It was late afternoon by the time I arrived at Ullapool, on the mainland. The boat was late, and I had to rush. Fortunately, the bus depot was close to the harbour. There was just one bus waiting there, clearly identified by a large number on the front. Still, as I got on, I asked the driver if this bus was going to Inverness, then installed myself contentedly in a front-facing seat.
It was a long trip through a stark moonscape. The grey, barren hills rolled monotonously past. There weren’t even any sheep grazing on the rocky slopes. Every bend in the road revealed yet another exact duplicate of the same boring view. Yet another endless glen. Yet another narrow pass choked with grit and dust whipped up into spirals by the wind. My elation gradually trickled away. Was this the world, then? Was this what, on Lewis, we used to talk about longingly—especially in winter, when the island seemed even smaller than usual, and the sea bashed against every shore, giving you the sense you were riding on the back of a small whale that might at any moment decide to dive under?
On the other hand, perhaps it was the sea I was missing. For six long years, with every intake of breath, I had smelled the sea, I had tasted it, I had heard it, and I had seen it. Now, with those familiar sensations missing, it was as if all my senses had been corked. I felt just like the Tarot deck’s poor, blindfolded Two of Swords, sitting with her back to the sea. Even when I was small, I’d pitied her; so close to the sea, and yet unable to look at it. ‘Well, she’s free to turn round, you know,’ my mother would say impatiently, ‘and she’s free to take off her blindfold as well. Take a good look: her hands aren’t tied, see? If she chooses to keep sitting that way, well, that’s completely up to her. If you’re dealt this card, it means you’ve turned your back on the unconscious, and can’t be bothered to do anything about it. But you’ll live to regret it.’
My mother and her explanations.
Inverness Airport was busy and noisy. In the departure hall, I found myself staring blankly at the other travellers, all of them families on holiday. Very ordinary families, each consisting of two adults and a couple of kids. It must be nice to grow up as part of such a conventional unit. What a lovely family, people would think when they saw you; or, better yet, they probably wouldn’t think anything of it at all. Strangers would never give you funny looks.
It was still light out when the airplane lifted off. I saw Inverness disappear below me. That narrow glittering band over there must be Loch Ness. The airplane heeled over to the south-east. Not a chance of catching a last glimpse of Lewis, somewhere out there in the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean, the only spot in this entire country that I actually knew outside of my geography books. I had to hang onto the armrest for dear life; that’s how immense the world seemed, all of a sudden. People living everywhere. Billions of people, all with their own needs, hopes, and aspirations. All of them hoping to make it from cradle to grave without too many mishaps, while along the way dreaming their dreams, overcoming their fears, readjusting their goals, and getting in one another’s way.
A flight attendant came by with a meal. An omelette and a warm roll on the side. It looked quite tasty. But after the first bite, I realized I wasn’t the least bit hungry.
The Netherlands was a sea of flashing lights in the black of night. Or rather, it looked like a piece of dog-eared cardboard someone had pricked full of holes, hoping against hope for a fairylike effect when propped up against a lamp. Even from way up high, the staggering flatness of the land was impossible to miss.
Fifteen minutes later, I was trailing down Schiphol’s endless corridors, feeling rather dazed. I heard Dutch spoken all around me, and the signs had writing with strange letter-combinations—eu, ij, and au. I’d forgotten what those diphthongs looked like in black on white. I caught myself mouthing the words, trying to pronounce them. The letters of the alphabet, which had never been my friends, were already ganging up on me, as a warning that this wasn’t going to be a picnic.
At customs, I took my passport out of my knapsack and held my breath. With a few short, dry clicks of the keys, my name was entered into the computer. I tried with all my might to make my mind go blank so I wouldn’t give off any vibes that might be construed as suspicious, but even before I’d done so, my passport was shoved back at me across the counter.
How fast it all suddenly seemed to go! My suitcase was already chugging around the baggage carousel. To buy myself some time, I went to the loo. I washed my hands meticulously and ran a pre-moistened towelette over my face. I stared into the mirror. Had I changed? Would someone who hadn’t seen me in years still be able to recognize me? You’ll be totally anonymous in the big city, the Luducos had assured me. But that didn’t mean I might not bump into someone from my former life; the academic year was about to start, and surely I wasn’t the only eighteen-year-old who was moving to Amsterdam this week.
I collected my belongings and went outside.
Warm air hit me in the face as I went through the revolving door. It was almost midnight, but the area in front of the airport was still teeming with life. Taxis, buses, and cars drove up and down. Travellers were being picked up and dropped off, most of them half-naked, in shorts and loose tank tops. I was suffocating in my heavy windbreaker, but I couldn’t take it off because I had my hands full.
Just take a taxi, Ludo and Duco had advised me. They’d given me some euros in an envelope, with the address of my lodgings written on the front. Huffing and puffing, I lugged my suitcase and knapsack to the taxi rank. I thought I’d better take the first one in line; that was probably what you were supposed to do. But suddenly, as I bent down to speak into the driver’s window, my heart started racing and an indescribable panic took hold of me. For a fleeting moment, I didn’t know who I was. There was just one thing I was sure of: I definitely didn’t belong here, amid all these people dressed for summer and the busy traffic and the dazzling neon hoardings. Then I got hold of myself again. I was dressed far too warmly, and was suffering a bit of culture shock—that’s all it was.
The landlord was all flesh, a colossal mountain of a man. He was practically popping out of his shirt. Gold glinted in his chest hair, and in his ears, too. He’d waited up specially for me, he said. He picked up my luggage as if it didn’t weigh a thing and had me follow him up the scruffy stairs. As we climbed, I started having serious misgivings about the actual existence of the polished wooden floors, the sunny corner window and the lofty ceiling with authentic old beams that we had seen on the website. The Luducos had been over the moon about their find. This was a room, they declared, that immediately made you think of birds chirping in the gutters, of a cosy bakery around the corner, of the happy sound of children playing in the street.
Upstairs, the landlord inserted a key in the lock and opened the door. ‘It sticks a little,’ he said apologetically, ‘and the stairwell has seen better days, but once inside, you’ll see, you’ll soon forget all about that.’ He switched on the light.
I tried to take it all in at once. The pale-blue window frames, the flowery sofa with just the right kind of flowers, the pendant lamp over the pine table, the odd-looking bookcase that had probably come from the Waterlooplein flea market. There was an alcove with a kitchenette, and the balcony boasted a potted honeysuckle in bloom.
‘That over there was delivered for you today,’ said the man, nodding at a parcel lying on the table, next to the snazzy cordless phone. Golly—where I was from, we had to place calls through the switchboard until just recently. I already saw myself sitting on the balcony with the phone to my ear and a drink in my hand.
In a haze, I heard him explaining how the cooker, the water heater, the microwave, the TV, and the central heating worked. I barely heard him, I was so happy; I just kept nodding. I accepted the keys from him, one for the front door and one for my own door. The doorbell: if it rang three times, it was for me. The letterbox: mine was the top one. And if there was anything else over the next few days, I shouldn’t hesitate to come and ask this friendly ton of flesh.
Then he wished me a good night.
All I had to do was hang up my clothes in the cupboard, and I could start living here. Soon people who liked me would ring the doorbell three times, or call me on the phone. The postman would stuff thick envelopes through the slot for me. I looked at the package on the table. I weighed it in my hands. It was heavy. Hastily, I tore the paper off. A wooden box, and inside it, a bottle of champagne and one crystal glass, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. I could just see Duco and Ludo, side by side on the pavement in Stornoway, peering in the shop windows—Lude with the tartan shopping bag he always carried on his arm, Duke with the belt of his trench coat dragging in the puddles. Oh, but they’d probably just phoned an off-license in Amsterdam; the card wasn’t in their handwriting. ‘To your new life! XXX, L & D.’
When I had only just begun my struggle with the Word, Ludo had said to me one night, ‘I’ll teach you a little trick, ducks. Miss Joyce will be so impressed with you. Look, this is how you write “kiss.”’ And he’d drawn a big X on a sheet of paper.
I’d been jubilant. Miss, miss! I know how to write ‘kiss’!
That should come in handy, she’d said. And how about ‘miss,’ do you know how to write that as well? Or ‘boss’?
Thomas had been the only one who’d been suitably impressed. He’d said …
Abruptly, I turned round. I walked into the kitchen and gazed at the dishes in the cupboards, at the drying rack hanging over the sink. I’d managed to avoid thinking of Thomas for years, and I certainly wasn’t about to start now, on my first day back in Holland. I returned to the living room and picked up the bottle of champagne. I would put it in the fridge; I’d save it for when my new girlfriends from Early Childhood Care III and I had something to celebrate, someday soon. At college I was going to come clean about my dyslexia right from the start. I’d show myself to be both strong and vulnerable at the same time. And if I should ever bump into Thomas in town, I’d calmly inform him that he owed me; he owed me big. I had, for all intents and purposes, saved his life, as well as Vanessa’s, that Sunday morning in Uig. Though it had been quite right for Iain to have the accolades, as well as the big fat check from Vanessa’s mother that he’d received in the post. I couldn’t blame Thomas for having no inkling of the role I had played in his deliverance. But still—as long as you weren’t in full possession of the facts, you weren’t entitled to judge, either.
The telephone rang.
The telephone! Dumbfounded, I picked it up and pushed a green button at random.
‘Is it nice?’ asked Duco. ‘Is the room all right? Wait a sec, Lucy. Ludo! I’ve got her on the line, Lude!’
I heard Ludo saying in the background, ‘Good, so the man did manage to get the phone installed, then.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Duke. ‘That fellow is one hundred per cent …’
‘Hey, are you talking to me or to Ludo?’ I cried. ‘And he isn’t your type at all. He’s dripping with gold chains.’
‘Hey, no need to be cheeky, young lady. How was the trip, all right?’
Ludo said, ‘Come on, first remind her she has to buy her textbooks tomorrow. Here, I have it in writing. And her schedule, she’s got to …’
‘Lucy? Say something!’
‘Jesus, man, I can’t get a word in edgeways.’
‘Just shut up for a minute, will you?’ I heard Duco say in a muffled voice.
Fuming, Ludo answered, ‘Right, then hand her over to me, will you?’
Feeling drained all of a sudden, I stared at the glass on the table, in a mess of shredded tissue.
‘Lucy-puss,’ said Ludo in my ear. ‘How’re you doing, sweetheart?’
One glass. They’d given me just one glass. They weren’t expecting me to make any friends in Amsterdam with whom I’d share their bottle.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Really, I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about a thing.’ Then I hung up.
I walked to the balcony. The sultry scent of the honeysuckle greeted me. Down in the garden, the landlord was smoking a cigar; I assumed it was him, anyway. From the neighbouring gardens came the sound of people making idle conversation when it’s too hot to go to sleep. Somebody must have said something funny, because there was a burst of raucous laughter.
The telephone rang again. I walked inside and pulled the plug from the wall.
Maybe they’d done it on purpose; maybe they’d prefer me to drink all by myself in my new life. After all, drinking tends to make you loose-lipped.
The next morning, I set out with my reading list. It was still early, but the street already reeked of hot asphalt. I had studied a plan of the city carefully beforehand; I didn’t want to walk around waving one of those unwieldy street maps like a tourist. I had to walk the entire length of Haarlemmer Dike and Haarlemmer Street, and then turn right when I got to the Singel Canal.
It had been ages since I’d been in such a crowded place. The people just barely avoided bumping into one another. At every bridge crossing, a horde of loudly cursing bicyclists would come bearing down on you, even if the pedestrian light was green. I was dripping sweat in no time, but I wasn’t going to be thrown off my stride. They weren’t out to get me; of course not, I knew that. But they all had such snide scowls on their faces. I had never seen so much disdain. Maybe it was me they were looking at; maybe they were laughing at the way I kept stopping to peer up at the street signs, worrying I might have missed the Singel Canal. At practically every crossing I got into somebody’s way, and if I took a few steps back just to check and make sure where I was, I was even more of a nuisance. If only I were invisible! I had the feeling I was walking around naked, like in a scary dream, or dressed in Struan’s dad’s flashy kilt.
Was I dressed wrong? Was that it? Seeing me coming from afar, did people jump to the conclusion that I wasn’t from here, that I was one of those country bumpkins without a clue about what was in right now? The thought cheered me up somewhat; after all, clothes were something you could buy, and it was wall-to-wall clothing boutiques down here. Even if it cost me an arm and a leg, it was worth it to me.
As soon as I started looking in the shop windows, I started feeling surer of myself. I was simply shopping, that’s what I was doing. And if I had no luck on this side of the street, there was always the other side. By the time the Singel Canal came into view, I was hooked. Even though the mannequins in the corner shop’s window were headless, one of them seemed to be winking at me: ‘Don’t you see? The outfit I’m wearing, it’s you.’ A faded pair of blue jeans and a wide belt, a shiny top the colour of whipped cream, and a short, square-cut, black velvet jacket. It was the jacket, especially, that did it. With that jacket I’d make a grand first impression at school. ‘Yeah, Lucy may be dyslexic, but does she ever have taste, man, she’s really cool.’
Buoyed, I went inside, where I was greeted with pounding music and two girls talking into their mobiles behind the counter. Luckily, they pretended not to notice me. The jeans were arranged in cubicles on one wall; the rest of the merchandise was hung on racks according to size. I blanched: 36, 38, 40? All I knew was that, in Scotland, I was a size 10. There was just one sample of the black jacket, size 44. Pretending to examine it, I furtively held one of the sleeves along my arm. Far too big. If the jacket in the window was a smaller size, that one might fit me. But there was no way they were going to bother undressing the mannequin if I couldn’t tell them what size I was looking for. As soon as I’d gone, they’d ring their boyfriends and tell them, ‘You should have seen what came in here just now! Some country bumpkin who didn’t even know her own size. And she wanted to try on the agnès b. jacket, imagine!’
It was best not to give in to impulse-buying. You always regretted it later. The whole city was full of jackets; it was stupid to fall for the first one that came along—dumb, dumb, dumb.
Don’t make a big deal of it, I told myself. With as much dignity as I could muster, I walked out of the store. I kept my back dangerously straight as I passed more clothing boutiques. It wasn’t until some minutes later that I realized I was walking in the wrong direction; I’d already come this way once. But so what, it turned out to be all for the best, because there, on the other side of the street, was a small supermarket, and back home in my bedsit, the empty kitchen cabinets were crying out for supplies. With the deliberate stride of someone who has everything under control, I crossed the street.
Inside, I grabbed a basket. I trailed along the shelves, gaping at the wealth of merchandise. Chocolate sprinkles. Butterscotch pudding. Fresh vegetables. And strawberries, of course. Heaps of strawberries in blue cardboard punnets. And as I bent down and inhaled the sweet smell, I was suddenly flooded with a memory from very long ago: I was lying on my back, on the green, on a tartan blanket, surrounded by the other babies from the village, and as, to our astonished eyes, a cloud in the shape of an elephant drifted through the sky overhead, little chunks of strawberry were being stuffed into our gurgling mouths. My mother’s voice was saying, ‘Look out for wasps!’
Absent-mindedly, I put a punnet of strawberries in my basket.
Maybe my mother, somewhere out there in the world, was doing the same thing this very minute. Was she, too, navigating the supermarket aisles, was she buying strawberries, and was she thinking of me? But why would she—my mother, who had long since ceased to be my mother? She’d informed me of that just before she’d run off. With her usual foresight, a few days before we were to find her note on the mantelpiece, she had casually mentioned that she’d been stripped of her parental rights when she went to prison. She’d agreed to it, she’d assured me, because that way Ludo and Duco could become my legal guardians, and child-protection services couldn’t take me away. ‘You and I,’ she’d said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘in the eyes of the law, we’ve had nothing to do with each other for years.’
It may have been that she’d been afraid I would want to leave too, otherwise. Or that it was her duty to take me with her.
There was a sale on Gouda cheese. I chose a big hunk. A package of macaroni. Olives, for the salad. A tin of tomato soup would make a delicious pasta sauce. A couple of tins of beans, for emergencies. Pepper, salt. Bread. Butter, eggs. I should have taken a shopping cart.
It was very busy at the checkout; there were two long lines. I was crafty enough to choose the longest line, because I knew the shorter one was bound to get held up the moment I joined it. I thought about the meal I would prepare that night in my own kitchenette, and how I’d eat it sitting in front of the open balcony doors. I was already feeling a bit peckish, because I hadn’t had any breakfast. The remaining rolls in Ludo’s bag had been so soggy this morning that I’d had to throw them out.
My line was moving at a good clip. We were doing well, at till number two. And as I moved up a couple of steps, I suddenly saw him standing in the other queue. Larger than life, he seemed, from the back: the big head on the slight body, the thick blond hair. A linen book bag hung from his shoulder. There might as well have been a label around his neck proclaiming: First-year Biology Student.
I stood nailed to the spot.
He’d turn his head around and see me at any moment.
I put my basket down. I didn’t hesitate for a second. I raced out of that shop as fast my legs would carry me.
Once I got home, I bolted the door behind me with shaking hands. I shut the balcony doors as well. Because if he was doing his grocery shopping here in this neighbourhood, he must in all likelihood live nearby, too, perhaps even in one of the very houses whose backyards I overlooked, and from whose gardens you could likewise see my room. If it had been him, that is. But even if it hadn’t been, if I’d seen a ghost, if I’d been mistaken, even then, the real Thomas might very well live here! It stood to reason. And even if he didn’t live right around the corner, chances were that I might still accidentally run into him, along any canal and in any square, in every café, in every park; there was no question Thomas the bookworm was here, or would end up here at some point, to attend university.
But his university didn’t have to be in Amsterdam! Surely that was something I could check. Universities had admissions offices and such. I could ring them, and make up some kind of story. Except that then I’d have to say his name, the name that was his father’s name and … I suddenly felt like just banging my head against the wall, like that woman in my mother’s cartoon drawing, the strip in twenty frames, with the polar bear pacing up and down on the other side. If you made it into a little booklet and flipped the pages quickly, you had yourself a little animated film.
The walls lunged at me like living things. I had to get out of here. But where could I go? The only place I was safe was here, in the room the Luducos had found for me and had furnished for me, the way they’d always fixed everything for me. Everything.
That evening, Ludo rang to ask if my book expedition had gone smoothly. Yes, I said. And tomorrow you’ll pick up your schedule, won’t you, because classes start on Monday. Yes, I said. Are you tired? Yes, I said. Then don’t make it a late night, sweetie pie.
I hung up the phone. I tore up my reading list. I sat down on the floral sofa. I couldn’t go to college at all; I couldn’t set foot outside the door.
It doesn’t matter, I told myself; it really doesn’t matter. So I wouldn’t be a nursery-school teacher, so what. I probably wasn’t smart enough anyway. In a few days’ time, when the others were dutifully listening to their first lecture, I could slip out of town unnoticed. I’d take a train to the Westlands, to my strawberry field. Working with your hands, that was the best solution for people like me. I’d think of some fib to tell Lude and Dukie.
To calm myself down, I picked up the television remote and started zapping through the channels. My empty stomach growled. A couple of days without food—would I make it? I got up again and looked in the kitchen cabinets. They were so spotlessly clean that there wasn’t a crumb or a grain of sugar left on the shelves.
Standing at the sink, I gulped down three glasses of water. Lucky for me, there was water aplenty in the tap. And what was I thinking—shit, there was bread, too! I went to the dustbin and took off the lid. I leaned down to extract the sandwich bag, which had worked its way all the way down to the bottom. The food scraps of generations of tenants before me wafted up my nose. The stale stench of poverty and rot. I stood up abruptly. I smacked the lid back in place, stomped on it with my foot, and then kicked the entire can over. I refused to be someone who ate out of dustbins—no, never again! Couldn’t you just see me waiting for the landlord to put out his rubbish on the stoop, then sneaking outside to sift through the wet coffee filters for the dregs left in some tin? Panting, I righted the pail again. I drank another large glass of water.
Shit. Shit. Shit!
It was suffocating in here with the balcony doors shut. I’d have to open them a crack, or else I’d pass out. And then, of course, no lights on all evening. In view of the mosquitoes it was better to leave the lights off anyway; anyone would do the same, on a hot night it was perfectly normal to sit in the dark.
I walked past the television to open the doors. But look! The screen showed a building with two white towers. I felt as if I’d just been punched in the stomach. Bijlmer Jail—it had to be. Where my mother had slept for two thousand nights, behind the locked door with the peephole and the sliding hatch.
I stood stock-still in the middle of my room.
There was the barrier where she’d been waiting for us, in that horrendous coat, with that weekend bag. The barrier was raised. Apparently, we were to be allowed inside.
A voice-over provided a running commentary. To the left, a control room with computers. On our right, a long, wide corridor. And there, suddenly, was the commissary where my mother had sometimes bought some teabags or a bar of chocolate. I recognized the spartan shelves at once. The camera focused on a guard wearing sunglasses. ‘You’re very much on top of each other all day, in this place,’ he said. ‘But at night I get to go home, and they have to stay in here, there’s the difference.’ And over there! The picture showed someone who just had to be the West Indian hairdresser. To think she still worked there, after all these years! You had to be crazy to want to stay in the slammer that long. Slowly, in order not to miss a thing, I perched on the edge of the sofa and turned up the sound.
Now a corridor lined with prison cells came into view. From time to time, the camera would swerve through a door to peek inside. Then you’d see someone writing a letter, reading a magazine, or listening to music on a Walkman. The place was pretty laid-back, from the looks of it. Except that all the faces were camouflaged by these jumpy little squares. That was how the viewer could tell they were criminals. Some of them told the TV crew about their lives. They went on as if they didn’t realize that half the population of the Netherlands could now see what they really were: drug dealers, rapists, bicycle thieves, crooks. Criminals, murderers.
But if you listened more closely, you soon realized that every inmate of Bijlmer Jail was, in actual fact, innocent. They weren’t responsible; they were victims, most of them. Victims of the most unbelievable bad luck, and, even more frequently, victims of their own poor upbringing. Their mother had been an alcoholic, which, of course, made you more prone to hitting the bottle yourself later in life. Their father had been violent; so was it a surprise if they developed criminal tendencies as well?
The prison was full of people who had only done what their parents had done before them, apparently, who in turn had probably inherited it from their parents, and they from the parents before them. Why hadn’t anyone thought of breaking that chain; why didn’t anyone just cut one of the links? Didn’t they know how whiny it made them sound?
In the meantime, the camera had arrived at the workshop. Here, table legs and chair frames were sprayed with a powder coating, but I already knew that. The huge machines were noisier than you could ever imagine. Suddenly I opened my eyes even wider. The remote control fell from my hand.
She was standing next to some kind of machine made up of tubes and rods. She didn’t look a day older. She was wearing a denim shirt and blue trousers. She was just tucking her hair behind her ears. What, in Jesus’ name, was she doing there?
As if her gesture had captured its attention, the camera began zooming in on her, slowly but surely.
‘Stop!’ I screamed. It was simply unbearable, to have her exposed like this for all the world to see. Where were the jumpy little squares that were supposed to camouflage her identity? The camera had now zeroed in on her so closely that you were struck by how blue her eyes were, and how the dimple in her cheek revealed itself as she launched into an animated description of her job as foreman.
I tried to listen to what she was saying, but all I could do was stare at her. Had she changed? She still gave off that sense of energy, but at the same time, her demeanour had acquired something quite imperturbable. She talked about her work as if she considered it the most normal thing in the world to get up every morning with the intention of going to prison.
‘Oh, the slammer,’ she said calmly, ‘well, you know, it’s all in your head, really.’