Antwerp: The First Time
A short story by Rosanne Dingli
©Rosanne Dingli 2011
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. Except by way of fair dealing for review purposes or study, no portion of this publication may be transmitted, entered or stored in a retrieval system, photocopied, or reproduced in any way or by any means whatsoever, without prior written permission of the copyright holder and publisher.
This short story appears in Over and Above, a collection by Rosanne Dingli, available wherever good books are sold
ISBN 978-1-4659-9450-9
This is a work of fiction.All characters and incidents are imaginary, and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this work are largely the products of the author’s imagination. If real, such as well-documented events, famous artists, works of art, or places, they are used fictitiously.
Antwerp: The First Time
From where he stood at the window, Marc could just see the glow of the Kermis. The top of the Ferris wheel was visible, like the necklace of a dark woman in a low-cut dress, but upside down. It was strangely enticing, that view of this part of the city: a half-visible, nearly invisible, fun fair where he had been on a previous visit to Antwerp, but now avoided.
He could not hear the tinny music – probably mostly rap − through the glass, but he could imagine its thudding and pumping and tried to think what it would be like to be closer: closer to the Kermis, the fun fair where he was led astray.
It was the summer he turned seventeen, when unsympathetic parents, unusually alike, brought him across the channel into Belgium rather than France. Rather than be in their company, rather than suffer more rain than they would have had in England, he would have liked Italy, or Spain for once, but they put themselves up in a flat in Oostende first, then in Antwerp. Celia and Peter, at once absorbed in their museums and galleries and books, were happy to let him wander the streets, thinking them safer than their part of Manchester.
In fact, they were probably right, but meeting Napoleon was something to keep from them; and not just to be adverse and secretive, like keeping from them all details of his innocuous and ordinary holidays at Kevin Marshall’s place in the country. There his parents thought he had smoked grass and done all sorts of things that, in reality, he had not even thought of. This was different. He kept from them even Napoleon’s existence, even his name. For a start, he knew the man was not really called that. And then, he did really smoke grass.
It happened rather suddenly. He walked into one of those dark brown pubs whose benches and deal tables seemed placed there by some designer centuries ago, and never changed for fear of changing the character of the city: Antwerp, where things were like they were because it was how they always were. He asked for a beer and got one, despite his age; something he was unused to, something that could not have happened in England. He sat and drank it rather quickly, and looked down into his glass phrasing the words to order a second without appearing too obviously eager, when a man placed an abrupt hand on his shoulder and twisted him round bodily.
‘Try a Duvel next time.’ He had a raspy voice.
Marc nodded. The eyes looking into his were light, whitish grey, with a black spot in the centre too small to be called a pupil. There were no eyelashes, or so it seemed at first, and lines around the well-shaven chin were deep and sculptured. When the beer, in a differently shaped glass, was placed before Marc he tried to say something in the way of thanks, but was stopped by a stream of invective coming from the doorway. Day had come to an end, and it was dark and drizzly outside, although it could not have been later than five. Night characters already cruised the streets of this strange part of town. In the distance, Marc heard carillon music, or Odeon music; he could not decide which. The screaming match in Flemish happening on the pub’s threshold was loud and attention grabbing. Perhaps it would not last long. Surely enough, the barkeeper soon had the prostitute and her client off, out of the way of a number of pub-crawlers who streamed in steadily now that it was fully dark.
Lights came on behind the bar, and mirrors dazzled the light-eyed man sitting next to Marc. He blinked and smiled, rolling a cigarette and starting to drag quickly on its rapidly shortening length. ‘That was Merle.’ He spoke without breathing, keeping the smoke in his chest. ‘She thinks she’s in Rome or something.’
Marc nodded. He did not know what to say. This man obviously saw he was new to the district.
‘Who you ought to meet ... you know who you ought to meet?’ The man had accented English. His cigarette end pointed at Marc. ‘Patrice. She will show you the fancy-fair.’
‘I’ve already seen −’
‘Nah − only Patrice can show you the fancy-fair. No one can show you like her.’
Marc was tongue-tied. In fact, he had only seen the Kermis from its edges, from the other side of the street. It was gaudy, noisy and everyone in there seemed somehow to belong to it. No one joined the fair’s light and energy, no one entered or left, as if it had landed complete with its people from above, like a brightly lit spaceship. So he stayed on his side of the street, not daring to cross and join the bustle of rowdiness, the stream of youths or gaggles of girls so absorbed and cohesive they would have found his arrival an intrusion.
‘And do you know where she is, this Patrice? Ha! I tell you − she will walk through that door in less than −’ he consulted the mirror clock behind the bar, ‘− four minutes.’
Marc was not surprised when she did. He had hardly said a dozen words to the man whose name he suddenly wished he knew, who had rolled another two small cigarettes in the meantime. He sucked them urgently and smoked them to the very end of the damp paper, fingernails gripping the side delicately but strongly, like a bird would hold prey.
‘Napoleon.’ The man said the name as if he had read Marc’s mind. ‘I am Napoleon.’ He pronounced it in the French way, making the last part sound bi-syllabic and more leonine than Marc had heard before. He was not in the least feline or leonine: his dull fair hair gleamed, his unusual eyes winked, like a nocturnal bird’s.
‘Of course not what my mother called me, but that is not important.’ He stood suddenly and waved at someone in the ell past the bar. A man saluted in an identical way and Napoleon sat again.
Then Patrice entered. Marc knew it was she immediately, although she was preceded and followed by other women. She looked like he expected, and he was surprised Napoleon’s description was so exact. Dark short hair in elfin wisps surrounded a small pointed face, whose eyes were dramatically made up. She wore no lipstick, but red coat and shoes flooded her with a kind of desperate colour.
‘Ha!’ She addressed one breathy syllable to Napoleon.
‘You only talk to me when I have company.’ His eyes were slitted. They both laughed a similar laugh and she sat close to him; so close Marc thought immediately that they must be together.
When her beer was half drunk, she spoke to Marc, who was still glued to his seat, and had not given a thought to leaving and going home to his parents. No doubt by this time they were already half way through their dinner, and would soon leave for the theatre. What was the point of rushing home? He was fascinated; more by the silences that fell over these two people, allowing babble from the rest of the pub to infiltrate what they said, than what Napoleon said to Patrice or what she said to him. She nodded a lot, even in the silences, and smoked what Marc saw were real cigarettes, from a rigid white box with a flip top. Their conversation, when it took place, was mostly in riddles, inside jokes, and ribbing. They had known each other a long time.
‘Take this man to the Kermis.’ Napoleon said the words flatly.
‘Man!’ She laughed without looking up.
Marc coloured and looked away, out of the pub door into a wall of drizzle lit by the glare from mirrors and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in rows. But Patrice stood and smiled: an ageless smile that drew him automatically, as if he had no will of his own. He almost said he had no money, but she pulled him quickly by the arm and he felt the damp rasp of the red fabric of her coat through his trouser leg.
He wore jeans and his father’s old Canadian lumber jacket, with its matted shawl collar, his shirt underneath buttoned to the top. His hair became wet and spiky the minute they were out in the drizzle, and his nose formed a drop at its end that he nervously blew away again and again, until he realised he sounded as if he were panting, trotting beside her in the rain.
They turned two corners and were on the edge of the Kermis. The music was now loud in his ears. Yells and cries of delight and fear reached him from the rides as he stood in silence next to the woman Patrice. ‘I have no −’
‘Come, cross!’ She pulled him into the traffic and crossed the street, avoiding crawling cars and arriving suddenly and finally on the pavement on the other side. ‘We will start with the wheel, and then you tell me if you want the tunnels.’
‘The tunnels ...’ Marc realised too late his question did not sound as if he were asking what the tunnels were.
‘Okay then.’ She pulled him forward again, thinking he wanted to see the tunnels, whatever they were. ‘Okay,’ she said once more.
Past the queue for the Ferris wheel, they hurried in the rain, past gaudy stalls selling stuffed animals and flags, cheap inflatable toys and whirly gigs. Past the shooting galleries where youths whistled and jostled each other purposely, as if the twisted gun barrels were not hazard enough in their contests. Marc was sodden right through his clothes.
Patrice lit another cigarette as they waited for a crowd of sailors to pass through a narrow alley, where blaring music was deafening and the smell of potatoes frying in lard stung his nostrils. Suddenly, they were in a short queue, and before he knew it, Patrice was paying a boy with a small curled note she dug from her pocket.
Inside, the music seemed far away, muffled, fed through thinner pipes. It was dark and smelled of stale smoke, diesel fumes and old old perfume. Marc remembered the smell of old letters Celia had in a box in the attic in England, and the strange scent of stale orange peel and screwed up handkerchiefs discovered in the pocket of a raincoat after the summer. He looked around and saw, past a stall, a number of small bucket-like carriages fitted with seats.
Patrice settled them in one of the tiny vehicles, which were painted black and connected to each other with short lengths of chain. They had a greasy patina, looking like they had been touched continuously by chip eating children for a decade. The buckets bobbed, as if they floated on water. Marc sat unsteadily across from Patrice, who opened her coat to reveal a black satin mini-dress. Her legs were bare and thin feet were thrust into those red shoes as if unwillingly. Thin knees nudged his, due to the small space they were sitting in. He had to open his legs numbly to make room for her tightly clenched knees between his own. They were surprisingly warm: hot, seeping wet warmth through his jeans and scalding the insides of his thighs. Before he had time to hide his embarrassment by looking down, they were flooded by an inky palpable darkness.
Marc felt their bucket bob, as other laughing passengers boarded carriages on either side of them. With a jerk that jolted the small of his back against the metal rim, they were off.
The buckets were tugged along in complete darkness. Amplified sounds of rushing water were all around his head. The ancient scraping and wheezing of recorded sound effects did nothing to allay Marc’s fear of what they would next be assailed with. He hated ghost tunnels. In England he avoided them since the first ghoulish experience as a child. But here he was plunged in suddenly without knowing, in total darkness. Even Patrice was not there. Her knees were still hot and tight between his own, and although her face could not have been further than two feet from his own, and his eyes were wide open, he saw nothing.
The sound changed to roaring wind, laced with squeaking and hissing from bad reproduction, then to pathetic screaming by women pretending to be witches or banshees. Red lights flashed above their heads, shedding no illumination. He did not know where he was. There was a giggle from Patrice, then her knees slid away from his and she was sitting next to him, squeezing herself into the space on his right. She was not wearing her coat: he felt her hot shape as he moved his arm to accommodate her small figure. Plunged into confusion, he said nothing, but his swift intake of breath must have revealed his surprise to her.
‘This is a short ride, come on.’ Her mouth was up against his neck and ear, and her hands guided his to the hem of her satin dress, which had ridden up her thighs. She was not sitting on the skirt. Marc’s hands found the bare skin of her buttocks on the greasy leather seat, and before he knew what he was doing, moved his hand over her, searching for a garment, the edge of clothing, for anything but skin.
Patrice laughed. Her hands were at his throat, and then at his belt buckle. ‘You are well trussed up, boy − um, man!’ she laughed again. ‘What did Napoleon say your name was?’
‘Marc.’
‘Well, Marc −the lights are going to come on before you get your coat off.’ It was a dull statement, said without mirth. With a sigh of impatience, like a nanny with a slow child, she took Marc’s hand and guided it quickly between her legs, through, up and between.
Marc could do nothing to stop breath leave his chest explosively. He struggled to silence his gasping. Whether it was surprise or arousal, he could not be able to determine later. At the moment, he was overwhelmed by the sensation of his cold numbed hand being guided into hot scalding creases and crevices of skin, of warm softness and the shocking contact of sleek wetness and then hair. ‘I... you −’
‘Hush... Is that enough? I thought so.’
When the lights came up they were in the same spot they departed from. Marc afterwards wondered whether they had ever actually moved from there. He went over the experience in his mind so many times it was impossible to determine what he actually remembered about the ride and what his memory had concocted for him, in his own bed, with the lights off and the electric blanket warming under him.
‘Buy Napoleon a beer for me.’ She threw flat words at him at the end of the evening. He did not know what she meant. Her smile was sweet and mild and patient, as if she was disappointed but did not mind. There had been no more dark rides. After the greasy buckets, she led him to a gallery where they both threw rope quoits at bottles, hoping to capture numbered prizes that corresponded with figures painted on the sides of bottles in an illiterate hand.
He managed to bring in the twelve and the seven, to the cheers of smoking youths standing around them, jostling their elbows as they threw. The prizes were two identical polar bears of white nylon plush, with red bows tied at their necks and black dots of gluey paste for eyes.
Patrice snatched them away, one in each hand, and gazed at them, comparing and checking in a childlike way.
She drew one quickly to her chest greedily, and handed back the other. ‘I will this remember you by.’ She garbled the formal words as if embarrassed by a lover bearing an expensive gift. The expression on her face was infantile, the features suddenly old. It was incongruous and faintly sickening.
Marc stood before her helplessly. He had not seen her paying for the quoits and could not understand what form of exchange had taken place between her and the stallholder. He was baffled and annoyed at his own ineptitude, but her sudden bright smile made him forget.
It was only afterwards, in his room, that he wondered more about why she acted the way she did, and why Napoleon sent him with her if he knew he had no money: whether she was a prostitute and Napoleon her pimp. It was all too muddled and confused. But it was over.
*
When he saw Napoleon again it was in another part of town, outside a discount shop where he was going to look for pencils for Celia. The Hoogstraat was full of tourists and locals eating frites.
Outside the money-changer’s he remembered Celia’s request for pencils and doubled back suddenly, bumping into the person at his heels.
‘Sorry!’ He stopped lamely. Recognition made his cheeks flame. ‘Hello, Napoleon.’ The memory of what happened on the night he met Napoleon flooded back. Then he felt how close he was standing to the man, who remained silent, a wide smile splitting his sculptured chin in half. His pupils were dilated enormously despite the bright light in the lane.
‘Were you following me, Napoleon?’
‘Ha!’ The man laughed. ‘I was certainly not ahead of you, until you turned!’
They laughed together, and moved quickly as one out of the way of a car that tried to manoeuvre its way among pedestrians. Marc found himself on the threshold of the moneychanger’s and Napoleon moved inside with him.
‘Come in here, there are some nice African artefacts in here.’ They looked together at pennants, chess pieces and ropes of beads in a long silence Marc was unwilling to break. He wondered whether he should stay or leave under the pretext of his mother’s pencils, but did not move. He was afraid Napoleon would mention Patrice, but the woman did not enter the man’s mind, it seemed, until much later.
There was an exchange with the man behind the counter. Small curled notes were obtained in return for large folded ones, without apparent need for counting on either side. Marc watched out of the corner of his eye, fascinated and repelled by Napoleon, yet attracted by the way the man spoke, his cleanliness −a surprise that belied his behaviour − and his good English.
The man pulled a ready-rolled cigarette out of a pocket and lit it, once they were sitting at a table outside a pub in a narrow lane.
‘I usually sit at the Volle Maan at this time.’ Napoleon exhaled smoke. ‘But here we can talk in peace, and smoke and pass the time and watch the women as they hurry along. Look at that one.’
A tall redhead passed them, thighs level with their eyes as they swished inside light trousers that reached to high-heeled sandals. Napoleon nodded in approval. ‘I give them names. That one was a good Annabelle. That one there, in the green coat, with the beret − she is Jacqueline. And you,’ he said to the waitress, ‘are Alex!’
She smiled courteously but did not cross the formal line of being nice to customers. When she left their table, Napoleon said there were many university students working in pubs. ‘Good families, short noses, shallow pockets, wide eyes. Remember that.’
Marc could not see the point. He looked at the waitress, and then back at Napoleon. He was rolling a joint, picking at dry green flakes in a small lozenge box and crumbling them into a curved paper he held. His large tongue shot out and licked the gum, slowly and sensuously, as if he was going to enjoy smoking his own spit along with the grass. The tip of the cigarette was twisted expertly and he laid it down on the table, fumbling for a light in his coat pocket.
He looked around patting himself all over, as if searching for someone with a match, then suddenly retrieved a lighter from a pocket, snatched the joint from the table and lit it, savouring the inhalation and keeping his lips clamped together for a long time. He did not exhale until he wanted to talk, looking mildly at Marc and winking.
‘I do that, you know − that search for a match kind of thing − to see if anyone is watching me.’ He smiled and lowered his eyes. He dragged heavily on the joint again, turned it in his fingers and gave it to Marc, who stared at it in the man’s hand for a long moment before taking it quickly, not to offend him. He held it gingerly, then took it to his lips, thinking of Napoleon’s saliva keeping the thing together. He inhaled slowly, closed his eyes and hoped he would not choke or cough. The first experience of a filched cigarette when he was eleven revisited him.
He was alone then, behind the big chair in the living room when Celia was shopping, and they were her Du Mauriers, out of a flat red box. This time, he was being watched. He opened his eyes as he felt smoke in his chest and actually saw the waitress dance. Her body wavered and the large plate glass window behind her wobbled, but his chest stayed calm and he exhaled smoothly. The space at the back of his head, just between his ears, tingled as he took another drag. The shop window wobbled again, and skin over his cheekbones stretched and hardened. He turned the joint in his fingers as he had seen Napoleon do, and handed it back.
The man smiled and nodded. He looked around and smiled again when the beers came. ‘That one with the earrings down there ...’ He waggled the joint at a woman down the lane. ‘She is a passable Veronica. See the hair?’
They laughed together. Marc could see his attribution. It was like something out of his literature class, with mad Dr Tolliver asking them to draw pictures of Shakespearian characters.
Then Napoleon went totally serious. ‘Tonight she is coming to my place.’
‘Veronica?’ Marc laughed, thinking the game was still on.
‘Patrice.’
Too late, Marc sensed the change in mood, looking at the man quickly. He knew consternation showed plainly on his face.
‘You remember Patrice.’
Marc nodded and swallowed, and saw the joint disappear between the pinched fingertips and lips of the man he knew only as Napoleon. The glow went out: fingers flicked a tiny fragment of paper into the ashtray. The conversation stopped as he rolled a fresh joint, lit it and inhaled deeply. He handed it to Marc for another two drags.
The shopwindow was now hidden by shoppers, but Marc waited for it to waver as he inhaled. The horizontal planes of pub tables rolled slightly, and he placed a hand on his chest as he let smoke stream slowly from his lips. His cheekbones tingled, but his chest did not tickle or wheeze, and he was glad he did not cough in front of this man, who was beginning to appear as if he wanted something from him.
Napoleon leaned forward across the table, his hand caressed the beer glass. ‘Twenty-four Koepoortstraat, top floor, at about eight. Can you bring some vodka or something?’
‘Vodka?’
‘Mm − there will be food and smoke and music and ... and Patrice likes spirits.’
Marc was being asked to a party where the alcohol and cigarettes would not be smuggled in behind parents’ backs, in brown paper packages. There would be no gin poured into lemonade bottles. He imagined the smoky atmosphere and sophisticated music would be a far cry from parties organised by class ringleaders back in England. ‘Thank you.’ The polite words made him feel inadequate and young the minute they left his mouth.
*
Standing now at his hotel window, and watching the glow of the Kermis obliterate city lights at the edge of his view, Marc found it easy to recall his anguish and the full detail of his return home. He arrived without pencils, to lunch with Celia and Peter, to concoct a story about some youths and a party on the other side of town. It was a memory that needed no reconstruction.
‘We’ll take you ...’ His father made the offer automatically.
‘... And pick you up, at midnight?’ His mother finished the question, which was not a question at all but a kind of maternal mandate he had difficulty countering in the past.
‘No, no.’ He was surprisingly confidently at last. ‘Paul – um, Paul has a car. Or his father will... um – yes, drive me back. No problem!’ He was sure they would see through his forced smile. But they nodded, and returned to their papers, and nothing else was said about the party, to his surprise. When he was dressed and near the front door, they turned to him as one.
‘Have a wonderful time, darling.’ His mother tilted her head. His father nodded, appearing to hold back words. Perhaps they had had a talk and decided he was too old to be cosseted any longer. Nothing was said about drinking or smoking. Nothing more was said about being out in the city late at night.
Antwerp, they must have thought, was definitely safer than Manchester. The streets were quiet. Only occasional cars swished past, turning pavements into puddled walks where bins and black bags were already out for the morning.
The entrance at the easily found address felt warm after the long walk. And what happened later warmed Marc until he was sweating under his blue shirt, wishing he had not worn a singlet.
There was no party, of course. His half-bottle of vodka, warmed from being clutched in his pocket for the entire walk, was taken with a smile by Napoleon.
‘You came.’
There was no music, none of the food Napoleon had mentioned and no other person in sight in the densely furnished apartment. It looked as if there were many other rooms leading off the large one where stereo, tables, a large television set, three sofas and a number of chests all crowded for wall space. There were three doors, but they only led out to a small kitchen, bathroom and closet Marc found, when he opened them later on, in his search for the toilet.
Napoleon sat in a deep green sofa and pointed at another, where Marc sat, on edge, wondering why he had felt the compulsion to accept the invitation. The silence was complete.
When Patrice arrived, she shrugged off the heavy red coat to reveal the same black satin mini dress. Marc looked at it and a hot flush came over him when he remembered there was no underwear underneath the thin fabric.
She gave him a cursory glance. ‘Oh − this one.’ She looked meaningfully at Napoleon, as if Marc could not hear she was referring to him.
He blushed again and looked at his shoes. She brightened, though, when she saw the small bottle of vodka. ‘You are on this side of town again, Carl.’
‘Marc.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She gripped the screw top of the bottle deftly and twisted, nudging a glass with her forearm as she prepared to pour. ‘Is there a lemon?’
Napoleon straightened his back when she spoke. ‘There are half a dozen in there −’
She looked at the man, now shrouded in smoke from his thin joint. ‘Then you have mescal.’
He smiled. ‘Give Marc a beer, then show him.’
In the kitchen, which was surprisingly clean, the light was clear and bright, spreading from a fluorescent strip above the sink. Marc obeyed Patrice’s beckoning and stood numbly at the table, watching her slice lemons. She put what looked like sugar into a small bowl. ‘See? Know what that is? Salt.’ She answered her own question. ‘For the mescal – see? In the bottle. Look in the bottle.’ She giggled, a sound too young for the way she moved and spoke.
Marc looked at the worms in the yellow spirits and wrinkled his nose, but was intrigued. The golden liquid looked expensive, the label foreign.
Patrice showed him how to lick salt off his hand, drink a shot of the spirit then quickly suck the quarter of lemon. She gave him the same segment of lemon she sucked herself when demonstrating, and laughed brightly when he appeared to like the trick.
Marc looked at her face. The eyes were expressive and as before, made up with black and green to appear dramatic. This time, her lips were painted faintly, a kind of beige colour that accentuated their size, but he was suddenly shocked looking at her in the kitchen light. This was certainly the same woman who had taken him to what she called the fancy fair, but the skin was different. The hair was coarser. The lines around the eyes were painted over, but visible in this merciless light. He looked away. Later, watching the dark window frames waver as he smoked with them and drank more of the spirits and beer, he thought of the fair and how Patrice guided his hands over her body. He became tense, the memory clouding his mind as he watched the same woman leaning over Napoleon and whispering into the man’s ear.
The thin man rose slowly, and tapped Marc’s knee as he passed. ‘It’s not raining. I’m going down to the pub for more beer and cigarettes and then I might turn in.’ He laughed and addressed Marc pointedly. ‘Don’t go − uh,’ he waggled his joint. ‘Patrice, she will −’ His words faded and blurred as he shrugged into a jacket and banged the front door behind him.
Marc half stood, not wanting to appear clumsy by saying a simple thank you. He mumbled something and fell back into the sofa, surprised at the weakness in his knees. Someone once told him never to drink sitting down. This must be why. Being alone with Patrice disconcerted him, but he felt a kind of tenseness in his stomach, and the realisation he was starting to become aroused flustered him. He looked at her, repelled by what he had seen in the kitchen: the lines on her face, the curve in her shoulders.
‘Come here and choose some music, uh – Marc.’ One of the straps slid off her shoulder and she let it drop, the bodice slipping to show Marc light skin he knew to be warm, hot: hot as she was on the night of the fair. He wanted to leave, out of fear of what could happen if he stayed. But he stayed, dreading to have her see he was afraid. Part of him wanted to know what would happen, and another part knew something would if he stayed. He chose a cassette without looking and Patrice slipped it in and pressed a button. A deep husky voice filled the room.
A singer whose name he could not remember sang Waltzing Matilda: a dark melancholic version. Then the name came to him. Tom Waits.
‘Come here.’ She took him by the forearms and danced him to the centre of the carpet, looking pointedly at his pants. Marc looked down to where she stared, and blushed again.
‘Don’t say anything, or do anything.’ Her voice was harsh. ‘Just come here and it will be okay. Napoleon will be a very long time − maybe morning. We can talk... or not talk, as you like.’ But she was touching him, his shirt, his buttons, and he knew the words were automatic ones she had said before. She was small, and lithe and wiry, but she was not young.
Marc loosened his arms from her grip and held her, like he held girls at school dances. Patrice danced, as if prompted, and they swayed together. He felt the heat from her body through his clothes, and felt perspiration bead on his forehead, under his arms, wishing he had worn less, knowing suddenly why she wore so little. His hands were being guided again, but this time, unlike at the fair, the darkness was not complete, and he was slightly repulsed by the knowledge she was much older than he had thought.
He looked at her hair, and at the small nose, the closed eyes and the lips, slightly puckered. He bent to kiss her. Her hand was firm at the base of his neck, sliding upward to hold his head. She was as old as his mother: older than his mother. He started to pull away.
‘You are not comfortable.’ Her accent was now distinct. ‘You are too hot.’ She busied herself with beer and cigarettes, lighting two and placing one in his lips. He plonked backward onto the sofa. Close once more, her fingers were busy with the buttons of his shirt. He wanted her to stop, and when she did, desperately wanted her to go on: take his shirt off and pull him out of his singlet. He wanted it so badly he almost felt the pull of her arms ridding him of his clothes, but it was dizziness brought on by the smoke and all the mescal and vodka he had swallowed. He was thirsty and hot, and Patrice was suddenly standing in front of him, holding out a beer bottle.
‘Drink,’ she said softly. ‘And then stand, but slowly. I want to open that sofa you are sitting on.’
*
Later, much later, he pulled himself up onto an elbow and looked around in the semi-darkness. He looked at his watch, but it was too dark to see the hands.
‘Napoleon and I ...’ Patrice spoke hoarsely in the gloom. ‘We have known each other a long time.’
Marc turned suddenly. He thought she was asleep. Her short hair was spiky against the pillow, her shoulders dark against the sheet. She had small conical breasts; not the first he had seen, but the first he touched.
He gained confidence and a kind of mad recklessness when the bed was open, falling suddenly into step with the woman, letting himself be led like a dancer to a new kind of step. Patrice was eager, her urgency all too transparent, even to him, as she pulled at his clothes, stroking as she talked and talked, then fell into silence as she took his body.
Part of him was surprised at the things she did, but only because he never knew desire could drive a woman like that; and for a man so much younger. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Shush, shush.’
He felt her smile without seeing it, and turned to look over his shoulder as she pushed him back onto the pillow. ‘I told you − Napoleon will be all night − so we don’t hurry. Not any of the times do we hurry, all right?’ She said times, relishing the word, rolling over and allowing him to caress her.
She pulled his arms around her waist and for a long moment he held her, but it was not romantic, not yielding. She got her urgency back, and in an instant was crouched over him: predatory, frightening him with her ardour.
‘Here.’ She directed his hands and mouth. ‘Here... here,’ She guided his hands over her and twisted for him.
Marc felt his body tense, stretch, spring and recoil time after time, the numbness at the base of his neck melting until he lost track of time, ignored the smells and repulsion, forgot the place, and relented to Patrice’s pressure.
She kissed him deeply, sensing his arousal when she did so. ‘You have a sweet mouth, you know?’ There was a sad note.
He touched her hair and her cheek. He thought of her as he saw her in the gaudy fun fair lights, looking young and reckless, tired and greedy like a child. Now she was a voracious woman, tearing at him in her haste to arouse him again. She attempted patience, but blurted without control. ‘Yes, come on!’
Marc shuddered, overcome partly with fatigue from the physicality, and partly by her energy. He suddenly saw very clearly it was not him at all, but his sex and his age that fired her. He had heard at school that older women were insatiable, that they were initiators: that they ensnared young men who were inexperienced, oversexed and desperate to try everything they had talked and bragged about among themselves.
But he had not believed any of it. He never believed there would be a woman who would stimulate him again and again, with her hands, her mouth, her whole body, urging him plaintively to do over and over again what he had only fantasised about, read about and listened to with a disbelieving ear as it poured out of the bragging mouths of older boys.
He gasped and panted, lying back with her full weight down upon his pelvis. His eyes were full of the jumble in the room, the lights that filled the night windows and Patrice’s squirming writhing frame. She toppled over, exhausted and suddenly spent, the heat gone from her body. She had poured it into him, over him, as they struggled and grappled through the night. It had warmed him, overheated him and the bed as they rolled over, turned around, spread out and covered each other in turn.
He would not be able to believe what he remembered, he knew, when he thought about tonight.
Suddenly the heat was gone. Patrice gathered sheet and blanket and rolled herself into a ball. She reached for a glass and took a final sip, retreating to the far side of the bed as she did. Marc sat up, rubbing his head and finding he was sober all at once, drained of what he drank and smoked during the evening. He looked at Patrice’s curved back, the way her hair parted away from a small sparse patch at the back of her head. He was struck again by repugnance at what he had done, and at the same time, felt victorious, very nearly elated and flattered at what had happened. He crept softly from the bed, thinking suddenly, when he saw her dress on the floor, about who she was and what she was.
He wondered about Napoleon, and about money. There was noise on the stairs outside, but no one opened the front door. Marc reached for his clothes. He realised when he had done up his belt buckle and pulled on his jacket that she was lying there, looking at him.
Her smile was dry and mirthless. ‘Sit here for a minute.’ She patted the bed exactly like his mother would when he came into her bedroom in the mornings as a child.
‘I have no money.’ The last word was lost as she rustled sheets.
He tried but failed to find words to say. How could he be delicate about this? He was still worried about his inexperience.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Napoleon and I, we do things for each other. We always have. I go to the country, where I know a gardener − I bring him things. Grass, resin. You know?’ She did not stop at the automatic question. ‘He does things in return.’
Marc’s confusion was complete. He had no words for what he felt. He left the apartment, stumbling and trying to remember, as he took the stairs two by two, which way he had come from the city centre.
*
Now, years later, at the hotel window, Marc looked out at the rain that was starting to cloud and blur his vision. Lights at the Kermis went out in stages. From the direction of the port he heard two quick blasts of a ship’s foghorn. Thin splashing from tyres in the wet reached the window as he drew curtains and lit a side lamp.
It was years, many years since the encounter with Patrice, since the time Napoleon led him astray. What was that she said? We do things for each other. I get things for him.
And he got things for her. At the time, he had abhorred the thought that he was a mere thing Napoleon had procured for her. But time had dissolved the insult. Time dissolved most insults, leaving only the occasion, the actual action that took place. Words lost their effect with distance and experience, leaving only what happened.
He quickly pulled on a heavy gabardine raincoat and took the lift to the street. Years had not changed the city. Antwerp was ageless, its streets inalterable and its people seemingly identical to those he had seen in those very streets years ago. He strode quickly until he came to the edge of the Kermis. It was late. Stragglers shouted last good nights and tarpaulins were already stretched across his path. All the lights were out and there was no music in the rain.
It was only when Marc saw a figure disappear round a corner − the form of a young girl with short brown hair, whose ill-fitting coat was pulled tightly around her against the rain − that he realised exactly how many years had gone by. His parents were long gone: his mother buried outside Manchester, an old and exhausted shadow of herself when she went, his father a mere memory.
And Patrice? She too must have aged and ... But it was too hard to imagine, to visualise. For him she would always be the woman who spirited him away into a grimy terror tunnel at a fun fair whose lights and music wielded most of the fascination; the woman who greedily took from him − and in unwitting generosity gave him − his first time.
Turning away from the square, Marc hurried back to the hotel. He looked at his watch as he heard the cathedral bells toll out, but it was too dark to see the hands.
*
If you have enjoyed Antwerp: The First Time,
get it in the original collection of short fiction by Rosanne Dingli
Over and Above
Available in paperback and ebook, wherever good books are sold
www.rosannedingli.com