Arrival

It seemed to Carmen, as her taxi charged off the highway, that she may have made a mistake. Her mouth had been dry since getting off the plane and just now she had noticed how white knuckles were from grasping onto the greasy door handle. Whether these symptoms were born from elation or fear of what lay on the other side of the taxi-door, Carmen was uncertain. The morning was early, and a usual greyness hung in the air, a greyness that always seems to carry the chance of rain. She peered into the rear view mirror, all hints of the airport and the highway and her old home, amongst gum trees and white-washed coastal suburbia, were long gone behind her.

You didn’t even buy a ticket home…anxiety punched her in the gut, and she forced the thought out of her head. A rogue bus screamed past them. Twenty-three years it had been since she had driven through Amsterdam-Zuid, the towering dark magenta-brick student housing blocks, although more swollen with the spirits of time long past than it was before, it had not aged a minute. Her free hand worked to prise out the gathered laughter lines around the corners of her eyes and smooth out the creases on her cheeks. It was true, Carmen had aged, and it was because of her lack of sleep, but she had become used sleeping restlessly between two bodies. The taxi halted at a forked cobbled street, he veered left. For twenty-three years she had slept within her ‘home’ body…and for twenty-three years, when the house was quiet, she would devour the authors that they had loved….Pico Lyer, Alain de Botton and Freya Stark. It connected her to ‘there’ and to him. Perhaps it was because of the lack of sleep that she had aged so badly, and the added guilt that ate at her neck for never allowing her husband to know of her secret affairs.

As the city grew thicker, the taxi seemed to smell stronger of sour coffee and damp leather. Her eyes fluttered to the source of the smell. The driver, goat-faced and solemnly chewing on a toothpick, began to snake his way through the back streets of Zuid, that rolled and bled into each other. The taxi carried them over the bridge, the Nieuwe Amstelbrug, one that she rode across many times, usually on the weekends, sitting on the lap of a tall, blonde boy called Claude. While he peddled synchronously on his yellow bicycle, she would hold onto his neck and laugh and deliver sips of red wine, straight from the bottle, to his kind, cherub lips. She had a good, deep love for that colour yellow. The bridge had been left graceless, a mangled mess of trash interrupted their path and Carmen wondered what had ever happened to his bicycle? One thing was for certain, the bridge certainly did not have the same affect from the rotten confines of the stale taxi as it did from over his shoulder. She didn’t plan to see him this time.

Around them, the buildings grew taller, cobble stones replaced the tarmac and the passers by began to walk with more direction and swagger. He had walked like that, in olive green corduroys and tight-teeshirt, even the way he used to pull up outside her apartment and ring his bicycle bell because he knew that every time, like clockwork, she would step onto the street and greet him. The taxi came to a halt at a narrow pedestrian crossing. The driver rolled down his window, probably to spit his toothpick on the road but Carmen didn’t even notice. In a rush of crisp winter breath, harbour stench and marijuana, the city welcomed her. As the green man burst to life, the crossing erupted into a sea of vintage clothing, mullet-cuts and psychedelic sunglasses, they came on boot-clad foot or on colourful, thin, low-riding bicycles. As the ocean of thoughtfully and beautifully commodified pedestrians paraded in front of her, Carmen felt them trampling on the bones of her old life; the life where she would sit all day in the soft afternoon light and resent what was and dwell on what could be. That life was long overdue for departure. Her knuckles loosened on the greasy door handle and Carmen, with grace and ceremony pulled on an old skin as she arrived in her new world. The ancient canals opened their arms and bore the taxi alongside the ferry-boats that were full of weary eye’d travellers, bright, bubbling families, ultramodern women, those with briefcases and of course the genuinely lost. Cafe’s began to blossom in-between the ancient canal houses, offering a seat, where you could lay back and watch the world, and write and sit and smoke in the cold sunlight. The taxi moved on, weaving seamlessly through the warren of bookstores, flea markets, flower bazaars and rows upon rows of perfectly parked bicycles. The blue, early morning sunlight held her cheek in its warm hands, an old youth had eclipsed her. As the taxi moved forward into the deepest part of the city, courts and terraces and landings smothered the cobble stones, this maze of apartment blocks, canal houses, cafes, and misleading alley ways did not always follow the rule of ‘right-angled streets’, and any route that you took rather unapologetically bled and mingled in the mouth of the red-light district. Carmen was again surrounded by music, and laughter, and the ebbing darkness. It was always somewhere like here, on Nieuwe Hoogstraat or another street that promised excitement, that she and her lover in the olive green corduroys had together dipped into the sudden, bustling evening and devoured the wonders of the red night. The taxi continued to crawl. They passed row upon row of lawn ornaments and chained fences that stood to guide unknowing travellers, who without them would likely disappear into the forest of developments, narrow bicycle paths and balconies.

‘We have arrived’, a low, thick accent broke Carmen’s thought. The taxi driver faced her, oily black hair poking out from under his cap like a pair of grotesque horns, hand already outstretched, gesturing to her backpack. A choir of authors, most of them she had read before, gave warning in their drawling poetic genius that once she paid her fair and opened the taxi door, there would be no reaching her old life again. She paid the driver in cash.

With her destination to her right, Carmen arched her neck to look; the city centre glistened with terror and promise. Across the road, she spotted a man walking towards her, guiding with him a yellow bicycle. He rang his bell and like clockwork,

Carmen stepped out of the car.