I sighed. ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’
‘No! Now!’
He used to do that to my parents, too. Every time they went to bed, he would be sitting cross-legged in his cot, wide awake. My mother said it was the fault of the noisy steps, that the creaking woke him. He didn’t make a sound, until my parents had changed into their nightclothes and climbed into bed, and the house had gone eerily quiet—then he started. Question after question. I was sometimes jolted from my sleep too, in my room on the other side of the landing. Not by his reedy voice, or Mother’s answers. But by Father. By the sound of his spanking my brother’s bottom to get him to stop. Or his thundering string of curses just before the spanks. Then came the crying, which only stopped when Mother got out of bed and cradled him in her arms. They argued about it. Mother wanted to keep my brother in their room a little longer, while Father, who had to get up at the crack of dawn to go to work, wanted to throw him out, cot and all.
His questions were usually about animals. That was my doing. During the day, I dragged him through the garden where we lifted the patio flagstones and watched the earthworms, ants and woodlice panic as the roof of their world disappeared. Some frantically tried to crawl away, others scrambled through exposed tunnels, creeping and writhing over each other. We bored into holes and crevices with sticks, digging out eggs and larvae. Then we would stroll down the gravel path to the kitchen garden without giving the garden shed, its windows covered in fairy-tale cobwebs, a second glance. To the hedge. That was the boundary. Pointing through the hornbeam hedge to the woods, I told him that large, wild animals lived there: foxes, deer, badgers. Even wild boars with curved tusks. Bears and wolves, too, I whispered with wide-open eyes. At that point, he’d turn round and run inside. In the evening, the questions rose like bubbles in the descending silence of the night.
‘Mum? Mum?’
‘Shush. Keep it down. Dad needs his sleep,’ Mother whispered.
‘How many wolves live in the woods?’
‘Wolves? Silly boy. There aren’t any wolves here.’
‘But David says there are.’
I always giggled when I heard that.
‘David is pulling your leg,’ Mother said. ‘I’ll box his ears tomorrow.’
She never did.
‘And bears?’
‘No bears, either.’
‘Mum?’
‘Go to sleep now, or Dad will get angry.’
The morning I woke up to the sound of axe blows and cracking wood, I knew at once what was going on. Looking out of my dormer window, I could see Father chopping up the cot. The image shocked me—the violent blows of the axe, the same one he used to chop the chickens’ heads off.
‘Four’s the perfect number,’ my father told me when I had run downstairs to join him. ‘There won’t be any more.’
He was dragging the chopping block into the garden, to hack the planks into even smaller pieces. His axe came very close to his thumb. At every chop, I was afraid he would lop off his thumb, black-rimmed nail and all. From then on, my little brother and I shared my bed. I was ten at the time, he was four.
He dug his elbow into my side.
‘Why doesn’t the bear have a long tail?’
I didn’t have the faintest idea, but remembered a story from one of the books Mother used to teach us to read.
‘A very long time ago, his tail froze off,’ I said.
‘No it didn’t!’
‘Shhh! Be quiet.’
He was silent for a while, watching the door closely.
‘So how did it happen?’ he asked, once he was satisfied there were no footsteps coming up the stairs and the door stayed shut. Slowly pulling up my knees and clearing my throat with a deep, guttural sound, I tried to remember the rest of the story.
‘The monster awakens from hibernation and rises up from the ice valley,’ I improvized. Giggling, he tried with all his strength to push down my knees. He had never succeeded before. It gave me time to think, to frame my answer to his question in my mind. The wooden bedframe creaked. He was leaning his full weight against my legs. Slowly, I let them slide down.
‘Now tell me!’ he whined.
‘Well, it happened one very cold winter. So cold, the ice on the ponds was thirty centimetres thick,’ I said. I took hold of his hands and held them apart at approximately the right distance.
‘This thick?’ he asked incredulously.
I nodded, looking at the two round spots in his face where his eyes were. Silver moonlight surrounded his head. I went on.
‘Once upon a time, there were a fox and a bear. The bear was very skinny, and the cruel, sly fox, who wanted to play a joke on him, said he would show him a place to find food. The bear knew the fox and his pranks, but was far too hungry to be suspicious. The fox told him to make a hole in the ice, and with his last strength, the bear managed to do it. Then the fox told him to sit on the hole dangling his tail in the water and wait for a fish to bite; he had tried it himself and it had worked like a charm.’
Out loud, the story sounded ridiculous. I knew he didn’t believe me, but he hung on my words all the same.
‘Then, the hunters came.’
I shouldered an imaginary rifle and closed one eye to take aim, which he couldn’t see in the dark.
‘And then? And then?’
He pulled down my arm, bending my thumb so far the joint cracked.
‘The fox escaped, of course. The bear wanted to, but his tail was frozen in the ice. He was stuck fast. He twisted and turned his bum, while the voices of the approaching hunters came ever closer. Panicking, he pushed and pulled, harder and harder … until his tail snapped off.’
My brother pondered for a while, then laughed in my face.
‘What a load of rubbish,’ he said, his voice more breath than sound.
‘It is, actually,’ I admitted. ‘But it could have happened that way. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It would have hurt the bear, when his tail started freezing. Animals don’t like being hurt, either.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, glad he had thought of that himself.
‘Sleep tight, Ratface.’
I called my brother Ratface, a name I gave him when he was less than a year old. Not because his hair was short and spiky; on the contrary—it was white and fine, and there was so much of it that people sometimes mistook it for a white cap when Mother took him to the bakery or the butcher’s shop in the village. She laughed about it.
‘People who say that are talking through their hats,’ Father said when she told us.
I called him Ratface because for months, he only had two incisors in his lower gums, and my parents started to worry whether the other teeth would ever come through.
-
MR VANTOMME LIVED close to the school. I knocked at the door and waited. Then I peeked through the semi-transparent net curtain, but nothing moved. I knocked again. No sign of life. Only by shielding the sides of my face against the sun was I able to detect movement inside, which turned out to be a cat, lazily stretching itself on the back of an armchair. Then I spotted an envelope, folded four times and wedged into a gap in the window frame. I wrenched it free, flattened the paper and saw the name Mr Bucht – 91 scribbled on it. Inside the envelope was a key. I slipped it into my trouser pocket and walked in the direction of Boezinge, to the house on number 91.
The key didn’t