After Papa Africa disappeared, the meeting place at the ferry landing had gone out of style. During the last summer all of us were together, Joe’s car became the nexus; in the mild early evening hours we drove out to Waanders’ to drink (me) and exchange anecdotes about the year gone by (them). Christof had joined a fraternity, and he introduced us to a new world. Among the subspecies of frat-rat the laws of the barracks were adopted voluntarily, and the newcomer (‘fresher’, Christof said) had to quickly learn a new jargon in order to survive. The malicious tyranny of the senior members resulted, according to him, in ‘friendships for life’. He was proud of having endured those humiliations. Christof didn’t seem angry at his tormentors; instead, he seemed to long for the moment when he himself could administer such afflictions.
Engel looked at him in mild horror.
‘You mean they stood on your face?’
‘Well, they didn’t really stand on it, it was more like putting your foot on it, for a little bit.’
At that, everyone fell silent.
‘But everyone does it,’ was how Christof defended the customs of his brotherhood. ‘You just have to grit your teeth and bear it. After Christmas it gets a lot better. It was fun too, in some weird way, an ordeal you all go through together.’
He sighed.
‘It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there.’
Perhaps, Joe suggested, that was the whole idea: to cultivate a conspiracy in which only the members knew what it took to belong. Christof nodded gratefully. Whenever he got in a tight spot, Joe came to his rescue. For as long as I’d known him, Joe had always watched over Christof.
‘It’s getting chilly,’ Engel said.
That day he had on a beige suit and white shirt, the tips of its collar worn over his lapels. The world of the artist had done little to change him, although it was easier now to see the kind of man he would become; the kind you saw standing at the rudder of a yacht in magazine ads, with that brand of eternal boyishness from which greying temples and crow’s feet from peering at the horizon could do nothing to detract.
He had sold his first work — a gigantic triptych, ink on paper, showing a horse hanging in a tree in a attitude so twisted it made your stomach turn — to a gallery in Brussels. When asked, Engel didn’t mind explaining where the idea had come from: a little World War I museum close to Ypres, in West Flanders. In a stereoscope there he had seen photographs of horses blown into treetops by the force of an exploding mortar; he had never been able to shake the image.
Engel turned to Joe.
‘By the way, are you going to come by and pick up your stuff sometime?’
‘Is it in the way?’
‘No, as long as you pick it up before December. After that I’ll be in Paris.’
‘I’ll come by with Frankie sometime,’ Joe said.
I saw Ella Booij clearing glasses from the terrace tables and caught her attention with a great wave of my arm.
‘More beer, Frankie?’ she shrilled over the heads of two customers, a gray-haired couple so vital they might have come cycling out of a Geritol commercial.
When Ella brought the beer, she referred to Engel no less than three times as ‘the young gentleman’, which produced great hilarity. Ella couldn’t keep her eyes off him.
‘God’s gift to lonely ladies, you are,’ Joe said to Engel once she’d left.
Summer broke out like an ulcer. Ma complained of swollen ankles and fingers that made her wedding ring pinch. I had a furious rash on my back and arse, as though I’d been rolling in a patch of nettles. Then P.J. came to Lomark. And what did Joe do, the jerk? One Saturday morning while I was pressing briquettes in the sun, bare-chested (after Ma had announced in her farmer’s-almanac voice that sunlight was good against rashes), he brought her to my house.
Joe and P.J. came through the bike gate without me hearing them, and suddenly we were standing there face to face, all three of us speechless somehow. I looked for something to cover myself with, but my shirt was on the bed. Withering under P.J.’s gaze, I crippled my way through the briquette machinery and into the house. Joe came after me. I frantically tried to pull on my shirt, but the little sparrow claw was unwilling and the other arm was spasming out of control.
‘Don’t act so pissed off,’ Joe said. ‘How was I supposed to know you were walking around half naked? Here, let me. .’
I slapped his hand away. It had to be on purpose: the only, the really one and only time I went outside uncovered and he had exposed me to her eyes. Outside, P.J. seized the handle of the press and pulled it down. She was less pale than usual, her skin was now the lightest shade of beige, her eyes an even more whopping turquoise. Later I heard that she’d been to a Greek island with Lover Boy Writer.
Joe had come by to ask me to go along to collect his things in Enschede. P.J. would be going too. We had to pick up Engel first, at Ferry Island. He buttoned my shirt for me, murmuring, ‘Mean-tempered bastard’ as he did. The black T-shirt he wore had DEWALT written on it in yellow letters.
‘Hello, Frankie,’ P.J. said when I came outside. ‘Sorry if we gave you a fright.’
It was the first time she’d ever spoken directly to me. I saw Ma looking out the living-room window and waved to her. When she appeared at the kitchen door I made a drinking gesture. She said hello to Joe and introduced herself to P.J., ‘but I’ve seen you before, of course’. They were an unlikely contrast, this worldly girl and Ma, that rough monument of care and industry. Although they seemed to speak the same language, I was sure that if you sat them down for an hour at the kitchen table together an abrupt end would come to the vocabulary they both understood, they would reach the outer limits of the things both of them could imagine.
I repeated the drinking gesture.
‘Would you like some coffee, or tea? Or something else? Something cold? Both coffee? I’ll just make a little then, it will be done in a jiffy, no, no problem at all. Cream, sugar? Both black? Well, that should be easy to remember.’
I felt like scratching, my back was itching badly, aggravated by Ma’s blank inertia and the cross-examination that had to go before a plain old cup of coffee. P.J. asked me a jumble of questions about producing briquettes, the answers to which I wrote on my notepad without meeting her eye.
‘You have nice handwriting,’ P.J. said as Ma brought the coffee.
‘He writes everything down,’ Ma hastened to say. ‘You name it. He sits there writing all day long. Frankie, come on, show the young lady your books! His whole wall is covered in them.’
I hissed at her like a cornered serpent, but P.J.’s curiosity had been aroused.
‘That’s pretty special,’ she said, ‘a guy who keeps a diary.’
Ma, who had backed off to the kitchen door, nodded and wrung her hands in that way of hers that made me feel bad about myself. P.J. asked if she could see the diaries. I led her into the house and pointed to them.
‘Are these the ones?’ she asked.
Her finger, the same one with which she had scared the daylights out of Mousetown, slid across the bindings of ninety-two chronologically arranged hardback notebooks, for which I was the sole customer at Praamstra’s bookshop. She turned to face me.