Will, стр. 94

WHEN YOU CONSIDER someone a soulmate and give her all your love, you think you understand things about her that dumbfound others, drive them to despair or wrack them with anxiety. My granddaughter slashes her arms and my sin is that I think I know why. I quietly believe I understand what she’s doing or subjecting herself to. I think I know what’s burdening her. More than that, I am convinced she’s weighed down partly with the baggage I’ve given her, that she’s the recipient of a bill of reckoning I unwittingly passed down with my genes.

‘What can we do with her?’ Yvette laments when she’s had yet another phone call from our son about him having tracked Hilde down to some drug den or other, completely out of it and talking gibberish.

‘Nothing at all,’ I answer. ‘Let the girl be. She’s just a kid playing silly buggers.’

But to me she’s not a kid and she’s not playing silly buggers. In my eyes they’re acts of resistance, signs of great inner anguish. I am convinced she’s being urged on by the voices that force people to finally discover themselves, to become who they have to be, who they really are, and that, as I’ve already said, is the most difficult thing of all, because the world doesn’t grant that privilege easily and other people always want you to be like everyone else.

*

You understand everything. You put everything in perspective. You lull yourself to sleep.

After yet another round of therapy or a forced admission to hospital, she reappears at our front door, radiant as ever. She’s got a pink balloon with ‘Hello, I Love You’ printed on it and is all sweetness and light to her grandmother while giving me a wink that betrays the truth. I wink back and whisper that she shouldn’t let them manipulate her. She gives no sign of having heard. She’s wearing black lipstick and a black long-sleeved top decorated with scythe-carrying skeletons. A ladybird is walking over her shoulder and then suddenly it’s gone. She is no longer my granddaughter. They’ve pumped her full of medication that burns away the insides of her skull, making her normal, something she won’t be able to bear, something that will lead her to the abyss.

She says, ‘Dad said I have to come and tell you not to worry. I’m going to straighten out and go back to uni. My enrolment’s all ready. Good, huh? And which one of you is most pleased?’

‘As long as you’re happy,’ my wife says, as pleased as she could possibly be.

‘What are you going to study?’ I ask.

‘History!’ Hilde beams.

You know why. You think it’s the way it has to be. You try to fool yourself into thinking you should be proud. But she no longer rings you up, you don’t hear from her at all.

‘She’s on the up and up,’ Yvette says. ‘She’s probably got a boyfriend. She’s studying hard. She’s finding her way.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

But inside I’m fuming because in the meantime I’ve heard from Lode that he does see her, regularly even. That’s what he tells me during our weekly chess game.

‘She’s got all kinds of questions.’

‘About what?’

‘The old days. Does she do that with you too?’

‘Sometimes,’ I say curtly and dangle my bishop in front of Lode’s queen as bait. Of course the bastard doesn’t fall for it.

You hope. You grit your teeth. You try to be patient.

She has disappeared.

Nobody’s seen her for three whole days.

Yvette goes into our bedroom, locks the door and starts crying on the bedspread.

I say to the door, ‘It’ll be OK.’

She keeps crying. She won’t let me into the room. I lash out at the cat.

An icy steel fist takes hold of an artery and won’t let go.

You don’t think anything any more. You listen to your breathing. You feel your heartbeat.

Then the phone call comes.

They have found her, strung up on a rope, hanging in an old wartime bunker that’s normally completely closed off, hanging there for a reason, I feel it.

Sobbing I scratch on the bedroom door.

‘Open up, for Christ’s sake… It’s bad news. Open the door, sweetheart. Please.’

But the door won’t open. The crying just gets louder and louder so that she’s practically screeching, until hours later when she can’t keep it up any longer and finally appears, suddenly aged so much there’s nothing left of her. ‘You didn’t protect me,’ she sighs and that’s all. And maybe even that’s not entirely true. Maybe she doesn’t say anything at all.

You don’t know. You did know. You kid yourself about all kinds of things.

But that’s what everyone does every fucking day, damn it, everyone does it and mostly without consequences. Everyone does it and it doesn’t cost them their grandchild. Most of them plod undisturbed to their grave. Not you.

She’s left a note behind.

Bompa is a bastard.

That’s all it says.

But those four words are enough.

Yvette drinks two bottles of port every day and I don’t get another word out of her.

Every morning she goes out for a new supply of booze, then locks herself in.

I sleep in my study. Now and then I still hear her sobbing, that’s all.

Bompa is a bastard.

My son, my daughter-in-law and my grandson stare at me.

They ask why.

Because of the pills, I say, because of the antidepressants you all made her take. In the end they drove her completely mad.

They don’t want to ever see me again.

My son says, ‘I hope you die a slow death.’

They are the last words I ever hear from him.

I see him six months later at my wife’s funeral.

‘She drank herself to death,’ I hear Lode saying behind me in church,