Through Dead Eyes

by Chris Priestley

  ‘Ghosts?’ said Alex, his voice faltering. ‘What?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Angelien. ‘Creepy, huh?’

  Alex’s stomach seemed to lurch as though he was coming down quickly on a swing. The view from his window the night before came back to him with startling speed and vividness.

  ‘Hey?’ said Angelien. ‘You OK? You look like you’ve seen a ghost yourself.’

  ‘I’m . . . OK . . . What else . . .’

  ‘Well,’ she continued. ‘I was wrong about Graaf never meeting Hanna because he seems to have talked to her about this himself.

  ‘It was when he was painting Van Kampen’s portrait. Van Kampen had to leave on urgent business and Hanna wandered through as he was packing his things away.

  ‘Graaf says that after initially saying nothing, and just standing and watching him from the doorway, Hanna did begin to talk and Graaf asked her whether it was true that she saw ghost children from her window.

  ‘Hanna said that it was true and she seemed more than happy to talk about the whole thing until a servant walked in.’ Angelien laughed and shook her head.

  ‘Graaf just doesn’t seem to understand that kids make things up, and they did it back then just like they do it now,’ she continued. ‘The painter just seems to have swallowed her story whole and never questioned it. People were more gullible in those days but this was an educated man. It’s amazing really.’

  Alex opened his mouth to speak, but Angelien continued.

  ‘Kids don’t make the same distinction between imagination and reality that adults do,’ said Angelien. She shook her head ruefully. ‘Or at least some kids, huh?’

  She smiled at Alex. His brief spell of being a ‘man’ was over. He was back to being a ‘kid’. But he knew he didn’t want to be seen as one of those kids who couldn’t tell the real world from the made up. He knew he didn’t want to look foolish in Angelien’s eyes.

  ‘But you were going to tell me something about the painting,’ she said.

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Alex. ‘I had an idea but it was stupid . . .’

  ‘OK,’ said Angelien with a chuckle. ‘If you’re sure. You hungry?’

  ‘A bit, yeah,’ said Alex.

  ‘You want some frites?’ said Angelien. ‘Chips?’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘OK,’ said Alex.

  The area was becoming increasingly seedy and the atmosphere was complemented by the stench coming from the garbage truck that seemed to be following them down the street.

  Angelien stopped at a kiosk and ordered two paper cones full of chips. Alex turned his nose up a little at the creamy splodge on top of them.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Mayonnaise,’ said Angelien.

  Alex screwed his face up and Angelien laughed.

  ‘You Brits always do that – but trust me, it works. Go on, taste it.’

  After a moment’s hesitation, Alex tried one of the chips. Not only were they very good chips, but Angelien was right – the mayonnaise was delicious. Alex grinned.

  ‘You see?’ said Angelien. ‘Good, huh?’ She patted her stomach. ‘Not so good for the waistline though.’

  ‘I don’t like skinny girls,’ said Alex with a shrug.

  ‘Ha!’ said Angelien. ‘You’re saying I’m fat.’

  Alex coughed on the chip he was eating.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘I – I just meant . . .’

  Angelien laughed again and slapped him on the arm.

  ‘I’m messing with you. Come on – let’s get a drink before you dig yourself into a deeper hole. I know a really nice café not far from here.’

  Chapter 11

  Angelien set off towards a narrow alleyway lined with shop windows. Or at least that was what Alex took them for. He was halfway along before he realised that in each window there was a female figure standing, almost naked save for some very small pieces of underwear. Alex had thought they were dummies, until he saw one of them move.

  Angelien made no comment and looked neither left nor right, but walked through, seemingly oblivious. Alex tried to do the same. They emerged into a much wider street and Angelien walked towards a café with a bench and some folding metal chairs outside it.

  ‘I’m going to have an orange juice,’ said Angelien. ‘It’s fresh. You want one?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ said Alex.

  Angelien went inside and ordered and then came back, sat down and took out a pack of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth, looked at Alex, sighed and put it back in the pack.

  The street was a quiet one, except for the odd cyclist and occasional pedestrian: tourists mainly, it seemed. One man walked by, dragging a case on wheels noisily behind him, stopping to look at a map before continuing on his way.

  ‘That way is De Waag,’ Angelien said, pointing down the street after the tourist. ‘It was a gatehouse to the old city. Produce was weighed there. Criminals were executed there too and then carved up by surgeons in the anatomy theatre inside.’

  Angelien pointed her thumb in the other direction.

  ‘Or they might be taken out to the Volewijk to hang from a pole until they rotted; a horrible warning to those arriving by sea.

  ‘Where the Central Station is now there was the harbour where the bigger merchant ships would anchor. Can you imagine it? There would have been a whole forest of masts. Small boats would ferry the merchandise ashore. But smaller ships would sail straight up the Damrak and drop their goods at the houses of the merchants who –’

  ‘Angelien?’ interrupted Alex as the waitress handed them their orange juices.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Those women?’ said Alex, looking back towards the alleyway they had walked through. ‘The women in those shop windows. What’s that about?’

  Angelien sighed and waved her hand about, a small shower of ash fluttering down from her cigarette and an ash-grey pigeon took to the air nearby.

  ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she said. ‘But there you go.’

  ‘What?’ said Alex.

  ‘They are prostitutes, Alex,’ said Angelien, stirring her orange juice with her straw and taking a sip.

  ‘Prostitutes?’ said Alex.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Angelien with a smile. ‘Have I shocked you?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex, smiling and trying to sound relaxed. ‘I know about stuff like that.’

  In fact, Alex’s father had told him a little bit about the red light district. It had just come as a bit of a surprise to actually be there.

  Anglelien nodded.‘They stand in those windows like they were fridges or TVs,’ she said. ‘They are for sale. It is a shop selling women. What do you think about that?’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ said Alex. ‘I can’t believe it’s allowed.’

  Angelien shrugged.

  ‘But it is.’

  Alex asked if there was a toilet and Angelien pointed to the back of the café. There was a large mirror above the wash basin. Alex looked at himself as he washed his hands, cocking his head and peering at his face as though it belonged to someone else, remembering that Angelien had called him good-looking. He had never thought of himself as good-looking. Maybe he was. He stood back from the mirror and flicked his hair.

  He wished he had told her about the mask, but how could he? She would think he was making it up. She would think he was a stupid little kid. At best, she would think he had dreamt it. Maybe he had. It certainly seemed preferable at that moment to thinking that he had looked through the eyes of a dead girl and seen ghost children.

  Angelien was paying as Alex appeared at her side and they began to walk back towards the alleyway. Two policemen on mountain bikes cycled by, handguns on their hips. Angelien’s phone pinged as she walked towards him. She looked at it and then stuffed it back in her pocket.

  ‘Dirk again,’ she said.

  ‘What do you see in him anyway?’ said Alex.

  ‘That’s none of your business actually,’ said Angelien, frowning.
>
  ‘It’s just that – well, he doesn’t seem very nice and –’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to judge people, Alex. I know he seems like a jerk sometimes, but he has had a really difficult life. I see a different Dirk. He can be so sweet sometimes.’

  Alex nodded unconvinced.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ he asked.

  ‘The pancake house,’ she said. ‘He used to work there too.’

  When they entered the alleyway, he did not want to look in the windows and faced doggedly ahead, but he was all too aware of the blurred shapes of the women either side of him. He tried to concentrate on the back of Angelien’s head and nothing else.

  Once out of the alleyway they walked over the canal across a little bridge and stood looking up at the high walls and lead roof and sharp spires of a church – the Oude Kerk.

  An unpleasant smell drifted towards Alex’s nostrils and he turned to see what he realised was an open-air urinal: a kind of curved metal shield covered the user from knees to shoulders only.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ said Alex, screwing up his face.

  Angelien laughed.

  ‘It’s better than pissing in the street,’ she said.

  ‘That is pissing in the street,’ said Alex. ‘It’s just doing it behind a bit of metal.’

  They walked into a small square and Alex took some photographs looking up at the jagged roofline. They walked on into a narrow alleyway. Alex was trying to frame another shot when a loud tapping made him turn round. There was one of the half-naked women in a window grinning at him and raising her eyebrows.

  Angelien stepped forward and banged on the window with the flat of her hand. She pulled Alex away and yelled towards the woman. As they walked away, a group of women shouted at them from the doorway and Angelien stopped and turned round, shouting back at them. Alex may not have understood Dutch but he knew that it was a pretty foul-mouthed exchange. By the time they reached the canal, Angelien was flushed in the face but Alex could see that it was not embarrassment, but anger.

  ‘Everyone thinks we are all cool with this stuff?,’ said Angelien. ‘But it stinks. It is all so . . .’

  She waved her hands around struggling to find the right words in English and fired off another volley of Dutch, making an old man on a barge nearby clap his hands and smile.

  ‘All ports are a little bit sleazy,’ she said turning to Alex. ‘But it’s too much – it brings in all these idiots.’

  She nodded to a group of guffawing men across the canal who were pointing at one of the women in the windows and shouting. Alex could hear by their voices they were Irish.

  ‘Amsterdam is a beautiful city,’ she said. ‘She’s my home and I love her. Do you understand? No matter what. But sometimes she makes me angry, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Alex.

  Angelien reached over and hugged him.

  ‘You’re a nice boy, Alex,’ she said, her lips so close to his ear that he could feel her breath. ‘Come on – let’s go in.’

  They walked towards the entrance. The sky above was a great bubbling mass of cloud, like balls of grey wool, each a slightly different hue to the one beside it. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  Stepping into the Oude Kerk was startling. Outside the building looked dark and gloomy; inside the ceilings soared high above them on towering columns and huge windows made it seem brighter inside than out.

  It was quiet too. The contrast with the streets around the church could not have been more radical. There was a stillness here that seemed as though it was borrowed from another age.

  The floor was uneven and flagged with what Alex quickly realised were tombstones. They were inscribed with a number in a sequence, many with other curious marks like little diagrams.

  In the centre of the church there was an area of seats and private boxed-in pews with names written in gold paint on the doors. Some of these boxed-in pews were at the foot of columns. There was a pulpit attached to one column with a roof and a staircase with a coiling brass handrail. Brass chandeliers hung on long chains from the high wooden ceiling.

  Alex followed Angelien through a carved wooden screen and into the choir stalls. At the back was a row of misericords, the small wooden seats for choir boys, lifted to show the carvings beneath.

  ‘I love them,’ said Angelien pointing to the carvings. ‘Do you have these in England?’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘My mother always used to show me these when I was a kid,’ he replied. ‘Whenever we would go into a cathedral, she would always head for the choir stalls and be lifting up the seats to check if they had any carvings.’

  Angelien passed him the guide they had picked up at the entrance. ‘This explains some of them, but a lot of them they don’t have any idea about. Sometimes it just looks like the carver was having fun.’

  Alex checked the carvings against the diagram in the guide and saw that the misericord showed a man banging his head against a brick wall.

  Nearby there was a carving of a man squatting down, coins coming out of his bare backside. ‘Money doesn’t fall out of my arse,’ said the guide by way of explanation.

  Alex laughed loudly and a couple who had just walked in scowled at him. Angelien stood next to him and whispered in his ear.

  ‘It’s a bit like “Money doesn’t grow on trees”,’ she said.

  ‘I prefer this version,’ said Alex.

  ‘It’s certainly to the point, huh?’ she said with a smile. ‘But follow me.’

  Angelien stepped through the door at the other side of the choir stall and headed towards a large stained-glass window that Alex realised now was made up of fragments. He stared up into the faces of sullen-looking angels.

  Turning to see where Angelien was going, Alex noticed there was a grave slab with the name Saskia carved into it. Angelien stopped and Alex stood alongside her.

  ‘She was Rembrandt’s wife,’ said Angelien. ‘You saw some of his paintings in the Rijksmuseum – remember?’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Angelien. ‘Just her name spelled out in those big letters.’

  Angelien walked on.

  ‘Is it OK to take photos?’ asked Alex.

  ‘Sure,’ said Angelien.

  Alex took his camera out of his bag and took photographs of the tombstones, the misericords and the stained glass and the huge pipe organ and the painted ceiling.

  An older man in skinny jeans was studying the tombstones intently, bending over to photograph them. After taking a few more photographs Alex watched him walk away and take a notebook out of his bag and start writing.

  Alex looked at the floor himself. The tombstone at his feet was badly worn but he could clearly make out that it showed the body of a man laid out with worms squirming out of his flesh. Next to it was one that had a skull, dust gathering in its eye sockets.

  Angelien took her iPhone out of her pocket and after a little tapping and scrolling showed Alex a web page with a diagram of all the tombs in the church.

  ‘Clever, huh?’

  As she ran the cursor over it, names appeared next to each tomb.

  ‘So the one at your feet is seventy-eight,’ said Angelien, turning away. ‘That means that – one, two, three – this one is the tomb of our friend Graaf.’

  ‘Really?’ said Alex.

  The painter’s tombstone was quite decorative. Alex wondered if he had designed it himself. There was a motif at the bottom which he thought was another skull, but as he leaned in he could see it was actually a mask – and not just any mask. It was the mask; the mask that Hanna wore when he had painted her at the window. Angelien looked at her iPhone again and moved on.

  ‘And – one, two, three, four, five down and one, two left – here is Van Kampen.’

  Alex looked at the grave. Unlike the painter’s tomb it was completely plain except for a beautifully carved number. Of course, thought Alex: of course he wouldn’t have any decoration. The tombstone seemed appropria
tely grim.

  Alex crouched down and touched the surface of the stone, worn smooth by centuries of worshippers and visitors. It felt cold – even colder than he thought it would.

  ‘Is he actually under there?’ asked Alex.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Angelien. ‘He’s under there all right. What’s left of him anyway.’

  Alex was reminded of the tomb with the worm-ravaged corpse and shuddered. He had a sudden realisation that this stone floor concealed a great layer of dead bodies, sleeping under their stone blankets.

  ‘And this,’ said Angelien, ‘is Hanna’s.’

  Alex started at the name and felt as though he was standing at the edge of her grave pit, teetering on the brink of falling.

  The tombstone was plain save for a design, as on her father’s grave, that Alex realised was the first letters of her name. The only other detail was a crisply inscribed number forty-five at the top. Alex was trying to think why that number had some significance, when he recalled that it was the number of his room back at the hotel.

  This realisation brought on the dizziness he had felt when looking at the painting of her. The more he looked at the stone, the more he felt like a great darkness was closing in on him. When Angelien spoke, her voice seemed to come from miles away.

  ‘Alex?’ she said. ‘Alex?’

  ‘What?’

  She chuckled.

  ‘I was asking if you wanted to buy any postcards?’

  ‘Oh, right. Maybe.’

  ‘I’ll go and see what they have,’ she said, walking away.

  As soon as Angelien was gone, Alex staggered outside, gasping for air. A group of tourists on a guided tour looked at him suspiciously as he walked to the canal edge and took some deep breaths. The sky had darkened over the church and the building looked black and forbidding.

  Alex tried to regain his composure. He felt as if some of the darkness of that grave pit was still clinging to him. He wasn’t able to make sense of his feelings and didn’t feel ready to share them.

  Angelien came out looking for him and he concentrated on taking a photograph even though his hands were still shaking.