mice, watching them muttering under their breath. When you realized that you were somebody’s cross to bear, it became hard to get the dry bread down, and your heart started pounding like mad. It seemed that your birth had set off an unanticipated chain reaction. Mummy had become invisible because of you! She was sacrificing herself for you! She had a whole laundry list of motherly grievances! Even hours later your hand wouldn’t stop shaking enough for your crayon to stay inside the lines.
When the day had had such an inauspicious start, we’d often spend the afternoon in the old rectory on the village green where Lucy lived with her mother and the Luducos.
It was a rambling, rather draughty house, with an old-fashioned doorbell pull, a panelled staircase and creaky wooden floors. Lucy’s mother, who didn’t believe in looking back at the past, had her studio on the second floor. Piles of books and papers lay scattered all over the floor. There were jam jars with dried paints on the windowsills, and the walls were papered with charcoal sketches for her picture books. Clara 13 was her most famous book, about a cow with a permanent streak of bad luck. All of us had a copy of it at home.
In the darkest corner of the room was a table topped with a green felt cloth. That was the Tarot table. Here your fortune was either made or lost. Here the Five of Wands made you war with yourself, the Wheel of Fortune turned everything topsy-turvy, and the Knight of Cups was known to turn up to save the day. Really, there was nothing supernatural about it, said Lucy’s mother, but hey, wait, look, here’s the Two of Pentacles, that amazing card that augurs a big change, plus the High Priest, the most protective card of all.
Eagerly our mummies saw their fortunes spelled out for them in the cards. They leaned over the fascinating pictures that told the story of their lives in cartoon-strip form. Meanwhile we stood there gaping at Lucy’s mum. She had a dimple in one cheek. Her eyes were cornflower blue. The buttons on her blouse were always half-undone, and when she crossed her legs, you could see a tanned limb through the long slit in her black skirt. Gazing at her, you’d feel so happy and dreamy inside that you couldn’t believe she could seriously be somebody’s mother. ‘Lucy is upstairs, kids,’ she’d say, glancing up from her cards. ‘Run along up and go play.’
We didn’t have to be told twice. We clambered up the staircase whose every tread let out a soft groan.
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
