‘So if you drop out of the course,’ said Gloria, shaking her head, not looking for a fight. ‘What will you do?’
‘What do you mean what will I do? Sure I have a job, don’t I?’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t take up much time. The course got you out of the house, didn’t it?’
‘Oh right. And that’s what you want, is it? Me out of the house. Do you have some young lad coming round when I’m not there?’
‘Chance would be a fine thing. But you know what I mean, Toastie. It gave you an outside interest.’
I nodded. I had a notion that I could just go somewhere every day and read at my leisure instead. Just enjoy the books. Set one aside if I thought it was shite and not have to get all the way to the end. Life’s too short, you know?
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll stick it out. I might try one more essay and if that goes down well with Calvin Klein, then I’ll reconsider. Listen though, do you mind if I head across to Florence on Tuesday?’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Work.’
‘Oh right. And where will I go? We’re supposed to be heading home on Tuesday, aren’t we?’
‘You and Charlie could stay on here for an extra couple of days. I’ll come back on Wednesday afternoon and we can fly back Thursday.’
She nodded. She didn’t have to be asked twice; she loves an old break. ‘You’re very good to me all the same, Toastie, aren’t you?’ she said, snuggling up to me now because she was on her fourth drink and I knew what that meant. She’d get all affectionate and cuddly and if I could manage to persuade her back to the hotel after only one more then there was a chance that I might be given twenty minutes’ attention without the need of a Toffee Crisp.
‘I do my best,’ I said.
‘You do more than that. You take care of me. You take care of Charlie. You’re a good man, Toastie.’
And I don’t know why but something in the way she said that sent a shiver down my spine. Was I a good man? I didn’t know. I’d never thought about myself in those terms before. In moral terms, I mean. This was the type of thing that Trevor had been getting at, I suppose. Using my brain, my analytical senses. Thinking for myself instead of cutting and pasting off the Internet. Not that they’d find anything there to say whether or not Toastie was a good or a bad man. I keep myself well off the radar in that sense. No social media or anything. Much like himself. The Bourne lad.
‘Do you think so?’ I asked.
‘Of course I do. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.’
I pulled her close to me and kissed her on the top of her head. Her shampoo smelled of peaches, which was a bit unfortunate as I can’t fuckin’ stand peaches, the big slimy gooey things. Still and all. I looked out the window of Harry’s Bar and felt a sense of well-being at the notion of Florence. I’d never been there, after all. And it was full of museums. Maybe I could wrangle an extra day out of Gloria if I told her it was grand later, that we didn’t need to have the sex and we could just have a cuddle instead. She’d be so happy about that that she’d probably agree to anything. I could take a look at the paintings and the art galleries, wander in to have a squizz at Michelangelo’s David. See the big langer on him in person instead of just in pictures.
I’ve always had an interest in painting, even if I can scarcely draw a straight line myself. And maybe if the literature course doesn’t work out and Trevor gets on me tits too much I can switch over to art history. Roll on Florence, I thought. A new start. I might even bring Mary-Lou back a snow-globe from there. She’d love that, I’d say. She’d give me all the cultural destinations from then on.
fn1. Just like this.
fn2. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, by George Eliot. Originally published in serial form between 1871 and 1872.
Amsterdam
You have your first drink since your son’s murder in a small bar on Amstel’s curve, where the street separates from the canal and snakes its way in towards Rokin. It’s the second year of the Light Festival and from where you’re sitting, you can see families crossing the Blauwbrug, pausing to look at the illuminations that have sprung up on either side, the small hands of the children mittened against the cold.
On the morning of Billy’s funeral, you went out to the studio room you’d built in your back garden, to the glass-fronted fridge filled with beer and wine, and reached for a bottle before changing your mind and putting it back. Although you needed something to take the edge off, you didn’t want to become a cliché of a man, the type you see in a movie whose son dies, he turns to drink and before long he’s an alcoholic, his wife has left him and his entire life has turned to shit. You didn’t want oblivion anyway. You wanted to feel your pain. And so you haven’t drunk alcohol for nine months. Until now. Until Amsterdam.
Most of the people in the bar are in their early to mid twenties, a good ten years younger than you. They’re beautiful, well dressed, conscious of how they sit, speak and what they order. Their voices create a low buzz, soft-shoe-shuffling over the jazz music, and it’s comforting to reacquaint yourself with a language you learned during your student days. Back then, with three years’ study at UvA, you picked up Dutch quickly; your skill with languages has been helpful in your work.
A girl sitting in a corner, one half of a mismatched couple, throws you a look and you hold her gaze for a few moments. She lights a cigarette and keeps staring at you while blowing smoke into her boyfriend’s face. You shake your head and turn away. She reminds you of a girl you met in a hotel bar in Geneva a few weeks ago, the sixth girl you’ve fucked since March. You only started cheating on your wife after Billy’s murder. Before that, you had been faithful for eight years. The girl’s name was Kate, or Katy. Something like that. The memory of your most recent infidelity causes you no guilt. You wonder sometimes whether you have a conscience at all. You’re aware that there are people you would like to kill and you’re certain that you would feel no remorse afterwards.
That first beer, a Jupiler, tastes a little sour in your mouth, so when you order another, you point towards a different tap. This one is sweeter, lighter on the tongue, and you feel a sense of calm when the alcohol starts to hit your bloodstream. You check your watch. Your wife is late – she’s always late – but you can’t call her, as you don’t carry a phone any more. You remember when you were a student how much you enjoyed sitting in bars like this in the late afternoon with a book and a beer, watching the people coming in and out as you waited for your friends to arrive. It doesn’t seem like any time ago at all. And yet if you were to stand up now and try to ingratiate yourself with any of the young people here, they would stare at you and question your motives. You’re only thirty-four but you feel old enough to be their grandfather.
A boy comes over and asks whether the empty chair at your table is taken. He says it in Dutch and you answer in English.
‘Do you want to sit there or do you want to take it away?’
He blinks. ‘I want to take it away,’ he tells you, scratching his head and smiling pleasantly. ‘To sit over there with my friends.’
‘I’m waiting for my wife,’ you reply, shaking your head. ‘Leave it alone.’
He nods and his expression shifts a little. You haven’t been rude but he seems quite sensitive. You’ve hurt him in some way. He’s a little overweight. You watch as he rejoins his table of friends and they acknowledge him briefly but because he’s standing they don’t involve him in their conversation. He leans in to hear what’s being said but then seems to slip away from them gradually. When he takes his phone from his pocket and starts to scan through his messages, pretending to be busy, you look away and close your eyes, telling yourself to breathe. Not to lose control again.
A bell above the door sounds and you open your eyes to see Sarah walking in, dressed for the Arctic in her coat, scarf and gloves. It’s December, it’s cold, but she’s gone over the top. She looks around and when she sees you she doesn’t smile, and you get the impression that she h
ad hoped she might have some time to herself before you arrived.
‘You’re drinking,’ she says when she sits down, pointing at your beer.
‘I am.’
‘OK, that’s fine.’
You smile and glance out the window, where the universe is populated entirely by people with no hold over you. A woman and her little boy are standing on the street, waiting to cross the road. She’s holding his hand but after a moment she lets go and kneels down to tie her shoelace. You watch the boy, who looks like he might step out on to the road. You watch him closely. He doesn’t move; he stays where he’s supposed to stay. His mother stands up and takes his hand again. After a moment, they cross safely.
‘Well are you going to get me something to drink?’ asks Sarah.
‘Sure. What do you want?’
‘I don’t know. Anything. You choose.’
‘Just pick something,’ you say.
‘A glass of red wine.’
You nod but don’t stand up. Your eye catches sight of her hand on the table. The veins stand out a little because of the cold. A part of you wants her to tease you by pressing it against your cheek and making you jump.
‘Where were you?’ you ask.
‘Utrecht.’
You look at her in surprise. She had said that she was going to spend the day relaxing in the hotel. ‘Utrecht? You’re kidding me.’
‘No. It’s only half an hour away by train. I felt like seeing it.’
‘What the hell is in Utrecht?’ you ask.
‘It’s quite a pretty town, actually. I went for a walk. Saw the cathedral. Had some lunch. A boy asked me would I like to have a drink with him.’
‘A boy?’
‘Yes, a young barge-sailor. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.’
You nod. ‘And did you?’
‘Yes. He was charming. Now are you going to get me that glass of wine or do I have to go myself?’
You stand up and make your way to the bar, ordering her drink and another beer for yourself. There are photographs on the wall behind the barman. He looks like a movie star and in some of the photographs you can see him pictured with actual movie stars who’ve spent time there. As he reaches up for a glass, his T-shirt lifts slightly and you notice a deep scar running across his abdomen. His skin is brown and covered in dark hairs but the strip of white where the knife sliced him divides his stomach in two. You pay for the drinks and sit down.
‘I don’t feel like staying out tonight,’ says Sarah. ‘Do you mind if we just go back to the hotel and get an early night?’
‘I don’t mind in the slightest,’ you tell her.
When you think about Billy, these are the things you remember:
Sarah became pregnant only seven months into your relationship and there was some question over whether or not you were the father. The two of you had not yet moved into any sort of exclusive relationship and there was another boy, a trainee solicitor, who’d been sleeping with her too. She told you both the same night, at the same time, in the corner booth of a burger restaurant, where she explained that she couldn’t be sure which one of you was responsible. You were twenty-five years old at the time and felt it would be beneath your dignity to be outraged by any of this and so you discussed it calmly and agreed that Sarah would wait until after the child was born to undergo the necessary DNA tests. In the meantime, she discontinued the relationship with the trainee solicitor and said that she would like to continue to see you, regardless of the outcome of the tests. You liked her a lot; you were falling in love with her. You told her yes, of course yes, and even if the baby wasn’t yours it wouldn’t make any difference to you.
But as it turned out, the baby was yours.
You struggled during the first year of his life though, as did Sarah. Neither of you seemed capable of making any real connection with the child and you resented how he tied you to your apartment when you would have preferred to be out with your friends. It was a difficult time. You never told Sarah this but you looked into what would happen if two people decided to offer their child for adoption. You knew you would never do it but somehow it relaxed you to know the options.
Eventually, however, you grew used to Billy and things began to get better. You realized one day that you loved him. And he seemed to love you too. To your surprise, you found yourself increasingly happy and your resentment at appearing so middle class and traditional wore off.
When he was four years old, you lost him in a shopping centre. You were holding his hand but then saw a friend from your college days and released him. It was a few minutes later before you realized that he was gone. You went wild, running around shouting his name. Security brought you to their offices, where the police were called. Before they arrived, Billy was delivered back to you. He’d been discovered sitting by a fountain eating an ice cream. He had no money and you questioned how he had bought it. The security cameras revealed a hooded figure, indistinguishable, taking Billy by the hand and leading him towards the front doors before apparently changing his mind and bringing him back, buying him an ice cream and whispering something into his ear before vanishing. When questioned, Billy said that the man had simply said sorry and told him to stay there exactly where he was until he saw a guard. It was a terrifying experience and one you never revealed to Sarah. You told your son that if he said anything about what had happened he would be in big trouble and so he never did. You’re not proud of this behaviour.
When he was six, you began to grow concerned about your depth of feeling for him. You needed to be with Billy as much as possible and it bothered you how beautiful you found him. Not in a sexual way, there was nothing perverse attached to your love. But you found yourself staring at him frequently, his clean, clear skin, his deep-blue eyes, the sheer elegance of his trim little body, and all you could think was what a beautiful boy he was. You hated to think of him growing older, the fluff of teenage stubble sprouting on his chin, acne on his forehead, his body beginning to smell in the mornings. The notion of him touching himself in his bed, jerking off and disposing of the evidence, sleeping in his soiled sheets, depressed you. You wondered whether you needed professional help or whether it was normal for a father to love his son this deeply.
He stole money from Sarah’s purse. You saw him doing it and he did it in such a skilled way that you knew it wasn’t his first time. You didn’t say anything.
From the age of five until the age of seven, either Sarah or you walked him to school every morning, holding his hand every step of the way. On the day of his murder, he’d only been walking without you for a few weeks. And even then he wasn’t alone. He walked with a red-haired boy named George, his best friend, who lived three doors down from you. For the first week of their independence you drove behind at a safe distance to make sure they made it there safely. They were holding hands, which moved you enormously. After that, you decided to let go. You believed he would be fine.
Once, he discovered you watching pornography on your office computer. He was standing there while you flicked, bored, through a series of images on the screen. You were fully dressed, you weren’t doing anything untoward, but as one sequence of pictures changed in favour of another you saw him reflected in the monitor, a ghostly presence, and jumped. You turned to him but he wasn’t looking at you, he was staring at the screen with a bewildered expression on his face. You brought him back to bed and said nothing. You went downstairs and said Fuck about a hundred times. You felt terrible about it, although not enough to stop looking at pornography online.
When the police told you that he’d been murdered, you started laughing. They say that the mind reacts in bizarre ways to things that it cannot accept. They didn’t flinch. Perhaps they’d seen this kind of thing before. Eventually you stopped and grew dizzy and they had to help you into a seat. You asked whether Sarah knew yet and they shook their heads. At that same moment, she turned her key in the front door and came into the living room.
A few minutes later she too
knew that your son had been murdered.
You prefer to travel alone these days. For one thing, it makes it easier to have sex with strangers, something you have increasingly come to rely upon since Billy’s murder. You’re still relatively young, you’re in good shape, you’re reasonably good-looking. It’s not difficult to find the right bar at the right time, to dress correctly, to sit in the right seat, to read a newspaper or work on one of your columns until the right girl comes in. The Internet will tell you everything you need to know about pick-up joints. You don’t go over first but you do make eye contact and you hold it. Usually, if she’s interested, she will too. And it becomes obvious what’s going to happen. Maybe you’ll buy her a drink, maybe you’ll finish your column first, maybe you’ll wait for her to make the approach. You never stay the night and you prefer not to bring someone back to your hotel. You’re not particularly interested in conversation but if it’s something that’s important to her, then you’re happy to go along with it.
The funny thing is, you don’t particularly enjoy it. But it passes a couple of hours and makes you feel removed from a world that allowed you, however briefly, to feel part of a family.
You were never very promiscuous when you were younger but when you look towards the future, constant casual sex is all you see and the idea neither turns you on nor depresses you. Before you met Sarah you had slept with no more than half a dozen girls and one boy. The boy was a friend of yours in college. He was in love with you, or so he said. One night you decided to let him have what he wanted. You were young, nineteen, it didn’t seem to matter much to you. Also, you were mildly interested to know how it would feel, to understand what another boy would do with you, to find out where his hands, his lips, his tongue might travel. The experience didn’t move you very much and you didn’t want to repeat it. The boy, who had promised that a single night together would satisfy the desire that threatened to overwhelm him, only grew more attached to you, and your friendship soon came to an end. He accused you of lying about yourself. He was wrong. You weren’t lying about anything. You just weren’t interested, that’s all. You missed him afterwards though. You’d enjoyed his company. Still, you didn’t regret it.