Higher Ground Anke Stelling (great novels of all time .TXT) 📖

realise that I don’t have a driver’s licence. Let alone a Renault Espace.

I so wish everybody was happy. At least in the autumn holidays!

I must be a megalomaniac to think I could start a mega-big family without mega-grandparents and a mega-car and mega-incomes. It was rash. It was anti-social.

Now my progeny has started attacking one another. I don’t have control over them anymore. I can’t provide for them; they will have to fend for themselves, and we all know where that leads.

Bea will become another statistic in the teenage pregnancy figures.

Jack will become an assassin, as befits his name.

Kieran will kill himself because he won’t be up to living the ghetto life.

And Lynn might be fortunate enough to be taken in by a foster family at the age of twelve; to have a father like Ingmar, who likes to take on responsibility for injured souls, an adoptive father like Woody Allen.

Whose fault is all this?

Clearly mine.

I could have spared them the burden of life by not giving birth to them. I’m not so blind that I can’t see a simple truth: how you plan the autumn holidays separates those who have the right to reproduce from those who don’t.

The truth

‘Ate way too much again.’ This is the only sentence written in the diary my mother left behind when she died. She didn’t have a lot of personal things, because she was used to not having her own room. At the end of her life, she had one: my brothers and sister and I had given her space. There, in the first room she’d had to herself, we sorted through her things and thought about who would like what to remember her by. I took her diary, a thick notebook with lined pages and a plasticised apple-green cover, in which she had written this one sentence in red felt-tip. Perhaps she was going to use it as a diet book?

Marianne had always been on diets. If only she could be as slim as she had been before she’d had children, then … I’ve no idea what. She never told me; her diary doesn’t reveal anything either. No notes of secret desires or dreams, just this one sentence hinting at what constantly preoccupied her. She counted calories all the time. In hospital, she was happy to have lost weight. ‘Hello Death, just look at how slim I am now I’m about to die!’ And then Death screwed her on the spot.

I also go on diets. Secretly. Not that I’m overweight, but there’s always room to be thinner. Thinner, more beautiful, more in control. Less influenced by looks from strangers who notice: ‘There goes a woman who’s let herself go! She thinks she can satisfy her hunger by feeding it all the time. What a twat! It’ll only get bigger, along with her BMI.’

I want to know what Marianne hungered for.

Want to dig her up and shake her so that she’ll tell me. And if not her, then Renate. ‘Tell me!’

Renate gives me a look. ‘If you knew how it was back then, you’d understand what it was that we achieved.’

She doesn’t want anybody to destroy her life’s work.

‘Oh, really?’ I say. ‘Why don’t I know how it was? Why do I only know that Marianne would have liked to be thinner?’

Renate doesn’t say anything else. She keeps her mouth shut. She’s thin.

Wednesday, early in the morning. Three more days of school. Bea doesn’t want to go because her hair is greasy.

‘Then wash it,’ I say.

‘It won’t dry in time.’

‘Then use the hairdryer!’

‘It’s not good for your hair.’

‘Then cut it off.’

I could strangle her. Hasn’t she got any real problems?

Oh yes.

She tells me them, and I feel helpless. No one should have to go to a place like ninth grade, governed by such strict but random rules, and enormous peer pressure to fit in and still prove you’re an individual.

‘Try not to concentrate on what the others think about you,’ I say. ‘When you feel them looking at your hair, think about decimal equations. If you notice you’re holding in your stomach, remember that in other cultures, it would give you prestige. I’ll buy you a Fjällräven backpack later today.’

Bea washes her hair angrily. I begin to blow it dry for her. She hisses that the hairdryer’s too hot. I shove it into her hand and leave the bathroom. Now she’s crying hysterically. I push Jack and Kieran out of the door while my thoughts club each other over the head.

She should sort it out herself — no, I have to support her.

It’s useless — of course it is; but who’s supposed to help, if not me?

I understand her — great, that’s never helped anybody.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — my poor little baby.

Lynn looks at me. Lynn’s expression is hard to fathom. What does Lynn expect me to do?

‘Do you think I should go in and comfort her?’

Lynn nods.

‘But maybe she’ll scream and throw the hairdryer at me?’

At that moment, the hairdryer goes on again. We both listen for more sounds coming from the bathroom.

‘She’s doing it herself,’ says Lynn. ‘You can go back to bed.’

‘Don’t you want me to read you something?’

‘You just get some sleep,’ says Lynn in a sympathetic tone. And as always, that’s what finishes me off: when one of my kids is compassionate and selfless.

Sven is lying in bed with his eyes open. I can’t remember the last time I saw him do that.

‘Everything okay with you?’ I ask anxiously.

He nods.

‘Did we wake you up?

He shakes his head.

‘Are you worried?’

He doesn’t react, just stares in front of him. I shed my slippers and lie down next to him. Hear Bea’s steps, hear Bea talking to Lynn, hear the front door clack — thank God. Everything else that happens will be just like always: bad, but we’ll survive. I just shouldn’t think about it too hard.

What is Lynn doing on her own in the kitchen? Won’t she be lonely?

‘Oh God, these mornings,’ I say.

‘Only one