Kieran announces that he’s not doing the school holiday program. Jack says, ‘You have to. When I was eight, I had to as well.’ Bea repeats that everybody in her class has something nice planned — everybody, except her.
Me (not thinking): ‘Really? Like what?’
Bea: ‘Sicily, Barcelona, Mallorca. Karl is even flying to LA with his dad.’
Me (after a short pause in which I luckily remember last summer): ‘But you hate family holidays.’
Bea: ‘Amelie and Ronja are going to Ronja’s sister in Cologne.’
Me: ‘You could go and stay with Aunt Gitti in Munich.’
Bea: ‘What am I supposed to do there?’
Me: ‘I don’t know. What are Amelie and Ronja going to do in Cologne?’
Bea: ‘Have fun?’
Me: ‘Okay, I—’ (desperately trying to come up with anybody I know under forty in a different city).
Bea: ‘We never do anything! You go to work, and I have to stay at home and put up with my stupid brothers.’
Me: ‘Kieran’s doing the holiday program.’
Kieran: ‘No, I’m not.’
Me: ‘Yes, of course you are.’
Kieran (angrily): ‘And Jack gets to stay at home and play computer games all day!’
Me: ‘Jack has to make his own lunch and tidy up and do homework. It’s not as great as you think.’
Jack: ‘Yeah, exactly.’
Bea: ‘Don’t pretend. Of course you play computer games all day.’
Jack: ‘Shut up.’
Bea (to me): ‘See? I can’t stand it.’
Kieran: ‘I’m not doing the holiday program.’
Me: ‘Okay, then. Stay at home. Everybody can stay at home. I don’t care.’
Lynn: ‘Can I stay too?’
Me: ‘Sure!’
Bea: ‘Seriously?’
Me: ‘What? You can go and visit Gitti in Munich. You’re the only one who can actually do what she wants.’
Jack (gloating): ‘Yeah, exactly Bea.’
Bea lunges at Jack and spits in his face.
Me: ‘Seriously, Bea? Are you nuts?’
Jack starts crying and wipes his nose with the sleeve of his sweater.
Bea has gone red in the face, but her voice is calm.
‘That’s what I can do.’ She disappears into her room.
You can’t dance on four legs.
I’m terrible at knowing where the boundaries are between Bea and me. You could say that I am her. I’d love to go to Cologne with a friend! Or at least to her grandparents’ house in the countryside. It’s better than these never-ending days, these last grey three months of the year. What are we supposed to do with all this grey? All this dragging time?
Oh yes, and when the year’s over, we won’t have a flat anymore either.
Yes, my dear, I could say, then there’ll be some action around here! Don’t tempt fate! Soon you’ll long for the days when nothing worse happened than a fight over screen-time and the washing-up. You’ll miss your brothers’ gentle features when the Marzahn mob has disfigured them beyond recognition.
I so wish everybody was happy.
How can I force them?
I pull up in our estate car. No, it’s no longer big enough. We need a seven-seater, a Renault Espace with safety locks that bolt all the doors in case we have to drive through the inner city at night. And we will, because we have a long way to drive and the days are short.
It’s the last day of school before the autumn holidays, and I packed everything this morning: the Renault is loaded up, and Lynn is already sitting in her velvet-covered child seat. Sven is in front next to me. We park in front of the school and wait. ‘Yes!’ Here they come, striding over, her big sisters and brothers. ‘Hello!’ Then they say goodbye to their friends at the gate and, ‘Off we go!’ to the grandparents in the countryside.
We sing cheerfully because their tablets are off limits in the holidays. ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by John Denver and other songs. It’s autumn, and the Renault roars on towards Magdeburg, straight on down the highway.
Sven says that’s the nice thing about Niedersachsen: it never looks like anything in particular.
There are heathland potatoes for sale by the roadside.
When it gets dark, we drive through the area around the railway station in Lehrte. I activate the automatic locking device, and the little nubs on the doors drop down with a clack. They’re called ‘Pinökel’ in Niedersachsen, I tell the kids. They laugh.
At Sven’s parents’ in the countryside, the lights are on. Grandma is standing at the door in an apron, waving. Grandpa has a pipe in his mouth.
No, wait: Grandma is smoking — because Grandpa isn’t allowed to anymore. He’s indoors with an oxygen mask over his mouth. Grandma stands alone in front of the house and doesn’t notice us, throws her cigarette into the rainwater collector, and is wearing baggy tracksuit pants and Crocs, not an apron. She lights another cigarette so that it’s been worth coming out. We watch her from the car.
‘Should I honk?’ I ask Sven.
‘You’ll scare her to death,’ he replies.
The children wait.
I’ve turned off the headlamps to see better. The rhododendron has grown tall, hiding the view through the panorama window, behind which my father-in-law is lying in the living room. There’s nothing to see now that my mother-in-law has disappeared into the house.
‘What are they doing?’
Sven doesn’t reply. As soon as he gets close to his parents’ house, his imagination fails him.
He turns his head away, and I say: ‘Shall I drive on?’
He nods.
‘Let’s go to my parents’!’ I shout because that’s the great thing: there’s always an alternative — a second, hopeful possibility.
I steer the Renault south.
We have stopped singing. Sven has turned on the radio; it’s now night-time. The traffic warnings on the radio regularly announce new things lying on the motorway ahead: car parts, branches, dead animals.
‘Perhaps it’s a code,’ Sven says.
The kids have fallen asleep.
We daren’t take a break because they might wake up. The Renault has a large petrol tank.
The further south we get, the more my hope dwindles. My imagination fails me too, such as how we’re all supposed to fit into my dad’s one-room flat. We could sleep next to my mother at the cemetery.
Sven decodes the traffic warnings: they’re telling us to forget the whole idea.
I
