Anita
By winking_tiger
- 911 reads
'Well
sweetie, I cannot believe you are leaving me. You have always been
here?'
In the yearbook there is a picture of you. It is my
memory of your face. On the inside of the hardback front cover and the
following page you have written in your best curly writing, two pages
of our time together, a collection of memories edited for humour and
affection. Remember when?I stop myself. I close the book. Even after
eight years it is still an open sore, the agony of goodbye debilitates
me, makes me weak and breathless. But I am going to do this because it
is all I have. The only part of you I can physically touch. I open the
book again and start to read. 'Mijn beste Knorreltje' you have written
to begin. An inside joke as we both knew your Dutch was minimal, but I
had taught you the names of the characters from Winne the Pooh and you
found opportunities to use them in almost every situation. So I was
piglet, at least here, in my yearbook, the summer of 1995.
0pt">
'Remember our lovely games of pool followed by a late
night cup of tea in the Kings Ice Caf??'
King's Ijs Caf? opened on the road in to town. We would seek refuge in
the clinical whiteness of the ice cream parlour and then avoid the
afternoon at school by spending it in the pool hall, Fortuna's
Poolgarden, next door. Sometimes we played for money, but mostly we
played to pass the time. You would stroll confidently to the bar in
your green three quarter length jacket and order our drinks, even
though we were only fourteen and the pool hall was for over sixteen's.
Our pile of coats and jumpers were discarded on a chair next to the cue
rack as we set up trick shots and practised until our talent for
getting the balls in the pockets exceeded the knowledge of the maths
and science lessons they replaced. When we did go to the lessons, we
were often sent out of class halfway through, like that time when you,
me and Annie Catnik were sticking post it notes on to peoples back's
during Mr Waanders' explanation of electricity.
style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">'We both feared Mr
Waanders all through EMS2. Remember when you me and Annie got sent out
of science class for sticking post it notes on people's backs?'
class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm
0pt">
We battled for straight faces as he came outside to
tell us what we already knew, that it was a pointless waste of
everyone's time, it was childish and disruptive. He hadn't found the
note on his back. Annie Catnik was probably to blame for that
particular incident. Remember on the way to the sports ground one day,
when she tried to kill herself by standing in front of a train? The
bells went off and the barriers started to come down and she walked
calmly to the middle of the track and stood there watching the train
getting nearer. And we were screaming from the barriers for her to
move, but she didn't. She never even flinched. It was damn lucky for
her that the train was going slow enough on its approach into the
station that it could stop in time. The driver got out and shouted at
her but she just walked away laughing and calling to us that God hadn't
wanted her to die. A few months later and her father moved his family
along to his next posting and she was gone forever, again.
0pt">
People were always disappearing forever again from our
lives and their own. We lived on the beach of a constant unending ocean
of people that washed new friends up on our shore and carried old
favourites away with the tide. Nothing was fixed or reliable. You could
only be truly sure of one thing, that it was not going to last.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">
0pt">
The day you arrived in school was the first day back
after the summer holidays. Your accent was loud and brash and American,
your clothes the latest fashions with the best labels, your manner was
practised confidence, but your eyes were those of a rabbit facing a
pack of hungry dogs. I kept my distance to begin with. I watched you
from across the classroom, across the hallway, across the street. I saw
what you ate, what you wore, where you went after school. Then one day
in October, Mrs. Noble, the English teacher paired us off for an
assignment on 'Flowers For Algernon' and that was it. We spent weeks
reading our thoughts into a tape recorder, taking it in turns to say
every other word of the introduction and cackling madly when we got it
wrong. You laughed at my collection of colourful socks and I couldn't
believe you still had a sylvanian family dolls house. You lent me all
your cds and educated me in the fine art of American horror movies. I
introduced you to riding a bike the Dutch way and showed you around the
town.
It was your big brother who introduced us to the town
at night though; I take no credit for that. Your father being away a
lot meant that you and Hemant had the house to yourselves most of the
time and so every weekend I would get my dad to drop me at your front
door with my clothes and shoes in a bag. Karroesel was the bar where
everyone from school went in the evenings. It had a life size Native
American made of brightly painted wood in the entrance and a large
Amstel beer sign that dimly lit the white wall outside like a fading
moon. Sometimes we played pool on the table in the back bar and
sometimes we just sat around in the corners getting speedily less sober
and trying to smoke. The interior was heavily wooded, like sitting in
the hollow of an enormous old tree. You and I, although chaperoned by
Hemant and his friends, would more often than not miss the midnight bus
back to yours and then have to walk through the back streets to the
train station and try to find a taxi. We were never afraid although
looking back on it we should have been. It seemed that as long as we
were together then everything would work out.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">
0pt">
'Remember eating all the ribs to please the cook in
Brugge? Everyone was so cruel to the cook. Remember Sasha putting a
banana peel in the applesauce and Mrs. Noble finding it?'
0pt">
The school trip in the second year was to Brugge, or
Bruges as they call it here. The teachers planned it with the guise of
improving our Dutch, but really it was a holiday to Belgium. Already a
family to each other, our class had no fear about travelling the few
hours on the bus and staying for the week in the huge crumbling manor
house that tried to be a youth hostel. The house was held together with
paint and mildew and it smelled very much like a forgotten pond. There
were four rooms for us, two for the girls and two for the boys. Each
room was full of metal-framed bunk beds with suspiciously stained bed
linen. On the second day we were there, the boys were having a water
fight in their room and Gulraj fell through the window and on to the
flat roof of the back porch. Apart from a few cuts on his hands and
face, he was miraculously alright. The replacement window however was
not alright. As a punishment, we believed, they changed their cook so
for the rest of the week our food was largely inedible. Sasha, being
class clown, hid a banana peel in the punch bowl of applesauce on our
table. Mrs Noble having been tipped off, marched over, rolled her
sleeve up to her skinny elbow and plunged a hand into the bowl. We held
our breath, looking nervously to each other as she felt around with a
scowl on her birdy face. She pulled the banana skin from the bowl, put
it on a plate and said nothing.
style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">We went roller blading, indoor skiing,
rock climbing, but we also toured the city, went to a natural power
plant and sailed the river of love with a guide who dressed confusingly
like Elvis. On the day that we toured the city, the kermis was in town.
All day we nagged and begged and whined to the teachers to be allowed
to go. They gave in because it turned out that they wanted to go as
much as we did. We had to wait for Mr Waanders to finish his go on the
Terminator before we could get on the bus home.
style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">That year was my
favourite school year, everything felt settled, I was looking forward
to starting my IGCSEs in the third year and you were there, my best
friend. For your birthday, I bought you a mini gum ball machine. We sat
and chewed our way through evenings, weekends and movies always ending
up with a pile of white gum balls because neither of us liked the white
ones. Sour polished snow balls. We saved them for my neighbour Ed. It
was a running joke that I was stalking Ed and spent many an afternoon
with binoculars on my face disguised as a bird in the big tree over
looking his house.
'Remember Mr. Nietzman calling you piglet and our whole
table getting an essay on Willem de Koning for talking too much?'
0pt">
We were always talking, non-stop, all day, talking. Mr.
Nietzman was an artist who had never wanted to teach. He hid grumpily
behind his bear like beard and hair, trying to inspire a love of
painting in the class by using endless slides and gesturing
emphatically in the semi darkness. His classroom was in the attic of
the oldest building in the school and could only be reached by one tiny
and very steep staircase. When you did get to the room it was a forest
of easels and canvases so crossing the room demanded the skill of an
acrobat. You and I shared a love of art, but unfortunately for Bill
Nietzman, our love of talking seemed stronger. One unusually raucous
conversation pushed his patience as far as it could go and he gave us
an essay to do on a painter we'd never heard of. The word count of
which doubled when you asked him who Willem de Koning was. He was
Bill's favourite painter.
style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt">I sit with the yearbook open on my lap
and run my fingers over your curved black words feeling the bumps and
dips in the paper. I remember the day you wrote those words, during a
biology lesson on reproduction. I can see your big brown eyes hiding
behind your shiny black hair. You are wearing a grey and white checked
shirt that was once your brother's and a pair of faded jeans that are
turned up to reveal black caterpillar boots. The boots are three sizes
too big for you but your father gets them free from work in one size
only. And you are smiling. You are always smiling. We used to write to
each other all the time, every week, every month, then less frequently,
until now it has become a sporadic correspondence by email typed in
rare spare moments. You are in New York at Drama College, which is what
you always said you were going to do. I have no doubt that one day I'll
be sitting in the cinema and there on the big screen will be you and
your smile.
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