In the foetid afterbirth of mass death men were making money. If you’d been fool enough to believe in the kitschy utopia which fell 988 years short of its proclaimed span you were certainly fool enough to swap your watch for forty cigarettes, your camera for twenty more, your girl for less.

This calvary of burnt trees represents a business opportunity. This charcoalscape lively with rags spells gelt, the rags rustled and danced like frayed banknotes. Here’s a city whose cellars are filled with bits of the houses that once hid them, made them dark and covert: bombs made them quarries seamed with gilt. Here’s an old soldier on the street where he might have lived when the great lie seemed true, but it might have been another street, and he isn’t really old, just worn and maimed and attrited by famishment and by despair contracted in pursuit and service of the great lie. He’s abandoned socialism for the elemental graft of survival: the first step towards the economic miracle is made on stumps where knees should be. Just watch them go. Watch them scurry down a pyritoid heap of stone, cisterns, lath, stucco, dust, dust, filth, wood, brick, this, rat, torso, china, blanket, that, bathtub, wrench. Watch the hands that hang down to them. Look at the nails attached to the hands. The nails are curled, long; black with yellow for chromatic relief; ridged for strength; they are emblems of their owner’s state, of his nation’s state, of the national trade: the eagle has claws in order that it may scratch about in imperial ruins.

‘Hunbelievable,’ wrote Guy Vallender, ‘absolutely hunbelievable!’ It was a catchphrase in all his letters, to Douglas and Douglas’s young wife, to my mother, to men he had messed with, to Margot Case whom he’d messed about with during his last leave and whom he’d sort of promised to marry – he meant it, he always did: the day before he reported to Woolwich he had strapped her to her parents’ bed with his Sam Browne and, while she gammed him, talked of the opportunities for converting belligerent explosives into fireworks that must exist in Germany.

His ten days at Woolwich were passed in martial oblivion.

One Thursday in June 1945 Guy Vallender sailed from Chatham to Antwerp (‘steak the size of a plate, chips fried in Heaven, beer, wine, any amount of cognac’). He underwent a War Office Selection Board (‘wozbee’) near Dendermonde, at a former seminary whose gables stood like rearing horses against the sky which was vast, molten. He shared a room with two other substantive majors, one of whom, Tigger Dawkins, accompanied him to Brussels to see the ENSA production of Richard III, the title role taken by Laurence Olivier. Later, in the foyer of the Astoria on rue Royale, they saluted that actor, now dressed in his service uniform, and his drunken mufti’d Clarence. Two days later Guy Vallender was called to the office of a man he refers to as ‘the Brig with the conk’ and offered ‘railways, newspapers or accommodation. Well I never wanted to be an engine driver and there are too many chaps with experience as journalists for me to exactly shine in that game. So I’m set to become a Town Major.’ He spent a further week in Belgium billeted on a baker’s family at Malines. He fished in a tributary of the Schelde and took two eels; he spent a day drawing the ruins of a belfry at Duffel; he borrowed a motorbike and visited the battlefield of Waterloo; he ate copiously; an outing to Spa to see the place where Dick Seaman had died during the Belgian Grand Prix the summer before the war was curtailed when a drizzle-soaked road caused the tyro motorcyclist to skid – he gave up having travelled no further than the Bruxellois suburb of Schaarbeek. The weather was otherwise fine. All this is recorded in his letters. He makes no mention of Alban Meyer-Decker. But then why would he?

The momentous comes all dressed in black; it arrives unseen like a germ in water; it disguises itself as the man whose bar stool in a dingy corner café in that brick suburb teeters parlously when he leans towards Guy to warn him in a public whisper that ‘Elle, celle-là, elle était collabo – tu piges? Une collabo en collage: c’est bien bon, non? La collabo en collage.’

Here he begins to sing with a thump on the terminal syllable –

‘La belle collabo en collage

Pompe dans une maison d’abattage

Elle jure “Si t’as gouté du boche

Le jus de tous les autres est moche

J’étais la collabo en collage.”’

The man’s stool lurches and he seizes the pression tap to steady himself, the stool’s foot shrieks, a couple of men at a table (they’re only props) ignore the now tearful singer, the crone perched behind the bar struggles with her numeracy problem and a column of figures, the child sweeping the floor makes her brush swerve round a suitcase and leaves a comma of ash and dust and stuff.

Guy Vallender looks about the bar for the song’s subject, its singer clasps his shoulder.

The singer shakes his head: ‘N’est pas là.’ The man who sends Guy Vallender to his death, that man shakes his head in maudlin spasms and whines ‘N’est plus là’ and exhales ulcerous warmth onto Guy’s face. This is Alban Meyer-Decker, those epaulettes of his are scurf, those eyebrows are to frighten children. And this was how they fell in together. There’s danger in diffidence, it’s not safe to be at a loose end, you may be hijacked by a bad hat. They went on a bender, the singer and the pyrotechnician.

They agreed about women: Guy Vallender explained the difference between fuck and fuck up. ‘You fuck them, they fuck you up.’ No woman fucked up Guy Vallender the way his new friend Alban did.

There were smooth, dungsteaming cobbles outside, lots of rain on them, lots of shine, lots of glister in the drizzle. The air was like just-breathed-on glass. It held water particles in visible suspension. It obfuscated the carts (rotting wood, rusty metal) and the horses that heaved them, horses that were truly too weak to work and too thin to eat, horses with hardly the skin to cover their ribs, horses whose bones were highlit by their tight wet pelts. This air makes impressionists of us all. It gangs up with the sky that’s like human ash to conquer detail, expunge colour, make it all the same then more. That mansarded barracks is a smudge of itself; that sooty 0-4-0 shunter is out of focus – it’s already wrapped in its steam and smoke, and new commas of steam and new screamers of smoke punctuate the slug forward of this train from the wharf on the black canal. This clanking convoy of trucks that carried children to their death moved on rails down the centre of the street. Here’s the café, there’s the barracks, that’s the train, this is no weather to go drinking in.

Did they hear me? I was born too late to tell them that alcohol works in concert with such weather. I was mere seed; but by the time I reached Guy Vallender’s age then, thirty-five, I knew that drink brings down blinds, that it works from the inside out to build temporary cataracts, to custom-weave fine grimy nets (the filthiest curtains you ever peered through) that snugly cover your corneas; it turns day to dusk, drink does, it turns day to dust, and a day like that with a bent to dusk, with emulsified dust filling up all the gaps between matter, it turns a day like that to the ape of night, it counterfeits the dark. Now evening is here – the sort of evening that occasions electric light, clock evening – and Guy and Alban (who’s cajoling, shouting at, pleading with a janitor) have not noticed. You don’t lose time, you didn’t lose time, did you? Can they hear me? Both dead, gone to dust, like that day went for them. You don’t lose time. You win, you defeat the very idea, you vanquish chronal tyranny, you stuff the Switzers and the Nips, you know it’s all an Helvetic business scam, you know that for a moment till you turn to tell Alban and misplace the hunch between brain and tongue so you tell him instead that the wrinkled cylinder he’s putting a match to should be a cig not a cigarette because it is shorter than a cigar not longer.

Now, the fratchy rabbit chop of the air Alban Meyer-Decker does at this moment should have been warning enough – he’s patently playing with a nine man team, he doesn’t need to treat the frail old janitor thus. Guy has forgotten why they have come to this appartment building in the garden suburb of Joli Bois (aka Pins Noirs) where the dormers wink and the hedges come up to your knee. Three possibilities.

a) Alban Meyer-Decker, whose name he has yet to commit to memory, is here to prosecute one or other of the deals he has boasted of (obligingly translating anticipated profits into sterling and, with infantile cupidity, into cars, houses, horses and a future of willed sloth).

b) Alban wishes to show off his mistress in person: so far all Guy has seen is a shadow of the lot. In the bistro where they ate a dish of pancreas and oxtail called choesels Alban leaned across the plates and asked: ‘Tu veux que je te montre ma Cato?’ And from his wallet (reptile skin, crenellated with bills and tickets and banknotes’ corners) he pulled a photographic print, three inches square with a crinkly border; he laid the photo before Guy with smug ceremonial. She was naked. This is the first thing Guy notices. Guy looks up at Alban Meyer-Decker who exposes a wedge of palate (i.e. smiles). Cato (already referred to as ma Catherine, ma p’tite Trina) wears a kerchief tight about her neck, heavy Amara-work bracelets around her ankles. She sits on the arm of a Leopold II chair, one foot on its seat, the other’s tense toes touching a swirling carpet. Her aureola are, in this monochrome copy of her, black puckered quoits; the wake of her bush trails back to her navel which is spelaean; her head hair is thick and falls in steps over the right eye; the visible eyebrow is as abundant as those of her lover, this lover who gloats: ‘Pas mal hein?’ Guy’s distracted nod dissembles the spinal charge, the shiver in his shoulders, the testicular itch which the woman prompts. What Guy would like to do is to – oh he will, he will.

c) This building is in some way associated with, is maybe a former home of, Madaleine Van den Putte, the subject of the song Meyer-Decker first sang two pages back and which he has reprised in different versions since. It cannot be her last home for that burned with her and her infant son inside it on October 21 the previous autumn, 1944.

The incident is cited in Patricia Barnes: Resistance, Reprisal, Revenge: The Phenomenology of Post-Liberation Belgian Public Punishments 1944–59. Vol. II Flanders, Brabant, Limburg (New Haven 1969). It was also reported, so partially as to be incorrect, in the London News Chronicle of Monday October 23, 1944; the headline is The Wages of Treachery, the photograph shows the black, smoking ruins of the little bungalow near the beach at Saint-Idesbald, the presence of the little boy is disregarded as being irrelevant to the arson by petrol-soaked rags. Dr Barnes contends that the boy’s presence, indeed his very existence, were crucial. Her book, an important influence on British proletarian youth coiffure in the years immediately subsequent to its publication, presumes that the boy was born of Mlle Van den Putte’s union with a German officer commanding a coastal defence squadron and it suggests that had she enjoyed a fruitless relationship with this man (Sepp Kupp, now a widowed concrete technologist living in retirement near Regensburg) she would merely have been shaved and shoved through the streets. Dr Barnes further notes that Saturday October 21 was the day that Aachen became the first German city to capitulate to the Allies, and that the murder of Mlle Van den Putte may have been an instance of ‘celebratory retribution’. Meyer-Decker believed that the boy was his, conceived before the woman left him for Kupp.

‘C’était mon gosse – tu sais? Venait de moi … fabriqué avec ma semoule.’

He had met the woman at the Bar-Music O’Connor on Rue des Trois Mollettes, Lille, in the spring of 1938. He had topped the bill, he was then at the height of his brief fame; she was an artistic dancer. They lived together for three years (in a series of apartments whose increasing insalubrity was determined by the failure of his career, the proscription of his records, the forced closure of theatres and music-halls, the nazification of radio).

At Christmas 1942, just before the boy’s first birthday, Meyer-Decker travelled by train to Ostende and thence by bicycle to Saint-Idesbald. He carried two parcels. One contained a wooden toy cart which he had painted in the black, yellow and red of the Belgian tricolour and to which he had attached a lanyard of those colours. The other had in it two Maredsous cheeses, combined weight 3 kilos; these were intended to induce Madaleine Van den Putte to allow him to present his gift to the child he had never seen, never would see. He was within sight of the pantiled, steep-roofed bungalow, standing to pedal against the wind and the wet sand of the unmade road, his heart chugging in excitement or exertion when a motorcycle combination that he hadn’t heard (wind, ears full of blood) drew alongside him. The malnourished youth in the sidecar waved his rifle as though frightened of it. Alban Meyer-Decker’s bicycle bucked and reared and threw him onto a bank of marram that grazed him, put sand beneath his nails. The Germans were skulls with helmets and threadbare greatcoats and bloody eyes. The one with the rifle prodded him and swore at him in a catarrhal voice. The other tore open the parcels. He threw the toy to the ground then he held one of the cheeses in the crook of his arm and sliced it with a dagger whose blade was chipped and smeared. The two soldiers ate with furtive desperation, noisily, rind and all, specks of curd stuck in their stubble, they smacked their lips. Meyer-Decker gripped the front wheel between his knees and straightened the handlebars. He picked up the little cart. When he looked towards the bungalow a curtain moved, he was sure of that. The way he stared at the place made the soldiers quit masticating a moment (they saw in his eyes what Guy Vallender was blind to). Then a full mouth shouted ‘Raus’, and he pushed his bicycle away up the soggy road between the wan gardens of other requisitioned villas where city doxies, who before the occupation would not have entered them save as maids, swanned in nicked silk and purloined pearls waiting for their German lovers, the harbingers of terror and scent. He heard the sea beyond the dunes and the twisted trees. He tied the lanyard to the centre of the salt-pitted handlebars and the cart bumped against the crossbar as he pedalled back to Ostende with the wind behind him.

Alban Meyer-Decker finds the right key the right way up and opens the door to the apartment. He turns to the janitor who has followed them up six flights of stairs: ‘Ne pas entrer. Si? Restez là mon vioc.’

Meyer-Decker closes the door on him and pushes past Guy along the narrow hall that’s lit by a wedge of light from the room at its end. Both men trip over unseen objects on the floor. Meyer-Decker swears and enters the lit room. Once it was a sitting room, now it is a chaotically improvised store room. There are boxes to the ceiling casting a cardboard dunness, there are shoeboxes and crates, labels, stamps, packing codes like brands, tea chests, bottles, packs of stockings, jerrycans and soupcans, enough cigarettes to last a five pack a day man the lifetimes of six non-smokers, twenty-four methuselahs of Pol Roger, three Sten guns, the keys to a feast of sardine tins, a pyramid of veterinary syringes, a damp bulgy sack, a kukri, a side of beef with ochreous seeping fat, jars of suppositories, a drum of spam, five Willis Jeep tyres. There is also a sofa over whose back Meyer-Decker stretches, his shiny bottom higher than the rest of him. When he rights himself he is clutching a bursting foolscap envelope into which he puts his right hand with gynaecologist’s bravura and withdraws a quire of banknotes. He counts them with a spat-on finger, stumbles out of Guy’s sight behind a column of packing cases, reappears with a bottle of Canadian Club. He gives the money and the whisky to the janitor, pats him on the back, shoos him away.

It is now 7 pm or 1.30 am and they are drinking manhattans chased by tepid Duvel beer. They are friends. They are going to keep in touch. They agree on so many things they forget what they are now. Their trains of thought have suffered multiple derailments. Meyer-Decker has shown Guy Vallender framed posters that are souvenirs of his former career, before he went into business. The name Albeau is rarely at the top, and when it is at the top the music-hall is in Namur or Lille or Toul or Léopoldville; in Paris and Brussels he is billed beneath, say, Baba et Bobbi et Leurs Chiens Vedettes and well after such stars as Jean Lumière, Andrex, Dranem and Bach, the Odeon lettering of whose names melds with their profiles by Ponty or Gus.

Because the gramophone is beneath two crates containing fire-extinguishers Albeau’s records may not be played. So the singer sings his repertoire unaccompanied, stopping between songs or mid verse to mix more manhattans (Old Buck Kentucky Bourbon and Martini Rosso). Songs collide, slide into each other and from the elisions spring new verses, fresh lines that Alban struggles to write on a sheet of memorandum paper headed ‘From the office of the Deputy Commander-in-Chief Allied Control Council’. There are many such sheets, littered with graphitic scrawls that their maker can’t read, piled on a table in the window bay.

Have you ever heard Albeau sing?

In 1983 Retrovox of Brussels issued a compilation to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth. Its title, derived from one of his songs, is a lie: ‘On se souvient d’Albeau.’ Not even the song it alludes to, ‘On se souvient d’Anvers’, is remembered. The photograph on the record cover is all retouching and cigarette smoke, and the central glabella is hairless. The biographical note states that ‘le patriotisme et la fierté d’être Belge que l’on trouve dans ses paroles se réfléchissaient dans la valeur de sa résistance personnelle à l’occupation de son pays’ – an assertion which is merely publicist’s hyperbole; it goes on to say that following the war he did not attempt to revive his singing career but became a businessman in the Belgian Congo where he died in 1960.

His voice was a thrilling, leeringly lubricious baritone, a voice used to asking for sexual favours, used to pleading for them – this is a voice quite bereft of pride; it makes baser appeals, to the sodality of the self-pitying, to the wordling’s certainty that everyone has his price, to schadenfreude and sentimentality. It’s the sort of voice that I am ashamed to be touched by. The tyranny of tone over lyrics is total; even a potentially light song such as ‘Kiekefretter, Sûrement’ is turned into a hymn to aggrievement by the pitifulness of the line where the narrating child, a Walloon teased by Flemings, whines ‘Et ils ont piqué mes speculoos.’ (‘And they’ve nicked my biscuits.’)

Guy Vallender suggested that he should design a firework show to accompany a concert of Alban’s, outdoors by the lake in the Bois de la Cambre where the sky would be mirrored. Alban sang further chapters in the story of La Belle Collabo – her death might have occurred only to be made a ballad of. ‘Les pompiers ont laissé la pompeuse en panne.’ Alban spoke the line, ‘non. Non. Et les pompiers patriotes.’

Guy opened his eyes and the sun was shining through the metal-framed window and his mouth was full of prickly felt. His knees were momentarily immovable. He had slept in the chair where he had been sitting, his fist gripped about a cut-glass tumbler. Alban Meyer-Decker was on the sofa, his head partially covered by a cushion, snoring, a vulnerable beast with an exposed throat and each eye rendered impotent by its segmental prepuce. Guy climbed gingerly over a barbican of Hershey boxes and went into the kitchen, a vertical coffin with no oven, no cooking rings and a larder filled with scent bottles and three-inch mortar shells. The tap emitted nothing. Guy looked out of the window onto the matching windows of the apartments around the same dark lightwell. Then he made his way back past Alban Meyer-Decker into the hall. He craved water. His armpits, his eyes, his crutch, his mouth had been kneaded with grit, anointed with salt. Two doors faced each other. The one he opened revealed a rudimentary bathroom – a small bath tub with a rusting sprinkler above it, a w.c., a washbasin beneath whose working tap he cupped his hands and drank and drank. He drank so his tight spotted tie and his officer’s-issue cotton shirt got soaked. He doffed the rest of his more or less mufti and stepped into the bath. The shower was droughty. He peed more than it did. He shivered beneath a dorsal trickle he moved to his belly by turning to face the wall (lousy grouting, oxidisation).

Thus he has his back to the door and to the naked woman who comes through it, bleary and bemused as the newborn.

He never saw Catherine with clothes on. She lived in his imagination in a state of eternal nudity (p. 130). She was with him for ever, for ever raw. They didn’t make fig leaves of their hands. They laughed in mutual appreciation. And they didn’t make love – that compound is inapt. They copulated, rubbed offal. She told him he had looked beautiful when he was asleep. Not like Alban; she had stayed out late, as she often did, because she didn’t want to see him. He was mean. He was maudlin. He was too drunk to fuck, always; he was impotent.

She squeezed Guy’s urethra, twisted his scrotum, reached over his shoulder for the soap and smothered her left forefinger with it and pushed up his arse. His glans grew and glowed like a shiny apple, she licked it till little beads of sap oozed out. His eyes rolled and he sobbed. She leaned forward over the washbasin and stretched between her legs with her right hand, pulled his penis into her and out and in as though it were a dildo and she a mere merkin. Her nails dug into him, drew blood from the cushion between balls and anus; he bit her shoulder to keep himself from screaming. Chimneysweeps’ trade disease is cancer of the scrotum, totem poles are tall and redwoods are taller, oh mercy me, oh you greedy gobbler, you darling cannibal, your cunt’s as big as the gaping neck of a beheaded horse, you smell like tar and pears, you’re going to feel this. She rubbed her clitoris with her other hand, with machinist’s speed, with strumming abandon. She gasped and quivered and again and still he kept – there, done, come, spent. He’s finished and something else has started no doubt. Some sperm flowed down the inside of her thigh, but not all of it. Guy Vallender sat on the lip of the bath.

‘God, hangovers are good for sex,’ he said.

Brussels woke. Alban Meyer-Decker snored on. In the redbrick streets the scents of waffles and coffee, chips and cheroots mixed to make the smell of the city.

Guy Vallender who could smell only her secretions strolled, weak-kneed and light-headed, back to the Café de Sedan where he had left his motorcycle in a yard. The doorstep was gleaming, the crone was still adding, the child was still sweeping. He drank a glass of genever. The day was going to be a hot one. A cream tram rattled along beside the barracks.

He had not even spoken her name.