Craving Read online

‘I didn’t lock her up, did I?’

  ‘What’s she supposed to do with it?’

  ‘Not still trying for Mother of the Year, are you?’

  ‘I’m talking about Coco.’

  ‘Oh, a parenting discussion. Not our forte.’

  ‘Our,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says then, ‘I don’t want to be a jerk, maybe it wasn’t so clever of me.’

  ‘We used to have it good, once, didn’t we? Before Coco?’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  ‘That too?’

  ‘We were good too.’

  ‘I’ve never told you this before,’ she says, ‘but do you know I always used to think, as far back as school, that you smelled of pencil shavings?’

  ‘You have said that before.’

  ‘Have I said that?’

  ‘Several times.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wilbert takes off his jumper. He is wearing a polo shirt underneath. He has got fat.

  ‘I want to say it again,’ Elisabeth says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought you smelled of pencil shavings. But I like that smell. Have I already said that too?’

  ‘Yes, you said that too.’

  ‘Then I might have a good memory, but …’

  ‘Not for the things you say yourself.’

  ‘I always forget whether I’ve thought something or said it out loud.’

  ‘No, you always forget to look for a reaction. That’s it.’ His face is angry.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘is that it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  She lapses into silence.

  ‘What are you thinking about now?’ Wilbert asks.

  ‘Things I’ve already said.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘just say it then.’

  She holds out her hand. ‘I can still feel it. The finger you put a plaster around, on your sixteenth birthday. I sliced it open on a tin. You put it on very tight. That’s when I decided that you were the one for me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I’m certain I’ve said that before.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve got those plastic pre-cut plasters. Not the stiff kind you have to cut yourself.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘When Coco came she had that kind of plaster on.’

  ‘You say that like she was delivered to you every week wounded.’

  ‘I asked her whether she’d put those plasters on her arm.’

  ‘Miriam?’

  ‘She was seven at the time. I explained to her that those are ugly plasters and that you should cut plasters from a big folded roll and they should feel stiff and dry. She’d forgotten. Even then.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s a shame you’ve only come now. I have to sleep in the afternoons.’

  ‘You can sleep. I’m just here.’

  ‘When I wake up, you’ll be gone. I’m not going to sleep.’

  ‘I promise I won’t be gone when you wake up.’

  She closes her eyes and sniffs. She tries to smell him. He’s too far away.

  Wilbert is the tight plaster around her finger, the smell of pencils, dispelled later by the smell of beer. Wilbert is the taste of blood when he kisses her with his damaged lips after falling off his moped again. He is one of those cotton rucksacks with leather piping, which they all had at the time, in different colours. His was black and always a bit too heavy because he carried bottles of beer in it, in amongst the schoolbooks. You heard them clink against each other and Elisabeth is still amazed how few of them broke.

  The rare bottle that broke in her bedroom replaced the pencil smell permanently with that of beer. It was a long Sunday afternoon, her parents had fallen asleep in the sitting room. The rays of sun made everything dustier, not more beautiful. You could taste the dust on Sundays. Your palate became rough, you wanted to eat all the time and then stop eating. Anything to get rid of the taste. Her sisters had left home already. The big attic bedroom was hers. She was like a pet that didn’t require any attention, a cat that really just lives outside. You feed it and it goes its own way. She liked being that kind of animal. Wilbert had long stopped going into the sitting room when he came over, he just walked straight on up the stairs. She recognised the way he walked, he always skipped some stairs.

  Wilbert didn’t have a bottle opener. He always had bottles in that rucksack but never a bottle opener—as though he never intended to buy beer but hit upon the idea each day anew. He usually opened his bottles with a lighter. That Sunday he didn’t have a lighter and tried to use the sharp edge of radiator to whack the top off. The bottle broke. Foam and brown shards of glass on the carpet of her childhood bedroom. It was one of the few times that Elisabeth didn’t consider the damaging of things a sign of decline. It was as though her bedroom had been inaugurated, as though it had merged with Wilbert. Now her whole bedroom smelled of him, and her bedroom smelled of him again every time the heating went on during the days that followed.

  He sat on the floor with his back to the radiator and drank, faster than ever, at a speed he’d keep up for years. That was the moment he hit the right rhythm.

  She opens her eyes. He is slumped backwards on the sofa holding a newspaper he must have brought with him. She doesn’t get a paper.

  He never drank faster than he had done in those days, but never slower either. Well, not until he stopped completely. But that doesn’t say anything about the speed at which he’d drink if he allowed himself to.

  The longer he sat in her bedroom drinking, the more often he said that she was beautiful, but he also asked, repeatedly, ‘What do you want with someone like me?’

  When he’d drunk enough, she’d dare answer, ‘You are my dog, come and lie with me.’ He looked at her with drunken eyes. He wanted to lie with her.

  ‘Come,’ she said. He crawled onto her bed and laid his head on her lap. She stroked him. ‘You are my dog,’ she said.

  ‘My dog,’ she said quietly, ‘my dog.’ He looks up from his paper.

  ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘Come and lie with me.’

  ‘Elisabeth…’

  ‘Did I say something strange?’ she asks, feeling amazed that she doesn’t ask this question much more often, while god-knows-how-often she thinks it. He smiles. He doesn’t want to answer. Ask again then. But it’s the previous question she asks again.

  ‘Come and lie with me?’

  ‘Are those morphine plasters working a bit now?’

  ‘Don’t you ever drink anymore?’

  ‘Not a drop.’

  ‘I never minded when you were drunk.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I love you.’ He doesn’t speak. It doesn’t matter. It’s nice that she can say it. ‘I love you so much.’ He doesn’t speak. ‘Do you mind me saying that?’

  ‘You don’t love me, you love an idea.’

  She searches for a superlative form of loving someone, of loving with heart and soul, but all she comes up with is his name.

  ‘Wilbert.’

  ‘You love a memory.’

  ‘So you and Miriam love each other better?’ She doesn’t understand and will never understand it, she only understands that she failed and that her love doesn’t count.

  ‘Come and lie with me for a moment?’ He kneels at her bedside and rests his head on the edge of the mattress. She smells the pencil shavings. She rests a hand on his head. She strokes him. She doesn’t say: You are my dog. She doesn’t say it out loud. She was always happy with her dog, but one day he didn’t want to be her dog anymore. Miriam told him he had so many other names, and then he wanted them all. Names she didn’t want to give him, she wanted her dog.

  ‘I can be so much more,’ he once said. ‘And you can too,’ he added afterwards. She could be so much more too. But who on earth wants that? To be more?

  When the front door opens Wilbert scrambles to his feet. It’s Coco and Miriam.

  She looks at th
e broad-hipped woman and counts the times she’s see her in her life. How many birthdays?

  Very quietly, Coco asks her father whether everything has gone well. Miriam nods amicably. Again Elisabeth thinks about vampires. Miriam was invited in just the once and now she’s here again, as though that single invitation was sufficient for her to just walk in whenever she wanted from then on. For years Miriam has just been a name to her. Seldom has anyone taken so long to materialise.

  ‘In the beginning I thought sometimes you might not exist at all.’

  Miriam looks behind her, as though she’s not the one being spoken to.

  ‘You exist,’ she says. No one speaks. ‘A joke, I was making a joke … I think … Wasn’t I?’ Every bit of language she sends into the world has to be translated, explained, clarified. In her own bloody home.

  When the doorbell rings, she remembers that the doctor was coming to visit and is suddenly delighted by all the people in her home. Especially now. Are you telling people? He will be pleased.

  #

  Her mother sits up in bed. Her cheeks seem to have some colour. Coco sits in between her father and stepmother, on the sofa at right angles to the bed. They sit in a ridiculous row facing the doctor, while he does his best to mainly address her mother.

  Just before Peter Voors introduced himself as ‘Peter Voors, GP,’ Coco thought the tall man on the doorstep had come to sell them something. Miriam, of course, had been the first to say she’d leave them alone together, but her mother had gone to quite a lot of trouble to keep Miriam in the sitting room.

  ‘Sit down, sit down, Miriam, sit down.’ And Miriam sat down.

  ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with,’ she said, but Coco thought: even if my mother was comfortable with you beating her with a chair, you shouldn’t be comfortable with it. You shouldn’t want to be here, but she saw that Miriam was all too eager to be here.

  ‘How are you doing?’ the doctor asks.

  ‘Good,’ her mother says, coughing. ‘Sorry, good.’

  She gives the doctor a friendly smile. Her father coughs now too. Miriam stares straight ahead, her mouth clamped shut, acting as though she knows her place and Coco just thinks: don’t meddle, know my place, fucking hell, already asked too many bloody stupid questions. Know my place. I don’t want to be the daughter, Coco thinks, the insatiable one with all the impertinent questions. When she was about fourteen things had got really complicated. On Tuesdays you still had the stepmother with her You can tell me anything to the point of tedium, and the next day there was the real mother who found the slightest question too much, too difficult, and on Thursdays the other one again, with her How are you feeling, darling? How are you feeling? Her father played along nicely. What Coco herself wanted to ask, wanted to know, wanted to say, disappeared into a very thick mist.

  The doctor says, ‘Listen, if the neighbours ask how you’re doing and you don’t feel like talking, you can just say “good,” but when I ask how you’re doing you can give me an honest answer.’

  Her mother glances at Coco, as though asking for help.

  ‘Because of course it isn’t going that well,’ the doctor says.

  ‘No,’ her mother says meekly, ‘not so well, of course.’

  Coco, her father, and Miriam, all three of them, look at the floor now. Three toddlers on a bench, thinks Coco. She’s the boss of us all.

  ‘How’s it going with those pills I gave you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m cutting down on them a bit,’ her mother says, she looks proud, but Coco sees the doctor’s concerned look.

  ‘You mustn’t do that. They reduce the pressure in your head. Will you please not do that? Why did you reduce the dose?’

  ‘… I just wanted to. I just wanted to do it. Is that wrong?’

  ‘You know you’ve got metastases in your head. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ her mother says, ‘I do know that.’

  Coco’s father looks at Coco and asks, almost silently, ‘Did you know that?’ Coco shrugs, and shakes her head angrily, like a teenager who thinks her father has asked a stupid question or at least at a stupid moment.

  ‘Would you just take the prescribed dose of it?’ the doctor asks.

  ‘Oh, that’s fine, no worries, if you think that’s better,’ her mother says in a tone that suggests she doesn’t mind doing things for others.

  ‘Mrs. De Wit,’ the doctor says, ‘you do understand the situation, don’t you?’

  And then Coco stands up, takes Miriam by the hand and pulls her from the sofa. ‘We’ll make coffee,’ she says, and doesn’t let go of Miriam’s hand until she’s on her way to the kitchen.

  Just before she closes the kitchen door behind her, they just catch her mother giving the right answer. That she knows that it won’t be long, that she’s dying. Soon, yes. No, no, not months. Weeks. Perhaps not even that.

  ‘I could die tomorrow,’ she says. ‘I do know,’ proving to the doctor that she’s not crazy, but extremely friendly.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Coco says, ‘that man is so serious.’

  ‘The situation is serious,’ Miriam says.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Coco says, ‘the funeral’s all taken care of.’

  #

  Elisabeth keeps dropping off to sleep and then waking up with a jolt from the same dream each time: that she’s fallen asleep in the shop when she should be working, the frame has to be finished this afternoon. She gropes around for her tools, but the sound of glass wakes her up in the wrong space.

  ‘Martin?’

  It’s Wilbert. He is sitting on the sofa, he bends down and picks up a glass. It isn’t broken. He says, ‘There wasn’t anything in it.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘You’re not at work, Elisabeth, you’re at home.’

  ‘I know that, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Coco made a roster—you remember, don’t you?’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘It’s still the same roster.’

  ‘But you’re here again.’

  ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘I like it.’ She is too tired to be polite. Too tired to think about what she should or shouldn’t say. Again she sinks away, when she wakes up again the space is the right one. She sees what she expects to see and whom she expects to see.

  ‘Hey,’ she says.

  ‘Hey,’ he says.

  ‘My dog.’

  He doesn’t speak.

  ‘You are my dog.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a dog.’

  …

  ‘I don’t want to be a dog.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Did she let you come?’

  ‘I’m my own man.’

  Elisabeth smiles.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Did she say that? Did she say: “You’re your own man?” Did she say that?’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re a dog who doesn’t want to be a dog.’

  ‘I’m not a … goddammit.’

  ‘You don’t want to be a dog, I know.’

  Coco comes downstairs. They hear her go into the kitchen. The stairs are steep. Now that Elisabeth no longer goes up and down them herself, they are in her thoughts more than ever, due that constant daughter-clatter. Coco has never gone up and down the stairs quietly.

  ‘Does Coco have to go out?’

  ‘I said I’d take over for this evening. Then she can pop out.’

  Coco comes in. Elisabeth closes her eyes.

  ‘Dad, are you sure?’ Coco says it softly, she must think she’s asleep. ‘I don’t really have to go out, you know.’

  ‘But then you can pop round to Hans’s.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not a problem.’

  ‘Does Miriam really not mind?’

  ‘Jesus, I decide for myself, right?’

  ‘But of course—it’s Wednesday.’

  ‘What’s on Wednesda
ys?’ Elisabeth asks.

  ‘Did I wake you up?’

  ‘What’s on Wednesdays?’

  ‘Miriam has yoga on Wednesdays,’ Wilbert says, ‘but that’s not the point. What kind of a person do you take Miriam for? It was her idea.’

  ‘Dog,’ Elisabeth mumbles. He hears it. Coco doesn’t, she’s already walking away.

  ‘I’m not the same man I was twenty years ago.’

  ‘You’re fatter.’

  ‘That too, yes.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘No.’

  Coco stomps back upstairs.

  When her daughter was two, she’d carry her down the steep stairs. One arm under those still-skinny buttocks. The child allowed this, step by step. And yet halfway down the stairs, she’d sense Coco preparing herself to fall. As soon as they had reached the bottom, she’d arch her back and slip out of her arms like a fish. Elisabeth tried to move with her—she didn’t like to drop things—she wanted to be in control of how the things she was carrying were set down, how quickly they were released, but she’d just follow the fish as it fell. It wasn’t uncommon for them both to be lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. The child would get up more quickly than she did, and Elisabeth would watch her go like someone who’d lost a contest. It wasn’t yet seven o’clock in the morning, sometimes first light, usually still dark.

  Before Elisabeth had got to her feet, the fish would have already become a different animal: a wild bull you’ve just freed and are watching carefully, hoping the fences will hold. Her daughter was many animals, but never a dog like her father, who used to let himself be stroked. Elisabeth would get up and as Coco ran to the heater, she had to rush and put herself between the two things.

  ‘Whoa,’ she’d say, ‘whoa,’ making herself broad, her arms spread. Wilbert was already at work then, and she’d look at the heater as though he was the heater, and think about the way he would sigh and say that it was nice for them to come downstairs to a warm room. It was years before she dared to say that it wasn’t nice, before she understood that Wilbert wasn’t the heater.

  ‘I’d rather you turned the heater off before you left,’ she said, but she said it too late and after too many of his questions.

  Whether the warmth was nice, whether it was a nice thought, whether she realised …