Us

by Nicholls, David

  My son, by contrast, was of a generation that no longer thought of countries in terms of Allied or Axis, or judged people on the basis of their grandparents’ allegiances. Outside of first-person shoot-’em-ups, the War never crossed Albie’s mind and maybe this was healthy. Maybe this was progress.

  But it didn’t feel like progress on the train. It seemed like disrespect, ignorance and complacency and I told him so, and in response he tossed his book onto the table, muttered beneath his breath, clambered over Connie into the aisle and away.

  We waited for the other passengers to return to their newspapers. ‘Are you all right?’ she said quietly, with the intonation of ‘are you mad?’

  ‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you.’

  We travelled on in silence for two or three kilometres, before I said, ‘So clearly, that was all my fault.’

  ‘Not entirely. About eighty-twenty.’

  ‘No need to ask in whose favour.’

  Another two kilometres slipped by. She picked up her book, though the pages didn’t turn. Fields, warehouses, more fields, the backs of houses. I said, ‘By which I mean you might sometimes support me in these arguments.’

  ‘I do,’ said Connie, ‘if you’re right.’

  ‘I can’t recall a single instance—’

  ‘Douglas, I’m neutral. I’m Switzerland.’

  ‘Really? Because it’s clear to me where your allegiances—’

  ‘I don’t have “allegiances”. It’s not a war! Though Christ knows it feels like it sometimes.’

  We passed through Brussels, though I could not now tell you much about it. In a park to the left I caught a glimpse of the Atomium, the stainless-steel structure built for the World’s Fair, a fifties version of our present day and something I’d have liked to see. But I couldn’t bear to mention it, and could only manage:

  ‘I found his attitude upsetting.’

  ‘Fine, I understand,’ said Connie, her hand on my forearm now. ‘But he’s young and you sound so … pompous, Douglas. You sound like some old duffer calling for National Service to be reintroduced. In fact, you know who you sound like? You sound like your dad!’

  I’d not heard this before. I had never expected to hear it and I would need time to take it in, but Connie continued:

  ‘Why can you never let things go? You just pick and pick away at them, at Albie. I know not everything is easy at the moment, Christ knows it’s not easy for me either, but you’re up, you’re down, you’re manic, chattering away, or you’re storming out. It’s … hard, it’s very hard.’ In a lower voice. ‘That’s why I’m asking again: are you feeling all right? You must be honest. Can you do this journey or shall we all go home?’

  66. peace talks

  I found him as we entered Antwerp, sitting on a high stool in the buffet car eating a small tub of Pringles. His eyes, I noted, were a little red.

  ‘There you are!’

  ‘Here I am.’

  ‘I’ve walked all the way from Brussels! I thought you’d got off.’

  ‘Well, I’m here.’

  ‘Bit early in the day for Pringles, isn’t it?’

  Albie sighed, and I decided to let the point go. ‘It’s an emotive subject, war.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘I think I lost my temper.’

  He upended the tub into his mouth.

  ‘Your mother thinks I should apologise.’

  ‘And you’ve got to do what Mum says.’

  ‘No, I want to. I want to apologise.’

  ‘S’okay. It’s done now.’ He licked his fingertip and started swabbing the bottom of the tub.

  ‘So are you coming back, Egg?’

  ‘In a bit.’

  ‘Okay. Okay. Excited about Amsterdam?’

  He shrugged. ‘Can’t wait.’

  ‘No. Me neither. Me neither. Well …’ I placed a hand on his shoulder and took it off again. ‘See you in a bit.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Albie?’

  ‘I would come with you, to the War Cemetery, if you really wanted. There’s just other places I’d rather go first.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ I looked around me for some way to cement the truce. ‘D’you want anything else to eat? They have those waffles. Or a Kinder Bueno?’

  ‘No, because I’m not six.’

  ‘No. Right,’ I said, and returned to my seat.

  And that, pretty much, was everything that happened to us in Belgium.

  67. grachtengordel

  I had visited before, once with Connie and on conferences too, so my experience was somewhat selective, but even so, Amsterdam’s reputation as a city of sin always seemed something of an anomaly to me, as if one were to discover the presence of an immense crack-den in the centre of Cheltenham Spa. Both faces of the city, genteel and disreputable, were in evidence as we rumbled our suitcases along the lanes that zigzagged west from the Centraal station towards Keizersgracht; fine, tall seventeenth-century townhouses, glimpses of interior-designed living rooms and copper-panned kitchens, a little gift shop selling notepads and candles, a bikini-clad prostitute on the early shift drinking tea from a mug in a pink light, a baker’s, a café filled with stoned skateboarders, a shop selling fixed-wheel bicycles. Amsterdam was the trendy dad of European cities; an architect, perhaps, barefoot and unshaven. Hey, guys, I told you, call me Tony! says Amsterdam to his kids, and pours everyone a beer.

  We crossed the bridge at Herenstraat. ‘Our hotel is in the Grachtengordel, which we’re entering now. Grachtengordel, literally, the girdle of canals!’ I was a little out of breath but keen to maintain an educational element to our visit. ‘It looks wonderful on a map, this series of concentric circles like the growth rings on a tree trunk. Or horseshoes, nesting horseshoes …’ But Albie wasn’t listening; he was too distracted, eyes casting here and there.

  ‘My God, Albie,’ said Connie, ‘it’s a hipster’s paradise.’

  We laughed at this, though I’d be hard-pressed to define a hipster, unless it referred to the pretty girls in large, unnecessary spectacles and vintage dresses, sitting high on rickety bicycles. Why do the youth of other cities always seem so attractive? Did the Dutch walk the streets of Guildford or Basingstoke and think, my God, just look at these people? Perhaps not, but Albie was certainly agog in Amsterdam. For all its grace and elegance, I suspected that Paris had been a little hard and severe for Albie. But here, here was a city that he could work with. The question, as in any trip to Amsterdam, was how long before sex and drugs raised their complicated heads?

  A little under eight minutes, it transpired.

  68. sex dungeon

  The hotel, which advertised itself as ‘boutique’ and had seemed perfectly pleasant on the website, had been decked out to resemble a top-of-the-range bordello. Our receptionist, an attractive and courteous transvestite, greeted us with the news that Connie and I had been upgraded to the honeymoon suite – the ‘irony suite’, I thought – and directed us down corridors lined variously with black silk, satin and PVC, past large-scale prints of a corseted dominatrix sitting astride a flustered panther, a pop-art tongue prodding a pair of cherries to no useful end and a concerned Japanese lady encumbered by a complex series of knotted ropes. ‘She,’ said Connie, ‘is going to get pins and needles.’

  ‘Dad,’ asked Albie, ‘have you booked us into a sex hotel?’ and they began to laugh convulsively as I fumbled with the key to our room – which, I noticed, was called the ‘Venus in Furs’ suite, while Albie was in ‘Delta of Venus’ next door.

  ‘It’s not a sex hotel, it’s “boutique”!’ I insisted.

  ‘Douglas,’ said Connie, tapping the print of the bound Japanese lady, ‘is that a half hitch or a bowline?’ I did not answer, though it was a bowline.

  The honeymoon suite was the colour of a kidney. It smelt of lilies and some kind of citrus disinfectant and was dominated by an immense four-poster from which the canopy was missing, leading me to wonder what function t
he posts served, since they had no structural purpose. Black sheets, hot-pink bolsters, purple cushions and crimson pillows were piled in the absurd Himalayan ranges that now seem to be de rigueur, but in this case were presumably there to create a kind of pornographic soft-play area. In stark contrast to all the mahogany and velvet, a huge off-white Bakelite contraption stood adjacent to the bed on a raised dais, like the kind of specialised bath you’d find in an old people’s home.

  ‘What is that?’ said Connie, still giggling.

  ‘Our very own Jacuzzi!’ I pressed one of the worn buttons on the control panel and the tub was lit from below by pink and green lights. Another button and the thing began to churn and grind like a hovercraft. ‘Just like our honeymoon,’ I shouted over the roar.

  Connie was quite hysterical now, as was Albie, entering through the adjoining door to laugh at our room. ‘You can really pick a hotel, Dad.’

  I was feeling defensive. I had made the booking, and the hotel was meant to be a treat, but I did my best to remain good-humoured. ‘How’s your room, Egg? Dare I ask?’

  ‘It’s like sleeping in a vagina.’

  ‘Albie! Please …’

  ‘There’s a massive picture of lesbians kissing over my bed. They’re freaking me out.’

  ‘We have this masterpiece,’ and Connie indicated a large tinted canvas of a spiky-haired lady fellating some fluorescent tube lighting. ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.’

  ‘She’s going to get a shock, licking that,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t it outrageous?’ said Connie. ‘So seedy. I feel like I want to wipe everything down with a damp J-cloth.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Tea-making facilities.’

  ‘Kinky. I wonder what the breakfast buffet’s going to be like?’ said Albie.

  ‘Oysters,’ said Connie, ‘and great trays of cocaine.’

  ‘Well, I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s boutique!’ and I did my best to laugh along.

  When everyone had calmed down, we stepped out to a pleasant café in the Noordermarkt, and sat in the square beneath the handsome church there. We ate cheese toasties and drank small glasses of delicious beer, trying out our Dutch accents, an accent like no other in the world. ‘It’s a little bit cockney, a little bit sing-song,’ said Connie. ‘And the “S”s have a “sh” sound to them. ‘“Sho – welcome to our shex hotel. If you require anything – handcuffsh, a courshe of penischillin …”’

  ‘No one talks like that,’ I said, though it wasn’t bad.

  ‘Nonshenshe. It’sh perfect.’

  ‘You sound like Sean Connery.’

  ‘Because, Egg, that’s exactly how it sounds – it’s a Germanic cockney Sean Connery.’ And perhaps it was the beer at lunchtime, or the sun on our faces, or the charm of that particular corner, but it was as if the Petersens had decided that we liked Amsterdam very much, that it would suit us very well, after all, as a family.

  69. the night visitor

  Until then I really only knew the city in winter, in the rain. It had been raining on our first trip here, in November, nine months or so after we had first met, yet still very much during our prolonged probationary period. Connie had been endeavouring to incorporate me into her social life, with the caution usually reserved for releasing zoo animals into the wild. As part of the programme, we had gone to Amsterdam with Genevieve and Tyler, two friends from her college who had recently married. As artists, I’d presumed they’d be keen to see the Rembrandts and Vermeers, but they seemed much more interested in nodding their heads in various coffeehouses. Smoking cannabis held little appeal for me. I did my bit, but one puff of Purple Haze – or Cherry Bomb or Laughing Buddha – instilled a degree of anxiety and paranoia that was remarkable even for me. Certainly I felt no desire to giggle as the blood drained from my face and the dread took hold. I decided to leave them to it, and spent a solitary afternoon in the Anne Frank House instead.

  This was shortly before Connie and I began to co-habit and my nostalgia for that first spring and summer remains undimmed. We saw each other every day, but kept separate flats, separate family and friends and social lives. There were those cultural excursions, of course, but if Connie felt the need to ‘have a late one’ with her art-school pals, or go to a nightclub where things might ‘get messy’, whatever that meant, then I would suggest she go alone. She rarely fought to persuade me. Sometimes I found myself wishing that she’d fight a little harder, but I did not protest. Once the party was over she’d always come and see me at two or three or four in the morning. She had a key by then – what a happy day that was, cutting that key for her – and she’d let herself in and climb wordlessly into my bed, body warm, make-up smeared, breath smelling strongly of wine and toothpaste and ‘social’ cigarettes, and she would fold herself into me. Sometimes we would make love, at other times she would twitch and fidget and sweat, a restlessness that I put down to alcohol or some kind of drug use, though I knew better than to preach or pry. If she could not sleep we would talk a little, with Connie doing her best to sound sober.

  ‘Good party?’

  ‘The usual. You didn’t miss anything.’

  ‘Who was there?’

  ‘People. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Was Angelo there?’

  ‘Don’t think so. He might have been, somewhere. We didn’t talk very much.’

  Which didn’t make sense, if you thought about it.

  ‘And do you still love him?’

  Of course I refrained from asking this latter question, despite it being foremost in my mind, because I valued sleep too much. Most people entering a relationship carry with them a dossier sub-divided into infatuations, flirtations, grand amours, first loves and sexual affairs. Compared to my sheet of lined A4, Connie possessed a three-drawered filing cabinet of the things, but I had no desire to flick through the faces. After all, she was here, wasn’t she? At two and three and four in the morning, all through that wonderful first spring, that glorious first summer.

  But there was no escaping Angelo. She had once believed, she said, that they were soul-mates, until it transpired that he had many other soul-mates dotted around London. Quite apart from the flagrant infidelity, his other offences were legion. He had undermined her confidence, jeered at her work, made remarks about her looks, her weight, screamed at her in public places, thrown things, even stolen money from her. There had been a mercifully brief allusion to him being ‘a bit dark in the bedroom’ and certainly there had been physical fights, which shocked and angered me, though she insisted she had ‘given as good as she got’. He was a drinker, an addict, unreliable, belligerent, childishly provocative, rude. ‘Intense’, she said. In short, he was everything that I was not. So what possible appeal could he hold for her now? All that was student stuff, she said. Besides, Angelo had a new girlfriend anyway, beautiful and cool and they had so many friends in common, they were bound to bump into each other, weren’t they? No real harm done, nothing to worry about. I would meet him too, some day soon.

  70. corduroy

  And so it came to pass, at the wedding of Genevieve and Tyler, one of those ferociously unconventional affairs – the bride and groom entering the reception on a motorbike, I recall and, for their first dance, pogo-ing wildly to French punk. No white marquee for Genevieve and Tyler. The party was held in a soon-to-be-demolished prosthetic limb factory on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, and was a good deal edgier and more nihilistic than the weddings I’d been used to. I’d never seen quite so many angular people in one industrial space before, all under thirty – no jolly aunts in hats here – all enjoying a buffet of ironic kebabs. I’d taken a gamble on a new corduroy suit, and the heavy fabric on a warm September day, combined with a certain self-consciousness on my part, was causing me to perspire to a quite startling degree. Beneath the jacket, dark circles of sweat had formed. My contortions beneath the hand-dryer had had little effect, and so now I stood perspiring as I watched Connie talk to beautiful people.

  I thi
nk I can honestly say that I’ve never met a biochemist that I didn’t like. My friends and colleagues might not have been particularly glamorous but they were open, generous, funny, kind, modest. Welcoming. Connie’s clan was a different proposition. Noisy, cynical, overly concerned with the appearance of things, and on the few occasions I had visited her shared studio – a garage, really, in Hackney – or went to private views, I had felt awkward and excluded, loitering at the edge like a dog tied up outside a shop. I had wanted to be involved in Connie’s work, to show interest and enthusiasm because she really was a wonderful painter. But being with her artist friends drew attention to differences that I was keen to play down.

  They weren’t all monsters, of course. Artists are an eccentric temperamental bunch, with habits that would earn them short shrift in most labs, but that’s to be expected. Some of them were, and remain, good friends, and several of them did make an effort at social events. But as soon as conversation turned to ‘what are you working on?’ they would suddenly need to ‘go for a wee’. And so I stood there at the wedding, the human diuretic, in a puddle of malarial sweat.

  ‘Look at you, man! You need a salt tablet,’ said Fran, Connie’s old housemate. I was unsure of Fran’s true feelings for me, and remain so even now that she is Albie’s godmother. She has always had the particular gift of hugging and shoving away at the same time, like repelling magnets pushed together. Here she stepped back and brushed her cigarette ash off my arm. ‘Why don’t you take this off?’

  ‘I can’t now.’

  She started tugging at the jacket buttons. ‘Come on, take it off!’

  ‘I can’t, my shirt’s too wet.’

  ‘Ah, I get it.’ She placed a finger on my sternum and leant all her weight on it. ‘You, my friend, are caught in a vicious circle.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a vicious circle.’

  ‘Ahhhh,’ she said, rubbing my arm. ‘Connie’s lovely, lovely, funny, lovely boyfriend. You make her so happy, don’t you, Dougie? You look after her, you do, you really do. And she deserves it, after all the bullshit she’s been through!’