The Light of Amsterdam (40 page)

‘I'd like to see the red-light district,' his embarrassment only half-hidden in his cowled shadow. ‘Everyone in school says there's no point going to Amsterdam and not seeing it.'

His son's embarrassment was subsumed into his own. He didn't know what to say then realised it was just another part of everything he associated with the city being taken from him and arranged into a new shape. He struggled for an answer, believing now that some of his peculiar, spaced-out brand of puritanism was responsible for perpetuating the gap between them. He didn't want to go, never really wanted to go, but he suspected that to say no would serve only to reinforce the view of him he thought existed in his son's head of always being afraid, of being afraid of life. He understood the teenage curiosity but balked at having to facilitate it.

‘What would your mum say if she were to know that's where we went?'

‘She's not going to know because I'm not going to tell her and if you don't then she's not going to know.'

He didn't entirely trust his son's commitment to discretion and could imagine it becoming a future weapon in whatever lay ahead for them all.

‘I don't think it's a good idea. It's a pretty miserable place.'

‘We're only going to have a quick look,' Jack said, pulling his hood down to reveal his face and presumably his sincerity.

It was a stupid idea but the mist that seemed to float weightlessly on the undercurrents of the city seemed an appropriate mask if he agreed to the tour. And then it struck him that if he could resist his usual temptation to moralise and not talk about dignity or exploitation of women, if he could walk silently through this human zoo, then perhaps there would be forged something private between them, hewed out of an unspoken but shared awareness of the weakness of the flesh, an inescapable acknowledgement from his son of the flawed nature of their gender.

‘A quick look and then back to the hotel,' he said, not totally convinced that he had made the right decision and knowing the way he said it made him sound like a Boy Scout leader. Jack nodded his agreement and off they started through the mist. He set a brisk pace partly to try and inject some warmth into his body and partly to get the episode over as quickly as possible. Already he was having reservations, with his imagination enthusiastically constructing ever more disastrous scenarios that no attempts at explanation could hope to rescue from Susan's wrath and Gordon's sniggers. His vague memory of where it was located proved correct and before long they were trailing behind other groups of gawping tourists through streets along the canals where the trees were mist-shrouded, their branches congealed into a grey amorphous whole. He felt more and more nervous, glancing at his son as they started to pass what he wanted to see. Everything looked lurid and pink, human beings wrapped up in black plastic, skin tones the colour of basted turkey. Curiously sexless, shrieking the impossibility of tenderness, everything spinning on the ugliness of money. He felt embarrassed and ashamed to have brought his child there and he was glad he had put his hood up again because it felt as if it might grant him protection. He wondered what he was thinking but didn't dare to ask. They paused to avoid a stag party and suddenly in their bellowing bravado and their horned desire to rut he understood the name. Jack had taken again to walking closely behind him and when he turned to check he was all right he saw his eyes flitting from place to place but he looked nervous rather than curious.

‘I've seen enough,' Jack said and he felt his son's hand tugging lightly at his coat in a curiously childish way. ‘There's not much point going on.'

‘We'll go back then,' he answered, having to try really hard not to show how pleased and relieved he was. ‘It's getting cold.' He shivered as if saying the words had exacerbated it but there was relief too flowing through him and a desperate desire not to believe that what would be the shared legacy of their trip would be these images. ‘It's just a bit sad really.'

They headed back to Spui walking in silence, linked only by what he felt as a shared embarrassment, his son a step behind somewhere over his right shoulder, and then as they got closer to their hotel he realised that he didn't want them to return to their room with these images still clinging to them like burrs. It was as if the mist made the memory sharper by smothering the brightness of the city that might have served to replace them.

‘Do you want something to eat?' he asked, stopping suddenly and warmed by the memory of the girl with the wok. ‘An ice cream or something?'

‘An ice cream?'

His son's incredulous intonation told him that he was about ten years too late with the suggestion. But he continued in similar vein. ‘A hot chocolate?'

‘Could we have a drink? A proper drink. It is Saturday night.'

‘
OK
just the one.' This felt like a concession but a minor one and, after the last experience, less fraught with unwelcome consequences. They would have their first beer like father and son in a civilised way and perhaps they would talk like father and son should. He wasn't entirely hopeful but Jack's sulk had grown less evident over the course of the night and if he hit the right subject, didn't rile him, then perhaps words would pass between them. ‘There's some nice bars over at the Spui and they're on the way to the hotel.'

The first two on the square looked packed to the gills and they moved on round the corner where they found one which although less plush had the invitation of music and someone singing Van Morrison's ‘Moondance'. They eased by the clatter of people on their phones at the door and in through the entrance where it was hard to tell where the mist ended and the cigarette smoke began. The best they could do was squeeze on the end of a table running into one of the corners and which ended quite close to a makeshift stage where a young man was finishing the song to polite applause. When a waitress greeted them, and without asking Jack, he ordered them both a small beer. Looking around he wasn't sure that all the cigarettes were tobacco but he smiled at Jack who just stared back at him and when the two beers arrived they were both glad to be able to concentrate on their drinks.

The ‘Moondance' singer was followed by two young po-faced women who turned ‘Heart like a Wheel' into a monotone dirge and followed it with some song in Dutch whose tune he didn't recognise but which had all the sing-songy characteristics of a Eurovision entry. It was an open-mic evening and they sat in silence through a series of singers, some more talented than others but all receiving the audience's encouragement. There was a guy who looked like a fossilised hippy who was compering, announcing the performers in a mixture of Dutch and English, and then they appeared to run out of contributors. It was their chance to talk but he didn't know what to say and so they sat facing each other in silence until he thought of Christmas and asked Jack what he'd like.

‘Nothing really,' he said, lifting his glass and sipping from it carefully.

‘There must be something – it would be better if you told me so I don't get the wrong thing.'

‘Don't know.'

‘Well have a think about it.'

The ancient hippy was trying to urge some further contributions and for a crazy second he imagined the shade-wearing young Dylan from the Greenwich Village era ambling from the back of the bar to the stage and sitting on the high stool while he tuned his guitar and fiddled with the harmonica holder round his neck. But no one stood up even when the compère held up an acoustic guitar to the audience or when he started to walk through the tables picking out individuals to coax.

‘Nirvana – it's a good name for a group,' he offered, trying to break the silence.

‘Kurt Cobain was religious, that's why he chose it.'

‘He was religious?'

‘It means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world,' Jack said, his eyes fixed on the top of his beer.

‘Right. Sort of Buddhist or something.'

He nodded and then glanced over his shoulder a couple of times as if he was looking for someone.

‘What's wrong, Jack?'

‘Nothing.'

Then as they both went back to concentrating on their beers the compère moved along their table, his exaggerated and jocular gestures of invitation falling on stony ground. When he reached their end of the table he rested his hand on Jack's shoulder and spoke to them in English asking if either of them wanted to perform.

‘I will,' Jack said, swivelling in his chair to look up at the asker.

He was completely and utterly astonished and then filled with deep apprehension. How could Jack, who looked at the world from behind the screen of his hair, who wouldn't walk beside him, who felt the brush of embarrassment in the most normal of social situations, suddenly say that he was going to perform in front of strangers in a city he didn't know? It felt like an outburst of madness and he stared at his son's drink to confirm that he had only taken a few mouthfuls. Perhaps it had been spiked, perhaps he was high on the smoke.

‘I don't think this is a good idea, Jack,' he said, shaking his head at the hippy in as parental a way as he could muster.

‘Why not? Let the boy have his chance.'

His chance to humiliate himself in a memory that they would have to add to their already expanding share of things best forgotten. He had felt that despite it all things were slowly edging towards a vaguely less confrontational place so he was desperate not to see them slide backwards. ‘I don't think this is a good idea – you haven't got your own guitar or practised anything. Why don't you give it a miss and we'll get another beer?'

The hippy shrugged a dismissal of his words and without speaking Jack stepped sideways on to the stage, sat on the stool with his hair sliding forward and started to tune the guitar like he knew what he was doing and ignoring the applause of the audience and the occasional whoop. His own heart was pumping fear and he had to restrain himself from standing up and telling the audience that it had all been a mistake and dragging his son off the stage and out into the mist-filled streets. Then the hippy put his hand on Jack's shoulder and was asking him something and he flicked the hair back from his eyes and said something in reply.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, it's Jack all the way from Ireland doing Nirvana's “Come As You Are”.'

There was more applause and he knew it was too late and what was going to happen, could not be stopped, but he felt that without much encouragement he could be sick. The beer was sour in his mouth. Jack hadn't looked anywhere but the guitar and it felt as if they were standing together on the edge of a cliff about to topple over and then he started, his thin fingers strumming out a strong rhythm that some people clapped in recognition but which he didn't know. Then his voice came, high and swooping over the heavier, chunky chords, and at first he didn't recognise it as belonging to Jack – not fully powerful but not hesitant, not in a Belfast accent but not in an American one either, coming from some place he didn't know existed and which flowed through him, releasing a surge of relief and then of pride. The voice wasn't as assuredly confident as the playing but was delivering as it deliberately slurred out the words about friendship and memory and parts he didn't catch or understand. The word ‘memory' was repeated in the chorus and as Jack's voice strengthened he glanced up once, the pale moon of his face suddenly open and visible before he looked away.

Fifteen

There was still one thing she wanted to do before they went home and so she gently nudged her husband awake, ignoring his complaints about holidays supposed to be about resting, and when she heard the lightness in his voice she was relieved that at least in these first moments of a new day, she had no sense of anything being different to any other morning.

‘Richard, I want to go bike riding. If we get up now, get our breakfast and pack we'll still have most of the morning before we need to go to the airport.'

‘You're not serious, Marion. We haven't been on bicycles since I don't know when,' he said, rolling on to his side and shrugging the duvet round his shoulder. ‘It's crazy out there – we don't want to get run over five minutes before we're due to go home.'

‘Richard, I really want to and we can just ride in Vondelpark – it'll be safe there.'

She slipped out of the bed, put on her dressing gown and then went to the window, only opening it wide enough to peep out, holding the curtains tight as if she didn't want to risk the world peering in. Part of her expected the mist still to be lapping against the glass but in its place instead was a sharp-edged swathe of sunlight that washed across the square, cold to the eye.

‘The sun's out so you've no excuses,' she said, turning to find him sitting up in the bed and looking at her. She wasn't sure if he was scrutinising her and whether it was apprehension she saw in his eyes. ‘And if you do have an accident you can claim from one of those insurance policies you always rush to give our money to.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes, I want to try it before we go back. I used to cycle when I was a girl.'

‘And you think you'll remember how? I suppose if you remembered the skating there's a chance you just might.'