The Light of Amsterdam (23 page)

Her father comes down the stairs and he's puffing a little because there's a hospital run to start his day and you can't be late for that and he says the traffic up round the Ulster is enough to give anyone a heart attack. She squirms aside to let him pass and turns her head to the wallpaper which is bruised and soiled by the years of hands that have helped themselves take the first step. Someone stands close beside her and it is her father's voice she hears and he's asking what's wrong over and over but she can't speak and then he takes the letter and reads it and calls her mother who comes out of the kitchen with a tea towel in her hands and her face flushed by the heat of the pan. She reads it too and at first no one speaks and then her mother puts her hand to her mouth as she repeats ‘Oh my God', her hands first pulling at opposite ends of the tea towel as if she's trying to tear it apart then tightening it into a rope with which she might strangle someone. And she seems to hate her more than him because she's saying he's had the best of her, had it far too easy, and now he doesn't want the leftovers. There is coloured light touching her mother's feet but her words are flecked only by a bitterness and she uses the word shame twice before her father tells her to stop in a voice that is the closest to a shout that she has ever heard. And then they're still arguing while she slowly goes back up the stairs and climbs into a bed from which all the warmth has drained and so she tries to hug herself and by an effort of pure will doesn't allow herself to be sick. Then there is the slam of a car door and the sound of her father's car driving away. She wasn't sure but she thought the light in the painting looked like it was evening and she was glad because there would be no fullness of the day to stretch out ahead of her and that at least will be a mercy.

She knew now that she wouldn't cry. All her tears were released in the slow long hours of that day when her mother turned her back on her and left her to whatever misery she thought she deserved. So as she walked away through the crowds she was consoled by her anger and found in it sustenance and a strength that she knew had carried her in the past and might do so again.

 

 

He woke eager to get going, the knowledge of where he was already exercising some of its old power. Beside him Jack slept on, cocooned deep inside his white duvet, only a ragged spout of black hair sticking out like grass from a tousled fall of snow. It was still early: they had all day. There was no need to rush but then he remembered the capacity of teenagers to sleep and he deliberately stirred a little and lightly tapped the headboard. His son slept on and when he looked over he saw that he had rolled himself inside his duvet like a fat white cigarette.

There was no sound of his breathing, just a kind of strange snuffle every so often as if he was sniffing the quality of his sleep or hunting a dream truffle, and he remembered how the first time when as a baby he had slept through the night their physical pleasure had been shattered by an overwhelming fear and how they had both rushed to his cot, tormented by the worst of imaginings. That first night's unbroken sleep had been a long time coming – he remembered how a full night's sleep had become the most intense of desires and that sometimes when he had gone to work any horizontal surface was a temptation. He understood then that sleep deprivation could break a man, make him confess to anything that was asked of him.

He read his copy of Van Gogh's letters for an hour then showered and got himself ready, hopeful that the noise would waken his son, but although he continually glanced at the bed he couldn't detect any sign of him stirring. He went to the window but despite the hotel overlooking a canal the view afforded not much more than a brief glimpse of the street below and a mesh of ugly pipes and conduits. At least the day looked bright and clear and if he angled his head he could just about see blue sky. He felt hungry and was starting to worry that they would miss the breakfast that was included in the price he'd paid. For a second he took a malicious pleasure from imagining that he went out leaving Jack to stew but then felt shame at the idea of abandoning him in a strange city. For better or worse they would have to see the weekend out together and although it hadn't begun particularly well, it still represented the best chance in a long time to try and kickstart some better relationship, or at the very least to strike a better balance and find an equilibrium that would allow them to give and take just whatever each wished, without everything always feeling as if it were on the edge of disaster.

He needed to visit the Van Gogh Museum, look at a few pictures, gather some books that he might usefully – he didn't want to use the word plagiarise, even to himself – synthesise and use as the basis for some academic article that might postpone the arrival of the wolves at his door. He told himself he felt the same sense of invigoration that he always felt in this place and so his thoughts turned to his own painting. Stan had been right in one thing at least – it was too long since he had been creative and perhaps the time had come to galvanise that rusting part of himself into new life. Perhaps time to leave his old abstraction behind and branch out in a new direction. Momentarily fired by his own enthusiasm he wondered if in some way that still eluded him he could combine his research paper with this new work that already existed in his head even though it had neither subject matter nor form. And spurred on by this new surge of optimism he wanted Jack to waken so that they could get out and crest the wave of the day.

‘Jack,' he whispered gently and without response. A little louder this time. ‘Jack, it's time to get up if we're going to have breakfast.' The fat cigarette that was his son rolled slightly to one side and another tuft of hair puffed out, intensely black against the whiteness of the duvet cover. There was a louder snuffling noise and at last an arm worked itself free like a periscope from the tight burrow he had made of the bedclothes and briefly scanned the air before disappearing again.

‘Jack, is there any chance of getting up soon – we don't want to miss our breakfast?'

He had tried to use the temptation of food but ultimately believed it had no guarantee of success because his son's biological clock ticked in ways that bore little connection with Greenwich Mean Time and the eating of meals could take place unpredictably. For all he knew Jack's clock was telling him it was the middle of the night. Perhaps his son's body was even telling him that it was winter and he should be hibernating in the dark cave of sleep. But Jack was saying something. The words were muffled and indecipherable but he was definitely speaking and as he went closer to the bed he realised he was asking what time it was. He glanced at his watch and then even though he had adjusted it on the plane added another hour to his answer. As more of his son's black head emerged like a seal's cautious appearance at an ice hole he felt a sudden burst of tenderness and had to stop himself sitting on the edge of the bed and stroking his hair. The way he did once before when he'd cried because he hadn't been selected for his primary school's football team after the trial game. Stroked it even though it appeared to have little effect until eventually his son had turned his face to the wall and sobbed as silently as he could. Then he had understood for the first time the terrible truth that you couldn't take away the pain the world gave your child and although each tear hurt him to the quick, he had been able to do nothing but sit and forlornly hope his presence would help it pass. Now as he watched his son unwind himself, a mummy come back to life and stripping away his bandages, he wanted to go to him and tell him that if it were only possible he would take all the pain of the past and all the pain that was still to come and press it on himself. And then he remembered the first time Jack had been stung by nettles and he had shown him how rubbing it with a dock leaf would ease it, and how that had been the best moment ever as a father, and he tried to hold its comfort.

‘Jack,' he said and only into his child's name was he able to pour all the love he inexplicably and inexpressibly felt in that moment, ‘how are you?'

‘Fine.'

‘That's good. Did you sleep
OK
?'

‘
OK
.'

‘That's good. So I didn't keep you awake?'

The answer was lost as Jack burrowed his head into the pillow and stifled a sneeze. In the corridor outside a trolley rattled and a nearby door opened and shut loudly.

‘Well have a shower and get dressed and we'll have breakfast. My stomach thinks my throat has been cut.'

There was something unexpectedly awkward as his son rolled himself out of bed in a Kurt Cobain Teen Spirit T-shirt and underpants that sagged like a loose nappy round his bum and he tried to avoid looking at him, picking up his book from the bedside table and taking it to the chair at the window. He opened it at his bookmark, the memory of the thin whiteness of his son's body staring at him from the page. It was a letter to Theo dated 8th September 1888 and Vincent was talking about his new painting
The Night Café
which was the Café de la Gare where he had lodged for about five months. In it he described how he had tried to ‘express the terrible passions of humanity' through his choice of colour. The phrase echoed in his head. What an incredibly bold intention, rooted deep in the hand and the heart, to express those ‘terrible passions' in reds and greens, the bright brush of yellow. The tenderness he had felt in the moment for his son seeped further and into the world itself. If only even once he could paint those same passions, find the colour and the style to portray them, then everything would have been worthwhile and all his other failures would surely be absolved.

He thought of George in his skinny red flag of a shirt as it wove those patterns that mesmerised and left behind the twisted blood. He thought of the colours of the flowers strewing the hearse and the rain-washed road, the whiteness of Susan's dress that he glimpsed over his shoulder as she came towards him like the first soft snow of winter. All the colours of his life. In the church where he had been brought up, the front ice-blue fresco coped with a rainbow and bearing the gilded lettering of the text ‘Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness'. The sunlight stirring the red wine in the red communion glasses: the black weighted gowns of those being baptised to symbolise that they were dead to their old selves and born into their new.

There was too the first bright splatter paintings of their children that they proudly pinned on kitchen noticeboard and fridge, the ones that gave all parents hope that their children might be imbued with the blessing of talent that they themselves had missed, and, in the assurance of some acclaimed future, nourish the sustaining idea that they might be carried along in their offspring's slipstream of success. It was too early to give up on Jack – everyone was a mess as a teenager. Not to be a mess was probably more of a warning of future dysfunction than the other way round. And there was the music. There was infinite hope in his love of music and his attempts to start a band and perhaps seeing Dylan would spark something and encourage him to go and make his own, whatever type that might be.

As he listened to his son rattling round in the hollow soundbox of the bathroom he set his book down and remembered the first time he heard Dylan. Probably around the age Jack was now. His parents had bought him a record player – they probably came later to think of it as the Trojan horse they had unwittingly brought into their house – a simple red mono box that he would treasure for the next ten years and then he'd bought his first
LP
in the city-centre Gramophone Shop. A record player and one record.
Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits
. He could never hear the opening organ sounds and the ragged jangling chords of ‘Like a Rolling Stone' and not be transported back to that moment when everything that was fixed and settled in a permanent dreary conformity seemed to shift and the world itself tilted on its axis. Nothing could ever be quite the same as it had been before. If Jack could find that awakening, the same sense of expectancy even though it felt deliciously reckless, almost dangerous, then perhaps his life would embrace the momentum to move itself in a new direction.

At last Jack emerged and said he was ready. They made the breakfast with fifteen minutes to spare and as he paused to give their room number Jack almost walked into his back, so intent was he on stepping in his shadow. At the buffet he filled his plate but watched his son lift the most meagre of helpings – two pieces of toast, a slice of ham and a small glass of orange juice.

‘Is that all you want?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why don't you take one of those croissants – there's a chocolate one. Or take a yogurt or a bit of cheese.'

He answered with a shake of his head then asked, ‘Do you have to take so much?'

‘We've paid for it. They expect you to take what you want. And the more we eat now the later we'll need to buy something.'

‘I don't want anything else,' he said, staring across the table at his father's plate with accusatory eyes.

‘Fair enough but if you want anything else you can go up and get it, or if you like I'll go for you.'

‘I don't want anything else,' he said again, spreading the butter carefully on his toast with both sides of his knife, making sure it went right to all the edges. He didn't eat the ham – there was something wrong with it.