But now, as it was already seven o’clock and he still hadn’t arrived, my father was undermining his own notions. Mum’s after-work face seemed a complete waste of time, and the mussels started making that noise in the pot again. My brother was the only one of us who was still looking forward to his mussels and chips. Mum and I had lost our appetites and were both edgy. It was the waiting. If my father had come back at six we wouldn’t have noticed how silly and pointless it was for us to switch, Mum to wifey mode, we to child mode. Shortly after seven Mum said, I do hope nothing’s happened; and out of pure spite I retorted, what if it has, because all of a sudden my father was a spoilsport in my eyes, or, to be more precise, a mood-wrecker. Suddenly I no longer wanted him to come home, even though an hour earlier, as I said, we all were prepared for him to walk through the door and ask, so, what do you have to say, because he’d been successful. Mum looked at me, not as horrified as I’d expected, but with her head to one side, and then she smiled and said, well, we’ll see, and she didn’t sound as if she’d find it surprising or even terrible if he didn’t come home. And gradually we stopped thinking that he’d arrive at any moment. Only we didn’t know what to do with the mussels, which were still rattling away quietly in the pot because we’d thought my father would be at the door at six on the dot, his promotion virtually in the bag, and that would have been good reason to celebrate with a mussel feast. My brother’s mood also turned, and although it was not yet eight o’clock we all knew that this day was special, unexpectedly so. Only we couldn’t decide what to do. So my mother went and cooked the mussels. We couldn’t just leave them to die, so she cooked them quickly and I thought, who can eat mussels now; in fact none of us ate any mussels, although my brother did eat some chips, which Mum made while the mussels were cooking; later the mussels sat in a huge bowl on the table and nobody touched them. As if they’d gone off and were poisonous, my mother said, but my brother said, toxic, not poisonous, because we didn’t say poisonous in our family any more; for some time now we’d been saying toxic, my mother had said poisonous by accident. Our family used different expressions now; for example, when we burned our mouths on potatoes that were too hot we no longer shouted, Christ that’s hot; sometimes we still said it by accident, because we hadn’t switched modes, but my father would say, potatoes have a high heat capacity, that’s the more accurate way of putting it. But when my father was away on business we burned our mouths on potatoes as before and shouted, Christ that’s hot, and Mum said that the mussels looked off and poisonous, and when my brother said toxic she laughed and said they’d become truly inedible. Afterwards we wondered whether by then we already knew what was up, but of course we couldn’t have known; we talked the whole time in hushed tones, as we still imagined that the door might open at any moment and he’d be standing there and catch us talking about him, and that really wouldn’t be right: instead of being delighted to see him and jumping up to welcome him back home, we’d be caught red-handed talking about him, and nobody wanted that. Anyway, nobody dared to because he could be extremely sensitive and unpleasant, he couldn’t bear people whispering behind other people’s backs; but after I’d said, well, so what if something has happened to him — out of pure spite because my mother had already switched to wifey mode, but she hadn’t reacted horrified, only saying, we’ll see — after that, for it sounded as if she didn’t think it so terrible either, we wondered what we would do if he didn’t come back now, and soon it turned out that both my brother and I would prefer him not to come home; we no longer liked being a proper family, as he called it. In truth we didn’t see ourselves as a proper family. Everything in our lives revolved around us having to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a family to be because he hadn’t had one himself and so didn’t know what a proper family was, although he’d developed the most detailed notions of what one was like; and while he sat in his office we played at being this, even though we’d far rather have let our hair down than be a proper family. Of course, all this came out very hesitantly; to start with I kept quiet because I thought, if he does eventually come back then Mum will blab, and my brother also thought she’d blab, and I thought my brother would blab, too, because he wants to play the loving son with my father, and my brother thought that I’d blab because I wanted to show that I was Daddy’s girl. In those days, you see, we still said that I was Daddy’s girl, and my brother was Mummy’s boy, as my brother was very affectionate, a cuddly boy, and was forever kissing Mum. I didn’t, I wouldn’t have any of that; I take after my father, I thought, who was a logician, and my mother and brother were anything but logicians. And that’s the reason why we, my father and I, always mocked them. And they were very wary of saying anything to me, complaining to me about my father, because they thought I’d blab about them to show everyone I was Daddy’s girl. In actual fact all of us blabbed, everyone blabbed about everyone else if I think about it, and my father was burdened by the family’s blabbing, even though he’d enjoy it as well, for it meant he was very important in the evenings, resolving matters in his family as he imagined happened in proper families. He’d drink beer and cognac and interrogate us in order to find out what had been going on, and we gave our statements in turn while the others waited outside. In the end he’d draw logical conclusions, fix punishments and mete them out; we were all pretty scared, to be honest, because the punishments were fixed according to logical conclusions which none of us could really understand. I pretended to understand them; it was to my advantage if they believed I was Daddy’s girl and therefore logical, although in truth I couldn’t really understand my father’s logic and only pretended to. Neither of the other two could pretend. It was clear they belonged together because they’re cuddly rather than logical, forever wanting to give each other kisses; while I belonged with my father, because I’m logical and I think, which isn’t always the case with girls, but it’s far better than kissing. Of course my father would have preferred our characters to be the other way around, for my brother to be the logical one, and my mother and I the ones who weren’t logical, but our relationships weren’t arranged in the way he thought they ought to be in a proper family. What the boy lacked was wasted on the girl, he said, but overall I wasn’t as badly off as my brother, who was the younger one, too. But maybe my mother was worst off, as she had to ensure that we behaved like a proper family, surely a Herculean task given my father’s notions about what constituted a proper family; they may have been incredibly precise, but were impossible to fathom as none of us understood the logic behind them. Especially not my mother, who did what she could, but, in doing what she could, she very often got it totally wrong; even though she blabbed as she ought to in a proper family, it often rebounded on her. And that evening, when she realized he wasn’t coming home, she said, you can’t imagine how it is, and then she said, I get really scared sometimes. Why, we asked. Although we were relieved, hearing our mother’s confession felt extremely unnerving; besides, none of us could be certain that the door wouldn’t open any second.