The House with Nine Locks, page 3
FOUR
Adelais had plenty of time to admire the bicycle later, after its rider had been taken away in an ambulance. It was a shiny new Gitane, with drop handlebars, a shimmering blue frame and whitewall tyres. The only thing it lacked, being a racing model, was storage: there was no saddlebag at the back, and no basket at the front, nothing that would spoil its sleek, aerodynamic lines. That was why the boy had rested his bunch of flowers across the handlebars, and was holding on to them as he sped along the quayside under the dappled shade of the plane trees.
The sight of him brought Adelais to a halt. Bands of winter sunlight were flashing across his face as he leaned into the bend. As she explained to herself later, his speed and the flowers on the handlebars, and maybe even the striking, cobalt-blue bicycle – it was these things that struck her, and not the boy himself, who looked about fourteen or fifteen, and was only more handsome than average if you noticed that sort of thing, which she didn’t.
A truck thundered past, horn rasping. A flock of pigeons took to the sky, wings clattering, and the road was empty again. The young man had vanished, along with his bicycle. Nor were they further along the quayside or on the bridge. The only clue that he had been there at all was the bunch of flowers, lying in the gutter.
Adelais didn’t know if the pigeons were to blame, but she did know that boys on bicycles didn’t vanish into thin air. There were people on the pavement and cars on the road, but none of them had stopped. They didn’t seem to know that anything was wrong.
There wasn’t time to tell them. Adelais launched herself across the junction. A van with a ladder on its roof swerved to avoid her, sounding its horn. From the quaysides on the River Leie, it was a three-metre drop into the water, but here, by the Sint-Joris Bridge, there was a stone ramp leading down to a towpath. From the top, Adelais scanned the scene: the sun was reflecting off the river, dazzling her, but then she saw the boy, lying half in the water and half out. He wasn’t moving. His bicycle lay on the path, the back wheel turning.
Adelais turned down the ramp. It immediately came to her that she had never gone down a steep slope before because Ghent did not have any steep slopes. The handcycle surged forward, as if motorised. The frame began to shudder, the front wheel swaying from side to side. Adelais squeezed the brakes as hard as she could. They squealed as if in pain, but made no difference. She came off the ramp too soon, slamming hard onto the towpath. The front wheel locked. For an instant, she felt weightless. Then the handcycle pitched over on its side, tipping her onto the cobbles.
She looked up. Her vision was slowly rotating, like the back wheel of the Gitane, and there was a sharp pain in her left wrist. The boy had slipped further into the water, which was coloured with red swirls. His head was beneath the surface.
She didn’t like to wear the brace when she was on the handcycle. Instead she relied on a walking stick with a crooked handle. It lay in front of her now, its tip pointed at the drowning boy.
Adelais grabbed the walking stick and crawled towards the water’s edge. There wasn’t time to get up. She hooked the handle of the walking stick around the boy’s far shoulder and, with one great heave, rolled him onto his back. Water spouted from his mouth like a whale. Before he could slip under again, Adelais heaved him towards the edge of the towpath, reaching it on the third attempt.
The coughing told her he was still alive. It went on for at least a minute, during which time Adelais found the gash on the boy’s forehead: it was an inch long, and crossed the hairline above his right eye. In the course of the struggle, she had got her dungarees wet, and there were smudges of blood all over her blue cardigan. She wondered if she would get into trouble with her mother, or if saving someone’s life would count as an excuse. She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and pressed it against the boy’s forehead to staunch the bleeding.
She was adjusting the knot when he opened his eyes. They were chestnut brown, like his hair.
‘You.’ He blinked. ‘Are you—’
‘Don’t try to talk,’ Adelais said, because she had heard people say that in films. ‘Help is on its way.’
The boy smiled at her. Adelais could not deny that he had nice teeth. If you had just saved someone’s life, you were allowed to notice their teeth. You were also allowed to notice broad shoulders and a strong chin. She was going to ask the boy what his name was, but then he moaned and closed his eyes again.
By this time, they had been spotted from the bridge. A man with a cigarette in his mouth appeared, followed by a man wearing spectacles and a double-breasted suit. The man in the suit said the boy should be put on his side, and as they were rolling him over a woman with a pram came hurrying along the towpath. She removed the bloodstained handkerchief, and wrapped the boy’s head in a pink baby blanket, which made him look ridiculous, like a woman at a Turkish bath.
The adults were now in charge and there was nothing more for Adelais to do but limp back to the handcycle which, like the boy, was lying on its side. She examined the front wheel: something had happened to the axle, so that the rim of the tyre scraped against the mudguard when it turned. She was not sure if she could cycle home. She realised that she was trembling slightly all over, even though she wasn’t cold.
An ambulance pulled up on the quayside above and the boy was loaded into the back on a stretcher. The man in the suit looked at his watch and left. The woman wheeled her pram away, the baby crying inside. The man with the cigarette was soon the only one left.
‘What about the bicycle?’ Adelais said.
‘Someone’ll be back for that,’ he said, and sauntered off.
The bicycle looked expensive. Adelais couldn’t leave it unattended. What if it were stolen? She had no choice but to wait, but an hour went by, and then two hours, and nobody came to claim it. No one came back at all.
The wind picked up. The sun slowly sank behind the houses. The traffic along the quaysides increased, and with it the noise, until the place where she stood beside the river became a cell of stillness, a forgotten backwater in a busy, important world.
Adelais found herself fighting back tears – tears which she knew were stupid. Her father would know how to mend her tricycle. He mended things for a living. Her wrist was only bruised, and her handkerchief could be washed. If she got into trouble for staying out late, she had an excuse: it was because she had saved a boy’s life – unless, in fact, she hadn’t. Because it wasn’t impossible that the boy had died in the ambulance, or at the hospital from an injury to the brain, or from having swallowed too much riverwater. No, she couldn’t boast about saving the boy’s life, even as an excuse. That would jinx it. That would tempt Fate. It felt like Fate was involved already.
As dusk was descending, a policeman finally noticed her from the bridge. He pushed the handcycle back up to the road, and took charge of the Gitane. He was unable to tell Adelais about the boy, what had happened to him, or even where he was. He said only that she might be called upon to make a statement, and he took down her name in a notebook.
Adelais pedalled home, her front wheel rasping and squeaking. If the boy was dead, it meant that hers was the last face he had ever seen, hers the last words he’d ever heard – words from a stranger that were not even her own. She wished she had come up with something more comforting or beautiful or wise. More than that, she wished she had found out the boy’s name, or at least told him hers.
FIVE
By the time she got back to Schoolstraat it was dark. Adelais pushed the handcycle into the alley and let herself in through the back door. Her mother was going to be angry with her – it was unavoidable – but Adelais could not resist postponing the moment of reckoning. When she heard voices in the workshop she knocked and went in.
Seated at the workbench under a cone of light was Uncle Cornelis. He was staring through the big magnifying glass that her father used to mend watches.
Adelais’s father stood beside him. ‘Don’t you knock?’ he said.
‘I did knock.’
Uncle Cornelis’s attention remained fixed on the object under the glass. Adelais glimpsed metal, threads of bright reflection on polished steel. ‘Hello there. Is it time for supper?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve been out.’
‘Having adventures, were you?’ Uncle Cornelis adjusted the magnifying glass and picked up a small pointed instrument.
‘Sort of, yes. How did you know I—’
‘Squeak, squeak, squeak. That front wheel has taken quite a knock by the sound of it.’
‘I think the axle’s bent.’
‘We’ll have to take a look at that.’
‘Not now, Ada,’ her father said. ‘Run along.’
Adelais closed the door and made her way to the kitchen, following the smell of onions and stewed meat. She found her mother standing by the window, biting her thumbnail. She looked anxious, even more so than usual. People used to say Adelais took after her father when it came to her looks, which was not what she wanted to hear. She would have preferred her mother’s thick brown hair and delicate features, and her dark, sad eyes.
‘Mama?’
For a moment her mother seemed confused. She glanced at the clock. ‘Where have you been? It’s late.’
Token anger, barely irritation.
‘There was an accident. A boy fell off his bicycle and I went to help him. And then the wheel went wobbly on my cycle, and there was nobody to help me get home.’
Adelais sensed that if she got to the end of the story quickly enough, she might escape being questioned about where the accident had happened, or how she came to be there.
‘Well, you’re back now. Have your supper. No need to wait for the others.’ Her mother went over to the range. ‘Your uncle’s brought us some chocolate.’
On Wednesdays Adelais’s mother usually made a big stew, using whatever meat she could get – pork or beef or occasionally rabbit – but always with onions and bacon, and cooked in beer. By Thursday the meat was tender. The dish would last until Monday, eked out with cabbage and potatoes, or bread if there was nothing else.
Adelais sat down to eat. It was lucky she wasn’t being questioned about the accident, but she sensed that something wasn’t right. ‘What’s Uncle Cornelis doing with Papa?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw them in the workshop. Is Papa making pictures again?’
With a clang, her mother replaced the lid of the stew. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘He gave me a picture for my birthday, the one in my bedroom. Didn’t they used to do art together? Isn’t that how you met?’
The etching of the bridge was hanging up beside her bed. It was the first thing she saw when she woke up every morning: the warm biscuit-coloured stones.
‘You never forget anything, do you?’ Her mother wiped her hands on her apron. ‘I expect Uncle Cornelis has a watch that needs mending. Now eat up.’
Adelais didn’t think her uncle had been looking at a watch, but her mother was clearly in no mood for arguments. Adelais finished her supper quickly and went upstairs to record the day’s progress in her notebook. Normally, she would have asked to stay up so that she could spend some time with Uncle Cornelis, but not tonight. She had a feeling he would want more details about the accident and, unlike her mother, he would know at once if she left anything out.
Adelais woke the next morning with a knot of anxiety in her stomach. She threw on her dressing gown and clambered downstairs.
Her parents were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading. Her father had the newspaper, her mother a small booklet that had arrived in the post a few days earlier. She hid it in her apron as soon as Adelais came into the room, but Adelais had already taken a look when it first arrived. It came from a company in the Netherlands that made ‘prosthetics and orthotics to order’. Adelais had no idea what the words meant, but the photographs made it clear: they were supports for amputees and people with bad legs. Unlike the support Adelais’s father had made, these were sculpted to look like normal, well-muscled limbs, and some even had hinges and springs at the knee so that the wearer could flex without falling. The devices were tailor-made for each customer, which entailed a trip to North Holland. The prices started at six thousand francs. Adelais did not know how much money her parents made between the watch-mending and the shifts at the linen factory, but she knew six thousand francs was more money than they had, because it was years since her mother had worn a new dress, and the last time her father had bought a pair of shoes, they had come from a second-hand stall at the Friday market.
Adelais did not care about the booklet. It was the newspaper she wanted. If the boy on the bicycle had died, the tragedy was sure to have been reported in the press. Unfortunately, her father seemed in no hurry to be done with De Standaard. Adelais watched him scan every column from top to bottom, slowly turning the pages between leisurely sips of his coffee. Her mother gave her some bread and butter, and a mug of warm milk, but Adelais immediately began to hiccup.
Her father sighed heavily. ‘Oh dear.’
‘What is it?’ Adelais asked at once.
‘Our new king, our king-in-waiting, isn’t going to be crowned. He’s going to swear an oath to the Constitution, and that’s it.’
‘No coronation?’ Adelais’s mother said. ‘That is a shame.’
Like most Flemings, Adelais’s parents had both voted for the old king to return, but when he did, the French-speaking Walloons had started rioting. They said Leopold had been too friendly with the Germans in the war, which was a lie, Adelais had been told, because he had really been more of a prisoner. In the end, Leopold had given up trying to be king and handed the job to his son, who had been too young in the war to get blamed for anything. Even so, Boudewijn was being told to keep his head down and not push his luck in case the Walloons went back to rioting again.
With a grunt of disgust, Adelais’s father tossed De Standaard onto the table. Adelais did not wait for permission. She snatched up the newspaper and began searching for news of the boy. There were reports about politics and football matches, and a new ‘community’ of coal and steel, whatever that was, but nothing at all about a boy falling into a river. It came to Adelais that perhaps De Standaard, being a paper for the whole of Belgium, did not bother with cycling accidents, even bad ones, and that what she needed was one of the local newspapers. Unfortunately, her father had stopped taking his to save money.
‘Can I go to the Wouters’s house after breakfast?’ she asked.
Mr Wouters had the Staatscourant van Gent delivered every day. Adelais had often seen the delivery boy pushing it through their letter box.
Her mother smiled. ‘You’ve been playing a lot with those boys lately. I’m glad you’re getting on.’
Since her last visit, the de Wouters twins had acquired an electric train set, which they had set up in a spare bedroom. Adelais was not allowed to touch the trains or the signals. She was given the task of organising the model farm animals that had been drafted in to enrich the scene. She escaped as soon as she could and went looking for the newspapers. Luckily, Mr and Mrs Wouters had gone out.
Adelais found several editions of the Staatscourant van Gent in the scullery, where some of the pages had been used to wrap potatoes, but none of them were recent. A two-day-old copy had found its way under the kitchen sink, next to a bottle of bleach and a box of shoe brushes. In the front parlour there were magazines in a magazine rack, but no newspapers. She went out into the backyard and lifted the lid of the dustbin. She was greeted by the sight of peelings, and a smell of rotten eggs.
She made her way upstairs again. The twins had suffered a derailment, and were arguing about whose fault it was. Their parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the landing. Adelais knew it was wrong going into other people’s bedrooms, but this counted as an emergency. She eased back the door. On a small table, beside the unmade double bed, lay a neatly folded newspaper.
Adelais’s heart was in her mouth as she hurriedly flipped through the pages, taking in the report of a new road, the threat of a tram strike, a council plan to encourage tourism. A local footballer called Bavo van Gorp had broken his ankle. There was nothing about a cycling accident or the death of a boy.
Adelais went back the next morning. She could not search the house this time, because Mrs Wouters was in, but she had already come up with a new strategy. ‘Is there any news about Bavo van Gorp’s ankle?’ she asked.
Mrs Wouters had never heard of Bavo van Gorp.
‘The football player,’ Adelais explained. ‘I expect it’ll be in the newspaper.’
At which Mrs Wouters went and fetched the paper for her. She did the same thing the following day, but Adelais found no mention of the accident in either edition of the Staatscourant van Gent, even though the boy had nearly drowned. You had to drown completely, she supposed, to get a mention in the local newspapers. All the same, Adelais found the silence disquieting. It was almost as if the incident had never happened. What evidence could she produce that it had? The swelling in her wrist had gone down, and the front wheel of her handcycle had been mended by the time she went to inspect it the next day.
On Wednesday, school ended an hour early because of an inspection for nits. Adelais decided it was time she resumed her uncle’s challenge. She set off as usual, but when she reached the river she could not help stopping, if only to see if anything remained of the flowers. She rode up and down the quayside, but could find no trace of them. The idea came to her that if the boy was all right, he might come cycling this way, just as he had before. If she saw him, she would have the final proof she needed that he was still alive.
The old bell of the Sint-Jacobskerk sounded in the distance. The challenge was over for the day. Adelais was supposed to keep going all the way, but she had been waiting on the quayside for twenty minutes. A chill wind blew, tugging at the dead leaves still clinging to the plane trees. A strange loneliness came over her, one she hadn’t known before. She tried to imagine what the boy was doing at that moment, if he was out with his friends playing football, or buying flowers at the market to make up for the ones he had lost. Who had the flowers been intended for? His mother? A relative? A sweetheart? She wondered if he had any memory of her, if in that fleeting moment of consciousness, her existence had actually registered. Perhaps, she thought, she had never been more real to him than a figure in a dream.
