FROM THE OUTSIDE SINGEL 500 was an imposing building. Built in the seventeenth century, it was a five-storey redbrick grachtenhuis with an elaborate rococo gable cast in white plaster depicting the date of its completion – 1679. The grain trader’s once-proud coat of arms had been blurred by the elements, the ears of wheat on it almost invisible. In the Golden Age the quay on the Singel was where the barges and long-boats would offload their wares. Now it was given over to Amsterdam’s flower market – a spectacular display of colour all year round, from local tulips to imported blooms, with even marijuana seedlings sold in trays from floating barges gently bobbing on the water.
In the back vases and pots were stacked ceiling high, many of them decorated in Delft blue. The calls of the vendors, shouting out the bargains of the day (roses from Turkey or the season’s latest batches of tulips from the fields of Lisse), competed in a chorus of regional Dutch accents and there was much sardonic humour in their dealings. It was a lively, vibrant place.
Inside, Singel 500 was less prepossessing. Essentially a herenhuis, it was gradually falling to ruin beneath at least fifteen years, perhaps two decades, of episodic neglect. The heavy door fell closed behind me with an implosion of dust, swirling motes catching the light that streamed in through the broad window with its inlays of roses in pewter – a pattern reflected in shadow on the marble tiles of the entrance hall floor. The walls were a dirty white. Obviously not painted in years, they were streaked with black rubber scuff marks left by the handlebars of the bicycles stacked against them. There were panels of sheet metal bolted onto the back of the door, and behind this was an odd array of weaponry – baseball clubs, mallets, lengths of metal pipe, even a buckled golf club. M. had not been kidding. As he moved politely aside, his arm on my shoulder so that the formidable door could swing shut, he voiced what I was thinking. “Knokploegs. In case we are attacked.”
I noticed three thick bolts that had been fixed to the wall so that the door could be locked firmly shut from the inside.
There was clearly a hierarchy in this building that was to be my new home. To the left a door, ajar, led into a well-appointed apartment. In my short appraisal of the room I noticed paintings on the wall, abstract in style, a leather couch, a tall vase of Dutch irises and, in the room’s deeper reaches, a bookshelf. In the windows deep blue verbena in pots. On the coffee table near the door were the remains of afternoon coffee – white mugs, a blue teapot and a saucer of stroopwafels cut into triangular wedges.
Again as if reading my thoughts, M. spoke. “Jan and Marijke,” he told me. “They founded the squat.”
I followed M. up the steep uncarpeted staircase into the higher reaches of the building. The stairs were old and worn. In some places they were concave, and in others the boards were lifting. I would get used to this but on my first visit I stumbled on my way up. The interior walls were all stained by damp. Just before the landing to the second floor, I observed that some masonry had come away and there was water trickling down the plaster facade. On the second floor and the floors above it the generous rooms had been subdivided into smaller units with pressboard partitions; a dark, unlit passage divided two sets of six rooms. Many of the doors were padlocked, although there were traces of domesticity. Outside one door was a coat-stand; outside another a tray of cat litter and an umbrella, unfurled, drying.
We continued to climb the derelict stairs and arrived on a floor near the top of the building. Light poured down from a skylight in the high ceiling. I could see cumulus clouds in the sky above. Here there were no partitions, just two rooms leading off the landing, which in the seventeenth century would have accommodated the household staff. One of these rooms had been assigned to me.
M. pointed at a door and I pushed it open. The empty room was small, suffused with grey light. Accretions of dust had turned the walls a similar grey. It had two very high sash windows. I took a couple of steps forward and looked out, expecting a view. Instead I was confronted by a brick wall, redeemed only by a sapling bruidsluier that sought a tenuous hold on a gap in the bricks, its leaves stretching upward towards the invisible light. A pigeon sat on the opposite ledge, wings folded over an apathetic nest of rudimentary twigs and strips of newspaper.
I looked down and the view below was just as depressing. At the bottom of the well a pile of domestic garbage had accumulated – an abandoned mattress, an up-ended wicker chair, magazines and the skeleton of somebody’s discarded bicycle. I shuddered at the spartan gloom of the room and a wistful image of our warm room – Oliver’s and mine – came to mind. “I’m afraid this is it,” said M.
“I am grateful, M.,” I responded. “You have saved me from the streets.” My ironic tone was only half intended.
When M. left, I found myself close to tears. Leaning out of the window into the dark well, I felt a near-consuming sense of overwhelming loss.
M. had lent me a musty sleeping-bag and some blankets and I did my best to settle in, but the room depressed me. At night the only light came from a bare bulb overhead. No candles here, lit against the dullness; no ochre and russet Bedouin rugs.
At first I found the siege atmosphere of the squat unnerving. For the first week I worked late in Allegro, then went to De Engel, secreting myself in one corner and blowing money on whiskies to avoid going home. I also avoided the glances of the boys, some of which were very direct and alluring. I became hostile, occasionally aggressive. “Fuck off, you stupid queen,” I would mutter under my breath in English. Eventually, when it was after three in the morning and the bar was empty, I would return, drunk, to my grey room and the constrictions of M.’s zipped-up sleeping-bag.
I would wake early to the sounds of the pigeons. In the mornings we regarded each other balefully across the gap, I with a steaming mug of coffee in my hand, they with the poverty of their space. Sometimes I’d talk to them. “Take up a gable on the Herengracht,” I advised them. “Why pick this dreary fuck-hole, this meagre nest, cooing pointlessly?”
They responded to my movements by turning their heads this way and that with sideways apprehension. I might have fed them if there was any place I could have put out bread or seeds. Instead we stared morosely at one another through the glass. Sometimes I would see myself staring, catching a close-up glimpse of my reflection. I looked as hunched into my pullover as the pigeons did into their dirty feathers, shielding themselves against the spring showers. We were dreary companions in a dreary place.