Joe Speedboat (20 page)

The committee's proviso was clear as a bell: the motorway
could be tolerated as a
fait accompli
, but not the lack of an exit and entrance ramp at Lomark. Lomark must be given its own exit and entrance, a windpipe, an asphalt smoker's lung.

When Harry Potijk realized that there was little he could expect from the mediocre-minded town fathers, he piloted his supporters along a more radical tack: one Wednesday afternoon they left in a hired van from Van Paridon Rentals for the houses of parliament in The Hague. In their imaginations the demonstrators may have been preceded by the sound of fife and drum, but reality consisted of the cobblestones of the Binnenhof beneath a gray sky, and no one who listened. A few attempts were made at the yell they had practiced on the bus, but the war cries fell to the earth as mutely as insults in a foreign language. A man with a briefcase and umbrella passed by at one point and inquired politely about the purpose of their gathering.

‘An MP,' whispered Mrs Harpenau, the librarian.

Harry Potijk rose to his full height and began rattling off the group's mission statement, but was soon interrupted.

‘Oh, so this is about a highway? But then you're in the wrong place, you should be at the Ministry of Transport. On Plesmanweg. It's quite a way from here.'

Dazed, the group left the Binnenhof and headed for the address he'd mentioned, which was indeed a long walk. They stopped along the way for coffee and sandwiches, then it began growing dark. Mrs Harpenau and two of the others wanted to start home, because of the children . . . and that was the end of the march on The Hague.

The photo that appeared in the
Lomarker Weekly
was taken from so far away that the signs were unreadable, and the huddle of protesters looked painfully small there on that huge square.

I've kept that photo. It shows how laughable we are, even in the pursuit of good.

The spring fair brought us something new: Mousetown. As an attraction it was fascinating, precisely because it was so dated. You passed through a black curtain and found yourself in a darkened, unpleasantly hot space where the bitter smell of mouse piss and sawdust snapped at your nostrils. What awaited you there was the rather static spectacle of a wooden castle, at eye level for children and wheeled pedestrians like myself. The castle itself was two stories high, lit from the inside by clumsily sunken lightbulbs. The streets around it were illuminated by Christmas lighting, with bright yellow sawdust scattered on the ground. The entire fortress covered about ten square metres and was surrounded by a moat, its water as opaque as that in the water bowl of the guinea pigs Dirk used to keep – all of whom, one by one, had died a death as hideous as it was mysterious.

The element of motion in Mousetown – a fair, after all, is the celebration of flying, spinning and/or swaying movement; little wonder, therefore, that Joe could be found there almost all the time – consisted of a few hundred mice. The visitors watched the rodents swarm with a kind of fascinated horror. The animals pissed, shit and screwed in what in the human world would be called public places, which produced a great deal of laughter. There was a drawbridge leading to an island in
the moat which, along with the back wall, formed the edges of the mousy world. The city was rectangular, you could walk around it on three sides, and the back was a plywood barrier crudely painted with clouds and a sun. The city itself was well lit; the area around it, where the people stood and stared at the storybook plague of rodents, was dark as a haunted house.

Of course I saw Mousetown as a parable for Lomark, that stinking nest in which we were trapped in each other's company, caught between the river on one side and the future sound barrier on the other. Harry Potijk's committee, however, failed to underscore their arguments with that particular metaphor.

One day I saw Joe and P.J. at the fair. They were standing at the Spider, their backs to me. P.J. was waving to someone being flung around in one of those seats, and Joe was counting the money in his wallet. God, it had been a long time since I'd seen P.J. Had she lost weight? I looked at her golden blond curls and heard myself sigh like a melancholy hound.

After Joe had gone to Amsterdam he and P.J. had sort of become friends, and they saw each other whenever she was in Lomark. Which wasn't very often. The last time had been at Christmas, but I hadn't seen her then because I hadn't felt like going to midnight mass. That made it almost nine months now – months during which my time had stood still and hers had sped up.

I rolled along behind them in the direction of Mousetown. The noise coming from all those rides grated on my eardrums. It was tough going on the flattened grass, the fair was probably the only time I left the asphalt and paving stones behind.

I didn't want to be seen. I was suddenly furious at the thought that I didn't live on my own two feet but could only
look up at her, speechless and stunted. I had to force myself not to think about what I might have grown to be . . . the height from which I might have looked in her eyes, the words I would have used to make her laugh, the way Joe did, the way that asshole of a writer made her laugh. (Since becoming aware of his existence I had run across his name a few times in the papers. When I did I mocked him and crumpled the paper into a ball. Somewhere, he had someone who hated him.) In P.J.'s presence my defects were aggravated, I became as crooked and little as I already was. There was no salvation from that.

In one of the most frank, most personal entries in my diary, the kind that simply has to be true because it's about feelings (tears tell no lies, haha!), I talked about the nasty predicament in which I found myself.

. . . allowed to dream, but don't kid yourself into having any
expectations. I dream the colour of my love for P.J., the
staggering orange of a rising sun. I won't be able to tell her
that. This is completely fucked. I mean, when it comes to my
life touching hers I might as well be dead or a Chinaman from
Wuhan. Sometimes it feels like I'm going to cry, but that's
nonsense, I'm going to turn to stone. Work on that. Never stop
practicing, Master Musashi says. Do not think P.J. thoughts.
That weakens. Practice practicing. Become stone. This is my
Strategy.

I closed myself up in the darkness of Mousetown in order to think diffuse thoughts, about how they transported an attraction like this from town to town, for example, or what you would have to do to keep the population from exploding. If the mice were allowed to reproduce at will, before you knew it the whole city would become a roiling blanket of soft little
mousehides, they would form factions, the struggle for resources would begin, all against all and each one for himself, a bloodbath . . .

Maybe the owner got rid of the nests with a spade or a Dust-buster. It was also possible that the baby mice were eaten by the adult animals, a phenomenon I had seen once with Dirk's guinea pigs, who had exterminated their entire nest one night in an inexplicable fit of fury. We found the hairy babies the next morning: bitten in two. Those otherwise so daffy guinea pigs had in their hearts a horror you would never expect. Not long afterwards the adult animals met the same fate. The culprit was never brought to justice.

I sat in my cart in the dark by the back wall, because it amused me not only to look at the mice, but also at the people doing the same thing. They were so intent on the sparkling light source in the darkness that they usually didn't see me. It was the vantage point I liked most: looking without being seen. Creeping into their minds and trying like hell to figure out what was going on in there.

From the sniggering you could tell that mice were doing it, otherwise it was mostly women complaining about ‘that smell, it's like ammonia', and children growing ecstatic at the pileup of hundreds of filthy animals.

The black curtain opened and some of the twilight leaked in, I saw the sheen of P.J.'s hair. Joe was behind her.

‘Oh, that smell!' P.J. said.

The curtain fell heavily into place behind them, and P.J. approached Mousetown with the enthusiasm of a child.

‘Oh, look, what a darling! The one with that crippled leg.'

She stuck her arm over the moat and tried to pet some of the mice. Her finger scared the daylights out of dozens of little animals.

IT IS
ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN

TO TOUCH MOUSETOWN
!!!!!!!

was written on at least six pieces of cardboard.

‘Picolien Jane!' Joe said in mock rebuke.

I breathed as quietly as I could, the longer they were in here the more painful it would be to have them spot me. My heart was pounding. People I knew seemed very strange whenever I eavesdropped on them. I drifted far away from them; paradoxically enough it wasn't the intimacy but the alienation that grew.

P.J. wouldn't stop teasing the mice. She leaned far over the moat and was busy trying to cut off one particular mouse from the rest. She succeeded in manoeuvring him toward the drawbridge, then blocked the road into town with her right hand, her fingers spread slightly like the pickets in a fence. All the animal could do was cross the bridge to the island in the moat.

‘Come on, Robinson, there you go.'

In a panic he ran across the bridge onto the island; P.J. raised the drawbridge and isolated him from the rest.

‘That's kind of mean,' Joe said.

‘Nooo, Robinson's always been kind of a loner.'

Joe laughed a little reluctantly and followed her to the curtain at the other end of the room, where the
EXIT
sign spread its soft green glow.

‘Bye, Robinson,' P.J. said. ‘Be a good boy now!'

They went out through the curtain, P.J. laughing at something Joe said, and I was alone again. I took a few deep breaths and looked at the castaway mouse, who was now on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He sniffed around at his new surroundings, and I noticed then that mice have lovely beady little eyes.

Although it was early spring and the heating season was almost over, I jacked up my daily production of briquettes. Working helped ward off bad thoughts. ‘You'd think they were eating those things for breakfast,' Pa said each time he loaded a new batch onto the trailer.

We could be outside now without freezing to the ground or being washed away by rain; the greenery in its pots shot up high. Each day the rushes in the ditch grew a few centimetres as well. The silhouettes of trees, hard in winter, were coming into light-green bud and the chestnuts were full of pale candles. Sometimes a happy feeling started swirling around inside you that had nothing to do with good news or anything that had happened. ‘It's in the air,' that's what they always said, and because I have no better explanation I'll leave it at that.

I was in the garden, waiting for the newspapers to spin-dry.

It was eleven o'clock, Ma had already called out, ‘Coffee, Frankie?', when Joe suddenly appeared at the bike gate.

‘Welcome,' he said, ‘on this glorious Day of Labour.'

It was indeed 1 May, and Joe had a bee in his bonnet: I'd known him long enough to see that. Hands in his pockets, he took a look around the junk store that I had secretly started
thinking of as Briquetterie F. Hermans & Son, the son being the result of a glorious union between a certain Ms Eilander and yours truly.

‘Yup, today's a lucky day,' Joe said.

He took the aluminium ladder from its hook at the back of the house and asked for a claw hammer. Then he began prying at the horseshoe above my door. Ma came to the kitchen window, waving and pointing to ask me what he was up to. I shrugged. The door opened.

‘Good morning, Joe! What are you doing?'

From his perch halfway up the ladder, he looked at her over his shoulder.

‘Mrs Hermans, good morning. I'm turning the horseshoe around. It brings bad luck if you hang it upside down. It's sort of asking for trouble, if you know what I mean.'

With a couple of blows that made the windows rattle in their frames he hammered the horseshoe back in place, with the points up. Wednesday began cawing and jumping around in his cage. I'd been neglecting him for the last few months, and I promised myself to do something about that.

‘Are you serious?' Ma yelled back. ‘Has that poor boy been living all these years . . . ?'

I hissed at her to make her shut up. She stood in the doorway wringing her hands, our Marie Hermans, laden with guilt and motherly love.

‘Don't worry,' Joe said as he hung the ladder back in place. ‘Today's a lucky day anyway, Mrs Hermans.'

He pulled out a pack of Marlboros. Since he'd started at Bethlehem he smoked cigarettes from a pack; it was too much trouble to roll them while he was working.

‘Smoke?'

Oh yes, something was definitely up. He had that Half-a-league-half-a-league-half-a-league-onward
look in his eye that held a promise, a Change of Gear.

I waited. For a while we sat across from each other like that in the crystal clarity of the first May morning, blowing clouds of smoke into air so fresh you felt like licking it up. The neighbours had the blankets hanging out the windows. Joe looked at the briquettes drying on their racks.

‘How many of these things have you made, anyway?' he asked suddenly. ‘A thousand? Two thousand?'

I nodded. A thousand, two thousand, how should I know?

‘And how many are you planning to make?' Joe asked. ‘Another thousand?'

I held up five fingers.

‘Five thousand! You're kidding me! Jesus Christ, Frankie, are you going to keep squeezing newspapers for the rest of your life?'

I nodded solemnly. Pressing newspapers into fuel was my mission. I couldn't imagine anything better. Joe pushed his cigarette butt into the ground with his thumb. It left a little planting hole.

‘You know, I don't believe it for a minute. What I wanted to say, Frankie, is that I've had plenty of time to think in the last few months up on that bulldozer, and I'm going to tell you why this is our lucky day. I think your arm means something. A lot more than you even realize. And I've figured out how we can put that special arm to use to obtain the two things for which all humans are condemned to strive: money and prestige. Because you, Frank Hermans, are an arm wrestler.'