Chrysalis Page 5

  Taking the initiative and to avoid an explanation Sebastian introduced himself to the newcomers.

  “Hello Sebastian, I’m Anneke. How do you find the Tulp? Comfortable, I hope. It hasn’t taken you long to meet everyone. Welcome.” Her voice was a smoker’s, deep and welcoming with a hint of the hard vowels of Germany. She evidenced no surprise that he was at dinner. She was dressed plainly in a light blue cashmere roll-top jumper to her chin, her skirt tight around the midriff and drifting to the top of her knee. Her feet, unusual for the summer in full calf-length suede boots. As if to confirm her sex a simple necklace and locket hung imperceptibly between her small breasts. Her black hair parted at the side covering half her face which was covered with a thick skin of foundation, hiding and not highlighting her features, rouged gloss on her lips and a hint of mascara to extend her small eyelashes. Her right eye was visible through her hair like a peeking child. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was being in a different country where the rules don’t apply – Anneke made him feel accepted and he instantly, and unusually, trusted her.

  The meal clattered on, pleasurable with the arrival of numerous Oriental tapas dishes, clinking of glasses and the rise and fall of amiable conversation. The talk focused on the rehearsals and the forthcoming opening. Throughout, Sebastian had been included as if a member of the troupe but unable to join in the conversation as a non-participant in their recent history.

  “Sebastian, you will come on the opening night, won’t you? Perhaps you can write a review for us along the lines of before and after. You’ve met them all,” as she waved around the table, “but not the Chrysalis.” Anneke spoke as if he already had an audience that would want to read his review. Warming to the theme she continued, “I think it would make a great review.”

  “As do I!” the wine in him replied.

  “I thought you weren’t going to write about us.” Eva looked at him as if he was a habitual liar.

  Before Sebastian could reply Dasha unravelled his legs, turned table ward looking directly at Sebastian. Dasha’s mouth opened and his crooked nose, like a pugilist from a 1950s fairground, pointed to tobacco-stained teeth.

  “You are not from here either, are you?” he whispered softly with a Russian accent through a drunkard’s simian smile. Putting on his jacket he stood up and left without saying goodbye to anyone.

  Pepper, flushed with wine, hooked her arm through Sebastian’s for stability as they left the restaurant.

  “Whatever he said to you, ignore him. I told you there was darkness in his head,” she said.

  Anneke and Umuntu turned right at De Wallen to head home. The rest walked onwards to the Tulp, Pepper drunkenly leaning her head on Sebastian’s shoulder. Arriving at the Tulp Salt took hold of Pepper’s free arm, as if her twin was drunk because of him, and accusingly said, “I will take her from here,” as she protectively guided her on-board.

  Over the retreating shoulders of the troupe as they boarded Pepper whispered, “He is very sexy, isn’t he?” followed loudly by, “Night, Sebastian.”

  2

  It was pre-dawn and Sebastian was woken by a deep groaning as if a hungover man was gutturally regretting the previous evening. Poking his head through the companionway silhouetted against the rising sun sat Dasha in the lotus position.

  “You alright?” he asked, to no response.

  The groaning continued but with a rhythm.

  For fear of interrupting this morning ritual he retreated below and drifted back into sleep to the incessant background sound.

  The groaning was gone when he next woke, to be replaced by the weekend morning chorus of infrequent heels on cobbles and birdsong. He looked around the room. Decorated by functional furniture, it felt robust and impersonal. The only personal effect was a photograph of Zoe outside the Rijksmuseum taken fifteen years ago. He turned towards the photo; it had been his amulet from the day it was taken. Usually hidden in his London bedroom wrapped in one of her silk scarves available for viewing in solitude. The picture always available, but she was now physically unavailable. Before thoughts of regret clouded the start of a new day he decided to get up and find a coffee and shop for the week ahead, anything to delay the lonely process of change, from pretending to acting and finally writing.

  Wiping the steam from the shower room window the view looked directly onto a street of tall houses; they looked as if they were reflections from a fairground mirror where the shapes were pinched and elongated. Amongst these pillars of domesticity four cells with curtains drawn and dimmed red lights hinted at contemporary sexual attitudes. The door of the house closest to the Tulp opened and a mother kissed her Ajax-uniformed son as he departed to a Saturday football fixture. As she closed the door the curtain of one of the cells opened.

  A man in jeans and a leather jacket clutching a plastic Albert Heijn shopping bag was laughing as he retreated backwards from the entrance. As he turned to depart the whore passed a hand across his cheek with a stroke of feigned familiarity. Was he her pimp? Perhaps her pusher? The alarm clock buzzed the arrival of 8.00. Sebastian watched the Mediterranean-skinned prostitute leaning out of the doorway dressed in a basque and suspenders wave at the departing man. As she waved Sebastian noticed a tattoo in her armpit, recently done as it was bright with colour – a winged horse’s head. The man turned towards her.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  It was only 8.00 in the morning and she was working and already had a client.

  A bicycle bell pinged at the punter in anger. As he turned towards the canal to curse the cyclist, he looked directly onto the window where Sebastian was standing. It was Dasha. He directed a long and hostile look at Sebastian. A warning to silence an accomplice sustained for a full minute before he disappeared round the corner.

  The thought-troubled walk to Dam Square took Sebastian past the four prostitutes touting for business in their cells. Another curtain opened with the whore indicating she was ready for business but his eyes concentrated on the Mediterranean girl, which she mistook for interest. Lithe and dark with a pretty, overly made-up face failing to disguise her youth. Her bored face broke into a Lolita-like smile with her finger wagging, enticing him in.

  “Suck and fuck for fifty euros,” she said in a husky foreign voice. He raised his palms and smiled a watery smile of self-denial.

  “Don’t be shy, I will suck you dry,” she continued to try to tempt.

  A rush of irrational fear at being seen looking at the property of Dasha increased his speed. Before turning off to Dam Square he looked over his shoulder to see the curtain being drawn behind the form of a portly man entering the cell. She must belong to Dasha and like a flat she was being rented out for temporary use.

  No, it can’t be he owned her, he was just a punter perhaps; no one actually owned anyone in Europe, did they? Dasha was a sinister-looking man from a former Soviet state and everyone knew what they were like. Sebastian didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him, perhaps he knew some shady people. Pepper said he was dark. Sebastian’s mind played with the various options, none with a happy start or ending, certainly not for him.

  Distracted, he heard his name being called and ignored it in the knowledge that no one knew him in Amsterdam except Dasha, now. The salutation became more insistent.

  “Sebastian! Sebastian!”

  Turning towards the voice he looked onto a sunlit terrace of tables fully populated with early morning weekend coffee drinkers. Through a maze of raised newspapers he placed the voice in the half-seen mouth of Anneke.

  “Hi Anneke, I didn’t see you against the sunlight.” She was sitting under a sun umbrella in the gloom of shade.

  “Have you time for a coffee?”

  She moved sideways tapping the chair seat next to her so they could sit side by side and watch the city wake up.

  “How are you settling in?”

  “Fine,” he replied although s
till troubled by what he had seen that morning. “I was the first up, I think,” he lied.

  “It’s a wonderful city, Amsterdam. Probably the most peaceful city in Europe to wake up in. The absence of cars, the wakeup alarm of cycle bells and the chime of Westerkerk. It’s no wonder the bells comforted Anne Frank during her hiding,” she said through a veil of hair.

  “Have you always lived in Amsterdam?”

  “No, I used to live in Germany, moved here four years ago.”

  “With the Spiegeltent?”

  “No, I did something else before this, something different but still similar,” she said vaguely and to avoid any further questions she asked, “You, Sebastian, why Amsterdam? Why writing? Hope you don’t mind me asking.”

  The coffee arrived giving him some moments to think how to answer the question.

  Anneke raised the cup to her mouth, her finger too large to fit into the handle.

  As she waited for a reply he saw the movement of her hair as she turned away leaving him looking into a curtain of black with a hint of her mouth and eyes behind.

  “It’s complicated really,” he replied evasively.

  “If it’s complicated it’s probably worth the telling, don’t you think? Complicated things are always more interesting.”

  He felt as if he was in a confessional. Anneke, anonymous and non-judgemental, offering absolution. Like all confessors what he really needed was guidance. There was no contrition, nothing to confess to other than his fickleness of thought (or indeed absence of thought). His penance was a vacuous life of self-imposed reluctance to take a decision, a decision to do something he wanted.

  “It’s a shit show,” is all he said and felt the better for it.

  The veil of her hair was flicked back by a red painted nail. Her eyes looked at him.

  “I come here every day for coffee in the morning.”

  After the last word her hair fell forward offering the anonymity of the veil.

  Chapter 4

  As the days passed a routine established itself offering infrastructure, predictability and familiarity of events. Each day started with the pre-dawn head-sore groaning of Dasha which might be some form of foreplay. By 8am his libido was as active as an alcoholic’s search for an open pub to assuage his thirst. Dasha’s daily pre-coitial routine ended with a KGB-like stare toward Sebastian’s shower window, a warning. A post-coitial serene smile was absent as he scowled on departure, always clutching his Albert Heijn bag. From the look of fear the whore gave to his back as he turned the corner it could only contain something that demeaned or frightened her. As well as disliking him Sebastian was now scared of him.

  The new addition to the days was Pepper. The first day to apologise for the night of their first meeting and thereafter for company in the late afternoon under the guise of getting an update on the literary progress. The meetings were easy and flirtatious. A welcome distraction from a morning and afternoon spent writing.

  “How did it go today?” she asked on entering without waiting for a reply in the sunny, confident way that Americans, especially West Coast Americans, have. She was met by an echo of Dasha’s early morning moan without the anticipated pleasure.

  “Well,” followed by a pause trying to convey studied thought, “same as every day. It’s taken all day to write fifty lines. I won’t read them to you but would you like to see?”

  He lifted the computer lid and the light of the screen increased as if an heirloom from a long-departed relation was about to be revealed. The screen divided into perfect paragraphs, all ten paragraphs with five uniform lines like a battle formation. Each paragraph starting with a capital letter and finishing with a full stop. The sentences had uniformity of length. The words “Fuck It” covered the entire screen.

  The corners of her mouth tried to chew back a forming smile.

  “It’s progress, I suppose, I mean you could have written nothing! Imagine a whole day without even one word. Perhaps over time your vocabulary will widen.” By the end of the critique her smile had broken free. As she laughed the pink of her mouth, enclosing Californian even white teeth, offered the same symmetry of his writing but complete and perfect. Having worked with Americans Sebastian had always admired them for their ability not to see a problem. If too tall, climb over it; if too wide, circumnavigate it; if too thick, push until it falls over. If all else fails blow the problem to smithereens.

  “Fancy a glass of wine?” Too early for her perhaps, but in his frustration required by him.

  Handing her a glass and to avoid any further discussion of his work he asked, “How did you get involved in the circus business?”

  She sipped from the glass.

  “Sebastian, it’s not a circus, it’s a Spiegeltent. We were looking for adventure, I suppose. In the States we lived the full American dream: nice house, high school, two cars, all the usual. My mother is third generation American but of British stock. Dad was a theatrical agent in San Francisco so it was a sort of natural choice to go to London to study.”

  Reaching into her pocket she pulled out a reefer, showed it to him to enquire about acceptance. A nervous nod permitted her to fire it up.

  “Throughout school we were good gymnasts competing interstate, you know hoops and ribbons stuff.”

  She offered the lit reefer; he raised the glass to decline.

  “Salt broke her leg aged seventeen so that ended our gymnastics career.”

  “Are you really that close? You never refer to yourself, it’s always ‘we’.”

  She let out a laugh which could be an effect of the dope or acknowledgement of her use of pronouns.

  “We are very close. In fact we are as close as you can be as twins. Not born conjoined, but Salt arrived first and I arrived holding her hand seconds later. Doesn’t get closer than that, almost one.”

  She curled her legs under herself making a cushion, lent back and exhaled a blade of smoke towards the ceiling like the extraction of a sword.

  “Anyway we decided to enrol in Circus Space in London to see if we could become performers. The location but not the course met with parental approval.”

  “But sword swallowing? What on earth made you choose that?”

  Pepper smiled indicating simplicity. “There were no women doing it so we knew if we could specialise in that we could get work, well at least busk around Europe as a duo. At the last show before graduation Anneke and Umuntu were on a talent-spotting trip and offered us a job at the Chrysalis. We’ve been with them ever since.”

  “Dasha was with you at Circus Space too, wasn’t he?” Sebastian nervous that Dasha would overhear.

  She reached for her glass and downed the full content and tapped the glass for a refill.

  “He was a year above us. Sure you don’t want some of this?” She offered the lipstick-stained roach. Already half a bottle of wine down and equivalent in resolve he took it, inhaled and held the smoke deep in his lungs and coughed.

  “Is it only me or do you hear him early in the morning?”

  The effect of the dope now obvious on Pepper as she giggled.

  “The soul cleanser! It’s something he picked up in Hong Kong when he was studying some meditation and martial arts. It’s supposed to make you reflect, isolate yourself from your being and reveal a route to purity of living and light.”

  Feeling the effect of Morocco’s best, fingers tingling and his mind achieving the opposite of Dasha’s chanting, Sebastian’s brain worked slowly as if watching a film but seeing it in slow motion, frame by frame. Each set of frames divided into vaguely related subjects: father, mother, disappointment; present, past, future; sex, Pepper, Zoe; blank pages, scrolls of words, success. The triptychs floated hazily by as if being exhibited at a pre-sale show at Christies. Sebastian, whore, Dasha.

  She uncoiled herself, came over to the sofa and placed her head in his lap. She reached up a
nd gently took the roach from his mouth.

  “I like it here, with you. We are all together so much we are like rats devouring each other.”

  Confused he replied, “Salt and you?”

  “No, of course not, the others.” She loosely gazed into the now dilating eyes of Sebastian. He looked back at her and felt himself step into the manhole of her widened pupils careful not to stand on the red cracks forming on the whites of her eyes. She continued dreamily, “Do you think it’s what people do that makes their character? Or should it be their character reflects what they do? I mean, Hugo and Ricard are neat and tidy, precise. Is that why they do balancing acts? Eva, lonesome and suspicious, is that why she does solo trapeze? Philippe, evasive with a Jekyll and Hyde character, the ultimate illusionist? Umuntu, the guide and musician, creating the mood of the show? Anneke, shy, reserved and not what she is, the conductor of the whole show?” she asked with a quizzical and slurred voice.

  Now high he heard the words but could only concentrate on the last image, the previous replaced by the new arrival. Anneke: who she wasn’t or was it who she was? There was someone absent.

  “Dasha, explain him if you can,” he drawled whilst contemplating kissing Pepper.

  She pulled on the roach and blew the smoke into his nostrils with practised skill. The room now as smoke filled as a 1960s Bob Dylan concert.

  “Confused, Asian Kazakh Jew fighting agnosticism, solitary but kind and to cap it all gay, I think. Well I’ve never seen him with a woman. No wonder he is a contortionist.” She giggled sleepily.

  Even in the befuddled foggy state of Moroccan Black Sebastian concentrated on the last image. Gay! He knew that to be wrong. How can you work and live closely with someone and not even know their sexuality? Kind? He’s a bastard either using or controlling a young woman in sexual bonded slavery and almost in view of Anne Frank’s house too. He must be an atheist not an agnostic, at least an agnostic can be proved wrong. The heat of trying to focus was enough to melt the frame of thought to be replaced by an action rather than an unconscious substitute. He leant over and kissed Pepper on the lips. The response was slight but willing. Before he could go any further he felt the wine press on his bladder. Walking unsteadily towards the toilet chuckling as a small, animated film played in his memory: the occasion his mother was introduced to his first adolescent girlfriend. She looked towards her and said, “You look lovely and I know there is no fear of an unwanted pregnancy as Sebastian has an inbuilt contraceptive: a small bladder.” A pause. “Would you like some tea?”