Gerbrand Bakker - June

After eating at long tables in the gym, they rode bikes, ran or rode scooters in a disorderly rush to the swimming pool. Not a single teacher called out ‘let your food settle first’. Johan went looking for Jan, shouted, ‘Wait for me!’ a couple of times, and was relieved to find that his big brother really was waiting for him at the entrance, together with Peter Breebaart. Jan still looked miserable, his anger was still eating away at him. Silently they held up their season tickets at the ticket office. ‘Ah, if it’s not the Kaan boys again,’ said the ticket lady with the black hair. She was smoking a cigarette. That made Jan even crosser. It wasn’t his fault that there were three boys and one girl in his family and that they were all called Kaan. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. He gave the woman a dirty look. ‘Now, now,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘The Kaan boys are moody today.’

Johan wanted to go into a cubicle with Jan. Jan pushed him out of the way and went into one with Peter. Inside they quickly turned the lock.

‘Dickheads,’ said Johan, two cubicles down.

They changed and came out of their cubicles at exactly the same time, hanging their swimming bags, clothes and sandals up in the big changing room with the hooks. Then Jan and Peter crossed the imaginary line that divided the swimming pool grounds in half, indicated by a white sign with the words Experienced swimmers only past this point. Now they’d got rid of Johan, who had swimming lessons in zone two and wasn’t allowed to cross the line. Music was coming out of the funnel-shaped speakers on the ticket booth. The ticket lady had turned on the radio.

They hadn’t even bothered writing numbers on the temperature sign next to the sweet counter, just a drawing of the sun with a Dutch flag to mark the special occasion. The swimming instructor was already holding the long white pole with the hook on the end. Backstroke. Jan preferred swimming on his back to swimming face down. At least then you didn’t feel all that water pressing against your chest — in zone three it was at least a couple of metres deep. Deep water that, as he’d found out recently, could also turn inside out. And ever since Johan had asked the pool attendant if there was a bogeyman in the swimming pool and the pool attendant had just laughed, Jan couldn’t help thinking about that sometimes too.

‘Diving!’ shouted the swimming instructor.

They climbed out of the pool and lined up in position. Jan turned his head slightly. The ticket lady had turned the radio up and the song he’d heard earlier in the morning was playing. He sang along under his breath. Johan screamed something at him from zone two and he looked up and saw him waving. He didn’t wave back, of course. Peter nudged him. ‘See who can go furthest?’

Underwater, Jan realised that he hadn’t had enough to eat. He wondered if there’d be pancakes or French toast when he got home. He thought it was Saturday. Normally they had swimming lessons on Saturday mornings. Klaas isn’t here either, it suddenly occurred to him. No, he thought afterwards, it’s Tuesday today. And it’s not morning, it’s afternoon. Because he wasn’t thinking about the competition at all, he surfaced at least half a length past Peter.

He swam to the duckboards that separated zone three from zone four and pulled himself up to get his elbows on the wood, resting his chin on one arm and looking up at the diving board. Teun, the year-six boy with the yellow swimming trunks, bounced up higher than he was tall. Jan didn’t know what he’d done to deserve that hand earlier in the day. It was as if Teun wanted to protect him. But who from? The photographers? The Queen herself? It seemed like he was doing his best to bounce in time with the music until he pulled up his knees, wrapped his arms around them, did a somersault and plunged into the water with his body almost perfectly straight, not pressing his arms against his sides, but holding them out a little and bent slightly at the elbows. Did he already have his C? Jan stayed dangling there for a while, though it was quite tiring as the duckboards were fairly high up. He stared at Teun, who climbed up out of the pool and waited for a few other kids, mostly older than him, to finish their clumsy jumps. Again he got up to an incredible height and even from this distance Jan could see his hamstrings appearing and disappearing again, and that one knee pulled up in front of the other, and then both feet landing together again on the end of the diving board. This jump wasn’t as beautiful. Teun hit the water a bit crooked and sent thousands of orange water fleas flying up into the air. Jan shook the water out of his hair and lowered himself back down into the water. He wanted a pair of yellow swimming trunks too.

‘Come on, we’re not finished yet,’ the swimming instructor shouted.

Jan swam calmly over to the side of the pool. Peter was already up on dry land. He looked up at the big clock. Time was passing fast enough. Soon he’d buy a liquorice shoelace or a marshmallow. The ticket lady was nodding her head in time to the music. She was the mother of the boy with the yellow swimming trunks. They lined up again and waited for the swimming instructor’s signal. Behind the windbreak that separated the swimming pool from the fields beyond, a few lambs started bleating.

Jan had left Johan behind in one of the changing cubicles. A little later he left Peter behind, halfway through the village where he lived. By then they’d finished the liquorice shoelace he’d bought with the ten-cent coin in the front pocket of his checked swimming bag. ‘It’ll turn your teeth black,’ the ticket lady had said. The look he gave her in reply was just as dirty as when he’d arrived at the swimming pool. He rode through the village, making up words with as many ‘r’s in them as possible. Here and there, flags and pennants were still flapping in the wind; at the garage a man was standing on a ladder to take the flag out of the flag holder. It reminded him of that big bunch of flowers and he remembered that he was cross and sulking.

‘Jan!’

Who was calling him, now that he was almost home? Without realising it, he had almost reached the Braks’ big white house, which was just before his own. Only now did he really look around and ahead. What was the baker’s grey van doing there?

‘Jan!’

He braked, put one foot on the ground and looked back. Uncle Aris, Peter Breebaart’s father, was following him on his bike. I wasn’t supposed to eat at Auntie Tinie’s, was I? he thought. Wait, the baker’s van is parked right across the road, in front of the labourer’s cottage. But they were away. The baker was sitting at the wheel. Not properly, his legs were dangling down to the side, Jan could see that from the feet poking out under the door, which was wide open. The baker looked up: maybe he’d heard Uncle Aris calling too. First Jan felt like he was looking straight through him, but then he raised a hand very slowly and held his head a little crooked. Just like earlier that day. Then it had meant, I’m sorry. Except now the hand had gone up differently and his face, definitely from this distance, seemed even redder than usual. The wind was blowing on the right side of Jan’s face, the roadside elms were rustling. The sun was shining down on the road at an angle, but not now, because a cloud had drifted over. Jan kept his eyes fixed on the baker, mainly because he had no idea what he was going to do next, or what he was doing there in the first place. Since the baker had seemed to be waving to him, he too stuck his hand up in the air. They were both holding up a hand and Jan felt that this situation could go on for quite a long time, maybe the whole afternoon.

‘Come with me,’ said Uncle Aris.