‘There you are!’
‘Here I am.’
‘I’ve walked all the way from Brussels! I thought you’d got off.’
‘Well, I’m here.’
‘Bit early in the day for Pringles, isn’t it?’
Albie sighed, and I decided to let the point go. ‘It’s an emotive subject, war.’
‘Yeah. I know.’
‘I think I lost my temper.’
He upended the tub into his mouth.
‘Your mother thinks I should apologise.’
‘And you’ve got to do what Mum says.’
‘No, I want to. I want to apologise.’
‘S’okay. It’s done now.’ He licked his fingertip and started swabbing the bottom of the tub.
‘So are you coming back, Egg?’
‘In a bit.’
‘Okay. Okay. Excited about Amsterdam?’
He shrugged. ‘Can’t wait.’
‘No. Me neither. Me neither. Well …’ I placed a hand on his shoulder and took it off again. ‘See you in a bit.’
‘Dad?’
‘Albie?’
‘I would come with you, to the War Cemetery, if you really wanted. There’s just other places I’d rather go first.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ I looked around me for some way to cement the truce. ‘D’you want anything else to eat? They have those waffles. Or a Kinder Bueno?’
‘No, because I’m not six.’
‘No. Right,’ I said, and returned to my seat.
And that, pretty much, was everything that happened to us in Belgium.
I had visited before, once with Connie and on conferences too, so my experience was somewhat selective, but even so, Amsterdam’s reputation as a city of sin always seemed something of an anomaly to me, as if one were to discover the presence of an immense crack-den in the centre of Cheltenham Spa. Both faces of the city, genteel and disreputable, were in evidence as we rumbled our suitcases along the lanes that zigzagged west from the Centraal station towards Keizersgracht; fine, tall seventeenth-century townhouses, glimpses of interior-designed living rooms and copper-panned kitchens, a little gift shop selling notepads and candles, a bikini-clad prostitute on the early shift drinking tea from a mug in a pink light, a baker’s, a café filled with stoned skateboarders, a shop selling fixed-wheel bicycles. Amsterdam was the trendy dad of European cities; an architect, perhaps, barefoot and unshaven. Hey, guys, I told you, call me Tony! says Amsterdam to his kids, and pours everyone a beer.
We crossed the bridge at Herenstraat. ‘Our hotel is in the Grachtengordel, which we’re entering now. Grachtengordel, literally, the girdle of canals!’ I was a little out of breath but keen to maintain an educational element to our visit. ‘It looks wonderful on a map, this series of concentric circles like the growth rings on a tree trunk. Or horseshoes, nesting horseshoes …’ But Albie wasn’t listening; he was too distracted, eyes casting here and there.
‘My God, Albie,’ said Connie, ‘it’s a hipster’s paradise.’
We laughed at this, though I’d be hard-pressed to define a hipster, unless it referred to the pretty girls in large, unnecessary spectacles and vintage dresses, sitting high on rickety bicycles. Why do the youth of other cities always seem so attractive? Did the Dutch walk the streets of Guildford or Basingstoke and think, my God, just look at these people? Perhaps not, but Albie was certainly agog in Amsterdam. For all its grace and elegance, I suspected that Paris had been a little hard and severe for Albie. But here, here was a city that he could work with. The question, as in any trip to Amsterdam, was how long before sex and drugs raised their complicated heads?
A little under eight minutes, it transpired.
The hotel, which advertised itself as ‘boutique’ and had seemed perfectly pleasant on the website, had been decked out to resemble a top-of-the-range bordello. Our receptionist, an attractive and courteous transvestite, greeted us with the news that Connie and I had been upgraded to the honeymoon suite — the ‘irony suite’, I thought — and directed us down corridors lined variously with black silk, satin and PVC, past large-scale prints of a corseted dominatrix sitting astride a flustered panther, a pop-art tongue prodding a pair of cherries to no useful end and a concerned Japanese lady encumbered by a complex series of knotted ropes. ‘She,’ said Connie, ‘is going to get pins and needles.’
‘Dad,’ asked Albie, ‘have you booked us into a sex hotel?’ and they began to laugh convulsively as I fumbled with the key to our room — which, I noticed, was called the ‘Venus in Furs’ suite, while Albie was in ‘Delta of Venus’ next door.
‘It’s not a sex hotel, it’s “boutique”!’ I insisted.
‘Douglas,’ said Connie, tapping the print of the bound Japanese lady, ‘is that a half hitch or a bowline?’ I did not answer, though it was a bowline.
The honeymoon suite was the colour of a kidney. It smelt of lilies and some kind of citrus disinfectant and was dominated by an immense four-poster from which the canopy was missing, leading me to wonder what function the posts served, since they had no structural purpose. Black sheets, hot-pink bolsters, purple cushions and crimson pillows were piled in the absurd Himalayan ranges that now seem to be de rigueur, but in this case were presumably there to create a kind of pornographic soft-play area. In stark contrast to all the mahogany and velvet, a huge off-white Bakelite contraption stood adjacent to the bed on a raised dais, like the kind of specialised bath you’d find in an old people’s home.
‘What is that?’ said Connie, still giggling.
‘Our very own Jacuzzi!’ I pressed one of the worn buttons on the control panel and the tub was lit from below by pink and green lights. Another button and the thing began to churn and grind like a hovercraft. ‘Just like our honeymoon,’ I shouted over the roar.
Connie was quite hysterical now, as was Albie, entering through the adjoining door to laugh at our room. ‘You can really pick a hotel, Dad.’
I was feeling defensive. I had made the booking, and the hotel was meant to be a treat, but I did my best to remain good-humoured. ‘How’s your room, Egg? Dare I ask?’
‘It’s like sleeping in a vagina.’
‘Albie! Please …’
‘There’s a massive picture of lesbians kissing over my bed. They’re freaking me out.’
‘We have this masterpiece,’ and Connie indicated a large tinted canvas of a spiky-haired lady fellating some fluorescent tube lighting. ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.’
‘She’s going to get a shock, licking that,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it outrageous?’ said Connie. ‘So seedy. I feel like I want to wipe everything down with a damp J-cloth.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Tea-making facilities.’
‘Kinky. I wonder what the breakfast buffet’s going to be like?’ said Albie.
‘Oysters,’ said Connie, ‘and great trays of cocaine.’
‘Well, I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s boutique!’ and I did my best to laugh along.
When everyone had calmed down, we stepped out to a pleasant café in the Noordermarkt, and sat in the square beneath the handsome church there. We ate cheese toasties and drank small glasses of delicious beer, trying out our Dutch accents, an accent like no other in the world. ‘It’s a little bit cockney, a little bit sing-song,’ said Connie. ‘And the “S”s have a “sh” sound to them. ‘“Sho — welcome to our shex hotel. If you require anything — handcuffsh, a courshe of penischillin …”’