She finished high school with no real ambitions in either athletics or academics. It was 1977 and she was the perfect age. She moved to London. She signed on the dole. She found a squat in Hackney. She listened to the Damned. She listened to the Clash. She listened to the Pistols. John Lydon was talking directly to her. She wanted to hear more about England’s Dreaming.
She followed the Pistols all over England and back to Europe. She met a Dutch boy at a Pistols gig at Club Zebra in Kristinehamn, Sweden.
“This is the worst music I have ever heard,” he said to her in his peasant accent.
“That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” she replied.
And thus their lifelong relationship had begun.
Hans had encouraged her to enroll in college. She hadn’t been interested in further study before, but now she read everything. Hans was a competitive bicycle racer, and at first she’d gone to watch him and then she too became a racer.
She was better than him. She won trophies.
She was fast.
And more important than being fast, she was determined.
She read Tim Krabbé’s The Rider. She read it and, for a while, it became her bible. She was one of Krabbé’s “true alpinists.” The true alpinist does not climb mountains because “they are there”; the true alpinist’s will is not so weak that it is bent by a mere mountain.
It was all about will.
The ravine was only a meter wide and a meter deep.
She ran on.
Stones, red dirt, red clay under her feet—definitely a riverbed. A winter phenomenon, and not every winter.
She could hear Hans’s voice in her head, see his face. They are going to catch you. They are coming in a pincer movement. Go faster and keep your head down and then when they are behind you, you can slip out of the hollow and double back to the beach.
“I’m not going anywhere near the beach. I will go this way as far as I can. I will make noise and keep going and going,” she said.
You alone on the flat land? They will get you.
“Yes. Eventually,” Petra said with a smile.
Why are you doing this?
“Because of the children, Hans.”
You and the children. You won’t forgive me for that, will you?
“Of course I will, my darling Hans. It was our decision.”
Petra, is there any other way? The dogs…
“I will contrive to get myself shot before the dogs get me.”
Hans said nothing and then he too smiled.
The sun was almost directly overhead and the T-shirt was drenched with sweat. Hans had been correct about black. Heather’s black T-shirt absorbed the heat. Her gray one was a few degrees cooler. A long-sleeved cotton shirt would have worked even better.
She kept running as the gully narrowed.
A mosquito had settled on her left arm. Only the female mosquitoes bit you, because they needed blood to make eggs. There was, Petra noted, no female solidarity between them. Petra didn’t mind. “Live, little mosquito, make your eggs,” she said and it flew away from her, satiated.
She had gone about four hundred meters.
It was time to make some noise.
She stopped and caught her breath and looked back.
The two teams were converging on the beach where they had been.
“Where are you going, you bastards!” she yelled in her best Johnny Rotten voice and ducked back into the gully.
That will do the trick, poor dead Hans said in her head.
“I think it will,” she replied.
She could hear the dogs. Four of them. Four dog voices. Twenty human voices. Kids with them. What kind of sick people were they to bring their children with them?
She ran on as the gully got narrower and narrower.
Surprisingly, she found that she wasn’t so much scared as sad.
What a waste. All the things she knew. All the stuff about humans and their mores. All her travels. All her languages. She had English, French, Dutch, and German.
All the experiences. Working in the university. That year in Mali. That terrible year where she’d studied the effects of tragedy on nurses in the children’s cancer ward in Amsterdam. Those were the real heroes, the nurses who worked there. She’d written a book about it. It had been translated into German and Danish.
The dogs.
Coming up fast.
Faster than her.
She wasn’t that old. Hans wasn’t that old either.
They’d almost never argued. Not even about having kids. We’ll buy a house and ride our bikes and we’ll travel, Hans said. We’ll see the world. We don’t need kids dragging us down. Too many kids on the planet anyway.