Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

Ma didn’t say anything about it either, so I knew it was bad news. She usually told me everything; her silence now told me that she felt badly about it.

At supper I could see Pa and Ma discussing subjects that I could tell had to do with me; sometimes, when the spark of disagreement jumped the gap, I would see Pa shove his chair back abruptly and raise his voice as he pointed an angry finger toward the garden. I could see that Ma was defending me, but after a while the subject became snowed under — literally as well, for the carload that fell around Christmas covered the garden and the thing along with it. In the morning Ma would defrost a little circle on the kitchen window and wave to me through it.

I went outside less than usual; exams were coming up in May and I planned to pass them without a hitch and graduate with honours. I wanted to deliver one proof of intelligence. I would not go on to university, would not learn a trade, would remain outside the arena of competition, and so I wanted to finish off one thing so that people would say, ‘Did you know that the Hermans kid, the poor sod, passed his exams with an 80 percent average!?’

After the fight in the Sun Café, the summer before, a certain distance had grown between me and Joe. It wasn’t that he condemned me for it, it was more like I felt bad about it. I had failed to live up to an unspoken but important agreement about the kind of people we were going to be. It had to do with purity, with making sure no one could claim that we were part of a defective world or that we helped increase the volume of idiocy in it. We would form a disdainful fifth column, that was the agreement. But before you knew it, you had blood on your hands.

I had, that is. Not Joe.

That he continued being an example to us, that was a comfort. Sometimes I wondered whether he really saw things as clearly as it seemed; at such moments I thought he was simply indifferent to most things and just sort of laughed at them. But most of the time I was sure that Joe was good at holding people and situations up to the light. Ever since I’d met him I had tried to look at the world through his eyes and weigh it in the balance. The brawl had ruined things, but I really wanted to do better and get my purity back. No matter how Joe laughed at Catholics and their methods, I would do penance and cleanse my soul of the filth I had inherited from Hend. I would go through the fire of purification, come out clean at the other end, and while I was at it I’d cut out the cognac and cola at the weekend, when there was live music at Waanders’ roadhouse out along the highway.

But oh, it was a great temptation.

When I’d had a few I stopped caring what people thought, as long as they kept raising that glass to my lips. Until my blood alcohol had risen far enough for me to hold my own glass, that is; alcohol relaxes the muscles and makes the spasms less intense. I was the only person in the crowd who got a steady hand from drinking. I drank therapeutically, as it were.

It would be hard to stay away from Waanders’. People acted different when they were in there. They dared to say more and didn’t look past me so skittishly. Others had no problem with feeding me like a lamb raised on the bottle. Sometimes I felt positively cheerful. Elvis or Dolly Parton was playing on the jukebox, outside night had fallen and smoke rose from the copper ashtrays. We were passengers aboard the drunkards’ ship, we had slipped our moorings and were drifting to where no one could ever find us. But when the whole thing was over there was always someone who pushed you out the door, cart and all, because they wanted to sweep the floor and turn off the lights. After all, what would become of the world if everyone stayed drunk all the time? I would put up a struggle, swat at the hands that pushed me, yank on the brakes, but they just pushed the whole thing out the door anyway.

‘Hey, Frankie, take it easy, man!’

When they laughed, it was in annoyance at the struggle against what was always an untimely end to all things good and easy.

It was a bad winter for Mahfouz. He’d taken on the tint of unvarnished garden furniture. ‘It’s my blood,’ he complained. ‘It’s not good.’

He was wearing three sweaters and a ski jacket and had a wool cap pulled down far over his ears. All you could see was his moustache and a pair of rheumy eyes.

He wasn’t the only one who’d been feeling poorly. Christof’s grandmother had died, even though she must have expected to see the daffodils come up one last time. But March arrived too late for her, and she remained behind in February. February is a real bastard.

The day they put old Louise Maandag in the ground the heating in the church was turned up high; the east wind cut through your clothes like a scythe. The people actually kept their coats on inside to save up a little heat for the procession to the grave. The church was filled to the rafters. A dead Maandag always receives a lot of attention, because so many people are dependent on them in one way or another. Nieuwenhuis gave it everything he had, he sprinkled his water and swayed his incense with the holiest of holies he had in him.

I was parked in the aisle, Joe was sitting beside me at the inside end of the pew. Beside him was Engel, his legs crossed in godless elegance. Two rows up ahead I saw the blond curls belonging to P.J., who was sitting ridiculously close to Joop Koeksnijder. Old Look-at-how-cool-I-am Koeksnijder, finished school two years ago and the proud owner of a Volkswagen Golf. Outside you could hear a truck backing up; my eyes traced the contours of P.J.’s shoulders. She had the broad, straight shoulders of a swimmer.

Sometimes the sight of her would suddenly enrage me. I’d never had that with Harriët Galma or Ineke de Boer, who had been the very first in our class to bear fruit and already went bowed beneath their weight. Sometimes I stared at P.J. for the longest time, just to see whether there was something not quite right there, something ugly or weird to make it hurt less, and sometimes I drove my cart along right behind her to see if she stank. But she didn’t stink. Then I would grow furious and feel like crushing something. But the angry flame always leapt to the inside.

Up at the front of the church, Nieuwenhuis was blaring, ‘And when You call us to You, we bow to Your majesty!’

Joe leaned over to me.

‘So you finally get around to being dead and you have to god-damn bow all over again!’

He leaned back in the pew, then thought better of it.

‘If He’d wanted us to do so much bowing, why didn’t He make us with a hinge at the back?’

I burst out laughing. A lot of people looked around, I simulated a spasm. Joe sat there, keeping a straight face. Christof stood up stiffly from a pew at the front and walked to the coffin with his grandmother in it. A couple of nieces and nephews followed him, they all put a rose on the lid. Men came to lift the coffin onto their shoulders and carry it up the aisle and outside, and with that the whole thing was pretty much over. The visitors crowded out behind the bearers. Piet Honing gave me a friendly nod.

It was hard for me, having Piet be so nice all the time. I could never have been that nice back, simply because I didn’t have enough of it in me. It would always be a transaction in which I found myself short of change, and that left me feeling guilty.

I was the last in line and rolled down the little ramp at the side entrance. There were a few people standing around out there, lighting cigarettes and commenting on the service, the rest were walking behind the hearse. We were bathed in the light of a limitless blue sky. I watched the tail of the procession disappear and had to take a shit. I went home.

There was no one out on the street, and the shops, usually filled at that hour with housewives with little children, were empty. I turned right on Poolseweg and heard footsteps behind me. Joe passed me, he was running toward his house. He waggled his eyebrows at me as he went by. At the bottom of Poolseweg he suddenly stopped and turned around.