‘Hey, man, want a drag?’
Joe looked up. A man with black curly hair beneath a red cap was holding out a trumpetlike joint.
‘No thanks,’ Joe said. ‘I’m waiting for someone.’
‘Don’t be an ass, man, that’s what it’s made for.’
‘No really, thank you.’
‘You look like you could use a toke.’
Joe accepted the joint.
‘My name’s George,’ the man said. ‘The Urban Indian. But you probably picked up on that.’
Joe reappeared from behind the cloud.
‘My name’s Joe Speedboat,’ he said in a squeaky voice.
‘Joe Speedboat! You’re all right, man, you’re all right!’
Like tens of thousands of tourists, on his first day in Amsterdam Joe got stoned (‘Jesus, man, you know, if I could just build all the things I see. .’). It was completely dark outside when George the Urban Indian left, from outside the window he had shouted, ‘Good luck, Joe Speedboat! Good luck, man!’ and cycled away on his delivery bike. Joe remained behind in the blessed dreams of his first, second and third joints (‘I was really dying for a strawberry yoghurt drink, so I ordered one. That stuff ran down into my stomach like a cold mountain stream. You never tasted yoghurt drink like that’).
It will never be clear what would have happened had P.J. not run out of cigarettes that evening. She had returned home at around seven, and now she went downstairs without a coat to buy a pack at the coffee shop. The men at the pool table looked up; walking over to the counter with the jar of tobacco, rolling papers and lighters she said, ‘Could I have a pack of Marlboro, please?’
‘Anytime for you, baby, anytime.’
On her way out she saw, in the shadow of the rubber plant by the window, a familiar face. The boy, his eyes half closed, was sitting at a table littered with empty bottles of strawberry yoghurt drink. P.J. went over to him.
‘Hey, Joe,’ she said. ‘You’re Joe, aren’t you?’
His eyes opened a little further.
‘Hi.’
‘It’s me, P.J., we went to school together.’
‘Oh. Hey. I. Know. You.’
‘What are you doing here? No one from Lomark. .’
That was how Joe made his arrival, floating in a basket of reeds and encircled by feminine attention and lots of questions. Where he was staying? Nowhere? He could sleep in her bed. She always spent the night at her boyfriend’s place, she’d be back in the morning. He must be hungry, she started talking about something she called ‘the munchies’, triggered by the smoking of marijuana. But it would have been wiser for Joe not to have touched the pasta she prepared for him. He made it to the toilet just as the geyser of rosy-pink yoghurt drink, commingled with tagliatelle and tomato sauce, came rocketing up, spreading a sweet-and-sour dairy smell throughout her toilet and living room.
‘Oh. Shit. Oh. Sorry.’
‘Jesus, Joe, what did you do? Smoke the little plastic bag along with it?’
His eyes were bloodshot, his body as wobbly as on the day his father had been lowered into the grave and grief had forced him to lean against his mother.
‘You need some sleep, Joe. Lie down. You don’t want to get undressed? No? Well, OK.’
‘Hey. Thanks. A. Lot.’
The next morning he found a note.
Hey Chief Smoke ’m up
Back at noon
Breakfast is
in the fridge take
whatever you want
x P.J.
In his memory, the night gone by had lasted a hundred years. Tepid light came drizzling through the cracks in the curtains, he went back to bed and lay there with one arm under his head, smoking a cigarette. There were dead houseplants in the corners. His gaze slid over the shadows on the ceiling, which was higher than the room was broad. Breakfast, as he had seen it by refrigerator light: half a container of cottage cheese, a crescent sliver of hard cheese and half a litre of skimmed yoghurt.
When P.J. came in a few hours later, he was sitting straight as a ramrod in a chair by the window, which provided him with a view of paintless balconies and gardens where the sun never shone. The bed was made up so tightly you could bounce a coin on it, and the gas fire was turned off.
‘Wow, cheerful as the grave in here,’ P.J. said. ‘Have you been sitting in the dark all this time? Didn’t you get yourself some breakfast? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m always tense when I come back from Arthur’s place.’
‘Arthur,’ Joe said.
‘That’s right, you don’t know, how could you? Arthur Metz, the writer. He’s my significant other. Or I should say, my boyfriend; Arthur hates euphemisms.’
‘Euphemisms.’
‘Arthur Metz,’ she repeated. ‘Never heard of him? This is his latest novel.’
She pushed a book into Joe’s hands. My Gentle Demise was the title. P.J. stood at the counter making coffee, she looked over her shoulder at Joe.
‘He’s a poet too.’
Infatuated pride radiated off of her. On the back cover of the book was a photo of a handsome man with premature wrinkles on his forehead, bags under his eyes.
‘I’m always at his place at night, during the day he needs to be alone. He can’t write with anyone else around. After ten o’clock he wants to see me again. Arthur needs that solitude, he’s very sensitive. Anything that disturbs his rhythm upsets him terribly. When I’m ten minutes late he starts asking where I’ve been.’
‘Wow,’ Joe said.
‘I’d love to introduce you, but he can’t handle new people. It scares him. Sometimes it makes him aggressive, you never know. He finds it very difficult to be touched, sometimes he shrivels all up when I touch him.’
‘Is he, uh. .’
‘Oh, Arthur is as psychotic as they get. He’s tried to commit suicide three times. But the things he’s taught me! It’s amazing, the things he teaches me! With him it’s totally different from anything I’ve ever known, I’d never thought that existed, you know what I mean? It’s hard to explain.’
‘Even better than Jopie Koeksnijder?’
At that P.J. laughed so hard that the coffee splashed over the sides of the mugs.
‘And what about here, Frankie? Anything happen around here?’ Joe asked when his story was finished.
I frowned. I couldn’t come up with anything worth telling. It had been quiet without him, without Engel and Papa Africa, even without Christof. Almost everyone I knew had left, and the ones still around didn’t interest me. Quincy Hansen had stayed, of course; I wouldn’t be shot of him as long as I lived. He was working at Bethlehem Asphalt, doing minor administrative work. What a waste of all those years of valuable learning.
I was still pressing briquettes myself, although production had taken a dip since the rains had set in.
‘Really, nothing?’ Joe asked.
I shook my head and wrote: Papa Africa?
‘Shit situation. Anything’s possible. Theoretically, he may even have sailed back to Egypt, but. .’
Joe’s expression reflected the incredible hardships of such a journey.
‘It’s possible, though,’ he said. ‘Stranger things have happened. What do you think, would he have tried that? I mean, you two got along.’
Difficult.
‘Difficult, but not impossible! I looked at the map; he could have gone right out to sea. Along the New Waterway to the North Sea, through the Straits of Dover. If he stuck close to shore, then along the coast of France toward the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, northern Spain, I mean, why not?’