The Devil's Playground (4 page)

and for all. Yes. He unconsciously inventoried his flat,

appraising what there was of value.

After the seventh day of torrential rain, Jon’s resolve and

paranoia finally broke and all the reasons for not inviting the

tramp in were washed away like the summer leaves. He’d

been thinking about it so much, it had swallowed up his life

and he knew that there was only one thing to do. He got

drunk. Stared at the wet old man two floors below. Drank

more. Went out into the rain, shouted over the noise of the

thunder. Made his offer.

Now, staring at the empty space, rubbing his engorged ankle,

Jon could understand a little better the reasons that had made

him invite the old man to stay. At the time, he only vaguely

pressed against the surface of his motivation, afraid that

probing it too deeply might make it wilt. And he was glad

that he had done it, even if Jake was back on the streets. His

mother would have been proud. She’d always taught him to

think about the men who lived on the fringes of life. She

had taken him to parts of town that his father hadn’t even

known existed. She’d led him through small, crowded, smelly

streets that for the twelve-year-old boy were like a window,

a gateway into a world that bubbled under the surface of

this one.

The first time he had cried so much that his mother

apologized. He’d told her that it wasn’t fair that they were

going home to dinner while these men and women had to

sleep in cardboard boxes. His mother just nodded sadly, and

something in the world had shifted slightly.

At first the tramp had mumbled and demurred, but Jon

insisted, the rain hissed and splattered, and they walked back

into the building together, dripping and cold, exchanging

names and wet handshakes as they waited for the lift.

They sat opposite each other in the living room and didn’t

say a thing.

Jon stared at his bookcases, crushed by a sudden feeling

that he’d made a terrible mistake. He’d invited a stranger

into his house. More than a stranger. A tramp. Who was to

say he hadn’t come from an institution? Or prison? Jon

suddenly realized that he knew nothing about this man, that

all his assumptions and speculations were just that. He tried

to think of something to say, but nothing came.

There was a tired smell exuding from Jake, like the whiff

of old books or attic-rescued toys. He just sat there, almost

a part of the armchair, his head bowed, his hand running

through the straggle of his beard.

Jon tried not to stare at Jake’s feet. He was barefoot, as

always, but it was only now in the small confined light of the

room that he could see that the marks and patterns on the

old man’s feet were not just from sleeping rough. His feet

were dark and sunburned, crisscrossed with tiny white lines,

the flesh sometimes folded over itself, sometimes stretched

tight to the bone, a latticework of streets and alleys carved

into the skin or an ancient map of places still unseen. They

looked hard and worn like an athlete’s feet, as if the flesh

was slowly turning to leather.

He glanced up and noticed that Jake was watching him.

He shivered, a real body snap and jerker, the kind that

makes you feel as if too volts have just surged through your

system. He coughed to make it seem like something else,

hoping Jake hadn’t caught it, thinking of exiled Chilean

academics he’d seen in a documentary once and the

torture scars they carried like a secret tattoo beneath their

clothes.

‘I wonder if I could have a bath.’

Jon jumped. Then laughed, or tried to, but it came out

wrong and Jake didn’t smile back or make things any easier.

His face held still like the face of a man carved in stone.

‘It’s been a couple of weeks. I must smell awful.’

Yes he did, Jon thought, but he’d been way too polite, too

embarrassed, to say anything. ‘There’s towels in the racks

and you can use whatever soaps, shampoos I’ve got,’ he said,

trying not to let the relief show in his voice.

‘Thank you,’ Jake replied and got up, leaving big wet,

soggy footprints on the faded carpet.

When the door closed, Jon felt a sudden surge of relief, a

welcome spasm of privacy. What had he done? But it was

too late for that now, of course. He couldn’t ask him to

leave. Couldn’t change his mind. That would be worse, and

more difficult. He suddenly remembered his toothbrush,

wondering whether Jake would use it, it was the only one he

had, and he made a decision to buy a new one tomorrow,

but one that was identical so that the old man wouldn’t feel

insulted.

Jon lit a cigarette and put the first side of Zappa’s Waka/

Jawaka on the stereo. As the horns began blasting the melody,

reaching ever higher, counter-phrasing and spinning across

the wild, propulsive beat, he went to the kitchen, buoyed by

the screaming trumpets, and started to make an omelette,

figuring the old man must be hungry, wanting to do something

for him, even if it was just this.

He thought about his father’s funeral while the eggs slowly

turned opaque in the pan. The sound of the sizzling fat like

the rain on the roofs of the cars that morning … another

grey rain-lashed day … his inability to look anyone in the

eye, hiding behind the cortege of hearses; a small child again,

weeping for a father that he’d hated in life, filled with

shame, regret and the massiveness of all that had been left

unresolved.

He took out the milk and made some coffee, hearing the

pipes squeak and whisde as Jake ran his bath. Thinking about

his father again made Jon’s body tense up and he spilled

sugar all over the floor, cursing himself and the way his

memory always lay in wait like a densely packed minefield,

impossible to avoid, fracturing the present.

It made his ankle throb. Thinking about his father, about the

past, Jake’s disappearance, all the things that were still raw

and painful. He didn’t want to think about any of that.

He got up, poured another drink. Stared out at the cashpoint,

deserted now. He was glad that he’d invited Jake in.

It was the one thing in his life he was unmitigatedly proud

of. The one time when he overcame his fears and quibbles

and actually did something without reservation. Not that it

had made any difference. The old man was gone.

Jon thought about the tissues on the floor, the unexpected

sight of the old man naked, but surely it was more than

that. The thought that he’d somehow driven him off was not

something he wanted to contend with. Not now. Not with

all this work still to be done, this flickering mass of pixelated

crap.

He pulled the curtains shut, drained the scotch, shut down

the computer and turned on the dying minutes of a football

game. Took a couple more painkillers. His headache had

settled behind his eyes, fine white pins of pain piercing his

retinas.

The phone rang.

It sounded like something snapping inside his head.

Each ring seemed to get louder. Dave checking he was

working. Dave hassling him. He almost didn’t pick it up. But

what if it was Jake? He picked up, said, ‘Hello’, trying not to

slur, to sound too drunk or drugged.

‘Mr Jon Reed?’

‘Yes?’ he said, muting the TV.

‘My name is Detective Ronald van Hijn, Amsterdam

police.’ There was a pause in which the detective seemed to

be lost for words. Jon stared blankly at the mute players

dancing across the brilliant green. The detective coughed.

His voice sounded thin and far away. ‘I’m afraid I have some

bad news for you, Mr Reed.’

Wouter tied her to the four corners of the bed using pairs of

tights he had taken out of her drawer. The arms came first;

small wrists covered by smooth Lycra, pinioned to the brass

ends of the headboard. When he was satisfied that her arms

were safely pinned, he began tying her feet, wrapping the

tights around her ankles, ankles he dearly loved, and pulling

them across to either side of the bed.

Suze said nothing, didn’t struggle, let him continue with his

slow seduction as she stared at the black of the blindfold that

covered her eyes and saw the desert appear in front of her.

It was a good image. An image drawn from the vast

repository of her youth. Before things had turned bad.

Before …

She focused on the lone mesa in the distance, black and

mysterious in the corners of her memory, as she heard him

taking off clothes, coughing, getting on top of the bed and

mumbling something in Dutch.

She told him to hit play on the deck. The sound of the

Geraldine Fibbers’ second album, Butch, alternatingly soft

and savage, saturated the room. She felt his tongue, warm

and sticky, slide up her thigh, and though it was almost like

being tickled, she tried not to move or squirm, instead letting

the creeping sensitivity drown her as it raced across her body

making nipples stand cold and rosy, skin prick up as if

expecting an unexpected guest. He noticed this and began

to play with her breast, grabbing the nipple slightly between

his teeth, tightening the grip and gently releasing as he heard

her moan.

He lit a cigarette, reached over to the bedside table and

picked the two clothes pegs off it. She felt the cold plastic

clamp her nipple and the warm trickle of pleasure that

coursed up through her neck and down her thighs. She saw

the desert, the hands of her mother shaking in an alcoholic

rage, the sound of her father on an answering machine, the

closest she got to him for many years, that disembodied

crackle and pulse of humming lines and whispered, breathy

urgencies that could only be expressed in the close confines

of a faraway telephone booth - she saw all that and then it

was blown away, scattered and gone.

He placed the other clothes peg, twisted it so that her

nipple seemed almost to blush as the blood engorged it,

darkening the already dark skin there. He felt her move,

gyrate slightly, though he could sense that in some essential

way she was no longer with him, that somehow in her

restraints she’d managed to escape to somewhere small and

private, and he entered her then, feeling himself ready to

explode, the cigarette slowly burning down in the ashtray

beside the bed.

*Now that wasn’t too hard, was it?’ Suze said as he undid the

tights and carefully took off her blindfold.

‘It was kinda fun,’ he replied in that quasi-American accent that she found so sexy in Dutch men, as if they’d all learned how to speak English from movies, giving them a brusquer,

more commanding tone than they would have ever learned

in pronunciation class.

He lit her a cigarette and then one for himself. She wiped the blood that had begun to dry and crack on his chin. ‘Did

you enjoy it?’ she asked him, placing her hand on his shoulder,

feeling the still hot flesh of his urgency.

‘I guess so.’ He took a drag of the cigarette and lightly

placed it in the ashtray. ‘Not that I’ve done this kind of thing

before but it’s good to try something different.’

And it was, he had to admit to himself, more fun than

he’d expected it to be. When he tied her up, he felt as he had

with the twins, lost in a world of his own imagining, able to

leap whatever barriers.

‘But I want to know if you enjoyed it. If you really enjoyed

it.’ She looked at him, suddenly serious.

‘No, not really. Not of itself.’ He lied, ashamed of the lust

that had stirred within him. ‘Being with you, yes but this,

no.’

She moved away from him. ‘I thought all you Dutch boys

were into kinky sex.’

‘Why do you think that?’ he replied. He liked the way

Americans managed to generalize and place everything in a

box from which understanding could then be gleaned. It

made life so much simpler.

‘I don’t know, it’s just the common impression,’ she

replied, not having really thought about it; but, now that she

did, it seemed to make a whole lot of sense. ‘You have this

legalized sex and drugs industry — I mean hell, Wouter, you

yourself run three sex shops.’ She smiled, sensing that he

didn’t find the paradox quite as entertaining as she did. ‘And

you know, to us foreigners, you Dutch seem so straight and — forgive me — boring, that we twisted Americans have got it into our heads that you must all be perverts of some kind.

C’mon Wouter, underneath that prim Protestant exterior

something darker must lurk.’

‘I don’t think that’s quite the case.’

‘I was just joking.’ She grabbed him and squeezed his

hand, thinking God, I wish he had a sense of humour, but then

he’d be pretty much perfect and Suze knew there was no

such thing, not for her anyway. She got up, took off the

Fibbers and put on Waits, Foreign Affairs, sensing the moment

required something mellow. They sat and smoked silently

for the length of the album.