Gerbrand Bakker: June

As hot as the days got, the water wasn’t appealing. Lying around, talking and looking, that was appealing. Looking at the girls lying by the corner of zone four. Talking about dicks. Jan listened, but kept getting distracted by the diving board.

‘He did. He pissed spunk!’

‘You can’t piss spunk.’

‘Yes you can!’

‘Who told you that ?’

‘ He did.’

‘Who?’

‘Bram.’

‘His brother, you know who that is, don’t you?’

‘Oh, him. How old is he anyway?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘So your brother pisses spunk?’

‘Yep.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true.’

‘What’s it look like then?’

‘Well, kind of bit whitish. And thick.’

‘Thick?’

‘If you’ve got a hard-on then your, what’s-it-called, the tube your piss comes through. It doesn’t work any more.’

‘So you always piss spunk if you piss with a hard-on?’

‘Um…’

Jan only saw Teun in summer now. He still wore his yellow swimming trunks, although they were getting more and more faded. His jumps were still high, the water still swallowed him like a transparent plastic bag after a somersault. He climbed out of the pool and sat down, directly behind the diving board, without drying himself off. Alone. He always sat alone. With his knees up and his hands on the ground behind him. His black hair was like a helmet on his head, one wisp over his ear. Jan looked at the grass behind his back, at the hands supporting his weight. The pump started to buzz louder and burst into action, water gushing into the ditch. A girl walked up.

‘Here,’ she said, handing Jan a note that was folded up as small as possible.

It took him a moment to smooth out the paper. It said: Do you want to go out with me? Yvonne . He looked diagonally across the pool at the girls’ group and then at the messenger, who was staring down at him quizzically and a little impatiently.

‘OK,’ he said.

The girl walked back. It was that easy, the other boys didn’t even mention it. Because the messenger walked back past Teun with Jan watching her, he saw that Teun was staring at him. Then Teun stood up. He pushed a few boys waiting their turn at the diving board out of the way and walked out to the end of the board, raised one leg, jumped and dived.

‘I’m off,’ Jan said to Peter.

‘Already?’

‘Yep.’

‘To the girls?’

‘No, home.’

‘Same tomorrow?’

‘I’ll pick you up on the way.’

Teun surfaced at the end of zone four, pulled himself up onto the duckboards and slid back into the water on the other side. Then swam leisurely to the side. Jan walked alongside the ditch to the paddling pool. Johan was lying on his towel on his stomach and didn’t see him passing. Cutting through between screeching children and hushing mothers, he reached the changing cubicles, avoiding Yvonne. Tomorrow, he thought. Starting tomorrow I’ll go out with her. In the changing cubicle the rustling of the poplars sounded much louder than outside. He deliberately took his time getting changed. Teun’s mother was sitting behind the counter smoking. He was pretty sure that wasn’t even allowed. Her pitch-black hair stood out against the white planks. ‘Bye-bye, Kaan!’ she called as he walked towards the exit. Unbearable woman. Teun was waiting outside.

He lived near school. There were fields behind the house all the way to the north dyke. Jan never went to the north dyke; his dyke was the east dyke. It was a small house with a narrow kitchen and big furniture in front of a television set. ‘It’s boring,’ Teun said, ‘being an only child.’ And, ‘Tech’s OK, but all the way to Schagen on a bike, do you know how far that is? Especially when you’ve got a headwind. Soon,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a moped.’ He asked where Jan was going at the end of August (the state comprehensive) and whether he was hungry (no, Jan wasn’t hungry). It was muggy in the house, or did Jan think it was OK? ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk to the dyke. Leave the bag here, you can pick it up later,’ Teun said.

Jan let Teun lead the way. He didn’t know these fields, every now and then he turned and saw things he’d never seen before. The village houses from the back, with unexpected sheds, extensions and shrubs. The playing fields behind the school, the grass green and summer-holiday empty. The swimming pool through the windbreak (Yvonne on the other side of the trees, invisible from here), the yelling audible even at this distance. Past the swimming pool, a piece of land with a low embankment around it: for now a sheep field with lamp posts; in winter, the ice-skating rink. To the right, a strip of wheat, already changing colour. The north dyke itself, on the other side of a wide ditch, accessible across a narrow board that sagged badly. When they were standing up on the top, Teun pointed east. There, where the canal curved and three polders came together, there was a triangle of water, a small lake. The Pishoek. ‘You know it?’ Yes, Jan had heard of it. Klaas went swimming there sometimes; he’d never been himself. Strange name. Yeah, maybe people used to come here to piss. Jan tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right. ‘Later, at home, I can show you on a map. It’s really called that,’ Teun said. ‘OK,’ said Jan. ‘Towels?’ Ah, no need, it was hot.

Jan followed in Teun’s footsteps, climbing over fences and walking past sheep that turned their heads away, but kept chewing their cud and didn’t run off down the dyke. As the crow flies, he was at most three kilometres from home, but it felt like a foreign country. After walking for some time they reached the lake but Teun kept going, along the top of the dyke.

‘How do we get into the water?’ Jan asked.

‘A bit further along there’s a place without reeds.’

Jan was scared that he wouldn’t be able to swim any more, that his certificates weren’t valid here. There weren’t any duckboards to climb up on in the Pishoek. And his swimming trunks were rolled up in the damp towel in his swimming bag, and the swimming bag was on a big armchair at Teun’s house.

Teun took off his clothes and threw them down in a heap. ‘Come on,’ he said.

Jan waited until Teun was in the water before taking off his own clothes.

It wasn’t deep and the bottom was like zone three in the swimming pool, a thin layer of gunk oozing up between his toes like custard. Teun swam to a red post that stuck up above the surface to mark the waterway for boats coming from the canal.

‘Can you stand there?’

‘No. But you can hold on to the post.’

Together they hung on to the waterway marker and gently trod water, their knees bumping against the post and each other’s. Jan did his best to look around. It was quiet, no barges sailing past and no waterbirds nearby. Lots of water in all directions, bordered by reeds everywhere. Deep water, as Jan imagined it, especially in the channel whose edge was invisible because of the lake all around it. Teun let his hand slide down the post until it was touching Jan’s hand. ‘I want to go back now,’ Jan said.

‘OK.’

A brace of ducks coming in to land were startled by the swimming boys and flew up again. Teun swam faster than Jan, spitting out mouthfuls of water the whole time. Sometimes he waited briefly, floating on his back. Jan took his time, following. He didn’t have much to say and let Teun do the talking. He hardly knew Teun’s voice. It had all started during the Queen’s visit, with that hand taking hold of his. Jan still felt its pressure, now that he was pushing the water of the Pishoek to the side and back and making such slow progress. He remembered how he had stood there that day. Grandpa Kaan had taken photos, even though he hadn’t seen him there at all. Tummy pushed forward, a scowl on his face. ‘I hope the Queen didn’t look in your direction right then,’ Grandpa Kaan said later. ‘Otherwise she would have said something. She’s like that.’ Sulking and angry, because of the baker’s daughter and the butcher’s son. And he was still sulking later when Hanne was run over and killed.