The Woman Who Fed The Dogs. Kristien Hemmerechts

did she do it for?

      God rest her soul. Died while her daughter was in prison, and was loathed by the whole country. The fruit of her womb. Le fruit de ses entrailles. La pauvre.

      They buried her next to my father. Her name and date of birth had been carved in the tombstone for over thirty years. And there was also room for me, she said. I bet she was counting on dragging me into that grave with her. If she had had the chance, she would have done it.

      I don’t know if I want to go there. I don’t need to go. I can see that grave in my dreams, I’ve been there so often. Week in, week out.

      There are so many other things I want to do. Especially with the children, if they want to. Please let them want to. All those lost years!

      Don’t think about it, Odette. Don’t think about it.

      What I’d most like to do is sit on a bench in a park. Feel the sun and the wind. Hear the birds sing. Watch the ducks on the water. Forget prison exists. And go to the seaside, to the seaside, to the seaside. Stroll along the promenade. Dance.

      M was a good dancer. That came from skating, he said. ‘All good skaters are good dancers.’

      He didn’t think that I was a good dancer, or a good skater, but I danced and skated better than his first wife. He thought I was prettier than her. I thought so too. Everyone thought so. He was afraid she would never find another man after him. He said, ‘I can’t leave her in the lurch, because otherwise she’ll never get to fuck again. Do you know what that means to a woman of her age to realise that she will never fuck again? I can’t do that to her.’ He organised a special party for her to which he invited all the bachelors he knew. And they had to bring the bachelors they knew. He acted as DJ. He had never done it before, but he did it very well. He played only bambas and slow romantic numbers. And he gave free beers to anyone who danced with his wife. While she had no one else, he felt responsible for her. He told me that immediately, on the very day we met. I realised that I had to take her as part of the package. And that I was lucky not to have to take his mother as well. Some men demanded that, he said, but I could treat him as if he had no mother. Or father either.

      I can’t say even approximately how often the three of us went out together, I and his first wife, and I often looked after her children, his children too, and then there was Sasha-with-the-fur-hat, until I was really sick, absolutely sick of it, and then he gave that party to find a new man for his first wife.

      It was a bit embarrassing for her. Everyone knew why M was giving the party. And his friends felt obliged to dance with her. She wasn’t stupid, was she? She was only too aware. She would have preferred everything to stay as it was.

      Not me.

      We went together to buy clothes for her. He almost never came up with any money, on this occasion he did. He realised that something had to happen. He had even sent her to the optician for prescription contact lenses, but she couldn’t wear them. She claimed they made her eyes sting. ‘You’ll get used to them,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said. She could be very stubborn. You wouldn’t have thought her capable of it, but she was. The worst thing was that she could not return the lenses to the optician, or the products she had bought. All money down the drain.

      She had been an orphan for years and years. No one had taught her how to make herself presentable. She wouldn’t have learnt it from the nuns in the orphanage.

      She and I must have tried twenty shops before we found something that was sexy, but not vulgar or ridiculous. We get home and she puts it on, and I make up her eyes dramatically, so that even with those glasses on her nose they are still seen to their best advantage. I give her my lipstick and she makes up her lips in front of the mirror, and she runs her tongue over her lips, and suddenly I see M looking at her, and I think: help, soon he’ll want to keep her.

      Because she had something. Not at first sight, but when you got to know her better, and if you could picture her without those glasses… If I’m really honest, I have to admit I can see what M saw in her.

      We would have done better to buy some new frames for her. She would have had years of pleasure from them.

      She was determined to buy shoes with heels and those fine straps, but she wasn’t used to them. In the end she danced in her bare feet. At the beginning of the evening she kept changing partners, but after a while she danced with the same one the whole time. I breathed a sigh of relief.

      Here in prison there is also dancing sometimes, but I don’t join in. Women dancing with women are almost as pathetic as women having sex with women. That was different with Sasha and me. We wouldn’t have touched each other without a man present. We did it for M. We knew it excited him. That was our aim.

      If I ever dance again, I will dance alone. Or with a man. A real man who gets an erection when he dances with me. Like that man at the party for M’s first wife. ‘Nights in white satin, never reaching the end.’ It went on and on. ‘Cause I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you, oh how I love you…’ And the whole time I felt that thing between us, and I thought: M will kill him. If he knows what that guy has in his trousers, he’ll kill him. And me too. I didn’t dare leave him standing in the middle of the dance floor. That would really have drawn attention to us. When the number finally finished I made it clear as discreetly as possible that I had had enough. Then I joined M at the mixing desk. He said nothing about the man, but he trod on my toes, without saying anything. He didn’t have to say anything.

      Sometimes I think that I think of those murderess-mothers in order not to think of him for ten minutes.