Dimitri Verhulst - The Latecomer

My intention of going to a bookshop must have come as both a surprise and not a surprise. Not, because I’d always been mad about reading, of course. On the other hand my urge to buy books surprised her now because she couldn’t reconcile my rediscovered appetite for literature with the decline in my mental faculties. For a moment she must have thanked her lucky stars she had deferred telling everyone about my failing memory. A straw of hope to clutch at, the hope that she might have been mistaken about my condition, that it had only been a temporary setback. My head had gone on holiday and come back in one piece, ready to knuckle down again, as keen as ever, with a pile of books.

I really did come home with that pile of books. Or rather, the police were so kind as to deliver the books when they brought me home. But unfortunately for Moniek, the titles couldn’t confirm her hope that I was at least in remission: How I Run Marathons; A God for Daily Consumption; Willy Snotter and the Order of Ninety-Seven Broomsticks; A Beautiful Garden in All Seasons; 1001 Home Repairs; Original Casseroles … and another ten or so works of a similarly literary bent. A considerable chunk of our family budget, by the way. Paid with a smile.

I was no stranger to the bookseller; around a quarter of the titles on our bookshelves were from his bookshop. He must have scraped together at least a couple of family holidays from my belletristic gluttony. There was no question of his not knowing my literary obsessions and he must have had his reservations about my sudden interest in casseroles, origami and garden furniture. But it’s not every day a bookseller gets a visit from a dementia sufferer and times were hard for everyone, including small businessmen, so he seized the opportunity to make one last killing at my expense and sold me the most disgusting garbage. Also with a smile. Knowing full well that I wasn’t all there as I bought these cack-handed publications. Even more disgusting: this man who, through the contents of my bookshelves, had been granted some degree of insight into my intellectual values, stooped so low as to deliberately overcharge me.

Of course I was tempted to drop the mask and confront the dirty money-grubber with his dishonesty and lack of ethics. It would have been worth it for the look on his face: his gob gaping open with surprise when I told the leech that I was only feigning dementia for a laugh, to see how people reacted. But this pleasure — mostly reserved, I presume, for investigative journalists and undercover policemen — was one I had to forgo. No matter how tempting it was to step out of character, just for a moment.

With the help of my shopping trolley, I then transported this load of books to a clothes shop. A trendy place, with blaring music and an industrial interior. The two women behind the counter gaped at me as I walked in. An old coot with a shopping trolley. I was the most ancient pillock by far to ever set foot in their hip establishment. Their joke of the week embodied: that was me, it was obvious. And they were already smirking in anticipation of the moment I figured out that I’d wandered into the wrong shop and realised this wasn’t the place to buy something like a tweed cap or a walking stick, but oversized jeans that hung halfway down your bum. It was only when I actually started to rummage through the summer collection that one of the two approached me (the ball bearing in her extravagantly exposed navel didn’t shock me in the least, but I did find it quite ugly) and quacked, in the ducklike tones that unfortunately characterise the majority of the female members of the garment sellers’ guild, ‘Can I help you, sir? Are you looking for anything in particular?’

I gave her a glazed look, at least that was what I hoped I was doing, grabbed a random piece of clothing and asked if I could try it on. The piece of textile concerned could most deferentially be described as a casual shirt, albeit one without sleeves and decorated with a loud print of an English slogan referring to an activity healthy couples usually perform on a mattress. In all her youthful vanity, the girl probably assumed I didn’t speak a word of English.

Her colleague remained where she was behind the cash register but had followed the entire conversation and was now having visible difficulty in suppressing an undoubtedly ugly laugh. A laugh that would soon erupt like the contents of a ripe boil.

I took a few more shirts and jeans into the fitting room and twisted myself into all kinds of clothes in psychotic hues that I, as a father, would never have tolerated on my children.

The next step was crucial and essential for moving my life’s final project up to the next level.

I left my own, age-appropriate clothing on the rack and exited the fitting room decked out like a pathetic carnival character. (Tautology!) The girls abandoned all attempts to suppress their guffaws. For minutes and minutes they had stood firm but further resistance was inconceivable and they burst into gales of laughter. And the laughter was as ugly as I had feared. From both of them. But before it could burst my eardrum, I had strolled out of the shop as casually as possible, still wearing all those highly fashionable, unpaid-for, brand-spanking-new rags, and completely ignoring the caterwauling of the alarm system.

I attracted plenty of attention out on the street, dressed up like a circus monkey on sabbatical as I was, but the gawking only increased when the black girl with the ironmongery in her belly button followed me out onto the pavement, pointed at me and started screeching that I was a thief and needed to be stopped.

Fine, but to my disillusionment nobody stopped me. What did the citizenry at large care if a shop full of nursery supplies for adolescents was robbed of a few yards of hideous fabric? No great loss, surely? And when it came down to it, nobody knew who I was — I could have been armed. In this part of the world, you had to do something a little more sordid to awaken a sense of civic duty. It’s a miracle, really, that they still manage to sell car and other alarms at all, when you see how unanimous people are in ignoring the racket they produce.

I shuffled undisturbed to the end of the street, where I was quietly but firmly apprehended by two good cops who had evidently been informed of my approach by high-tech tom-tom. They politely requested that I accompany them back to the shop I had just left. The numerous rubber-neckers on the pavements left and right had been hoping for a dramatic denouement but were now disappointed.

And so, in next to no time, there I was, back in that very same shop. Even if my presence there didn’t make much difference. With a professional composure I had thought lost to mankind, the older-looking of the two policemen scolded the teenagers playing at shopkeeper. He was willing to put most of it down to their inexperience and youthful self-obsession, and that was forgivable, but he still found it hard to believe that they could be so blinkered as to take a senile old man for a common criminal.

‘You must have got a little confused for a moment,’ the other policeman said to me with an unusual degree of sympathy and friendliness. Perhaps he had a grandfather wasting away under a plaid blanket in a home. Things like that hone one’s empathy. ‘Your clothes are hung up in that fitting cubicle. Perhaps you could change back into them? Then these ladies will put the things you’re wearing now back where they belong.’

They studied my identity card. ‘Azalea Street? Is that where you live?’

‘Yes, I think so. Azalea Street. Yes, yes, that’s it. Definitely.’

‘Come on, we happen to be going in that direction, we’ll give you a lift. And this here, are these your books? Did you buy them or did you just walk out of a shop with them too?’