The Last Thread Page 8

  He knocks on the front door.

  Dirk opens it, stares down at him over his beard. ‘Did you drink any?’

  Michaelis watches his brother lie all the time. The way to lie is to empty your face, to believe yourself, and to not look for reassurance.

  He meets Dirk’s eyes. ‘No.’

  Dirk swipes him with one hand and then lifts him by the hair. ‘Idiot. Liar. Look at yourself in the mirror.’

  And the proof is there, staring back at him, alongside the glowing red handprint on his cheek: a milk moustache.

  Inside, Constantine is helping Mum bathe Jonno. Michaelis can hear their voices echoing in the bathroom, drifting up the stairs.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Con says. ‘I was this old. I can’t believe that Dad would do that to someone so small, so fragile.’

  ‘You hated me for taking you away,’ Mum says. ‘Do you remember? And you used to talk about wanting to come back. You talked about it all the time. I thought this was what you wanted.’

  ‘We should have stayed in Australia. I hate it here.’

  Now red welts cover his arse and his back. Not from Dirk, but from a disease. They itch like mad. He wants to scratch them, but he’s not supposed to. They’re contagious. No school, no going outside to play, no walking around. He has to lie on his belly and wait. Ed stalks in sometimes, plays at his toes and then curls up beside him.

  Three times a day, Mum comes up and rubs cream into his skin. The bedsheets stick to him when he moves.

  Mum is cooking downstairs, singing along with one of her records. The sound of her bustling clatters up the stairs. The album fills the walls with the cloying tones of a French singer. Edith Piaf. Mum explains the songs sometimes. One song is about death and ghosts. In the song, Edith says that she’s not afraid to die. You only say things like that when you are afraid, Michaelis thinks. If you don’t care, you just don’t talk about it, like Constantine, who is afraid of nothing. He only acts. Anything Michaelis mentions becomes real, so he keeps silent. It’s the same if he pulls the blanket to his neck at night, closes his eyes against the darkness, counts his breath. Wait. There’s nothing there. We all have stories.

  Moessie claims she once saw a UFO. It was a silver dish, with a circle of lights, and flew overhead when she was shopping in the marketplace. She was so surprised that she fell and broke her hip—but no one else saw it, except for Beatrix, who is a terrible liar, so how can you believe what she says? Beatrix is one of Michaelis’s aunts. She has seventeen children, but Michaelis has seen none of them, because Beatrix hates Mum like a lot of her sisters do, and they have not come to see her since she returned from Australia.

  ‘I never liked her either,’ Mum admits as she rubs cream into his bottom. ‘A horrible, nasty person, right from the beginning. Worse than Jannie. When I was little, after my illness, I used to have to walk to school with her. It took us an hour or so. She’d make me walk behind her, and we would hardly speak at all. I wore her old clothes, and they never fitted me well. As we got closer to school, I would slow down because there’d be a group of older kids waiting, girls in her year. They called her names, said that she was a liar and a thief and so on. She was all of those things, but the way those other girls treated us was partly because of our family.’

  ‘What was wrong with our family?’

  ‘There were stories, things that happened before I was born, during the war. The kids in the neighbourhood weren’t supposed to play with us. We were never invited to birthday parties. It used to outrage my mother. I remember playing by myself outside the houses where there were birthday parties, hoping they’d invite me in. I was never entirely sure if it was because I was fat or because of the stories.’

  ‘What stories?’

  ‘Wait.’

  Mum gets up to answer the phone, and she does not come back upstairs, and Michaelis thinks how it is always like this, how so many of the stories she tells have no real endings, or they end at a different place every time. Perhaps this is why he can listen to them again and again. It doesn’t matter what the endings were, because it is the past, and the last daylight is sinking from the windowpanes. A smell of meat, spicy and warm, comes from downstairs. Mum is making tomato soup with meatballs. There will be a stack of pancakes, thin as tissue paper, afterwards.

  The words that Mum leaves him with fascinate Michaelis, all the dark places they touch, the way that they connect and separate like paths in a maze. He decides that when he grows up, he’ll be an explorer, and he’ll write about it. He’ll discover every last part of the world. But he is an explorer already, whether he likes it or not. There is one difference only: he doesn’t forge bravely ahead, the landscape just changes around him.

  Like when he watches television and grows sleepy. His eyelids fill with lead.

  ‘Go to bed,’ Mum tells him, ‘go to bed.’

  But he doesn’t listen. He always wants to know the next part of the story. He blinks, and when he opens his eyes, the room is black, everyone is gone—the television is a dead, empty box in front of him, the floor cold and hard beneath his back.

  This is how quickly things change.

  ~

  ‘We’re going back,’ Mum says one day.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where do you think? To Australia. That’s really our home. We just needed to come back and live here for a while to realise that.’ It is as if Mum is finishing a conversation that she started in her head.

  Then snow turns to mud and spring comes. The bare trees fill up with leaves and Michaelis almost forgets that he’ll be leaving. Days grow longer and longer until he falls asleep with the light of the day still out there. They go to farms outside town and buy crates full of fragrant strawberries and fresh milk that you have to boil to get the cream off. Sometimes Constantine takes Michaelis exploring. Sometimes they go into places that are forbidden. Sometimes they ride their bicycles out to the strawberry fields and crawl in on their bellies and eat everything they can touch, the green light on their faces. They lie with their cheeks close to the ground, listening for the barking of the dog to change tone. The sound of gnats and flies gathers around their ears and the sun rests against their backs and strawberry juice trickles from the corners of their mouths. Michaelis eats, lost in that moment, until it’s time to run.

  ‘I’ve got them.’ Dirk brandishes the envelope with the tickets, the aeroplane tickets, the proof that they are going back to Australia. Dirk and Mum stand there staring at one another and smiling. Whenever they know they are going somewhere, Mum and Dirk get happy for a while, like they are looking in the same direction, and there is nothing behind them. Dirk takes the tickets out of the envelope and shows them to Mum.

  ‘Can I see?’ Michaelis asks.

  Dirk looks at Michaelis. The corners of his mouth drop. ‘No. You’ll only ruin them.’

  Mum folds her hands across her chest. ‘You don’t have to be that way.’

  ‘Verdomme. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Why do you have to turn everything into a fight about him? Can’t we just enjoy something for a change?’

  ‘You’re always on his side.’

  As he walks past Con in the hallway, his brother grins and whispers, ‘Well done, Michaelis, well done.’

  Michaelis takes his cat upstairs, sits at the desk that Dirk built beneath his window and stares out over the street. The street is busy with afternoon traffic. The cat purrs. Michaelis thinks of how Constantine hardly gets in trouble, how he is an expert at avoiding it. Usually it only happens when he does things to Michaelis, when Michaelis calls for help, and then they both get it.

  Every now and again, though, Constantine does make Dirk upset. He once told Dirk to get fucked. Dirk chased him up the road with a piece of wood. Con is fast and he got away. Later, he gets the beating, but there is always that moment where Con is running ahead of Dirk, when Dirk throws down his arms and stands gasping on the street, defeated.

  ~

  Farmland rolls p
ast the window, the flat, green landscape broken by skinny trees and hedges and occasional houses. The carriage rattles as it enters a bend. Claws rake through the gap in the cardboard box on his lap and his cat gives another frantic hiss in the darkness. Michaelis is taking Ed to a farm in the north of Holland, to say goodbye, to leave him forever, but first he is treating him to being trapped in a box for three hours.

  ‘He’ll love it there,’ Mum says again. ‘There are lots of animals. He’ll feel right at home. You’ll see.’

  When they get there and open the box, the cat bursts out like it’s on fire and hurtles up into a pine tree. Michaelis stands under the tree for a long time, calling softly, but it does no good.

  ‘Never mind,’ Mum says, frowning up into the branches. ‘We’ll get you another cat in Australia.’

  Michaelis’s aunt is called Margreet. She is a farmer’s wife. She gets up with her husband at four in the morning to milk cows. Early in the morning, the moon stares in through the glass, pale with hypothermia. Maybe this is why Margreet is such a hard-looking woman, with a downward turn in her mouth and a glint in her eye.

  ‘That,’ Mum says, ‘comes from your grandmother. She’s a real survivor.’

  ‘What did she survive?’

  Mum doesn’t answer. She’s talking to Margreet. His aunt’s skull is outlined through her short, peppery hair. She gives Michaelis a present, a Lego knight on a horse. Michaelis plays with it on the polished floor. He lies on his belly with his feet under Mum’s chair. He doesn’t listen to most of what they are saying, but towards the end of the afternoon, a word catches his attention. Trut.

  ‘She was a bitch,’ Margreet says. Een trut.

  Mum clears her throat. ‘Yes, but she’s still our mother.’

  The Lego knight pauses in his hand, under the shadow of the chair.

  Margreet snorts. ‘No helping that. What makes me so angry is how she can moralise. After what she did in the war!’

  The two of them fall silent. He can hear geese and chickens outside, caught up in their own babble, and a dog barking, as if there is a stranger out there, entering the property.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Mum says. ‘We don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Isn’t that what they said about you and Andreas?’

  Mum takes a deep breath before she answers. ‘That was different.’

  Margreet’s voice goes brittle and hard when she laughs. ‘How do you imagine they became so wealthy during the war? Do you think our parents were thrown into jail for nothing?’

  ‘Well, no. Of course not.’

  The two of them drink their tea. No light-hearted chatter here, no gezellig. Just breathing and the clinking of cups.

  ‘Look,’ Mum says, ‘she never talked about it with me. There are things that I remember growing up with. Just a few odd events.’

  ‘Why do you think our grandmother rejected us?’

  Mum glances towards Michaelis. He makes a show of running his knight across the floor again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mum says. ‘I mean, I do, but I don’t want to talk about it now. I didn’t come here to talk about this with you.’

  ‘That’s what we do in our family. We don’t talk about things—we bury them. Just like they did with you.’

  Mum doesn’t answer. There’s an open fire in the corner, crackling and hissing. Michaelis stares into the fire and the glowing embers. His face near the flames is warm and his feet are cold.

  Margreet’s voice lowers, as if that is all it takes to make Michaelis stop listening.

  ‘You and I both know that she still believes that rubbish about the Jews. That she still thinks Hitler was a great man. But do you know why Mother sent me away when I was born? Why she hardly had a thing to do with me for most of my life? She got raped in prison by some Canadian prison guard. I think that was my father.’

  Raped. Michaelis turns the word over in his head.

  Mum glances across at him again, a look of warning in her eyes. ‘I didn’t know that. God. I just thought that you lived somewhere else because she had so many of us to look after. I thought it was normal.’

  Margreet makes a scoffing sound. ‘There are a lot of things that we grew up thinking were normal.’

  ‘Maybe she’s changed since then.’

  ‘Then why are you leaving again?’

  ‘We shouldn’t be talking about it now.’

  They face one another for a moment in silence, Mum and his aunt. Beside Margreet, Mum looks particularly young, with her fuller lips, the blush on her cheeks, and the hair that comes down to her shoulders. All of his aunts have short hair, just like Moessie.

  ‘It needs to be said,’ Margreet declares. ‘I’ll never forgive her. You shouldn’t either, after what she tried to do to you. People like that don’t deserve forgiveness. She’s filled our family with poison, and it’s still here, in all of us.’

  On the train back, he tries not to think about Moessie. He imagines that he is a king with one loyal subject, a Lego knight with an unbreakable smile. One day, he tells the knight silently, I’m going to buy a castle, and I’m going to put you in charge.

  But they are going home. Back to Dirk, to whom all of Mum’s relatives are so polite, although they don’t admire him or laugh at his jokes the way that they do with Dad. Michaelis leans back in the seat and lets his imagination drift. Nothing lasts forever, not even this sensation in the pit of his stomach, the feeling of going home, the feeling of knowing things that he doesn’t want to. Some things you can’t change, but some things you can. He will run away, maybe when he is sixteen, and come back later. The older he gets, the more he can imagine killing Dirk.

  Mum looks across at him suddenly. ‘I wish your aunt hadn’t said those things. She shouldn’t have spoilt your grandmother for you. You only really have one, after all.’

  Michaelis thinks of the museum with all the doomed people, and then he thinks of Moessie with her smile, and the way it makes her eyes grow small.

  ‘But it’s true, right?’

  ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Mum gives a slight shake of her head. ‘Of course I know she did some terrible things during the war. That’s why I didn’t have any friends growing up: I was the daughter of a collaborator. But my mother never regretted the choices she made during the war, only that she lost everything afterwards. In many ways she’s a strong woman, your grandmother. Formidable. She has no time for weakness. She once told me that I killed my father because I dated a Jewish man. She tried to have me committed to a mental asylum after I left your father and said what he’d done, and she always stood up for him. I’ll never forget how she collected me from the hospital after I overdosed on the pills. She didn’t hug me or help me. She just walked ahead of me. She said that she’d let me die if I did it again.’ Mum’s shoulders drop. ‘I love her because she’s my mother, but she’s not what you’d call a nice person.’

  ‘Why did we come back here, then?’

  Mum looks away, out of the window, to the passing trees and the flat, damp countryside. ‘I was homesick. I try not to hold grudges. In the end, I thought you boys should know your father. My family felt the same. Your father did some terrible things, but he has his good side. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him otherwise.’

  Michaelis sees his aunt Jannie again, standing in the middle of the road, shaking her fist. You’re sick. Possessed by the devil. It is quiet in the train. A woman across the aisle looks up from her paper and then looks down again.

  Mum shifts beside him and touches his arm. ‘You were born out of love, you and your brother. You must never forget that.’

  They are leaving and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Michaelis and Con have already handed over their pocket money to help pay for the trip.

  ‘You’ll get it back eventually,’ Mum says, ‘but we need it right now.’

  They have sold their house to a group of monks. Michaelis imagines the monks making themselves at home in his bedroom with all of its wooden furniture,
playing each other on the ping-pong table in the attic.

  But now they are to stay at Aunt Carolien’s house in the north, and then they are flying out again to Australia. Carolien is the only sister Mum gets along with. When they visit each other, Carolien and Mum are always drinking wine together and laughing. Michaelis hardly ever sees Mum happy like that.

  Michaelis spends a lot of time by himself in the back garden, which has a massive plum tree. One night, Dirk goes out to tell Michaelis that it is dinnertime. Michaelis forgets he’s been told. He’s looking for fish in the pond under the tree. Dirk comes out again. He drags Michaelis away from the pond by the hair and pins him against the wall, one hand around his throat.

  ‘I don’t want you fucking things up in Australia.’ Dirk speaks softly as he makes a fist with his other hand and rests it against Michaelis’s jaw. ‘I don’t want you being stupid and I want you to listen. And if you run to your mother and tell her about this, we won’t talk anymore. I’ll just kill you.’

  Michaelis can feel the blood trapped in his head, the bruise under his jaw, the twitching jolt beneath his skin. He goes inside and sits at the table, next to Constantine. Everyone is laughing and talking. Mum is feeding Jonno, her pale face creased into a smile. Dirk sits at one end of the table, gnawing on a sausage, fat dripping into his beard. He coughs softly and says something and Carolien laughs the way that she laughs for everyone. No one can see what Michaelis sees. Or perhaps they see it and pretend not to, and forget the moment when it stares back at them.

  7

  The plane banks and beyond the wing the sea comes into view, flecked with white, shadows of storm clouds racing along its surface. The plane drops and Michaelis feels the lurch in his stomach. Mum reaches across and holds his hand. Dirk glances at the movement and looks away.

  ‘There it is, Mike,’ Mum says. ‘There it is.’