“Well, all the effort you’ve put in with him since he came to Weesperplein. You’re good at it, you really are. Better than me.”
“Neither of us are his father,” said Bastiaan. “We mustn’t forget that.”
“I know. But it’s starting to feel as if we are, isn’t it? Or surrogate father figures anyway. It’s been three months now, after all.”
“Three months and two weeks.”
“And look how much he’s changed. No more drugs, no more selling himself to strangers, he’s eating healthy food, he’s got a job. And most of that is down to you. So tell me, how long have you wanted to be a father? Don’t you think it’s strange that we’ve never talked about this before?”
“Always, I suppose,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I never minded being gay, it never really bothered me, even when I was a teenager.”
“Well, that’s because you were fucking all the local footballers,” I said. “I wouldn’t have minded it either if I’d been having your experiences.”
“One footballer, Cyril,” he said. “One. And he was the goalkeeper.”
“That still counts. Quick with his hands.”
“Well, anyway, I didn’t mind being gay but it always bothered me that I probably wouldn’t have kids. If I’d been a woman, I’m sure I would have had a few by now. What about you?”
“Honestly?” I said. “I’ve barely given it a thought my whole life. My childhood was fucked up. I had such peculiar experiences of parenthood when I was actually being parented that it put me off. And yet, the funny thing is, now that we have one, or are pretending to have one, I find that I’m quite enjoying it.”
Of course, when the idea of Ignac moving in was first brought up I had been deeply uncertain about it. I was sure that he would either steal from us again or return some night in a drug-induced frenzy and commit some irrevocable act of violence against one or the other of us, but Bastiaan had persuaded me that we should help him for no other reason than he had asked for our help. That in itself seemed a logical equation to him. And then, what started out as an agreement that he might sleep in our spare room for a few days while he hid from his pimp turned into a few weeks and eventually the three of us sat down and decided to make things permanent. Jack Smoot agreed to give him a part-time job in MacIntyre’s and the rest of the time he stayed home, reading and scribbling in a notebook that he kept locked away in his room.
“You don’t want to be a writer, do you?” I asked him once.
“No,” he said. “I just like writing stories, that’s all.”
“So that’s a yes then,” I said.
“It’s a maybe.”
“You know my adoptive mother was a writer,” I told him.
“Was she any good?”
“She was very good. Maude Avery? Maybe you’ve heard of her?” He shook his head. “Well, you will if you go on reading at the rate you have been.”
“Did she like it?” he asked me. “Did it make her happy?”
And that, I realized, was a question I found impossible to answer.
The more Bastiaan and I got to know Ignac, the more he revealed about his past. He was shy at first, uncertain whether or not he could trust us but, as with his writing, the words eventually came. He told us that he had arrived in Amsterdam from Slovenia a few weeks after his mother died, when his paternal grandmother, in whose care he had been left, handed him a train ticket and told him that she wasn’t prepared to take care of him anymore. She had no money, she told him, and even less interest in bringing up another teenager, having failed spectacularly with her own son, Ignac’s father. When we asked about him, he made it clear that was a subject closed to us. The train ticket took him to Amsterdam and he’d been in the city less than a week when he turned his first trick. He told us that he wasn’t gay, that he was, in fact, attracted to girls, although he had never slept with one and didn’t particularly want to, not after all the things he had done with his body since leaving Ljubljana. He didn’t seem embarrassed by his experiences, nor did we make him feel there was anything wrong with them, but it was obvious that he hated the life that he had fallen into. We asked about his friends and he said that although he knew many boys in the city he did not think of them as friends; they were simply runaways, refugees or orphans from many different countries who’d come to Amsterdam in order to make money and in whose company he found himself on a daily basis.
“I needed to eat,” he said with a shrug, avoiding our eyes as he explained it. “And I made money doing it.”
He’d started to take drugs for no other reason than it helped to pass the long mornings and afternoons before the men came calling in the bars at night. With nothing to do, he spent his days in the coffee shops where the other rent boys gathered, sitting around talking rubbish and smoking weed before graduating on to more serious substances. Bastiaan took this in hand from the day he moved in, bringing him to one of his colleagues at the hospital, who helped him to wean his body back to health. Clean and sober now, his skin had begun to glow and his disposition had definitely improved.
I had only seen his deerstalker pimp once since Ignac had come to live with us and that was a week or two earlier when I’d arranged to meet the boy after leaving work for the evening. We were due to meet Bastiaan for dinner and as we made our way along Singel, it made me happy to see that the boy had a noticeable bounce in his step.
“Tell me about Ireland,” he said, the first time he’d shown any interest in my home country.
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s it like there? You’re not going to go back anytime soon, are you?”
“Oh God no,” I said, shivering at the idea, partly out of fear of confronting the mess I’d left behind, even if it had been seven years before. “I doubt I’ll ever go back.”
“When you do, will you take me with you? I’d like to see it.”
“Ignac, I just said that I don’t want to return. Ever.”
“Yes, but you’re lying. I can tell from your voice. You’d love to go back.”
“There’s nothing there for me anyway now,” I said. “My friends, my family…none of them would have anything to do with me.”
“Why? What did you do that was so terrible?”
I saw no reason not to come clean. “I lied to my best friend for twenty years, never telling him that I was in love with him, then married his sister and left her during the wedding reception without so much as saying goodbye.”
“Shit,” he said, biting his lip and trying not to laugh. “That’s not good.”
“No. And anyway, Bastiaan would never find a hospital interested in his kind of research in Dublin.”
“Don’t they have sex diseases in Ireland then?” he asked with a snigger, and despite his own past it was easy to see how young he really was.