The Light of Amsterdam (21 page)

Suddenly she felt trapped in a grubby, ugly little room that was too small for all the feelings that wanted expression and where the mirrors seemed to reflect everything endlessly back into her so there was no release even after the words were spoken and she needed to be gone and breathing the cleanness of the night air before the anger inside choked the remaining life out of her. Brushing past her daughter and ignoring her sobs rising again into a wail she hurried through the bar aware that all the party sat silently with their faces turned towards her and she could see that someone was standing attempting to comfort a weeping Veronica.

Outside she took deep breaths and tried to steady herself. Already part of her wanted to go back and make things right but a stronger part insisted that she had only told the truth. She wanted nothing more than to go home but instead found herself in a strange city, on her own and dressed as an Indian. Her costume had never felt more painfully ridiculous than it did in that moment and if there had been any way she could have torn it off and replaced it with her own clothes she would have grasped it with both hands but there was no alternative to trying to make it back to the hotel. She stopped in the penumbral light of a café and searched in her bag until she found the tourist map she had lifted from the foyer while they were checking in. Locating the station she realised that most of the roads stretched eventually back towards it and trying to stem her fear she started off through the streets that seemed even more full of people than when they had set out. People were looking at her, some were laughing at her, but she ignored them all and kept her head high and stared only straight in front, determined not to let the humiliation show on her face. Once she stopped to show her map to a young woman on her own who patiently took time with her, pointing the direction and smiling in a way that made her grateful for the kindness.

The walk slowly burnt the anger away but left in its place an emptiness in which echoed a confusion of other feelings that couldn't be controlled or shaped into comfort or meaning. She passed a group of young men, one of whom plucked a feather from her headband, but she kept walking and when they had gone she took the headband and threw it into a rubbish bin. Then into the hollowness at her core started a fear like the one she had felt when the plane was taking off, a fear that she was about to hurtle into a sphere where she was not supposed to be and where only danger and destruction awaited. What did she have but a daughter and whatever she had become was in part down to her, so to throw her away now was as impossible as throwing away some part of herself. Shannon would see how she felt and, even if she sulked and pouted, when it came down to a choice she would never pick someone who was little more than a stranger over the person who had cared for her and loved her. She was sorry she had hit her and then sorry that she hadn't done it years ago. Knocked some sense into her empty head. Knocked her on the right track while it was still possible and with a pulse of bitterness she thought of all the times when she was growing up that she had gathered the money to buy the right clothes, the right trainers, the latest this and the latest that, all of which enjoyed the shortest of shelf lives before their five minutes of fashion expired. All except the dressing gown. She had got it when she was about ten. Bright red with flowers embroidered on the pocket and collar. She had kept wearing it into her teenage years when her arms and legs stuck out and it just about met round her middle. Even when she stopped wearing it she had insisted on keeping it in the back of her wardrobe until years later and without comment she had cleared it out with more recent obsoletes and sent them down to the charity shop.

Reaching the hotel she went as quickly as she could through the entrance and up to her first-floor room. It wasn't good that she had to share but at least Shannon was in a different room and so whatever was going to happen would happen in the light of a new day when she hoped heads were cooler and things would somehow fit back together. He had turned Shannon's head the way once he had turned hers but he wasn't ever going to get a second chance to worm his way back into their lives. Surely she would be able to see that and when she weighed everything up she would understand where her loyalties lay. If she did this, then in time perhaps she could forgive what she thought of as her daughter's betrayal. It was also true that she could not now think of the man who had deserted her without something of him tainting her vision of Wade and already she doubted that he would ever be someone with the energy or eventual inclination to meet Shannon's inevitable expectations. At least the absence of a baby was something for which to be grateful and if they had any sense they would make sure one didn't arrive before they had got their home organised and the means to provide for it.

In the bathroom she started to scrub off the war paint and the damage of the night that made her face look like the crackled glaze on the inside of an old cup but couldn't look in the mirror without thinking herself back in the bar. She had never struck her child before and her hand still held the memory of slapping her face. She folded her costume and placed it in the bottom of her case. She would have no further need of it. Now she sought nothing more than to get into bed and to pull the sheets round her and seek to block out everything that had happened, try to fall into the deepest dreamless sleep and in the morning start to sort out the mess the way she did in her job. She felt cold and her body tried to shiver some heat into the bed but although she wanted to she would not let herself cry and so in the first night in a foreign city she burrowed her head into the pillow and tried to block out the drunken shouts of someone in the street below and the distant warning of a tram.

 

 

The mid-price hotel he had booked was in Spuistraat overlooking a canal and it was only after they had checked in that Jack realised he was sharing a room.

‘Why can't I have a room of my own?' he asked, looking at the two beds and keeping his bag on his shoulder to suggest that he might not be staying.

‘Two single rooms are much dearer than a double and it's only two nights.' For a second he thought of saying sarcastically that it would be more fun to share but he checked himself.

‘Why are single rooms dearer?'

He sensed the potential of the issue to become a protracted one and already a little wearied by the strain of the journey he slung his bag on the bed nearest the door then sat on its end and considered his son's question.

‘I suppose hotels know that single people are generally sad losers who'll pay whatever needs to be paid so they see it as a way of making more money. We each have our own bed – it's not as if we have to share.'

‘Mum says you snore.'

He looked at Jack who still stood resolutely with his bag on his shoulder. His hair had flattened and died so that it looked as if he was wearing a black bathing cap. So Susan had no doubt itemised his faults to their children and he wondered if she had included his propensity to spill food down his front when he was eating, his tendency to leave traces of jam in the butter and his occasional inability to bring his amorous advances to a satisfactory conclusion. For a bitter second he thought of spewing out a balancing list for his wife, his ex-wife – that fact was going to take a very long time before it fully registered as a reality – but instead he simply said, ‘I'll try not to.' And then he lay down on the bed, put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling in a gesture of exhausted surrender.

Without turning his head to look he heard his son's bag plop on to the bed and then the sound of him locking the bathroom door. So in the momentary calm he composed speeches he knew he would never deliver about sleeping in shrubbery in Vondelpark, about having no money, about never in the whole of his growing up having stayed in a hotel room, about how his first and only family holiday was in a caravan in Millisle. There was a vicarious pleasure in the unbridled freedom of being able to say what you wanted to your child without having to walk on the eggshells of potential regret at having inflicted some lifelong trauma and given them reason to hate you that no sessions of therapy would ever cure. He had looked forward to seeing Bob Dylan for so long and now the experience was to be tempered by the need to accommodate his son's unpredictable and unfathomable state of being. He was grateful at least that it was getting late and soon it would be permissible to go to bed and in giving himself to sleep he would have to make no effort or worry about anyone else. And then with a pang of pain he remembered that Susan too would be sleeping in a foreign country but that she wouldn't be sleeping alone. Despite himself he started to think about things that he knew would only cause him pain and as Jack finished in the bathroom he wished he could so easily flush away the images that took pleasure in tormenting him. And so he was glad when his son emerged from the bathroom and he could turn his head sideways to look at him and say in sarcastically jolly-father style, ‘Hi Jack, jimjam time?'

 

 

For some reason she had woken early and despite her best efforts couldn't make herself drift over again. She got out of the bed and went to the window. Richard slept on, his breathing steady and relaxed. He was wearing the new blue pyjamas she had bought for him in Marks & Spencer, still bearing the furrowed fold marks and smelling like fresh cotton should. The room remained too hot despite his attempts to adjust it and she regretted wearing the heavy nightdress she had chosen for the trip. She pressed her face close to the glass as if she might be able to absorb some of the cool morning air. Outside the light was milky, almost clotted as if it could be scooped in the hand and pressed to the mouth. She printed her fingers lightly on the glass and when she looked into the square below was surprised to see signs of life. Policemen hung around in relaxed mood beside their vehicle; bare-headed, arms resting on their black belts they stood watch as assorted groups of people made their way across the square, occasionally someone dropping behind to crouch over and light a cigarette, their arm raised level with their heads to act as a windbreak. She assumed they were returning from clubs but found it difficult to grasp how anyone could spend so many hours doing whatever it was they did. On the edges of the square council vehicles were cleaning and emptying bins. It was as if there was a secret life of the city that she had never glimpsed before.

She looked back at the bed but stayed with the coolness of the glass. A jogger with a dog on a lead cut a diagonal across the space below. A drunk was approaching the policemen but they stood impassively and then one waved him on and although she could not hear him, she could see that he was calling out and two of the drunk's companions returned to claim him and usher him on his way. A couple of girls wearing high heels and with cases on wheels appeared below crossing the road in front of the hotel, their cases bucking upwards when they hit the tram lines. Another troupe of young women in party dresses, although clearly together, cut a straggling broken line with the lethargy of their movements in sharp contrast to their stylish appearance. She thought how much their looks contrasted with her memory of herself and her friends. Would it be possible to organise a reunion of those surviving girls? She thought of poor Lillian dead from breast cancer and suddenly the young women in the square seemed sad vulnerable creatures, unprotected from what life might have in hold for them. So let them link arms and let them pull their shawls and flimsy jackets closer in the early light of morning if these things might ward off future danger. But perhaps her former friends would come together and find that their lives had moved on, what previously existed had faded, and that realisation would damage the memories they shared. One of the young women passing the policemen did a little pirouette and bow and got a salute in response.

She remembered the terror of her final-year school formal and the nightmare of waiting to be asked and only being saved by the complex machinations of Susan and Hilary who ran a kind of match-up service for lonely hearts. And then as she stared into the strange light she couldn't stop herself remembering what she didn't want to remember. It was sad and strange the way a thousand kindnesses might fade out of the memory while a single unkindness might remain untarnished for a lifetime. Once in the week before the formal she had overheard a group of girls in her year refer to her as Maid Marion and it was something that had managed to stay with her and despite all her efforts she could not erase. So that was how she was seen and if she had confounded them by marrying a handsome husband she had also paid the price a plain wife would always have to pay. But she was tired now of that insecurity and would have it no more in her life. It was time to give it up. For a second she glanced back at her sleeping husband as he turned on his side oblivious to her absence. How would he cope in the future? How would he come to terms with this change? That would be up to him. She thought of the young trees in the grove at home and of their scent as the early-morning light pressed them awake. They had more years of growing before their time would come and there was new planting to be done to continue the cycle. She wished more people would buy rooted trees and then replant them, but it was already clear that it was a wish that had little chance of being granted in an age where no one wanted any inconvenience and everything had to be instantly disposable. Sometimes in life patience was needed.

There was movement in the square below and she watched the policemen get into their vehicle and slowly drive away. The light was already beginning to nudge the day awake, a day when so many new things would happen, and suddenly shivering a little and not knowing whether it was from the cold or that knowledge, she went back to the bed, put her arm round him and tried to share his warmth.