‘Stand back from the platform edge, the Hilversum train is about to depart!’
This time I am on board, a little girl who intrigues the other passengers.
My grandmother has principles. In contrast to the murky busyness of the hotel, she gives clarity and rules to my childhood: something to lean on.
No noise on Sundays at Granny’s house, no bicycle. The table is a place of quiet, not a station chip shop. You must meditate and pray so as not to burn in the flames of hell. You thank God at every meal as if He were providing the food Himself. It’s strange. I sense that my questions would not be welcome in this slightly strained silence, so I keep quiet, I obey, that’s why I’m here.
There’s a three-sided mirror in front of my chair. I always make sure I can see it, training my curiosity on myself. I peer at my reflection, discovering myself a little more each time. An often solitary child, I am interested in myself. I look at my profile, the top of my head, the usually invisible parts of myself. I also watch myself grow. And the bigger I grow, the more I watch myself. I like looking at myself. When my grandmother isn’t there I go right up to the mirror, so close I could kiss it. My breath creates a light mist that I wipe away with an arm so I can find myself again. I move each of my features in turn, making all kinds of false faces that I hold for a few moments. Pretending is easy.
I’m intrigued by the colour of my eyes, by the family resemblance. I don’t know the name of this colour. Grey, pale green …?
My grandmother doesn’t like my narcissistic ways, my poses. This lengthy contemplation of my face, its discovery from every angle, distracts me from my prayer and is really too much. So one day Granny stands up, tacks some newspaper over the mirror and looks at me with kindly authority, not saying a word. Deprived of the sight of myself, for a few days of the holidays I surrender to my grandmother’s good, serene orderliness.
Aunt Mary is manic-depressive, like her father.
‘She’s not very well in the head,’ my mother whispers.
Before she came to the hotel we used to visit this bizarre aunt in hospital. She seemed normal, all smiley and sweet. Aunt Mary enjoyed our visits and always made sure to put on a good show, to prove her sanity and that she shouldn’t be locked up. Depending on her state she was either drowned in lithium or subject to electroshock therapy to achieve an artificial stability. I was little, and struck by the size of the nurses.
‘They’re animals!’ she would say, quietly so they wouldn’t hear. In a bid for survival she set her bed on fire and was asked to leave. My father went to get her. He signed a document, paid for the burnt bed and brought Aunt Mary back to the hotel.
She was shouting ‘Tell me I’m not crazy, tell me!’ as she left the hospital, furious at having been pharmaceutically gagged, reduced to a state of continual and hazy smiling. She jabbed a vengeful finger at the huge, impassive white figures.
‘No, you’re not crazy,’ my father replied, squeezing her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go!’
‘Manic-depressive’ is an odd, complex word, with an intellectual sound to it. It is always said clearly but quietly, accompanied by sorrowful discomfort on my mother’s face. It must be a failing that needs to be hidden, a rare defect that has affected our family, of which my aunt is the vivid proof.
Aunt Mary spends half her life in the air and the rest on the floor. She lives mostly at night, when the contrasts show less. She sometimes laughs and sings for days at a time, buying extravagant presents on credit and exclaiming at how wonderful life is, and how short. Aunt Mary gives her love in huge bouquets, or else goes to ground, at her slowest moments, like the victim of a broken dream or departed lover. Then one day she comes back to life, believing in it again, more fervently than ever. Giving us her sense of humour, her regained appetite and her temporary zest for life.
When I grow up I’m going to be manic-depressive. It’s so much fun, so entertaining.
I adore my aunts. So opposite to each other, but always there for little love-starved me. They are the warm, lively figures of my daily life, weaving a palpable web of love around me every day.
Aunt Mary runs the hotel bar, that pivotal space she often doesn’t close until morning, that hub of routine, ritual debauchery. She doesn’t sleep much, or drink at all. Aunt Mary is always sober as she witnesses the spectacle of the daily drinking sessions. The customers feel relaxed around this kindly, changeable woman – to the extent that some of them think her as drunk as them.
My mother is a regular, discreet, efficient customer at the bar. She drinks constantly, serving herself wine or sherry. She can hold her alcohol – I take after her. She never seems drunk. When she is, she hides away or tells me to go to my room. That’s all my mother seems able to say whenever she is vulnerable, moved or surprised.
My mother is incapable of expressing emotion. She sup-presses it as a weakness, a threat. Life is hard and dangerous, you have to be on guard. My mother fears feelings, as a never-ending wave sure to sweep her away. She prefers control, and uses drink to make this inhuman state bearable.
My father frequents the bar for the same reasons as my mother, but he also hosts the space. He plays the piano and the synthesiser, a sort of modern music box that reproduces the sounds of other instruments as well as bespoke rhythms. It is magical, mysterious, cheerful. My father occasionally and impatiently teaches me a little.
The customers like the hotel bar, where everyone drinks until they are laughing uncontrollably at nothing; deep, throaty laughs that resonate through the whole building. Some fall over, and weep, then get up again and sing, badly. They shout unknown names – faraway lands they will visit, women they will love.
Alcohol has been part of my life since the day when, before I was weaned, my mother got me to sleep by putting a cognac-soaked cloth wrapped around a lump of sugar to my lips.
Alcohol made my father loud and cheerful. He played, sang, acted the fool; he was my clown.
Alcohol broke through my mother’s Protestant restraint, brought her out of her silence, freed up unknown, vicious words, the words of a different person. Emotions burst forth, and then my mother would disappear.
Alcohol gave life. It was the song, the blood, the bond of the hotel. My father would drink up to forty beers a day. I practised my maths by counting them. To arrive at different totals I would then add each whole glass of cognac and each Underberg to the beers.
When he was sober, my father didn’t speak.
I preferred alcohol to silence.
Kristel is my real name, from the word ‘crystal’. It suited my father’s fragile luminosity.
There’s not always a reason for fragility, it can just be a part of someone’s nature. My father was fragile but he hid it, drowning and destroying himself in alcohol and noise. My father adored clay-pigeon shooting and hunting, and his carpentry machines – the screaming metal beasts that lived in his refuge, the attic. He would listen to the intolerable mechanical roar of these carving tools without ear protection.
When out hunting he would fire his gun often, right next to his ears, shooting rebelliously in the air out of a taste for loud noises. By middle age he was almost deaf, which suited him. The voices of the women, the cries and screaming of the children, these signs of life slowly disappeared, growing fainter like an echo, vanishing into his silence