Breakwater, page 6
“Emilia? You still asleep? I had a quiet night shift. I was thinking about you. Will I see you this afternoon? Will you ring me?”
She calls the taxi company. She has no voice and, startled, she hangs up. All that comes out of her throat is a feeble grunt. Have her vocal cords been destroyed? Is that possible? She rings again and orders a taxi in a whisper. She wraps a scarf around her neck and puts on sunglasses. She fetches cash from her desk drawer. She goes down the stairs to the front door one step at a time. Her ribs, thighs, and pubis feel crushed.
She waits behind the front door until she hears a car horn. Beyond the ribbed glass, shoulders and a head appear. It’s a struggle to open the door. The taxi driver doesn’t look at her but turns straight back towards his car. That suits Emilia. She walks after him as steadily as she can. He waits in the driver’s seat until she’s got in. Her right hand isn’t working. Perhaps that’s broken too. She pulls the door shut. Not firmly enough, because the driver gets out, opens it, and slams it shut again. She gives him a bit of paper on which she’s written Lucas Andreas Hospital. On the back seat of the car she falls asleep almost immediately. She wakes up on a moving bed, in a hospital corridor. Later she discovers that the taxi driver took the liberty of fishing the money, all the money, out of the pocket of her sweatpants. She is wheeled past the waiting room straight into a smaller room. The nurse helps her to remove the scarf and pulls off her shoes. Emilia can tell from the nurse’s face that she must look terrible. Shortly after that, a doctor comes in. She asks questions then helps Emilia out of the rest of her clothes. Her wounds are cleaned, she’s given an internal examination, and evidence is collected. She’s told it’s a pity she took a shower. She’s given painkillers, antibiotics, and a morning-after pill. Several hours later she whispers answers to questions from a detective. Then she’s given a pill to help her sleep.
The next day she has surgery on her jaw. People keep telling her to phone someone. A friend or relation who can look after her. She shakes her head and asks for a newspaper. She stays in hospital for a week. Then she’s allowed to go home. The heat of summer has given way to autumnal rains. The nurse says to her twice at the door that she mustn’t think it’s her own fault. It hasn’t ever occurred to her to think that. She buries her copy of the police report at the bottom of the kitchen bin.
Her bruises turn into patches of dirty yellowish green, and the tormented feeling gradually disappears from her body. The severe sore throat lasts another week, but then that goes too. She drinks tepid soup and yoghurt through fat straws, and water. She sleeps a lot and ignores the telephone. She thinks of Bruch. Of the evening when he described her. Of his hands. His mouth. She listens to his voice on her answering machine. Cheerful, then impatient, then peremptory, and eventually despairing. Jacob rings. Bruch has phoned him, too.
“What did he want?”
“To know if you were still alive.”
“Really?”
“He asked for your address. When I refused to give it to him, he asked when I last saw you or spoke to you.”
“And what did you say?”
“That it was none of his fucking business.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He asked whether I was sure you weren’t dead. He made me promise to go and check everything was all right with you.”
“And?”
“That’s for you to say.”
“No, I mean, what did you tell him?”
“I asked him why he thought you were dead. He said you hadn’t rung him back. I asked whether it had ever occurred to him that you might simply not feel like talking to him—an idea from which he derived the impossibility of any such explanation. Which I thought unbelievable. What a character!” Jacob’s voice is saturated with disapproval.
“And?”
“What?”
“What did he say?”
“You sound odd. Your voice sounds odd.”
“I’ve got a throat infection.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really.”
“He said he wasn’t stupid, that the way you parted the last time didn’t exactly justify the conclusion that you were now unreachable and refusing to explain why.”
“Hm.”
“You’ve got something going with the guy?”
“Maybe.”
“Possessive type.”
“No, he isn’t. Or I don’t think he is.”
“He rings me because he can’t reach you! I don’t even know him.”
“True.”
“You don’t think that’s possessive?”
“There’s been a long silence …”
“Yes. But not endless. Because at any rate you’re not dead.”
“Just tell him everything’s fine, that I need time to think, and it might take a few weeks.”
“Or do I know him?” Jacob asked.
“He was at your birthday party.”
“Is he that doctor?”
“What doctor?”
“That thin one. Friend of Jan’s. Sunday watercolourist type. Bit of a ninny. That one?”
“Jake, I’m tired. I’m going to hang up.”
“Shall I come and look after you?”
“No. Thank you.”
“Is something wrong?”
“It’s over already. I want to be alone.”
“Okay, Emmie. Whatever you want.”
“Don’t give him my address.”
“Of course not. Em?”
“Yes.”
“You do know that I’m fairly good at looking after sick people?”
“Are you?”
“I heat soup, I read aloud, I like providing drinks for sore throats.” And after half a minute’s silence, “You still there?”
“No …”
“I’m coming round.”
“I’m going to sleep.”
“I’m coming round. There’s something wrong.”
“If you come round I won’t let you in.”
“If you don’t let me in I’ll kick the door down. You still there?”
“No.”
“What will you do if I kick the door down?”
“Jake. Stop. I’m not in the mood. Okay? Stop.”
“In Scotland they said to me, look for something to care for, a dog, or a plant.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Emil?”
“No.”
“Sleep well.”
She does her shopping late at the 24/7. She reads and watches tv. She spends hours looking at the street below her window. Tourists. Groups of teenagers. Children clinging to their parents’ hands. Parents clinging to their children’s hands. Couples. Hand in hand. Unable to stop touching each other. Hand in hand but still miserable. She pretends to be an extraterrestrial studying people from her space shuttle. One time she thinks she can see Bruch on his bicycle. She represses a desire to ring Jacob and ask whether he’s passed on her message. She’d rather he didn’t know how important it is to her. If she wants to leave open the possibility of seeing Bruch again, the chance of carrying on where they left off, then she must wait patiently and withdraw into the shadows. If Bruch were to know what has happened to her, he’d be worried. He’d be frightened of touching her. He’d want to spare her. He’d be careful. He’d treat her like a victim. He wouldn’t dare let himself go. Or he’d leave, removing himself from her as far as possible, as quickly as possible. That’s what she thinks as she sits with her feet on the windowsill, slurping her porridge.
Chapter 10
She hasn’t slept for more than a couple of hours when Osip strokes her awake with his podgy little hands.
“I’m here.”
“I see you.”
He snuggles up against her and sings into her hair. She wants to sleep. It’s half past six. “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,” he sings in her ear. He climbs up to lie on top of her and pushes her face into strange folds. Ought she to ask Bruch about his memories of those first weeks here? Or not? If memories are so unreliable, what could his version do other than contaminate her own without telling her what was true? The whisky has to go. And she needs to get up, to be ready in time for those men in their overalls, the young lad who says nothing and the older one who gives her dirty looks. She knows what he’s thinking. Perhaps she could leave till they’ve finished here. Perhaps she could go with the boys to stay with Jacob in Amsterdam until it’s all done. She could hire a babysitter; that would surely be possible. Maybe Josepha knows someone. She could work in the office and go out at night. See people. Escape this churning torrent of thoughts, this rut she’s landed in where she continually thinks about the rape and about Bruch in the beginning. About time, which is irreversible and can never transport her back to earlier years, can never give her a chance to do things differently: not go home that night, not let her attacker in. Or at any rate ring someone immediately afterwards. Tell Bruch about it. Go and seek out her father and reconcile with him before he loses his powers of comprehension. She can never be young again. Is it true, what Jacob thought: Has she grown lonely? Was it stupid to rely so completely on Bruch? Was it a mistake to retreat to the isolation that a family is, which becomes even more isolated if it withdraws holus-bolus to a house like this? Now they’re building an expensive luxury kitchen, and they’re dividing the attic up into separate rooms. They’ve demolished the shed. You couldn’t call this an experiment any longer. Bruch would find it ridiculous if she said that out loud. For him it was never an experiment. Bruch loves nature, exercise, cold early mornings. Bruch would have been better off with a different kind of wife, a stable, sports-loving woman like Sophie. While she expressed her horror, he hid his envy. Was that true? Does she know him? She knows what she’s hiding but not what he’s hiding.
“Mummy!!”
“Shhh!”
“Get up.”
“Ow, not so loud. Yes. We’re getting up.”
“Mummy.”
“Yes.”
“Mummy.”
“Yes!”
“I’m a princess.”
They go downstairs, Osip with a shawl draped around him, she in her nightshirt. She makes coffee and tea, throws open the French windows, and hides the ashtray on the lowest part of the roof. Leo starts yelling Mummy-Mummy-Mummy from upstairs. She ignores it for a while then goes up to him. He’s standing on his bed, red-faced and shouting.
“Yes!” She goes over to him and grabs him by the arms. “Jesus! Leo, I’m not deaf!”
“Why didn’t you come then?”
“I was busy.”
“But I was calling you.”
“I’m not your slave.” That’s what her mother used to say. She wants to drive the sentence out of the room. “What’s the matter?” She opens the window. It’s raining. Again, or still.
“I’ve lost my flint.”
“What d’you mean, lost? What flint?”
“My flint.”
“What does it look like?”
“Like a flint.”
“Okay, Leo, why don’t you go and make coffee and sandwiches and get the schoolbags ready and get Osip dressed, and I’ll look for a flint that doesn’t have a description in all this mess.”
Leo starts crying.
“Stop crying!”
“I’m allowed to be unhappy, aren’t I?” Leo is shouting too.
She sits on the bed and for a full minute doesn’t say or do anything. Then she picks him up and puts him in her lap. A stiff, defiant body. She strokes him until he stops crying.
“Sorry, Mummy.”
“That’s all right sweetie.”
They go downstairs and again she thinks about those rooms in the attic, the new kitchen, the futureproofing it will give their house and with it their life. She makes sandwiches. Then she sits down. Motionless at the kitchen table, ignoring the chatter and squabbling of her sons, she clutches her coffee cup.
After she’s taken them to school and the crèche, and spent some time sitting in her car scrutinizing the cheerful ordinariness of other mothers and the occasional father—she can no longer spot the bmi types, with those raincoats they all merge into one another even more than usual—she rings Bruch and says on his voicemail that she can’t stand those men (Neanderthals she calls them) and he must ring her. She’s conscious of her blunt, unreasonable tone. While she’s scrolling to Jacob’s number there’s a tap on her side window. It startles her. She’s become ridiculously jittery, dammit. The smiling face of what’s-her-name-again under an umbrella. She winds the window down.
“Hey, Emilia, we were wondering if you felt like coming for a cup of coffee.” Bright blue eyes in a too-round, too-blonde, too-soft, too-untroubled face. Beyond her she sees the mother of Sam and the mother of Maya and the mother of what’s-his-name-again. She smiles at them. “We do it every Wednesday.” They smile back. She declines the invitation, grins broadly at everybody one more time, then winds up her window. Jacob doesn’t answer her call. She rings Josepha to ask whether she knows of a babysitter for a week.
“Emilia, can I interrupt you for a moment? You haven’t looked at your mails yet, I take it?”
“No.”
“Marieke has accused Eddy of sexual assault and intimidation.”
Marieke is Eddy’s intern, early twenties, bright, attractive, slightly shy.
“She’s reported him, as well.”
Emilia knows immediately that it’s true. “And Eddy?”
“Denies it.”
Of course.
“I support him,” Josepha says.
“What?”
“He wouldn’t lie to me. Not to me.”
“It’s true. I know it is. I know Eddy too. We’re old enough to say no, but … Jos, you know it as well as I do. It’s true.”
“Or to say yes.”
“What? Yes. Or to say yes.” Is she talking about herself?
The river has doubled in size after all the rain. The meadows are empty; all the sheep have gone. Desolate willows stand up to their trunks in the water, at its mercy. She turns the ventilator to its highest setting to drive the moisture off the windscreen. With Leo and Osip safely stowed at school and the crèche, she loves them more than at any other time. From this distance she can feel the love instead of drowning in it. Will her own parents have experienced that, thought about it, about that mixture of love and imprisonment, the chronic fatigue caused not just by lack of sleep but by an overloaded brain, by continually having to know where they are, see what they need, estimate which dangers around them must be eliminated? Her parents never gave the impression that having children had interfered with their lives, that life had ever been any different. They did sometimes tell her a bit about their own childhoods, but never about the period between being a child and being a parent, their free adult lives. Didn’t they ever have such a thing? Or wasn’t she interested in hearing about it?
Bruch rings. He’s listened to her voicemail, she assumes, but he doesn’t say anything about it. She tells him about Eddy. The subject slips into the place of her misery. All you need is for things to keep happening, external things that can distract you.
“I don’t like him.” Every time she talks about Eddy for more than a minute, or after Bruch has seen him, he says that.
“I know. Where are you?”
“I’m in the atrium at the university.”
“With your bag at your feet and your jacket over one leg?”
“Yes.” He chuckles.
“What do you think, if you look at yourself from a distance? Do you look professorial? Or more like a slightly older student?”
“Discuss. Perhaps still mainly like a doctor gone astray.”
“Sorry about that voicemail.”
“Drive carefully.”
She turns onto the highway and accelerates. Driving always has a calming effect on her.
She parks on the north bank of the ij and takes the ferry. Once she’s past the bustle of Amsterdam Central Station she turns right, left, right, and into Spuistraat. She hears someone call her name from the far side of the street. It’s Vincent. She sticks up a hand and wants to keep on walking but he runs over to her, as if he hasn’t seen a living soul for weeks. He jumps in front of her on the pavement, panting for breath. He looks bad.
