‘You’re so restless…’
She runs her fingers through my hair and gives one of my earlobes a little tug.
‘You make me restless.’
‘I can tell,’ she says, sounding a little sad again.
I say I don’t know what’s got into me.
In reality it’s quite simple. I’d rather be draped over a chaise longue, acting like I’m suffering from some kind of poetic consumption that wracks my lungs and limbs, but sets my soul on fire. The problem is I can’t see myself lying there like that. I’m not consumptive and I’m not a seer. It’s that longing, the ache to be something I’m not, that’s weighing on me. All I want is to stare hollow-eyed at the horizon, at the birth of a fantastic vision that only I will be able to capture in verse that will leave the world staggered. I want to be praised and hated, with enough people at my feet and the rest frothing at the mouth to curse me. I need to be offered prizes, not out of love and admiration, but because of the fear of misjudging me. Prizes which I, of course, would arrogantly refuse, hurling accusations of the most dubious double-dealing into the faces of the jury members. I want to shine in people’s imaginations like a creature of fable that is beyond the reach of mere mortals, a being with goat’s legs and dark gentle eyes you mate with at risk of eternal madness. Piss off, all of you, I want to be a poet, a lyrical genius, a monster whose satin lips adorn a mouth that spouts verse. I want to spin the wheel of fate, giving it an almighty tug, a gambler who risks everything on everything. All or nothing!
But I’m almost twenty-two and sitting here on a sofa above a butcher’s shop with just one person to worship me, who seems to have completely suppressed all thoughts of the darkness she once saw in me. I sit here as an off-duty cop who, since this business with Jean, is considered completely untrustworthy by Lode and everyone else at the station. Another one of those things: off and on duty. That’s how we all refer to our time. As if they’re the ones who turn us on and off… Even when I’m off duty, it’s on their say-so; my time is not my own. Do you see how work takes you over? An off-duty cop. Someone who sees himself that way doesn’t even realize how much he’s been enslaved. I am imprisoned here, that’s what it is, locked in concrete from my ankles to my crotch, with a life that’s still ahead of me but already seems to have been chewed over from beginning to end by toothless ancestors. So I’m just like the others, like everyone. And that takes time to process, that makes a person—Yvette, your beautiful future great-grandmother, is right—a tad restless.
‘Your tea’s getting cold. And I made it for you with so much love.’
‘Whoops,’ I say and take a sip.
We are alone, inasmuch as two young people could be alone in a parental home in those days. Her parents are downstairs cleaning up the butcher’s shop and Lode is on duty. We, of course, are in the living room. I would be refused entry into her home for all eternity if I ever got caught in her bedroom.
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘that’s enough gloom and doom. You’ve hardly given me a second glance all day.’
Without a word I undo a button of her tightly fitted, mauve satin blouse.
‘Ah, down to business, is it?’
But her voice doesn’t sound reproachful and her hand doesn’t push away mine.
I undo another button, then look into her eyes.
She asks if I’m proud of myself now.
A bit of her flesh-coloured bra is showing.
‘Are you too scared to go any further?’
Her tone of voice makes my blood race. Like a cartoon hero who is suddenly surrounded by an enormous gang of bandits and doesn’t want to let on how terrified he is, I hardly dare swallow, scared that it will echo through the whole house.
I undo another button and try to do it as smoothly as possible, as if it’s routine. Trembling fingers start on the last button, which needs to be forced through the buttonhole. The blouse falls open, revealing the shape of her breasts, covered in flesh-coloured lace. She’s still gazing at me, the look in her eye betraying curiosity. My heart is pounding. Hers seems unaffected. She hooks a thumb under a strap and pulls it down over her round shoulder. She slides away the other strap too. Then with one hand she raises her left breast up out of all that lacy fabric. For the first time I am staring at one of her nipples. She offers it to me, slowly pulling my head down with her other hand.
‘Here. This is for you,’ she whispers, and only now do I hear her own excitement. ‘Here. Spoil me. It’s all yours.’
Her own words make her nipple swell.
I press a kiss on it and smell her skin. She smells of things that until now have only existed in my imagination. Things from an unknown south, the south of the sun, the south of naked bodies, undiscovered still, but already filling my secret thoughts.
My kiss is a little too cautious for her taste.
‘Again.’
I close my mouth over the nipple and suck.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s it.’
My trousers tighten. I try to breathe calmly. I run my tongue over her nipple, exploring its softness and its hardness at once, the lust that’s shaping it.
‘There’s two of them, remember…’
This doomed poet is reduced to forced labour in the fields of love.
She calmly strokes
