Punishment aka What Is Mine

FORTY-SEVEN

It seemed that the girl wanted to die. He couldn’t see why. She got enough food. Enough water. Enough air. He gave her everything she needed to stay alive. But she just lay there. She’d stopped answering when he spoke to her. That irritated him. It was rude. As he couldn’t bear the smell of her, he had found a pair of his old underpants and sewn up the fly. He couldn’t really buy a pair of girl’s underpants without attracting attention. They knew him in the local shops. He could, of course, go into town, but it was better to be on the safe side. He had been on the safe side all along. They would never find him and he didn’t want to ruin everything because someone found it odd that a childless man was buying girl’s underpants. People were hysterical. They talked about nothing else. At the co-op, with Bobben at the gas station. At work he could put on ear protectors and shut the others out, but during lunch breaks he was forced to listen to their whining. A couple of times he’d just eaten his lunch in by the saw. Then the boss came and asked him what was wrong. Lunch was sacred to them all and should be eaten together in the hut. Simple as that, and he had smiled and followed him in.

When he ordered Emilie out of bed to wash herself the other day, she was stiff as a robot. But she did it. Staggered over to the sink. Took off her clothes until she stood there naked. Washed herself with the cloth he’d brought in with him. Put on the clean underpants, faded green ones with a cheeky elephant on the front. He had laughed. The underpants wouldn’t stay on and she looked completely ridiculous when she turned to him: thin and pale with her right hand closed around a handful of material by the trunk.

Then he had washed her clothes. Put them in the washing machine with fabric softener in the rinse. He hadn’t bothered to iron them all, but she could still have been more grateful. She just kept on lying there in the underpants. Her clothes lay folded beside the bed.

“Hey,” he said brusquely, from the doorway. “Are you alive?”

It was quiet.

The little bitch didn’t want to answer him.

She reminded him of a girl he’d gone to primary school with. They were going to put on a play. His mother was going to come. She had made the costume. He was going to be the gray goose and only had a couple of lines. His costume wasn’t too great. The wings were made of cardboard and one of them had a crease in it. The others laughed. The beautiful girl was a swan. The feathers frothed around her, white tissue-paper feathers. She tripped on something and fell off the edge of the stage.

His mother didn’t turn up. He never knew why. When he got home, she was sitting in the kitchen reading. She didn’t even look up when he said goodnight. His grandmother gave him a slice of bread and a glass of water. The next day she forced him to visit the swan in the hospital and apologize.

“Hello,” he said again. “Will you answer!”

There was a slight movement under the duvet, but not a sound was made.

“Careful,” he said through gritted teeth, and slammed the door again.

It was pitch black.

Emilie knew that she wasn’t blind. The man had turned off the light. Daddy would have given up looking by now. Maybe they’d had a funeral.

Most likely she was dead and buried.

“Mommy,” she said mutely.