The light of amsterdam, p.1
The Light of Amsterdam, page 1
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, t he 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.
So if his summons was about Jack it would be a wasted journey. He didn’t have any answers except a vague and unconvincing reiteration that it was a phase he was going through, one of a million such adolescent journeys and which sooner or later he would come out of, and if not be his old self again exactly, then someone at least they could recognise and even have a conversation with, exchange pleasantries about the weather or plans for the weekend. He thought, too, of George’s son confronted with all that outpouring of love for his father. How did that make him feel? It was not Susan’s gift of guilt now he opened, which he knew was counterfeit and unfair, but his own which was more crushing because he believed it came stamped with the hallmark of truth. There was no outpouring of love for him, no public or personal achievement that a son might see and have it shape his view of his father. In stolid middle age and with a predictable and plodding job teaching in the city’s art college, what fires might spark his son’s evaluation of his father? What was there to admire or emulate, what shared language to speak? And why did he have this permanent feeling about his own life that he, too, was going through a phase, a phase that seemed to have no ending, but which in his imagination was the precursor to something better? Something, however, that recently seemed less and less likely to arrive.
He looked round his flat, the one-bedroomed hidey-hole he rented after his eviction from the family home and the half-hearted attempts to soften its bleakness only seemed to signal how far short they fell. So the black and white portrait of John Lee Hooker, the Dali poster of melting clocks and the three of his own abstract paintings – one of which had a damp patch in a corner, a consequence of Susan’s banishment of them to the garage a decade earlier – seemed like futile gestures that only drew attention to the very condition they were supposed to remedy. He wondered what the most accurate description of his living quarters was – it wasn’t a bachelor pad or an apartment, it wasn’t a gentleman’s residence or a den but just a tired space above a flower shop that existed on the edge of shabby. His eyes rested on the folded portable bed, the one he had bought for Jack in anticipation of when he would sleep over and which had been used twice. He had slept on it himself more and more, usually those times when his own bed seemed only to signal its emptiness and he needed the momentary comfort of a narrower, smaller place. It also helped sustain the illusion that where he found himself was a temporary setback, a brief diversion into a siding before he returned to the main line for the continuation of his journey to some better destination.
He knew that the future journey would not involve Susan and part of him believed that his infidelity was not entirely unwelcome to her as it provided the justification for his dismissal and was merely the event that galvanised her into an action that had been brooding in her mind for some time. He put the bullet in the gun and she fired it. And there was a new man on the scene to set the seal on the permanency of their separation. Bloody Gordon. He couldn’t think of Gordon without prefacing the name with a term of abuse and although he was prepared to acknowledge that jealousy was the spark that initially fired his judgement, it had burned more intensely and purely the more he got to know him. Gordon the small-time builder of extensions and roof-space conversions, Gordon with his suntanned muscular arms who couldn’t wear any kind of shirt unless it had an alligator or a polo player on his left tit. It was as if Susan was kicking sand in the face of how he liked to see himself and had taken a wild swing on a vine through the jungle and thrown herself into the arms of someone who didn’t do art, or read books, and who permanently had a copy of the Sun folded on the dashboard of his white van above the steering wheel like a proud proletarian flag. Gordon who listened to AC/DC and Metallica and was five years younger than Susan. Gordon who was good with his hands – why didn’t she just come right out and say that he was red-hot in bed and in comparison made him look like an undersexed wimp? The solace he tried to take in his intellectual superiority was thinning in spiteful synchronicity with the thinning of his hair and if at the back it still rested at an artful and slightly rebellious length below his collar, there was a melting polar cap at his crown that he monitored in the mirror on a weekly basis. In spiteful contrast Gordon sprouted hair from every possible part of his body: he had a Michael Heseltine hairline that started low on his head and swept back like the thickest of hedges where all sorts of wildlife – foxes, rabbits, birds’ nests – could hide undetected. It fell out from his always open shirt like tumbleweed in an abandoned Wild West town; it swathed his forearms. He remembered the story of Jacob who deceived his blind father by covering his arms with animal skins to get the blessing and started to think that the hirsute Gordon had stolen his.
He wondered what their daughter Caroline thought of him. Away at university in Scotland she had less time to form any strong opinion but he fervently hoped she disliked his replacement before telling himself that he was being selfish, that if he had been so committed to happy families he wouldn’t have strayed one night in October when false faces and municipal firework displays were the order of the day and somehow, and for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he had succumbed to temptation, only to find that what held the tantalising prospect of passionate excitement fizzled out almost instantaneously like a damp squib. A Master’s student he was supervising. A mature student thankfully. A ceramicist. He had felt it coming for weeks – the needing advice, the enjoyment of his praise, the way that being together subtly left him feeling slightly different, in some vague but pleasant realignment. So maybe it wasn’t about future possibilities so much as nostalgia, a rediscovering of what had been lost. Late at night in the studio. She was rolling clay, slapping and stretching it with an honest vigour and a simple determination that made him stretch out his hand and touch her hair. That’s all he did, all he would have done, except she was in his arms and kissing him with an urgency that took his breath away and before any part of his brain could engage with the moment she was pulling him backwards on top of the table, on top of the clay. Afterwards – one of several embarrassments created – there was a pressed print of the moment. But a print of what? Passion? Loneliness? Stupidity? He still didn’t know and it was followed by nothing else. Nothing was ever fired or formed beyond that brief, breathless encounter where two strangers stumbled against each other. Afterwards he did what he thought was the gentlemanly thing and inflated her marks and they parted wishing each other well with an unspoken understanding that they would never see each other or mention this thing ever again. Ships in the night they sailed steadily on.
