‘I hate penetration! Do you understand?’
My mother is drunk. She has taken me by the shoulders and is staring at me fixedly, repeating: ‘I hate penetration. I can’t stand your father coming back from hunting or wherever, reeking of alcohol, sweat and blood, slipping into my bed while I sleep and wanting to penetrate me. I’m sleeping, tired, and he is all dirty and excited and wants to penetrate me. I don’t want it, I can’t do it. I’m too tight, do you understand?!’
‘No, I don’t understand, Mummy.’
‘You do, you do understand! And anyway, there isn’t just penetration, there are other things you can do …’
I wriggle out of her arms, put my hands over my ears and shout, as I run away: ‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand what you’re talking about, so stop talking to me like this, leave me alone, Mummy!’
When she is drunk, lost and abandoned, when my father has gone off, when she has refused herself to him, my mother talks to me without any concept of the child I still am. She is confiding in a human being, perhaps the closest one to her, confessing her pain. I run away. I cannot hear these adult words, nor contemplate that my father and mother can no longer stand each other.
My mother insists that she has never made love with my father. She denies any physical relationship, any contact. She doesn’t know how we were born; not from her body in any case.
I am the eldest. I have two years on Marianne and four on my brother, but I still can’t remember my mother pregnant. Perhaps she hid her round belly under artfully loose homemade dresses? She must have bound her belly, smoothing it out like a mouldable paste, moulding us too, rejecting this evidence of the other’s body, this visible proof of her penetration, her lack of restraint. I have no memory of childbirth, or preparations, or a wait, or her absence; just squalling, ugly newborns who scared me and were presented by Aunt Alice as holy marvels.
I am jealous of my sister. She has found in the neighbours a warm and loving foster-family. I am occasionally invited to dinner. I hang around, trying to get myself adopted too, but I am already big and independent. I have my own friend, but she is cruel. Her parents own one of the very first televisions in Utrecht. I am fascinated, bewitched. She knows it, and invites me over when she wants to and pointedly not when I am dying to go. I am devastated. My mother feels sorry for me and understands that she can make up for her absence by providing me with this piece of modern treasure. My mother buys a television! A box of marvels, a miracle; never-ending pictures. It lives in my parents’ bedroom. I watch it as much as I can. My mother puts limits on my hypnosis, especially in the evenings. I must go to bed. Once in my room I keep quiet for a few moments, giving the impression that I’ve fallen asleep, then tiptoe back out again in the direction of the television. The door of my parents’ bedroom is closed but glazed, with a multicoloured stained-glass window in the middle. I stand stock-still a few feet behind the door, just able to see the TV, distorted but in colour.
I am growing up alone these days. Marianne is almost never around, Nicolas spends his life outside and my parents are becoming invisible. I don’t deal with it well. I rebel. At school, I refuse to go to the toilet during the allotted break times. My bladder becomes infected but I still refuse to go. I won’t hang my clothes on the coat rack. I hate the squirrel design on it, that pseudo-sweet animal with claws like my mother’s staples.
I become a stubborn, contrary child.
I never do what I’m told, rejecting everything wholesale. Hierarchies and orders remind me of my mother. Growing up is a dead end. I won’t take the boring educational path I’m being shown, won’t heed the stupid, abstract advice, ‘you should do this, a big girl must do that …’ But what is a big girl? A woman who works herself to the bone? A woman who has forgotten how to laugh or dance, who says she isn’t a woman? Nothing about grown bodies or adults holds my interest. I like only my childhood books, my continuing dreams at the window, my Walt Disney pictures, the movies and TV. I become lazy, indolent; I still am, sometimes.
I have a need to lie down and do nothing, motionless, watching the time passing, experiencing idleness, gazing around the room with slow-motion eyes, my only activity the gentle coming and going of air in my chest. I like being inert, touching the slow moment. I am congealing in torpor, in rest, becoming stunted. I convince myself of my innocent stillness, my different fate: I am not behaving like my mother, am not trapped in the industrious rhythm of life, on and on until death.
It’s around then that I start dreaming of a job in which I do nothing. A task that won’t exhaust, won’t cause black rings under my eyes, on the contrary will make them shine. A soft, joyful job, rather languid and voluptuous.
Marianne no longer comes to the hotel even at night. I sleep alone. I bumped into her today on my way to the chip shop. She looked my way so I slipped my arm through hers. She looked at me nastily and said: ‘Let me go! I’m not your sister! I am Marianne Van de Berg, Anneke is my sister, not you!’ I let go of her arm, fled to the hotel and wept. I’ve got a new book: Billy Bradley Goes to Boarding School. Good idea. I’ve nothing left to lose, it can only be better than here. I ask to go away to school, an immediate escape.
‘May I have a cognac, please?’ I speak up to hide my nervousness.
‘A cognac?! You must be joking, my girl! And you’ll sing a little lower, if you don’t mind!’
This funny Flemish expression means ‘lower your voice’. I wasn’t singing, I didn’t feel like it. I am afraid of this new life, afraid that I have lost my head and made a bad decision.
I am eleven years old, it’s my first night at boarding school and I can’t sleep. This is the first time I’ve been refused a cognac. They’ve also refused to take my bags up. What is this place?
‘Straight to the sickroom with you, my girl!’
Sister Assissia is shocked, and wants to be sure I am of sound mind.
I am sane and realise for the first time, from the astounded look of this strict but kindly adult, that the relationship between alcohol and the body is an unnatural one, that the two are not bound together like the body and water. Alcohol is not merely a bracing liquid that stings and warms, leaving you dizzy and making you sing even if you’re tone-deaf.
Alcohol is not natural, not good.
I am returned to my room.
‘So, no cognac, my girl. But three Hail Marys and two Paters will send you to sleep just as well!’
Sister Assissia shows me my room, shuts the door behind her and rushes off, bemused, thinking of the vast amount of work that will be needed to sort me out.
This is a religious secondary boarding school, not far from Utrecht. I am now in a finishing school for smart young ladies preparing for life as upper-class wives.
At the hotel, when I couldn’t sleep I used to either serve myself a small cognac or finish off the customers’ glasses, making crazy mixtures that knocked me out fast. I was sometimes upset in the evenings, left alone to face the issues confronting a growing girl. I would feel sad when I heard them announce the departure of the last train for Hilversum.
The