The Light of Amsterdam

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

For Alberta

 

 

In others' works thou dost but mend the style,

And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;

But thou art all my art, and dost advance

As high as learning my rude ignorance.

 

William Shakespeare, Sonnet
LXXVIII

One

The ink was black, the paper the same shade of blue as a bird's egg he had found a week before. In their balanced elegance the capital G and B mirrored each other. Unlike most of the soccer signatures he collected which were largely indecipherable hieroglyphics – the bored scribbles of fleeing stars – this name was readable and perfectly formed. He knew instinctively that it wasn't a fake and Thomas Bingham who harboured no interest in football hadn't asked for a payment, other than an unspoken acknowledgement that through living in Cregagh Estate he had access to important people and so, if only vicariously, was also an important person. He had always assumed that it had just been big talk when Bingham said he'd get it for him, that it was only one of those self-aggrandising promises boys shake up like a lemonade bottle and release with the empty froth of their words.

George Best's autograph. Where did it go? Where was it now? On a Saturday morning, a lifetime later, he stood waiting at the top of the Cregagh Road close to the estate and wondered how you always lost the things over which you should have taken more care. It would mean something to have it now and he patted the empty pocket of his overcoat as if to check whether by some transubstantive miracle memory might have realised it into a physical reality. But there was only emptiness and as he turned again to look down the road that ran from the city to the Castlereagh Hills and comfortable suburbia, the panelled sky hung grey as if hammered out of tin with the only visible colour the distant yellow of the shipyard cranes. It was an hour before the cortège was due but already the road was lined on both sides and then just after 9.30 a.m. it did what didn't seem possible and the sky darkened even more, almost as if the waters of the lough had flowed into the city. He wondered again why he had come and felt a sense of confusion edged with embarrassment. It had the same uncomfortable feeling of emotional meltdown, the collectively generated hysteria of sentiment, that had prompted all his joyful cynicism about Diana's farewell.

He tried to justify his presence by telling himself that it was about respect, that it was about memory, because unlike most of those around him he could claim to have actually seen him play and not just the jaded pastiche of his final years when his legs had gone. Saw him at Windsor Park for the price of a bus fare by simply going to the turnstiles, searching for a sympathetic face and asking to be ‘lifted over'. Overhead a helicopter relentlessly shredded the air while motorcycle outriders patrolled the road constantly checking the route was clear. What was it he remembered? The heady, sweet-sour, swirling narcotic of nicotine and beer? The collective howl and roar of a predatory, almost exclusively male crowd, a fierce living creature swaying on the terraces, anticipation bursting from its throat every time he touched the ball? The fear in the eyes of those who had to mark him as foot on the ball he struck his matador pose, signalling them forward to their public humiliation? All of them left the pitch with heads spinning and, having had a transfusion of the twisted blood, glad their ordeal was over. No, it was something else that brought him there, something to which he couldn't give a name.

It was raining now and people were putting up umbrellas but no one risked losing their place in return for shelter. Every few minutes heads collectively turned as a whisper spread that the cortège was coming but all that arrived was more rain, insistent and indifferent. All colour had leached from the sky and then in the distance from the entrance to the estate they heard the clapping start and knew it was finally on its way, the applause being passed along both sides of the road getting louder as the cortège moved slowly through the morning gloom. A green-flag-draped coffin. Despite the rain George's son in the following car kept his window down and acknowledged the crowd. And then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone, the applause a fading echo along the route of this final journey. In its wake the road looked suddenly startled, its grey, wet-slicked surface brightly spangled by the strewn flowers that had been thrown in the path of the hearse.

He stood in the steady slither of the rain for a few moments fiddling with his coat as if making the necessary preparations for his own journey. Letting the crowds slip past him he stayed facing the road and he was glad it was raining, glad that it might just disguise the tears that had started and which he was desperate to prevent. He didn't even know why he was crying. He hadn't cried since childhood – not even the night Susan told him she was leaving him – so it was a strange and unsettling sensation. Perhaps it was for George, perhaps it was for the past. For everything that gets lost, for all the things with which you should have taken more care. And then as he tightened his collar he blinked the tears away because despite it all, despite everything, he guessed that he was crying for himself and knew that was a good reason to stop.

The whole city was a giant wake. They were bringing home their favourite son and determined to give him a send-off of which they could be proud. Now most would go back home with their families and watch the official ceremony at Stormont on television but he didn't want to return to the flat, thinking that this was something that needed to be shared, and so decided to head over to his local bar and view it there. It was on the big screen and he watched it with the other punters, glad now to be a little distanced from it by the drifting fug of smoke, the smell of dampness rising off wet coats, the clinking salute of glasses and the general clumsy attempts at reverence that soon slipped into maudlin tributes and competitive reminiscences. But it was not a city where reverence ruled easily and soon there was a commotion further down the bar when some hard-bitten cynic, who somehow had already managed to drink too much, suggested George had wasted his talent and it would have been better if someone else had been given it, someone who would have taken better care of it. Then swivelling on his seat he taunted the simmering bar by asking what George had in common with the new West Link motorway, and after raising his glass to his audience told them that they were both blocked by midday. Then the shouting and recriminations started and the exchanges were heating up dangerously until Sam the bar owner informed the dissenting voice that he was no longer welcome and to a volley of cheers suggested that he should take his business elsewhere.

Some of his own emotional confusion was beginning to slowly seep away but as always when things get shaken and tumble around inside, like cargo in stormy seas, back in calm waters everything has been displaced and so when he returned to the flat and saw the red message light on his phone, he still didn't feel fully familiar to himself. He knew it would be from Susan who, despite three months of official divorce, remained, in his head at least, irrevocably his wife and for a second he thought of phoning her, telling her it was all a terrible mistake, that he still loved her, that George would want them to get back together, but he knew it would only be true in the crazy disorientation of the moment, that the shifting plates opening up some faultline of his need would soon settle back into place and what might be true in the heated confusion of the present would be a lie in the cold new light of day.

‘Alan, I need you to come over. There's something we need to talk about.'

He slumped into his chair, then leaned over to the stereo and set the stylus on Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks
, let the old familiar sound wash over him in an effort to restore his equilibrium. Always vinyl, even with its dusty patina of imperfections and scuffs.

Susan's need had not declined since their separation and if anything the phone always made it seem more insistent, more statutorily binding, and of course she had him on tap because he was the defaulter, the unfaithful one, and that residual guilt they both knew he felt meant he was always available for small acts of contrition. These might involve hedge cutting, emergency DIY or financial contribution, but as often as not recently they had focused on their son Jack who at the age of sixteen had belatedly and unexpectedly sailed into the maelstrom of adolescent upheaval, who after a quiet and inconspicuous childhood had become windblown, wind tossed, and whose increasingly fragile foundations threatened to be submerged by whatever darkening and unfathomable waters now swirled inside his head. A couple of poor reports at school in this his important GCSE year, a couple of detentions for posting an inappropriate picture of one of his teachers on Bebo, an unfortunate incident involving the breaking of an elderly neighbour's window with a golf ball and the appearance of a relatively small amount of cannabis in a bedside table – he supposed in the greater scheme of teen trauma it didn't amount to very much but these weren't the real things they worried about. It was more the sullen retreat into self, the isolated slide into some remote world governed by shifting and inexplicable rules that required the wearing of only black clothing, that the menu of what he ate had incrementally reduced itself to a core of about five items, that the computer was the ventilator, the dialysis machine, the heart defibulater that kept him alive, the mechanism that allowed him to go on breathing when everything else appeared to have been discarded as meaningless. All his room emptied as if memory, or the past, was a weight round his neck, piled into black bin bags and dumped with ruthless efficiency. Only his mother's surreptitious salvage had succeeded in preserving a few items. And there were, too, the scratches on his arm which to their embarrassment the school had noticed rather than them. Thin little red scratches on his lower arm that he had inflicted with the edge of a protractor and for which he wasn't able, or for which he was unwilling, to give any rational explanation. Self-harm was fashionable, the school had reassured them, it didn't always mean anything, but naturally all parties were to keep an eye on it. Their interview was kept low-key, counselling for Jack was offered, which he refused, while they tried their best to hide the tumbling terror they both felt.

The past was simple. But one day you were searching in rock pools or kicking football in the garden and the next it was all gone, airbrushed from history and replaced by a monosyllabic, non-committal, non-communicative vagueness that suggested a gaping space had opened up inside, that the hard drive had been rewired, reprogrammed and you didn't have the password to access it any more. He listened to Dylan's ‘Shelter from the Storm' – it usually made him feel sad in a happy way but this afternoon it just made him sad. And of course Susan predictably had regularly dumped the blame on him, on his one and extremely pathetic infidelity. So it was the break-up of the family, the divorce, the loss of faith that had sent their son spinning off into some catatonic cyberworld on the edge of the universe. It pained him to think of the times he had attempted to follow him, to reach out and pull him back into whatever might constitute his personal happiness, only to be rebuffed at the frontier with the coldness of the dead-eyed, brainwashed border guard.