The Light of Amsterdam (31 page)

‘We should have one of these in Belfast,' Jack said.

‘Yes we should. There's a lot of things we should have that they have here.'

‘If we had canals in Belfast there'd be old fridges and settees floating in them.'

‘And bodies. Every morning a new body to be fished out.'

Jack didn't reply but to signal that he had finished his part in the conversation took his mobile out of his pocket and clicked his fingers over the keys. To his surprise, his son hadn't finished speaking.

‘It's a rip-off what they charge you to use your phone,' he said as he held the mobile at arm's length in front of his face like a mirror. ‘A total rip-off.'

‘Love never comes cheap,' he said, regretting almost immediately his need to say things that sounded wise. But his son only glanced at him quizzically and said nothing before they got to their feet and eased past the queue, their passage made more awkward by the number of backpacks. As he stepped outside he glanced for a final time at the young woman with the wok and then he knew he was destined to spend the rest of his life falling in love with women he never spoke to and whose traverse across his heart lasted only long enough for him to feel the pain of their loss.

‘Did you see her tattoo?' Jack asked. ‘It's class.'

‘Yes,' he answered, feeling guilty that his son had observed his gaze and so almost immediately he turned the conversation away from himself. ‘You're not thinking of getting a tattoo, are you?'

‘Might do. Coloured ones like hers are cool. You can get ones that are symbols and kind of ancient writing. I like them.'

He couldn't help himself – it was too important. ‘The first rule of getting a tattoo is to get it where it's only visible when you want it to be.'

Jack merely shrugged a reply and then put in his earphones. So as they walked he was left to ponder what his son might choose to engrave on his body and he remembered the ‘people are shit' he had printed on the white page of his arm. Perhaps the disguise of Latin or some hieroglyphic squiggles might ameliorate the impact of whatever inane or aggressive slogan his imagination was able to devise. He wondered what age you had to be to legally get a tattoo but realised it hardly mattered after it was done and then told himself that if Jack did go ahead and get one, he and his mother would be the ones paying for the laser removal ten years down the line. Every other person they passed seemed to have one, including a guy who sprouted green-leafed tendrils from some hidden plant clinging to the lattice of his neck.

The journey on the metro to the concert hall in the south-east of the city took less than half an hour and they arrived before the doors had been opened so they milled about aimlessly for a while as the crowds gathered and touts tried to do business in tickets and hawkers sold posters and other Dylan merchandise. There was a lot of smoking and the air was clotted and pungent with the smell of cannabis, sometimes sickly sweet, but sometimes reminding him of burnt grass. No one was dealing, everyone seemed to have brought their own and were sharing it openly with their friends. The assembling audience now forming an orderly queue, while not confined to a particular age group, inevitably revealed a sprinkling of bald men with ponytails. At one point the crowd cheered the arrival on a tandem of what looked like man and wife, both bedecked in tie-dye from head to foot, their long grey manes of hair held by red bandannas and, apart from the colour of their hair, looking like they had stepped out of a time machine that had brought them straight through the decades from Woodstock. They flashed peace signs at their audience and the driver honked a large horn perched on the handlebars of the bike which drew renewed, if ironic, cheers. He tried to tell himself that it felt counter-culture but there were too many things that jarred to allow himself to spark that nostalgia – the exorbitant price of the tickets for a start; the fact that the audience was so diverse in age and dress and so lacked any sense of cohesion or shared identity; their passive amenability to the instructions of the stewards; but mostly the fact of everything that had happened to the world in the intervening years. So he knew there was no flag of freedom flying, that most of those of a similar age to himself who had come there had momentarily slipped discreetly out of lives of quiet respectability and careers which were bound up with preserving the status quo and for whom all forms of change were shrouded in fear.

‘You could get high just breathing,' Jack said, slipping his hood over his head, and he wasn't sure whether his son was expressing a moral objection or just sheltering from the coldness of the wind that was beginning to course round the hard edges of the building. Whatever the reason it made him look like a young monk, a novice, and he momentarily felt again that pleasing image that their journey to this city was an initiation, a sharing of what he had known and treasured in the past. Perhaps everything was not yet lost, perhaps those opening jangling organ chords could still hold the power to quicken and spin them both into some new orbit. He had to stop himself reaching out a hand and resting it on his son's shoulder and then another cheer rose from the throat of the crowd as the doors opened and suddenly they were moving forward when people started to progress through the security checks. He held on to Jack's arm as the queue suddenly took on a life of its own but he felt his son flinch away and so he dropped his hand.

 

 

She had left him at a point where all she had to do was follow the road and she would be back at her hotel. He had offered to take her all the way but she had declined, not wanting him to see the basic nature of her accommodation. When the time came for them to go in their separate directions there was a moment of awkward uncertainty and he stared over her shoulder then swung the plastic bag again so that he looked like a boy going home from school.

‘Well thanks,' she said. ‘I hope everything works out with Jack.'

‘Thanks. It's Karen, isn't it?'

She nodded and waited for him to say whatever it was that he was reaching for.

‘You make a good nurse, Karen. Thanks.'

And then he turned to hide his embarrassment and for a second she stood watching him go before she too turned and set off to find her daughter. But she didn't want to be a nurse any more. It was what she spent half her life doing – looking after other people, cleaning up their mess. Just once in her life she wanted someone to look after her, to nurse her with gentleness and kindness, put their arm round her and tell her that everything was all right. If such a person existed and if it was someone she could finally give herself to in trust, then she believed it was just possible that the hardness she knew had grown on her like a second skin might be softened. She had always thought of it as a protection but now she wondered if it was a barrier to whatever good might happen. She would lose her daughter one way or the other, whether through the physical separation of the coming marriage or through what would happen between them in the next hours. That awareness suddenly echoed again with loneliness and despite everything that she had thought before about being better on her own, she could not sentence herself to a life without love. There were people in the home who hardly ever had visitors but there were others who had someone who came faithfully and whose regular presence was a source of comfort. She thought too of the dying man whose hand she had held and she knew she didn't want to be old and alone.

She tried to think of what she would say to Shannon and with renewed shame she remembered hitting her. Perhaps her daughter wouldn't even want to speak to her. All her life she believed she'd had to pay a high price for her mistakes. And this one could be as big a grief as any that had gone before. But the shame was counter-balanced by the knowledge of how her daughter had betrayed her, of how she had planned to tell her in a strange city far from home of what she had schemed and hidden from her. She had no idea of what she would say and as she walked the events of the day splintered in her head then re-formed in sharp-edged, disconnected images – the pregnant girl reading the letter, the ice-skaters, the music in the church, a stranger's tears.

She noticed that as she got closer to where her hotel was the neighbourhood became seedier and a little run-down. There were some small restaurants that looked like customers never crossed their thresholds and a few boarded-up doorways. The cold was much more intense now and the faces of those who passed her looked pinched and pale. There were no Christmas lights here either and for the first time that day she felt a little apprehensive about being on her own. There was a slewed concertina of collapsed bicycles and out on the road two trams slithered alongside each other like mating snakes. From an approaching car ripped the bass beat off a pumped-up sound system. A man who passed looked at her and made her nervous but then momentarily glad that she could still, if not turn heads, attract a stranger's fleeting gaze. She didn't spend that much time on herself but Shannon's fixation with appearance had ensured that she had never been allowed to let herself go, even when she had no other motivation than to humour her daughter.

She remembered, too, how her own city had looked from the Craigantlet Hills on that night, stretched out below them and studded with amber pearls of light, how it had assumed a momentary beauty like a bride dressed on her wedding morning. She had almost forgotten how love could colour and shape the world. He had given her a metal ring from his van and she had thought herself lucky and nursed it as if it was the most valuable of diamonds. She had never had a wedding dress and after it was all over and the honeymoon started, she would try on Shannon's dress and no one would ever know but herself. In some ways it felt like hers because she had worked so many extra hours to earn the money to pay for it. Every flounce and frill, every stitch of embroidery was the result of her labour, of working in the kitchen in the home, of cleaning toilets and showers, of toiling in the laundry room. So she was entitled to try it on and for a moment at least to think that it was hers.

She was nearly there and almost sick with nervousness as she got closer. Then suddenly there was a young woman running to meet her. It was Shannon and her arms were outstretched but almost immediately she saw that it wasn't her daughter but Lorrie.

‘Karen, thank God you're here.'

‘What is it? Is it Shannon?' She felt the slime of sickness in her throat. ‘What's wrong, Lorrie, tell me!' But the girl was starting to cry and she had to grab her arm and force her into a response while her own imagination rippled through ever-expanding terrors that left her desperate for an answer.

‘Has something happened to Shannon? Lorrie, tell me. Tell me right now!' And she pushed the girl's arm again as if she was pressing her into a starting gear.

‘She's been crying her eyes out all day and we've all been out looking for you. But we couldn't find you and Shannon was starting to say that something bad had happened to you. And she's really upset. And then an hour ago she said she was going to find you and she wouldn't let any of us go with her and we're all worried sick.'

So her daughter wasn't dead or in some hospital ward on a life-support machine. She was upset and she was somewhere in Amsterdam and looking for her. She must go and find her but first of all she released her grip on Lorrie's arm, tried to lightly brush away the print her grip had puddled on it, told her everything would be all right and then turned and set off into the night.

Twelve

She hesitated at the door of their room, more nervous than she had ever felt at any time in their marriage since their first night in the Slieve Donard Hotel with the sea a grey featureless swathe outside their window and almost indistinguishable from the sky that seemed to press it into a stubborn stillness. Too nervous and shy to enjoy much more than the comfort of the room and the knowledge that it was just the soft rasp of the sea stretching away from them outside. Only that one night before they caught a flight to London where they found themselves in a cheap and cheerful hotel near the British Museum. And somehow it was easier in an unfamiliar place where no one knew anything about them. Taking the boat on the river past all the sights that they'd only ever seen on television. She was happy then, filled with anticipation about the future.

Without being entirely sure why, she knocked on the door before inserting the key-card. It didn't work first time and she had to take it out and swipe it again. It still didn't work – perhaps she was doing it the wrong way. Then there was the click and she opened the door to find an empty room. She looked at it carefully but in its neatness it was a room without a story. She looked in the bathroom to find it too how she had left it. Then there was the stirring of panic as different scenarios started to play themselves out, each one more fantastic than the one it replaced. She lifted the phone to ring the front desk but put it down again not knowing what it was she intended to say. Perhaps she had been scammed – it was the perfect opportunity for easy money and no likelihood of any comeback – and she felt both foolish and then for the first time in her life dangerously reckless. Who knew what might have happened or the potentially dangerous repercussions of her actions? She had to find him, assure herself that he was all right, and nothing beyond that mattered now to her as she hurried out of the room and towards the lift.

How could she ever forgive herself if she had brought danger to him or if she had been the cause of some terrible misfortune? Despite her frantic pressings of the buttons, the lift took a long time to come and she was glad that it was empty but it stopped at the floor below where no one was waiting and in her panic she pushed buttons randomly and impatiently in her desire to see the doors closed. But as if to punish her the lift stopped at each succeeding floor. The foyer was empty and as she headed to the front door, unsure of where it was she was heading, she heard her name called and he was standing in the entrance to the bar. He was staring at her, staring more intently at her than she could ever remember, and she felt herself flinching, as if she was suddenly exposed and unprotected.