‘She’s my mother,’ she says calmly, ‘and she’s dying.’
‘She’s your mother?!’ her father cries, ‘Miriam bloody brought you up more than she did!’
‘Wilbert,’ Miriam says, he gets a hand on his thigh too.
‘No one asked Miriam to bring me up,’ Coco says. ‘It was her own idea.’ There’s silence. Only her father eats.
‘Your mother,’ he says with his mouth full, ‘your mother…’
‘Wilbert,’ Miriam says.
‘Your mother shut you up, in your bedroom. When you were two. Two.’ He sticks two fingers in the air and looks at her. Coco can hardly hear what he is saying, all she sees is his angry glare.
‘You say that like it was my fault.’
‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’
‘Wilbert,’ Miriam says, ‘this isn’t appropriate.’
‘You’re lying,’ Coco says.
‘I’m not lying.’
‘Where were you then? How do you know?’
‘When I came home you were screaming in your bedroom.’
‘So you weren’t there, you’ve no idea what happened when you were out.’
‘Bloody hell, Coco, she locked you up. Two years old. She just locked you up in your bedroom.’
‘Didn’t you know?’ Hans is almost whispering. She crosses her legs so that his hand slides off her lap.
‘What happened next?’ Coco asks, ‘when you found me screaming in my bedroom? What did you do?’
‘I thought she was over-exhausted. I stayed home for a few days.’
‘You stayed home for a few days.’
‘I closed up the shop, yes.’
‘A week?’ Coco asks.
‘A few days,’ her father says.
‘Four?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Three?’
‘Or two.’
‘Or just one day?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Just one day?’
‘You can’t shut shop for a week, Coco, you can’t.’
‘If you stay home for a whole day,’ Coco says, ‘how much turnover do you sacrifice?’
‘Well, what would it have been at the time? Business was going well then, a day closed, that would have mounted up, you know.’
‘If business isn’t going well, is a day of being closed all right?’
‘Then you can’t afford that, a day closed.’
‘Can’t afford a day closed.’
‘No, actually, you can’t.’
‘I’m going to live with her.’
‘Coco, please,’ Hans says, loud now, ‘you’re acting like a teenager.’
‘You’re only saying that to bug us,’ her father cries.
‘Darling,’ Miriam says in much too high a voice, ‘have you talked to anyone about this?’ She looks at Hans.
‘She’s talking rubbish,’ Hans says.
‘Bloody hell,’ Coco says, she shunts her chair back.
‘We’re only worried,’ Miriam says.
‘Why do people who say they want to look after you shout at you?’ Coco asks.
They have some good replies to this, which take a long time to explain. Coco doesn’t know what is worse—people talking too loudly or people talking too long.
Coco stands in the sitting room next to the dresser, the bedroom door behind her. He is sitting in his leather armchair, a glass of whisky in his hand, looking at her. She’s wearing just a tight white T-shirt now and a new pair of pink panties. The material is shiny at the front, transparent at the back. She turns away from him slightly, buttocks towards him and waits for him to make a sound, a sigh, a groan. Nothing. She turns back. He’s not moving. It’s like throwing a stone into the water without any ripples forming. Up until now it has been simple. Just be young and pretty and take something off and he’d follow, take over, and she’d utter small cries of astonishment. Now he is massive, he has become one with the chair he is sitting in and she is an uneasy pink pig. Pig’s arse.
On the way home on the bike, she’d said she didn’t want to talk about her mother for a while.
She had tried to sound sweet when she’d said, ‘Just let it drop for a while, will you?’
She arches her back. Buttocks out. Her stomach has got too fat for this pose.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink?’ he asks. He’d already asked earlier. ‘Just the one?’
She has stopped. It happened gradually. She simply drank less every day, at the beginning imperceptibly, nothing to worry about, but at a certain point she got down to a single glass a day at the most, and then that began to bother her too and she dropped the last glass.
‘It doesn’t agree with me, alcohol,’ Coco says, ‘you know that.’ He drinks too much. Every day he opens a new bottle of wine, but she’s never seen him drunk. He doesn’t change when he drinks. She turns away from him slightly again, so that he can see her buttocks through the transparent fabric.
‘Are you going to bed?’ he asks. She has been sleeping a lot over recent months. The days are getting ever shorter, sometimes the day ends at nine o’clock already. She manages to send herself to sleep earlier every evening, like a skilled monk who can speed up and slow down his heartbeat. She rotates some more.
‘Go and sleep,’ he says. She’s cold, her nipples are hard. She turns towards him. He looks into his glass again.
‘I was thirteen the first time I got drunk,’ she says. ‘At the school disco.’ She hears how childish the words ‘school disco’ sound and sees that that is the only thing Hans has heard—he doesn’t have a clue about the darkness behind it. ‘I couldn’t stop,’ she says, ‘I didn’t want to stop… I could do anything. I could think.’
He smiles. ‘Get to bed, will you?’
‘Mr. Polderman, my French teacher, took me home because I was too drunk to cycle. In his car…
