Craving. Esther Gerritsen

      ‘I’m coming to live with you, Mum.’

      Elisabeth smiles, as though she’s heard a strange, new word: livewithyouMum. It’s because her daughter’s voice is different from normal. Usually she sounds raspy and a little too slow, now her voice is clearer, and faster.

      ‘I don’t want you to be alone—now that you’re ill,’ the clear voice says. Elisabeth hears what her daughter says, but what she hears better is a lovely sound that she doesn’t want to drive away.

      So now she says, just as sweetly and just as fast, ‘But that’s not at all necessary, thank you very much. It’s really very kind of you, but not necessary. Is there anything else you were calling about?’ In the silence that follows she is afraid that her daughter’s clear voice has gone again.

      ‘Coco?’

      But then her daughter continues, just as sweetly and just as quick, ‘Hans can drop me off tomorrow afternoon … I’ve got a big suitcase here. Be packed in a jiffy.’

      ‘Tomorrow afternoon?’ Elisabeth asks—tomorrow afternoon is soon, tomorrow afternoon is real—‘Hang on.’ There’s silence. Coco is waiting. Elisabeth has to say something.

      ‘Hans?’

      ‘My boyfriend.’

      ‘I know that.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Handy having a boyfriend with a car.’

      ‘Great,’ her daughter says.

      ‘No,’ Elisabeth says.

      ‘What?’

      ‘It’s not possible.’

      ‘I want to.’

      ‘Oh,’ Elisabeth says.

      ‘I really want to.’

      ‘Oh,’ Elisabeth says.

      ‘All right?’ Coco asks.

      ‘But of course,’ Elisabeth says, because that’s a nice answer. Don’t think about tomorrow.

      The stomach ache starts even before they’ve hung up. It’s the stomach ache she hasn’t had for the past twenty-three years. During the first few weeks after Coco was born she had it several times a day. Back then she didn’t know whether it was fear or heartburn. The doctor couldn’t find anything obvious. Her body slowly grew accustomed to it.

      She’d come around one.

      ‘Or do you need to go out?’ Coco had asked. No, she didn’t need to go anywhere.

      Elisabeth looks at the table, the phone still in her hand. The table had been so beautiful just now. The table that had revealed everything for a second. Now the wooden top is dirty again, worn. Everything gets broken.

      ‘Here I am,’ the daughter says. Yes, there she is. On her porch, a large woman with a case, exactly at the time she said she’d come. Elisabeth wants to say ‘yes,’ but she can’t breathe and just nods.

      ‘Heartburn,’ she says.

      ‘Here I am then,’ Coco says again. She looks young. She smiles the same way she did as a child. Elisabeth catches a glimpse of Hans’s matt-grey Mercedes driving off. A lovely colour, she’s never seen it on a car before. You need to give them compliments, children.

      ‘It’s lovely,’ Elisabeth says, ‘that matt-grey.’

      Her daughter turns around and watches the car disappear.

      She steps aside to let her daughter in. She presses herself into the wall to make herself small for that large daughterly body. The body doesn’t move.

      ‘Christ,’ Coco says, ‘this makes no sense.’

      Elisabeth sighs and smiles.

      ‘Damn it,’ Coco looks at her feet. Elisabeth is still pressed into the wall.

      ‘What do you want?’ she asks her daughter.

      Coco looks up. ‘I wish it was normal, me standing here.’

      ‘But it isn’t,’ Elisabeth replies at once, but then she adds, ‘Or is it?’

      ‘Damn it, bloody case.’

      ‘Come in first,’ Elisabeth says. Coco heaves the heavy case over the doorstep.

      ‘Come in for a sec,’ Elisabeth says again. She’s coming in for a sec, she thinks, Coco’s just coming in for a sec. ‘A sec’ is a nice phrase. Coco rolls her case down the corridor to the stairs at the back. Elisabeth wants to help her daughter, she has to want to.

      ‘Just pop it upstairs,’ she says, ‘just pop it in your old room and then…’