by
She finally decided on the nickname when, at some international swimming championship, a slightly built American girl called Sherrie Lingwood had humiliated the rest of the field – including her – with a time that made the front pages of the Amsterdam sports papers.
Table of Contents
SHERRIE
NOWAY
CAPTAIN
CATHERINE
MIA
WHEELCHAIR
VENUS21
MUSTAFA
WOLF
XAVIER
So there she was, Jolanda Bartels, aka Sherrie, in the full glory of her recently completed eighteen years, going home from school and then on to the gym, before running in the parks or along the canals that criss-cross her city and inspire its residents with improbable pretensions to vie with Venice.
In any case, the only people asleep at night are the elderly, the sick, the diligent and the dead, which for Jolanda are four aspects of the same category reflected in a single mirror. When her parents and her brother, two years her junior, have gone to bed, she leaves the house again and, jogging briskly along more out of spiritual compulsion than from any commitment to a training regime, she reaches the sports complex where at least four distinct clubs are based. And it was there that she learned how to use the Internet. The manager of the bar, which serves only non-alcoholic drinks and perversely protein-rich snacks, arranged for a computer to be installed so that his youthful patrons could keep in touch with other young people around the world.
Jolanda was a practical young woman, with a matter-of-fact attitude – shared by many other Dutch people – that sometimes tilts into intellectual brutality. She always passed her exams at school because she had a good memory but Shakespeare and essays on literature merely exasperated her. That was one reason why so many hours sacrificed in the gym served at least one purpose. No one in the school was faster at getting up in class, rifling through the notes, papers and tables of the cleverest student in the class, and returning to their desk with a look of offended innocence, as if they had never moved at all.
Jolanda began to explore the labyrinthine involutions of the World Wide Web. Not long after, she sent an email to a surf club in California. The pages of its website portrayed an earthly paradise reminiscent of TV commercials for soap powder. The protagonists live out their lives in an Eden where bad breath, eviction orders and spiritual angst are unknown, and a delicious soft focus swathes meek yet obviously sexy mums as they dress their twelve-year-olds that major advertising agencies have already made seriously wealthy. Jolanda’s first missive was in basic Internet English, couched in an artless jargon that would have seemed unambitious even for someone with serious learning difficulties. The reply was enthusiastic and came complete with a photo in which an instructor appeared naked on the Pacific shore, the surfboard under his arm carefully held aside to reveal his mahogany tan and a sexual organ that would have drawn admiring glances from even the most blasé of brothelkeepers.
"He's just an old man with an enormous cock," a girlfriend told her, echoing a phrase that seemed particularly apposite from a book by Charles Bukowsky. Then she stared briefly at Jolanda to see if her remark had struck home before turning back to examine the photo with the pitiless gaze of a teenager capable of crushing anyone over the age of twenty-five.
It was more or less at this time that Jolanda became Sherrie, or rather, it was around then that the surfer proposed a live conversation on a chatline. His name was Kevin Karp but on the Internet he was known by disappointingly unimaginative nickname inspired by his sporting activities, "Surfman". Observing the conventions of netiquette, he introduced himself with a brief account of his life, which nevertheless added little to what you could have found in the local registry office. He was forty-six, divorced with no children, and held five diplomas that qualified him as an instructor in five different sporting disciplines.
Sherrie was above all curious, particularly because of the bizarre nature of the encounter and Surfman’s age. He was six years older than her father. And while she was thinking about him - she was actually watering the garden one Saturday afternoon after her brother had done the job three times in a row - there came into her mind when she was least expecting it a slowly delivered monologue that English lessons at school had rendered hateful to her. It was "The Life and Death of King Richard the Third". Translating it from Shakespeare's impenetrable English had forced her to skip two sessions in the gym. From the confusion of names, phrases and metaphors there leapt to her eyes only a few words. King Richard has had an ominous dream on the eve of the crucial battle ….. spirits, evil presences and insolent ghosts have tormented him through the night …. and in the end, when he opens his eyes with a start, his brow beaded with a sweat portending misfortune beyond description, he utters a phrase without thinking, and which for that very reason cuts through the nocturnal mists ……. "Richard, loves Richard……"
Sherrie was intrigued by the passage, which may be an exhortation or perhaps is mere self-obsession. And so she slipped off her T-shirt, shorts and knickers, asked her willing brother to hose her down carefully, as if she was a particularly delicate flower, and then had him take an out-of-focus photo that would suggest exotic shores.
Sherrie: how did u like my pic?…. it’s me in Fuerteventura last summer… she told Surfman him after sending him the picture, in which the dissimulation foreshadows a desire she expects from Kevin.
Instinctively, guilelessly, she describes trees, flowers, shells, horses on beaches and days spent gathering fruit she has never actually seen, drawing his attention away from her nudity so that in fact her body will burn itself into his eyes like an iron branding a bull’s backside.
Then comes the phrase, the compliment after the magical moments of suspense bracketed by pressure on the enter key:
Surfman: WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i didn’t know u were so pretty….
Immediately, improbably, Kevin wanted to send her a picture which showed him standing next to the Californian surf champion. An excusable act of vanity, accepting the risk of comparison while selling what, after all, involves least cost.
The photo arrived. Kevin in bermuda shorts on the beach, his arm round a young man an inch or two taller than he is – the champion. The youngster is looking at the photographer with a world-weary smile, his canines sticking out slightly. He has the air of an absent-minded vampire caught in the dawn sunlight just before he crumbles away to dust for ever.
It was still not real passion, even though Kevin asked her how she spent her evenings and suggested she should visit him in California the following summer. Beside the ocean, obviously. With him, of course. But the invitation wouldn’t have been so explicit if both parties had not first made some thorough investigation. Inquiries unfiltered by discretion, arriving quick-fire as if in a game show where only one answer is possible, with contestants who are astute enough to avoid the heavily signalled trick questions.
Sherrie: u have a girlfriend now?
Surfman: oh, plenty girlfriends around……. and u?
Sherrie: i don’t know yet…. maybe
It was as if she had answered with the insane intention of making him repeat the question and surprising him in front of the office computer amid his cups and trophies. Meanwhile, Kevin struggled to understand what the blond Dutch girl wanted to conceal behind the concision of her message.
But the man seemed to have lost interest. He played along for a while but didn’t go for the kill. Nor did Jolanda want to reveal her true feelings. She didn’t know why she kept going back every evening to a centre where – after all – the people were pretty uncool and her girlfriend, Melanie, kept making fun of her sudden passion for the Internet.
"You can’t screw your wrinkly friend over the keyboard," Melanie told Jolanda with the shrewd insight of a practised prick-tease. As she walked past, she extended her arms to brush her friend’s back in an extravagant mockery of flying whose evolutions suggested various absurd images – an obscene metaphor for a huge bird or an aeroplane, now that California was increasingly often the subject of their conversations. Or it may just have been the simple tribute of a graceful shape, so well-defined in its extension of herself as if her friend wanted to embrace the world without malice. Or again it may have been a desire to shake free of everything, the girl hungering only to imagine herself breaking away from the earthly world, hanging in ecstatic ascension midway between floor and ceiling.
Jolanda paid her no attention. She smiled without looking away from the computer screen and stretched a hand behind her back to pinch her friend. On the tit, since it is the other’s proud claim that she was the motor with the biggest air bags in all Amsterdam.
"Watch out or I’ll deflate your safety equipment," squealed jolanda, giggling all the while. Melanie, too, laughed at the jibe and took up the exchange of insults and mutual recriminations they whispered like a secret language.
"Do that, and I’ll hit you where it hurts most," Melanie replied, making it clear that she was prepared to extend the principle of "an eye for an eye" to other areas of the body. While she was speaking, her gaze wandered over to the blue-coloured computer screen where Kevin appeared to be smiling his smile for her alone. But Jolanda, alternately serious and silly, put her arms round the screen when she realised that Melanie is almost on top of her, preventing her from continuing a relationship woven from subconscious glances. She was even jealous - the lads at the bar would say – of a poorly scanned photograph.
Surfman: ok darling, i really gotta go now… somebody’s waiting for me
Sherrie: shall we meet tomorrow?
Surfman: yes, but later… i have to give lessons in the afternoon
Sherrie: ok then…. kiss me…
She asked him for a goodnight kiss, when it was time to say goodbye, which for Jolanda meant bedtime although Kevin still hadn’t had his evening meal. Then a phrase popped up in full colour, repeated three, four, six times in row, each time in a different hue.
Surfman: SURFMAN KISSES SHERRIE ON HER CHEEK!!!!
Irritated and put out, Jolanda logged off without even saying goodbye, leaving Kevin’s kaleidoscopic crassness on the screen. How come he didn’t understand? She asked him for a kiss, not that cheap rainbow and the condescending peck on the cheek as if he were an uncle kissing a niece not yet old enough to wear stockings!
Jolanda was sure she hated him now. Certain that she would never again let herself be surprised in front of that stupid machine, which couldn’t even keep the simplest of promises.
Melanie watched her go off in silence, with the dignified arrogance of a wild creature on the verge of death. She waited until Jolanda had left the club, then skipped round the tables and went into the kitchen with the manager.
The following day, Jolanda managed to stay away from the club. Luckily, her computer at home wasn’t Internet-enabled so resisting the temptation to chat was no great effort. When school was over, she went for a run in the parks, then on to the swimming pool to pass the time until supper. After her swim, she had a sauna and while her body was still glistening with heat, she decided she’d like to have her portrait done like that – dripping with sweat and buckling under the impact of heat that the thermometer indicated as having reached precisely ninety degrees Centigrade.
"Oh baby…." a transitory thought transfixed her as, involuntarily, the shadow of a phrase in Dutch brushed her lips, "I’d really love to see you sweat …….."
She imagined him to be there with her, "oh baby….", but for some reason strangely subservient to her whims – a docile slave who would accept the most atrocious tortures with the same smile that, since she saw the photo, she expected from him when he was riding the waves.
Sitting on the sauna benches were four other people who did not seem to know each other. Two were middle-aged men, one was a teenage girl and the other a woman Jolanda had exchanged a few words with them in the past, as one does in saunas. But today, she only wanted to talk to herself. Suddenly, she hurried out, not even bothering to jump into the tub of icy water, dried herself off, got dressed and sped home bursting with anxiety.
Jolanda said a cursory hello to her brother then darted into the bathroom. After locking the door - something she very rarely did – "Oh baby…." she ransacked the laundry basket and picked out one of her father’s shirts. Enraptured, she sniffed it, amazed that she could have been so unaware of the smell of an adult male.
"Oh baby…." she mumbled, still uttering no more than a general invocation. But her body clung motionless to the shirt, her desire rapidly growing to distill her lover drop by drop and finish him off in a sauna that her sublime torment imagined as a sealed container with no beginning and no end.
So she raced back to the sports centre to find the manager closing up. She begged him to let her in and booted up the computer, anxious to see Kevin’s sun-burnished body, as if meeting and embracing in the electronic labyrinth were more real than a night of lovemaking under the stars in the garden.
But this time, Kevin was not online so she did a whois search, again without success. And yet he was there, says the manager, for almost everyone had chatted with him. Jolanda tried to figure out the time difference and reckoned that, for today at least, she had missed out. He’d be having dinner now. Then he’d go to bed with some local lady. While she was thinking this (and she used the English term "lady", only to add a string of epithets that would have startled even the most eloquent virtuosos of invective), she said goodbye to her friend and walked away. Slowly, as if she knew her train has already left the station.
"Oh baby…." she imagined him fighting back the tears but she would lick them as they descended to the corners of his mouth, tracing a Viva Zapata moustache, washing away the deep, generous blue of his eyes, an insolent blue bright as the waters behind the dykes in spring.
- Oh baby…. another night in Holland to be got through, then another trivial day, with trivial people and trivial conversations ……. Now Jolanda wanted to lie in bed after drinking one of the philtres that in the epic poems she reads at high school bring sleep or death, or preferably that singular abstraction which, if only for the space of one night, transports you out of the mortal world ……. and while she was dreaming and the words were tumbling out one after the other, then, yes, of course…. beyond good and evil, it occurred to her, where her churning emotions collided with the graceless rebukes of the philosophy teacher and phrases intertwined so it was no longer possible to disentangle the stunned embrace of Nietzsche and Sappho …… for the first time since she started going to school, she felt that everything she had unenthusiastically learnt was written for her and her distant lover. That was right, because wasn't it true that the passage from Shakespeare was composed expressly for her? …. the tragic demise of King Richard desperate to escape just as she wanted to run away for ever, invoking wings and chargers to lift her above the pikes that even now transfix the king's bloody breast …… "I think there were six Kevins in the field. I have killed five today instead of him. A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
Oh baby………. or, and this was the illusory fruit that no one except her had been able to pick from the tree …. "like the reddest apple ripening on the highest bough …. no, the pickers did not forget it, but they could not reach it."
Suddenly, as soon as she opened the door, her father's odour made its imperious return. Jolanda could detect it in the corridor leading to the bedrooms. She even felt tears well up at the smell of the man who is asleep in the next room but who for some perverse reason seemed further away than Kevin. In short, she felt that her family no longer existed except as a faint background noise in the night. Her father's light snore had become more insistent after his accident last year. Her mother replied with a cough stifled in her pillow, revealing her long-established habit of sleeping with her face buried so deep that her husband had taken fright on their honeymoon. In contrast, her brother was more discreet. You wouldn't know he was in the house at all, except for the bow and arrows incongruously inserted into the umbrella stand in the hall. Archery was his latest craze and he practised every afternoon at a club.
It was not their presence that Jolanda perceived. She sensed them through indirect signals. Emptinesses as indefinable as memories of school. Shades that spawned a tangle of emotion and exasperation even as she realised how disporportionate they were to those tiny signals.
Morning was ushered in by the household noises that had infiltrated her dreams. It was the happiest day of the week, and not just because it was Saturday. At school, she had three hours of physical education, which were given over to volleyball matches against the other educational institutions in the town. So for three hours without a break, Jolanda could forget she was Sherrie and concentrate on something that not even the tribulations of love could compromise.
Briefly, on her way to the changing rooms, the sweat-glistening athlete met Melanie, but her friend didn’t play sports. Older than Jolanda, she disdained such pursuits for other, more mature, delectations. Instead, Melanie asked her how her cyber-affair was going and this simple enquiry was enough to capture Jolanda’s undivided attention. Yes, because – she was told as if it proved the truth of some astounding story Melanie was prepared to swear to – the secretary at a shipper’s had fallen in love with a Frenchman on a chat line, and now she spent more time in Paris than she did at home. Melanie smiled her ambivalent smile, without letting on whether what she said actually happened or if it was just a mischievous story she had dreamed up to exacerbate Jolanda’s disappointment.
But the athlete merely phoned home to say she wouldn’t be back for lunch and jogged off to the club, picking up some fried fish at the shop on the corner. Then she sat down at the computer and searched for her lover, knowing that he wouldn’t even be awake at that hour. There was no sign of Surfman. So Jolanda decided to send him a message but she couldn’t make her mind up about what tone to adopt. Should she be firm, keeping her feelings in check behind a wall of dignified self-importance? Or should she be nonchalant and cheeky, pretending she had only just noticed the size of his tackle and perhaps reminding him what happened to the equally well-hung bulls in Hemingway (the campesinos would celebrate by roasting the animal’s testicles over an acacia wood fire and eating them while the beast was still breathing its last)?
In the end, her letter was brief, and very different from how she had originally conceived it. There were four – rather formally written lines – except for the final phrase, in which the sender ceased to dissemble and the force of her emotion was mirrored by the directness of the language. ANSWER ME, YOU BASTARD!
Naturally, Kevin replied. He made a date for the evening of the day after at an hour which from that moment for Jolanda lay in another dimension of time. Confusedly, Surfman hinted that he wasn’t feeling very well but it was just a ploy, a calculated exaggeration of courtesy, a weapon from the female armoury that he had noticed was always effective on the web.
When she logged on to the chat line, Jolanda experienced the thrill and emotion of a really important "first time". Today, Kevin asked her for a kiss. She asked how he was, but not because she wanted to put him off. She was playing for time, needing to take a deep breath so she wouldn’t be awkward and screw up her appointment with happiness.
Surfman: oh, i’ve got influenza, but nothing serious darling…… kiss me and i’ll soon get better! He said to her, seeming to near his lips to Sherrie’s computer screen. Without seeing him, she stared at the terminal from the other side of the world.
But Jolanda jerked away. Nothing disgusted her more than physical decay. Kissing a sick man was to her like an act of blasphemy, an insult to life. And although Kevin may have been the lover for whom she was most prepared to make a sacrifice, for the time being he was just a sick man, and even more culpably had deteriorated to a state she had hitherto thought impossible. For reading between the lines that Kevin so feebly fired off, Jolanda could actually hear his voice slurring. She could see on his hunky all-American face the ignorance and insensitivity induced by a life devoted exclusively to riding the waves. She didn’t think about the virtual illusion or the sympathy of a contact that she, too, had sought. She simply said no. No kiss. No hug. There could be no complicity between a sick man and a woman who detested illness as if it were a moral failing.
Sherrie: no way, Surfman, i wont kiss u…..
But Kevin was convinced that this was a game in which the force of desire is conveyed more by its denial than in careless capitulation. So he continued to distill his blandishments into ever more passionate concentrations, tracing and retracing exquisitely circular arguments, losing his way in labyrinthine syllogisms without realising that by now only he was chatting. However, when he repeated his request, the verdict was unchanged.
Sherrie: i told u Surfman, NO WAY!; she screamed at him in capitals, surprising herself with her vehemence.
What was she to do? Kevin remained silent, after tapping out a word or two by way of an incongruous appeal for mercy. Jolanda said nothing either. She didn’t close Surfman’s window, avoiding contagion with a hygienic click of her mouse. Nor did she change the subject. But it was the adventure that won the day on-screen. Jolanda knew only too well that there was nothing else to talk about except the topic they had both met up for. And with the practical attitude of those who have something better to do, she cut off the contact without further comment. But she was still undecided. What should she do, she asked herself. So she scrolled through the list of channels open at that moment, searching for someone or something she felt close to, running down names whose very banality rendered them even more stridently ostentatious …… sexygirl thebest one4all deathwish snowboard…..
Now she needed to get in touch with someone. A name that belonged only to cyberspace, or the "ether" as the guides put it with cod-poetic delicacy. She had to plunge in among those familiar presences, yet so inaccessible even when they seemed only a keystroke away. She tried contacting people simply because their nickname was particularly interesting, then clicked on status, tapped in /whois Surfman, and discovered that her cold-bedevilled lover was no longer on line. Perhaps now Jolanda could have explained why she had said no, adding a belated but love-filled apology. She’d have told him that it was nothing really – just that she was afraid of having to stay in bed, with hot lemon drinks and paper handkerchiefs, because of one ill-considered kiss. Tomorrow, or the next day, there’d be plenty of time to put things right. Even now, as the first inklings of summer were adorning the avenues of Amsterdam, and the canals fooled houseboat-dwellers into thinking they could drift away to distant seas if only they would cast off, close their eyes against the midday sun and let themselves be rocked in the gentle rolling waves that make seasoned sailors sad. Now that Kevin had formally invited her to spend the summer with him in California, just the two of them, surfing the Pacific breakers and riding on the beach. Now that her parents had all but agreed to pay her air fare if she passed her exams at school.
But as she slowly walked home – it was her turn to water the garden today – the realised that the distance she had covered was a trap. There wouldn’t be another chance tomorrow, or ever again. Even if she was still unaware of the final act of this sad little comedy. For the past couple of days, her friend Melanie had been holding onto the return air ticket. Her parents hadn’t given her a single guilder and she had no savings. But the tourist class travel document carried an indication and signature the desk staff at KLM knew only too well – paid in advance by Mr. Kevin Karp, USA.