Tommy Wieringa: Joe Speedboat

‘Hello,’ says the figure.

A boy’s voice. I stare into the light coming from the kitchen behind him, and all I can see is his silhouette in the doorway. He comes over. A boy, thank God it’s just a boy. He walks around in front of me and takes a long, unembarrassed look. His gaze takes in the steel braces clamped to my feet, the cart’s blue upholstery (genuine leatherette, my good man), the silver tubes and the wooden lever on my right, used to steer the front wheels and propel the back wheel by sheer force of the human arm. Bought ‘to grow into’, after a manner of speaking. It’s a real peach, never left the garage except on Sundays, you know the spiel. They say I’ll be able to move around in it myself someday, but for the time being I can’t even knock a fly off my own forehead.

‘Hello,’ the boy says again. ‘Can’t you talk?’

A tanned face with clear eyes. Hair cut in a Prince Valiant fringe. He turns around and looks out the window. Hoving’s garden: heads of red clover, stinging nettles and the lovely poppy, so pleased to be seen but so insulted when picked that she withers in your hand.

‘They dumped you here, didn’t they?’ the boy says, his gaze fixed on Lomark.

The top of the Ferris wheel is sticking out above the houses. He nods.

‘I’ve heard about you. You’re a Hermans, from the wrecking yard. They say Mother Mary worked a blessing on you. It doesn’t look like it to me, though, if you’ll excuse my saying so. I mean, if this is a blessing, what’s punishment look like? Right?’

He nods, like he’s in full agreement with himself.

‘My name’s Joe Speedboat,’ he says. ‘I just moved here. We live on Achterom, you know where that is?’

Broad hands, stubby fingers. Broad feet, too, which he stands on like a samurai. That’s something I happen to know about, samurai. About seppuku , too, the Way of Dying to preserve your honour, when you stick a short sword in your guts and pull it up, from bottom left to top right. You could tell how brave someone was from the length of the cut. But I’m digressing.

I can see what it is that pisses Dirk off. It radiates off him: he’s completely unafraid. Joe Speedboat, planter of bombs, ruiner of slumbers — with your cut-off jeans and your nutty dried-out leather sandals. Where have you been so long?

‘Wait a minute, I need to get something,’ he says.

He leaves the viewfinder and I hear him going up the stairs somewhere in the house, then footsteps above my head. Is that where he has his workshop? For his bombs and things? Speedboat’s Control Room? When he comes back down he’s carrying a washing-machine timer and two Black Cat batteries. He sits down on the windowsill, frowns in concentration, and hooks up the poles of the batteries. Then he attaches a little metal rod to the clock and sets the timer to zero. Suddenly he looks up.

‘We had problems while we were moving,’ he says earnestly. ‘An accident. That’s when my father died.’

Then he goes back to what he was doing.

The first time Lomark heard of Joe and his family was when the Scania crashed through the ancestral gabled home of the Maandag family on Brugstraat. All the way up to its ass in the front room, where son Christof was sitting in front of the tube playing a video game. He never flinched. When he finally looked up the first thing he saw was a headlight poking like an angry eye through the whirl of dust and debris. Then it gradually dawned on him that there was a truck in his house. The only sound the whole time was the toing-toing of the video ball bouncing across the screen.

Hanging down over the grille of the Scania was the torso of a man, his arms dangling limply like a scarecrow fallen from heaven. The man’s lower body was pinned inside the cab and he was dead, clear enough. But there was still movement inside: the door on the passenger side of the cab swung open slowly and the boy Christof saw climbing down was roughly his age, twelve or thirteen. He was wearing a gold lamé shirt, sandals and a pair of knickerbockers. Your parents would have to be slightly bonkers to dress you like that, but he just peered around the room matter-of-factly, the mortar swirling down onto his head and shoulders.

‘Hello,’ Christof said, the joystick still in his hand.

The other boy shook his head, as though something peculiar had occurred to him.

‘Who are you?’ was all Christof asked him then.

‘My name’s Joe,’ the boy said. ‘Joe Speedboat.’

*

And so he came like a meteorite into our village, with its river that floods its banks in winter, its permanent web along which gossip scuttles, and its rooster, the rooster in our coat of arms, the same rooster that chased a band of Vikings from Lomark’s gates a thousand years ago or so while our ancestors were in the church praying, for Christ’s sake. ‘It was the cock that showed its pluck,’ we say around here. Something that keeps something else at arm’s length, that’s our symbol. But Joe came roaring in with such force that nothing could have stopped him.

The accident had left him a partial orphan; the man hanging out the windshield of the truck was his father. His mother was lying unconscious in the cab, his little sister India was staring at the soles of her father’s shoes. Christof and Joe looked at each other like creatures from different galaxies — Joe stranded in his spaceship, Christof holding out his hand to make the historic first contact. Here was something that would free him from the leaden immobility of this village, where the only thing that showed any pluck was the cock, that hateful animal you ran into everywhere: on the doors of the fire engines, above the entrance to the town hall and in bronze on the market square. The rooster that was pulled around on a float during Carnival parades, that crowed at you from decorative roofing tiles beside dozens of front doors and whose incarnation at the local patisserie was the ‘Cocky’ (a crumbly dog biscuit strewn with granola flakes). On sideboards, mantelpieces and windowsills you found glass roosters, ceramic roosters and stained-glass roosters; oil-painted roosters hung on the walls. When it comes to that cock, our creativity knows no bounds.

Joe looked around in amazement at this house into which Fate (read: faulty steersmanship aggravated by violating the speed limit in a residential zone) had tossed him. In the house where he’d grown up, the one they had traded in for the house in Lomark, there were no oil-painted portraits staring at you gravely from the walls, as though you’d stolen something. And of course you’d always stolen something, which meant those faces would always keep looking like that so that you didn’t have to be afraid, just give them a friendly nod and say, ‘Come, come, boys, a little smile wouldn’t hurt.’

The chandelier was real nice too, he thought, as was the antique refreshment trolley bearing Egon Maandag’s crystal decanters filled with whiskeys of provenances from Loch Lomond to Talisker. At Joe’s place all they had were squat bottles of elderberry wine, deep purple and homemade with a water seal that bubbled and belched like a gastric patient. The wine was always either not quite ripe or just a tad past its prime. ‘But the flavour is really quite special, isn’t it, love?’ (his mother speaking to his father, never the other way around). After which they would guzzle manfully, only to flush the rotgut down the toilet the very next day; the hangovers it produced resembled nothing so much as the near-death experiences of Russian rubbing-alcohol drinkers.

Later Joe would find out that he had landed in the salon of the Maandag clan, the most important family in Lomark, owners of the asphalt plant by the river. Egon Maandag employed twenty-five men at his factory, not to mention a housemaid and at times an au pair from yet another land beyond the dykes.