‘So you’ll be attending polytechnic?’ Kathleen Eilander asked Joe.
Joe shook his head.
‘But I thought your mother said you were?’
They were silent for a bit. Then Kathleen, who was taller than Joe, leaned over to him again.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Become an artist. I guess you can’t really say that. You’re either an artist or you’re not, so you can’t really become one. The way I understand it, you go to art academy to figure out if you are one. Engel, for example, he’s an artist and everyone knows that. But me? I’m good at making things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’
His gaze travelled over her face, his mouth headed toward a laugh.
‘What is it?’ Kathleen asked. ‘Is there something on my face? Here?’
She wiped her lips with her fingers.
‘Now there is,’ Joe said. ‘A little bit of lipstick, higher . . . yeah, there.’
Kathleen dug into her handbag and pulled out a compact. She turned her back to him and dabbed vigorously at her mouth. Across the washlands, crooked columns of dust were rising up behind the threshers.
‘Is it gone now?’
He nodded. ‘It’s gone.’
‘Why do you let people call you Joe Speedboat?’ Kathleen asked pointedly.
‘Because that’s my name.’
‘But you don’t own a speedboat, do you?’
Joe shook his head.
‘And what about your real name?’
‘There is no real name, only a mistake my parents made.’
His smile placed the conversation in another, warmer light.
‘Joe Speedboat, that’s just my name, Mrs Eilander, really.’
‘Oh, please call me Kathleen. It makes me feel so old to be called “Mrs”.’
Kathleen looked toward the waterline, where her husband and a few others were waiting for the boat’s return like believers awaiting redemption.
‘He should wear his hat,’ she said. ‘He’ll get a sunburn like this.’ She sniffed. ‘Your stepfather has been gone for an awfully long time, if you ask me. I would be worried sick if I were Regina. After all, a boat can sink, can’t it?’
Regina and India were standing down by the water as well, apart from the others. India spoke words of comfort to her mother, who was bent over with worry. Julius Eilander came up the ramp, shoes in hand, and suggested they drive down-river a ways to see if they could find Papa Africa. He asked his wife for the car keys. The things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be men didn’t wait to see what would happen, they thanked Regina clumsily for ‘all the hospitality’ and headed off to their bench.
Julius Eilander returned half an hour later. He had driven all the way down to the New Bridge but hadn’t seen the big sail anywhere. Faith in a happy ending had faded. A mood gray as a cloud of ashes settled over those still at the landing.
‘We should call the police,’ Julius Eilander said.
‘Not that they’ll do much around here,’ his wife said.
No one dared to look at Regina, as though just looking at her would hit the percussion cap of her fear and pain and result in something you couldn’t oversee. Julius Eilander drove back to Lomark; his wife stayed behind at the old shipyard, along with a few others who were saying, ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ and ‘if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes’. The flames went out under the hot trays, no one bothered to relight them, the waiting took on the character of a wake. The blue hour was rising up around us, the blackbirds sang and chased each other through the bushes. Mrs Tabak, whose house Regina cleaned, turned to leave. She said, ‘Try to stay optimistic, Regina, no matter how hard it seems.’
Two cars approached along the Lange Nek, Julius Eilander out in front and Sergeant Eus Manting’s police cruiser bringing up the rear. They parked on the landing. Manting climbed out slowly and shuffled toward the group like a worn-out circus bear. He nodded to Kathleen Eilander, whom he remembered from a complaint about obnoxious air traffic.
‘You’re Mrs Ratzinger?’ he asked Regina.
He took a notepad from his inside pocket, flipped it open and held it at bent-arm’s length.
‘The situation was explained to me by this gentleman. I’ve contacted the river police and reported missing a wooden sailboat, approximately six metres long, in the colours red and white. Is that correct?’
Regina and India nodded.
‘Good,’ Manting went on, ‘and on board is a certain Mr . . .’
‘Mahfouz,’ India said promptly, ‘Mahfouz Husseini.’
‘Mr Husseini. And where is Mr Husseini from, if I may ask?’
‘He’s Egyptian.’
‘Does he speak Dutch?’
‘He understands it better than he speaks it.’
‘And did he provide any information concerning his destination, leave anything behind . . . ?’
Regina opened her mouth, her breathing came in fits and starts.
‘Mahfouz was just trying out his boat,’ she said. ‘That’s all. A little jaunt. Up and back, no more than that. So where is he now?’
She poked her finger accusingly at Manting.
‘So where is he now?’
‘My colleagues are looking for him, Mrs Ratzinger, at this point there’s nothing else we . . .’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Now don’t get worked up, ma’am, my colleagues are combing the river for him right now.’
At those words something snapped. Regina turned and walked away, weeping for the first time that day, with the howling ups and downs of a chainsaw. With her eyes, Kathleen Eilander heaped flaming reproach on Sergeant Manting for his lack of tact and went after her. Manting climbed into the cruiser and backed away from the landing. As he made the turn, his headlights swept over a shape down at the waterfront. Joe.
That was how the day ended, with Regina choking on her tears as she leaned against the Bethlehem Asphalt amphibian and Joe coming up the boat ramp and stopping beside the table that still held enough food to sate Tamerlane’s hordes. He stuck a soggy rooster-biscuit in his mouth.
‘Donkey knows the way,’ he said quietly. ‘Donkey knows the way.’
October came and Papa Africa still hadn’t returned. In Regina Ratzinger’s eyes there smouldered a plaint against a world in which people lose the thing they love most. She became a woman people looked past in order not to have to see that.
Her first husband had a grave she could visit, the second hadn’t even left behind a body to which she could say goodbye. Once the sun had risen from the morning mist and was climbing quickly in pale and brighter light, Regina would walk along the Lange Nek to the river. There where the ship was launched she stood like the statue of the sailor’s wife looking out to sea. She lived with one foot in hope and the other in sorrow, without being able to give in fully to either of them. The sound of the telephone ringing was never the same to her again.
When you saw her standing there, your heart shrivelled like an old apple. You prayed with her that the drab dragon’s wing would come sailing around the bend any moment. That Papa Africa would moor his boat and say, ‘I am sorry, it was more far, and the wind was low.’
And Regina stank. Oh Jesus, she stank with sorrow. India did her best to care for her, but to provide care you need someone who wants to be cared for. Regina might as well have moved to a cave in a barren mountain range, she had reached a degree of self-denial that would have made saintly Anthony the Anchorite shake his head in pity. She ate only the minimum needed to keep the organism going, and she fell silent. After school India would cook copious meals, but her mother only scratched at the edges of her plate. Sounds of domestic tension were heard, of something that could break any moment.
They were completely overspent and condemned to each other. Sometimes, for no real reason, Regina would summon up childhood memories and then, for a moment, you might have thought you were seeing a mother and daughter living together on an even keel.
After his stepfather disappeared, Joe waited two weeks before leaving for the art academy; he had tried to comfort his mother. ‘Maybe he just sailed back to where he came from,’ he suggested, ‘out of homesickness.’ Regina’s resistance to that idea was bitter. To Joe she was an abandoned woman, to herself a widow all over again. She wouldn’t let anyone console her or change her mind; Joe had no reason to stay any longer. He put on his father’s old army rucksack and went to Engel, who had found a room in a working-class neighbourhood in Enschede. Engel had told him there was always room for him on the sofa. Joe left on the 6.45 bus, and I went with him to the station. He didn’t say much, nothing really. We were headed for an important moment in our friendship, which would reach its conclusion with Joe waving to me through the back window of the bus and me rolling home with a huge lump in my throat, convinced that an epoch was drawing to a close.
Somewhere in November, Joe came back to Lomark. At least, that was when I suddenly saw him standing at my window, grinning from ear to ear. I waved to him, he came in trailing cold air. He looked bigger, standing there in my room with his heavy army coat and his rain-drenched hair. I was happy as a pup to see him. I had also run out of cigarettes, and now he could roll me a bunch. He hung his coat over the chair and sat down across from me.
How’s it going? I wrote on my notepad, and he shook his head.
‘It was about time for me to come home.’
Things were not going well, his mother and India were both on the verge of exhaustion. I looked at him as he rolled my cigarettes and dropped them in the empty mustard pot. His hair was longer, but that wasn’t what gave me the feeling something had changed. I squinted hard and tried to take him in carefully, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe I just wasn’t used to him anymore.
‘I was in Amsterdam for two weeks,’ he said.
He licked the cigarette paper and rolled it into place.
‘With P.J.’
I looked the other way. Jealousy’s as visible as a solar eclipse.
‘She’s got something going with a writer. A real nutcase.’
Joe gave me a rundown of the last few months, starting at the moment he’d left that morning on the bus.
They were going to be fellow artists there in Enschede, Engel and he. They were going to show people a thing or two. But one day in late autumn, Joe and his classmates went on an excursion to the Van Gogh Museum. During the ten minutes he stood there, the queue advanced only a few metres. Right in front of them was a busload of Japanese tourists, behind them a group of disgruntled day-trippers from Groningen who were doing their best to keep spirits high. Joe looked around. His feet were cold. Fuck this, he thought suddenly, stepped out of line without a word and disappeared in the direction of Museum Square.
And there he stood, far from home and with no reason to go back. He took a deep breath, looked around and decided to stay in Amsterdam for a while and see how things worked out.
Around dinnertime he started thinking about a place to stay. He knew only one person in the whole city: P.J. Eilander. He phoned P.J.’s mother, who gave him her daughter’s address on Tolstraat, just above a coffee shop. The coffee shop was called Babylon, if she remembered rightly.
Joe took the tram. He experienced giddying happiness – no one knew where he was, life could go any which way, there were as many possibilities as combinations on a fruit machine and every direction he chose was the right one, because it was time for the machine to pay out.
P.J. wasn’t home. Joe waited in Babylon Coffee Shop, sitting by the window where he might see her come by. Meanwhile, he had all the time in the world to feast his eyes on the economics of soft drugs. In Lomark it had been sport for a while to smoke a few quick joints and then cross the border into Germany – to come back with stories of a different planet. That was just for laughs, but smoking here was serious business. The users seemed to avoid daylight as much as possible, and applied themselves with cultish dedication to the rolling and routine firing up of huge bombers. It was truly something to see. A native from the jungle who was dropped here and saw this for the first time would think he was observing an official religious rite.
‘Hey, man, want a drag?’
Joe looked up. A man with black curly hair beneath a red cap was holding out a trumpetlike joint.
‘No thanks,’ Joe said. ‘I’m waiting for someone.’
‘Don’t be an ass, man, that’s what it’s made for.’
‘No really, thank you.’
‘You look like you could use a toke.’
Joe accepted the joint.
‘My name’s George,’ the man said. ‘The Urban Indian. But you probably picked up on that.’
Joe reappeared from behind the cloud.
‘My name’s Joe Speedboat,’ he said in a squeaky voice.
‘Joe Speedboat! You’re all right, man, you’re all right!’
Like tens of thousands of tourists, on his first day in Amsterdam Joe got stoned (‘Jesus, man, you know, if I could just build all the things I see . . .’). It was completely dark outside when George the Urban Indian left, from outside the window he had shouted, ‘Good luck, Joe Speedboat! Good luck, man!’ and cycled away on his delivery bike. Joe remained behind in the blessed dreams of his first, second and third joints (‘I was really dying for a strawberry yoghurt drink, so I ordered one. That stuff ran down into my stomach like a cold mountain stream. You never tasted yoghurt drink like that’).
It will never be clear what would have happened had P.J. not run out of cigarettes that evening. She had returned home at around seven, and now she went downstairs without a coat to buy a pack at the coffee shop. The men at the pool table looked up; walking over to the counter with the jar of tobacco, rolling papers and lighters she said, ‘Could I have a pack of Marlboro, please?’
‘Anytime for you, baby, anytime.’
On her way out she saw, in the shadow of the rubber plant by the window, a familiar face. The boy, his eyes half closed, was sitting at a table littered with empty bottles of strawberry yoghurt drink. P.J. went over to him.
‘Hey, Joe,’ she said. ‘You’re Joe, aren’t you?’
His eyes opened a little further.
‘Hi.’
‘It’s me, P.J., we went to school together.’
‘Oh. Hey. I. Know. You.’
‘What are you doing here? No one from Lomark . . .’
That was how Joe made his arrival, floating in a basket of reeds and encircled by feminine attention and lots of questions. Where he was staying? Nowhere? He could sleep in her bed. She always spent the night at her boyfriend’s place, she’d be back in the morning. He must be hungry, she started talking about something she called ‘the munchies’, triggered by the smoking of marijuana. But it would have been wiser for Joe not to have touched the pasta she prepared for him. He made it to the toilet just as the geyser of rosy-pink yoghurt drink, commingled with tagliatelle and tomato sauce, came rocketing up, spreading a sweet-and-sour dairy smell throughout her toilet and living room.
‘Oh. Shit. Oh. Sorry.’
‘Jesus, Joe, what did you do? Smoke the little plastic bag along with it?’
His eyes were bloodshot, his body as wobbly as on the day his father had been lowered into the grave and grief had forced him to lean against his mother.
‘You need some sleep, Joe. Lie down. You don’t want to get undressed? No? Well, OK.’
‘Hey. Thanks. A. Lot.’
The next morning he found a note.
Hey Chief Smoke ’m up
Back at noon
Breakfast is
in the fridge take
whatever you want
x P.J.
In his memory, the night gone by had lasted a hundred years. Tepid light came drizzling through the cracks in the curtains, he went back to bed and lay there with one arm under his head, smoking a cigarette. There were dead houseplants in the corners. His gaze slid over the shadows on the ceiling, which was higher than the roo
m was broad. Breakfast, as he had seen it by refrigerator light: half a container of cottage cheese, a crescent sliver of hard cheese and half a litre of skimmed yoghurt.
When P.J. came in a few hours later, he was sitting straight as a ramrod in a chair by the window, which provided him with a view of paintless balconies and gardens where the sun never shone. The bed was made up so tightly you could bounce a coin on it, and the gas fire was turned off.
‘Wow, cheerful as the grave in here,’ P.J. said. ‘Have you been sitting in the dark all this time? Didn’t you get yourself some breakfast? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m always tense when I come back from Arthur’s place.’
‘Arthur,’ Joe said.
‘That’s right, you don’t know, how could you? Arthur Metz, the writer. He’s my significant other. Or I should say, my boyfriend; Arthur hates euphemisms.’
‘Euphemisms.’
‘Arthur Metz,’ she repeated. ‘Never heard of him? This is his latest novel.’
She pushed a book into Joe’s hands. My Gentle Demise was the title. P.J. stood at the counter making coffee, she looked over her shoulder at Joe.
‘He’s a poet too.’
Infatuated pride radiated off of her. On the back cover of the book was a photo of a handsome man with premature wrinkles on his forehead, bags under his eyes.
‘I’m always at his place at night, during the day he needs to be alone. He can’t write with anyone else around. After ten o’clock he wants to see me again. Arthur needs that solitude, he’s very sensitive. Anything that disturbs his rhythm upsets him terribly. When I’m ten minutes late he starts asking where I’ve been.’
‘Wow,’ Joe said.
‘I’d love to introduce you, but he can’t handle new people. It scares him. Sometimes it makes him aggressive, you never know. He finds it very difficult to be touched, sometimes he shrivels all up when I touch him.’
‘Is he, uh . . .’
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