by James Bailey
“This isn’t funny. I remember telling you in Pinkman’s that I didn’t want to do any social media campaign. And then you go and do it behind my back. You had no right to do that.”
“I’m sorry, but we just wanted to help. We were going to fly out and help you but figured this would probably be more productive.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“Well, me and Jake were discussing it, and then Jake’s Jake offered to help, and we went with it.”
Of course. No wonder it’s got so much traction already with a social media marketer behind it.
“So you’re all in on it. Great. Everyone except me. Couldn’t you have told me about it at least?”
“OK, we probably should have done. I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to look like a stalker now. This is going to scare her off, if anything.”
“No, I promise it won’t. We can close it down if you want. But we’ve had lots of interest, and it’s clearly working if people in Amsterdam have seen it.”
True. Maybe it isn’t such an awful idea.
“Have you got any leads?”
“Nothing concrete yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. I think you’re getting close.”
“You’re holding something back from me, aren’t you? What is it?”
“OK, so we’ve had a few messages from girls who claim to be Sunflower Girl. But I don’t think any of them are her, as they don’t live in the right places. One was from Paris, another Melbourne, I think one was from South Korea. There were a few. It’s a bit weird how many girls want to be with you.”
“Keep their details just in case,” I joke.
“And, well, we did have an email, which Jake thinks could be real, but I’m not so sure.”
“What did it say?”
“It was from another girl who claims to be Sunflower Girl . . .” She pauses. “She said to take the campaign down as she already has a boyfriend.”
My heart sinks.
“Why would someone lie about that?” I ask.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s her.”
“Why does Jake think it’s real, then?”
“She mentioned what you were wearing that day.”
Now my heart breaks.
“Come on, how else would she know that? It must be her, then. She’s met someone else already.”
“I don’t know. The message just seemed a bit off, and when I asked for more information, she didn’t reply again. Like I feel the girl you described would have sent something nicer, even if she didn’t want you to find her.”
I consider Jessie’s words.
“Look, I am only telling you so you can keep it in the back of your mind. I still think she’s out there. You’re there anyway, so you may as well have a look at the bookshops today and see if you have any luck. We’ll keep the page up until the end of the day and see what happens.”
“OK, I will let you know how I get on. You had better get back to Mr. Nobody.”
“I’ve got to go and feed Jeremy, actually. Good luck.”
“Thanks, Jessie, but don’t think I’m not cross with you both still.”
I put the phone down, confused about both the message and the mystery man.
26
As soon as I approach the Van Gogh Museum, I spot her. In fact, I can’t miss her. While all the holidaymakers are in shorts and T-shirts, she is dressed like Sherlock Holmes. The only thing she is missing is the pipe.
“Why are we going to need a magnifying glass?” I ask her, bemused, as she greets me with an embrace that is overfriendly, considering we’ve known each other for less than twelve hours. As we hug, I accidentally knock her deerstalker hat off her head.
“This is what detectives wear. No wonder you haven’t found her yet, wearing those.” She points at my jeans. I am wearing the same black jeans I’ve worn for the last few days, complete with a hoodie.
“You do know we’re just going to go to a few bookshops to see if this girl works there, not trying to solve a murder.”
“Fine, then,” she says, annoyed, putting the magnifying glass away in her backpack, simultaneously revealing an array of other detective gear stuffed in her bag. I’m sure I catch sight of a listening device but decide not to mention it. After all, she kept schtum about my brothel faux pas.
“I thought you could maybe put a photo of me on the Instagram page?”
“That’s why you’ve dressed up? Just to have your photo taken? You do know I don’t run the page, right?”
“Well, you could send a photo to your friend and ask her to upload it?”
“You really want to be on it that badly?” She nods enthusiastically and retrieves her magnifying glass again, ready to pose.
A stray football bounces past us as I take a photo of her on my phone. One of the kids playing in the large park next to us runs after it, scaring off the dozens of seagulls that have menacingly settled on the grass.
“OK, where are we going first, then?” I ask, now that we’ve got the photo shoot out of the way.
She unveils her large paper map of Amsterdam, a retro item these days.
“There are four English-language bookstores in the center of Amsterdam. Each is in close proximity to the Van Gogh Museum, where Sunflowers is displayed. I have marked them with a red pen.”
She has certainly done her homework. Four red circles mark our destinations. Could one of them be the shop?
“I figure we go this way, head here, and work our way around.” She points to the map and illustrates our planned route with her finger, as if she’s a football manager delivering her tactics for the game.
“Great.”
It takes her almost five minutes to fold the map back down again, and in the end she just scrunches it up and shoves it in her bag.
“Anytime today. Let’s get going,” I joke.
“We’re not going anywhere yet. Before we go to any of these shops, we’ve got to go into the museum. No trip to Amsterdam is complete without seeing Sunflowers, especially your trip.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“We need to get into her mindset. We need to channel Sunflower Girl.”
I look at her, bemused.
“Come on, Josh, do you want to find her or not?”
“Don’t we have to book tickets or something?”
“It’s OK, I booked them last night. You can pay me back later, don’t worry.”
Our tickets? Brilliant. I’m meant to be on a tight budget.
“We’ve just got to go and collect our audio guides first,” she says without giving me a choice.
Oh yippee, even more money.
We eventually head up the escalator to the gallery, although Eva is not happy having to be separated from her detective equipment when we are instructed to leave our bags in the cloakroom.
Despite the throng of people, the gallery is eerily quiet, with everyone walking around listening to their audio guides. The only voice that can be heard is Eva’s; she doesn’t realize she is shouting.
We skip past Van Gogh’s early works to get to the main attraction. It has a wall to itself, positioned centrally in a golden frame on a turquoise wall. Unlike in Munich, it is hard to get a good view of the painting as the crowds swarm around it. They all look down at their multimedia guides, which have close-up pictures and extra information.
“For Van Gogh, yellow was an emblem of happiness. He famously only used three shades of yellow to complete this painting. In Dutch literature, the sunflower was a symbol of devotion and loyalty. In their various stages of decay, these flowers also remind us of the cycle of life and death.”
We head up another flight of stairs.
“This could be something.” I take off my headphones and call out to Eva as I browse the display of original letters written between Van Gogh and his brother Theo. “She said she’d been reading his letters recently, so maybe she saw them here.”
“Yes, that
sounds possible. Let’s have a look in the gift shop.” Eva drags me across the room to the shop tucked into the corner. “And look what we have here,” she says in full-on detective mode.
Alongside every conceivable item of merchandise printed with Sunflowers—key rings, pencils, T-shirts—there is a pile of the Penguin Classics edition of The Letters of Van Gogh.
“I reckon she came here, saw the letters in the museum, and bought the book.”
“It would make sense.” She nods along in agreement with my theory. “Do you think we should buy a copy to channel her?”
“Actually, I’ve already read it,” I reply, putting the copy that Eva passes to me back down.
I downloaded the book and read it in a day after Sunflower Girl mentioned it so we could discuss it, if we ever met again.
As we head down to the ground floor and hand back our audio guides, I don’t confess to Eva that the museum was a good idea, but I am now more optimistic about the search.
“Do you feel like we’re in the right mindset now to go and find her?” I ask sarcastically as we head back out into the fresh air.
“I think so, but I’m quite hungry after all that. I’ve not had any breakfast yet, so shall we go and eat first? Do you like omelettes? Good, because I’ve got the perfect place for you.”
“SO, YOU CAN have pretty much any type of omelette you want. It’s great, isn’t it?” she says as she takes a seat at a large booth. Old vintage musical theater songs are playing through the speakers, competing with the sound of the frying.
“What are you having? I guess you’re going to flip the coin? Can I do it as well?”
“Sure.” I hand her the coin.
We are choosing between an omelette and an omelette.
The restaurant has really gone big on the theme: the walls are decorated with artwork depicting flying eggs, and the chef is wearing a red T-shirt saying “Eggspert” on the back. As I watch him cooking, he lives up to his title as he makes four omelettes simultaneously.
“So, what are you going to say to her when you find her, then?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure? You must have thought of something. What if you had found her in Germany? You weren’t just going to stand there in silence staring at her, I hope?”
“No, I guess I was just going to tell her . . .”
“Shall we do a role-play?”
“What? Of the conversation?”
“Yes. I’ll be Sunflower Girl, and you be you. Pretend you’ve just seen me in the bookshop.”
“We’re not doing this.”
“Yes, you need to practice. You’re only going to get one chance. I don’t want you to fuck it up.”
“Shall we just eat first?”
I know in my head what I want to say, I just don’t want to go through it with Eva.
“Someone’s getting a bit hangry, I think. Come on, just until our food comes.”
She’s not going to stop.
“Hi there, hopefully you remember me from London? We met in the National Gallery on the day of the marathon?” I say in a silly voice.
“You’re starting with “Hi there’? Really? And it sounds too nervous. It needs to be more bold. More confident. Start again.”
Why did I agree to spend the day with her?
“Hey, we met in London, at the National Gallery, on the day of the marathon, and I really wanted to ask you out on a date but never got your number so I tracked you down.”
“Ugh, ugh, you really sound like a stalker. ‘Tracked you down’? Don’t say that.”
“OK, what should I say?” I try my best not to get angry.
“It’s a good thing we’re practising, isn’t it? What happens if she doesn’t remember you? Or she does and she doesn’t like you? Or she has a boyfriend?”
“I thought you were meant to be helping me.”
27
As we step out of the restaurant, full of omelette, I’m nearly knocked to the ground by a cyclist who comes out of nowhere. I really don’t understand the Amsterdam road system, and what is scarier is neither do any of the locals, apparently. Cyclists, motorbikes, cars, and lorries all come from every angle across roads and pavements. Even the trams don’t seem to be constrained to the lines.
“OK, this is the first shop.” She points to a tall town house that that sits alongside the canal. A cute blue sign pokes out discreetly, with white text reading “Used English Books.” “Let me do all the talking when we go in. Obviously let me know if you see her, but otherwise I will ask.”
I feel my search has rather been hijacked.
As we walk in, the man standing behind the counter must wonder why a Sherlock Holmes impersonator is coming into his bookshop. It looks like we should be heading to a convention.
“Hallo,” he says.
“Hallo,” Eva replies.
Even I understand this, but I just nod and head deeper into the store.
The shop is completely silent, bar the noise of the creaky floorboards, which wail every time we step on them. It feels more like I am browsing this man’s house than a bookstore. As Eva browses the ground floor, I venture into the basement, crouching down, careful not to hit my head on the low ceiling. It’s deadly silent, and the smell of musty books is overpowering.
I jump when Eva taps me on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, she’s not here. The man is the only person who works in the shop. On to the next one.”
One down.
We head toward the main shopping area in the city, away from the cannabis and sex museums, and on to Waterstones, which is the next circled shop on the map. The front window display is full of quintessential British children’s book characters: Harry Potter, Paddington Bear, Peter Rabbit, and Alice in Wonderland. Inside, the dark-green patterned carpets and mahogany bookcases are immediately reminiscent of every other Waterstones branch. We split up to cover the four floors, stocked not just with books but also with board games, gifts, and notebooks.
“I can’t see anyone matching her description, and I asked a couple of the guys who work here, and they didn’t think such a girl has worked here recently,” Eva says as she rejoins me.
I’m transfixed by the British food shelves, which separate the books on the second floor. This section is an expat’s dream: Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, Walkers Shortbread, Yorkshire Tea, Hobnobs, Jammy Dodgers, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, Branston Pickle, Bisto Gravy Granules, Bovril, Marmite . . .
“Did you hear me?” She shakes me.
“Yep, she’s not here either. But we still have two more stores to go,” I reply.
“What are Hobnobs?” Eva asks, noticing me staring at them.
“You’ve never had a Hobnob?”
“Isn’t that what you guys call dicks?”
“Knobs?” I laugh out loud. “No, these are just a type of biscuit. Come on, I’ll get a pack so you can try one.”
Despite the heavily inflated price, we need a snack to keep up our energy, and something to cheer me up.
“Not bad, actually,” she says as she crunches her way through half the pack before we’ve even left the store.
It’s only a few hundred feet to our next destination, but we don’t spend more than two minutes in the New English Bookstore. The street could be anywhere in the world—with brands such as Superdry, Mango, and Levi’s—and the shop is equally as generic—a modern bargain-basement store selling cut-price Nicholas Sparks novels and Anne Frank’s diary translated into every language. Two Dutch women, one stocking the shelves and one behind the counter, talk to each other as a local radio station plays in the background. As I browse the mindfulness coloring books and wonder who buys a calendar half a year early, I receive a shake of the head from Eva, and we’re back out into the street.
“Looks like our last hope is that she works in the American Book Store, then,” Eva says optimistically. My glass is now definitely less than half full. “We can take a shortcut. This way.”
&nb
sp; We head through a narrow alleyway and by the time we come out the other side, I feel high from the fumes inhaled. Before we go into the shop, Eva pulls me to the side and gives me a pep talk.
“I know this is our last shop, but if she’s not here it doesn’t mean you won’t find her. She is out there somewhere, and if it’s meant to be, it will be.”
Despite how annoying she can be, it’s really nice to hear this and to have had someone to help with my search.
“Thank you. Let’s just hope that she works here. It would make everything a lot easier.”
I immediately catch sight of a poster of Sunflowers hanging behind the counter on the right of the entrance.
Could it be?
That’s got to be a good sign. It’s a megastore. Multiple floors of opportunity. Eva looks around the ground floor with the large coffee-table books and the magazine section—every title imaginable is on sale, from luxury periodicals to Marie Claire and Hello!
I head up the staircase, which has bookshelves built in, showcasing an extensive music section, and which winds around to the first floor. I’m greeted by large, tall shelves of fiction paperbacks and a café selling Ethiopian fair trade coffee and a selection of cakes. A couple of people sit and read while having a drink, listening to the jazz music played through the speakers.
I take another flight of stairs and meander through the biography section. This floor is buzzing with customers and staff, but none of them are Sunflower Girl. A good-looking man lounges on a leather seat reading a book as if it’s a library rather than a shop. A rope stops customers going up to the top floor. The sign states “Staff Only.”
Is she up there?
I turn around and see Eva.
“OK, so I have good and bad news,” she says as she approaches me.
“Yes, go on, tell me.”
“Well, which do you want first?”
“Whatever is the most important.”
Get to it.
“So the good news is, I think we’ve found her. The manager said there was an English girl who worked here who matches the description.”
My face lights up.
“There was a girl? Where is she now?” I ask impatiently, sensing we’re near to finding her.