An extract from the novel, Femke.

Mother often had premonitions she'd speak about afterwards. I can't square the mother I
knew as a kid with the suburban mama of now. Back then she was a witch. Father, I
think, thought so - I could see he was in awe of her. She used to brew a weird concoction
to keep from catching a cold. She was something of a singer in those days. Strictly small-
time operettas. I got a tongue-lashing once when I tried her cold medicine, though the
taste was punishment enough. It makes me think now that it had a strong lacing of
alcohol. She was capable of drinking during the day. Once father was gone I had visions
of us losing everything. Mother becoming a Baby Jane. Or perhaps that has happened,
and she spends her days tormenting Annemieke, with rat for supper. A girl can dream.
            My weirdness got blamed on her. This was in the time of tests. I remember sills
and sills of geraniums and spider plants in a long corridor with mad paintings along it.
The first time mother really hit me was to get me out of a trance. Then it became
punishment for going into one.
            Her job was to have old friends round and do their hair for them. I expect there
was too much time spent alone, alone or with us. The way she stared through us, it was
almost the same thing. (No, something in Annemieke held her attention.) At least we had
dead hair to play with. I used it to make extensions to my own hair, and when I saw how
ugly it looked, to Annemieke's hair. She chuckled anyway.
            I'd watch mother fill up with emptiness between phone-calls, in the hours waiting
for father to come. I liked those mornings when she was on the phone and sounding
animated, I didn't care how much, I never feared her manic side. I knew we were in for a
good day then. What scared me was her monotone. (I shivered just there, thinking about
it, and I was already shivering.)
            She was suspicious of me. I fed her suspicions without wanting to. The only time
I took a man home and we fucked in her double bed, she knew. She got back from a
weekend away and shook me to find out what I'd done. As she was shaking me, I saw a
pair of my socks under her bed. She hadn't seen those, or they would have been all
the proof she needed. 'Christ, you are a witch,' I thought. 'You made me leave them there.'
            She suspected father too. There were odd words, tears, famously a plate smeared
with ketchup thrown against a wall (blood, I told my friends), which I understood
suddenly: father was having an affair. I doubt this now. He did have a glamorous
secretary, possibly a succession of them, I only ever saw the one. My sole time in
daddy's office. There was a man called Clark or Clerk - Clark Kent was a name I knew -
who stood the whole time father sat: I remember father's voice being softer than in the
house. Africa was mentioned. I'd been given a toy snake with brown and beige scales and
was playing with it. The secretary appeared as she was about to leave. She was wearing
white gloves.
            Talking about father's death won't warm me up. One thing, though: it made us
richer. Now that the money's gone - or more likely tied up in something - I'm glad. It's
cleaner that way.
            I learned all about men once father was dead. A beautiful widow and two
pubescent girls are not nothing. They came sniffing round, pawed us a little, ran off, then
they'd come sniffing back. (Why do I lie? We were safe enough in our own house. Only
the insurance man - mother had a lot of dealings with him - got further than the
doorstep.) Mother's body had thickened before grief went to work on it. In the photo I
have of the three of us from then, taken by some monkey making a display before
mother, she is alarmingly beautiful.
            Holidays were worst. One man I remember: I called him Shoe Shuffle Man. We
had just stepped off the boat when mechanically the music started up - twenty minutes it
played for - and mother did three or four steps of a dance with Annemieke. Always the
same steps, danced from girlhood on, maybe to this day. Shoe Shuffle Man appears,
sliding his moccasins across the planks, arms raised in a 'May I?' gesture, but of course
directed towards Annemieke in order to get to mother, who was now walking smartly
into the reception area. A whisky laugh and a few words of song, which mother foolishly
turned and smiled back at. He dogged us the whole holiday then. There was only the
promenade, so it was easy for him. His grey-blue trousers - slacks, he'd have said - were
perfectly pressed. Why does that generation of men hate women? Mother despised them.
She felt she shouldn't, but she did. Father at least had something gutsy about him, looked
almost like Robert Mitchum at times. He must have seemed an odd fish to those slacked
shufflers. Those Clarks or Clerks.
            Another time, now. Not a holiday snap, this one - father was even alive. I was
singing in the choir. I'd coaxed mother to come along and she was quite taken with us,
spoke respectfully to our prim teacher, a type of woman she disliked. The girl behind me
sang with a hissing sweetness that drove me to belt out the hymns. Only the mothers
stayed behind, and one father it looked like, until everyone was accounted for. No, he
was simply 'a music lover', he said. You couldn't even accuse him of being a lover of
small girls. I was put into my coat by him. He had charmed mother enough to have us
waiting by the kerb while he fetched his car. I think I expected a Rolls. It wasn't that. The
ugliest thing was the plastic covering on the seats. I asked about it, was told not to; asked
again as if that girl was still hissing in my ear. It came out that his wife was liable to roll
around and dribble. Something incurable. Mother coughed and his neck grew red, while I
squeaked on the plastic.