The dog comes back to the shell path and immediately lies down, without taking his eyes off the Kaan boy for an instant.
‘But you’re not knocking over any headstones,’ she says.
He finally stands up. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to knock over any headstones.’
He could have just as easily have said ‘Yes, I’m a Kaan’ again, it sounds exactly the same. Is he making fun of her? She looks at him. Shameless. Topless and wearing shorts in a cemetery. And what’s he got tied round his head? It looks like a T-shirt. Those pale eyes, hard eyes. No, no — don’t think about before, her son’s big penis, his cheeky face; no, not even cheeky, it was more unseeing, as if she didn’t exist, as if she was irrelevant.
‘Dieke, come back here. That dog’s harmless.’
Really? You think so? She looks at the mess on and around the child’s grave. A screwdriver, a bucket, a wet rag, and what’s that other thing? It looks like cuttlefish. There’s a big scratch on the headstone. The gravel is wet and dirty, a dirty green. What’s going on here? She doesn’t trust it, she doesn’t want to trust it. The girl has come up next to the Kaan boy. What an ugly little red-headed brat. ‘Who’s that?’ she says. ‘Your daughter?’
He doesn’t say anything, just gives a wry smile and takes the hand the girl is holding out to him.
‘You’ve both got such red hair.’
‘I’m Dieke,’ the girl says.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘This is Dieke, she’s helping.’
She tries to look as neutral as possible, but it’s not easy. She breaks the spell of her revulsion for that bare body, those pale eyes, by pushing her glasses up again. He must see who I am? Why didn’t I walk off right away, without Benno? ‘Fine,’ she says.
‘Fine?’ he says. ‘Who are you? The cemetery attendant?’
If this child is his daughter, was the woman on the bike his wife? Is he really being as contemptuous as he sounds? To her?
‘He’s not my father,’ the girl says. ‘This is Uncle Jan. Who are you?’
Yes. Jan Kaan. The green filth on the gravel is drying to a crunchy crackling layer. Benno is panting. The sun is shining, but not as fiercely as earlier.
‘I’ll be heading off then,’ she says.
‘Yep,’ he says.
‘Bye!’ says the girl.
She hauls the dog up onto his feet. ‘Will you keep an eye out?’
‘What for?’ she hears the girl saying, before she’s even taken a step.
‘Nothing,’ Jan Kaan says. ‘Do you know who that woman is, Diek?’
‘Nope. Just a woman, I think. A granny.’
‘Do you think she dyes her hair?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Come on, back to work.’
They’re doing it deliberately, she thinks, as she walks back down the shell path agonisingly slowly. This bloody dog! He’s acting like he’s twelve already! Through the gate with the two evergreens next to it. She looks back over her shoulder and sees that the dog’s tail has left a trail in the grit. She yanks off her coat and removes her glasses.
Water
‘But,’ says Dieke, ‘what is this?’
‘Cuttlebone,’ says Uncle Jan. He doesn’t look at her, he’s staring at a headstone and rubbing his chest with one hand. The dog lady pointed in that direction. ‘What?’ he says, after a while.
‘You were the last one to say something, not me.’
‘What did I say?’
‘Cuddle bone.’
‘Cuttlebone.’
‘What is that?’
‘It’s from a cuttlefish. That’s a kind of squid.’
‘Aren’t they all soft and slimy?’
‘Yes. But these ones have a hard bit too.’
‘Where?’
‘On their back maybe.’
‘I don’t get it.’ She rubs her finger over the worn, soft part of the cuttlebone.
‘Me neither. It’s rubbish anyway, it doesn’t help at all.’
‘It’s all dirty.’
‘Let’s get some more water.’
‘OK.’
‘Or would you rather go to the pool?’
‘No!’
On the way to the little house with the long name, Dieke looks around. There are dead people buried everywhere, that’s what Uncle Jan said. But not all dead people come here, some prefer to be burnt. He said other things too, and she was glad when they started scrubbing the stone, and secretly she thought about the swimming pool after all, and Evelien too.
‘Do you want to do it?’
‘No.’
Uncle Jan turns on the tap and waits with his hands on his hips until the bucket’s full.
‘There’s a bird in there,’ she says.
‘Hmm.’
‘On a string.’
‘Hmm.’
‘It’s dead too.’
Uncle Jan turns the tap off again without any trouble at all. She watches him closely and can’t work out why she couldn’t manage it before.
‘Why?’ she asks.
‘What?’
‘That bird?’
Only now does he look in through the window. ‘That’s a magpie.’
Dieke sighs.
Uncle Jan empties the bucket over the stone in a few splashes. He chucks the bits of cuttlefish into the bucket, together with the sandpaper and the wet rag, uses the screwdriver to lever open the paint and stir it. Then he gets the wet rag back out of the bucket and wipes the screwdriver clean. Wet rag and clean screwdriver go into the bucket, which he puts down on the shell path. ‘So,’ he says. ‘Now we’ll just wait till it’s dry again.’
‘OK,’ she says.
‘Do you know what a bogeyman is?’
‘No.’
‘Neither do I. In the old days Grandma and Grandpa used to tell us stories about the bogeyman to scare us. They said he lived in the ditches. That’s how they kept us away from the water.’
‘Why?’
‘You can drown in water. They were always scared of us drowning.’
‘Didn’t you have swimming lessons?’
‘Of course, but not till we were about five or six.’
‘What’s a bogeyman?’
‘A great big monster that grabs you if you get too close to a ditch. In the ditch between your house and my parents’ house, there’s a spot where there’s always bubbles coming up. Do you know where I mean?’
Dieke thinks about it. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘That’s marsh gas, but my father always said it was air bubbles from the bogeyman.’
‘Grandpa?’
‘Yes, your grandpa.’
‘Was it really air bubbles? Is that where the bogeyman lived?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘It’s a bit scary.’
‘Yes, that’s why he said it. And do you know what happened the first time Johan went to a swimming lesson?’
‘No.’
‘He asked the pool attendant if there was a bogeyman in the swimming pool. “What’s that?” the pool attendant asked. “He bites,” said Johan. He was terrified. The pool attendant laughed and said that the only thing that might bite him would be water fleas and they were so small you wouldn’t even feel it.’
‘Do they bite?’
‘I don’t think so. Have you ever felt them biting you?’
‘No. How old was Uncle Johan then?’
‘Five, I think. The same age as you are now.’
‘And you?’
‘Seven. And once we were there when lightning struck.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep. The whole swimming pool was full of people and then there was a thunderstorm. The pool attendant blew his whistle three times and everyone got out of the pool straight away. Johan and I went to sit in a changing cubicle. Johan was really scared and kept asking if the storm was going to go away again. He was as bad as Tinus, the dog we had back then; once he crawled into the cellar during a thunderstorm. We started counting.’