13: AMSTERDAM WITHOUT A BAEDEKER

  Kevin and Ingrid talked for the next week solid. The first day had set the pattern for what was to follow. Most afternoons they would go round museums and galleries together. At first Kevin thought he was only putting up with this for the sake of Ingrid but he soon found he was enjoying the experience for itself, although being with her was undoubtedly the best part of it all. Under her tutelage he found himself appreciating works of art he would not otherwise have got anything out of. He got off, as Darren would have put it, on some of the stuff, notably Vermeers and Jan Steens and Rembrandts, without any coaching at all, and only wished Ingrid didn't feel the need to analyze them quite so much.
   One day, however, they went round a gallery specializing in modern art, and Kevin decided he would have been unable to enjoy it even if he and Ingrid had danced a naked lambada around the place. To his slight disappointment he found Ingrid appeared to be getting as much out of it as she had out of the paintings by real people. His subservience reflex was taxed to the limit in trying to echo her enthusiasm and if she hadn't been wearing a particularly low-cut and tight-fitting top that day he might even have found it in him to disagree with her or at least question her opinions.
  He was particularly dismayed when they went into a room devoted to an exhibition of pieces by the noted French prick Leon and she was in raptures over that. Leon worked, if that was the word, in a variety of mediums. For a start there were several paintings. Some of them were intended to depict actual things and were no worse in execution than the majority of paintings five year old kids sent in to Children's BBC. There was actually one picture which Kevin at first thought was of Edd the Duck but which Ingrid said was a portrait of one of Leon's girlfriends. Some of the paintings were not meant to be of anything and were no more meaningless and aesthetically displeasing than most of the other pieces of non-representational art Kevin had seen. Then there was a series of black-and-white photographs of the same female pudenda viewed from different angles; Ingrid said these were also portraits of one of Leon's girlfriends. "He has managed to capture her essence," she said. He has managed, thought Kevin, to take pictures of her quim.
  In the middle of the room a piece of performance art designed by Leon was going on, which Ingrid thought was either a comment on the bizarre cultural juxtapositions of the modern world or a comment on the wastefulness of Western society or both. A man dressed as a clown was picking various objects off a table - pieces of fruit, slices of cake, dead chickens, pieces of uncooked liver, and pages torn from books, newspapers, magazines and comics - and placing them several at a time in a food blender. He would then activate the blender for a few seconds and then empty the resulting mulch into a bin, then repeat the process with more food and literature. Meanwhile a man dressed as a down and out kept trying to take the food from the table and the clown stopped him and pushed him away. It was only after a couple of gallery guards came and escorted the tramp out that Ingrid and Kevin realized he was not part of the installation after all but a real tramp who really wanted to eat the food. Ingrid said Leon would be delighted by the irony when she told him.
  There were a number of installations ranged around the room mounted on pedestals or inside glass cases. One of them consisted of a copy of a romantic novel with a small insect placed on top of it. This was entitled Pubic Louse No.1. Kevin could see no sign of pubic lice bearing other numbers anywhere around and wondered if they had escaped. Then there was a display of Mr. Potato Heads that Leon had made entitled Potatoes 1, 2 & 3. Ingrid thought this might be saying something about inherited characteristics and individuality. Kevin suggested Leon might be trying to say that potatoes were people too. Privately he thought that Leon was trying to say that he was a talentless twat with no purpose on the earth and that someone should shoot him. There was a tableau of plasticine figurines of people, as a child might make them, with sausages for limbs and a ball for a head and blobs for eyes and nose. Ingrid said this was a comment on the malleability of human nature and the fact that everyone was made from the same clay. There was a row of gingerbread men, one of which had a leg missing; possibly this was intentional or perhaps the tramp had eaten it. There was also a TV showing a piece of video art, a ten minute montage of film of car crashes, mushroom clouds and trains arriving at Auschwitz, sometimes running backwards, intercut with excerpts from Tom and Jerry and shots of a man painted up for Japanese No theatre stroking an armadillo and looking sinister. The soundtrack featured eerie electronic music when the cartoons or the armadillo were on and I Am The Captain of the Pinafore when the footage of Auschwitz or H-Bombs was on. Ingrid said this was probably an essay on decontextualization and pronounced the whole exhibition to be delightfully subversive.
  After the museums and the galleries they would go back to Ingrid's flat where the usual debating squad would be gathered, and Ingrid would be promptly snatched away from him, usually by Jan, and Kevin would swiftly find himself bogged down in high-minded talk again. For years Kevin had wanted to meet someone with whom he could discuss the sort of things they discussed there, but with Ingrid's friends he often found it a royal pain in the arse, largely because of the deadly earnestness, didacticism and pedantry they brought to bear on things, partly, no doubt, just because they weren't Ingrid and were therefore cluttering up the room. As time went by he came to find a sterile repetition in many of the arguments. He could still be provoked or intrigued on occasion, but increasingly he tried to spend as much time as possible talking to Rollo. As well as pop music Rollo was eager to discuss television programmes, particularly Australian soap operas; he got English TV on cable at his place.
  "My favourite character in Neighbours is Annalise," Rollo enthused happily one day. "Annalise - rowrrr! I am liking to do naughty things with Annalise I am thinking. Who are your favourite characters in Heartbreak High, please?"
  Kevin looked around to make sure no-one else was listening. "Con, Rivers, and Mr. Southgate," he murmured. "But if you tell any of these lot we talked about this I'll smash your teeth in."
  Rollo grinned. "Okey-doke, will be our little secret." Kevin liked Rollo.
  But for every five minutes he managed to spend discussing important things with Rollo he had to spend an hour talking about life and death with the rest of them. "To no longer exist is not the same as to never have existed." "Even if you had just got back from there, you could not adequately prove the existence of New York to me." "Capitalism must be brought to the Third World before true socialism can begin there. You cannot bypass a stage of the dialectical process." "If used correctly suicide can be a positive act of rebellion. The most perfect suicide note would be a blank piece of paper. Even then it might be misinterpreted." "There is no purely aesthetic criterion to say that an extermination camp could not be a valid artistic statement." This last from Leon.
  All of this might have been less unbearable if he had at least been able to skin up. He couldn't even have a drink; Ingrid frowned on alcohol. She didn't mind him smoking cigs but disapproved of the brand he smoked as it was owned by a multinational conglomerate that exploited the Third World. He had changed his brand immediately.
  The pretence of being passionately committed to every worthwhile cause was often hard work. Kevin reflected that every time he got close to a girl it was in the guise of a character not his own. He had been Garfield when Veronica had been so thoughtful to him and Godwin Jessup when he had made such a splash with Agnes. Garfield was probably a closer approximation to his true character than whoever it was he was supposed to be now. It wasn't exactly that he didn't really give two fucks about anything, he thought, just that he was certain he'd never be able to do anything about any of the bad things in the world. Neither he nor, he reckoned, any of these lot, nor in fact anyone else he knew or had ever met, would ever be, to use one of their favourite words, empowered. This consideration alone served to make the political talk, the endless arguments about how, when, and along what lines they would reorganize society, almost more unbearable than the Zen talk or Leon's art talk. How, he would think, in this city of weed and fleshly delight, the twin mecca of the pothead and the sexually starved, had he come to be spending his time with a bunch of puritan bores who thought they were going to save or overthrow Western civilization?
  But then every night, just when he thought he could take no more, Ingrid would come and take him by the hand - inevitably giving him an anticipatory erection - and lead him into her bedroom for a good long one-on-one talk session. With Ingrid the talk was always exhilarating, probably just because it was with her, but due to the qualities of her remarkable mind as much as her remarkable body. While their conversations would hark back to themes they had touched on in previous nights, or sometimes pick up at the point they had broken off the morning before, they were never repetitious. They were thought-creating and cross-fertilizing rather than mere exchanges of information or comparisons of viewpoints. Moreover, Ingrid could often even genuinely inspire him with her political passions; for a time he would find himself half believing that this girl really could change the world. Her excitement about art and literature was even more infectious. Best of all was the feeling he got when he could tell that he was stimulating her.
  If the talk with Ingrid ever did become slightly wearying it was when, as occasionally happened, it became mired for a time in some abstruse theory of modern art or political or philosophical sophistry. But then always there were her breasts, dangled before him scant inches away like some ripe exotic fruit that was his for the taking, cleavage visible in the low-cut or half-unbuttoned tops she wore, more so when she leaned towards him to make a point, and nipples distending the fabric, and, oh, God, her face, her eyes raptly intent on his as she sought to explain some point or follow what he was saying, lips parted slightly when she was eager to speak again and stretching out into her stomach-warming smile when she was delighted by his agreement or his quickness to understand something or some sharp comparison he had made or new thought he had provided her with, and, Jesus, her bare thighs spread beneath her and pointing towards him and pointing him towards the centre of her body and, oh, God...
  They would talk the night away and at five o'clock she would light a cigarette and tell him to go home.
  Ingrid sometimes had lectures in the afternoons. During these hours Kevin would go to the library or consult Forbes to bone up on topics she had mentioned the night before so he could be ready for her if they came up again and to provide ammunition for his own salvoes.
  Forbes, after an initial fit of pique at the cosmic injustice of Kevin rather than him being picked up by a Camus-fixated intellectual chick with the body of a centrefold, and then a protracted sulk because he was neglecting him to be with her, found the whole situation as described by Kevin hilarious.
  "There's a similar character in Huxley's Point Counter Point," he said. "A woman who uses her fabulous breasts to ensnare men into endless conversations. I'm so glad that I have conquered passion, more or less. It used to be horrible to be in thrall to a creature I invariably knew to be less intelligent than myself. But my right hand never tries to read me my horoscope or tell me that Sylvia Plath died for my sins, or, as in your case, tell me about Marxist literary theory. You realize, of course, that you have absolutely no hope of going to bed with her?"
  Kevin was indeed fast losing this hope. He occasionally wondered whether he should try to snog her or declare his passion or something; on the whole he thought not. She had shown no indication of liking him that way and one night had remarked, apropos of not very much really, "Sexual impulses are a terrible distraction from the important matters of the mind, don't you think?" Kevin, who had spent the last ten minutes failing to stop himself from looking at her bosom when he should have been listening to what she was saying about Andre Malraux, had to agree.
  On the other hand, one morning at the end of another of their Homeric conversations, she had said regarding him thoughtfully after her first drag on her cigarette, "How long are you staying in Amsterdam?"
  "I don't know," Kevin replied. "Until my friend's money runs out, I suppose."
  "You must get a job here," said Ingrid firmly. "Many hotels take on English staff. Then you will be able to stay here and we will continue to be together. That will be good. Yes?"
  "Yes." So now Kevin was looking for a job.
  It seemed most probable, though, that she merely regarded him as one of her courtiers, of which there were many. All of the males among the debaters except the homosexual and at least one of the girls (happily not Eve who lived there) were Kevin's rivals for Ingrid's affection. Jan and Leon in particular were obvious and unremitting and unbearably oleaginous in their attentions to her. Leon already had a girlfriend in tow, a rather pretty but bedraggled and dejected-looking girl named Asta whom he treated like shit. Kevin had once heard him tell her - the whole room, in fact, had probably heard him tell her - that she was a pathetic insect without a fraction of Ingrid's intelligence and vitality, a rebuke which Asta had accepted meekly, even apologetically. Kevin had also been nearby when Leon had cornered Ingrid in the kitchen one night and told her: "I do not respond to beauty. I respond only to ugliness and disease. But I think you could change that for me." Ingrid had half-smiled and half-frowned and started to talk about the political implications of aestheticism. To Kevin's eyes Leon was reassuringly hideous and weedy, but Rollo had told him that he exerted a hypnotic power over women and had had a string of beautiful and usually rich girlfriends while keeping Asta in his thrall for months. Asta was an heiress and paid for Leon's studio and apartment in a highly desirable part of town.
  "They respond to the force of his passion I am told," said Rollo. "Or maybe he is hung like donkey."
  Even Rollo fawned over Ingrid, sprawling at her feet and looking up at her with dog-like devotion and saying things like, "We make a revolution soon, yes, Ingrid? You will lead us?" She would smile affectionately and pat him on the head. Thankfully, this was the most affection she had shown anyone; she treated them all with the same asexual friendliness mixed with austere intellectual rigour which was all she had shown Kevin so far.
  Kevin for his part got back at them all, except for Rollo, for fancying her by scornfully attacking them and all they held most dear when conversing with them when Ingrid was not nearby. In particular, he was fond of telling Leon to get a job. With Jan, who was by way of being a revolutionary firebrand, he espoused extreme right-wing views in order to rile him and hopefully kill him with an apoplexy. He was very careful never to do this when Ingrid was within earshot but Jan snitched on him one day. That night in her bedroom she confronted him.
  "Jan says that you said that unemployed people should be made to pull rickshaws."
  "I was making a joke with Jan."
  "Ah, jokes."
  Kevin fantasized from time to time about letting Forbes loose on Ingrid's friends. In practice, though, he had been careful not to let Forbes get anywhere near Ingrid's place and not let Ingrid get anywhere near Betsy's. If his two lives were to collide it was all over. One day, however, Kevin and Ingrid bumped into Forbes in the street while they were en route to a museum. Kevin considered pretending not to know Forbes but before he could do so Forbes had introduced himself to Ingrid and said he'd heard a lot about her, and the next thing he knew the three of them were going for a coffee together.
  This turned out to be very nearly as disastrous as Kevin had anticipated. Forbes had at least not skinned up or attempted to implicate Kevin in drug abuse. He had, however, advanced several of his more Blimpish opinions within a very short space of time and with very little provocation. Freud's theory of penis envy had also made an unasked-for appearance. When Ingrid had argued with him he had merely sneered at her mockingly. With some difficulty Kevin had turned the conversation from politics and sociology and psychology to literary matters. This had not helped much.
  "I'm a big fan of Hemingway myself," said Forbes. "Do you like Hemingway?" he asked Ingrid.
  "Hemingway was a macho posturing, ah, what is that word, Kevin? - wanker."
  "Oh, I don't know," said Forbes. "I think he wrote and talked a lot of sense. For example, he said that silence is the best ornament of a woman."
  Ingrid rose. "We must go now, Kevin, or the museum will close," she said.
  "I went to see some sex shows last night, Kevin," said Forbes. "They were satisfyingly disgusting. One of them involved a terrapin."
  "I think you are a very rude person and not nice," Ingrid said to Forbes. "You think you are very clever but you are not."
  "I'm really really sorry about that," grovelled Kevin as they walked away. "He has a strange sense of humour. He's actually a very sweet person when you get to know him."
  "I do not like that boy at all," said Ingrid. "I do not think he is a nice person. He postures and pretends not to like foreigners and minority groups and the proletariat and women. He thinks it is amusing but these are not amusing subjects. He is someone who is playing with fire who does not know that fire burns, as your George Orwell said about someone else."
  Well my George Orwell could hardly have said it about Forbes, thought Kevin. He reflected that, whatever differences Forbes and Ingrid had, they had a lot in common in the way of gratuitous literary references.
  "I do not know why you are friends with such a person," said Ingrid.
  "He's more of an acquaintance, actually," said Kevin, feeling like a weasel but feeling that Forbes would have more claim on his loyalty when he looked as good in a white T-shirt and miniskirt as Ingrid.



Chapter 14
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