At the hospital, Mathilde is reminded once again of her pitiful deference to authority: when she’s feeling good about herself, and retaining her ironic sense of good-humoured irony, she refers to this as her “the big man’s going to shout at me” syndrome; at these times she reflects that, ever since she was a child, she’s been anxious – mostly unconsciously – about being told off, or being found wanting, or having people laugh at her (especially people who don’t know her, and whose shallow judgements of her would be based on inadequate knowledge: if those people truly knew her, they would see that her authenticity, honesty, integrity and depth offset these momentary lapses of behaviour).

The first memory she has of this syndrome comes from an early school nativity play – she’d have been about six. She was playing the inn-keeper’s wife. (For this particular school production, performed on imaginatively multiply-reused [hollow wooden cubes] in the chilly, blank interior of the cavernous new concrete church, their Religious Instruction teacher had decided that the traditional gender roles should be reversed: thus Mary knocked at the inn door, and Mathilde’s inn keeper’s wife answered her knock while her husband provided ludic relief with a tea towel and a cup that never quite dried.) Once the holy family were installed in the inn’s straw-strewn outbuilding, Mathilde had to wait for another cue that called her back onto the stage to announce that “your supper is within”. At the first performance, already sweating with nervous relief at having delivered her earlier lines successfully, and without stammering or forgetting anything before the gaze of the terrifyingly large audience of parents and older siblings (probably sixty in total), she pre-empted her second cue and found herself standing on top of a wooden block in the bright light, but with nothing to say and nothing to do, and intensely conscious that it was obvious to everyone that she shouldn’t be there. She stood, blinking, for a few seconds, then stepped back out of the light and into the shadow of the flat. She felt the sweat trickling cold down her back, under the woollen jumper she was wearing under her flimsy cotton costume.

The next thing she knew, she was back in the choir’s storage room, which the school was using as a changing room. There, amidst the smell of incense and musty cassocks, she pushed her way to the back of the costume rail and sat down against the cold exterior wall, pressing her skinny back against the rough textured breeze blocks. That was where the teachers eventually found her an hour after everyone else (except her parents) had departed into the frosty December night.

Since then, anxiety and fear of ridicule or exposure have been a constant motif in her behaviour. She knows it’s irrational, and that as she learned it so young it’s not something she should be ashamed of, but it’s still painfully embarrassing to her, and it seems impossible to kick the habit.

At the hospital, the desk nurse makes it very clear – almost brusquely – that Jan [Martens?] is too ill to be seen. They will take his clothes and hygiene equipment for her, but there is no point in her waiting. She should go home. Even before the nurse has finished speaking, Mathilde is moving apologetically towards the rotating doors, feeling guilty for even having come, and having had the temerity to take up any of the hospital staff’s time. As she walks down the concrete ramp to the street and the latest of this evening’s bus stops, she rehearses ways in which she could have made herself less of an imposition on the nurses.

When she gets home, she can hear the noise from the pseudo-wake from the street: there’s no music, but the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and drunken shouts of laughter carry plainly through the autumn air. She goes round to the rear gate, noting the bright yellow strips of light between the vertical fence slats, and the fast-moving shadows that accompany the running, laughing young men inside.

It is mostly young blokes in the back yard, milling around a growing pile of beer bottles stacked on top of empty crates by the back door. There are some younger boys playing in the yard too, and some others who stand in the shadows near the drinkers, watching their faces and body movements, stashing away memories of the approved adult drinking behaviours for implementation in a couple of years’ time.

Mathilde eases her way through the haze of beer fumes and testosterone and into the kitchen, where her mother kisses her cheek and squeezes her arm, and her father nods and smiles at her over the shoulder of Aunt Iris, who is in the middle of a finger-jabbing bout of needless over-emphasis. Mathilde grabs herself a bottle of beer and sidles off into the dining room, hoping to see her cousin Trudi: Trudi is one of those relatives whom she only seems to see at family gatherings like this, and with whom she has always shared an unspoken sense of understanding and goodwill, despite the rarity of their meetings. Mathilde wishes that she could meet a romantic partner with whom she could share the same kind of innate sympathy and wordless mutual regard.

But Trudi isn’t there. Instead, Mathilde finds herself watching a disagreement escalating into something more physical: two people she doesn’t recognise – a well-built thirty-five year old with a shaven head, and a late teenager with dyed black hair and black-ringed eyes – are facing each other, framed in the doorway that leads to the hall and stairway. As the punky kid’s head waves backwards and forwards, Mathilde can see the white painted balustrades {what are those vertical things at the side of the stairs called?} flickering in and out of vision. The punky kid must be drunk, otherwise he wouldn’t be arguing with the other guy, who has inverted vee-shaped torso of a fireman, and the massive upper arms of someone who lifts weights regularly. Mathilde can see, from the way that the bald guy is staring and nodding at the punk, and shifting his weight from foot to foot, that the first punch or head butt is not too far away. If only the punky guy could see the other guy with sober eyes, he would shut up NOW.

(c. 1050 words)