Girl in the Dark (8 page)

“Excuse me?
What
did you say?”

“You know perfectly well what I'm talking about, Mother.
Who
is
Ray Boelens to us?” Aaron was in bed, and Slovenia's telephone network was finally granting us a connection.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. An indignant pause, giving her the time to formulate the torrent of words that followed. “Jesus, Iris. I thought something serious had happened. I've tried calling you dozens of times. Don't you know I'm on vacation? And to find it's just some nonsense about some Ray Boelens? Did you really have to bother me for that?”

“Who is he, then?”

“That's completely irrelevant.”

“Aha! You won't tell me. That only makes it more interesting.”

“Iris, stop it. Don't you have more important things to worry about? Your own son, for instance.”

I wasn't going to let her off that easy, even though her comment about Aaron made me seethe. “I can't
tell
if it's important or not, as long as I don't know why you have been taking care of his aquarium for all these years.”

“I'm telling you, loud and clear, it's got nothing to do with you.
And if you persist in sticking your nose into my affairs, you'd better just run along home. I'll ask my neighbor to water the plants and take care of the aquarium.”

“So—Ray Boelens is your affair, then. In what way?”

“Save your legal tricks for the courtroom.”

“What are you getting so mad about?”

“Nothing,” she said firmly, and just a bit too quickly.

“Come on. Why can't you just tell me? Is he your brother?”

She hung up. Or else the Slovenian operators had decided it was time to end our conversation.

I tried calling back but got her voice mail. “We weren't done,
Mother dear
. Call me back” was the message I left her, knowing she wouldn't.

If I had to rate her as a mother, I'd say she had been adequate. Not that good, not that bad, not very human, either. My mother had done everything by the book. The cup of tea when I got home from school, nutritious meals, sensible footwear, the right kind of after-school activities, and a nice sum to furnish my room when I left home for the first time. With a mother like that, I had no right to complain.

When we were fifteen or so, Binnie's older brother gave her a joint. She showed it to me in between French and Economics. We used to smoke the occasional cigarette behind the bicycle shed, but we'd never tried a joint before. According to Binnie, her brother smoked practically every day, and it made you mellow.

I looked at the cone-shaped thing. “Where do you want to smoke it? And when?”

“After school, in the park,” said Binnie. She made it sound as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's do it.”

The stuff didn't have much of an effect on me. We passed
the joint back and forth, as we did when we shared a cigarette, sucked at it thoughtfully, and then stared up at the sky, waiting for whatever was supposed to happen. We lay on the grass, each with one of my Walkman ear buds in an ear, listening to Womack & Womack.

“I feel very relaxed,” said Binnie. “Do you feel anything yet?”

“I think so.”

“Did you know smoking a joint can give you the giggles?” She started chortling experimentally.

“Really?”

“Yeah. This stuff especially, my brother says.”

“That would be fun.”

Then we started singing along with the music.
“Next time I'll be true. I'll be true. I'll be true.”

I had a slight headache when I got home, and felt sleepy.

“You're late.” My mother looked at me with a frown. “Are you feeling okay?”

I muttered something about homework and was going to disappear into my room, but she stopped me. “Where were you?”

She sniffed, widening her nostrils. “Iris, have you been doing drugs?”

I felt myself getting red and knew that there was no point trying to lie.

She stared at me, a shocked expression on her face. I was expecting a sermon, a tirade and being grounded for at least a week. But instead she said, “You and I are going for a little drive this evening. Go freshen up. You stink.”

That night we drove into Amsterdam. I hadn't the faintest idea where she was taking me. A shrink, I guessed, or maybe a mental health clinic. But she drove on into the town center and parked the car along the Prince Hendrik Quay. “Get out.”

I followed her into the warren of streets and canals of the red-light district, which at the time wasn't the relatively safe tourist trap it is now. There were pockets where even the police feared to go.

The sun set as we walked along the illuminated red windows. I had heard of the red-light district, but I'd never been there before. My mother was coolly strolling along as if she were shopping in the supermarket on a Saturday morning. I peeked at the girls in the windows as discreetly as possible, and had to run to keep up with my mother.

There weren't many people in the street. Just a man here or there slinking out of a curtained berth and vanishing into the night. Junkies begging for change. Chinese men roaming the streets in long leather coats.

We turned into an alleyway and stopped in front of a dilapidated house. The windows were nailed shut with wooden boards and the front door's glass pane was smashed.

“Here we are. Go on in.”

I hesitated, scared. I wondered what my mother was up to. She prodded me in the back. “Hurry up.”

We stepped into a concrete hallway reeking of mold and sweat. There were slogans painted all over the walls.
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.

“What are we doing here?” I asked, my voice shaking.

My mother did not reply, but pushed me inside a dark room. It took a few seconds for my eyes to get used to the gloom. I saw someone lighting up. Then I realized that there were human shapes all over the floor. Stretched out on worn mattresses, with very little clothing to cover up their emaciated bodies. A shudder went up my spine.

A walking skeleton approached us. His eyes bulged out of their sockets. “Got some for me?” He stuck out his hand.

My mother shoved me forward. “Ask her.”

I was deeply shocked. My mother, who always worried about whether I'd washed my hands before a meal, was pushing me into the arms of a junkie.

The druggie came even closer. He stank.

“What you got? Give me what you got.”

I thought,
What if he has a knife on him? What if my mother intends to leave me here?

“Mother,” I pleaded. She was holding me fast. She wasn't leaving me any room to step back or turn around. I was fifteen, but my mother was still much stronger than me.

The junkie stretched out a hand toward me. To touch me or to dig into my pockets, I'm not sure which. I just saw that hand coming at me in slow motion. A vulture's claw. “Mommy, please.”

When the skinny yellow hand was about to graze my face, my mother yanked me backward. She rummaged through her handbag and took out a twenty-five-guilder bill, which she tossed to the ground. “Here,” she said. “Have yourself a party. Shoot yourself up until you drop dead.”

The junkie dove after the money. My mother and I left the building.

“That was it,” she said as we walked back to the car, ogled by pimps, dealers, and the prostitutes at their windows. “That's all I wished to say to you.”

I stared at the aquarium. At the coral that had been lovingly and patiently nurtured. It grew just a few millimeters a year, depending on the water quality. Ray had created a magnificent habitat for his fish. And then he had gone off and murdered his neighbor and her young daughter. It seemed a strange combination.

I picked up the logbook and started leafing through it. It had been kept meticulously. Ray never skipped a day. The ink was never smudged, and there were no food crumbs or spills. Until the year 2003, no one else had ever recorded anything in that book, but that year someone had written
King Kong
in a childish hand.
King Kong,
and then in Ray's writing,
January 25.
The words took up three whole lines, as opposed to Ray's own neat handwriting. A child. Ray had been with a child.

The letters the child had written were shaky, as if the child wasn't yet able to hold a pen properly. How old? Four? Five? Six? I wondered if the handwriting had belonged to the neighbor's little girl. The thought alone made me shudder.

From that day on I brought Anna a madeleine every day. I was usually invited to come in. Then Rosita would make me a cup of coffee, and we'd talk for a while until she said I had to go. On other days Rosita would only open the door a crack to take the offering from me. “Not today, Ray.”

I asked my mother for advice. She explained that it was quite understandable that Rosita wouldn't let me in every day. People don't always have the time. It wasn't anything personal. After all, my mother also had very little time for me these days. She came by once every other month. She'd always bring me something. A tablecloth and a stripy red duvet cover. Tall drinking glasses and a picture of a boat to hang on the wall. She thought it was important for my house to look nice.

I couldn't think why. Apart from her, nobody ever visited me.

Rosita didn't have visitors very often, either, but she did have them more frequently than me. The old man who'd helped her with the move came at least once a month. Rosita told me he was her stepfather.

“Where's your mother, then?” I asked.

She told me her mother was dead. She had died of cancer
shortly after marrying her second husband. Rosita said her stepfather had taken good care of her mother and so she'd always be grateful to him.

“Why does he come here?” I asked.

“He comes to talk. To fix things in my house. To see Anna.”

“Do you like that?”

“I like it better when you're here; it's more fun. He's nice and all, and he's a very good handyman, and that's nothing to turn your nose up at if you're a single mother like me. But do I enjoy his company? Not really. To be honest I think he mainly comes and helps me because he's so lonely himself. Otherwise he's just hanging around at home. He used to be very rich. He had a successful tulip-growing business, but he lost it all. Couldn't stop drinking.” Rosita lit a cigarette and went on, “When he met my mother, he was sober. He said he had finally found happiness. But then my mother got sick. So he never really got what he wanted.”

The stepfather didn't bother me. As far as I was concerned he could come as often as he wanted, and unclog the drain or paint the woodwork. It was the other visitor who bothered me: Anna's father. He was married to another woman and refused to get divorced. That was why he couldn't live with Rosita and Anna. But he did come by. Not on a regular schedule, like my mother's visits to me, but at random.

“Only when it suits
him,
” Rosita had said, with an expression I couldn't place. Angry? Sad?

“But what about Anna? He's got to look after her, doesn't he?”

“He has
three
kids with the other woman, and they're married.”

“But doesn't he want to live with you?”

“He'd like to, but he can't. Want to know why?” Rosita sucked
deeply at her cigarette and puffed out the smoke again almost immediately.

I really couldn't think of a reason why anyone wouldn't want to be with Rosita, no matter what it took.

“Because she was first. So here I am. In a house without carpeting on the floor, with
his
kid. While she lives with him in a fancy townhouse and can do as she pleases. Not because she's better than me, or prettier, or smarter. And definitely not because she's skinnier.” Rosita smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. “Not even because he loves her more than he loves me. But because she was first.”

“You need someone else,” I said. What I meant was:
You need me
. But of course she didn't, really.

“You're not cut out for having a relationship,” my mother always said to me. “No woman will ever stick it out with you, so you better stay away from them, before you get into trouble.”

“Of course I ought to end it,” Rosita replied. “But the problem is that I love him. There's nobody else who even comes close. I want no one but him. Does that make sense?”

Anna's father usually came in the middle of the night. But he was sometimes there when I brought Anna her madeleine. Then Rosita would ask me to watch the kid for a bit.

“We get so little time to be together, me and Victor.”

One time Victor came and stood next to her in the hall. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and gazed at me with his head on her shoulder. She looked so happy that it turned my stomach. As far as I could tell, Victor was nothing special. Maybe he was smart. And he drove the kind of fancy car we hardly ever saw on Queen Wilhelmina Street. But I looked right through him. He might act as if he had a right to be there, but I saw a man who was making the mother of his child live in a house without carpeting. That's what
I
saw.

As Rosita went to fetch Anna from the living room, he tried to start a conversation with me. “So, you're a baker.”

I did not respond.

“It's nice to know someone's looking after my girls when I'm not around.”

I looked down at my feet until Rosita and Anna stepped back into the corridor.

I took Anna home with me to look at the fish. She was the first person to ever come visit, apart from my mom. I told her their names, and she repeated them after me. “Hannibal, François, Maria . . .”

As she sat there next to me in the blue light of the aquarium, I tried not to think of Victor pulling off Rosita's clothes. Caressing the hollow between her collarbones. Taking her boobs in his hands and kissing them. Lying on top of her and pumping away. Touching her naked privates and making them filthy.

“Chili, Saturn, Venus . . .” I went on, repeating the names of the fish to calm myself down.

Sometimes Anna and I would sit there looking at the aquarium until it got dark outside, the bed stopped creaking, and Victor's car disappeared down the street.

I sat at the desk in my cell staring at an empty sheet of paper. Dr. Römerman had ordered me to write a letter to Rosita, but I had only one thing to say to her.

I'm still really angry at you.