Since no one can make a living from picture books alone, Lucy’s mum had a couple of lodgers living on the third floor. The Luducos, as we called them, were two slow, amiable men of indeterminate age who were constantly on the phone. You hardly noticed their presence, except for their shoes lined up in the corridor. The ones belonging to Ludo were all black leather brogues; the ones belonging to Duco were sneakers in various stages of disintegration. We pinched our noses shut when we passed by.
Lucy’s domain was all the way upstairs in the attic.
Her room had a swing hanging from the rafters. There was always a bunch of freshly picked pansies sitting in the dormer window. The floor was strewn with rugs and cushions. Lucy didn’t have a Minnie Mouse nightlight like ours, but an artistically swagged string of Christmas-tree lights nailed to the wall above the bed. On the wall opposite, her mother had painted a rainbow, with blue ocean waves underneath, and a ship filled with giraffes, zebras, and lions sticking out their perky heads.
We usually found Lucy sitting cross-legged on the floor when we came in, engrossed in some solitary activity that would immediately strike us as the only possible game anyone would want to play today; indeed, the game without which there wouldn’t even be a today. Eagerly we plopped down beside her and spat into our hands.
Under her Indian-cotton dresses Lucy’s knees were always a patchwork of scrapes and bruises; she had grubby toes sticking out of plastic sandals and the mud of half a riverbank under her fingernails. She was the exact same age as us, but she’d already experienced so much more. She had discovered a rusty treasure chest filled with gold ducats in the ruins of some old castle; she had battled sabre-toothed tigers; she had sailed a pirate ship, wearing a wooden leg and with a green parrot on her shoulder. She’d spilled hundreds of glasses of orange squash, too, without any dire fallout. Just watch us try that at home. At our house, spills always left tell-tale stains on the tablecloth.
We asked our fathers more than once for some clarification on those squash stains. Daddies always seemed to know everything. But even they had no good explanation. Besides, they would always get this funny look on their faces whenever we started on about the way things were done in the rectory, or explained that if something got spilled over there, Lucy’s mother just laughed it off. Then our dads would cough and leave the table to walk the dog—our dog King, Whisky, or Blondie.
Lucy told us our dads sometimes lingered on the green for hours, gazing up at the rectory’s lighted windows. They’d grab their groins and scratch down there for a while. And then they’d head home again. Back to their own wonderful, modern houses. Saved from the nuisances of living in a white elephant: crumbling concrete, dry rot, and sagging beams. You had to be completely nuts to want to live in a place like that in this day and age, our fathers thought—it’s cuckoo.
Lucy saw it all. Nothing escaped her, for she had not only a dormer window but also an eagle eye. She reported her findings to us in the rectory’s spacious, overgrown garden every afternoon. Seated on the rim of the sandbox the Luducos had built for her, we listened to her deductions. But when a grown-up came within earshot she’d go all dimple-cheeked, squinting up at them adorably.
‘Are you kids having fun?’
‘Yeah, we are,’ we’d babble, impatient.
‘What game are you playing?’
‘Eskimos,’ said Lucy.
Oh, those kids! The things they say—just this afternoon, for instance! So cute, the stuff they come out with!
And so we were able to exchange, unhindered, a wealth of information while losing our first baby teeth and learning to button our coats and telling our grannies what was going to happen when we turned four. ‘When I’m four I’m gonna go to school,’ we lisped earnestly. Thinking happily: And then I won’t fit in my old bed anymore. Oh boy, when you turned four! The morning of your birthday you’d wake up to find your legs sticking out a mile beyond the bars of your cot. Everyone knew that was what happened.
The nursery school was a few kilometres from where we lived. We walked the whole way there and back every day, stoic as seal hunters, and there we learned to snip, paste, and weave placemats. We also went on a school trip to Utrecht Cathedral. At the sight of the gigantic church organ, Lucy asked, thrilled, ‘Is that the Statue of Liberty?’
On the way back we belted out a Russian sea shanty.
We didn’t need any Tarot cards to see into the future, not even the Three of Cups. It was written in stone: our friendship would last forever.
-
B is for Beetle
The summer we turned six—one after another, in dribs and drabs, but pretty close to one another all the same—it wouldn’t stop raining. It rained so hard that our toes went mouldy inside our wellies and our fingertips were permanently wrinkly. It rained morning, noon, and night; it rained for every birthday party, right to the bitter end when our parents came to pick us up. Umbrellas on your birthday were a bad omen; everyone knew that. It meant something was hanging over your head, something bad was just waiting to happen.
Only in the night-time did it ever stay dry for a few hours, as if the elements were taking stealthy advantage of the darkness to gather fresh energy. But even then we didn’t get a break, because our sleep was still disturbed by the noise of water gurgling down the drainpipes. We dreamed that out in the meadow, where we went to play, the ditch overflowed its banks and swelled into a seething river. The water cascaded over the speed bumps and gushed down our streets. It sloshed against the front doors, it rose and kept rising. When we peered out our bedroom window, we saw bulging fish eyes staring blankly back at us. Alarmed, we dragged a chair over to the window so we could look out. In the moonlit waves we saw ruined lampshades bobbing by; pots that had once held lush houseplants; tablecloths whose colours, cross-stitched by our grannies, had begun to run; welcome mats; old newspapers; and the cushions of the living-room suite our daddies had worked so hard to pay for. Way out in the distance we even caught a glimpse of a cooker adrift, its pots and pans still rattling on top, and, not far behind, an entire family packed like sardines inside a giant enamel colander, paddling away like crazy. Not long now and we’d all be goners.
Upon waking up in the morning it was reassuring, to put it mildly, not to see fish scales plastered to the walls. We were so relieved that at breakfast we went a little wild. One fine day our mothers just lost it. Stop it! I can’t take it anymore! For Christ’s sake, go play outside, let off some of that steam! Their voices were at such a high pitch that we knew it meant trouble. Nervously we grabbed our macs from the peg, pulled on our boots, and got the hell out of there.
Your mother had to have the house to herself for a few hours every so often or she would go completely round the bend. Her own mother had felt the same, as had her mother before her; it couldn’t be helped, mothers as far back as the Stone Age all suffered from the same syndrome.
Heads tucked inside our mac hoods, we ran to our meadow to inspect the water level in our ditch. We hadn’t been there in all the weeks it had rained, and were surprised to find a crane and several backhoes parked there. When the summer was over they were going to start building a viaduct there. It had been in the newspaper; our parents had read it aloud to us, including all the pros and cons. So they were still intending to build that bridge? So you mean people thought that by the end of the summer, the world would still exist?
We were just debating amongst ourselves what we should do when Lucy came splashing along. Lifting her knees up high, she stomped down hard in puddle after puddle; at every splash her plaits would whip round her face and she’d shriek with delight. ‘Don’t you think we should build an ark?’ she called to us from a distance.
All the ominous thoughts were at once forgotten. We ran to Mr De Vries’s store for some vegetable crates. Then we raided our fathers’ tool chests for nails, nuts, bolts, saws, hammers, and pliers.
We worked in shifts, from early morning to late at night. Some of us sawed and hammered. The others had already started digging earthworms out