Gertrude reached for his clothes, pulling on his jockstrap, his track-suit trousers and his socks. She slipped his shoes on to his feet and tied the laces. The wistful quality that she had seemed to have the night before had gone. She was brisk, unsentimental, and he did not attempt to resist her; he allowed her to dress him, as if he were a child. It was beginning to sink in now, the knowledge that they were about to let him go, and yet a feeling of suspense hung in the room, like mist, making it difficult to see too far ahead; he didn’t want to say anything in case he broke the spell.
While Gertrude was buttoning his shirt, he suddenly realised that his hands were free. He could have reached out and taken her by the throat. He could have strangled her. She seemed to guess what he was thinking because she looked up quickly. She was standing so close to him that he could see a burst vein in the white part of her left eye. He looked away from her. The moment passed.
Once she had finished dressing him she offered him a choice. If he was prepared to co-operate, they could simply slip a hood over his head. Otherwise, they would have to inject him with anaesthetic, as before. He told her he would rather wear the hood.
Astrid stepped forwards.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t have to warn me.”
As Astrid reached up with the hood, he had his last glimpse of the women, an image that seemed to print itself on to his mind, as motionless, as fixed in time, as any photograph. Gertrude had positioned herself at Astrid’s shoulder, with one hand folded over the other and held just below her breasts. Slightly to the left of Gertrude, and standing deeper in the room, was Maude, her head still angled away from him, as if she could not bear to look. Then just the bare floorboards, with their dust-balls and their splinters, stretching off into the thick grey light. . . .
•
They led him down the two steep flights of stairs. Instead of turning right at the bottom and doubling back towards the garden, they moved straight ahead, taking a right turn, then a left turn, until at last they walked, not into the open air, as he had been expecting, but into a large indoor space. The temperature dropped, and he could smell damp earth and paraffin. He might be in a garage, he thought—or some kind of warehouse, maybe. Though there was movement all around him, the rustle of the women’s clothes, nobody spoke. A key scraped in a lock. Then, just as he was being bundled into the van—he could tell it was a van because of the double-doors at the back and the corrugated metal floor inside—he heard the strangest sound, a sound that was somewhere between keening and wailing. Only later did he identify the source of it, and by that time they were driving. It was Maude, of course. It could only have been Maude. Perhaps she had learned that he was being freed. Or else they had told her that she couldn’t come with them. Once again, she had been mistreated, overlooked.
It was hard to sit with his wrists shackled behind his back. When the van pulled away, he almost toppled sideways, and one of the women had to reach out and steady him. He wondered if she had a loaded syringe with her, just in case. For the first ten minutes there were constant twists and turns. There were potholes too, which made him think that the road was being repaired. Either that, or it simply had no surface yet. Then only smoothness for a long time, smoothness and the roar of traffic. A motorway, presumably. Once or twice the woman sitting next to him shouted to the woman who was driving. She spoke so fast, though, and the engine was making so much noise, that he didn’t understand a word.
They reached what he thought must be a built-up area. The van stopped and started every thirty seconds, which told him there were traffic-lights or traffic-jams. Was it rush-hour already? He wished he could work out what make of van it was by listening to the engine. Some people could do that. But he had never known the first thing about cars. . . .
At last, after driving for about an hour, they stopped. He heard the abrupt creak of the hand-brake, but noticed that they kept the engine running. A woman walked round to the back of the van and opened the double-doors. She unlocked the leg-irons first, then the hand-cuffs. Though he was still wearing the hood, he could smell fumes rising from the van’s exhaust. Taking him by the arm, the woman helped him to climb out into the open air. He felt grass beneath his feet.
“Lie down on your stomach,” she said.
He did as he was told. The thought that he had had the night before came to him again, only it was stronger now, more urgent. They’re going to kill me. I’m going to be killed.
“Start counting,” the woman said, “and don’t move before you reach one hundred.”
He began to count under his breath. A door slammed shut. The van revved twice and drove away.
He lay on the grass and counted. He did not move.
Even when he had reached one hundred he did not move.
•
He lay there with the hood over his head long after he had finished counting and all he could feel was the earth beneath him, which he pressed himself against, which he clung to, as if it was a piece of wreckage that would carry him to safety. There was even a rushing sound, as if of waves.
At last, he sat up. Sat motionless, with the hood still on, and listened. Traffic. In the distance, though. Somewhere behind him. He slowly loosened the drawstring and pulled off the hood. Daylight burst against the surface of his eyes.
He was sitting on mown grass, next to a pavement. There were trees above his head. In front of him stood a small boy, four or five years old. The boy was wearing a pale-blue cardigan and red trousers, and he was clasping one hand in the other, as priests do when they deliver sermons. Behind the boy there was a row of houses. The glass in the apartment windows looked black.
“Don’t be frightened,” he told the boy, in English.
The boy’s eyes had opened wide, and his bottom lip stuck out. “It’s all right,” he said gently, switching to Dutch. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”
The boy turned and ran off down the street, his legs jerky, oddly stiff, like a puppet or a cripple. The boy was screaming as he ran.
He watched the boy disappear round a corner, then he stood up. His eyes were still adjusting to the glare. The sky was grey, but strangely dazzling, and a light breeze pushed against his face. He began to walk.
The street felt private, secretive, almost as if a curfew had been declared. Perhaps it was simply an effect created by the overhanging foliage. Or perhaps it was just him. A strip of city parkland lay directly to his left. The trees were part of it. A footpath curved past an empty wooden bench and on through areas of grass that looked too green. Beyond the path, beyond the trees, he could just make out the tarnished silver of an artificial lake. To his right, on the other side of the street, stood a row of semi-detached houses. They were made of pale-red brick, and all the window-frames had been painted white. Newspapers stuck out of many of the letter-boxes, which seemed unusual, given the time of day. He saw a man sitting at a table in a ground-floor window, doing a crossword. Everything would make sense, he thought, if he was calm, methodical. Everything would fit together.
He walked on until he reached a main road. The name seemed vaguely familiar. He thought he must be in the outskirts of Amsterdam, though he couldn’t have said where exactly. If he looked in one direction he could see a flyover. He could hear the steady, hypnotic roar of cars travelling at high speed. He turned round, faced the other way. A girl of about eight was running up the pavement towards him with one hand raised above her head. She was holding a broken cassette. Half the tape had wrapped itself around her, encircling her blue denim dress and her bare legs. The rest trailed in the air behind her, yards and yards of it. She was laughing. Beyond her, in the distance, he could see a row of shops. Perhaps he could ask there.
He had to choose between a bicycle shop, a supermarket, and a bar with small gold and silver trophies in the window. He chose the bar. It was dark in there. The woman behind the bar was smoking. He saw the end of her cigarette glow red as he walked in. He sat down on a stool and ordered a beer. He had
n’t realised how thirsty he was, and the beer tasted delicious, more delicious, possibly, than any beer he had ever drunk before.
“This is very good,” he told the woman behind the bar.
She smiled at him, but did not say anything.
“How far is it from here to the centre?” he asked.
“Three kilometres,” she said. “Maybe four.”
“How long would it take me to walk?”
“Half an hour,” she said, tilting one hand in the air to indicate that this was only a rough estimate.
She had bronze hair—it had been dyed, presumably—and there was a smooth, pale bump in the middle of her left cheek. It had been a long time since he had seen somebody’s face, and he found it impossible not to stare. He was noticing her clothes too—the crocheted turquoise cardigan, the rust-brown skirt. But she caught him staring, and she stared back. He thought he had better say something.
“How much do I owe you for the beer?”
“Two seventy-five.”
His hand dropped to his track-suit trouser pocket. Suddenly he wasn’t sure whether he had any money. He reached into one pocket, and then another, and finally into his zipped back pocket. His hand closed round a note. Ten guilders. This was the money he had taken out with him so he could buy Brigitte her cigarettes. He stared down at the note as if it held the key to what had happened. In that moment he felt that he should buy the cigarettes, and that, if he did so, he would be closing a circle, he would be bringing the story to its natural, its intended, conclusion. He looked up again. The woman was still watching him suspiciously.
He handed the ten-guilder note to her.
“Do you have a cigarette machine?” he asked.
“It’s behind you.”
He swung round on his stool. The machine stood in the corner, next to the door that led to the toilet. On top of it, oddly, was a plaster bust of Marilyn Monroe.
“Could you give me some change for it, please?”
He fed the coins into the slot and watched the packet drop into the stainless-steel lip at the bottom of the machine.
Outside, on the street, he slid the cigarettes into his back pocket. As he turned away from the bar he had the feeling he was being watched. He looked up. Yes, there. Somebody was standing in the window, watching him. It was several seconds before he realised that he was staring at his own reflection. He moved closer to the window, closer still, until he was standing less than eighteen inches from the glass. Though he did not think that he had changed at all, he hardly recognised himself. He remembered how he had looked into the stainless steel of the handcuffs and seen nothing except his left eye or a fragment of his neck or hair. He had wondered if he would ever be whole again. Was this part of the same thing? How long had it been since he last saw himself in the mirror? How long had he been gone?
He turned and walked back into the bar, then hesitated just inside the door, uncertain how to phrase the question. The woman in the turquoise cardigan watched him warily, one hand rising to touch the pale bump on her left cheek.
“Do you know what the date is?” he asked.
“The date?” The woman’s eyes narrowed, as if she suspected him of laying a trap for her.
He nodded, smiled. “Today’s date.”
“It’s May the fourth.”
May the fourth. And he had been abducted on the sixteenth of April. Which meant that he had been missing for eighteen days.
Eighteen days.
He thanked the woman, then he walked out of the bar again, and this time he did not look back.
•
He had been abandoned in a suburb of Amsterdam, about three and a half kilometres west of his apartment. After buying the beer and the cigarettes, he didn’t have enough money left for public transport, so he began to walk. He walked fast, ignoring his surroundings. He wanted to cover the ground as quickly as possible; he wanted to be home. Brigitte, he thought. Just that. No other thoughts would form.
As he moved through the city he had a feeling of intense exhilaration, a feeling that was close to euphoria. And yet, at the same time, he felt as if he was on the verge of tears.
It took him twenty minutes to reach streets that he recognised and, with that recognition, the sense of urgency grew. Through Hugo de Grootplein, across the wide sweep of Nassaukade. A motorbike hurtled past him at such speed that it sounded like a person sneezing. Over Lijnbaansgracht. The sun was shining now. Bicycle bells rang brightly. A bar released the slightly medicinal perfume of jenever into the air. . . .
Then he was walking down Egelantiersgracht. Pots of red geraniums glowed on the decks of houseboats. The trees looked greener than he remembered, their reflections undulating hypnotically on the canal’s dark surface. There was a drowsiness about it all, the drowsiness of three-thirty on a warm spring afternoon. As he approached the house he saw that the windows on the fourth floor were open. His heart turned over. He felt the sudden irrational urge to flee.
He took out his keys and looked at them for a moment, then he opened the door and walked into the cool interior. The letter-box was empty. He climbed the stairs. The fawn-coloured carpet, the chalk-white walls. That faint, sweet smell of grain, as if the building had once been used for milling flour.
He was breathing hard by the time he reached the door of the apartment. He felt under his shirt, found that his chest was slick with sweat. Sliding the key into the lock, he turned it once. The door opened with its usual steeply ascending whine. Air from the apartment pushed past him, into the stairwell. He stepped over the threshold, closing the door gently behind him. And there she was, standing at the far end of the living-room, watering the plants. . . .
She must have heard the door open, she must have realised who it was, and yet she didn’t put down the glass jug she was holding and she didn’t move towards him. She didn’t say anything either. She just glanced over her shoulder, with her weight on her left foot, her face alert and yet composed, almost expressionless. It would have been the perfect place to end a ballet, he thought, because the action had been interrupted halfway through, because her position was so beautifully incomplete, hold it, he would have said, just hold it, and the lights go out right there.
THREE
I stood just inside the door with my hands by my sides. All my lightness and purpose had gone, and there was only a feeling of paralysis. I felt like a bad likeness of myself, a souvenir carved crudely out of wood. Then—almost a reflex, this—I reached into my pocket, took out the cigarettes I had bought and held them out to her. She was still standing by the row of windows that overlooked the canal. The glass jug she was holding, half full of water, glinted with an unearthly silver light, like a holy object, but Brigitte herself was hard to see, virtually a silhouette.
“What are those?” she said.
I tried to smile. “Your cigarettes.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
When she said those words, something collapsed inside me. I thought back to that sunlit afternoon in the studio canteen, my notebook open on the table, the empty ashtray, the coffee cup. . . . I thought of how Brigitte had walked towards me in her dark-green leotard and her laddered tights, a piece of velvet showing in her hair. I could still hear her footsteps, light and yet resourceful. I could still see the frown balanced between her eyebrows, two tiny furrows—a j and a j reversed. . . . If she did not understand why I had bought the cigarettes, if she did not remember, then what chance did I have of explaining things to her, how could I even begin?
•
“You left me,” she said.
She was watching me across the kitchen table. Close up, she looked as if she hadn’t slept, the skin beneath her eyes dark-brown, like the flesh of olives.
“I didn’t leave you,” I said. “How could I leave you?”
“There was someone else. . . .”
Her eyes drifted away from me, and the fingers of one hand lifted and curled against the corner of her mouth. She looked so sad just then, so genui
nely forsaken, that I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I had the feeling she would only pull away. I stared down at the table, shook my head. Outside, a clock was striking six. Though I had been back for less than three hours, it already felt like an eternity.
“There was someone else,” she said, “another woman.”
“No, Brigitte. There was no one else.” I hesitated. “Well—”
“There. You see?” A kind of triumph rose on to her face, a triumph that was wounded and perverse.
She had wrongfooted me the moment I walked into the apartment. She had her own theory about where I had been for the past eighteen days. I had been unfaithful to her, she said. I had embarrassed her. Betrayed her. The conclusion she had jumped to in my absence had become the truth.
You left me.
Her certainty took me by surprise. I was certain of nothing. Also—and crucially, perhaps—I didn’t have the strength to challenge her. I felt tugged in too many different directions at once; I couldn’t seem to anchor myself in one clear feeling.
At some point I went into the bathroom and ran myself a bath. It was all I could think of doing. I soaked in the water until my skin turned pink and the sweat stood out on my forehead. . . . Afterwards, I gathered up all the clothes that I had been wearing earlier, carried them out to the kitchen and pushed them into the rubbish bin, deep down, where nobody would find them. I could hear Brigitte on the phone upstairs, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. As I stood there, up to my elbows in wilting lettuce leaves and ugly scabs of orange peel, I realised that I had eaten nothing since breakfast.
When Brigitte appeared a few minutes later, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a sandwich and a glass of milk. The fact that I was eating seemed to upset her. That I should be hungry at a time like this. . . . Brigitte had always expected absolute loyalty. If you were with her, you had to be there for her. That was the way she needed to be loved, and I had never had a problem with it. I wanted to be there for her. One hundred per cent, no matter what. When I disappeared, though, I think she saw it as abandonment—and from abandonment to infidelity, well, it’s not such a big leap to make. Brigitte was the kind of person who would rather believe in something definite, even if it hurt her, than go on living in a state of ignorance or doubt.
The Book of Revelation Page 10