Clutching the shopping bag under your arm, you set off at a run towards Belle View House, your eyes lifted to the fourth floor windows. A coffee table and wooden chair could be seen being shouldered from the children’s living quarters. The institutional sticks appeared to drift lazily down through the air, before splashing brightly into the glistening water below. Exasperated, and seemingly helpless in the face of it, you were hurrying past the moored barges as fast as you possibly could to put a stop to what was going on. For now your wayward charges were defenestrating their furniture, and you’d been left alone in charge.
You stepped in through the front door and began running up the five flights of stairs. More slowly, in two minds about whether to continue up to the flat or satisfy my curiosity, I was following close behind you. Alice might well have been right about me being your vicarious culture, but here was some more of my vicarious life. You had dropped your shoulder bag at the children’s door, assumed what must have felt like an air of authority, and stepped directly into the communal living room.
There was Edwin confronting you, with his Elvis Presley haircut, a chair arm doubling as his customized guitar.
‘You can do anything …’ he crooned, his spindly legs and small hips waggling. It was a good imitation, showing parody for parody, farce as farce.
The chair arm had been torn from a piece of furniture that Justin was hurling through the window at that very moment. He was leaning out, looking down at it and giggling as the chair plummeted into the canal.
‘Stop that!’ you shouted.
‘Piss off, girlie,’ said Sylvester in a stage whisper, too close to your ear, and, as if it were addressed to me standing in the doorway, ‘You know what I do to whitey cunts.’
Edwin, copying the older ones, had picked up a metal waste paper basket and was lobbing it after the armchair. Althea, an anorexic, and her friend, the spotty anaemic Tessa, were tearing lurid curtains from the windows, bringing the rails down with them.
‘We could just set these on fire!’ the girls sang and danced around the room. ‘We could just set these on fire!’
‘Get on with it then,’ you were shouting at the lot of them, ‘and chuck the telly in while you’re at it.’
You were trying the paradoxical injunctions, knowing they would never chuck the TV out. Beyond the partly eaten crisps stolen from the storeroom, scattered across the floor, and then ground into the carpet, there it would remain; surrounded by wallpaper hanging in strips, half torn from the scribbled-on walls, bits of it charred or smeared, alone there, in a corner of the devastated room, there’d be the television, the sole remaining item of their furniture.
Then, just as unexpectedly, you turned on your heels and, with a look of anxious responsibility, strode back towards me and the door. Mustering all your composure, you grabbed your shoulder bag as you went by, hissing ‘Upstairs!’ into my ear.
‘Piss off, girlie, like the rest of them!’ Sylvester was leering.
You locked the flat’s front door behind us, dashed to the phone and called Roger, a fellow worker, at his home number. He was just going out.
‘What do I do? They’re throwing all the furniture into the canal.’
You listened for a moment.
‘Should I try to stop them? … Well then, what about calling the police? … Can you come in, Roger? … Sure, fine, good idea … but what do I do now?’
‘All right then, yes, see you tomorrow,’ you were saying, slamming down the phone and gasping, ‘Bastard.’
‘So what did he say?’
‘He said I should learn to cope on my own. He said it was character building. Then he had the nerve to admit he couldn’t come and help because—you won’t believe this—he has to be there for the opening of Captain Psycho’s cabaret at the King’s Head. The sod’s their agent. And did I want to ask you if you’d like to make up a threesome before the show closes?’
Rolling my eyes towards the ceiling, I attempted what was meant to be an expression of pained and sympathetic disbelief.
Early next morning, after trying to kiss your forehead in the dark and missing, I slipped from the flat as quietly as possible, hurried down the flights of stairs and past the inmates’ living quarters. Their door was standing ajar, the room empty of furniture except for the one large television set in its corner. On the floor below were the Belle Vue Trust offices, then the classrooms of its Adult Literacy Scheme. Down two more staircases, and it was simply a matter of slipping the catch on the heavy blue front doors to be out into Warwick Crescent’s bright, deserted pavements. London was still sleeping, the Friday morning silence intensified by a distant car changing gear, accelerating away, and then nothing but the last of the birds’ morning chorus. Underneath the Westway’s flyover towards Royal Oak, the earth was a powdery grey.
I bought a ticket for Liverpool Street, descended to the empty platform and, sitting down on one of its benches, dropped the army surplus rucksack onto its grimy floor. Thick moss and grass were growing out of cracks in the opposite cutting’s concreted walls. Alice would be arriving in Amsterdam the following day. While you were waking and readying yourself for the second twenty-four hours of your shift, my ferry would be steaming out past Harwich’s piers, heading for the Hook of Holland.
Could I imagine living in the Netherlands? It was certainly the country whose landscapes were among my favourite haunts in galleries. What about stopping overnight in Rotterdam with its forests of masts and derricks, the ferries moored right on the doorsteps of houses? There was the Boymans Museum to revisit. But then there’d be the risk of missing my rendezvous. At last a faint movement in the lines began, a humming which signaled the arrival of a train. The silvery Underground carriages slowed to a halt. A purple line map appeared above an entrance opposite. The doors slid open before me with a thud.
CHAPTER 8
Reaching the Dutch capital late that Friday afternoon, I followed the signs for the Museumplein and Paulus Potter Straat. The Hotel Kok, where our seminar group had stayed three years before on an art-history study trip, was somewhere nearby. It was a reasonable place much frequented by American students doing Europe on five dollars a day, but would be no good when Alice arrived. It was organized like a youth hostel with the sexes in different dormitories.
Her boat train was due some time after one o’clock the following afternoon, and I spent much of the next twenty-four hours dreaming in various squares of cream-coloured gravel, squares edged with trees, parked cars, and, beyond, the street doors to small businesses, shop fronts, and bars—above them the windows of higgledy-piggledy apartment houses. Sitting down on a public bench, taking out one of my reading list paperbacks, opening the volume at the book-marked page, I would lose my place and drift off into memories of that first study trip we had made through the Low Countries.
Dr. Green had made no attempt to disguise the fact that he had his favourites, and he didn’t get on well with the girls in the party, especially Isabel. There were outbreaks of gossip and backbiting as we travelled to Antwerp, Brussels, then Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam. At Antwerp we stayed in the Seemanshuis and one evening, for a breath of air, I wandered off alone in the opposite direction from the town centre, Rubens’ house, the churches and galleries, to the docks on the Scheldt, where the lights of coasters and fishing smacks rocked in their rigging. After a while I went into a bar. It was a very modest place with just a few wooden tables and chairs. Two men were playing with a red and yellow plastic cigarette dispenser. The thing would stick every time they tried to use it; the men’s stubborn determination, the attention they were devoting to the thing, seemed only to humiliate them all the more. The cheap little object was like a Christmas present that breaks the first time you play with it—and however much you’re told it’s the thought that counts, something has been irreparably stolen from the thought.
That same night in a student bar our g
roup played Dr. Green’s guessing game: which famous reproductions did we each have pinned to our bedroom walls? Others were caught out with Breughel’s Icarus, his Tower of Babel, Piero della Francesca’s Nativity, Vermeer’s View of Delft and such like, but all the paintings attributed to me were met with a definite shake of the head.
Then Dr. Green exclaimed: ‘I bet he has his own daubs up on the walls!’
My blush at the acuteness of the remark made it clear our lecturer had guessed correctly.
‘How pretentious of you!’ Isabel said.
‘Why so?’
‘Because it’s your favourite word … and you’re always using it about other people.’
‘Which is rather pretentious in itself,’ Dr. Green added for good measure.
Sitting alone in one of those tree-lined squares, book open on my lap, another memory from those three years before came back, a memory of Isabel curled on the deck of the ferry home to Hull. She was petite, with auburn hair cut just to shoulder length, parted in the middle, a tiny upturned nose, aquamarine eyes, and a vulnerable smile—surprisingly vulnerable considering her subsequent career as a child psychotherapist. The ship’s steel decking was painted a dark emerald green; Isabel had become horridly seasick and her face turned a green much paler than that of the deck. Wearing a short grey coat, and pair of jeans, she was lying in a foetal position on the floor with a strong wind blowing and the white wake of the ferry widening behind us, seagulls scurrying above the lifting stern. It was the two shades of green brought her back. Isabel had matched her surroundings—as if they themselves had made her ill. Dr. Green stood fussing over her, wondering was she all right or should he call a steward?
I spent that restless night of high anticipation at the Hotel Kok, paid my bill the next morning and dawdled the time away exploring the Nieuwe Herrengracht’s environs, the Plantage, and Waterlooplein—arriving only too early at Amsterdam’s central railway station. In its buffet, a Borussia Dortmund fan wanted to discuss his favourite soccer teams in German. Escaping from that fix once our minimum of common language was exhausted, I waited impatiently by the timetable boards; then there was Alice stepping off her train, looking around, and now walking towards me.
‘Great to see you,’ I said, to acknowledge the fond feeling inside.
‘Great to be here,’ she replied, and kissed me Euro-style.
Outside, in clear sunlight, her firm features and usually animated mouth seemed drawn, her cheeks slightly puffy from lack of sleep. She put her travelling bag down and ran both hands through the thick hennaed hair, drawing it tight as she stretched, her neck curved back and eyes squeezed shut. She had freshly plucked her eyebrows.
‘Something to eat?’ I asked.
‘Did you find a place to stay?’ she came back, recomposing her features and granting me a smile. ‘I’d very much like to wash off that journey.’
Emerging from Amsterdam’s station, I had to admit that I hadn’t. But we immediately noticed a sign for the Tourist Information kiosk. It was on a traffic island, with the belongings of youth on the move in heaps outside. At the kiosk we were sold a map and handed a list of places to stay, the cheaper ones ringed in biro. Most were very near, towards the city centre. Heading in that direction, beside a canal with hump-backed cobbled bridges, we found ourselves entering the sex-industry quarter.
‘Hmm, pretty shabby,’ she said.
We found the address of the first recommended hotel and stepped up into its entrance hall. A youngish-looking man wearing a lumberjack shirt was at work with a broom on the floor of a dining area. It was a cheerfully decorated place, making no allusions to the main commercial interests of the district.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ I muttered, turning to the man with the broom, hoping he understood English.
‘Do you have a room for two?’
The man was glumly nodding his head.
‘May we look at it?’
The room, in deep shadow, was on the third floor, at a level with the upper part of a Dutch Calvinist church tower visible from its window; it seemed a glimpse of the street before the sex trade took over. The double bed was low. Alice sat down on a corner, testing its firmness, not liking to sleep on something too soft. She pronounced the bed comfortable enough. The room’s one light bulb had no shade. It hung from the high cracked ceiling, pendulous on its twisted cord. A sink was set into the wall behind the door. But it would do till we found something better.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, after we’d both washed and gone down, ‘what did you mean by “beggars can’t be choosers”.’
We were crossing the wide street called Rokin, a main thoroughfare lined with elaborately dressed windows of department stores.
‘I didn’t realize how expensive it was here. It’s not that I’m short of money or anything. Just have to be careful …’
‘Puts a bit of a dampener on things,’ is all she said.
After that Saturday spent going round the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums, then Rembrandt’s House, we were making our way back from a Chinese meal, walking under trees alongside a narrow canal that led up towards the station. With nightfall, the streets round our hotel took on their especially business weekend character. And there it was, a thing I’d never seen before: as if the shops were all staying open very late, as if the women clad in scanty baby-doll nightwear were modeling unusually frilly bedroom suites in a furniture store window. Only it was they themselves, those girls sitting with strange patience on display, set faces bathed in a pinkish red light, who were the emporias’ merchandise.
The dark pavements under the ground floor windows of those brothels, sex shops, strip and peep shows were crammed with jostling people: single boys, couples, gaggles of international executives. Here were men accompanied by girls who might have just encountered them. Outside the clip joints were the set frowns of bouncers and fixed grins of living invitations to step inside and see what was at that moment being revealed and up for grabs.
‘Dope, coke, acid, horse, speed?’ said a voice from a doorway. She shook her head definitively.
‘No, man?’ the voice called.
Flexing her knees up ahead, an Asian girl was making her play for passing trade. Perhaps she’d been selling too hard, for a man close by, instead of walking on, turned and started to abuse her. The girl herself hurled an insult at the man and spun contemptuously away.
‘I missed a day last week,’ Alice said. ‘Do you think, to be on the safe side, we could use a contraceptive?’
There was a shop up ahead on the left. Racks of magazines in cellophane wrappings promised to reveal all you could conceivably do with a body of either sex, or both, so long as you paid, pulled off the wrappers, and cracked the spine. There were varieties of aids in red and black, leather, rubber, and nylon, electrical devices for satisfying desires, and pink inflatable models. The shop had a vast range of condoms. Some were bright-coloured, crinkly and crenellated. The cool summer night air and a faint scent of canal water greeted me as she took my arm outside the door.
What had the young man in a tie-dyed T-shirt said to the other in a black and chrome wheelchair? Provoked somehow, the man with no more than stumps of legs suddenly launched himself from his mobile seat. He was yelling and throwing punches at the groin of the one in the T-shirt. Astonished by this violent assault against such odds, the young man backed quickly away. He was fending off the other, who came up to his waist, and trying to appease, or at least to stop him. Yet at great speed, on hands and stumps, the infuriated disabled pursued the able, taunting and attacking him with murderous intent.
‘Christ,’ she said, ‘do you think he’s got a knife?’
We crossed the street and quickened our pace to pass by on the other side. There in that zone of splayed or interlocking legs, some failed deal, betrayal, or affront must have infuriated the still young, but badly disabled man.
Relieved to be back in our bare room, she drew the curtains for us. Even so, there was quite enough illumination from the street to make the light bulb on its twisted cord unnecessary. Over by the basin, preparing herself for bed, she took off her clothes, folding them neatly in the wardrobe to the left of the sink. As she did so, I was scanning across her suntanned back, the vertebrae at the nape of her neck, and pale stripe where her bikini strap went. I was sitting at the side of the bed, naked too, leaning over to place one condom in its shiny blue packet under a pillow. The quiet of the room was perpetually invaded by voices of traffickers and punters from the street below.
The Dutch headmaster and his wife, in bathing costumes, had scampered off towards the waves—running in a vigorous diagonal, glancing to each other as they approached the sea. They were a well-matched pair, both about six feet tall, equally athletic, fair hair ruffled by a stiff offshore breeze. We were standing in a defile between sword-blades of sand dune grass, fully clothed. I was stooping to untie my laces as Alice took off her sandals. We were both some inches shorter than the Dutch couple, and differently built—a skeletal long distance runner courting his bonny Scottish lassie. Nor did our hosts hesitate as the breakers whitened round their waists, but struck out energetically into deeper water.
Maarten Verhagen and his wife Nina would drive up to Bergen-aan-Zee most Sundays from May down through September. They were only too happy to enjoy their regular swimming party with the two young English people that Maarten had found hitching on the road outside Amsterdam. We had been standing on the grass verge of a dual carriageway leading inland to the north. Almost the first car to come up was Maarten’s.
September in the Rain Page 10