The Last Thread Read online

  ‘Come on, Sebastiaan.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He says it now in a soft, whining tone.

  ‘It’s now or never,’ Michaelis tells him.

  Mum said this not long ago about going to live somewhere else. She said it to Dirk back home, at night, in the living room when she thought Michaelis was asleep. Michaelis likes the sound of those words, the shape of them. Now or never. Downstairs, he can hear Mum. She’ll come up sooner or later; she always comes in the end when things are quiet. Sebastiaan pulls down his pants. They work in silence. Squat, squeeze, hold, then a careful shuffle forward, pants still around the ankles. It is easy until they reach the stairs. The stairs need great balance. It’s like a circus act. Michaelis nearly falls onto his face. He’s running out of ammo. Before he can get to the second step, a shadow falls across him. Dirk says one thing. ‘Verdomme.’

  Things happen very quickly after that.

  Michaelis’s head hurts all the way home. His right ear throbs with heat. Mum and Dirk are quiet in the front of the car. Constantine is grinning beside him, tapping a finger softly on the bottom of the window so that only Michaelis can hear.

  ‘Verdomme,’ Dirk says again. His shoulders tense and his hands clench the steering wheel. ‘Verdomme.’

  This is what he says when he is angry. And when he is really angry, Dirk says godverdomme. You want to be as far away as possible when he says that. The g is thick and heavy, because Dirk pulls it from every part of his lungs. It’s an angry thing that sleeps in Dirk’s stomach, and when he isn’t angry, he speaks in a low voice, as if he doesn’t want to wake it.

  ~

  ‘I hope you’ll remember this.’

  Mum turns away to face the cathedral. The market square is full of people. More are pouring in from the narrow streets. Voices and music swollen with cymbals and trumpets bounce off the painted stone shopfronts and restaurants. The buildings gazing down on the square are crowded with tall rectangular windows, some shuttered, most dark.

  Michaelis floats above the commotion on Dirk’s shoulders. Everyone wears a costume. Even the Pepper Shaker, the grey cathedral rising from the buildings ahead, is dressed in blue sheets that snap and billow in the wind. The Pepper Shaker leans against the sky with vast, creaking arms of wood covered in canvas, and a grinning face on the clock at the top of the tower.

  Dirk points at the Pepper Shaker and speaks around his pipe. ‘He’s a farmer today. Een boer.’

  The ball of tangled tobacco in the chute of his pipe glows red and withers. Michaelis also smokes a pipe, except his pipe is made of candy. A procession is emerging from one of the side streets, orange flags and giant heads floating and swaying above the crowd. Over the angled rooftops, between the clouds, the moon makes a face. Poor moon, drowning in a daytime sky. Mum was crying this morning, in her bedroom, but when she came out, she was smiling and too busy to talk.

  Michaelis’s fingers hook in the black curls of Dirk’s hair. The layers of muscle and flesh in Dirk’s shoulders tremble when he coughs or laughs. People are singing. Nearby stands a wooden carriage, its sides carved with monstrous faces and people and animals leaping around one another. A man winds the handle with one tattooed arm and music pours from the machine’s innards.

  Michaelis could walk from head to head, he could step on people’s voices. Raised hands, beer slants in unsteady glasses, thick white foam rocking over rims. People are all around them, jostling one another, pressing close. Mum touches his foot again, as if she wants to say something, but she still looks straight ahead. Constantine stands alongside. Only the dark hair on the top of his head is visible. It wouldn’t matter if he could see Constantine’s face. Michaelis never knows how to read it. You know Constantine’s mood from what he does. Michaelis can feel Dirk’s voice through his legs.

  ‘One, two, three!’

  The hands of the clock in the cathedral come together. The bell in the tower begins to ring. The canvas arms of the Pepper Shaker lift up towards the sky, over the many windows that glint around its black, cavernous gate. The bell sounds out big brass doles. People are cheering, and Michaelis cheers too. The pipe slips from his mouth into the darkness between people’s feet and it is too late now to be careful, too late to catch what has already been dropped.

  ~

  ‘One time,’ Mum says, ‘when I got really sick, Constantine found me. I was lying on the ground and I could barely make out the table leg in front of me. My whole body was heavy. I couldn’t wake up properly. Your brother shook me; it didn’t do any good. I could hear him like it was very far away, but I couldn’t answer. Constantine didn’t cry. He wasn’t scared. He just went next door to Moessie for help. If he hadn’t done that, I might never have woken up again at all.’

  Moessie is their grandmother. After Mum nearly fell asleep, Constantine lived with Moessie and Michaelis stayed somewhere else. Moessie’s clear eyes are buried in the soft wrinkles of her face. They light up when Constantine walks through the door, because she remembers that time when he stayed, which was meant to be short but lasted a year. Mum wasn’t allowed to see Constantine then. That was for the best, they said. Now Mum isn’t sure. She would hear his voice sometimes from another room when she came by.

  ‘It broke my heart to hear that little voice.’

  ‘Is your heart still broken?’

  ‘No, Michaelis, it’s fine now.’

  Whenever they visit Moessie, they get a chocolate from a special tin. The wrapping has a gold elephant picture on it, and inside the outer layer of chocolate is a block of caramel that takes a long time to melt. An elephant never forgets. He holds the chocolate in his mouth. A sweet trickle finds its way down the back of his throat while he unfolds and flattens the wrapping, pretending that the elephant is made of real gold. Mum loves elephants. She’s always buying statues of them. Everywhere around the house, elephants, made of metal and wood and marble, their trunks lifted.

  Mum and Moessie talk in low voices while he is somewhere else in the apartment, away from them, playing with the toys that Moessie keeps in old biscuit tins for the visiting children. Thunderbirds Are Go.

  Moessie has a small white dog, Baasje. They have the same snowy hair, Moessie and Baasje. The apartment is full of barking and dog smell and squirming movement around their ankles. Moessie pours tea that smells of smoke. It is a mixture of Earl Grey and some other tea that sounds like a Chinese town. Only drink it in good cups. The silver strainer clinks on the cup. The tea pours through and Michaelis sees leaves in slick strands shipwrecked on the metal. The steam rises and finds the windows. Pour the tea first for yourself and last for guests. And for the coffee, you do the opposite.

  Moessie’s apartment is in a place called the Bunthof. There are two apartment blocks in the Bunthof, thirteen floors high, with a car lot between them. There’s also a park and a tree-lined lake alongside that, which often disappears into fog in the morning with only the tops of the trees poking through. It looks like it has been there forever, but people made it all.

  ‘Even the lake?’

  ‘Yes, even the pond. Even the fish that live in the water, they don’t belong here, those bright orange fish. But they make themselves at home now, don’t they?’

  ‘Like Dad?’

  ‘Yes, like Dad.’

  Gravity sucks at Michaelis’s heart when he takes the elevator to the apartment. Thirteen floors. Watch the light move through the numbers. Constantine knows about gravity. This is why spit falls from the balcony, why people’s heads explode when they jump from buildings. It makes Michaelis feel sick as the elevator shudders into motion, and then he forgets that he’s moving at all. Until it stops.

  Michaelis is in bed at night, with Mum’s hand moving through his hair as if it will be there forever.

  ‘I will always love you and Con equally. Don’t forget that. I never felt important, not with ten brothers and sisters. I was invisible. And that didn’t change until I got sick.’

  ‘How sick did you get, Mum?’

/>   ‘I got so sick that I could hardly leave the house for two years, not even to play. And my only friend was the teacher who brought me books.’

  ‘Why did you get sick, Mum?’

  ‘It was in my kidneys. I was six, older than you are, but not by much. Your grandmother was about to send me off to school when she noticed the colour of my pee. I had to pee in a bottle for a medical exam at school. The pee was brown, like mud. While she waited for the doctor, she rubbed my neck with balm and wrapped her favourite shawl around it. I don’t remember my mother giving me that kind of attention before then, or after. You wouldn’t believe how soft that shawl was. Or maybe it is just the thought of it.’ Mum’s hand stops. ‘Time for sleep.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Constantine come to bed, too?’

  ‘Because he’s three years older. He gets to stay up later. Now go to sleep.’

  ‘I’m not tired.’

  ‘Then pretend.’

  Constantine is out there while Michaelis lies in bed alone. He doesn’t like his brother, but he feels safer with Con in the room when it is time for sleep. His brother is never afraid.

  ‘Can you leave the door open?’

  ‘A little. But don’t make a sound or Dirk will come by and shut it.’

  Then he is alone. Whether he is quiet or not, if Dirk finds out the door is open, he will shut it. Michaelis has to learn not to be afraid of the dark, that’s why. A narrow rectangle of light plays on his fingers. He pretends that it is alive. He moves the light from one hand to the other. He can hear them in the other room over the noise of the television: Mum on the phone, talking or laughing softly, Dirk sighing or talking to himself or grunting at something on the television. Those sounds never seem to come from the same place at all.

  ~

  Gezellig. This is Mum’s word. ‘Nou ja, dit is gezellig,’ she says as she shrugs off her coat full of winter rain and puts on a light. Gezellig. Indoors you hear it, around talk and tea and coffee and pastries with cinnamon and clove and nutmeg, around Mum’s music. You hear it between people, and you cannot touch it because it is a feeling a place has when it is filled with the right kind of things, when it is safe, when Dirk is away.

  Michaelis helps around the house when he is too sick for preschool. Sometimes he makes up how sick he feels just to be with her. Mum plays records and makes him a clear soup that has chicken and carrot and small, translucent pieces of cauliflower floating in it.

  ‘After I got sick in my kidneys,’ Mum tells him as they sit side by side in the living room folding the washing, ‘it felt like I was having a very long holiday. The young woman who brought me books would tell me stories just like I do with you. Mostly, though, I’d sit on a day bed in the bay window and watch life go by in the street. There was this man who’d come past on a horsedrawn cart, picking up the rubbish. He’d always give me a smile and leave an apple on the doorstep. I’d hear him come from a long way off, that lonely clip clop clip clop down the street. I’d watch my brothers and sisters come home from work and school. There were so many of them, living in this massive attic which had been divided into all of these parts, going off to work, bringing money home for my mother, going out again. But I was the one at home with her. I was the one that needed her. I loved the attention, but I got fat from the medicine the doctors gave me. By the time that I was eight and had to go back to school, I couldn’t walk without my legs rubbing together.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  Mum is skinny. You can see the bones in her arms and wrists, the veins like rivers on a map, chasing each other under her pale skin. There is nothing to her at all, except life, the warmth in her voice, the quickness in her large blue eyes. It is hard to imagine her any different.

  ‘Yes, it was a very sad, lonely time after that.’

  The washing is done. She’s thumbing through her box full of records now as she talks, drawing out each cover for a moment from the wooden box that Dirk made for her. She finally chooses a bright yellow album and turns it slowly between her hands. The Mamas and the Papas.

  ‘I miss London. I bought this the year that your brother was born, when your father and I were still together. We didn’t have a lot of money back then, but we were happy. Or I was happy.’ She sighs and stares at the record cover without seeing it. ‘I’ve been here too long. It gets claustrophobic, these things that build up around you, that don’t let you be anything else. It will be good to see something completely different.’

  ‘Clasto…’

  ‘Claustrophobic. Close together. Everything crowding together: memories, people, all the things that they know about you. But we are going somewhere soon that is the opposite of all that. There’ll be space. You’ll get to fly on a plane.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A plane is the easiest way to get there. It’s very far away.’

  ‘But why are we going?’

  Mum slides the vinyl record from the sleeve and puts it on the player. California Dreamin’. She lifts and gently drops the needle into the groove. ‘You ask so many questions, Michaelis. Listen. Just listen.’

  Australia is an island. You can walk around it and never get off the beach. The beach is tropical. That’s why they are going, because the beaches are lovely. He knows only the beach here in Holland with its damp, clinging sand and icy water and the hot chips in a conical paper bag heaped with finely chopped onions and mayonnaise. But you have to drive forever to get to this beach, and when you’re there, you know you’ll have to go back, with all the other cars crowded on the flat, endless road. Everyone in Holland wants to make the most of summer’s hot days.

  ‘We’ll be there before you know it,’ Mum says.

  It never feels that way. They move so slowly, with all the traffic, that you can count birds in the trees. Michaelis has been to the beach twice that he can remember. He can count to twenty, and after that things get confused. After that he can throw out numbers, but he gets the order all wrong.

  2

  Now Mum has to go and he has to stay.

  ‘You’ll be fine. Really. Echt waar.’

  Words from home, but suddenly they are out of place. Home is too far away to imagine. Dad, Moessie, the Bunthof, Bergen op Zoom—they are memories now. They went to Amsterdam and boarded the plane and there was nothing to see through the windows except clouds and blue sky and night. The whine of engines was constant and everything stretched and stretched.

  The plane took them to a place called Sydney. For a few weeks, they lived in a warren of rooms with other people from other countries. Dirk and Mum talked about where to go next. They looked at maps and said the names of strange cities out loud and traced journeys with their fingers. Constantine kept to himself.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Mum told Dirk. ‘He’s upset.’

  For Michaelis there was only waiting—no more going to preschool, no more games, just waiting. Then they bought an old car and drove along a winding road through bushland with occasional glimpses of the sea. They headed to a place called Newcastle.

  ‘Come on,’ Mum says.

  Michaelis clings to Mum’s leg and he can’t bring himself to look in at the noise and the movement of the classroom behind him. A woman unpeels his arms and traps him in an embrace. The door opens and shuts. Mum is on the other side of the closed door, walking away. He can hear her steps, rapid and jerky, full of unhappiness. He can’t smell her perfume anymore. The woman talks at him. He can’t understand a word she is saying except now, now, now.

  He struggles, she holds on, her arms tensing, one bony wrist close to his mouth. Children are laughing behind him. He bites down on the wrist, writhes in the slackening of her grip, kicks her shin, and makes a break for the desks stacked against the end of the room. The carpet burns his knees as he crawls to the dark corner. He sits there against the wall.

  The life of the classroom goes on. The teacher talks to the other children and they calm down. They glance sometimes in his direction, under the table, but they are kept bu
sy by the teacher’s voice. He sees mainly their legs, skinny and bare, because it’s summer and it’s unbearably hot.

  The ceiling fan turns in slow, wobbling circles like a wheel about to come off. The scrawled paintings tacked to the wall flutter towards the open window. A swollen fly skids and bounces against the glass above the opening. The children have forgotten about him. They look the same in their grey uniforms, just two different kinds—boys and girls. The girls have white socks, the boys have grey with two thin gold lines, bunched down around shiny black shoes.

  The teacher crouches down and their eyes meet. Michaelis is too far away for her to reach him. She smiles tightly, and her forehead notches into an impatient frown. She speaks again, in the same tone that she used before. Michaelis stares back over his tucked-up knees. She disappears.

  ‘How was your first day at school?’

  Michaelis doesn’t answer. Mum asks again, and when he stays quiet, she sighs and walks ahead. The moment stretches out. His rage dulls. He has set it in motion, this silence between them, but he can’t break it. He wants to say that it’s okay, that he’s happy again now that they are together, he wants to tell her how bad it all was in this strange place where all of his words are useless. But he can’t open his mouth. He speeds up his stride to match hers, and stares at the cracks in the concrete path. School is behind him, yet ahead too, always ahead. He wishes that he could forget about that. Looking ahead is the worst part.

  Each morning, Mum walks him up the gloomy street beneath the arch of branches, towards the school, avoiding dips and rises in the footpath where the roots are coming through. The trees make the sunlight lazy and broken. Don’t talk on the way up. The road is impossibly steep. Look straight ahead, to the end of the road, and you can see only blue sky. As if you might walk straight into it.

  The teacher’s name is Mrs K. Michaelis is starting to understand some of the things she says, but not enough to make it worth listening.