by David Rees
“Has he written, or phoned?”
“No.” The excitement had vanished, like a burst bubble. “Still . . . to alter the old cliché, I may have lost a lover, but I’ve gained a son.” He paused, thinking. “He’ll write, I guess. When he needs his stuff. The harp. Etcetera.”
“I don’t know any Dutch,” I said, trying to shift him back to a more cheerful subject.
“Neither do I,” he answered, “but it doesn’t matter. You hear English spoken more often than Dutch in the streets of Amsterdam. Now . . .if, when we’re there, you want to go off and explore on your own, you must be careful about two things. Drug pushers, and—”
“I’m not into any drugs. I’ve never even smoked marijuana.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Nasty, smelly substance.”
“Have you smoked it?”
He looked taken aback at this question, and somewhat embarrassed. “Once or twice,” he admitted. “But I don’t want you doing it. Hmmm. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Liberal, easy-going dad refused to let son do what he’s done himself . . . These questions muddle me. I smoked it once or twice, as I said, just to see what it was like, but I was thirty-five at the time. It’s the worry or the fear, I suppose, that kids of sixteen aren’t old enough to know what they’re getting into . . .Oh, hell, I find these conversations uncomfortable! It isn’t like sex; a right age and a wrong age . . . but . . . anyway, Amsterdam is a very relaxed city. Lax, some people would call it. A lot of drugs change hands there, so I want you to be careful.”
“I said I’ve never touched anything; I’m not interested.” Then I added, mischievously, “What would you say is the right age for sex, then? Thirty-five?”
He stared at me almost angrily for a moment. “The other danger I have to warn you about is the red light
district. It’s rough and sleazy because in Holland prostitution is very open and above board. Too much so in my opinion—some of the streets in that area aren’t safe to walk in. I think you’re the kind of kid who can look after himself, but don’t make any silly decisions, that’s all. Anyway, as I told you, there are masses of interesting places to see and things to do.”
We went to the post office and got my passport, then did some shopping. Dad bought jeans for both of us, then said he wanted a shirt and that a pair of sneakers was a dire necessity for me; my current pair was on the point of imminent collapse, which was true. Buying clothes restored his good mood; when we reached home he was as effervescent as a child let out of school. After tea, I rushed round to Miranda’s house to tell her everything that had happened, but she wasn’t in—gone to visit her aunt, Ben said, and he didn’t know what time she would be back.
I was so tensed up that I slept badly, waking every so often from nightmares in which planes crashed to the ground, or caught on fire in mid-air and exploded. In the morning I had a headache which bothered me all the way up to London. Our route took us through Southampton and Winchester; when we stopped at Winchester I saw Mr Bowles’s little engine sniffling and snorting at the next platform. I was afraid I might be seen by Mum, Aunt Bridie and Nic arriving on some spending spree, and I was relieved when our train started to glide out of the station. At Headbourne Worthy I had a brief glimpse of watercress beds, the wide, lazy River Itchen and its willows; and I wondered, with a pang of loss or longing, if I’d ever be delivered back to the safe, familiar world of Alresford and my childhood.
We travelled from Waterloo to Heathrow on the underground, so I didn’t see much of London, a city I’d visited but didn’t know a great deal about. One day, I said to myself, I will get to know it, better than anywhere else in the world . . . Now the airport, and I couldn’t decide whether I was more frightened than bewildered, more excited than worried. It was huge! Everything was on a grand scale—the buildings, the runways, the aeroplanes themselves, the noise, and particularly the long, slow progress from the baggage check-in through passport control, the duty-free shops and the innumerable lounges and corridors to the departure gate.
The plane was a lot bigger than I had expected, though Dad said it was only a 727, quite small compared with the monster-size jumbos that flew across the Atlantic and half-way round the world to Australia and New Zealand. “This trip is like getting on a bus,” he said. “Just an hour’s ride.” It didn’t seem like a bus to me. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I shall have to be,” I said. “There’s not much I can do about it now.”
“You can get off and take the train home.”
There hadn’t been much I could do about it from the start, I thought, and I wondered again if Dad always got his way so easily with other people. Our seats were at the back, which helped—I remembered reading of a plane crash in which the only survivors were the passengers in the tail: on impact with the ground, the tail had conveniently snapped off, and was the one bit of the wreck not to become an instant fiery furnace.
I refused Dad’s suggestion of a place by the window. “You’ll see more from there,” he said. “And I’ve seen it all before.”
“I think I’ll feel happier if I don’t look out of the window.”
Take-off was terrifying. The speed with which we surged forward, much faster than any car or inter-city train, almost embedded me into the seat, and the roar and the jolting, though not as bad as I had feared, were sufficient to set the adrenalin racing—my palms sweated; my throat was dry and my stomach was a tight knot. Then we were in the air. Just like that: one moment careering over tarmac at heaven knows how many hundred miles an hour, about to smash to pieces, so I thought, in the houses at the edge of the airport; the next rising above them, the plane dipping its starboard wing to make a turn, so that the roads and railways and buildings of West London—I couldn’t help but look, although I’d said I wouldn’t—were like an ordnance survey map I was holding vertically at the side of my face, instead of putting it horizontally on a table. Then we were in the clouds—exactly as if we were immersed in dense fog—then above them, with the sun shining down on a vast mattress, it seemed, of fluffy cotton wool. It actually appeared to be quite safe; it gave me the illusion that, if the plane suddenly dropped, we would just bounce on some kind of celestial trampoline. The no-smoking lights were switched off, and there was no need any longer for seat belts. People unclunked and unclicked, lit cigarettes, got up and moved about as if they really were doing something utterly normal like travelling, as Dad had said, on a bus—well, maybe a train—instead of taking part in the most unnatural activity I could imagine human beings indulging in: whizzing through the air at immense speed thousands of feet above solid earth.
“O.K. now?” Dad asked.
“Yes,” I said, smiling. I was.
“Want to sit by the window?”
“Might as well, I suppose. Thanks.”
We changed places. “We’re already over the North Sea,” he said. “You can glimpse it through the holes in the cloud.”
There it was: a wrinkled sheet, and an oil tanker sat on it; absolutely stationary it looked, with the V of its
wake behind it like a crease. “Do they give us any food?” I asked. On air journeys, I knew, free drinks were provided, and dinners in plastic boxes.
“Not on a flight as short as this,” he said. “There wouldn’t be time to serve it. But do you want something? I can speak to one of the stewardesses.”
“No. It’s all right.” I felt disappointed. “I wish they hadn’t shown us that stuff about oxygen masks and emergency exits,” I said.
“Just as well to know where the escape hatches are.”
“Yes, I agree. But telling you all that somehow implies they’re expecting the worst.”
“Oh . . . nonsense!” He started to read a magazine he had brought with him; he was evidently losing any sympathy he might have felt—not much to begin with—for my stupid fear of flying. This fear was, in fact, fast evaporating, like the thinning cloud beneath us: the sea was quite clear now, and a long stretch of sand. A beach: behind it
houses and fields. Holland! I thought of windmills and tulips, and Dutch girls in clogs, and landscape so flat that nothing appeared to happen in it except in the far distance. (Well, that was the impression I had got from prints of Dutch paintings.)
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We are now beginning our descent to Amsterdam Schiphol. Please fasten your safety belts and extinguish your cigarettes.” Dad was right, as usual: it had been unbelievably quick.
The sensation of coming down was far from pleasant, and my terror returned, though not so acutely as when we had taken off. We re-entered the cloud, and the engine noises altered; there were all sorts of little bumps and trembles, and the wing—what I could see of it—seemed to be shaking. Suppose another plane was flying about in this murk and the pilot didn’t know? Radar, I reassured myself, and the airport control people were talking us down—they knew what else was charging round up here. But I was glad when we broke through the cloud and I could see another squashed-eyeball view of ordnance map buildings and roads and fields, looking, alas, much like the version we’d left behind in England.
Ca-rump! Only the smallest of jolts as we touched the runway, then once more we were belting along tarmac at petrifying speed. Slowing, however, with every second that passed. When the plane stopped, people unclunked again, then stood up to take their luggage from the storage compartments overhead. I gazed out of the window. Certainly the landscape was flat, but where were the windmills and the Dutch girls in clogs? (It was the wrong time of year for tulips, of course.)This airport looked much the same as Heathrow— concrete and glass. Maybe all airports are similar. But the city of Amsterdam, I hoped, would not be like anything in Britain.
We’d arrived! Excitement replaced fear, as I told myself this would be the first time I’d ever set foot on foreign soil. (Scotland, I decided, didn’t count.)
5. Amsterdam
On the rundfahrt—what a rude language Dutch is! In fact it means round trip and I discovered later that the word is borrowed from German—I realized that Amsterdam was not only a very beautiful city, but one that demanded exploration on my own. Not exactly as Bournemouth had done (it couldn’t possibly have been more different) but because it was a city of young people: every bridge, every square, every street market had crowds of kids. Bournemouth was mostly what my father had called it—costa geriatrica. The rundfahrt was a trip by water; Amsterdam was a little like my mental pictures of Venice, the city of canals. The boat took a tortuous route—left, right, left, left again, and so on—so that I completely lost my sense of direction. On the edges of the canals were cobblestone lanes, many of them planted with big leafy trees, and on their far sides were terraces of tall seventeenth and eighteenth century houses, built of brick so mellowed with time that they seemed to have been there for ever, each one individual in its paintwork, its pattern of windows, the ornamentation on its gables, the design of its front door, and all leaning together as if, with age, they needed their neighbours’ support to prevent them from toppling into the canals. Every so often an alley or a narrow passage opened up, revealing at its end something of interest that beckoned me, a tree in sunlight, a square with people milling about, a man playing a barrel organ, the walls of an ancient church. I just wanted to be by myself and soak up the atmosphere. But as soon as another new scene was revealed, the boat chugged on, removing whatever it was and replacing it with the next vista, only to snatch that away also. It was like being shown all the goodies in a sweetshop, but being told not to touch any of them.
Out hotel, on the Kerkstraat, was pleasant and old-fashioned; the staff were friendly and most of them spoke English. A Dutch breakfast was a bit odd—a lot of it seemed to consist of cheese—but the coffee was excellent, and so were the various kinds of bread. My father took me to the art galleries—the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum— and on our second evening we went to the Concertgebouw to hear Amsterdam’s world-famous orchestra. “Much more famous than the Wessex,” Dad said, “and I promise you there will be no Mahler.” The music I enjoyed this time, though my thoughts wandered in the slow passages— Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Debussy’s Nocturnes, and the London Symphony of Vaughan Williams. This culture was fine with me, and so was dinner at the bistro just across the way from our hotel, which served English food: pork chops and salad, roast beef and runner beans.
But I was restless; I wanted something more than a tour, conducted by Dad, of music, works of art, and trips by boat to look at buildings. At breakfast on our third morning, when he asked me what I’d like to do, I said “Can I just go off on my own for a few hours?” I wondered if I should have kept silent, for he didn’t appear to be in too happy a mood, and I did not want to upset him, particularly when he was so concerned to give me a good time.
He thought for a moment, then said “Make a day of it, if you wish.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll give you a street map—I’ve got one in our room and I’ve marked the hotel with an X. I’d better write down the phone number, so you can ring here if you’re lost. Come back at. . . tea-time. Five o’clock. No later than six. I’d like to eat tonight at an Indonesian restaurant I know, the other side of town. Do you need some money?”
“I’ve thirty guilders.”
“Well, that should buy you something for lunch, and leave plenty to spare. Watch out for bicycles.”
“Bicycles?”
“You must have noticed, what with the canals and the rabbit warren of little streets, that this is not a city for cars. It’s impossible to drive here! Good thing too. Everyone walks or takes a tram or rides a bike. You can be run over by madcap cyclists more easily than being knocked down by a car. And . . . if you get on a tram, you pay at once. It isn’t like an English bus, with the conductor coming round for the fares. The driver could be rather shirty if you walked past him without paying; he’d think you were trying to defraud the tram company. Well . . . enjoy yourself.”
“Thanks Dad; I will. This Indonesian restaurant . . . do you think I’ll like that kind of food?”
“Mike, how on earth should I know?” He really did sound irritable this morning; Adrian was obviously on his mind again. “All I can do as your father,” he said, “is to present you with things and people and places; put you in front of them and say T like this, or I enjoy that, or I approve of the other’ and hope you’ll agree. But you have to decide whether you agree. Or not.” “What will you do with yourself while I’m gone?” “No need to worry about that. I’ll stroll about. . . have a drink at a café, read the newspaper. Go to the sauna, probably.”
“The sauna? You come all the way to Amsterdam to go to a sauna?”
“Like coming all the way here to sit in a café and read the newspaper?” A smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. “I enjoy saunas. They’re very relaxing.”
“What do you do in there?”
“Sit stark naked on a bench in stifling heat.”
“Men and women?”
He laughed. “Sorry to ruin your fantasies. No.”
“Ah. I get it. It doesn’t sound like fun to me.”
He raised an eyebrow, and said “Off you go now, and have a good time. If we bump into one another, I’ll buy you a drink.”
Sagittarius is my birth-sign, and though I don’t believe in all that astrology nonsense, my mother says Sagittarians are born wanderers, the world’s travellers; and as far as women are concerned, the males of this sign love them and leave them. Mum and Aunt Bridie are deeply into this sort of thing—casting horoscopes and reading the tarot pack and interpreting lines on the palms of people’s hands. I haven’t much experience of loving and leaving girls, but I’m certainly a born wanderer. Mum’s a Virgo—icky picky typey, Aunt Bridie says; their role at parties, she says, is to empty the ash-trays. Dad’s a Taurus, but I don’t know him well enough yet to find out if he has the Bull’s characteristics. Maybe I’ll ask him. Anyway, to get back to me and wandering, I took to Amsterdam as happily a
s I did to Bournemouth, which I knew on the rundfahrt I would.
The weather was perfect. Sunlight glittered on the canal waters; it was hot, and a gentle breeze prevented the air from becoming too muggy. I turned off the Kerkstraat into a busier road—trams and dozens of cyclists; Dad was definitely right about the possibility of being knocked down by a bicycle. I strolled through the flower market—all the same flowers that one might buy, or see in gardens, in England in August; there were even a few early chrysanthemums and kaffir lilies. Then over a canal into a part of the city where the streets were narrower and more winding; it was an area of print shops, second-hand jewellers, and book stores. I studied my map: Amsterdam was shaped a bit like an onion sliced in half—the main canals were built, more or less, in a series of semi-circles, and I was walking from the outer rings to the centre, the oldest quarter of the city. The Dutch must be a nation of avid readers, I thought, particularly in foreign languages, for the number of book-shops was prodigious, and most of them had a section of books in German or French or English. Some of these places were of the pornographic variety; quite unlike anything I’d seen in the streets of Winchester. I went inside one, expecting to be told I was too young to be allowed in. I don’t look any older than I actualy am, or younger for that matter—just plain sixteen. As I said before, it’s not a good age to be, even if a girl like Miranda thinks I’m incredibly handsome. I’m not incredibly handsome—tall, very bony, with ordinary curly black hair and ordinary green eyes. At sixteen most people look down at you if you go on playing children’s games, but at the same time they think you aren’t old enough to indulge in the adult activities you want to indulge in. Dad seemed to be encouraging me to grow up, was in a way granting me a licence to stretch my wings; whereas Mum, I felt, still encapsulated me in a world of childhood. Which meant that last week—and maybe next, I thought gloomily—I was fiddling around on the railway lines at Alresford, and this week I was in a pornographic bookshop in Amsterdam staring at lewd pictures.
