Us (20 page)

But I was standing alone at the precise centre of a great circle of destruction, and soon the men were barrelling towards me, the four of them like the fingers in a fist, hatred in their eyes. The Dutch accent didn't seem so affable now, it seemed harsh and guttural as they quickly formed a circle around me, hands gripping my shoulder as if steadying me for a punch that I knew would surely come. The man with his nose touching mine was blond as a Viking, with a face like a cheap cut of meat, missing teeth – never a good sign – and beer on his breath. ‘No speak Dutch,' I repeated idiotically, ‘no speak Dutch,' on the basis that bad English is more easily understood than the good kind. But it's possible to spot swearing in almost any language and now four other hands were grabbing my arms, walking me – carrying me – through the crowd that had now gathered to watch the sport. Three motorcycles were hauled upright and inspected, but the nearest bike lay on its side in a way that seemed suggestive of a dying horse, the owner crouching beside the beloved creature, keening quietly, rubbing his thumb over the horrible scar on the highly polished fuel tank. Unusually for a Dutchman, he seemed to speak fairly limited English, because the only words I could pick up were ‘You pay, you pay,' then, as he grew in linguistic confidence, ‘you pay big'.

‘I didn't do it!'

‘Your bike did it.'

‘Not my bike. My bike over there,' and I gestured across the devastation to where my bike stood, immaculately vertical. There was, I suppose, an interesting debate to be had here about causality and the notion of ‘fault', intention and chance, but it might save time if I simply reached for my wallet. I had never re-sprayed a motorcycle. How much might that cost?

I began negotiations. ‘I can give you … eighty euros.' This made them laugh in an unpleasant way, and an immense paw took my wallet and started searching through the folds and pouches. ‘Excuse me – could you give that back?'

‘No, my friend,' said the blond man. ‘We are going to the bank!'

‘Give him back his money!' said a voice to one side, and looking over my shoulder I saw that a woman was pushing her way through the crowd, a large black woman with improbably blonde hair, tying her dressing gown over what appeared to be some sort of white fishnet body-stocking. ‘Here,' she said, snatching my wallet and returning it to me, ‘this is yours. You hold this until I say.'

There was, at this point, a certain amount of shouting in Dutch, the woman jabbing her finger into the lead biker's chest – her nails were extravagantly long, curved and painted – then throwing her shoulders back and pushing her chest towards him, using it as one might a riot shield, while pointing at me and gesturing up and down. She shouted something, causing the crowd to laugh and the biker to shrug defensively, then suddenly she changed her tone and tack, flirting with the man instead, her arms draped over his shoulders. He laughed and pinched his nose in thought. Looked me up and down. I seemed to be the subject of some sort of negotiation.

‘How much in your wallet?' said the lady who, I surmised from the body-stocking, was either a prostitute or very outgoing. Would she be coming to the bank too? Perhaps she wasn't my ally after all. Perhaps they were all going to rob me and toss me in the canal. ‘About two hundred and fifty euros,' I said, defensively.

‘Give me one hundred fifty.' She beckoned with two fingers of her hand. I hesitated, and she spoke fast and low. ‘Give it to me and you might live.'

I handed over the money, which she packed into a tight ball and stuffed into the biker's fist. Then, before he'd had a chance to count it, she took my arm and pushed her way through the crowd towards a flight of stairs. Behind us, the bikers were protesting loudly: ‘You pay more! More!' But the lady gestured dismissively, hissed something about the police, and I was bustled up the steps of the townhouse, through a red-lit doorway.

My saviour's name was Regina – though that may have been a pseudonym – and she was terrifically nice.

‘What is your name, my new friend?'

‘Paul,' I said, then with an awful inevitability, ‘Newman. I'm Paul Newman.' I'm not sure where my pseudonym came from. It lacked the ring of plausibility, and probably wasn't even necessary. After all, I hadn't done anything wrong. But too late; for the time being I was Paul Newman.

‘Hello, Paul Newman. Come …'

I took a seat on a sort of vinyl platform. The bedroom, if bedroom is the right word, contained a sink and a rudimentary shower and was lit in a deep red, and I thought for a moment what a terrific place it would be for developing photographs. A cheap fan blew ineffectually, a kettle sat in the corner. There was a microwave, and a powerful smell of some chemical approximation of coconut. ‘I watched the whole thing from the window. You are a very unlucky man, Paul Newman,' she said, and laughed. ‘They were big guys. I think they might have killed you, or at least emptied your bank.'

‘What did you tell him?'

‘I told him to claim on insurance. He has insurance, that is what insurance is for! You are shaking.' She illustrated with juddering hands. ‘Would you like some tea?'

‘Tea would be lovely. Thank you.' While we waited for the kettle to boil I became very aware of her bare bottom, which was large, dimpled and never more than half a metre from my face. I turned to the window onto the street, intrigued to see the booth from this point of view, and noted that she had exactly the same swivelling office chair that I'd once had in my lab, though I didn't point this out. Instead I turned to the TV.

‘Ah, I see that you have
Downton Abbey
here too!'

Regina shrugged. ‘You want to watch something else?' she said, and indicated a small pile of pornographic DVDs.

‘No, no.
Downton
's fine.' Without asking, she stirred two sugars into the tea and passed me my mug, and I noticed that my hands were indeed shaking. I used my left palm as a saucer. At a loss for conversation, I asked, ‘So – have you been working here long?'

Regina told me that she had been doing this for six or seven years. Her parents were Nigerian, but she had been born in Amsterdam and had started working here through a friend. The winter was depressing and it was hard to pay the rent on the little booth without the tourists around, but she had some regular customers that she could rely on. Summer, on the other hand, was too busy, too much, and she shook her head woefully. ‘Stag nights!' she said, and wagged a finger at me as if I had been organising them all. Apparently a lot of men required drink to get their courage up, then found themselves unable to perform. ‘They still have to pay, of course!' she said, pointing a finger with some menace and I laughed and nodded and agreed that this was only fair. I asked if she knew her colleagues and she said they were mainly friendly, though some girls had been tricked into coming here from Russia and Eastern Europe, and this made Regina sad and angry. ‘They think they're going to be dancers, can you believe that? Dancers! Like the world needs all these dancers!'

After a moment, she said, ‘What do you do, Paul Newman?'

‘Insurance,' I said, giddy on my whimsical flight of fancy. ‘I'm on holiday here with my wife and son.'

‘I have a son too,' she said.

‘Mine's seventeen.'

‘Mine's only five.'

‘Five is a lovely age,' I said, which I've always thought an idiotic remark. When do ages stop being ‘lovely'? ‘Five's lovely, but fifty-four's a bastard' – that should be the follow-up. Anyway, Regina's five-year-old son, it transpired, lived in Antwerp with his grandparents because she didn't want any of them seeing her at work, and at this point the little room took on a sombre air and we sat in silence for a minute or so, watching events below stairs at Downton and contemplating the anxieties of parenthood.

But all in all, it was an interesting and informative conversation, not one I'd expected to have that evening and I did feel we'd made some sort of connection. But I was also aware of eating into her time and also that she was practically naked, and so I stood and reached for my wallet.

‘Regina, you've been really kind, but we've been talking for a while so I really want to pay you something …'

‘Okay,' she shrugged. ‘It's fifty for complete service.'

‘Oh, no. No, no, no. I don't need a complete service.'

‘Okay, Paul Newman, you tell me what you do need?'

‘I don't need anything! I'm here with my family.'

She shrugged again, and took the mug from my hand. ‘Everyone has a family.'

‘No, we're here for the Rijksmuseum.'

‘Yes,' she laughed, ‘I hear that a lot.'

‘My wife's off with my son. The only reason I'm here at all is because I was looking for a Chinese restaurant.' This made her laugh even more. ‘Please, don't laugh at me, Regina, it's true. I was just looking for somewhere to … I just wanted to find …' And I imagine that at this point some kind of delayed shock kicked in, combined with the stresses and strains of the last few days, because for some reason I seemed to be crying in absurd, jagged gasps, hunched over on the vinyl bench, one hand pressed across my eyes, like a mask.

I wish I could report here that Regina told me to put my money away and held me to her warm, soft breast and soothed my brow, the kind of thing that would happen in an arty film or novel. Two lost souls meeting, or some such nonsense. But in real life lost souls don't meet, they just wander about and I think, in all honesty, she was as embarrassed as I was. A nervous breakdown in a red-lit booth was a breach in etiquette, and there was a palpable briskness as Regina took the remaining hundred euros, stood and opened the door.

‘Goodbye, Paul Newman,' she said, her hand on my shoulder. ‘Go and find your family.'

In the Mellow Times Café they played Bob Marley's
Greatest Hits
, which even I would have rejected as a little obvious. My bud-tender, a tall boy called Tomas with a patchy beard and a flute-y, lisping voice, asked me what I wanted, and I asked for something that would simultaneously calm me down and cheer me up, not too strong; did such a brand exist? Seemingly it did; he gave me something called Pineapple Gold and, like a good GP, advised me not to combine it with alcohol, though it was too late for that advice as I had already been to several bars.

Back in the honeymoon suite, I pulled out my phone and noted a series of texts from Connie that I imagined represented a spiral of lunacy:

Where are you?

Call me!!!

It fun here!! Join us

come have fun

u ok hun?

funny old man callme!!!

love you loads

But even that last message failed to cheer me. ‘I love you' is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations – taking away the ‘I', adding a word like ‘lots' or ‘loads' – render it meaningless. I opened the windows wide, set the Jacuzzi to massage, placed my ‘gear' in a saucer on the edge and climbed in.

I wish I could report some psychedelic odyssey. Instead, I felt the same sense of overheated melancholy that I usually associate with three p.m. on Boxing Day. Good God, did people really go to prison for this? My head hummed with the unpleasant throbbing one feels in a bath that's too hot, a sensation amplified by the fact that I
was
in a bath that was too hot, bubbling and churning like some terrible casserole. The drug was failing to bring about the amnesia I craved. I was, if anything, even more painfully aware of the failure of my best hopes. Despite my efforts, or perhaps because of them, the Petersens were stumbling. If there had been two of us, or four of us, perhaps there might have been some balance. But together we had the grace of a three-legged dog, hobbling from place to place.

By now I was feeling rather ill. The bedroom smelt like a burning spice rack and it was a non-smoking room, too, adding to my paranoia. My heart was beating far too fast and I became convinced that it would pop like my father's and I would expire like a rock star, on the floor of an Amsterdam sex hotel after three beers and two puffs of a very mild joint. One hand on my chest, still soaking wet, I stumbled into our absurd bed and waited beneath damp sheets for Connie to come home.

She returned at three a.m., just as she had that first summer. It had been my firm intention to sulk but she was dopily affectionate, settling her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelt smoky, there was an unfamiliar spirit on her breath and a slight, not unpleasant smell of sweat.

‘Oh my God,' she murmured. ‘What a night.'

‘Was it fun?'

‘In a teenage kind of way. We went to see bands! Did you get my texts? We missed you. Where were you?'

‘I met a prostitute. Called Regina. Then I OD'ed in the Jacuzzi.'

She laughed. ‘Oh, is that right?'

‘Where's Albie?'

‘He's next door. I think he brought some friends back.' And sure enough, through the door of our adjoining rooms could be heard the sound of laughter, and an accordion playing
‘Brown-Eyed Girl'.

From now on there would be no more returns at three or four in the morning. Now we went to bed and woke together, stood at the sink and brushed our teeth, shaping the habits and tics, the gestures and dances of a life together, beginning the process by which things that are thrilling and new become familiar, scuffed and well loved. Specifically …

Connie always dozes when the alarm goes off whereas I am already awake. Connie puts her bra on before any of her other clothes, I work on the lower half then proceed upwards. Connie likes a manual toothbrush, I swear by electric. Connie talks on the phone for hours, I am brief and to the point. Connie carves a roast chicken like a surgeon, I make excellent stews. Connie is late for flights, whereas I like to be there the requisite two hours before departure, because why would they ask if they didn't mean it? Connie has a facility for mimicry and dancing, I do not. Connie dislikes mugs but rarely uses a saucer with a teacup, habitually burns toast, hates having her ears touched or whispered into, licks jam off her knife, chews ice-cubes and sometimes, shockingly to me, eats raw bacon off the chopping board. Connie likes gritty award-winning dramas, old musicals and berating politicians on the news. I like documentaries about extreme weather conditions. She dislikes tulips and roses, cauliflower and swede, and eats tomatoes as if they were apples, wiping the juice from her chin with her thumb. She paints her toenails in front of the TV on Sunday nights, each leg raised in turn in a wonderful way, sheds a startling amount of hair into the plughole yet never removes it, has a terrifying dent in her scalp which she calls her ‘metal plate' from a childhood mishap on a diving board, a surprising number of black fillings in her teeth, a raised mole on her left shoulder, two piercings in each ear. She leaves a certain smell on her pillow, prefers red wine to white, thinks chocolate is overrated, and has an infinite capacity for sleep, could sleep standing up if she chose. We made these discoveries each day, then stood and undressed on opposite sides of the bed in which we made love 90, then 80, then 70 per cent of our nights. We witnessed all the petty maladies, the stomach upsets and chest infections, the gnarled toenails, the ingrowing hairs, boils and rashes that took the gleam off the person we had first presented. No matter, no panic, these things happen, and instead we shopped for food together, pushing the trolley a little self-consciously at first, trying on this domesticity. We had what we ironically referred to as our ‘drinks cabinet' and brought back lurid liqueurs when we travelled abroad. We argued over tea, Connie favouring fragrant, vaguely medicinal brews over regular tea-bags. We argued once again when she destroyed my fridge by defrosting the freezer section with a screwdriver, then again about the efficacy of Chinese medicine, and once more about furniture, as my perfectly decent sofa-bed was removed and replaced with Connie's smoky, baggy velvet affair. My fitted carpets, chosen for their hard-wearing neutrality – ‘office carpets', she called them – were torn up. We painted the floorboards together, as young couples must.