“I mean a GP,” I said, correcting myself. “An emergency room. You know what I mean. You’re a research scientist! When was the last time you did something like this?”
“He doesn’t need anything more than what I’ve already done for him. It’s best to let him sleep it off. He’ll be sore when he wakes up, but I can write him a prescription for painkillers in the morning.” He lifted the boy’s T-shirt and felt his prominent ribs for cracks. I could make out dark-purple spheres from where his assailant’s fist had struck. Bastiaan checked the underside of his left arm but it was clear and then took off his shoes and socks to check his feet and between his toes but there were no more needle marks there either.
“He’ll have to stay here tonight,” said Bastiaan, standing up and walking to the bathroom to wash his hands. “We can’t send him back out on the streets like this.”
I bit my lip, uncertain whether I approved of this idea or not, but waited for him to come back out to say so.
“What if he wakes up in the middle of the night and he’s completely confused about where he is or what’s happened to him? He might think we beat him up. He could come into our room and kill us.”
“You don’t think you’re being a little melodramatic?” asked Bastiaan.
“No, I don’t. It’s a possibility. You read about these kinds of things in the papers all the time. And what if his pimp comes back looking for him?”
“He’s not going to come looking for this kid until his bruises have healed and he can rent him out again. Cyril, we’ll be fine. Look at him; he’s barely there. He wouldn’t be able to hurt a fly.”
“Still—”
“If it sets your mind at rest, we’ll lock our bedroom door. And we can lock the living room door too. If he wakes up in the night and tries to get out, I’ll hear him rattling the handle and come out to him.”
“All right,” I said, not entirely reassured. “But just for tonight, OK?”
“Just for tonight,” he said, reaching over to kiss me. “He’ll be sober in the morning and we can bring him somewhere better then.”
I gave in. There was no arguing with Bastiaan when he wanted to help someone. It was in his nature. And so we laid him on the sofa with a couple of pillows beneath his head and threw some sheets over him. As Bastiaan turned out the light, I glanced down at the boy again. His breathing had become more regular and he’d brought his thumb to his lips as he slept. In the pale moonlight that seeped through the half open curtain, he looked just like a child.
The following morning, I woke up surprised that there had been no sounds in the night and even more surprised that there still weren’t any. My first thought was that the boy was dead, that he’d woken up in the early hours, taken something else and overdosed. We hadn’t checked for anything in his jacket pockets, after all, and who knew what he kept in there. I shook Bastiaan, who looked back at me sleepily and then sat up, scratching his head.
“We better go in there,” he said.
He unlocked the door slowly and I held my breath, preparing myself for some horrendous scene, but to my relief the boy was alive, awake and sitting up on the couch with one of the blankets wrapped around him. He looked utterly furious, however, and breathed noisily through his nostrils as he glared at us.
“You locked me in,” he said, and as he started to speak I could see that his jaw still hurt, for he put a hand to it to ease the pain.
“It was for our safety,” said Bastiaan, stepping into the room and walking slowly over to sit by the window. “We had no choice. It was for your safety too.”
“I should be gone by now. It costs more if I spend the night. You locked me in so you have to pay for it. Two hundred guilders.”
“What?” I asked.
“Two hundred guilders!” he shouted. “I want my money.”
“Shut the fuck up, we’re not giving you any money,” said Bastiaan, but in a completely calm tone. The boy looked across at him, startled, and Bastiaan smiled in reply. “How does your face feel?” he asked.
“Sore.”
“And your ribs?”
“Even worse.”
“It’ll take a few days. Who did this to you?”
The boy said nothing, looking down at the pattern on the blanket and frowning deeply. I suspected that he was unsure how to deal with the situation in which he found himself.
“You have to pay me,” he said after a lengthy silence, but this time in a more plaintive voice. “It’s not fair if you don’t pay me.”
“Pay you for what?” I asked. “What do you think happened here last night anyway?”
He jumped to his feet and marched around the room in search of his shoes and socks and when he found them, sat back on the sofa, massaging his toes for a few moments before putting them on.
“You’re bastards if you don’t pay me,” he said, and I could hear the emotion building in the back of his throat. Tears, I suspected, were not far away. “And there’s two of you, so I want twice as much. Five hundred guilders!”
“It was only two hundred a minute ago,” I said. “Wouldn’t double be four hundred?”
“Interest!” shouted the boy. “And a tax for locking me in overnight! Every minute you don’t pay, my price goes up.”
“We’re not going to give you any money,” said Bastiaan, standing up and approaching him, but when the boy took a combative stance he held his hands in the air in a peaceful gesture and sat back down again.
“Six hundred,” he said now, his voice rising in fury, and if the entire scene had not been so peculiar I would have laughed, for there was absolutely nothing threatening about this child. Bastiaan could have felled with him the side of his hand had he chosen to.
“We’re not going to give you any money,” repeated Bastiaan. “And whatever you might think, nothing happened here last night. We didn’t bring you here for sex. We found you outside. At our front door. Lying in the snow. You’d been beaten.”
“You’re a liar,” said the boy, looking away. “You both fucked me and I want my money. Seven hundred guilders!”
“We’ll have to take out a mortgage if this goes on much longer,” I said, throwing my hands in the air.
“I can help you, if you want me to,” said Bastiaan. “I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor who fucks little boys, yes?” shouted the boy. “You and your friend here?”
“We didn’t lay a finger on you,” I said, exhausted now by his petulance and wishing that he would just leave. “So one more line like that and you’re back out on the street.”
The boy jutted his tongue into the corner of his mouth and looked out the window. The light seemed to hurt his eyes and he turned back to me almost immediately. “Why did you bring me up here if you didn’t want to fuck me?” he asked. “You only want to fuck this old man?”
“He’s hardly old,” I said. “He’s only thirty-three.”
“Why didn’t you leave me out there?”
“Because it’s the middle of winter,” said Bastiaan. “You were injured and you were freezing. You think I would have left you on the streets? I told you, I’m a doctor. I do what I can to help people. The marks on your arms…what drugs are you taking?”