Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

We got back on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning I turned on the transistor and left it tuned to Radio God; I wanted to hate. A marriage was announced, between Elizabeth Betz and Clemens Mulder. The groom’s name, as it happened, was not entirely unfamiliar to me: it was the roofer from the Sun Café.

‘The vows will be celebrated at two-thirty,’ the man of God said in a Vaselined voice.

The roofer, too, had found a female of the species with whom he could produce little roofers. And no one raised a finger to stop them. The man of God continued with the week’s deceased.

‘Mrs Slomp, having passed away at the age of eighty-two.’

Organ, lento.

‘Mrs Tap, having passed away at the age of fifty-seven.’

Organ, andante.

‘Mr Stroot, having passed away at the age of seventy-three.’

Organ, allegro moderato.

‘Let Thy light shine upon these families in their hour of mourning.’

Organ, allegro con brio.

When the man of God said it was time to bring the Lord our gifts of love, I switched to Sky Radio.

On Wednesday my picture appeared in the Lomarker Weekly . I was wrestling with the Czech, the two of us listing like a ship. INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS FOR LOMARK DUO was the headline above the article, which dripped with local sentiment. The information was correct but caricatural; Ma, however, was so proud of that story. She was, if I’m not mistaken, more interested in the newspaper report than in the way it really went. Pa’s silence was deeper than ever. After the discovery of the briquette fraud we had been living with our backs to each other, both of us with different kinds of shame in our souls. Ma said he had hung the clipping beside the coffee and powdered-soup dispenser. For weeks, ‘the newspaper story’ served as point of departure for most of her conversations; she didn’t know that Joe had lost his virginity only a couple of hours after that picture was taken. That his hands, accustomed to gears and drive shafts, had never felt anything so soft. That he had been walking around ever since in a sort of loathsome glow, while at night I sweated the love out of my system like a fever. I masturbated myself silly, as the only remedy against fits of jealous frenzy.

My friend and my dream lover had broken the triangle, the triangle that forms the basis for every sound construction. I had lost contact with the new connection, become a floating point in the darkness. Ever since Joe had come back to Lomark and started work at Bethlehem, I had believed in the illusion of unchangeableness. Now he was in love.

But how could I shove Joe and P.J. out of my life? They were the only people with whom I felt any kinship. I was confronted with a crucial moment in the process of growing up: the capitulation.

It took a lot of willpower when I was around Joe to act as though nothing had happened. We attended tournaments, and I kept looking for Islam Mansur. I think Joe never noticed anything of the cold depths between us. I doubt whether he ever knew that I loved P.J., that I had longed for her from her first day in Lomark. He had never been particularly receptive when it came to affairs of the heart. He told me all about it. About how, when the violence in their relationship became habitual, P.J. had left Lover Boy Writer. The writer had gone on pestering her for a while; his own pathetic narcissism wouldn’t let him accept anyone leaving him .

‘Sometimes I’m glad it happened,’ Joe said, ‘that he fucked up like that. Not the punching and stuff, but you know. Otherwise this never would have happened.’

His expression actually went all soft when he said things like that.

‘Everything’s different now,’ he said, ‘even though nothing much has really changed. Except the thing with P.J. I wake up with the feeling that something’s waiting for me, something good and important. Every day is a promise. And when I go to sleep that feeling’s still there. It’s a kind of perpetual motion, an uninterrupted flow of energy that doesn’t need any fuel. Except for a telephone call, sometimes, or a kiss.’

I nodded, the bile rose in my throat. I was capable of hating him. I was vaguely shocked by the ease with which I could accept that idea. Somehow, though, the thought wasn’t unwelcome; it would be easier, after all, to hate the man who possessed what I wanted most in the world. Meanwhile, with masochistic pleasure, I let him tell his story. I always encouraged him to tell me more. Only never about sex, he never talked about that, maybe out of reverence, or maybe it was simply discretion.

He had taken her to the Dolfinarium, in Harderwijk. The dolphin show in the big tank had been set against the background of a story with witches and fairies. The actors were laughably bad, the dregs of the profession. The whole thing revolved around a magic pearl, which the fairy queen consistently referred to as the ‘magical poil’. The dolphins themselves were completely irrelevant to the story; all the animals had to do was a little synchronized jumping out of the water, for which they were rewarded with a herring. At the end the fairies and the witches had sung a song of reconciliation. The dolphins jumped through a hoop. Joe and P.J. were beside themselves with laughter, the story of the ‘magical poil’ was to become one of their pet memories.

The November sky was clear and cold, full of orange contrails that lit up like fireworks. Down here on the ground everything was in its naked form. Disorderly clouds of lapwings rose up above the washlands, slow explosions of thousands of specimens heading southwest before the freeze rolled in.

Joe spent all his free time in Dirty Rinus’s barn, working on his bulldozer. Once, when I went down to visit him there, I saw the plane again for the first time in years. It stood against the back wall, damaged and dismantled. There, in such miserable condition, stood the object that once filled me with such mad hope — of there being a way out that had to do with the will and the ability to think big. And it no longer interested Joe at all. I felt a lump in my throat. I made my way between a stripped Citroën 2CV, an antique hay tedder and a few other machines from the early days of industrialized farming. Dirty Rinus never threw anything away. He was so frugal that he even locked the garbage can when he left the house. People in the village weren’t particularly fond of him, but he was still remembered for his pronouncement during the oil embargo in the Seventies: ‘Oil crisis? What oil crisis? I used to spend twenty-five at the pumps, and I still do!’

The wings of the plane were leaning against the wall, with nasty rips in them. I reached out and tapped my index finger against the tail. The canvas was as taut as when Engel had first fastened it with tie-rips. It made a pleasant sound. This plane belonged in an aviation museum, it was a miracle that a couple of boys had actually built something airworthy, it should have been the showpiece in some private collection. The worst damage was up at the front; rods were sticking through the torn fuselage, you could see right through it. The propeller had been taken off and was lying on the floor, everything was covered in a layer of sticky dust.

‘Roofing tiles fell on it,’ Joe shouted from the front of the barn.

I looked around, he was standing on the ladder of the bulldozer, from up there he could see me amid all the rubbish. I saw the hole in the barn’s roof, the sky above. Around the plane lay mossy, broken roofing tiles. It galled me that Joe no longer even looked at the thing, but that’s the way he was. He made something, tested its possibilities, then let it fall from his hands. Conservatism was foreign to him; he let time and roofing tiles do their work while he started in on a new chapter in his study of mobility. He didn’t think much about things that weren’t there; neither tomorrow nor yesterday were there, and so of little importance to him. I wasn’t like that. There were days when I bridled at the sense of standing with my back to the future: a river running back uphill into the mountains.