The nymphs reign like Greek statues on either side of the station forecourt. On the left is the source of the red light that gives the area’s nights their bright, intermittent glow: an enormous Coca-Cola sign. I love the elegant writing with its upstrokes and downstrokes, and the funny name that rings out like a greeting in an exotic language. The light is intense and streams right into the hotel. It also tints the noses and breasts of my nymphs, making them twinkle.
I sometimes stretch my hand dreamily out of the window, watching my arm flush and fade. I am a station nymph, an angel ready to depart, a little girl on a journey. About to fly out of the window like a bird. I watch my flesh become flooded with the soft light, turning my arm, opening my hand then shutting it again. I do a finger-puppet show under the Coca-Cola spotlights and the gaze of my nymphs.
It’s a funny kind of home town, Utrecht: a puritanical, grey, swarming business hub whose visitors are welcomed by two naked women and a huge red neon sign.
The door to my room opens, slowly. My mother pokes her head round it and is astonished to see me at the window in the middle of the night.
‘You’re not sleeping?’
‘No.’
‘And your sister?’
‘Marianne always sleeps well.’
‘The hotel is full. Wake your sister and take her to room 22, I’ve just let this one to a good customer.’
Room 22 is not a room but a cubbyhole, with a skylight in the ceiling and a single bed. When the hotel is full we spend the night there. I pick up Marianne’s hot, limp body, telling her that it’s me and there’s nothing to worry about. I carry her upstairs while my mother tidies the room quick as a flash, and calls downstairs to the customer in her late-night auctioneer’s voice.
The bed in 22 is narrow and cold. The customer in 21 will enjoy slipping into the warmth left by my sister, and fall asleep easily. Not me. I tack up the pictures of Donald Duck that I drag around with me in an effort to recreate a familiar universe.
The skylight is too high to see anything through it except a patch of black sky. I concentrate on this rectangle. What if my mother rented room 22? Where would we go then?
I love my little sister. I’m glad she’s here, life isn’t as cold. My mother finds it amusing to tell how when I was two years old she found me trying to strangle baby Marianne. That story doesn’t make me laugh. I was jealous, it seems. Strangle Marianne? No, I would miss her. I prefer to pull her ear or pinch her chubby cheeks, not really hurting her, just reminding her firmly that I’m the eldest, the strongest, that we are here for each other.
We don’t hug in my family. Physical contact is reduced to a minimum. Touching would be letting the body express its tenderness, and what’s the point of that? Work, bustle and distance act as a substitute for everything.
‘Do you have to touch each other to make babies?’ I ask, curious.
My mother is embarrassed and tells me her cabbage-patch theory. Aunt Mary cracks up. How strange, I think to myself.
Tonight the hotel has lapsed into its night-time silence. I can’t sleep and I am listening out for the slightest sound, the potential movement of the china doorknob. I’m watching for my mother’s exhausted face, for it to come round the door and ask us to leave our room, whatever the time and the depth of my sister’s sleep, to go even higher, even further, into a space so small we can hardly fit, so small there could be no smaller space. We would be invisible, forgotten forever.
This childhood moving of rooms orchestrated by my mother, these nocturnal migrations to make way for strangers for the sake of a few extra florins, leave me with a deep conviction that sometimes eats into me beneath my calm façade: I’m in the way, too much, cheap, cut-price. I wander from room to room.
‘Is Hans here?’ asks the customer.
‘No, he no longer works here.’ Aunt Alice’s voice is terse.
The customer is surprised, his hands trembling on the reception counter.
‘But where has he gone?’ he persists, mournfully.
‘We don’t know, and do not wish to know.’
‘Very well …’
The customer takes his key and starts up the stairs. He hesitates, stops, grabs the banister, and brings a hand to his face. We are watching him.
‘Surely he’s not crying?’ asks Aunt Alice. ‘Do you know him?’
‘No.’
I go off to pace up and down the lounge. Yes, I know him. I recognise that scarlet coat with the black fur collar, that skin blistered with rampant acne. It’s the man that ‘Uncle’ Hans used to kiss in the kitchen. I had walked in silently, thinking I was alone, it was late and I hadn’t eaten. ‘Uncle’ Hans was holding the man by the neck, clasping him, eating the man’s mouth. Their movements were intense, they seemed to be hungry for each other. The man had his back to me. ‘Uncle’ Hans was facing me. He saw me immediately, paused for a moment, then resumed his gobbling of the man’s mouth. They were moaning a little. ‘Uncle’ Hans held my fixed gaze, then shut his eyes, and reopened them straight onto me. He stared as if he wanted to scream something at me, his suppressed rage perhaps, his desire to see my bubble explode, my sheltered, mute, dreamy little girl’s world.
I was witnessing desire and I didn’t like it. I was hearing pleasure and it wasn’t nice. I inched imperceptibly backwards, holding ‘Uncle’ Hans’s gaze.
My soles skated along the lino as I noiselessly left that invisible circle created around two bodies that wanted each other. I had walked into intimacy and I walked straight back out again.
I often ask myself about this world that comes to life so noisily behind closed doors. What are they doing? Personally, I always prefer a bit of light, a door ajar, so I can glimpse other people’s lives, like old people at windows. Doors close on intimacy, desire, secrets.
I pay attention to everything. I have noticed that there’s an energy stronger than anything else, which brings people together at nightfall, when work and the noise of the city cease. It magnetises them. In the bar I watch bodies touch each other under tables, see women offer up their necks. It’s an adult energy about which I am curious.
Why are my mother and father exempt from this energy? Why don’t they come together? My mother doesn’t offer her neck up like the other women. No, my parents don’t embrace, not even behind their bedroom door. I know. My brother sleeps in their room. I walk in there without knocking, quietly, apparently innocent and lost, determined to find out the truth. My parents are rarely in there together. Callas the dog growls and guards my father closely.
My parents are always heading in opposite directions. When my mother goes to bed, my father gets up. When my father undresses, my mother is waking up. There is no circle around them, no intimacy.
Aunt Alice is as upright and well behaved as Aunt Mary is unpredictable, unique and crazy.
Aunt Alice is my mother’s sister. She arrives early each morning by train from Hilversum (about fifteen miles away) to work at the hotel. She lives with her mother, my pious, Protestant, austere, taciturn, good grandmother.
Sometimes, I leave the bustle of the hotel