Craving Page 10

  ‘You said it was nice for us. I believed you.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘The-heater’s-on. How-nice-that-must-be. That was what the heater was like.’

  ‘But you didn’t think it was nice?’

  ‘It was nice … that it was supposed to be nice.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘You’re angry.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘It was nice to see the heater and think: he does that for us.’

  ‘But not anymore?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Should I leave it on or not?’

  And so they destroyed their heater, which could no longer be on in the mornings and could no longer be off. The longer they talked to each other, the more Wilbert said that it was good that they were talking properly at last, and the bigger the areas of rot in the home became. Bit by bit everything became corroded, demolished, broken apart.

  The largest injury, of course, was the sunroom window that their girl had broken during her great flight to the outdoors. It ushered in the demolition. It was as though Coco knew better than her parents that it didn’t really matter, because the decision to demolish had long been made.

  ‘Should I get something out of the freezer?’ Coco asks. ‘Soup? Bread?’

  ‘I’ll have a look in a minute,’ Wilbert says.

  ‘You know where everything is.’

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ Elisabeth says. ‘Everything’s still in the same place.’

  Again Coco walks away and returns. She is wearing her coat, a coat that is not made out of plastic and not made out of cloth. The coat makes a constant rustling, as though Coco is walking around in a giant newspaper. Doesn’t she hear it herself?

  ‘Do you still need me?’

  Elisabeth and Wilbert sigh at the same time.

  ‘Go,’ her father says.

  #

  When she rings the bell, he comes out of his practice, which is in the basement of his house.

  He says, ‘Laura’s still here, we’re preparing for Seattle.’

  Coco waits for him to let her in and introduce her, but he unlocks the upstairs door and says, ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

  She didn’t call him until she’d left her mother’s house.

  ‘Mum’s deteriorating fast,’ she said, ‘Dad’s with her, can I please come to yours for dinner? I have to get out for a bit.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ he said, ‘it’s getting too much, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I just need to get out for a while, it’s not too much for me! Christ!’

  ‘… Would you please not shout at me.’

  She cried because he seemed offended, because he was angry with her, and she could only think of one way to repair things quickly. So she just said: ‘Sorry, yes, you’re right. It is getting too much for me.’ Crying made it believable.

  She slowly mounts the steps to his house.

  She sits down at the table, next to the newspaper. There’s an empty wine glass next to the paper, an ugly green goblet. It’s an heirloom and Hans often emphasises how precious the glass is to him and how she has to be careful with it. She deliberately shoves it aside roughly, because his warnings annoy her all of a sudden, he makes such a fuss, a thing like that doesn’t break that easily, but mainly she doesn’t just want to accept his warnings. The glass falls. She jumps, the goblet rolls still intact across the table in the opposite direction, see, things like that don’t break that easily. But she jumps too her feet too quickly to grab it, bumps against the table, the glass rolls further and falls onto the floor. It breaks.

  Sweat breaks out all over her body. Her hands tremble. She shakes her head.

  Save me, she thinks, save me, and she knows that there is only one person who can.

  She knocks on the window of the practice.

  He doesn’t open the door fully.

  ‘Half hour, I’ll be there.’

  ‘I broke a glass.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s awful—it’s the precious glass.’

  ‘The green one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that is awful.’

  ‘I wasn’t careful, even though I was thinking …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course, I knew that …’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he says, ‘it only hurts.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s important to you. I …’

  ‘I mean it. I choose not to think about it then. It only hurts.’

  ‘Sorry. It was …’

  ‘Coco, stop. It’s my glass. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll be there in half an hour. OK?’ He closes the door.

  Breathing is difficult. The fear has not gone. Yet he won’t mention it again. The glass no longer exists now.

  Coco walks very carefully back up the steps, as though she’d never been downstairs. He mustn’t hear her footsteps.

  Coco wraps the broken glass in newspaper and puts it in her handbag, so that Hans doesn’t have to see it again.

  She is braced behind the newspaper when Hans comes in. She mustn’t mention it. That would be egotistical, it’s his glass, he can choose whether it existed or not, whether it broke or not.

  ‘Are you done?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall I make tea?’

  ‘I’ve already had tea.’

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘I’ll have a glass of wine. You won’t, I guess?’

  The word ‘wine’ makes her cringe internally. She feels dreadful and doesn’t know if it’s only to do with the glass. She thinks about that woman too.

  ‘Is she pretty,’ she asks, ‘Laura?’

  ‘Oh, Coco, please.’

  That’s not a good answer, but the question was worse.

  ‘I’ll reheat the Chinese from yesterday,’ Hans says.

  She accompanies him to the kitchen and sees the two trays he gets out of the fridge and thinks: no way is that enough.

  ‘I’ll have a drink with you,’ she says. It’s the final option. She doesn’t see any other way out.

  She wants to feel what she used to feel when she first got to know him. She wants him to feel that. It can’t be gone. Sleep can’t be all there is left. How pretty can Laura be?

  They eat and they drink. After two glasses of wine she manages to ask him about his ambitions and not find it odd that someone wants something. After three glasses of wine she is able to take his counter-question seriously. After four glasses of wine she can say that she doesn’t want anything and that it is a big problem indeed. By the second bottle of wine, she says that she admires him and she doesn’t know whether that’s true.

  She says, ‘You … you are … the one for me. I’ve seen you. I’ve chosen you.’

  ‘The way you chose which degree to take? The way you chose to move in with your mother?’

  ‘I love my mother.’

  ‘You can’t just decide to love someone.’

  ‘Shut up, man.’

  ‘Talk to her.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Should you want to know everything? She is my mother. I am her daughter.’

  ‘And I’m the one for you?’

  ‘Yes, goddammit.’

  ‘It’s not going well, Coco, you can’t deny that.’

  ‘But you’re going to see this through in the appropriate manner?’

  ‘What’s my keynote speech about?’

  She empties the last glass, walks over to him and says, ‘Overpower me.’

  She sees it bothers him, but she also sees his pupils widen, and he kisses her. No, he eats. He devours. There’s no difference between mouth, nose, cheek, ear, he devours her. And she doesn’t just think: overpower me, she thinks: more, further. She thinks what she mustn’t think. Hit me, beat me for god’s sake, beat me senseless. The drink really gets the thinking going, she’d forgotten that. It makes the only interesting thoughts surface, the ones
that are unreasonable but clear. She is so bad at thinking rationally, that’s why she always comes across as sluggish and stupid, because she doesn’t know the right arguments for the sensible thoughts. But she knows that she can hold forth for a long time on beat-me-senseless, which she hardly dares to think, she feels it, and one day there will be someone she’ll dare say it out loud to. In the meantime he continues to devour her, you can’t really call it kissing. He consumes her and she thinks about that girl—was it in England?—who wanted to commit suicide and took so many pills she didn’t realise that her dog was eating her face. This is how he is chewing her and all she has to do is allow herself to be devoured, bite him back as quickly as possible, keep up with him, don’t eat less than him. She pulls off his jumper, he hers, then vest, bra, and she cries and laughs and pants and eats and says without making a sound: Eating is the very, very, very best and most important of all things. She sucks his bottom lip. She wants to taste more than this and bites.

  ‘Aah,’ he says and she wants more of that sound too. She tastes blood, she sucks it up, together with his moans and again he says, ‘Aah,’ and pushes her off him.

  ‘Jesus, you’re biting me.’

  For a moment Coco is stumped. Of course she is biting, you can’t eat otherwise.

  ‘What is this?’ Hans asks and Coco doesn’t answer: Eating. She has to stay calm. Act reasonable. This is not unusual. It went wrong with her first boyfriends. They always stopped. Everyone is afraid of all that emotion, and she is only afraid of not feeling anything anymore.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, and, ‘Oh no, you’re bleeding,’ as though she hadn’t tasted his blood, swallowed it. She licks her own lips clean.

  ‘Oh, my poor darling.’ She kisses him gently. Gently on his cheek. Gently on his neck. Gently on his chest. His belly. She kneels. She hears his breathing quicken. She pulls his trousers down with great care. She pulls down his underpants with one hand, the other hand already nursing his cock. Don’t frighten him. She restrains herself and she cries because when it comes down to it, when she is awake, finally awake, when the alcohol has kissed her awake, she is always quicker than the other. She licks his cock and he groans and closes his eyes and hasn’t seen through her tears. She takes all of him in her mouth, shields her teeth, expands her lips and bites and slides and sucks and tastes snot and spit and tears and somewhere in the distance, blood.

  She stops and takes a deep breath.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says, pulling her up and pushing her towards the bedroom. He pulls off her trousers and pushes her onto the bed, a little wildly, thank god. She falls. He moves over her, too big and too heavy and she mustn’t say: Crush me, pulverise me, murder me, for god’s sake kill me, do something that feels worse than this. He pushes a leg aside, enters her, cock in her, his limbs against hers, and thrusts and glides and thrusts, pulls back and thrusts into places she can’t reach. And that is the secret of everything, places she can’t reach. It all needs to be faster and deeper and worse, but then there is his final thrust already, he shudders and as his sweaty body drops onto her she starts crying where she left off, because she knows it isn’t enough. She crawls out from under him, he rolls onto his side and falls asleep. How is it possible that this gives satisfaction, peace, to another? A big baby lies next to her. Coco is wide awake. It is not enough. She wipes her tears. It doesn’t matter. She just has to go and get more. She can do that.

  She gets up and puts her clothes on. When she’s drunk, she’s five. She thinks about leaves when she’s drunk, and then she wants to go outside, walk through them, like it was always autumn when she was five. There must have been an autumn when she could do anything. She remembers how certain she was of everything, knowing that she could jump over a much too big puddle, and how certain she was the others would listen to her if she told them what to do.

  Once she told the boy next door who was the same age as her that it was possible to jump out of the bedroom window.

  ‘You just have to bend your knees a lot when you land, that’s very important. I’ve done it a lot of times. You really can.’ She talked him into it, until he climbed onto the windowsill and went to open the window. Only then did she say that it had been a joke. But it was pleasurable being able to get another person to go this far.

  She looks at the sleeping man and is sure she has the upper hand. Whoever is awake has the upper hand. She won’t sleep anymore. She is sure she doesn’t need sleep now.

  Hans doesn’t hear a thing. Hans doesn’t believe in it. Poor Hans, he doesn’t see it. It’ll come.

  She stops on the pavement outside his house. Her handbag won’t close because it’s got the newspaper with the broken glass in it. She pinches at the paper but doesn’t cut herself. She crosses the street without paying any attention to the traffic and that goes well.

  ‘I’m back,’ she says as she walks into the centre. The city centre is her friend.

  She goes into the first pub she sees, an Irish pub. She pauses and looks around and thinks: you can have me, before looking for a seat, taking off her coat. It doesn’t take long for men to look at her. It is even easier than it used to me. She has forgotten why she didn’t want this anymore. Why did she give this up? This is so much better than eating. Better than sleeping too. Now things will come right. Now she has this again, she can stop sleeping, eating, Hans, everything.

  There is a football match on a screen in one corner. That’s good, directs the gaze. She walks past the screen, takes off her coat, orders beer, leans against the bar, and watches Ireland play Estonia.

  ‘If you sit here,’ a man taps her on the shoulder, pointing at a stool next to him, ‘you’ll have a better view.’

  Her eyes slide over his body, his face. Possible. Now all he has to do is not say anything too stupid.

  Whether she likes football? What she thinks of the Irish pub? If she wants another beer? If she’s cold? No? She seems to be trembling. Oh, she isn’t. Just a shiver?

  It almost goes wrong when he says, ‘I think you must be very sensitive.’

  She laughs loudly, ‘No, that I’m not.’

  He laughs too, that makes a difference, that helps, now don’t say anything else like that. Shut him up.

  ‘You’ve got a bit of blood on your cheek.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘cut myself shaving.’

  She reaches towards it, touches the small wound. Obvious, she has touched him, the rest is up to him now.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s not bleeding anymore,’ she says. As she goes to the toilet, she sees that he’s afraid it’s an excuse. He is tall. When she returns, she stays standing on the ledge that runs along in front of the bar so that she can look him in the face more easily, he takes a step closer. He kisses her and it feels good. Full, soft. Then he hugs her. It is very strange, his face moved past hers all of a sudden and now it’s resting on her shoulder. She breaks free.

  ‘No cuddling?’ he asks, and the word disturbs her for a moment, it’s such a strange word for in a pub. She lays a finger across his lips.

  ‘Sshh.’ She kisses him and then his hands knead her waist. Good, his hands are hungry, then it’s all right, then it’s possible. Although she could just go home now, because she knows it won’t be enough.

  Coco stands in the middle of the sitting room and smiles at her mother. Her father left as soon as she got home.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ her mother asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ she says, ‘did you have a nice time?’

  ‘Yes. Quite.’

  ‘I wish I liked it. Always said that to your father. But I don’t like the taste.’

  Coco nods and stumbles.

  ‘Poor child.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Coco says, she’s kneeling.

  ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

  ‘I nodded a bit too hard.’

  ‘Do you want anything else?’

  ‘What have you got then?’

  ‘Not much, just a bottle of port—for
Martin, but he never drinks much.’

  Coco is still kneeling and asks, ‘Have you never wanted another relationship?’

  Her mother appears to reflect.

  ‘Or am I not speaking clearly?’ Coco asks.

  ‘No, I can understand you.’

  ‘Have you never wanted another husband?’

  ‘Yes,’ her mother says, ‘but which one?’

  Coco thinks about the man from the Irish pub. She wants him again but knows that a different man would be better, before he too turns into someone in whose arms she wants to gently fall asleep. It’s too late for Mum, but not for me.

  ‘I commit too easily,’ she says, drunk enough to forget who she’s talking to.

  ‘I’ve got that too,’ her mother says.

  ‘I latch onto a man right away.’

  ‘You always had boyfriends,’ her mother says, ‘right from secondary school.’

  ‘I always latch on. I like to latch on. But then I die slowly, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Then the water stops moving, right? Then it gets stagnant.’

  ‘A fish has to swim.’

  ‘Yes, know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now the floodgates have broken.’

  ‘Are you the water or the fish?’

  Coco ponders this. ‘I’m a fish,’ she says, ‘but I want to be the water.’

  Her mother closes her eyes.

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘Very tired.’

  Coco turns off the lights in the sitting room and wishes her mother goodnight.

  ‘I’ll be quiet on the stairs,’ she says, and she slips out of the house again. There’s a bar on the street corner. It’s not even that it has to happen again right away, she just has to check whether it can happen again, whether it works. After that some sleep will be all right.

  #

  Coco has run around the house all day. Up the stairs, down the stairs. She has fetched glasses of water. If Elisabeth didn’t drink them, Coco would change the water. She made sure that the telephone was within arm’s reach. Set the base under it, crawling under the bed to find the socket.

  ‘There, now the battery can’t go flat. I think of everything.’

  She made bouillon, kept making fresh coffee, drank it herself. She ran to the off-licence to buy port for Martin, but called three times on the way.