And then a shrill
bing-bong
alarm and a tinny voice yanking me out of this unsleep, telling me we were approaching the Dutch coastline and would be docking in half an hour, time enough for us to enjoy breakfast in the ship's restaurant. More messages followed, about returning to cars, about the weather, about breakfast again, go on, have breakfast. There was no way to shut it off. I shed my clothes and stood under the shower head, face gritted against the rose. I took the water hotter than normal and imagined it flaying away my skin, layer by layer, until it could get at my brain and needle out all the bad.
Rotterdam was cold, blunted by thick fog. I looked back once at the ship and it was something slowly being consumed by wet, white fire; the sodium lights clustered around and upon it shone with a corona so dense, you couldn't see the outline of the craft beneath it. I searched for the porthole to my room but could not work out where I had stayed. I turned away, deciding that I would only try to see some shape at it, staring out at me from the room where it had tried to take my life.
I took a road vaguely leading in the direction of the city, a path that meandered through a landscape devoted to the sea and the things that moved upon it. There were few shops, and those that were open were unwelcoming; little bars or cafés designed to hold as few people as possible, serving coffee and feeding weak light to transients, ghosts.
I kept walking, looking around for a cab that never materialised. I tried thumbing rides, but none of the cars would stop for this Frankenstein's monster. Eventually a lorry driver pulled over and the driver agreed to give me a lift as far as the Park and Ride car-park in Zeeburg. He didn't, or wouldn't, talk to me. Maybe it was the scars. Maybe he was just a taciturn Dutch guy.
I caught a tram to Amsterdam. At Central Station I bought a coffee and sipped it too quickly, burning my mouth. The waitress saw me and fetched a glass of tap water. She wore a tight white blouse and a black skirt. I got the impression she had grown since putting the clothes on that morning, that it would be too difficult to undress without tearing her garments and that she simply kept them on all the time now. Her face was grey with tiredness. I thanked her for the water and sloshed it around my mouth. With my tongue I could feel a blister on the inside of my lip. I took some more pills and read the leaflet in the box.
In addition, some other side effects have been reported but definite relationship with the medicine has not been established: confusion, suicidal tendency, violent behaviour, stroke...
A guy flew past on a bicycle to which a massive wooden cart had been bolted. Three children and about a fortnight's shopping were piled up inside it. The poor, grey sky couldn't take any more and started weeping. I felt weird, being here. It wasn't just that I might be face to face with Tamara within the hour. It was being away from Southwick. I'd been slotted into that place like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle for such a long time. Not seeing the same buildings, people and coastline gave me a strange, vertiginous feeling, as if I'd just looked over a familiar fence only to find a thousand foot drop beyond it; the nerves behind my knee felt highly strung, painfully feeble. I guessed it must be some sort of agoraphobia. Bizarre that a dense, highly populated city should set it off, when home was all big skies and expansive beaches and the endless blue-grey span of the sea.
I didn't want my coffee now; even lukewarm it made my injured mouth sing. I left a couple of Euros and returned to the street, pausing by a bank of leaflets at the door, where I selected a streetmap heavily bordered by adverts for bars and restaurants in the city. I felt my heart lurch when I realised how close I was to Tamara's apartment. She was on Oudeschans, the other side of Neumarkt from the place I had booked on Oudezijds Voorburgwal. A twenty-minute walk... which meant more like forty for me. But still, touching distance.
I found myself unable to breathe. I leaned against the wall and waited for this dizzy spell to pass. What if she didn't recognise me? What if she refused to answer the door, or slammed it in my face? What if a man opened it?
I checked in at my hotel, which turned out to be three linked buildings incorporating a café and a nightclub. The hotel part of things seemed to be an afterthought and I was dreading the state of my room when I found the entrance was next to a seedy looking sex shop with multicoloured plastic streamers in the doorway barely concealing a row of glossy DVD covers depicting hairless, rubbery slits and a cornucopia of penis-shaped objects designed to fit them.
I had to climb a steep flight of stairs into a corridor that smelled sharply of old cigarettes and reefer coming up through the floor from the club below. There was a different kind of odour too, behind that, of something left to burn in a pan. I opened the door and found myself in a pleasant room with large windows looking out on to the canal. If anything, it was too big for me. I was used to close walls and the same view every day. I ignored the TV and went over to the window, watched the canal boats churning up the muddy water, and pretty girls in sensible clothes chatting earnestly as they headed into the Red Light District.
I went out and dawdled around the shops, staring in at piles of sepia-coloured junk and once-polished bronze and brass that now seemed to suck in the light rather than reflect it. The amount of traffic was staggering. I watched it play out behind me in the windows, the endless milling of people on foot or on bicycles or in cars or in trams. There seemed to be a hierarchy system going on. It appeared that cyclists had right of way over everyone. In reality it was one great mash-up waiting to happen.
I was stalling. My angle of attack was increasing beyond the point where lift began to decrease. I started laughing, then, and that helped. It didn't bother me that the act of laughing hurt my back and my head, or that people in the street gave me a wider berth. It was a positive reaction, no matter where it had come from. It was a surprise to be caught out by an old definition from the pilot's handbook. I still thought in terms of flight, it seemed.
Flight. There was an attractive prospect. I was distracting myself needlessly. Things were very, very simple. It all boiled down to her either taking me back into her life, or saying no. Everything else was just noise. I gathered myself and took a few deep breaths. Then I began my hobble over to Oudeschans.
I liked Tamara's apartment. She had intended to sell it when we sold the flat in Camden, but I insisted she keep it. We could come away for weekends, when we reached a point where we could employ a manager to look after the B&B and grew so sick of the hard summer work that we needed breathing space away. But we seldom managed to get over here. Either there was too much to be getting on with, or the logistics of such a trip were prohibitive.
'I'll keep it, for when you dump me,' she said once, treating me to one of her challenging, come-on looks. 'Then you'll have to come and get me, because I'll have stolen all your underpants and hidden them under my bed.'
I wanted children. The idea hit me from nowhere, although thinking of Tamara must have sown the seed. Seeing the child play so unselfconsciously in the ball pool on board the ferry had flicked a switch in me, I now realised. Tamara would understand.
My reticence had been well-founded, back when we had to think about budgets and five-year plans. I wasn't the right person to be a dad. There was no point in it. I didn't want to have a child only to farm it out to minders and nurseries at an age when they ought to be bonding with the people who created them.
My injuries had been extensive, but nobody had said the chances of me becoming a father had disappeared upon impact. I could have taken it as a sign, if I was a superstitious man.
I was so preoccupied with thoughts of boys and girls that I didn't realise where I was. Too soon, it seemed, I was on Tamara's street. I stood there, taking in the scene. I wanted it to remain with me, a stillpoint between my remarkable past life and the important, defining years to come. It all hinged upon this.
I closed my eyes. I heard cars and trams, I heard bicycle bells. Music from an open window. Jazz. I could smell the canal and the coffee shops. I could see Tamara answering the door in her long grey cardigan and skinny jeans. She'd be holding a large cup of steaming Earl Grey tea with lemon. Maybe her hair would be damp from the shower. She'd be listening to Radiohead or Roxy Music. She'd drop the cup. She'd run to me.
I made my way to the door and climbed the steps, shaky now, blood sugar low kind of shaky. I wished I'd eaten something. I couldn't remember the last meal I'd sat down to, or snack I'd bought. Thoughts of Tamara were sustaining me alone. I rang the bell and waited. No answer. She was out, buying lunch maybe. Going for a walk. Meeting a friend, or a lover.
I kicked the door, then punched the buzzer to the flat next door. A lazy voice answered. I knew it, but I couldn't remember his name.
'I know you,' I said, and regretted the words as soon as they were out. They sounded aggressive, illogical, the random snarl of a madman. Thankfully he didn't hang up on me.
It was a surprise when he said: 'I know you too, come on up.'
I struggled on the stairs. I'd been here on a number of occasions in the past, when I was wooing Tamara, when I had a spare weekend and I wasn't required at the airport. I would bound up here in seconds. Now it took me the best part of five minutes, with frequent stops. I thought about Schiphol airport as I did so, to try to sidetrack me from my pain. I thought of its six runways and tried to remember how long they all were. By the time I was standing in front of her door, my shirt was stuck to my back with what felt like an acre of sweat.
I tapped lightly on the door, just in case the buzzer was broken, but I was already coming to terms with doubt that I would see her today - a suspicion confirmed when I pushed open the letterbox and saw the small hill of mail, bills and advertising fliers reaching into the flat. Beyond that, familiarity snagged at me. I could see one of her jackets hanging on a coat hook. I could see the lower half of a framed photograph, a picture of the two of us standing at the rear exit of a Boeing 737: she was wearing my hat and saluting.
The door across from Tamara's flat shot open and I turned to see a familiar face. Jeroen? I thought. Is that his name?
I tried it and he nodded. He wore a cement-coloured shirt; one collar was flicked up. There were three pens in his top pocket. His hair was gelled back, a wet look, almost black: the skin of his scalp looked tender in contrast. His ears twinkled with diamond studs. He seemed athletic, comfortable in his skin. I noticed that about people these days. I envied him for it.
'Who are you?' he asked.
'I'm Paul Roan,' I said.
'I think - I thought - I recognised the voice, but you're not Paul Roan,' he said. 'I know Paul Roan. Not well. I've only met him a couple of times. But I know him. Who are you?''
I realised how different I must look. Everything about me, almost. Height, weight, clothing, not to mention the scar tissue: none of it was how I used to be. I pulled out my passport, almost laughing now at the complications that were arising. It was like being involved in a Hitchcockian movie about mistaken identity. At any moment James Mason and Martin Landau might materialise at my shoulder and ask me to step outside. I handed it over.
'I
am
Paul,' I said. 'We had you over once, for a drink. You had a Spanish beer. You forced a wedge of lime into the neck so hard that the neck broke and foam went everywhere.'
It was coming back to me now. This guy, this Jeroen, he worked at a recruitment agency in Leiden, as I remembered. I told him that too.
'Okay,' he said. 'So what happened to you?'
I ignored that. 'Tamara,' I said, nodding at her door. 'Do you know where she is?'
He frowned, shook his head. 'I've been away for a while. Holiday. Travelling to see relatives. Work. I've only been back for about a month. Why? What's up?'
He gestured for me to follow him inside. I gritted my teeth; I didn't want to move away from Tamara's door. It didn't seem right somehow. It was the closest I'd come to being near her since she left me. Turning my back was not what I wanted to do.
Reluctantly I went after him and pushed the door to, making sure I stopped it before the latch clicked shut. His flat was spartan almost to the point where it seemed he was either just moving in or ready to move out. But I remembered that he had no wife, no children. The more I remembered, the more came back: he read books but only on his Kindle. He couldn't abide dust - something to do with an allergy, I recalled - so surfaces were at a minimum. There was a sofa and a flat-screen TV in his living room. Precious little else.
'What's up?' he asked again.
I fixed my gaze on the canal and told him everything. I told him about skulls and the Craw and Amy and the lack of children in the village, and in such a mundane way, as if I was reeling off a shopping list, that he didn't say anything. But now I sensed he was frozen, and when I glanced at him he was looking at me with an expression that said:
I wish I hadn't asked.
'Don't you have a key? A spare?'
'Sure,' he said, apparently grateful for something to do. 'But I'll have to find it first.'
I stood by the window while he checked through a series of coin envelopes neatly filed away in a recessed cabinet. He emerged with a keyring dangling from his fingers, wearing an expression of distaste, almost. 'Drop it back when you've finished, if you want,' he said.