The Light of Amsterdam (19 page)

She wished she owned a camera that would take good pictures rather than the grainy, useless blur her mobile phone provided. She would buy one before the wedding and she knew that she would take one of the very best photographs with her to her early-morning work and leave it on the desks as she cleaned, moving it from place to place, letting it have a space with all the other photographs of family.

‘Well, how do I look?' Shannon asked, clicking the compact closed and dropping it into her bag with the finality of someone who knew that the job was well done.

‘You look great, love. Really great.' And something welling up inside her made her go and hug her, disregarding the surprise and bridling uncertainty in her daughter's body.

‘Thanks, Mum,' Shannon said, patting her neutrally in the small of the back at the same time as she eased her body free from the embrace, then smoothed any creases the contact might have produced.

‘Aww, isn't that nice?' Ellie said as she entered from the bathroom, her war paint shimmering and the two red circles on her cheeks making her look like a clown. ‘I wish I was as close to my mother as you two. We just fight all the time.'

‘Oh we can fight the bit out too,' she said, embarrassed by her own emotions. She was going to say something else but the other girls were coming out of the bathroom and she had to sidle into the narrow space between two of the beds to make room for them.

‘Now listen up,' Ellie said as she stood on a bed, her heels sinking into its softness and making her legs look as if they were made of rubber. ‘Let's get the rules clear. First, we get some food to put a lining on the stomach, then we hit the bars – starting with the Bulldog – and then a club. Rule number one: we stay together, no copping off with fellas.'

‘But what if they're gorgeous and a millionaire?'

‘A quick snog and no more – you can leave them your number. Rule number two: it's Shannon's night and nobody spoils that or they get dumped out of the tribe. Rule number three . . .'

‘Go on, what's rule number three?'

‘I can't remember so it must just be: enjoy yourself and party, party, party!'

Then, as everyone engaged in a communal wow-wow-wowing, she did a kind of war dance on the bed, her legs spongy and wobbly, her arms working like an automaton, until outreached hands helped her off and they were down the stairs and into the swirl of Friday night in Amsterdam.

By a show of hands they decided on pizza and ten minutes later, in a narrow restaurant-lined street where they ignored the invitations and proffered menus of keen-to-have-them waiters, they found an Italian place. At the door they were greeted by an older man in a black suit who looked them up and down and, clearly deciding that they were undesirables, foolishly asked if they had a reservation. His question was greeted with sniggering and then Lorrie piped up, ‘Of course we have a reservation. And a very nice one too.'

‘I'm sorry, ladies, we are fully booked tonight,' he said, shrugging his shoulders in a half-hearted simulation of an apology.

‘White man speak with forked tongue!' someone called.

‘Listen,' shouted someone else from the back, ‘we don't want to eat in your poxy restaurant.' And then as they turned away there was the by now ritual wow-wow-wowing of the tribe as they struck out for a more welcoming venue.

They found it a few minutes later round the next corner and the staff were happy to slide tables together and rearrange furniture so that they could all sit together and, spurred on by the bottles of wine that quickly appeared, they started to flirt with the waiters, asking questions about the size of the pizza and holding up their hands as if to indicate measurement. She tried to enter into it, laughing along to hide her discomfort.

‘You like a big pizza?' the young waiter asked.

‘The bigger the better.'

‘If it's too big we'll have to share it though.'

‘No, I want it all for myself.'

‘Could you show us how big it is?'

And on and on but she was glad at least that the waiters were well able for it, giving as good as they got and pouring glasses of wine and good humour, perhaps even glad of the break in the monotony. One of the girls sitting beside her who worked with Shannon and whose name she couldn't remember leaned into her and pointed out one of the waiters as gorgeous, asking her if she agreed.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘he's very nice and even nicer if he's the owner's son.'

‘That's not very romantic.'

‘I'm too old for romance.'

‘Well I wouldn't mind letting him visit my tepee.' And then she laughed heartily at her own joke, shouting it across the table until she was satisfied everyone had heard it.

And so the evening unravelled, full of laughter and not enough drink yet taken to tip it over into anything other than the energetic pursuit of a good time. But already she felt it slipping away from her, as sometimes in her imagination she was watched over by all the people she worked with in the home and Mrs Weldon having all her suspicions confirmed and even Kevin the doorman scrutinising her for what she might have secreted about her being, even though all she had taken from the plane was the magazine and the sick bag. And the safety instructions card which she intended to memorise before she got the return flight. She thought too of the bracelet and the way Jennings had looked at her, so even though she was further away from home than she had ever been there was something that still tied her to the life there that she knew as hers.

After the meal she tried to shake it off as they made their way to wherever they were going, intrigued by the strangeness of the buildings and the tall narrow houses on either side of the canal that stood like bookends on Mrs Hemmings' shelves, but it was impossible for her to read what lives might live within them, either now or in the past. She liked the strangeness, too, of the people, especially the women on their bicycles, indifferent to everything but their own balance and direction and always in such a hurry as if there was some important moment in their lives that it was vital to reach. She knew people were looking at them but she felt hidden in the group and, even when young men made remarks, the collective energy of the response they received seemed to intimidate them and so tagging on the tail of the tribe afforded a protection and a chance to absorb everything that was new to her. She still wasn't sure if she liked it, tasting it gingerly on the tip of her tongue as she would some strange new food. But at least it didn't frighten her or make her feel threatened the way walking late at night in her home town might. There were too many people coursing through the city and it was as if the streets belonged to them rather than the buildings. So although she was a stranger to Amsterdam she could still feel at least a sense of this belonging. She stared wide-eyed at an older woman with long white streaming hair who rode her bicycle with two dogs in a basket attached to her handlebars and a man dressed in a business suit who carried a young child on the back of his. The clang of a tram made her jump and she felt that she needed to take more care if she were to avoid becoming a traffic accident.

They reached their bar and were met by a wall of booming bass noise at the door and inside was all metal and wood and packs of mainly males clustered round their drinks. Some of them cheered their entrance and shouted comments she couldn't make out. Taking residence at a couple of tables near the stairs they pooled money and started a seemingly endless supply of drinks which mostly she only half-finished while sitting on the edge of things and although she knew it was wrong she couldn't help falling into her customary habit of measuring personal expenditure by the time spent to earn it. And when the drinking games started she couldn't understand the rules or make out the instructions over the noise of the music and the din of conversation that seemed to rise and rise like a river in flood until the only way to hear anything was to hold your head above the flow and shout into someone's ear. Sometimes young men came over, their beer glasses cupped in their hands, and stood watching as if it was a spectator sport. Occasionally one would point with his glass and say something in what she assumed was Dutch and which sounded to her as if it came out of a gargling throat before it splintered against the barrier of teeth. The girls tended to ignore them but sometimes directed their banter towards them and as the night went on and the drink seeped over their restraint they became more sexually provocative, flirting with each other and with everyone who caught their eye. Some began to dance and the watching males sidled in amongst them like sharks amongst a shoal but they took delight in only dancing intimately with each other, their movements deliberately exaggerated and parodying of themselves as they simulated abandonment that was controlled by a knowledge of how they wished to look. She hadn't danced in public since she was sixteen at a school disco but despite her protests they dragged her to her feet and she did her best to pass herself, throwing her arms in the air and shimmering in a kind of slow slalom, trying to match the motion of her body to the beat she couldn't find and which was replaced by a breathless and insistent drill that provided no space for respite or elegance and which pulsed and fused itself with the pink and lime-green neon that seemed to wash over and through them like radiation.

She watched Shannon as she danced, one side of her face stippled by a pink light, eyes sometimes closed as if lost inside the music, and she envied her self-assurance, her confidence about how she looked, but then she remembered the work and cost that was constantly needed to maintain it and for a second closed her own eyes and tried to find some memory of who she once was when life appeared to stretch out in front of her and the doors of possibility still seemed open. She remembered the guy she had sat beside on the plane. The one going to see Bob Dylan. The one with the son who didn't say much and who took all the photographs out of the window. She had embarrassed herself but he had been good about it even when she had grabbed his hand. It had felt like a good hand. She thought of Marty who drove her home every day in his taxi and who every morning hoped she would ask him in for a cup of coffee and anything she was willing to serve up and wondered if she would ever get to feel so needy or so desperate that she would issue that invitation. She believed not but as she danced she saw herself again as that young girl moving just as self-consciously in the school assembly hall at the Christmas disco and how then she had believed that a life without love was no life at all, that the only purpose of life was to find love and hold it so tight it could never escape. She let her arms drop into a light embrace of herself, then contoured the outline of her body with wavy movements of her arms, and for a moment it seemed as if she was swimming into a warmer sea whose currents might be able to carry her to some better place. Perhaps it was what she had drunk. But it wasn't impossible, she told herself, and if she didn't have the education or the knowledge or the social connections to open the shut door, could it not be that love, some better love than she had ever known, might be the key to open it? She knew, however, as her movements slowed into a dream, that she had parts of herself which were damaged by the bitterness of her experience and she wondered if they might ever heal and allow the possibility of trust. She no longer heard the music as she danced and moved in tune only with the rhythm of what the future might bring.

Plans to move on came and went. Some had already consumed enough alcohol to ensure that they only wished to remain slumped on their seats, animated only at intervals to share some sobbing aspect of their lives, some tale of two-timing boyfriends or puppies run over by post-office vans, while the tepee-joke girl whose name she still didn't know grew increasingly belligerent and offered to fight anyone over some convoluted story involving her nephew,
The X Factor
and Simon Cowell. She herself hadn't drunk as much as the others but more than she was used to and was already beginning to think longingly of bed, certain that none of them had started work as early as she had, cleaning city-centre offices while they were snug under their duvets. She remembered how McClean's desk had looked that morning and the little spur of concern she had felt when she had seen it. He, or someone else, had tidied it and there was none of the personalised debris that was its customary decoration. But it hadn't made it better – if anything it had acquired a new sense of desolation like a house clearance after the owner has died. Perhaps he was being moved or perhaps he had left. But if he had it all seemed very sudden. She wondered how he would spend his Christmas and whether the imaginary and fragmented family she had constructed for him would manage to come together, however briefly, for at least Christmas Day.

The smoke, and although not an expert she guessed it was from more than just tobacco, was starting to sting her eyes and she went and stood in the street for a few moments. Veronica with the wild red hair and who had grown up a few streets from Shannon was there trying to get better reception on her mobile phone. The two feathers in her headband had slipped into tired and opposite angles so that it looked as if someone was holding their fingers in a V-sign behind her head.

‘Just checking that Matt is coping with the kids and got them off to bed all right. Sometimes they play him up, take advantage, make him read stories until he's the one falling asleep. But I can't get a signal.'

‘I'm sure they'll be fine. Be good for him to look after them for a while.'