not months.’
‘Christ.’ Her daughter looks angry.
‘I shouldn’t have told you, should I?’
‘But… are they treating you?’
‘Not at the moment, no.’
‘Are they going to treat you?’
‘If they can think of something.’
‘And can they?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘… and so?’
‘Sorry,’ Elisabeth says, ‘I shouldn’t have told you like this. We’re getting soaked.’ The bag is now hidden behind her back.
‘So you… might… but not definitely?’
‘You’re not likely to live a long time with something like this.’
‘Not likely?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Christ.’
‘We’ll call each other. Let’s call. Yes? We’ll call?’
And then Elisabeth crosses back over the Overtoom as quickly as she can. She slips and falls on the first tramline, but scrambles up again. As fast as she wanted to get to her daughter, this is how fast, no, faster, she wants to get away from her. The trams ring their bells and Elisabeth remembers the way her daughter had painted her room.
‘I just start to paint when I feel like it,’ she had explained, ‘I don’t put on old clothes, I don’t tape up anything, because if I think about all the preparation, I stop wanting to do it. I just start, and then it takes me just as long to clean up the mess and get all the paint spots off as the painting itself.’
This was exactly what Elisabeth had just done. She had just started, at the wrong time, at the wrong place, in the wrong clothes. She had done it all in one go and now she would have to clean up the mess and hope that the result was better than before she’d started the job.
She walks to the tram stop without looking back and thinks about her hairdresser; her conversations with him never go wrong. Words exchanged between her and the hairdresser tinkle like loose change: short, quick melodies.
‘The trouble I’ve been having…’
‘Go on.’
‘The pain in my back, you know…’
‘Yes, you said.’
‘Turned out to be cancer.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Riddled with it.’
‘Aw, honey.’
‘I saw it with my own eyes. On the scans.’
‘And now?’
‘Now they’re seeing if they can stop it.’
‘And can they?’
‘They’re seeing.’
‘They’re seeing.’
‘Yes.’
‘You poor thing.’
‘Don’t tell the girl. You know – that you knew first.’
‘She doesn’t know yet?’
‘I don’t see her that often.’
‘No, right.’
‘No more than you do.’
‘She needs another colouring appointment.’
‘She dyes it?’
‘Highlights.’
There aren’t any inappropriate words at the hairdresser’s. As he dries her hair, they speak loudly. She can shout out words above the racket that would need to be whispered in other places.
Then the hairdresser hollers, ‘That woman upstairs isn’t doing too well!’
Elisabeth asks, ‘What’s the matter with her?’
The hairdresser says, ‘Stroke, I think.’
Elisabeth: ‘Talking funny, is she?’
The hairdresser turns off the dryer and does an impression.
Sometimes a customer will be sitting there waiting, a man reading a newspaper. Of course the hairdresser knows he can hear everything, but the hairdresser doesn’t give a damn. The hairdresser doesn’t talk to customers who aren’t in the chair. But Elisabeth is bothered by their silent witness. One of the ones who always seems to be there. One of the ones who pretends not to notice but whose very existence makes things inappropriate.
-
MY MOTHER IS dying, Coco thinks, wanting to say the words out loud. She knows to whom and she is also looking forward to being comforted by him. The feeling in her stomach resembles being in love, she can still remember it from last year, though it might be hunger too. Funny, the way she can just keep on cycling; she still knows the way to the deli on the Rozengracht. Getting into the right lane at the big crossing goes as smoothly as usual, she takes the tram rails diagonally. It’s not that she’d expected her emotions to make cycling impossible, she is far from sentimental, but she does long for a fitting reaction. She would like to stop and reflect, and this feeling does really seem like hunger. It’s not that far to the snack bar on the Kinkerstraat that has RAS super fries, crispy on the outside, soft in the middle.
As she approaches the snack bar, she sees that the blue lettering on the façade no longer spells ‘De Vork’ but ‘Corner Inn’—there’s a new owner, and now she realises that the feeling in her stomach is not love, it is not hunger but panic, because bloody hell, they must still have RAS super fries, mustn’t they?
It isn’t until after she’s ordered, ‘One RAS fries and two battered sausages, please,’ until after she’s paid (did he hear her properly?) and the sausages have been dipped into the batter, and the man has turned his back and used the concealed RAS fries machine, that now she sighs, turns around, and sits down at a table in the window in relief, a view of the key-cutting shop on the other side of the street. She slumps into the hard plastic bucket seat, is happy, thinks calmly: what was that other nice feeling again? And is shocked to discover it is the news of her mother’s impending death.
She stares at the safes in the key shop window, searching for appropriate thoughts, and is fairly satisfied with: later I’ll be able to think, ‘this is where I was when I heard that my mother was going to die.’
The new owner brings the fries and the sausages on a brown plastic tray. She doesn’t take the food from the tray. She should eat slowly, ideally in a calm state of mind, but she doesn’t.
When she’s finished everything, she sits there aimlessly, staring at the key-cutting shop. As much as she’d like to share the news, you should wait with something like that, she thinks. And she knows that it’s only half past three. His last client leaves at four, he gets home about half past.
‘Apart from my parents,’ she’d said, ‘I don’t know anyone who still has a house phone.’
‘Yes,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘you’re too young for me.’
Telling him over the phone would be a shame, she’d miss his facial expression. She’ll call and leave a message that he has to eat at hers tonight, that she’s cycled right across town to fetch truffle pasta.
Hans flies into a rage. Coco looks at the red flush on his cheeks and is happy, as though she’s hit the bull’s eye on the shooting range and a bunch of roses has popped up.
‘She told you like that?!’ Hans says, ‘on the Overtoom?! “I’m dying” on the Overtoom?!’
Coco