LITMIR.BIZ

       15

      I am jealous of my sister. She has found in the neighbours a warm and loving foster-family. I am occasionally invited to dinner. I hang around, trying to get myself adopted too, but I am already big and independent. I have my own friend, but she is cruel. Her parents own one of the very first televisions in Utrecht. I am fascinated, bewitched. She knows it, and invites me over when she wants to and pointedly not when I am dying to go. I am devastated. My mother feels sorry for me and understands that she can make up for her absence by providing me with this piece of modern treasure. My mother buys a television! A box of marvels, a miracle; never-ending pictures. It lives in my parents’ bedroom. I watch it as much as I can. My mother puts limits on my hypnosis, especially in the evenings. I must go to bed. Once in my room I keep quiet for a few moments, giving the impression that I’ve fallen asleep, then tiptoe back out again in the direction of the television. The door of my parents’ bedroom is closed but glazed, with a multicoloured stained-glass window in the middle. I stand stock-still a few feet behind the door, just able to see the TV, distorted but in colour.

      I am growing up alone these days. Marianne is almost never around, Nicolas spends his life outside and my parents are becoming invisible. I don’t deal with it well. I rebel. At school, I refuse to go to the toilet during the allotted break times. My bladder becomes infected but I still refuse to go. I won’t hang my clothes on the coat rack. I hate the squirrel design on it, that pseudo-sweet animal with claws like my mother’s staples.

      I become a stubborn, contrary child.

      I never do what I’m told, rejecting everything wholesale. Hierarchies and orders remind me of my mother. Growing up is a dead end. I won’t take the boring educational path I’m being shown, won’t heed the stupid, abstract advice, ‘you should do this, a big girl must do that …’ But what is a big girl? A woman who works herself to the bone? A woman who has forgotten how to laugh or dance, who says she isn’t a woman? Nothing about grown bodies or adults holds my interest. I like only my childhood books, my continuing dreams at the window, my Walt Disney pictures, the movies and TV. I become lazy, indolent; I still am, sometimes.

      I have a need to lie down and do nothing, motionless, watching the time passing, experiencing idleness, gazing around the room with slow-motion eyes, my only activity the gentle coming and going of air in my chest. I like being inert, touching the slow moment. I am congealing in torpor, in rest, becoming stunted. I convince myself of my innocent stillness, my different fate: I am not behaving like my mother, am not trapped in the industrious rhythm of life, on and on until death.

      It’s around then that I start dreaming of a job in which I do nothing. A task that won’t exhaust, won’t cause black rings under my eyes, on the contrary will make them shine. A soft, joyful job, rather languid and voluptuous.

      Marianne no longer comes to the hotel even at night. I sleep alone. I bumped into her today on my way to the chip shop. She looked my way so I slipped my arm through hers. She looked at me nastily and said: ‘Let me go! I’m not your sister! I am Marianne Van de Berg, Anneke is my sister, not you!’ I let go of her arm, fled to the hotel and wept. I’ve got a new book: Billy Bradley Goes to Boarding School. Good idea. I’ve nothing left to lose, it can only be better than here. I ask to go away to school, an immediate escape.