The Stag and Hen Weekend (18 page)

Had Phil fallen for Sanne? He considered the question carefully on his way to the bathroom and felt sure that the correct answer must lie somewhere in his head. What he did know for sure was that he had never met anyone like Sanne. She was different, and that difference spoke to Phil in a way that he had never thought possible. Last night had taught him that he could be a completely different person living a completely different life. Did a person exist who had never been tempted by that prospect? He thought about his childhood and the embarrassment he’d felt at having free school dinner tickets, he thought about the tiny house that he had grown up in and the graffiti and the litter that had plagued his estate, he thought about his education and exams he had failed and the opportunities he had missed. With a single action all the worries of his past could belong to another life and another time, and he could concentrate on being someone new somewhere new. It was a pipe dream of course, a holiday state of mind brought on by being free of the day-to-day routine, but what a pipe dream and what a state of mind.

He appeared fully dressed at the kitchen door. The room was modern, tasteful and obviously expensive. Sanne was sitting at a dining table underneath a window looking down at the canal beneath. A mug of coffee was by her hands, a second sat on the table beside her.

‘I think I’d better get off.’

‘What about the coffee?’

‘I’ll have to leave it. So, I’ll see you later?’

‘Eleven, by the Spinoza statue, Waterlooplein.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

They hugged goodbye but the embrace felt different, awkward. Phil thought about the shards of light that he had watched coming through the bedroom shutters. Everything looks different in the daytime, her embrace seemed to say, even love.

Beursstraat politiebureau in the daytime was a considerably more hospitable place than it had been in the early hours of Sunday morning. There were two officers manning the duty desk and a much shorter queue, which resulted in Phil’s dad arriving more quickly than he had expected.

Patrick still looked old and weary, just as on their last visit but there was a brightness about his eyes that had been missing before. ‘Son, what are you doing here? I thought you had a work emergency?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Phil. ‘It’s sorted. You all right, Dad?’

‘Of course I am,’ he turned to the officer who had escorted him into the waiting room. ‘Son, this is Peter, he’s been looking after me this morning.’

The officer was a tall blond man who couldn’t have looked more Dutch if he had been wearing clogs and a PSV Eindhoven top. Phil gave him a nod and raised an eyebrow in sympathy.

‘Your father, he’s a bit of a character, isn’t he?’

‘You could say that.’

‘He’s been regaling us all with stories of his past touring with bands. Did you know, back in 1972 he fell asleep in a hotel room in Amsterdam and woke up in a tree in Vondelpark?’

‘I may have heard that story once or twice.’

‘Right then, Pat,’ said the officer holding out his hand, ‘it has been nice meeting you but let’s hope that we don’t meet again, at least not under these particular circumstances.’

Patrick raised his hands in surrender. ‘On that, young Peter, you have my word! My days in the drug trade are over for good.’

The two men shook hands while Phil looked on with a look of bewilderment.

‘So where to now?’

Phil looked at his dad. ‘This hasn’t even slowed you down has it?’

‘Not for a second. They haven’t built a jail that can keep hold of Patrick Hudson.’

‘What were you even doing bringing hash cakes into the country?’

‘So you know?’

‘Well I couldn’t think of any other reason why you’d insist on carrying that stupid rucksack wherever you went. Are you mad? One: if the border police had picked you up with that lot in the UK I can guarantee that they would have been a lot less friendly than Peter here, and two: why would you bring hash cakes into Amsterdam of all places? There’s a shop on virtually every street corner selling the stuff!’

‘Yeah, but it’s the commercial stuff, no one likes that, it’s far too strong. My stuff was guaranteed all organic and pesticide free.’

The penny dropped.

‘You’re growing it?’

Patrick let out a schoolboyish chuckle that managed to be at once charming and annoying. ‘I got the basics from the internet in the local library and then filled in the gaps from some books I borrowed off Little Stevie from the pub. I’ve turned over part of the greenhouse on my allotment to full-time cultivation.’

‘You’re growing it on the allotment?’

Patrick nodded sheepishly. ‘And a bit on the windowsill at home. But I promise you it was for a good cause.’

‘And what cause would that be, Dad, the keep Patrick Hudson in beer, fags and horses fund?’

‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘It was for a wedding present for you and Helen. I know you don’t think much of me, and it’s not like I’ve been the greatest dad in the world, but I did want to do something to show that I wished you both all the luck in the world.’

‘What were you going to get?’

‘I don’t know, son, do I? A tea set . . . some cutlery . . . something or other from John Lewis in the Victoria Centre if I could scrape together enough cash.’

Phil and never felt guiltier.

‘You know you don’t have to do any of that. Helen and I have got everything we need.’

‘I just wanted to give you something nice, something that might make you think that you old man’s not a total dead loss.’

Phil laughed, ‘You would’ve had to sell a lot of hash cakes to get the cash together for a private jet, Dad.’

‘Doesn’t mean that I couldn’t try though, does it?’

Had they been any other father and son, this might have resulted in a man-hug, but as it was they simply exchanged grins, shoved their hands deep into their pockets and kept their eyes fixed on the road ahead.

It was five to eleven by the time Phil reached the Spinoza statue on Waterlooplein, and as he had suspected there was no sign of Sanne. She wouldn’t come, he knew that. Last night had been last night and this morning was a whole different story.

Patrick sat down at the base of the statue. ‘Who is it we’re meeting again?’

‘Sanne,’ replied Phil, ‘you know, the woman you met last night. The one that used to be married to Aidan Reid.’

Patrick considered this. ‘So did you get your answer? You know, find out what it was you wanted to know? You were worried about her ex-husband or something.’

Phil shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say. We talked but I’m not sure I’m any the wiser.’

‘But you’re not worried about Helen any more, are you? This Aiden Reid guy, he’s out of the picture?’

‘I don’t know, Dad,’ said Phil, ‘I really don’t.’

They waited by the statue for the best part of twenty minutes, talking about the past, making comments about the people they saw and the buildings around them, and it was only when Patrick began to moan that he could murder a cup of tea, that Phil finally accepted that Sanne wasn’t going to turn up.

There was a café opposite the statue and although it seemed busy, they headed towards the entrance.

They had barely taken more than a few steps when Phil heard someone calling out his name and turned around to see Sanne, cycling furiously and waving at him as she crossed the bridge. Leaving his father outside the café he ran over to the bridge to meet her.

Sanne came to a halt right in front of him and dismounted. She was wearing a cream T-shirt, a denim skirt and flip-flops and despite having only slept for a handful of hours still managed to look amazing. Phil wished that he had at least changed his shirt, let alone his underwear, and was aware that facially speaking he looked like a man who had had a very rough weekend in Amsterdam.

Phil was glad that he had been wrong about her. He was glad that there was still hope. ‘I was beginning to think you weren’t going to come.’

Sanne looked directly at him. ‘I wasn’t.’

Phil nodded, it made sense of course. ‘But you’re still hungry?’

Sanne grinned. ‘Starving.’ She glanced back over the bridge. ‘There’s a little place I go to a lot with friends. It’s a bit further down but I think you’ll like it. It’s a nice Dutch place, no luke-warm tea in chipped mugs, no tomato ketchup in a squeezy bottle and definitely no English breakfasts!’

The café was just as Sanne had described. They found a table outside for three, sat down and perused the menus.

Patrick, being Patrick, opted to stick with what he knew and asked Sanne to order him bacon and eggs but Phil, wanting to both impress Sanne and distance himself from his father’s limited outlook on Dutch cuisine selected a dish at random from the Dutch menu called
ontbijtkoek
and seemed thoroughly pleased with himself when he had done so.

Sanne, who had ordered an egg-white omelette on brown toast, looked at him and smiled as the waitress left the table.

‘Do you even know what you’ve ordered?’ she asked, clearly amused by his choice.

Phil hoped to bluff his way through. ‘Is it some kind of Dutch sausage?’

‘It’s a cake made from rye flour and spice that comes with butter. I quite like it, and my mother adores it, but I’m pretty sure after the night you’ve had you’d be better off having something like
Uitsmijter
. It’s still Dutch, you’ll love it and best of all you still get your “I love the Netherlands Brownie points”.’

Sanne called the waitress back and reordered Phil’s breakfast for him and once that was done she set about charming Patrick which, with Sanne looking the way she did, took all of ten seconds. It took Patrick approximately three and a half minutes to return the compliment by telling her, without a single deviation in the detail, about how the last time he’d been in Amsterdam he’d gone to sleep in a hotel bedroom and woken up in a tree in Vondelpark.

With the sunshine, the canalside setting and the laughter, it was, thought Phil as he finished the last of his Uitsmijter (fried eggs, ham and aged Gouda on white bread), one of the tastiest meals he had ever eaten and one of the most memorable. But as the waitress appeared to clear away their plates, and his gaze briefly met Sanne’s he realised that it was all about to come to an end.

Phil paid the bill, and Sanne suggested that as it was such a beautiful day they should take a stroll along the back up to the edge of De Wallen before she would take her leave.

Pushing Sanne’s bike for her, Phil tried to prolong the journey, eking out precious minutes by asking Sanne about the various buildings that they passed along the way. Finally Sanne came to a halt and explained to Patrick that it was time for her to say goodbye.

Patrick hugged her tightly, ‘You’re the second Dutch person today that I’ve really got on with and I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that I like your lot more than I like my own.’

Sanne kissed his cheek. ‘What can I say? The feeling’s mutual.’

Instructing his father to sit on a nearby bench, Phil walked with Sanne until they were out of his father’s eyeline to say his goodbyes but when he opened his mouth he couldn’t think of what to say.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s like my whole mind’s gone blank.’

Sanne put her arms around him and held him tightly. ‘I should go,’ she said finally. She looked up at him, quickly pressed her lips against his own and hugged him tightly. ‘I’m not very good at goodbyes.’

Phil kissed the top of her head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I am coming back.’

‘Don’t say that, please, don’t say that if you don’t absolutely mean it.’

‘Why wouldn’t I mean it? It’s all I’ve been thinking about since last night.’

‘Because you haven’t seen Helen. Because you haven’t worked things through. Because you don’t know anything for sure. And you need to be sure about this, Phil. There’s still a chance for you and Helen, all the Aiden stuff might not be as it seems, and then this time next week your life could be as exactly as you’ve always wanted it to be.’

‘But it won’t, I just feel it.’

‘You need to know for sure.’

‘And you’ll wait?’

‘This isn’t about me, it’s about Helen. You have to have faith in her. You have to believe the best of her until you know the truth. Despite everything she just might have what it takes to amaze you, and prove you wrong. But you need to fight for her, don’t give up until you’ve explored every possible avenue, proved to her that she’s the one for you.’

17.

It was after one as Phil and Patrick reached the hotel lobby and began searching for the boys. On the basis that they would have long since had to check out of their rooms Phil reasoned that even with the good weather there was every chance after the night of drinking they had no doubt indulged in that they wouldn’t have gone too far. But when after half an hour of searching the bar, the restaurant and even the hotel toilets proved fruitless, he began to think he would simply have to meet them at the airport.

Frustrated he wondered aloud where could they be, only to have Patrick answer back: ‘Any one of a million places. It’s not like Amsterdam’s Derby city centre is it?’