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1. Amsterdam

She wouldn't have been here. Not her kind of place.

It's a junction, a starting point, a place of transition. Not always speedy transition. I've been here, this little clump of white, seated limbo known only as D54 for two hours, a whole ninety minutes more than the official schedule should have required

You wouldn't catch her here, in D54, faced with the unappetising choice between reading the newspaper that really has to be preserved for the three-hour flight, or staring out the fellow passengers.

Although she may have enjoyed the artifice behind that particular art. Every European on an international flight regards every fellow passenger as an alien, until proven otherwise. There's an anthropological candour about the way we appraise each other, that, back in the boulevards, strasse, calles, ulitsi, gades of our homes, might earn us at least a slap.

In the artificial time-span of an airport gate-wait, the rules are relaxed. The eyes are allowed to linger on the attire, luggage, tan, sunglasses of the fellow traveller a little longer than is meet in any other situation. Although judging from the way the Slavic sort with the Bohemian crystal cheekbones sends a piercing glare winging back at me, perhaps this is not a universally understood rule. The glare only slightly breaks the mask. It barely penetrates the characteristic Eastern European make-up excess, the nervous paint-job that betrays overcompensation for the luxury-deficit lingering from ancient totalitarian austerity. It's discomfiting though, and I pick up my paper.

Usually, I like to think of myself as half-invisible. Another white European in dark clothes, tall, but not overly so, blue-eyed, but with irises dulled by too much observation, quiet, unobtrusive. I still think my existence is conditional, awaiting confirmation. Sometimes I get lost in this idea of detachment and forget that I can be seen.

She would have liked that. She would have grinned at my embarrassment, sighed a little at my eternal fixation with all women with genes that came within scrubbing distance of the Vistula. Except, of course, she wouldn't be here. D54 would have had to wait its turn, while she absorbed all the time-killing diversions of the mall.

It's one of those miniature decisions I always get wrong, one of those no-win modern dilemmas. Do you escape through the x-ray portals to the relative serenity of the gate, or do you loiter amongst the diversions of the chocalatiers, lingereuses, and duty-free hustlers?

Not that there are duties to be freed from any more. The twentieth century enticement to jump on a plane was that banal twenty per cent saving on a bottle of spirits, the chance to parade nicotine addiction in a flamboyant 200-hit carton, the opportunity to buy perfumes that remained ignored in the High Street. It worked, in the same way that the £10 sea passage populated Australia with its desired quota of pasty Anglo-Saxons in the middle of the last century. It's not needed any more. We are a people who require no further urging down the jetties, ramps and Jackie Kennedy staircases of the twenty-first century's airports, in search of nations better than our own.

We are a people who are all here, emerging, unblinking from the railway terminal escalators, into the Schiphol shopping experience, lost in the European Super-Market, free of duty, bound only by the negotiable timetable of arrivals and departures, by the mechanical imperatives of terminals, satellites, hubs, spurs,

I could picture her in the English language section of that bookstore. She'd be clutching the latest best-selling slab of single-woman lamentation, nibbling at the series of solipsistic meditations on the impossibility of true love, happiness and a Jane Austen ending in the cruelty of the modern romantic arena.

Even without her, her body language was there to be witnessed in the posture of the businessman, had to be Swiss, pushing fifty with the corpulence of a Zurich bean counter who had never been tempted by voguish health-consciousness. Self-consciousness was there as he ostentatiously adjusted the angle at which he viewed the porn magazine's spread flesh, applying his gaze to the carnal choreography on the page. There was a defiance too about his conspicuous determination to review the merchandise.

So with her, the little traces of guilt creeping around her lips would be repressed with the way she held up the book at the right angle so that the title, a marketing-seminar-briefed editor's encapsulation of the essential limitations of a woman's career without a man to coo approval, would catch the airport strip-lighting and reveal her as potentially one of the publisher's two million gulls.

"Why are you reading that shit?" I might say, because she would be reading it, digesting every dulled, metropolitan dinner-party half-thought. She could speed read these novels in just over an hour, oblivious to reproving looks from the shop staff.

"It's about a woman in her late twenties. Wanting to be loved." she might say. What looked like a gently-lobbed return would kick up alarmingly. Like every remark she had flipped back at me in that time, it had wicked spin. Spin that had eventually taken her beyond the range where the arch of her eyebrow, the twitch of the lip, the slight lift of the chin would at least give you some clue where her words were liable to land.

But they hadn't taken her here. That much I knew. The Zurich erotomane's self-righteous glare confirmed it. He shuffled across, getting his body between my stare and a group-shot that seemed to feature an adventurous dwarf.

Here was Europe's waiting room. The Dutch had been given the job of ushering us on our way through the old continent's airways to the diminished limits of Europe, nowhere further than three hours from Schiphol.

Here was I, younger than I felt, older than I wanted to look, with a bag packed for a month, with a Rough Guide to Europe, too rough to tell me more than a few phone numbers, with the vaguest of plans.

I worked, occasionally, as a music writer for the sort of magazine that caters for an age group too mature to get excited about new music, but with sufficient disposable income to indulge a fondness for repackages of their own familiar, pre-digested pasts. My absence would hardly be noticed. My existence allowed these slips into the velvet folds of Europe, credit-card treks through the last of the century.

----------------------

I thought of Lee. Two days before, I'd been collared by an Amsterdam American, who had staggered out of the Mellow Yellow cafe just as I was belting up Vijzelstraat with the half-formed notion of jumping on a tram to the station. As a rule Amsterdam Americans are like filthy punctuation on the clean linear prose of this city, cockroaches that crawl between the canals. They jig around in tiresome wonderment at the liberties extended them in Yurp, a continent with its twin pillars in the dope cafes of Amsterdam, and the more menacing heroin bars of Prague's marketed nihilism quarter.

This particular example though was still in the early stages of his continental degradation. The facial hair still followed the traces of goatee structure, the eyes were innocently pinkish rather than full-blown Altamont 69 psychotic. The lurch was genial rather than menacing. Worryingly he seemed to recognise me. "Hey man," he said, with a winning obliviousness to the truth that for an American staggering out of a dope bar those two words were gloriously beyond cliche.

"Remember me? The train, last night?" And then I did. The stagger helped. I had seen it just after midnight on the train back from Den Haag. He had stumbled across the platform, leering at the information screens, before slurring an interrogative "Amsterdam?" at some pristine French students boarding the train. They had the self-restraint to keep their disdain burn at seventy percent intensity before muttering a reluctant "sure".

He had slumped into the seat opposite me, and I had been considering shifting when he fell into the sort of harmless semi-coma that would ensure a quiet trip back to Amsterdam. He would serve as a useful deterrent for more garrulous late-night drunks (the French contingent were the only passengers who didn't appear to have spent at least five hours solid on the stronger stuff available in Den Haag's bars).

He awoke with a panicked start when the train stopped a few minutes later, clutched at his bag, and lunged towards the carriage door. Feeling charitable I stopped him. "It's OK, it's only Leiden." "Huh?". "Leiden. You're going to Amsterdam right?" "Uh, yeah."

He fell back into his seat, still a little unsure of what had happened. It came to him a couple of minutes later as the train resumed its journey. "Uh, thanks man." I gave him the half-smile universal acknowledgement of no big deal. He was awake now. "Where you from?"

I hated that. It was a question I went to tortuous lengths to avoid answering. There were reasons, not least of them the knowledge that if you give them what they want, a town, or even a country, they mentally click on a pull-down menu of prejudices, conscious and otherwise, begin painting you in a preset pattern. You are pinned there by that accident of birth, by history, geography, race and all the rest of the oppressive and inescapable baggage of identity. I preferred to be hated for less arbitrary reasons.

So I wilfully misunderstood, relying on the American unwillingness to pursue a matter if the solution wasn't immediately to hand. "Den Haag", I said. The nod of comprehension wasn't about to fool me. He didn't look capable of even remembering it as the name of the station where he had boarded. "Lee," he replied, "Lee Hazeldine, from Albuquerque."

"Hot dog, jumping frog," I half said, half sang, the combination of instinct, and too many Hoegaardens in Den Haag. Lee looked at me with casual appreciation. "Man, I do believe you are more stoned than me." Then he had resumed his slumbers until Centraal. Last I had seen him, he was trying to understand the late-night Amsterdam taxi etiquette, whereby everyone stands in a rough Dutch parody of a line, and when a taxi appears, lumbers towards it in a heaving mass.

And here he was again.

"On the train, man. You were reading Haruki Murakami. I was wasted."

"Looks like you still are."

"No. I'm cool. Daylight took me by surprise is all. Listen, man, you doing anything?"

Maybe it was his memory for literary detail shining through the dope haze that won me over. In the watery light bouncing off the surface of Prinsengracht, Lee was Woody Harrelson with added hick charm. Lee was the most garishly incongruous piece of detail in a big picture that had been beginning to depress me. He didn't fit. The Americans in Amsterdam went around in pockets of mutual support, high-fiving each other, nudging and hugging their way through the red-light district, yelling to old Amsterdam their high-school variants on the theme "I am so shit-faced".

Lee was, in the important details, different. Lee stank of sour beer and had the requisite acrid marijuana traces, but he still wore that American-abroad air of impermeable optimism, still had the thousand acre grin rather than the thousand yard stare. I looked up the street, saw the tram approaching, thought about it for a second or so, and then said "Nothing much. What do you have in mind?"

What he had in mind, sadly, inevitably, was "taking on board some more of this excellent gear, and maybe rapping a little." I looked at him closely when he delivered the line, and saw it there, glinting at the corner of that pinkening eye, the twinkle of awareness that proved he knew the words had been selected for him by a familiar script, and he was just being professional, giving the performance expected of him, without revealing too much of his inner contempt for the role.

So there we were, twenty minutes later, in a cafe on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. We squatted in the buzz of multi-lingual conversation, Germanic umlauts confronting nasal French intonations, Italian declamations defeating Japanese gutturals. He had a joint, I had a coffee, and the place was enough of a tourist trap to ensure that I was getting the bigger buzz. Lee started to speak, in a growly murmur that at first I found hard to follow, and was beginning to push into the assorted wallpaper of noise, a bass buzz under the latinate high notes, but gradually the words knitted together, and I began to listen.

"She's looking at me man, just looking, and I'm looking back, and neither us is seeing the same person we spent a year getting to know. What she is seeing is an embarrassment, an obstacle, no not an obstacle, something like an obstacle but more personal, more involved, what's the word I'm looking for here. . . "

"Impediment?"

"Im-fuckin'-pediment. Like I'm not just in her way, but like I'm blocking, like I'm some sort of line-backer running interference. Sorry, I mean . . . you know football, right?"

"American football? No."

"Sorry, you're European. This is Europe. I apologise. You don't have that shit here. So anyway, there's her looking at me, like I'm about to crash-tackle all her little dreams and, get this, the word she uses on me, aspirations. Like that's not a word she saw in the op ed section of the paper that morning and figured on throwing at me first chance . . . "

For a minute or so, I thought again of letting Woody/Lee become so much white noise, a vocal overlay to the indistinguishable Euro-rock seeping out of the speakers, the screech of the trams lurching towards Dam square, the babble of lowest common denominator English being exchanged as the currency of quick-fix conversation between strangers united over marijuana.

But Lee had something here, something urgent he needed to impart. Something about the words he dropped in occasionally, something hiding behind the dope haze seemed to hint it might be more than the usual "my girlfriend bummed me out because she couldn't relate to me getting stoned, chilling out and listening to Slipknot all day" mantra.

"There is no love in America," Lee was saying, and because he didn't end the sentence with "man", it seemed to carry a certain conviction.

"It's a ten-step programme. Think about it. You grow up in the 'burbs a freckly little kid with a baseball mitt. Maybe you collect comic books, you spit out your vegetables, you skip school once in a while, go to summer camp, get taught to jerk off, end of part one, commercial break.

"Then it's high school. Ever been to India? Hearda the caste system right? That's high school. What are you, a nerd? That's untouchable. Jocks are the Brahmins. So maybe you fall halfway in the middle, get to fumble with some half-pretty babe, who knows, maybe further? For plenty of kids that's the first exit off the interstate you know? Knock up Darlene and it's fast loop back to the 'burbs.

"But hey, say you stay in the fast lane, you're at college. Know who goes to college? Kids who want to get someplace. There is no learning in America. Learning is a kind of love, so they killed it in the 80s. College kids do marketing, systems analysis, management consultancy. Like some 20 year-old knows how to manage. Like they can tell others how to manage. Oh yeah, and finance, futures, the whole shooting gallery of buck-related chicanery."

Lee had momentum now, the eyes clearing, the lips quivering, the hands beginning to make patterns. And it wasn't the dope. Or at least wasn't only the dope.

"So there you are, you meet some green-eyed Buddhist feng shui expert, web-site designing, freelance troubleshooting superbrain babe who has read two books in her life, and before you know it the American net has dropped over the two of you, and pretty soon you know where you are?"

"Back in the 'burbs?" I said, with only the slightest degree of archness. Lee registered it, but let it go.

"Believe it. And OK they might be smart 'burbs, you may be furnished by Ikea, you may have a Gaggia spitting on the breakfast bar, you stick venison steaks on the barbecue instead of chump chops, but pretty soon you're watching the same sitcoms, and green-eyes is planning a career window so the two of you can bring another freckly mitt-wearer into America.

"So that happens, seven years along the road you're driving to the PTA and the Little Leagues and the other Moms begin to look hot, only not quite as hot as the red-headed PA in the office who's just fresh out of college with whatever the hell majors they offer in that future. One leads to two leads to three leads to divorce, weekend access, and you're forty-two, and it all begins again.

"Red-head's a doll but she likes to booze and spend. You hit the first coronary in the Caribbean, gets you just when you're looking along the deck of the cruise-ship, seeing all the other guys kept alive by Viagra and guilt, ripped up by bourbon and alimony.

"Then you're back in the 'burbs, and the lights are dimmed. Red slips you deli-delivery low sodium grilled vegetables in between hits of JD. She has other guys, well the guys from the deli and the liquor store at least. And you're counting the heartbeats, waiting for the sequel, number two, the one that really kills at the box office. Lie there watching old black and whites, French movies from the 60s, Nouvelle Vague, whatever, Billy Wilder screwballs, waiting for it, counting up what you've missed and getting back big numbers.

"And that my friend, and hey don't think I ain't noticed that you haven't told me your name, is why I am going to be a European. Live long, prosper, sip stuff that don't come fresh outta California."

And he beamed across at me; a little self-conscious about the spiel he had just delivered.

"I'd like to say I saw all that stuff in a flash of divine wisdom that cut through my corn-fed American consciousness. But actually it was a three-part NBC mini-series running over the weekend when me and Marie had our final bust-up. 'Dying Of The Light,' they called it. Always gotta steal their titles from Europeans. But don't ever let them tell you TV teaches you nothing."

"Marie?"

"Marie was the green-eyed Buddhist feng shui expert, web-site designing, freelance troubleshooting superbrain babe. I got off the wheel at step three."

"What were the two books?"

"Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss and The Road Ahead by Bill Gates."

Maybe I blanched a little. Lee grinned.

"Exactly.

"So in ear one I was getting Marie, all quiet, rhythmic, you know she speaks the way she learned to chant, no stress on any words. So Lee, where do you see yourself in five years? So Lee, do you worry about being goal-orientated? So Lee, is that your fourth joint . . . ? Ear two it's 'The Dying Of The Light', and you can see the guy, Bill Pullman, I think it was, or somebody just like him, and the wife is saying hey are you taking the kids this weekend . . . ?

"And OK it was my fourth joint, possibly fifth, and it was some heavy stuff I'd scored from this Guatemalan guy, which might explain it, but for a while I really thought I was there, in an NBC mini-series, and I was rifling through my brain for something to say to Marie, and all I could come up with were lame lines, the sort of stuff any decent script editor would stick a big blue pencil through.

"Now I don't get paranoia on dope; speed yeah sure all the time. But I can smoke this stuff all day, hell I do, and not feel the slightest anxiety, so this was like a revelation more than anything. I was in a show, Marie was female lead, and America was the whole fuckin' series, written by the most godawful, cliched hacks they could dredge up from the drunk tank. The budget stank, the acting was dismal, but somehow the ratings were huge. People lapped up this shit.

"Thing is, thing was, I couldn't see where I would be in five years. I couldn't see where I would be in five weeks. But in the middle of one of Marie's patient little sentences, one of those gentle squeezes, I had a pretty lucid idea of where I would be in the next 48 hours."

"And Lee lit up a great American jack cheese grin (this boy had about as much chance of being European as an Arkansas hillbilly) and waited for me to ask. I took a sip of coffee, took a few moments to realise that the soundtrack was Jesse's Girl rendered in better English than the original by some Scandinavian ironists, and then gave up. OK, where?"

"Delta to Dallas, connection to JFK, KLM to Amsterdam. Went pretty smooth as well. Albuquerque and Amsterdam are pretty damn close if you think about it."

"No they're not".

"You're looking in the wrong place man. Don't look at the atlas. Look at the index. Which reminds me, I've got to check out Alicante some time. Anyway, pretty much the last line on a Steve Earle album tells me 'Amsterdam is always good for grievin''. Who needs travel agents when you've got Steve? Took me twenty-two hours from hearing Marie say the word 'envision', to sparking one up down there in Leidseplein. Don't ever tell me I'm not a man of action when I need to be."

"And you've come here to be a European?" I asked, letting the scepticism drip all over his enthusiasm. He looked across at me.

"You think I'm one of these American guys, come over here for a little R and R from the States, a break from the saluting the flag, working for the Yankee dollar, eating at Burger King, all-you-can-drink bad coffee thing. That's fair, that's understandable, there's a lot of that here, can't escape it. That's why, most likely, I'm telling all this stuff to a condescending European guy who seems to prefer to remain anonymous."

He paused a little there. Not long enough to tempt me to fill the gap.

"OK, but you know where Europe starts?"

You know, it's often a good idea to treat virtually every question as rhetorical. You learn a lot more.

"Starts at the end of the departures pier at JFK. You're heading down there, got your carry-on bouncing off your shoulder and there's Europe. On the little shelf just before you get on the plane, there it is, next to all the Herald Tribunes, USA Todays that no fucker in their right mind has ever read for more than a minute, there it is, great piles of it. Le Monde, Corriere Delle Sera, The Daily Telegraph, El Pais, Allgemeine Zeitung, Izvestia . . . ain't that beautiful?

"But that's not it, that's just the teaser. Look up from the papers and there it is again, the Continent of Europe looking you in the face. A big Dutch stewardess, saying hello. No accent of course, she's been doing it too long, but she's foreign as any New Mexico boy can ask for. You see an American stewardess and she's got that twitch around the jaw from chewing too much gum, she has that look in her eye that says 'honey, I may have been to Madrid, Milan, Manchester three thousand times, but my mind is a Midwest mall wondering which lo-fat frozen yoghurt is going to be my weekend wild time.' But there's this big Dutch gal, and she's a little older, she's got a little less make-up, the hair isn't quite as tidy, the teeth are fine, but they don't have that look as if they've been hammered into line by a sadistic orthodontist.

"No, I'll tell you the difference, the difference is that she doesn't give a shit whether you like her, whether you give her an admiring glance as you haul yourself into that 747. And you can see that has an effect. All these American assholes, and let's face it 95 percent of Americans who cross the Atlantic are assholes, but you knew that already, they are cowed by that, that . . . power. These are guys who would snap their fingers at Continental, or American Airlines cabin crew, who snarl if there ain't enough ice in their Martini. Get on here, on this bit of airborne Europe, and the rules are changed. And you look at that big Dutch girl and you know why. She has age on her side. She's twenty-eight but those cheekbones came out of the Reformation. We've seen her picture before. Hell, I was in the Rembrandt museum for 20 minutes and I saw all of them. 'KLM stewardess as Madonna with Child; ground crew functionary as Utrecht burgher's wife; check-in girl as Flemish peasant.'"

Some of the faces in the background of the 'Night Watch' could be baggage handlers, I acknowledged.

"You get it. It's not just the women. It's all the expressions, what's going on behind the eyes. Race memory they call it, but it's more than that. It's just walking around this place. Take a walk around Albuquerque and the faces are bleached by mall lighting, the eyes have that fast food look about them, they're thinking about Taco Bell or Wendy's, they've all got that big-bucket-drink-with-too-much-ice walk.

"Europeans, they walk past a place where the Moors slaughtered a whole buncha Christians 1200 years ago, they sit in cafes where the Commies wrote their manifestos, they get it on with women who look like Venetian courtesans . . . "

By now Lee had attained a kind of high-pitched note of yearning, the words were slipping into each other, becoming an ululating howl.

"Europe's not like that any more," I told him. "Global village and all. American cultural imperialism. We're all here cowering in the same suburbs as you. IKEA is a European invention, but we've bought all the rest of the stuff from you. We all eat in the same burger houses, we all head out to the edge of town to do our shopping in the warehouses. We dress in Gap and Nike. We watch 'Lethal Weapon VI' in the megaplexes . . . "

"Sure, sure, but you despise it. That's the difference. For you America is like Disney, it's something invented for your entertainment, for the occasional diversion from all those wars, torture, religious persecution and really great art you guys are so good at. Sometime, we lost all that. 1776, I guess. Now. . . well, you know what the Atlantic is? It's like this big insulation sheet, this great foam rubber buffer zone between real experience and the dumb Bud-bloated North American existence."

I was half-convinced Lee was talking rubbish, but the unconvinced half was gazing through the marijuana-smoke mist, through the murky window, across to Spuistraat and beyond to the Singel canal. A watery sun was dipping, the street lights were coming on, the teeming cyclists were thinning out a little, and a few drops of spring rain were hitting the cobbles. The trams were rattling with a timeless sense of little urgency, off south to Oudzuid or west to Slotermeer. Amsterdammers were displaying their obliviousness to spurious notions of cool, pulling on garish plastic macs, donning tweedy caps. Lee had half a point going on here; Europe at times has an irrepressible aged superiority about it.

But it was time to go.

"Nice talking to you, Lee," I said, swilling around the coffee dregs and getting to my feet.

He looked up. "You haven't been."

"What?"

"You haven't been talking to me. I've been talking to you. Now I'm a European now, so I'm not going to give you that American thing about it being rude to be all take and no give, but before you head, maybe you'd do me the honour of telling me your name."

It always surprises me what a wrench it is when it becomes impossible to avoid revealing my name. Sometimes I cast around for a few seconds searching for a credible pseudonym. They always seem less ridiculous than telling my own, bland combination. I told him in the tones of a prisoner-of-war anticipating the application of electrodes.

"Great. And what are you doing here?"

This was easier, funnily enough. Telling Lee my name seemed to have removed any remnants of resistance.

"I'm looking for somebody. A woman."

"Well, of course. And she's in Amsterdam?"

"Well, not necessarily."

Lee just raised an eyebrow.

"She's in Europe."

"Big place. Getting bigger. "

"Yeah"

"What's her name? I'll keep an eye out for her."

That name came a little easier than my own. Perhaps because it had been squatting at the forefront of my mind for, oh how long?

"Sarah."

________________

I'd left Lee there, with an agreement that I would look him up in Prague. Lee might consider himself a cut above the American pack, but he was hitting all the familiar reference points.

And here was I at D54, thinking about KLM. Royal Dutch Airlines. The cabins always had that aroma, a cross between over-heated plastic and vomit. The pale blue livery had a strange 70s quality about it. The stewardesses Lee found so compelling had always seemed stern to me, reproachful almost, the professional cool receding into a quiet hostility.

And still I came back, to that comforting hub at Schiphol, a central exchange where you could trade the dust of Lisbon for the insouciance of Paris, the panic of Moscow for the anticipatory buzz of Madrid. Amsterdam was my idea of a European exchange, an unquestioning, tolerant metropolis where you were granted discreet hospitality while passing through. This airport was a mighty brick, glass and polymer stasis, a Euro-hiatus where you decided which course you wanted to consume/follow next. And whichever choice you made, you turned to KLM for assistance, and there was the light-blue craft, sitting at the end of the jetty. Or if you were unlucky, still taxi-ing tardily into position.

But here I was, at last, escaping D54, taking a last look at the Brueghel complexion of the girl taking my boarding pass, walking past the rack of Suddeutsche Zeitungs, Handelsblatts and Financial Times, and ducking into the cabin of the 737, thinking about Lee, thinking about Europe, thinking just a little about coffee. Needed some.

But mostly thinking about Sarah.

 

 

 

An extract from Europa

by Tom Lappin