three o’clock on Saturday afternoon Sarah returns to number 7 Nightingale Lane without any tears in her clothing. She slips in through the back door and goes directly to the bathroom. Behind the toilet, beneath a wooden construction meant to hide the toilet’s waste pipe, she hides the cigarette. Sanctimonious Sarah comes strolling into the kitchen. Contrary to all expectations, the one-person welcoming committee (Mieke) is not here to greet her. This is suspicious, since her mother can’t be anywhere else but home. What’s completely alarming is the pan of spaghetti sauce simmering unattended on the stove. In the middle of the afternoon, inferior food like spaghetti sauce, unattended—in this house that’s as unusual as a rhinoceros sitting on the sofa watching television.
Luckily the sound of her mother’s unique, high-pitched chatter can suddenly be heard in the living room, alternating with the gravelly voice of an unknown man. She hears the familiar, nervous click of her mother’s heels as she rushes into the toilet in the entrance hall.
Mieke usually leaves the door ajar for workmen, but only if there’s no other solution than to rely on their services. Mieke may praise the work of the electrician to the skies when he’s standing upright in the kitchen, his filthy shoes on a piece of cardboard, drinking coffee from a Villeroy & Boch cup and eating the pralines Mieke has urged on him (and withheld from Sarah for health reasons). But after he leaves she spends days talking about how the man spread mud all over the sheets on the cellar stairs with his ungainly clodhoppers without saying a word about it, how his work crew actually left the cellar looking like a brothel, and how they smeared her light switches with pitch—yes, she swears it, with pitch, which she won’t be able to get off in a hundred years.
Something is tickling the extremities of Sarah’s nerves: fear and excitement closing in together. Peering through a crack in the door, Sarah sees him. After ten years of life, Sarah beholds the first strange man she’s ever seen in this house who isn’t a worker. Legs wide apart, backlit, straight off the silver screen: a cowboy, a bad guy in torn jeans.
‘No, I won’t have it,’ she hears her mother say again. She must have rushed through her trip to the toilet. ‘You can eat, but then you’ve got to go.’
‘Settle down, Mieke, it spoils your looks. And that’s a damn shame for a good-looking woman like you.’
‘No, no, I mean it. This time I’m not going to let myself be taken in. You’ve caused me enough trouble.’
‘What are you talking about? We haven’t seen each other in ages.’
‘Why are you making it so hard for me? Why did you come here to give my family a hard time?’
‘Your mother-in-law, who doesn’t say a word to you, is welcomed here with open arms, but … ’
‘Open arms!’ Mieke interrupts, sneering.
‘ … and I get tossed out, even though I’ve come especially for you. I think that’s terrible.’
‘If you think it’s so terrible, get on your motorcycle and leave. I’m not stopping you. You’ll know where to go, or am I your only place of refuge?’
‘Mieke, I came here especially for you. You’ve always been special to me, you know that.’
‘Jempy, still the big charmer,’ Mieke says in a milder tone. ‘The spaghetti should be done, so you can eat. At least if you call spaghetti a meal. I expect Sarah any minute, by the way. She should have been home already.’
The man growls something unintelligible. A heavy cadence can be heard moving from the living room to the kitchen, right where she’s standing at the doorway, eavesdropping. When the door opens, Sarah flees to the utility room to continue her spying activities.
This strange man, intruding on a stable family that for ten years has been as unshakable as a sequoia, this daredevil, opens one drawer after another and rummages boorishly through their things. Mieke jumps between him and the kitchen cabinet and fishes a spoon out of the cutlery drawer. He takes the spoon and begins scooping straight out of the pot. Is he a member of a motorcycle gang, and has he taken her mother hostage? No, she never would have let him in. He can’t be a Jehovah’s Witness, either, because he never would have gotten past the front door. A worker? If he were, the whole house would be eerily covered in old sheets. The only people who ever come here, after much preparation, are Mieke’s best friend Elvira and her neighbour Ulrike.
‘Oh, please, that’s no way to eat,’ Mieke laughs. ‘Where were you raised, in a pig sty?’
Normally her mother would jump out of her skin. Her lax, tolerant attitude is more than alarming for Sarah, who isn’t even allowed to eat an apple whole. This strange man is standing slipperless in the kitchen and scraping a spoon across the delicate surface of the Tefal pan. Who can explain it?
What Sarah reads into this is a passionate soap opera. Her mother is unpredictable, and in her unpredictable logic there’s always an explanation to suit her. So it’s quite possible that Mieke, who is one hundred percent devoted to her husband, has Another Man. Sarah gulps for air at this offensive speculation. It would be horrible, first of all for her but also for her father, who works so hard six days out of seven, mows the lawn every weekend, and sometimes just sits there staring so distractedly that it makes her blood run cold. If it’s true, he’ll have to leave the house and there’ll be a dreadful fight over her and the lawn mower. Those kinds of catastrophic divorces are common fare for the people in the village, her mother has always said scornfully: the riff-raff who switch partners at the drop of a hat and just keep passing the children back and forth.
The man abruptly interrupts his mechanical eating and slurping activities when he catches sight of Sarah the spy through the crack that gives away her hiding place. His jaw drops, his sauce-filled mouth emits warm air and gasps for the cold. He swallows and calls her by name. Sarah patters shyly into the kitchen. Like a Chinese serving girl on lotus feet, she carries the women’s magazine for her mother.
Standing before Jempy is a four-foot-six beanstalk in corduroy pants and a pullover with bright yellow daisies scattered across it like flowers in a green meadow. A large head is doing all it can to hold itself erect on the slender little body. Curious, wide-open eyes stare at him, almost as pitch black as the child’s bobbed hair. ‘You sure do look like your mother, unbelievable,’ says the man with delight as he tosses Sarah into the air like a featherweight package, catches her, gives her a hug and plants her in front of him on the kitchen floor in order to look at her from a distance. ‘The last time I saw you, you were just a little thing, two, three years old. What a pretty girl you’ve turned into. Don’t you remember your Uncle Jempy?’ Sarah doesn’t know what to say, and she stiffens as her cheeks turn crimson. Mieke stands behind her daughter and lowers her delicate hands onto Sarah’s shoulders as she would on a piano keyboard. This rare, tender contact clears away the cloud in her head.
‘This is Jean-Pierre,’ Mieke says to Sarah. ‘My brother and your uncle. He’s come to stay with us for the weekend. You may call him Uncle Jempy.’ And with this Mieke has supplied all the necessary information. Jempy, the man about whom Sarah has heard so many stifled comments such as ‘nail in my coffin’ and ‘nuisance’, is now here in the flesh, right in front of her nose, slurping spaghetti.
‘I’m going to stay here awhile, if that’s all right with you.’ Sarah’s uncle smiles at her.
After having tricked her way into the big wide world, the big wide world itself has come to her. It’s as if a new person had stepped out of the back room of her tender young life, someone Sarah has never seen before but always knew was there. This cowboy is a member of her family.
