I walked out of Central Station, past the men loitering suspiciously near public telephones, past the tangled mass of bicycles in racks, and crossed that bleak, wide-open area beyond the trams, making for Zeedijk. I had always liked the red-light district during the day, especially when the sun was shining—some bleary, slept-in quality the streets had, the neon diluted, pale, and, every now and then, a girl on her way to work in full make-up and impossible high-heels—but it struck me, as I walked along, that I had been attracted to that world only because of its distance from my own. It had been a kind of romanticism, the naïve romanticism of the inexperienced, the uninformed. Now, though, the sight of a woman dressed in latex or plastic felt like something I knew about, felt much too familiar, in fact, and I hurried onwards, with my hands pushed deep into my pockets and my head lowered.
When I arrived at the tattoo parlour, the door stood half open, and loud music pounded through the gap. The window was smoked-glass, revealing nothing of the interior. I hesitated for a moment, wondering what kind of place I had chosen, then I walked inside. A man in a black leather vest sat at a counter with a newspaper in front of him. He was hunched right over, his bare forearms spread on either side of the front page, as if they were guarding it; I could only see the top of his head, his pale hair swirling as it closed in on his crown, like the pattern on a snail’s shell. I doubt he could have heard me move towards him, not with that music crashing out of the speakers, but he must have sensed my presence in the room because he looked up as I approached and then reached out and turned the volume down. I explained that I had a tattoo I wanted to get rid of. He asked me where it was. I pointed at it through my clothes. Pushing his paper to one side, he leaned back in his chair. For years, you couldn’t get rid of a tattoo, he told me, not unless you used a scalpel, that is. You literally had to lift the top three or four layers of skin away. Yes, he said when he saw the look on my face, that was the only way. He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, then offered me the packet. I shook my head. To remove a tattoo in those days, he went on, it was like surgery. Then, in the seventies, people started using acid. But acid was not so precise, and it could also be painful.
“Now, with lasers—well, it’s much easier. . . .”
“Lasers?” I said. “How does that work?”
“They break up the cells that form the tattoo, so the ink disperses. Of course, the process leaves a scar—” He broke off, shrugged.
“Could you do it today?”
He placed his cigarette on the groove in the ashtray. “Show me the tattoo.”
I undid my trousers and pulled them down a little so he could see.
“You want to remove this?” he said.
I nodded.
“I’m not surprised.” He looked up at me. “Did you do it?”
“No. Not me.”
Still looking at me, he eased back in his chair again.
“OK,” he said. “I understand.” A distant smile appeared on his face, and I wondered what it was he thought he knew.
Later, while he was working on the tattoo, I felt the room shake slightly. Without looking up, he told me that the Metro passed beneath the building. He talked on, but I was no longer listening. I was thinking about the day when I had been allowed outside, to breathe fresh air, and how I had heard a train in the distance, the rhythm of its wheels laboured, tentative, as if it was slowing down, pulling into a station. Then I remembered church bells jangling. . . .
A railway station, a church—these were co-ordinates, I realised. And if they were co-ordinates, then possibly, just possibly, I could use them to locate the house in which I had been imprisoned.
•
For the next week or two I walked the streets, covering Amsterdam methodically, area by area. With each day that passed, I grew steadily more exhausted, more disillusioned. The co-ordinates weren’t as useful as I’d imagined they might be. There were just too many places on the map where stations and churches coincided. The city began to irritate me. The houses that lined the canals weren’t houses at all, I felt, but façades built out of brightly coloured cardboard; the famous hump-backed bridges were equally two-dimensional. If I reached out with one hand, I could push the whole lot over. Only one area drew me back, exerting an uneasy magnetism I found it difficult to rationalise. It was in the east, near Muiderpoort. Immigrants lived there mostly—people from Morocco, Turkey, Surinam. Empty beer-bottles had been used to prop sash windows open, and wooden beads or strips of coloured plastic hung in place of the traditional Dutch net curtains. In the café where I stopped for something to drink, black women stood about in short leather skirts and sunglasses. Outside, I saw a tree with half a dozen children clustered in its branches, like birds or fruit. One road ran parallel to the train-tracks, which were raised high above it, on an embankment. The ponderous trundling of the wheels carried into the surrounding side-streets. There were three churches in the area, all within earshot of the railway, and I found two or three places where the sounds combined in a way that seemed familiar. But how to take it any further, how to narrow it down?
I was standing on the pavement, trying to think, when a hand wrapped itself around my forearm. I turned to see a man standing beside me, Turkish by the look of him, with a mournful droop to his jowls and a two-day growth of beard.
“Zoeken?” He paused, and then continued in English. “What are you looking?”
It was hard to explain, of course. I hesitated.
“Here is Javaplein,” he said, and his free hand moved in a horizontal semi-circle, the palm facing upwards, the fingers slightly curled.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”
The man took a firmer grip on my forearm and peered at me with a troubled expression on his face. He wanted to help me. I wasn’t allowing him to.
“I’m looking for three women,” I said suddenly.
He wiped his mouth, an odd downwards motion of one hand, which, because of his stubble, made a soft scraping noise, like a match being struck on the side of a matchbox.
“Women?” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at me for a moment longer, then he waved at me, a gesture that had a dismissive feel to it, and turned away.
But perhaps he had helped me after all, I thought—though not in the way he had intended. He had prompted me, given me something I could work with. I began to knock on people’s doors.
My first encounter was with a black woman in her sixties. She opened her front door about a foot and peered through the gap. She had strange orange-gold hair which was probably a wig.
“I’m looking for three women,” I told her. “Three women who live in the same house.”
The woman stared at me, her head wobbling a little.
“It’s possible they don’t live together,” I went on. “It’s possible they’re just friends. Have you seen anyone like that?”
The woman was still staring, but the gap seemed to have narrowed.
“Three women,” I said. “Dutch.”
The woman closed the door in my face, slowly though, as if she didn’t want to be rude.
Further down the street I spoke to an old man in a cardigan. No, he didn’t know anything. No, nothing at all. I had the feeling that he hadn’t even listened to the question. In the next street a Moroccan answered the door. He didn’t understand what I was talking about, even when I spoke to him in French. Two houses further on I came across a young woman holding a baby. Before I could finish asking her about the women, she accused me of being a plain-clothes policeman. When I denied it, she called me a liar. The Turkish man’s reaction turned out to be a sort of template for the various forms of suspicion I aroused in everyone I came across.
The encounter that put an end to my enquiries happened on a street that overlooked the railway line. When I rang the bell, a burly white man in a silk shirt and snow-washed jeans burst on to the pavement. He had opened the door as if the door was a steer that he was trying to wrestle to the ground. He was r
ed in the face, and breathing hard. I could hear loud voices coming from inside the house.
“Wat moet je?” he said.
I asked if he had seen three Dutch women.
He looked down the street, first one way, then the other, then he put his red face close to mine. “Rot op.” When I hesitated, he leaned into me still further. “Ben je doof? Rot op!”
I had no choice but to turn round and walk away. On reaching the corner of the street, I looked back, over my shoulder.
He was still watching me.
•
It was that same week, curiously enough, that I met Mr Olsen. Bouhtala held a small cocktail party in his apartment to celebrate his birthday (no one seemed to know how old Bouhtala was, and he chose not to enlighten us), and Olsen was one of the fifteen or twenty people who had been invited. When I first saw him, he was standing by the window in a greenish-brown wool sweater, a glass of beer held in the air below his chin. He had an affable, slightly rumpled face, and his wavy hair, once fair, was lightly dusted with grey. I suppose he was in his early fifties. Most of Bouhtala’s guests had the look of dilettantes—one arrived in a maroon velvet jacket, with a yellow rose in his lapel; another leaned against the bookshelves in a tight black suit and a black shirt—and their jobs, if they had jobs, were as glamorous and mysterious as his. Olsen stood out because he looked so ordinary. Of course, at that point, I had no idea that he worked for the Jeugdpolitie, a branch of the Dutch police that deals with crimes such as child abuse and violence against women. If I had been asked to guess what his profession was I would probably have said schoolmaster.
I walked over and introduced myself. Olsen was Danish, from Arhus, but he had lived in Holland for the last ten years. Then we had something in common, I told him. His eyes wrinkled at the edges; he lifted his glass of beer and drank. We had Isabel in common too. He had met her several times, through Paul Bouhtala. She had impressed him greatly, he said, not only with her elegance, but with her discipline. Like most people, perhaps, he hadn’t appreciated the amount of sheer hard work that went into the creation of a ballet. I asked him what he did for a living. The answer took me by surprise, and, wanting to hear more, I began to question him. At some point, he brought up the subject of unsolved crimes—and, more specifically, crimes that could not be solved because they had never even been reported. He called these crimes “dark number cases,” a phrase that has stayed with me ever since. Perhaps I drank too many cocktails that night—I have never been much good with alcohol—because I remember telling him that I knew of just such a crime. If he was curious he didn’t show it. He didn’t cock his head or raise his eyebrows, as some people might have done. No, that wasn’t his way. He just watched me over the rim of his beer-glass, his grey eyes steady, intent. I told him that a friend of mine, a male friend, had been abducted by several women and held in a room for eighteen days. Olsen was silent for a moment, and then he laughed and said, “That’s terrible.”
Though I had never told a man the story before, this was exactly the kind of reaction I would have predicted. Despite that, I found that I too was laughing. A few minutes later, though, I told Olsen that I needed another drink—he wanted one as well—and I left the room with both our glasses. In the hallway I hesitated for a moment, then I put the glasses down on the hall table, opened the front door and walked out of the apartment, closing the door behind me.
It was a misty night, more typical of October than July. I buttoned my jacket and, turning the collar up, set off through the orchard. For the past few years, it had been allowed to run wild: there was no footpath, and the grass had grown waist-high in many places. As I moved cautiously among the trees I trod on an apple; I felt it resist for a moment, then give beneath my weight, as if part of it, at least, had rotted.
When I reached the road I turned left, away from the house, and walked off down the hill. The fuzzy glow of a street-lamp, the tick of a bicycle freewheeling past. . . . Why had I left the party so abruptly? Had I wanted Olsen to surprise me with his reaction, to confound my expectations? Or was it simply that I had said as much as I could say?
At the bottom of the hill I stopped beside a gate. Beyond it lay a narrow waterway. I gazed at the still, flat surface, silence gathering around me. A rowing-boat glided towards me out of the fog. A man in a dark peaked cap, his shoulders hunched over the oars. The almost glassy trickle of water off the blades. . . .
Perhaps it was the shock of mentioning it at all.
Later that night, lying in bed, I felt shaken to have come so close to a confession—and to a policeman, of all people! I heard his laughter, then my laughter. I heard him say, That’s terrible. There had been a lightness about the exchange that I could never have anticipated.
The next day I apologised to Paul Bouhtala for leaving the party without so much as a goodbye. He smiled and said, “Well, it’s not as if we’ll never see each other again,” a statement which, given what happened two weeks later, had a quality of tempting fate about it.
•
The summer was drawing to a close. One warm evening in August I sat in Bouhtala’s apartment, listening to another of his stories. He was telling me how he came to own his cigarette lighter. This was no ordinary lighter. About four inches high, and made of steel, it was a black panther sitting on its haunches. Its eyes were real diamonds.
Bouhtala had just set the scene—a nightclub in Durban, 1962—when I began to smile. He stopped in mid-sentence, one eyebrow lifting quizzically, and reached for his cocktail. In the gloomy half-light of the room his shirt-cuff was so white that it seemed an object in its own right, moving entirely independently of him.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“I have decided to take a leaf out of your book.” I felt my smile widen. What was it about talking English to foreigners that made me use these old-fashioned idioms? I paused, and then I said, “I have decided to travel.”
That morning something extraordinary had happened. By the time I got downstairs, the post had already been delivered. At first it looked as if there was just a postcard—the Munch painting on the front told me that it had come from Isabel—but when I reached down I found a letter lying underneath. The handwriting was my mother’s. That, in itself, was nothing unusual; she often wrote to me with news of home. I scanned Isabel’s postcard quickly—There’s too much light in Norway, she complained. How on earth does anybody sleep?—then I opened the letter. The first time I read it I wasn’t certain that I had understood. I read it again, much more slowly. Afterwards, I walked out on to the terrace and sat there for a long time, staring into the pine forest. My great-uncle had died earlier that month, and he had left me approximately sixty thousand pounds in his will.
I told Bouhtala all this, and he listened intently, with his dark eyes fixed on me and his hands folded in his lap. Until he had started to describe Durban, I said, I hadn’t been sure what I was going to do. Ever since the letter had arrived I had been wondering about it. Now, though—thanks to him—I knew.
Bouhtala did not appear particularly surprised, neither by the windfall, nor by my decision to travel, though something did seem to be weighing on him all of a sudden. His head had sunk into his shoulders, and he had settled a little deeper in his leather chair.
“You were close to your great-uncle?” he asked.
“No, we weren’t close,” I said. “In fact, I only met him once in my life. About five years ago. He came to see me at Sadler’s Wells.” I paused. “He lived in Canada.”
Bouhtala nodded, watching me. “He must have approved of you.”
“It’s strange,” I went on, “but I was beginning to worry about money.” I paused again, and then added, “Now that I’m not dancing any more—”
A silence followed. I could hear the house creaking, the hiss of drizzle on the trees outside the window. The room seemed to darken. It was the first time I had admitted it out loud, and the words sounded curiously awkward, even bogus, as if they had been spoken by a medioc
re actor.
At last Bouhtala lifted his glass from the table at his elbow. Lips pursed, he watched the tiny strings of bubbles rise to the surface and then disappear. He asked me where I would go. Everywhere, I told him. I’d go everywhere.
Bouhtala smiled quickly, then drank. “You will not regret it.”
He replaced his glass on the table beside him, and, sitting back, reached up with two fingers of his right hand and smoothed his moustache. It was a gesture I had become accustomed to, but one which, in the circumstances, seemed to take on special significance. In that moment I felt as though Bouhtala was bestowing his own personal seal of approval on me, a kind of unspoken blessing.
•
I knew I had to see my parents before I left. I didn’t really feel ready, but I flew to England anyway, just for the weekend. Grey clouds flashed past the window as the plane shuddered and bumped through the air above London, and rain left slanting scratches on the glass. Though it was August, the lights had been switched on in all the airport buildings. The tarmac gleamed, slick and black, under a sullen sky.
On the train down to Hampshire I thought about my unlikely friendship with Bouhtala. I had seen him no more than once or twice a week, but I had seen almost nobody else; he had become the one solid point in my new fragile life, and I felt oddly indebted to him. I turned to the window. The rain was still coming down. A white horse stood under a tree in the corner of a field, its head lowered, its mane lank and matted. I smiled faintly as I remembered how Bouhtala had talked to me once about the beauty of English skin, and how one had to look upon it as some kind of compensation for the horrors of the climate.
The Book of Revelation Page 13