*
There was more business with buses and trains and then the ferry. Fortunately Kevin had brought his passport, relic of a school weekend in Paris, with him to the camp.
"And just like that, I'm going to be in a foreign country," he marvelled as they sat in the ferry bar. "It's as simple as that."
"It is all too simple," said Forbes, "and hardly worth it when you get there. Exotic destinations are far better imagined than visited. A foreign country is like the past: they talk funny there, they have some barbaric customs, and they don't wash as much. Apart from that, it's exactly the same as what you're leaving behind. To quote Saki, travel these days broadens the hips and narrows the mind."
But when Kevin protested and questioned him about his travel experiences Forbes was forced to admit he'd never been out of the country before apart from a day trip to Boulougne.
*
There was, of course, at least one important difference between Amsterdam and Britain.
They actually scored their first weed off - were in fact given it as a present by - a group of ghostly-white and paraplegic-looking English boys they found sprawled on the pavement outside the ferry terminus at the Hook of Holland, who had decided at the last minute not to attempt to smuggle anything back into Britain and had just given up an attempt to smoke everything they had before they embarked.
"Our first toke in a free country," said Forbes weightily when they'd built up.
Upon getting off the train in Amsterdam they dived into the first hash bar they saw and ordered everything in sight.
They remained there for the better part of two hours, sampling the wares frenziedly and occasionally fortifying themselves with coffee.
"Try some of this one," said Forbes.
"I've got two on the go already. Do you think I'm some sort of fucking...laboratory, er...you know...beagle?"
"I insist you try some of this one."
"Ffffp."
"Good?"
"Hurk."
"Good, yes?"
"Jesus. How much did you put in this?"
"I ran out of tobacco, so I used some of that quite mild stuff as, as leavening."
"Fuck, my lungs."
"Actually, this isn't the mild stuff, is it? This is the super-bastard stuff I used as leavening."
"Have it back."
"I don't want it."
"I think we should, like, eat something."
"An excellent idea. Let's try a couple of those hash cakes."
Eventually they decided they'd better find some accomodation. Skunked as drunks, they staggered forth into the street.
"Fuck, my legs," said Kevin.
They made it as far as another hash bar in the next street.
"Two savage coffees immediately," said Forbes to the man behind the counter as they stumbled in one step ahead of collapse. "Speak English? Deux cafe tres sauvage. Zwei Uberkaffee. Capeesh? I am afraid my epiglottis is not nearly malformed enough to attempt Dutch."
"I speak very good English."
"Well hop to it, then...I don't think we should have any more weed for the moment."
"I think that would be a very good move," panted Kevin, resting his head on the counter.
"Although these buds here with the purple bits on look very interesting. Perhaps just an eighth?"
They sat down and started to imbibe copious amounts of coffee and non-hash-laced chocolate cake. Then Forbes skinned up with the purple buds and insisted Kevin try a bit and against his better instincts Kevin tried a bit and immediately did a whitey and for some time was unable to raise his head up off the table. Forbes perked up and went out declaring his intention to find a tourist information centre or something before nightfall. Kevin stayed on, groaning and wheezing and being plied with coffee by the sympathetic barkeep. Eventually he began to feel more human and was just staring to think about skinning up again when a boy came across from another table and spoke to him.
"Have you got any roach material?...Fucking hell!" he cried delightedly. "A'right, mate! Indecently exposed yourself lately?"
It was his erstwhile cellmate Darren.
Kevin gaped.
"Darren! What are you doing here? Didn't you get sent down?"
"You're not fucking kidding I got sent down, best fucking thing that ever happened to me. I'm being fucking rehabilitated right now."
"What do you mean?"
Darren sat down and started to insert a roach in his joint.
"You would not fucking believe it, mate," he said. "I got sent to this fucking rehabilitation centre for persistent young offenders. Out in the countryside. I was expecting some sort of fucking concentration camp, but it was more like a youth hostel. All it was was a bunch of bearded nonces trying to get me to talk about me feelings and me fucking inner conflicts, and getting me to do all these mad fucking arts and crafts. All I was doing all day was painting pictures and making pots and weaving fucking baskets, and going for walks in the countryside. They're going, 'Oo, look at them fucking trees, oo, look, a squirrel,' and I'm at it, 'Yeah, man, I'm getting off on this, now I start to see the error of my ways.' And they thought I was a talented fucking painter, fucking top fucking artist, me. I did this one when me head was really done in one day, I just threw a couple of cans of paint at the canvas and then kicked the shit out of it, and they were all fucking wetting their kecks over it, wanted to send it to a fucking exhibition. So the next thing they say, do I want to go on an educational trip to Europe or somewhere to sample some fucking culture and art and that first hand? So I go, er...okay. So they give me some books and ask me where I wanna go. So I look up Amsterdam and go, er, it'd be a buzz seeing Rembrandt's house and all Van Gogh's stuff and that. So they go, okay, Bob's your fucking uncle, and the next thing me and this fucking guidance counsellor are packed off on a holiday to the fucking debauchery capital of the world." Darren shook his head. "And now on top of everything here you are. Fucking hell, what a buzz seeing you here. How long you been here?"
"Just got here."
"Where you staying?"
"Haven't found anywhere yet. Me mate's just gone looking for somewhere."
"Come to our place. Plenty of room there. It's cheap, it's over a hash bar, and it's right around the corner from the red light district."
"Er..." Kevin wasn't sure if moving into the same place as Darren would be such a good idea, but in his current semi-fuddled state was unable to think of a polite excuse why not. "Well, I could come and have a look at it," he hedged.
"It's a smart place. Come on, I'll take you now. I've got to get back to me guidance counsellor anyway. Wait'll you meet him, proper fucking nonce."
Kevin left a message for Forbes with the man behind the counter and they set off.
Darren led him along several streets and then into a hash bar that was significantly seedier than the ones he'd just been in. As well as some people sitting around skinning up who looked to have been doing exclusively that for the past two decades there were a number of what Kevin took to be prostitutes and their business managers. There was also a young man of around Forbes' age with a receding hairline and a sparse sandy beard, sitting on his own at a table near the door, nursing a coffee and looking extremely nervous. It was to him that Darren headed.
"This is Mr. Entwistle, my guidance counsellor," he said to Kevin. "This is a friend of mine from home," he said to the bearded man.
The bearded man extended a rather damp hand for Kevin to shake.
"Call me Keith," he said.
"Call me Kevin."
"Where've you been, Darren? I've been looking everywhere for you."
"I just went for a walk, Mr. Entwistle."
"Call me Keith."
"I just went for a walk, Keith. Looking at the sights. I went round an art gallery. I must have lost track of the time. I just got carried away getting off on all the culture and that."
"Well, that's nice." Call-me-Keith noticed Darren had started rolling a joint and frowned. "Ah...Darren...the purpose of this trip was to help you break free of the negative influences that have been enfettering you at home."
"Chill, Keith, one's not gonna do anything. Just sampling the local customs. When in fucking Rome, you know? It just helps me appreciate the culture better. Gets me in an artistic frame of mind."
"Ah...perhaps..although I don't think my superiors at the readjustment centre would see it that way."
"I won't tell them. Anyway, it keeps me mind off nicking cars and that. I've hardly thought about joyriding since I've been here. I reckon this trip's just what I needed to get me head straight."
"Well...splendid," said Call-me-Keith doubtfully.
"I owe you a lot, Keith," said Darren lighting up. "Right, I'll just get Kevin sorted out with a room."
Darren and Kevin went over to the bar. A skanky tart in a leopardskin minidress who was perched on a stool there smiled at them.
"You want to make big fuck with me, boys?" she asked. "I do two of you for hundred guilders, fuck you good, make sausage very happy, yes?"
"Not right now," said Darren, "but that man sitting by the door wants to make big fuck with you." He pointed at Call-me-Keith.
"Yes?"
"Yes, but he play shy boy, pretend to say no, but you sit on his lap, make sausage happy, he pay you big, okay?"
"Okay." The tart slid off the stool and undulated over to Call-me-Keith.
Behind the bar was a large man in a string vest who was a ringer for the chief prison warder in Midnight Express. Darren beckoned to him.
"Where's Betsy?"
"Betsy upstairs, he look for you."
Gesturing for Kevin to follow, Darren went through a door at the back and up a flight of rickety stairs. On the landing at the top was a big blowzy woman with orange hair and a huge pair of knockers.
"Ah, is you," she said to Darren. "You come with me, please."
She turned and went through a nearby door. They followed her into a dingy, malodorous bedroom with mouldering wallpaper and a cracked windowpane. Lying on the bed was an extremely corpulent middle-aged man wearing a complicated piece of bondage gear with many chains and leather straps. His wrists and ankles were chained to the iron bedstead, all the chains looping back to meet at a heavy padlock over his navel. He had a thick leather gag in his mouth from which muffled sounds were emerging. His face was flushed and his eyes were bulging.
The blowzy woman gestured at him. "I find him like this. He pay for two days. Been here two days now, no more rent. He go now. You take chains off."
Darren burst out laughing. "Who left him like this?"
"Girl bring him here. She go first night, she take key I think. I ask him but he does not say." She removed the gag. "Where is key?" she shouted at the man.
There was a torrent of splenetic German. The woman shook her head at it uncomprehendingly for a while and then muffled it by putting the gag back into place.
"You see, he cannot speak, only German. I look for key but I do not think is here. You are car thief, yes? You pick lock."
Darren examined the padlock and shook his head. "I can't do anything with that."
"He must go now. Here two days, no more rent. Smell badly. He go to toilet on bed, German pig. This very respectable hotel, he not stay here no more."
"You'll have to get a locksmith."
"I will not pay for locksmith. German pig must pay. Must pay for sheets also."
"Well where's his wallet?"
The woman waved a hand at a pigskin wallet lying on the dresser. "No money in wallet or I take it for rent. Girl has taken it, I think."
Darren went and looked in the wallet.
"Fucking hell, Bets! What do you mean, no money? Fuck, man, it's full of travellers' cheques and credit cards."
Betsy frowned thoughtfully. "He must sign cheques?"
"I'll sign the cheques. I'll forge his signature. I'll cash these tomorrow and we'll split the money, yeah?"
Betsy looked doubtful. "He go to police?"
"Will he fuck. Look at this stuff in his wallet, he's a respectable fucking businessman with a wife and kids at home, he's not gonna make a noise about this. Anyway, you can always say the girl took them. You're only taking what's rightfully yours."
"Okay. You get money, then I get locksmith."
"Well, you'd better feed him and give him a drink at least."
"Yes, I suppose I feed him," said Betsy reluctantly. She suddenly gave a machine-gun burst of laughter and patted the German affectionately. "Maybe I keep him. Quiet guest, well-behaved. Does not trash room, does not keep animals. But smells badly."
They left the room and she closed the door on the trussed German, who grunted and writhed and bulged his eyes apoplectically.
Darren nodded at Kevin. "This is me mate Kevin from England. He wants a room."
Betsy put her hands on her hips and looked Kevin over thoroughly. Kevin did the same to her, without putting his hands on his hips, and decided that rarely if ever had he seen a more monstrous hag.
"You staring at my breasts, English boy?" said Betsy.
"No," said Kevin hastily.
"You want to look at them?"
There was nothing that Kevin wanted less but before he could indicate this she had taken her outsize and flabby mammaries out of the loose silken top she was wearing. She waved them around a bit, cackled, and put them away again.
"Big, yes? Okay, I give you room." She scratched her head thoughtfully then pointed a thumb towards the door they had just come through. "You want his room when he go?"
"Not really."
"I change sheets."
"I need a room for two people." By now Kevin was fairly sure he'd rather sleep in a sewer than stay in this place but wasn't sure how to phrase this politely.
"Two people? Okay, I give you attic room. Penthouse suite, plenty good."
They went up two more flights of stairs. Betsy unlocked a door at the top and they entered the attic room. It was quite big albeit with the ceiling sloping down almost to the floor on both sides. There was a bed on either side just beneath where the ceiling met the wall. That was it for furniture apart from a packing crate in the middle of the room on which was an ashtray. In the wall that formed the face of the prism there was a grimy double window looking out onto the rooftops beyond. All along the apex of the ceiling and down the flex of the naked light bulb was a network of rope-thick cobwebs about which huge hairy shapes were scuttling. The bare floorboards were covered in dust and lying near the packing crate was the body of a very large rodent or small marsupial. Betsy tutted and picked this last up by its tail and flung it down the stairs.
"Is good, yes? Presidential suite. President come to this hotel, he stay here. Price is one hundred guilders per week. You pay now."
"I'm not sure," said Kevin. "You see my friend is out looking for somewhere too, and, er, he'd need to see it first at least."
"You waste my fucking time?" said Betsy angrily.
"No, it's just that-"
"You want room or not?"
Hands on hips again, scowling angrily, and standing between him and the door, Betsy cut quite an intimidating figure. Her arms were extremely muscular and, although it could just have been a trick of the shadows, she seemed badly in need of a shave.
"It's fucking cheap, that, for a double for a week," said Darren. "Come on, mate, we'll have a buzz together here."
"All right, I'll take it." He supposed it would do for now anyway. He counted out some guilders which Betsy snatched up instantly.
"Okay," she said handing him the key. "Your room now. This respectable hotel, you treat with respect. You no trash room and you no keep animals. And no throw rubber johnnies about. You throw rubber johnnies about, I kick your fucking heads in. Okay. Have nice stay. You want hash, opium, coke, clean girl, you come see me." She went.
Darren passed Kevin the remnants of his joint, sat down on a bed and started to skin up again. "Well, it's better than that prison cell, anyway," he said. "Fucking hell, what a crack meeting you again. You fucking saved me life in there with that weed and them cigs." He frowned. "Fucking funny thing. You won't fucking believe this. You know you read me that letter from me bird in Blackpool? Well she never came back. No-one's heard from her since."
"No," said Kevin. "Really?"
"No fucking sight nor sound of her. I reckon she heard about me getting nicked again and it did her head in. But I mean, she fucking loved me, man, you read the letter."
"How strange."
Kevin went to collect Forbes. On the way out he saw the skanky prostitute in leopardskin was sitting on Call-me-Keith's lap grinning at him and wriggling while Call-me-Keith tried to push her off.
Forbes was in the other hash bar looking agitated.
"Did you find anywhere?" asked Kevin.
"No."
"Well I did."
"I did get a couple of addresses," said Forbes as they walked back along the darkening streets, "but one place was full up and the other was a shithole. What's this place like?"
"It's got character. Maybe we'd better skin up again before you see it."
When they went in Call-me-Keith was being pinned against the wall by a big man in a leather jacket who was saying "You give me money," in Schwarzenegger tones while the skanky whore swore at Call-me-Keith in Dutch.
"Oh, my God," groaned Forbes. "What den of lowlives is this?"
On the way up Kevin could not resist opening the door of the German's room to show Forbes what lay beyond.
"This is the recreation room," he said.
"Oh, my God."
They went into the attic room to find Darren pissing out of the open window onto the alley below.
He turned and grinned at Forbes. "A'right, mate."
"This is Darren," said Kevin. "He used to share a cell with me."
The three of them proceeded to skin up for the next six hours solid.
"Who's that deep-bosomed redheaded floozy behind the bar?" asked Forbes at one point. "She looks like a bit of hot stuff."
This caused Darren to giggle almost to the point of asphyxia.
"Yeah, you get in with Betsy, lad," he panted eventually. "Betsy's all woman. There'd be something to hang onto, anyway."
At another point Forbes said:
"What's the rent in this dive, anyway?"
"A hundred guilders a week," said Kevin.
"A hundred guilders?" screeched Forbes in disbelief. "That's four hundred pounds!" He leapt to his feet and started to pace up and down the room clutching his head and yelling, "Four hundred pounds! Four hundred pounds! How could you? No, no, we're ruined!" Kevin eventually managed to calm him down and get it through to him that it was only forty pounds, although only after a lengthy period during which, heart pounding with panic, he was swept along in the hysteria himself and, unable to work out the exchange rate in his present condition and unsure how much of the money from his dad's cheque Forbes had handed him that morning, was convinced he had given Betsy four hundred quid.
Some time after this had been sorted out and everyone had mellowed out again, Kevin said:
"We should go and get some fresh air."
Forbes proposed finding a bar and Darren a tour of the red light district. It was agreed that they should at least leave the room. At this point, however, Kevin discovered that he had lost the use of his legs. So instead Darren went and retrieved the dead rat and dropped it on Kevin. A dead rat fight ensued.
Shortly after this Kevin's lungs, heart and brain went the same way as his legs and he found himself lying full-length on the floor panting sickly and staring into the beady black eyes of the rat, scant inches from his own eyes. He became convinced that the rat still had a bit of go left in it yet and for some time found himself unable to take his eyes off it or even blink.
By about the same point Forbes was draped limply out the window, groaning, "Ohh, God," and vomiting sporadically into the alley. Darren kept going on his own for about an hour, like a toy with Duracell batteries in the adverts, gabbling away ten to the dozen and appearing not to notice that both his audience were clinically dead. Eventually he said goodnight and went down to the room he shared with Call-me-Keith. Shortly afterwards Forbes slid down from the window and crawled very slowly onto a bed. By degrees, Kevin managed to pull himself onto the other bed, still staring the rat out until he made it. They lay there groaning and whimpering.
"Am I hallucinating," said Forbes after a while, staring fixedly upwards, "or are there tarantulas on the ceiling?"
"There are tarantulas on the ceiling."
"Jesus fucking Christ on a bike," groaned Forbes, "with Gautama blasted Buddha in the sidecar. Monstrous bloodsucking arachnids on the ceiling, and the Giant Rat of Sumatra on the floorboards. And a mattress that smells like it's been fucked by a herd of bulls. Congratulations. You could not have found a more uninhabitable cackhole if you'd tried."
"I know."
"And far be it from me to question your enthusiasm for feasting with panthers, but surely Darren is a dreadful person? Isn't he likely to slit our gizzards and steal our money and whatever organs he can sell?"
"He's all right."
"Wherever did you meet such a person?"
"In jail."
"Oh yes." Forbes groaned again. "We really must eat properly tomorrow."
"Good idea."
After a while Kevin lurched unsteadily to his feet, breaking out in a hot flush as he acclimatized himself to an upright position, and staggered downstairs. By means of stumbling about the house knocking on doors and trying the handles when there was no answer, he eventually succeeded in locating a very small bathroom on the first floor. There was a sink inhabited by a number of tiny spiders and a colony of pubes and a small bath in which a dead body had recently been dissolved in not enough acid. Kevin ran the cold water tap of the sink and started to splash icy water on his face.
Just then Betsy came in; he had neglected to lock the door. Betsy grunted at Kevin and Kevin smiled uneasily back. Betsy lifted up the toilet seat, hitched up her skirt, and started to urinate with a big sigh of relief.
Kevin looked away. Replaying the event afterwards he realized that by this point his eyes had seen what there was to see but his brain had refused to process it. All he knew was that there was something wrong with the picture. Then he had it. Betsy was urinating standing up. He looked back. Betsy was pointing a penis at the toilet.
Betsy grinned at him.
"You staring at my penis, English boy? Big, yes?"
Almost without transition Kevin found himself vomiting into the sink.
"You clean that up, English pig," said Betsy, putting her dick away and leaving.
Chapter 12
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