Saskia De Coster (BE)
The Worlds Comes to Us
Story for The Umbilical Vein translated by Jane Hedley-Prole
September 2013
At first you think you’re imagining things when you hear that low hum. It’s as if there’s a whole swarm hovering behind the mirror. Lean forward, look yourself in the eyes. Look until you can see through all the years. Look until you reach right back to the past. Until the house where you grew up looms up in front of you. The hum intensifies; it’s as if a whole swarm were pressing against the windows.
The house inhales deeply, filling itself with air. The roof bursts through the mirror, the high walls force themselves through its frame. They are spattered with countless dark windows, like the spots on a ladybird.
In the nick of time, just before the house explodes, the doors are thrown open. Out bursts a gaggle of girls, their skirts pulled up. The tiny creatures giggle when they see you. They’re different in stature, but their little faces are nearly identical: thick lips, snub noses, light brown hair. One keeps winding her long locks provocatively round her fingers like an elf-sized Lolita, another pouts as if she were tasting an invisible strawberry, a lone girl in Gothic gear blinks constantly in the bright light. The oldest one approaches you. She halts in front of you and shyly asks if you will take them back.
You stretch out your hand. It’s seized by many little hands. You will take them home, you say. You step through the mirror into the house. The walls of the house are so thick that other houses could easily be hidden inside them. When you finally enter the little room, you knock over the only chair in the tiny space. Back home.
You hadn’t remembered how small it was.You hadn’t remembered you could take on so many different forms. The girl who addressed you first offers you the chair and sits down on your lap. She lies against your belly, as warm and contented as a cat. The others nestle on chairs hanging from the high walls. They all chatter away like sparrows and never stop laughing. One starts a sentence, another adds a word and so it goes on. Together they knit sentences that stretch out forever. One pops sickly sweet pieces of gingerbread into your mouth. You remember other pictures. You remember the same cheerfulness.
‘We live indoors, so we don’t know where the house is heading,’ one of the girls says. You recognise yourself clearly now. ‘We dream, and for years now our dreams have caused our house to move about. It travels through time and space, we go from Cocteau to Bali to Michael Jackson. We aren’t bound by day or night, by fads or fashions, by obscenities or inanities. We just do what we do: dress up, fix ourselves in pictures for an instant and then continue. The world comes to us, we don’t have to go into the world.’
The sunbeams creep in, Catwoman departs, a girl in pyjamas takes over, the moon glides away, then takes over from the sun, till it’s the sun’s turn again. A little whore, still too young for an age, stands in the corner. One of the girls clambers onto your lap. She sprawls there comfortably, eating cake. Her fingers, sticky with crumbs, softly glide over your adult body. ‘They are always with you,’ she tells you, ‘the day and the night, the stars and the streets, the anger and the pebbles of peacefulness, your dreams, big and small, and the hotbeds of your desire.’ Then you hear her say, ‘Give me your hand, I’ll tell you how to get back.’
Suddenly the blood pounds in your head, as if you had got up too quickly. ‘Get back where?’ you ask. ‘To where you have to go.’Suddenly, from the other side, you can hear the normal sounds of daily life again. Is it the tap in your bathroom, or a voice calling you? It doesn’t matter, you know you have to go back, back to your life. Four pairs of hands form a cushion beneath your hand.
‘Show me a last story,’ you ask before you go, before you squeeze back through the mirror to this world. They look at you. They will tell you a story. And another. And another. Because this will never stop. Because they will go on forever.
‘From now on we’ll always be with you,’ they say, ‘we are your story.’ You leave. When you turn round, you see them walking, following along behind you.