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Amsterdam

Michael had been smoking skunk since he arrived in the city at lunchtime. He’d followed his friends along the slender, muggy lanes to Haarlemmer Sraat, and a café called Pink Floyd.

‘Look boys,’ Dale said. ‘Pink Floyd! We gorra check i’ out!’ Pink Floyd was Dale’s favourite band. He spent the majority of his weekends with his clumsy earphones fixed to his head, listening to The Dark Side of the Moon, a plastic baggie of dried mushrooms in his lap. How he fashioned discourse to entertain his comprehensive-teacher-fiancée was a mystery to all of them but she was going to marry him next week. This was Dale’s stag-party and he was making the decisions. They sat at the table nearest the mini-bar, facing the spirit bottles lined against the mottled blue splash-back. The rest of the room was dust coloured with nicotine stains.

‘Totally fuckin’ legal,’ Dale said, sprinkling the seeds into the oversized cigarette paper. ‘So stick it in yer pipe and smoke it!’

‘It’s not totally legal,’ Michael said, ‘just not illegal. Go and spark it up in the street and see what happens.’ Michael hadn’t smoked pot for the best part of two years. He hadn’t smoked anything. His friends had implored him to come to Amsterdam with them. A few bliss filled nights away from the valley; drinking with the boys, like old times - they said it was just what he needed. But narcotics had lost their novelty eons ago. Nothing amused Michael anymore.

He’d left them late in the afternoon for fresh air, wandering the labyrinthine streets slightly stoned, side-stepping bicycles, his limbs onerous. The night descended without warning. It was nine o’clock and now he couldn’t find his friends. The barman at Pink Floyd said they’d left two hours earlier and Michael walked back to the hostel, the sickly smell of cannabis saturating the route. Their underwear and toiletries besieged the beige carpet of the dormitory but the bunks were empty. He left again and walked the narrow pavements, concentrating on the dialogue stirring out of bars on the breeze, seeking Dale’s dull, Welsh clamour. Amsterdam’s chocolate-box compactness did not assist his search, in fact it frustrated him. They could be anywhere.

He was crossing one of the canal straps, walking as slowly as he could over the footbridge, trying not to panic, when he saw a prostitute emerge from the open door of the house in front of him. She leaned forward to adjust her shoe, her long, dark hair falling down in front of her shoulders. He stopped and watched as she stood again, surveying the street, the red light in the arched attic reflecting in the water. She acknowledged him, gawking hungrily not at his face but at the pocket of his denim jacket where his fingers were smoothing the leather of his wallet. Quickly, he peered around the lane, and in the absence of anyone he knew, approached her.

The room she led him to was dank with dry rot. Wrought iron ivy-vines twisted around the queen-sized bed-frame, worn white slashes amongst the baby-pink paint of the balustrades. They sat on the bed next to one another. The girl bent down again to remove her heels. Michael wondered why she wore any shoes at all. He manipulated three notes out of his wad of Euros and put them on the cotton sheet between them. The girl took them, crumpling them into a handbag underneath the frame.

‘You came to the right place, I’m the best girl on this block,’ she said. It was the first time she spoke. She could have been American had the erratic European inflection of the vowels not betrayed her. ‘It’s expensive because I’ll do anything – anything you want.’ She pushed her stockings down her legs and held them in front of his face. Michael looked at her thin, milk-shake pink ankles. Her pallid skin colour was faithful to Molly’s at least. He lay back on the hard mattress.

The girl straddled him, grinning, her thin arms punching into the bedclothes either side of his chest. She moved down slowly over his waist and fumbled with the button on his khaki cammo’s.

‘You want me to go slow?’ she said, ‘or fast?’

Michael reached down and pressed her face towards his genitals. The tips of her loose hair brushed against the bare skin of his belly. He bunched it up onto her crown and held it there while her head jutted against him.

After a moment, his eyes drifted to the stark, square window of the bedroom. There were no curtains. Nobody outside could see into the fourth floor. Nobody inside could see the street or the canal underneath them. The sun had gone but the sky stayed bright: sapphire coloured, as though night was just an illusion, like February days in Britain. There were no stars and the humidity still clung to his skin like the hot breath of an enemy.

He thought about his honeymoon in Northern Italy two July’s ago. They’d stayed in a small city outside of Milan. It was surrounded on three sides by three lakes, one of them lined with mercury. Every morning they ate hazelnut-chocolate spread on crusts from the self-serve breakfast buffet and went to the park in front of the Lago di Mezzo. The heat was searing, even when thunderstorms accompanied it. Molly would lay all day with her head on his waist, any energy she had left sapped. He toyed with her dark hair, watching it turn bronze in his fingers. He believed at the time that he had everything he’d ever need.

In the nights they ordered the local speciality in restaurants on the piazza with a bottle of house red. He never had the mettle to tell Molly that what she was eating was donkey. Afterwards they’d trawl the markets and architecture on Via Roma. The basilica there had a vial of Christ’s blood that supposedly cured a fifteenth century pope of gout. His wife was a lapsed Catholic. She tried to keep her hand in with God by occasionally visiting foreign churches and throwing a penny in the restoration fund. Perhaps it was this hypocrisy that denied her any luck.

Six months after the wedding she went out to buy emulsion at the retail park in Llantrisant. Michael was working at the factory but he knew what colour she chose. The insurance company rang him afterwards and asked him if he wanted to keep the goods from the back seat of the Suzuki. They came with a courier in a huge white cardboard box; strawberry cheesecake and soft lime – odour-free. There was a lamp there too which he plugged into the nearest socket. It rotated, sending Mickey Mouse shape silhouettes over the pleats in the drawn living-room curtains. On her way home from the DIY outlet she’d been waiting in the junction when another car, travelling at 80mph, zipped at her, head on. The driver, apparently asleep, never woke up again. And neither did Molly. She was five months pregnant with Michael’s first child.

He refused to believe the information the police told him over the too-sweet tea in the kitchen. From the dining table where he sat, he could see a glass beside the draining board with the imprint of her lip-gloss on the rim. It was still half full with juice.

When they left he went to the nursery and took the flat-pack cot out of its box. The instruction leaflet was in Chinese but even so it only took him fifteen minutes to erect, perspiring with his effort. He threw the packaging in the recycling bin and covered the cot with the plastic-weave tarpaulin, stained magnolia from previous use. He sat on the floorboards and waited for her to come back with the new paint.

She didn’t, and after a week or so, when he realised she wouldn’t, he went to the kitchen and drank the warm, glutinous orange juice left in the glass. It must have been laced with a reasonably potent anaesthetic because two years later he was still numb. The thick citrus tang still haunted his throat. Now he believed that all he’d ever need was never quite enough.

He felt the girl detach herself from his body. Her face rose up in front of him, locks of her hair falling down over her face. She took her hand to her mouth, her thumb and forefinger pressed together like a pair of tweezers. She gripped something between her front teeth and wrenched it out. ‘I think you’re ready,’ she said, mumbling. Her hands stretched behind her back and she unfastened the clasp of her bra. Michael watched as she threw it across the room. It settled in the corner of the wood-effect cushioned floor. There, separated from her, it didn’t look like a hooker’s bra. It was black with turquoise flowers embroidered along the edges of the padded cups. The matching panties landed beside it and Michael looked back at the girl. She was indelicately stimulating herself, her fingers moving in and out of view. She opened her eyes and he noticed that they were brown, not blue like Molly’s. She crawled over him on the bed.

When it was over she got up and went to her underwear on the floor, bowing to reach it. Her sex had turned to an abrupt, vermilion wound. She dressed hurriedly, refastening the clip of her bra and adjusting the cups to hold her breasts properly. She sat back on the bed to gently spread her stockings back up over her legs. Michael eased the condom from himself and tied the top of the thin rubber into a knot. He sat up and put it on the floor beside the bed. He pulled his T-shirt back down to his waist. The girl stood up and swam into her black dress, her thin, flaccid wrists floundering out of the armholes. She dragged a wastepaper bin over to the mattress and gestured towards the condom, summoning Michael to dispose of it while she pushed her feet back into her patent stilettos. She was intact again, ready for another customer - no trace of him left on her body.

‘Isn’t that a lot of hassle?’ Michael said.

‘Hey?’ she said. She was peering into a compact she’d pulled out of her bag, running a red lipstick wand over her shapeless mouth.

‘Having to dress up all over again? Don’t your feet ache standing around all night in those shoes?’

‘You don’t like my shoes?’ she said, pretending to be offended.

Michael observed her shoes for a moment and shrugged.

‘Besides I have to go out,’ she said, ‘for a drink. Come on-’ She took his jacket off the hook on the back of the door and beckoned him towards her.

Outside it had turned entirely to night. The water was black. The neon lights glared against it, illuminating the red light district into an odd public living room, in the midst of a teenage house party - a storm of sex and smoke. Many girls sat knitting in the windows of the adjacent buildings. This pleased him a little because knitting was a skill young women should have been accomplishing. His grandmother used to knit. He used to ask her to make fluorescent green mohair’s, with tears in the shoulders, like Johnny Rotten’s. She’d work with the colour but told him he had to make his own rips.

‘You’re new to this aren’t you?’ the girl said. Her heels were beating on the pavement beside him. Michael didn’t answer her, just carried on walking, unaware of where he was going. She stopped at the entrance of a bar. ‘You want a drink?’ she said and she turned and stepped inside.

Michael followed her. The radio on the bar was playing techno music. She took a note out of her bag, one of the furrowed 50’s he’d given her earlier. She ordered two whiskey’s, sidling onto the high-stool opposite the tender. Michael sat down next to her. She passed him his whiskey and swallowed almost all of hers in one gulp.

‘I have to go,’ she said bringing the glass back down to the bar. ‘Time is money, if you know what I mean. But here’s to the best you ever had.’

Michael laughed at her sass and made a toast. He watched her cavort back in the direction she had come. It wasn’t the best he ever had, not even close.

© Rachel Trezise, 2005.

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