man who was thirty years older. Her parents hadn’t spoken to her for three years, which had only contributed to the feeling she’d been rebellious.

Slowly they got back in touch and later it turned out that her parents had been following them all that time. They’d cut articles out of the literary supplements; they had first editions. Right from the start they’d kept a scrapbook of articles about Arthur’s company, photos of the two of them at parties and premieres. Over recent years she’d been less in the news herself. The premieres began to bore her. There were always female friends or interns who appreciated going along instead and Roxy was just as happy to stay home. Just knowing she was his wife was enough for her. Her parents carried on cutting out articles but she no longer featured on the last pages of the scrapbook.

#

Roxy assumes the second visit will be a formality, something to do with paperwork, but the policewoman doesn’t have a bag. She sits on the same stool at the bar again and doesn’t put any papers on the table.

Liza has taken Louise upstairs. The policewoman said twice she really didn’t want any coffee but Roxy insisted until she gave in.

Roxy says, ‘I can’t imagine you’ve had a nice cup of coffee at the police station already,’ and she wonders out loud why the coffee is undrinkable in some places. She’s never been to a police station but it sounds credible that the coffee would be bad there, and the policewoman doesn’t say otherwise. Whenever Roxy enters the realm of small talk, she easily finds herself saying things she doesn’t mean, has imagined, or couldn’t possibly know. The melody of what she says is believable but the words themselves are nonsense.

She has to work the espresso machine herself now and with a witness at hand too. She presses the wrong button, amplifying her clumsiness: better a clumsy wacko who is surely brilliant at something else than just a regular klutz who can’t even make coffee.

‘I’m not very good with this machine.’

It occurs to her that the young policewoman is making little effort to converse with her.

‘Have you slept?’ is the only thing she asks Roxy, but it sounds like a medical intake question.

‘I slept for three hours.’

The police officer nods.

‘Do you think that’s a lot or a little?’

The police officer doesn’t reply.

‘What’s your name again?’

‘Annemarie.’

Roxy copies all the actions she always saw Arthur do. The machine makes a racket; coffee trickles out. She’s forgotten to warm the cups. She stops talking until the noisy machine has finished.

‘I hope it’s hot enough.’ Roxy sets the coffee in front of the police officer, tastes her own and says, ‘Not hot enough.’

The police officer says, ‘Your husband wasn’t alone in the car. Mariëlle Dupuis was with him.’

‘The intern?’

‘Yes, we understand she was his intern.’

‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘And how …?’

‘She died in the ambulance.’

Of course, it’s difficult for the death of a vague acquaintance to shock her any further but she allows the image of this death to sink in out of emotional politeness. She imagines the bits that broke, where she bled, a torn-off arm, a shattered skull. These things happen.

Arthur was dead on impact, which sounded clean-cut: painless and decent. Now she realizes you can die on impact and that your entire body can be broken. What did she say exactly—‘on the spot’? Oh God, that wasn’t the same as: ‘on impact’. She only sees that now.

‘Did he suffer?’

‘We think he died instantly.’

‘You didn’t say that yesterday, did you? Yesterday you said, “on the spot”.’

‘Yes. He died at the site of the accident.’

‘But when you arrived …’

‘He was already dead.’

‘But in between the accident and you arriving?’

‘We think he died instantly.’

‘You think so.’

‘Yes, we think so.’

‘And were they together in the ambulance, when she died, or not? Dead people aren’t allowed in ambulances, are they?’

‘The fire brigade transported your husband.’

‘They do that as well?’

‘Yes.’

The fire brigade sounds bleaker than an ambulance; it sounds like tidying up. Suddenly she feels jealous of the young woman who died. She’ll be mourned a lot more than Roxy’s older husband. She thinks about Mariëlle’s family, who are, of course, already at the hospital. Arthur is there alone. What is she still doing here?

‘Did you have to go there last night too—to her family?’ The policewoman nods.

Last night they seemed so united. It was the first time for both of them, a night like that. Only she knew she’d have to play the same tune all over again afterward. Of course she’d have had to watch how her colleague did it and then she’d be allowed to do the talking herself at the next visit.

‘Why didn’t you say so yesterday?’ Roxy knows it’s a trivial question and there are a thousand more important questions to ask and that she’ll ask them all many times: how, what time, how exactly, what was the fatal blow?

‘But I was the first? I was the first, wasn’t I, that you came to?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t go there beforehand?’

‘No.’

‘You can just say so, you know.’

‘We went to see her family after you.’

‘Does she have a boyfriend?’

‘We spoke to her parents.’

‘Did you stay there for a long time?’

Annemarie doesn’t answer. She turns her cup of coffee around in her hands. She hasn’t taken a sip yet; the coffee must be lukewarm by now.

‘How old is she exactly?’

‘Are you aware of the nature of the relationship she had with your husband?’ The corner of Annemarie’s mouth twitches nervously and Roxy knows this expression from when people expect her to be suspicious.

‘I’m not jealous,’ Roxy says. The policewoman searches for words. Roxy doesn’t give her the chance to say anything.

‘My husband …’ Roxy says, ‘my husband is a flirt—a ladies man—I know that, of course. I’m the opposite. I don’t have any male friends. I can’t get on with them. The funny thing is that everyone always suspects him of cheating but he’s quite the …’

Roxy is unsure how far to go in her explanation to this woman she doesn’t know, but it seems like the last time she’ll be able to explain it to anyone, so a stranger will just have to do. She likes to talk about her husband. Most people don’t understand him. She’s often unhappy with the way they see him.

She says, ‘My husband …’ she sits down, ‘my husband had a very …’ she searches for the word, ‘comfortable … relationship with sexuality. He wasn’t afraid of it. He knew what he felt.’

She takes her time. She will build a modest monument of words for him.

‘I have always admired that because I’m quite weak in those things. I have to shut myself off. I’m frightened when I’m attracted to other men. I like to keep my world uncluttered because I don’t know how to cope with unwelcome feelings. Because I don’t trust myself.’

She has only just begun. She laughs scornfully and assumes that the policewoman won’t have understood, but something will seep through and later she’ll think back to her words of wisdom.

‘Arthur knew how far he could go. He knew himself. He trusted himself and I trusted him.’

The police officer looks at her coffee, cautiously raises her head and says, ‘They were naked. The car was hit on the hard shoulder. They were found naked.’

Only now does it occur to Roxy that the word ‘comfortable’ wasn’t right. As though she’s sent reality down the wrong path with an ill-chosen word. She tries to come up with a plausible reason for the nakedness of her husband and the intern but doesn’t get far.

Like the previous night, Annemarie has averted her gaze. Perhaps she understands that Roxy wants anything except to be seen. The officer doesn’t watch her arrogant gaze dissolving and wretchedness growing inside her.

Roxy stands up, grabs the policewoman’s coffee and empties the cup into the sink.

‘It’s cold,’ she says. ‘You mustn’t drink that. Cold coffee’s disgusting.’ She turns on the tap and rinses the cup until all the coffee residue has gone, but the images aren’t washed away with it: Arthur and the girl, naked in a car, mutilated bodies entwined; Arthur dying in a stranger’s arms; her death cry. The funny thing is that everyone always suspects him of cheating. Will that line stay with her forever now?

Roxy thinks about her parents, about their scrapbook and the fact she’s going to have to be the one to tell them. Even though she only sees them three times a year at the most, she seems to have become a child again all of a sudden, like she’s in their house, and first she’ll have to brave them taking in this scandal before she can take it in herself.

‘Do her parents know this?’

‘I believe her family went to the hospital last night and they’ve been told all the details.’

‘Details,’ Roxy says, imagining the details. ‘Is Arthur ... is he still in one piece?’

‘He’s in the hospital mortuary. You can visit him. The doctor there can give you all —’

‘The details?’

‘Yes.’

Roxy turns off the espresso machine, instantly giving up the notion of ever being able to use the thing and runs the tap again but the sink is clean. Would the bodies be carefully separated at the site of an accident like that, or might parts of one still be in the other?

‘Stop picturing it,’ Arthur always said if she got carried away in painful fantasies, like if she was watching unpleasant TV shows and crying. ‘Don’t do it,’ he’d say. ‘Why don’t you turn off the telly?’ It had seemed to annoy him more and more in recent years, as though she was the person who had invented all the misery in the world. It was her own fault that she pictured it.

Roxy turns off the tap and lets the images work their way in, uncensored: his lustful hands stroking her young breasts, her mouth around his penis, his facial expression as he came, and the strange girl watching him at that moment. When you say it out loud it becomes more real, as though what is heard can no longer be denied. She turns to the policewoman.

‘Was his penis still attached? Or is it inside her? Would that be possible?’ Annemarie looks at her hands on the table; no more cup of coffee to stare at. Roxy doesn’t want to shock her, that’s not her point. She just wants to break Arthur’s rules that state that people mustn’t emphasize pain.

‘Darling, anything you pay attention to only grows,’ and Roxy gives her loved one and the strange young woman her full attention, exactly the thing he would try to dissuade her from doing. She has to do something, doesn’t she?

She hears Louise running around and screaming upstairs and Liza calling her.

The police officer stands up and shakes Roxy’s hand. She seems to want to say something and then realizes that there isn’t anything she can say. Roxy doesn’t let go. Holding Annemarie’s hand in her own it’s as though someone has played a malicious joke on them. Roxy continues to hold her hand and the policewoman allows it, until Louise comes downstairs, screaming with pleasure, and runs into the kitchen in her pyjamas. She breaks their covenant; the hands let go. Louise’s joy cuts through the atmosphere in the kitchen like a knife. Liza runs after her saying she has to come back, she has to get dressed. Louise is enjoying the game and runs away until she sees the policewoman. She stops and stares through her white-blonde hair hanging in tangles in front of her face. She points.

‘Police,’ she says. She smiles blissfully, as though Mickey Mouse himself were in the kitchen. For a moment they are all silent and Roxy, too, looks at the shiny gold insignia on Annemarie’s cap, the police emblem on her chest, the belt with holster and handcuffs.

‘Yes, police,’ Annemarie says. ‘And who are you?’ Louise says nothing.

‘Her name’s Louise,’ Roxy says. ‘This is Louise.’ She lifts up her daughter and clutches her to her chest.

‘Mummy,’ she squeals.

‘I’m going to flatten you,’ Roxy says.

‘Don’t!’ Louise cries as her mother relaxes her grip: ‘Again!’

‘If you’ve got any more questions you can always call us.’

Annemarie says she’ll manage and excuses herself. Roxy clutches and releases her daughter, time and time again.

‘Stop!’ Louise shouts, and ‘again’, and ‘stop’, and ‘again’, until they’re tired, until Roxy simply holds her child against her quietly, cheek to cheek.

‘We’re stuck together,’ Louise says. Roxy carefully tries to pry her daughter loose but she presses herself harder into her mother.

The doorbell rings. Roxy doesn’t move. Liza goes to the door.

It’s Jane, Arthur’s PA. ‘Is he still asleep?’ Roxy would recognize that deep, smoky voice anywhere. When she works upstairs and Arthur’s PA comes round, she can hear it right away, a sonorous hum, even though she can’t make out the words.

‘Hi darl’,’ Jane says. ‘Aren’t you up in your attic yet?’

‘Say hello,’ Roxy says to her daughter.

‘Say hello yourself,’ Jane says. ‘I was talking to you, hon’.’

‘Hello Jane,’ Roxy says. Jane winks. In the distant past, Jane had been Arthur’s driving instructor. Later she’d done something to do with purchasing art. She’s got a girlfriend of Roxy’s age whom Roxy has never met and who people say is stunning. Roxy doesn’t know what impresses her the most about Jane, perhaps the fact she smokes like a trooper and isn’t planning to stop.

Jane has actually retired; she started doing this on the side to help Arthur out of a tight spot after he’d fallen out with yet another assistant—a favour to a friend. Now she’s been doing it for years.

‘Otherwise I’d just get bored,’ she says when people ask. Arthur believes he’s doing her a favour. Roxy thinks the opposite.

‘Where is that asshole?’

Liza nods toward Louise. ‘Shall I take her upstairs again?’

Roxy says, ‘I have a headache. I need coffee.’

Liza reaches out her arms to Louise but Roxy doesn’t let her go.

‘I just want a bloody normal coffee machine, something normal. What the fuck is wrong with just a normal coffee machine? I need to go to the mall.’

Jane points at the counter. ‘Is the espresso machine broken?’

‘It’s a bugger,’ Roxy says, walking to the kitchen carrying Louise. Liza follows them, as though she doesn’t want to stay with Jane.

Roxy feels she shouldn’t ask but she does anyway, ‘Liza, would you —’

‘Give her to me.’

‘No, I mean … will you tell her?’

Without waiting for a response, Roxy opens the door and leaves the house, still carrying the pyjama-clad Louise. She has left and she has everything she needs with her. It’s funny how great the relief is, being out of the house she has only left reluctantly in recent years. She strides along the street taking enormous steps, her daughter bouncing up and down on her hip.

‘Clip-clop, clip-clop,’ Louise says, like a horse in one of her picture books. To Roxy, she seems lighter than ever.

In the hardware shop, she calls for the sales assistant: ‘Sir!’

‘Yes?’

‘I want the cheapest coffee maker.’ It mustn’t look anything like their espresso machine.

‘Come with me,’ the man, whom she’s never seen in the shop before, says. Maybe he’s new; maybe he’s the manager and isn’t usually on the shop floor.

‘All the coffee machines are here.’ He opens a vitrine with a key. ‘We’ve got this Philips one for €24.95: the jug turns into a Thermos flask so it uses less energy. Then we’ve got a Tomado for €15.95: quite a standard coffee maker, nothing fancy.’

‘And that one?’ She points.

‘Yes, that’s a little one: €9.95—perfect for a caravan or a student dorm.’

‘Is it the cheapest one?’

‘And then we’ve also got machines which grind the beans, but they’re more sophisticated models.’

‘I want the cheapest.’ She just manages to say it in a friendly voice.

‘Do you want the Tomado then? Or —?’

‘That one.’ She points again.

‘You mean the little one?’

‘It’s the cheapest, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, the little one then. I’ll just fetch a boxed one from the back.’

Roxy goes to the till. There’s a rack of Smurfs films, Smurfs glasses, and Smurfs pyjamas.

‘Smurfs,’ Louise says who loves to name things by their names. The man walks up with the coffee machine. Roxy strokes a pair of blue pyjamas with a Smurfs pattern.

‘That’ll be €9.95.’

‘You like these?’ she asks her daughter.

‘Yes.’

They’re pyjamas Roxy would have wanted herself as a child, only she wore long floral nighties and hand-me-down pyjamas from her older neighbours. Clothing with prints from television series was an unknown luxury, something that has remained unknown because in their household such things were considered tasteless. Roxy’s daughter wears tasteful little striped pyjama suits. Even the buttons are pretty, with little anchors. They suit her daughter, they really do.

Roxy strokes the plastic Smurfs print, wonders whether it smells like plastic inflatable animals, and repeats her question: ‘Do you like these?’ She doesn’t hear her daughter. She takes the pyjamas from the rack. ‘And these.’ Under the pyjamas featuring Brainy Smurf, there’s a pair with Smurfette. She takes those too, ‘and these’—and underneath is the big Smurf with the red hat, ‘and these.’ Under there’s another pair with the big Smurf.

‘Do you have any others?’

The man comes out from behind the till immediately, happy that he can help her with something.

‘I believe there are also ones with Jokey Smurf,’ he says, beginning to search the pile. When he’s done, he searches through the pile again.

‘No,’ he says, ‘we’re out of Jokey Smurf.’

Roxy stands in front of her house, carrying her daughter in one arm, the shopping bag with the coffee maker and the Smurfs pyjamas in the other. It’s no longer her house. She wants to reject it but it has already rejected her.

Her own mother joined a convent to escape her parents and married her father to escape the convent. None of this was unusual. In her circle, in those days, these were the usual options and none of it needed to turn out badly as long as you didn’t choose the wrong convent and the wrong husband.

Roxy wants to escape now but Arthur has beaten her to it. There’s nothing left for her to do.

She can’t get to her key and doesn’t want to put either her daughter or the coffee maker down. Inside are the two women who have been organizing their lives for the past few years—the babysitter and the PA—both of them hired by Arthur, of course. If it were up to Roxy she’d do everything herself. On the days her computer freezes, she considers buying a typewriter, anything to avoid having to ask strangers for help. Now she’s standing at the door to her house, inside are the employees she has inherited—or are they acquaintances, friends? She doesn’t know; they’re Arthur’s, not hers—everything is Arthur’s. She rings the bell, like a visitor.