•
Four days after I arrived, Isabel left for Oslo. She would be away until the beginning of September. From that moment on, I had the apartment to myself. What did I do during those first few weeks? Things I had done as a child, I suppose. In the mornings I would sunbathe on the terrace with Isabel’s transistor radio playing close to my ear, or else I would lie on her sofa, reading books. Later, I would go for long walks through the forest or across the dunes; I had never explored the Dutch coast before—I’d never had the time—and I quickly grew to love its wide, bleak beaches, its lack of markings. In the afternoons I slept in the pale-blue room with the window open. Sounds filtered through to me—a car climbing the hill in low gear, the murmur of voices in the garden, a distant plane. . . . At least once a day I drove down to the sea and swam—before breakfast, usually, or late in the evening, when there was almost no one else about. This is what I had discovered, that I wanted nothing to do with people. I didn’t want to be seen, by anyone.
Odd then that I should take Paul Bouhtala up on his offer of dinner. With his thick waist and his glossy black moustache, Bouhtala looked more Mexican than Dutch. Though his eyes were deep-set, they were large and heavy-lidded, and he would study me with an air of boredom and world-weariness that I found daunting. Still, I ate with him on a number of occasions that summer. He lived in a ground-floor apartment which could only be reached with difficulty: either you had to follow an intricate series of staircases and passage-ways—this was the indoor route—or you had to work your way round the outside of the house, negotiating a vegetable patch, several beds of nettles, and an orchard of apple trees that had been left untended for years. In his dark rooms, which were hung with lithographs and tapestries, he told me about his travels, his business schemes, his double-dealings (his willingness to make confessions contrasted strangely with his surroundings, which would lead you to expect the opposite—mystery and obfuscation). I would sit on his brown velvet sofa by the window, and I would listen quite happily for hours, losing all awareness of my own existence, losing myself in his. The whites of his eyes were almost too white, I remember, reminding me of porcelain, and he had a disconcerting way of smoothing his moustache. First, he would press two fingers to his upper lip, then, slowly, sensuously, the two fingers would separate into a V. This gesture was so deliberate that I often wondered whether it was not some kind of signal that I ought to recognise, a sign to which I might be expected to respond—but perhaps I was reading too much into the situation. Like Isabel, he asked nothing of me except my presence, and it occurred to me, after a while, that she might actually have asked him to keep me company. At times I felt as if everyone had been told to be kind to me, even people I didn’t know, and I realised that, sooner or later, I would tire of this, I would rebel. . . .
•
It was a hot summer, the hottest for many years. I watched my body slowly darken in the sunlight. I watched it heal. In the evenings I sat outside with the french windows open, candles burning on the oak table in the living-room behind me. I would listen to records on Isabel’s old-fashioned stereo—Mahler, Puccini, Bach—the candles restless in the dark air, the wild garden below the terrace alive with rustling and shadows. Sometimes the phone rang—a naïve sound, too eager, somehow, almost desperate. If I answered it, it was always someone asking for Isabel. I didn’t feel neglected. I wasn’t unhappy either. Words like happiness just didn’t seem to apply.
My thirtieth birthday came and went, uncelebrated. In the evening I called my parents, in England. I had last spoken to them on the day after I was released, and my mother’s voice had sounded shaky, fearful. I told her it had been a big fuss about nothing. I had wanted to get away, that was all; I had needed time to think (I thought she would believe this because, as a thirteen or fourteen year old, I used to ride out to the New Forest at midnight on my bicycle, only to find her waiting for me in the kitchen, worried sick, when I returned). It had been difficult to lie to her, though, not least because I had the memory of her appearing in the white room and spinning beneath the full moon in her pleated skirt. Even now, it was hard to convince myself that she knew nothing about what had happened.
“Happy birthday, darling,” my mother said. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. I’m fine.”
“Are you doing something special tonight?”
“Not really, no.”
I could see my mother clearly. When she talked on the phone she would always hold the receiver against her ear so tightly and with such determination that she reminded me of someone gluing a handle back on to a jug.
She told me that she had tried to call me earlier, but that nobody had answered. I wasn’t staying at the apartment any more, I said. I had moved out for a while. I gave her the number at Isabel’s.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” my mother asked again.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
Thirty, I thought. My mind was empty. I felt nothing.
We talked for another five or ten minutes, firstly about my father, who was working too hard, apparently (my father ran a business that supplied industrial vacuum cleaners to big manufacturers), then about my brother, who had said that he would be coming home for Christmas. She asked me when I was coming home, and I told her it would be soon, though I didn’t think that that was true.
Later, when the phone-call was over, I drove down to the beach. I walked along the hard, flat sand for about a mile, then I turned inland, through the dunes. I couldn’t go to England—not yet, anyway. I would never be able to carry it off. I loved my parents, I always had, but this was something they couldn’t help me with.
There were times during that summer when the darkness was coming down and the green floorboards in Isabel’s apartment looked almost black. The flames of the candles staggered as the cool night air circled the room. I would turn towards the phone, which crouched on a round wooden table in the corner, and I would think of calling Brigitte, but it was funny, even before I rejected it as an idea, I would find that I had forgotten the number, a number that had been my own for the past seven years.
•
Every so often, when I was least expecting it, I would catch a glimpse of a white wall studded with an array of brackets, clamps and rings, or a woman wearing nothing except a scarlet hood. It felt like a story I had heard third-hand, it had happened to someone else, a person I would never meet, a stranger, and yet, when those images flashed before my eyes, my entire body heated up and suddenly my heart was beating too solidly inside my chest, making the same sound that a sledge-hammer would make if you raised it above your head and brought it down repeatedly on someone’s lawn.
One night, in Paul Bouhtala’s apartment, I was studying the pictures on his living-room walls when I noticed a framed black-and-white photograph of a Japanese man lying on a couch. He was naked except for a loincloth, and his body was covered with tattoos.
“Do you like it?”
I turned sharply. Bouhtala was watching me from the shadows on the far side of the room, where he was mixing himself a cocktail.
“Interesting,” I said.
“I took the picture in Yokohama, more than thirty years ago. . . .”
He embarked on the kind of story that was typical of him—one which involved, if I remember rightly, a Korean transsexual, a knife-fight and a boat-load of narcotics.
“You don’t have a tattoo, I suppose,” he said, already sounding disappointed.
I shook my head. “No.”
And then, with a start, I realised that I had lied.
“What is it?” Bouhtala asked, still watching me with interest, this time from his brown leather armchair by the fireplace. A maraschino cherry glowed like a gem-stone in the bottom of his glass.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “I was thinking of someone else. A friend.”
Later that night, in Isabel’s apartment, I undressed and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The marks around my wrists and ankles had long since faded, but Maude’s tattoo still showed, her claim on me scratched crudely into my skin.
•
The following morning I drove to the railway station in Bloemendaal and bought a ticket to Amsterdam. I changed trains in Haarlem, then sat by the window, watching the flat green land rush past. I had been away for two months. It seemed even longer. My stomach tightened, and, reaching into my pocket, I took out the notebook I had brought with me. Over breakfast I had copied down the names and addresses of all the tattoo parlours in the Amsterdam phone directory. I opened my notebook and ran through the list, trying to work out which would be the best. I had no way of knowing, of course. In the end, I chose one more or less at random, simply on the basis that I knew the street. Looking out of the window again, I saw apartment buildings sliding by, their façades decorated with dreary squares of yellow, red and blue. The suburbs of the city.
I walked out of Central Station, past the men loitering suspiciously near public telephones, past the tangled mass of bicycles in racks, and crossed that bleak, wide-open area beyond the trams, making for Zeedijk. I had always liked the red-light district during the day, especially when the sun was shining—some bleary, slept-in quality the streets had, the neon diluted, pale, and, every now and then, a girl on her way to work in full make-up and impossible high-heels—but it struck me, as I walked along, that I had been attracted to that world only because of its distance from my own. It had been a kind of romanticism, the naïve romanticism of the inexperienced, the uninformed. Now, though, the sight of a woman dressed in latex or plastic felt like something I knew about, felt much too familiar, in fact, and I hurried onwards, with my hands pushed deep into my pockets and my head lowered.
When I arrived at the tattoo parlour, the door stood half open, and loud music pounded through the gap. The window was smoked-glass, revealing nothing of the interior. I hesitated for a moment, wondering what kind of place I had chosen, then I walked inside. A man in a black leather vest sat at a counter with a newspaper in front of him. He was hunched right over, his bare forearms spread on either side of the front page, as if they were guarding it; I could only see the top of his head, his pale hair swirling as it closed in on his crown, like the pattern on a snail’s shell. I doubt he could have heard me move towards him, not with that music crashing out of the speakers, but he must have sensed my presence in the room because he looked up as I approached and then reached out and turned the volume down. I explained that I had a tattoo I wanted to get rid of. He asked me where it was. I pointed at it through my clothes. Pushing his paper to one side, he leaned back in his chair. For years, you couldn’t get rid of a tattoo, he told me, not unless you used a scalpel, that is. You literally had to lift the top three or four layers of skin away. Yes, he said when he saw the look on my face, that was the only way. He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, then offered me the packet. I shook my head. To remove a tattoo in those days, he went on, it was like surgery. Then, in the seventies, people started using acid. But acid was not so precise, and it could also be painful.
“Now, with lasers—well, it’s much easier. . . .”
“Lasers?” I said. “How does that work?”
“They break up the cells that form the tattoo, so the ink disperses. Of course, the process leaves a scar—” He broke off, shrugged.
“Could you do it today?”
He placed his cigarette on the groove in the ashtray. “Show me the tattoo.”
I undid my trousers and pulled them down a little so he could see.
“You want to remove this?” he said.
I nodded.
“I’m not surprised.” He looked up at me. “Did you do it?”
“No. Not me.”
Still looking at me, he eased back in his chair again.
“OK,” he said. “I understand.” A distant smile appeared on his face, and I wondered what it was he thought he knew.
Later, while he was working on the tattoo, I felt the room shake slightly. Without looking up, he told me that the Metro passed beneath the building. He talked on, but I was no longer listening. I was thinking about the day when I had been allowed outside, to breathe fresh air, and how I had heard a train in the distance, the rhythm of its wheels laboured, tentative, as if it was slowing down, pulling into a station. Then I remembered church bells jangling. . . .
A railway station, a church—these were co-ordinates, I realised. And if they were co-ordinates, then possibly, just possibly, I could use them to locate the house in which I had been imprisoned.
•
For the next week or two I walked the streets, covering Amsterdam methodically, area by area. With each day that passed, I grew steadily more exhausted, more disillusioned. The co-ordinates weren’t as useful as I’d imagined they might be. There were just too many places on the map where stations and churches coincided. The city began to irritate me. The houses that lined the canals weren’t houses at all, I felt, but façades built out of brightly coloured cardboard; the famous hump-backed bridges were equally two-dimensional. If I reached out with one hand, I could push the whole lot over. Only one area drew me back, exerting an uneasy magnetism I found it difficult to rationalise. It was in the east, near Muiderpoort. Immigrants lived there mostly—people from Morocco, Turkey, Surinam. Empty beer-bottles had been used to prop sash windows open, and wooden beads or strips of coloured plastic hung in place of the traditional Dutch net curtains. In the café where I stopped for something to drink, black women stood about in short leather skirts and sunglasses. Outside, I saw a tree with half a dozen children clustered in its branches, like birds or fruit. One road ran parallel to the train-tracks, which were raised high above it, on an embankment. The ponderous trundling of the wheels carried into the surrounding side-streets. There were three churches in the area, all within earshot of the railway, and I found two or three places where the sounds combined in a way that seemed familiar. But how to take it any further, how to narrow it down?