‘Holland.’
‘You know, the boy with his finger in the dike.’
She nodded gravely.
‘Beats having your head down the dike, I guess,’ he murmured against himself.
‘Why are we here?’
‘I have to see Dominique. She’s got a houseboat here.’
She sighed and looked out the window. Scully gathered his limbs brittlely to him and nursed his nausea. Call me Rasputin, he thought. Poison me, chain me up, kick the hell out of me, but I’ll get up and keep coming. A crooked grin came to his lips. Come to think of it I can do it all to myself and still keep coming, so don’t underestimate me, Christmas Day. But deep down he knew he had nothing left. Last night was a dark cloud at the back of his head. His teeth ached, his chest was hollow. Anywhere he walked today, he knew, would just be walking to keep from sinking. The whole earth slurped and waited. It was no use pretending. He had nothing left. Jennifer would be here. He’d find her, he knew it now, but he’d be an empty vessel. She’d get her way in the end.
• • •
CENTRAAL STATION was empty of passengers, its kiosks and shops shuttered, but it was crowded with people who looked as though they lived there. Ghetto blasters and guitars reverberated in every corner. Junkies and drunks lay nodding in hallways. Dreadlocked touts hustled limply by the deserted escalators, disheartened by the holiday. A madman in fluorescent tights shrieked at his own reflection in the windows of the closed-up Bureau de Change. Hippies of seventeen and eighteen who looked German to Scully swilled Amstel and laughed theatrically amongst themselves. Scully snarled at them and pushed by. The air was warm and foul with body odour, smoke and urine so that the street air was a sweet blast to be savoured a second or two. It revived him long enough to sling the pack over one shoulder, raise his eyebrows doubtfully at Billie and stump out dazedly into the feeble light and the unravelling plait of tramlines in the square before them.
A canal, hundreds of uptilted bicycles, a stretch of pretty buildings encrusted and disfigured by neon. A fish sky low enough to make Scully hunch a few moments until he got into some kind of stride that never graduated beyond a victim’s shuffle, a lunatic’s scoot, the derro walk. He was a mess. He was ratshit.
The city was beautiful, you had to notice it. Beautiful but subdued to the point of spookiness. There was almost no one on the streets. Now and then bells rang uncertainly and a pretty cyclist, male or female, whirred past dressed to the gills and intent on being somewhere.
They went down the wide boulevard of closed-up cafés and cheap hotels, change joints, souvenir pits until they came to a big square. Beneath the monument in the square a few dark-skinned men smoked handrolled cigarettes and a sharp young Arab offered cocaine in a hoarse whisper.
‘Piss off,’ said Scully, feeling the spastic twinge of the newcomer, the fear of being in a city he didn’t know. He was surprised to feel anything at all, but there it was, the bowel-clenching sensation he remembered from London the first time, Paris the first time, Athens. An emotion, by God. It was worse without crowds, without currents he could simply slip into, hide in and follow while he got his bearings. Every door was closed to the street. Their footfalls rang clear on the sharp air. Scully had to stand there and look like a rube without a shred of cover. Why should he care? Screw them all. The hell with Amsterdam and Christmas Day.
In time they came to a Turkish joint where they flopped into plastic chairs and ate ancient hommus and tabouleh. They drank coffee and chocolate while young women swept and wiped around them. Scully stared out at bell gables and wrought-iron and immense paned windows. He tried to produce a lasting thought.
‘Where’s the houseboat?’ said Billie, cleaning her teeth with a paper napkin.
‘Dunno,’ he murmured, watching her eyes widen in disbelief.
‘You haven’t got the address?’
‘Nope.’
‘This is a city!’
‘Nice work, Einstein.’
‘Don’t make a joke of me!’ She looked at him with such fury that he shifted in his chair.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I could leave you,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve got the money.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t make me a joke.’
She got up and went to pay their bill. He watched as she carefully unpeeled a hundred-franc note and was amazed that the Turkish girls decided to accept it. They thought she was a scream, you could see. How doggedly she waited for her change. His kid. Billie turned over the bright guilder notes in her hands and thanked them politely before returning to the table.
‘Scully?’
‘Hm?’
‘Let’s go home?’
Scully shook his head.
‘I want to stop looking.’
He shook his head again and felt the pulse jerk in his temples.
‘You don’t even know where to look.’
He smiled. ‘How hard can it be to find a houseboat?’
Billie whumped a fist onto the table and walked out into the eerie street in disgust. For a while he watched her blowing steam out there and kicking the cobbles. Pigeons kept back from her, pumping their necks cautiously. He smiled at her through the glass. She scowled back.
Forty-seven
EVENTUALLY THE KNOCKING GOES AWAY and she lifts herself onto one shaky elbow. A sick noon light lies across the twisted bedclothes. The room is strewn. Pretty red shoes. Black tights. A tartan suitcase pillaged and open. Shopping bags, gift wrap in drifts. The bathroom door is closed. Christmas Day. Of course, the little darlings, they’ll be in church. God, she needs a cigarette, but where is her bag in all this mess?
Slowly, with infinite care, she inches to her feet. Like a rolling boulder, she feels the headache coming. She kicks through the junk — no bag. She knocks on the bathroom door. Opens it slowly. All over the vanity, in the basin even, her stuff. She finds the light switch, hisses at the sudden fluorescence and sees her wallet on the floor. In her hands it still smells of Morocco. Travellers’ cheques, all signed, still there. But no cash.
Her passport, tampons, ticket stubs right there on the vanity. And on the mirror, right in her face, three X’s. Kiss, kiss, kiss.
Irma snatches up the Gauloises, finds the lighter and lights up. She takes a deep scouring drag with her head tilted back and the pain gathering at the base of her skull. XXX. You bastard. You asshole.
She begins to laugh.
Forty-eight
ALONG THE SILVERY CANALS they wandered as the weather fell, Billie and her dad, moving up streets called Prinsengracht, Herengracht, Keizersgracht, words that sounded like talking with cake in your mouth. Drizzle wept from bridges and drowned bikes meshed together beneath the clinching overhang of bald trees. Along the brick banks of the canals, dinghies, runabouts and rubber duckies were tied up beside every kind of houseboat you could dream of. They weren’t yachts, caiques and crayboats like in Greece and Australia, but big heavy things that hardly moved. With their pots and pots of yellow flowers, the houseboats lay low in the water, creamy with paint and varnish, their rudders strapped alongside like wooden shields. They were fat and wide with rounded backsides and windows full of green plants and frilly curtains. From their chimneys rose smoke and gas heat and the smells of cooking. Dog bowls stood out on deck catching the rain and chained bikes and garden chairs and party lights dripped. To Billie they looked made up by kids, painted like dolls’ houses. The whole town looked that way — every skinny house was a cubbyhole and hideout. The little streets and canals were so small you could imagine having built them yourself.