Gerbrand Bakker - June

When Jan climbed up onto land through the gap in the reeds, Teun was lying on the slope of the dyke with his head resting on his hands. ‘There you are,’ he said.

June, July, August. Yellow dress, the baker, a doorjamb without a door. Flowers for the Queen. Foreign country, here. Uncle Aris, the fly strip over the kitchen table, Auntie Tinie, Grandmother Kaan as a toppling heron, the window with the crack in it in the bedroom that wasn’t a bedroom any more. Teun in his yellow swimming trunks, the raised knee. Sulking and cross, while Hanne was run over and killed.

Jan reached Teun and started to cry.

Teun sat up and grabbed him by his calf. ‘Jan,’ he said.

Jan started crying even louder, he couldn’t understand where it was coming from. He didn’t mind. Jan, Teun had said. That was him. Jan. He wasn’t ashamed of crying, he wasn’t ashamed when he grabbed Teun’s hand. A big hand, with strong fingers, short nails that even long afternoons of soaking in the swimming pool hadn’t cleaned of the remnants of dirt from the technical-college practical week.

Half an hour later the brace of ducks landed after all, or maybe they were different ducks. The birds weren’t bothered by the boys, who were apparently less frightening lying on the dyke than they had been swimming near the post.

‘What were you crying about?’ Teun asked.

‘Nothing,’ Jan said. The back of his throat was itching, it was a feeling he knew from the days he sometimes lay down next to a calf and let it lick him with its rough tongue.

The next day Jan lay down in a different part of the swimming pool for the first time. There were two other year-six boys there. Peter wasn’t there, he didn’t have a girlfriend. Jan tried not to look over to the narrow strip of grass where he’d lain before. Things were very different here with the girls. When Yvonne got out of the water, using the ladder, she gave him a little kiss. He gave her a little kiss back, while keeping his eye on the diving board over her shoulder. Maybe he’d go back to the dyke later in the afternoon. Or tomorrow, or next week. He stretched out on his back and closed his eyes. He listened to the noise around him, which sounded just that little bit different from here. Strange, those girl kisses: so light, so easy. So girly. Teun’s mother was busy and didn’t have time to turn the volume dial to the left. ‘ All lovers make, make the same mistakes, yes they do. Yes, all lovers make, make the same mistakes as me and you .’ A whiny bloody song.

Some days Jan took a detour on his bike. Never in the morning, because in the mornings he was always standing on the Kruisweg corner waiting for the large group heading from the village to Schagen. Like birds or cows, they sought cover and safety in numbers, cycling the ten kilometres to Schagen in a long column. In the afternoon he sometimes took a detour; there wasn’t a big group then because not everyone went to the same school. It was at least two kilometres further to go through the village, but he didn’t care. It led him past Teun’s.

There, in the cramped attic above the garage, was a pile of burlap bags. The smell was faintly reminiscent of the big barn where the Wool Federation collected the wool once a year. On a day that was usually warm, all the farmers who kept sheep would come with trailers full of wool to be pressed into bales by a big machine. It wasn’t warm now. September, October. The garage attic couldn’t possibly smell of sheep’s wool, Jan knew that too, but the smell still hung there. If Teun could smell like fresh hay, which he sometimes did, the attic could also smell of wool. Now and then it smelled like wet dog instead, when it was damp from rain or mist or sweat.

Sometime that autumn Teun’s mother’s head popped up through the trapdoor opening. There was nothing he could do about it. Just lie there calmly, acting as if he wasn’t there, hoping nobody would say anything, while inside his head he couldn’t avoid hearing an annoying ‘Ah, if it’s not the Kaan boys’. Somehow she had looked at him as if that was what she was thinking and, for the first time, the ticket lady and Teun’s mother really were one and the same person. Her face turned red, all at once, and slowly retreated back down again, until he had a more or less free view of the open trapdoor. It seemed to take minutes, but that was an illusion. He didn’t have the impression Teun had noticed anything at all.

It happened over a weekend. One Friday in winter he came by and pretended not to be looking in, as if he couldn’t see the little attic window above the garage. It was easy enough, he knew when he and Teun would be seeing each other again. The Monday that followed he was able to look straight through the house at the sheep in the fields behind it; he could even see the north dyke in the distance, despite the drizzle. There were no curtains up, the windowsill was bare, the lightshades had disappeared. Big holes in the front garden — they’d even dug up the perennials. The swing-up door to the garage was open, it was horribly empty. The window above it looked as if it had been cleaned, but that must have been his imagination.

‘Now I’m going to run,’ Brecht Koomen says. The train still looks like it’s been hijacked, the door is still open. She starts to hurry over to it. ‘Are you coming?’ she asks, without looking back.

‘Yes,’ the man says.

Just before jumping the ditch, she sees the woman who was fanning herself with the magazine standing at a window with both hands up against the sides of her face to block out the light. ‘I’m coming,’ Brecht calls, as if the woman has beckoned her, as if she could somehow hold back the train if it started to move right now. She tosses her bag over the ditch. The Rubettes pops into her mind. She reserves judgement on whether or not it was a whiny bloody song. Either way, she never liked it. She jumps, lands well and walks across the gravel to the door with her arms stretched out in front of her. When she puts her hands on the floor of the vestibule the PA starts to hiss.

‘I’m t-aking off my T-shirt,’ says Johan.

‘Then I will too,’ says Toon.

They’re sitting on the last bench on Platform 1, a good distance from a group of passengers on the opposite platform. The train the other people got out of has been stopped for a long time; every few minutes there’s an announcement about an obstruction further up ahead. It’s been raining for a while. Not hard, but fat drops have started to fall from the crown of the elm behind the bench. On their shoulders. The platform lights are on.

‘N-ice,’ says Johan.

‘Yes,’ says Toon.

‘Ob-struction?’

‘I don’t know what’s going on either. They never say.’

‘But this way too?’

‘It’s a single track between here and Anna Paulowna.’

‘He’s s-till coming though.’

‘Of course he is. And if he doesn’t come now, he’ll come some other time.’

‘ Attention all passengers, because of an obstruction between Schagen and Anna Paulowna, trains are not currently running. It could take some time for this to be rectified. Please keep listening to these announcements, we will provide more information as soon as possible. ’

Yells and swearing from across the track. ‘Bring in a bus, then!’ someone shouts. There are other people who are almost undressed too, mostly young.

‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Toon asks, looking at Johan. Long wet hair, gleaming shoulders, big hands resting on his thighs.

‘T-eun?’

‘That’s right. From the swimming pool.’

‘But why are you called Toon now?’

‘Yeah… There was a time I thought that if you changed your name you automatically became someone else. My mother thinks names are very important.’