We and Me - Saskia de Coster

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lies. He’s like a cat: you don’t know where he’s come from and whose flowers he’s going to destroy, but you can be pretty sure he’ll be back, in perfect health and beaming all over. Stefaan is more like a dog. She lovingly keeps him on a short leash. Every now and then he’s moody, sometimes even paranoid, and when he’s in his basket he licks his own wounds. He’s not always Mr. Cheerful, but she values his sincerity. On the other hand, the blindingly white smile of Marc across the street is a perfect example of play-acting. When you take out the garbage cans after sundown and you catch a glimpse of his professional doctor’s grin, it can scare the living daylights out of you. As if his fee had something to do with the width of his smile.

      -

      SARAH 1990-1991

      ‘How much did you get?’ Emily asks. They’re walking to the beat of the jingling fortune in Sarah’s pants’ pocket. It’s sixty francs and not a centime more. Sarah’s absolutely sure of that. She’s even more sure that she’s not allowed to walk here with Emily. Excessive contact with other people is not a good idea, Mieke says, even if you just happen to bump into them, even if it’s the girl across the street who’s like a sister to you and whose mother takes turns driving you to school. Not even then.

      For an only child living in a villa on the mountain, the childhood years are a Kafkaesque labyrinth of rules and prohibitions. If you walk down the street you’re riff-raff, and if you play music in your room you’re committing a major crime because you’re making noise.

      At the tinkling of the doorbell the owner of the newspaper shop comes out from his dark infernal lair full of children’s screaming and televised din in the back. This man, Mieke has assured her daughter, is going to try to cheat her. This upside-down camel, whose humps are hanging out in front, takes his own stupidity for shrewdness and is so stupid that he thinks his customers are stupid and that he can easily put one over on them. He makes a game of it and keeps on trying, over and over and over again, even though he gets caught on a regular basis.

      The Libelle Rositas are on the camel’s counter. All Sarah has to do is take the magazine and count her change. Mieke has told her in no uncertain terms not to look around too much. There’s nothing there to interest her, especially in the back of the shop. Some of the magazines there are covered in silver wrapping paper with XXX written on them in black letters. As unusual as those obtrusive letters are, that’s how conspicuous and exposed to the real world Sarah feels. She conducts her transaction with downcast eyes, and when no change is forthcoming she turns to Emily, who follows their cleverly thought-out scenario and puts a twenty-franc coin on the counter. ‘And Marlboros for my mother,’ she says. ‘It’s three francs too much, but that’s all right.’ This is too quick for the camel. He puts a pack of Marlboros on the counter and goes to work with his Texas Instruments calculator, but the two girls grab the magazine and cigarettes and rush out the door before he can react.

      Behind the town hall opposite the newspaper shop Emily strips the pack of its transparent skin. Sarah takes one of the cigarettes, sniffs it, and places it between her fingers as if she were smoking it. The gesture feels like freedom. Sarah isn’t allowed to eat candy because candy makes you fat, and if you’re fat you have fewer chances in life. Her mother hasn’t laid down any rules for smoking. A car drives past slowly. She quickly slips the sharp-smelling stick of pleasure into the sleeve of her jacket. Pleasure is best done as quickly as possible so you can get on with your normal life.

      Along with that thought, an invisible angel of haste comes to perch on Sarah’s feathers. A delay of a couple of minutes can be reason enough for Mieke to call the police. It wasn’t long ago that she called in the police when a strange man set a ladder against the chimney. The man had come to the wrong house, he explained to the police. It was enough to get her mother to spend one whole hour combing her new rug. Sarah and Emily hasten up the mountain.

      At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon Sarah returns to number 7 Nightingale Lane without any tears in her clothing. She slips in through the back door and goes directly to the bathroom. Behind the toilet, beneath a wooden construction meant to hide the toilet’s waste pipe, she hides the cigarette. Sanctimonious Sarah comes strolling into the kitchen. Contrary to all expectations, the one-person welcoming committee (Mieke) is not here to greet her. This is suspicious, since her mother can’t be anywhere else but home. What’s completely alarming is the pan of spaghetti sauce simmering unattended on the stove. In the middle of the afternoon, inferior food like spaghetti sauce, unattended—in this house that’s as unusual as a rhinoceros sitting on the sofa watching television.

      Luckily the sound of her mother’s unique, high-pitched chatter can suddenly be heard in the living room, alternating with the gravelly voice of an unknown man. She hears the familiar, nervous click of her mother’s heels as she rushes into the toilet in the entrance hall.

      Mieke usually leaves the door ajar for workmen, but only if there’s no other solution than to rely on their services. Mieke may praise the work of the electrician to the skies when he’s standing upright in the kitchen, his filthy shoes on a piece of cardboard, drinking coffee from a Villeroy & Boch cup and eating the pralines Mieke has urged on him (and withheld from Sarah for health reasons). But after he leaves she spends days talking about how the man spread mud all over the sheets on the cellar stairs with his ungainly clodhoppers without saying a word about it, how his work crew actually left the cellar looking like a brothel, and how they smeared her light switches with pitch—yes, she swears it, with pitch, which she won’t be able to get off in a hundred years.

      Something is tickling the extremities of Sarah’s nerves: fear and excitement closing in together. Peering through a crack in the door, Sarah sees him. After ten years of life, Sarah beholds the first strange man she’s ever seen in this house who isn’t a worker. Legs wide apart, backlit, straight off the silver screen: a cowboy, a bad guy in torn jeans.

      ‘No, I won’t have it,’ she hears her mother say again. She must have rushed through her trip to the toilet. ‘You can eat, but then you’ve got to go.’

      ‘Settle down, Mieke, it spoils your looks. And that’s a damn shame for a good-looking woman like you.’

      ‘No, no, I mean it. This time I’m not going to let myself be taken in. You’ve caused me enough trouble.’

      ‘What are you talking about? We haven’t seen each other in ages.’

      ‘Why are you making it so hard for me? Why did you come here to give my family a hard time?’

      ‘Your mother-in-law, who doesn’t say a word to you, is welcomed here with open arms, but … ’

      ‘Open arms!’ Mieke interrupts, sneering.

      ‘ … and I get tossed out, even though I’ve come especially for you. I think that’s terrible.’

      ‘If you think it’s so terrible, get on your motorcycle and leave. I’m not stopping you. You’ll know where to go, or am I your only place of refuge?’

      ‘Mieke, I came here especially for you. You’ve always been special to me, you know that.’

      ‘Jempy, still the big charmer,’ Mieke says in a milder tone. ‘The spaghetti should be done, so you can eat. At least if you call spaghetti a meal. I expect Sarah any minute, by the way. She should have been home already.’

      The man growls something unintelligible. A heavy cadence can be heard moving from the living room to the kitchen, right where she’s standing at the doorway, eavesdropping. When the door opens, Sarah flees to the utility room to continue her spying activities.

      This strange man, intruding on a stable family that for ten years has been as unshakable as a sequoia, this daredevil, opens one drawer after another and rummages boorishly through their things. Mieke jumps between him and the kitchen cabinet and fishes a spoon out of the cutlery drawer. He takes the spoon and begins scooping straight out of the pot. Is he a member of a motorcycle gang, and has he taken her mother hostage? No, she never would have let him in. He can’t be a Jehovah’s Witness, either, because he never would have gotten past the front door. A worker? If he were, the whole house would be eerily covered in old sheets.

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