“About thirty-seven hundred euros.”
Her eyes, brown with light flecks in them, absolutely amazing eyes that can get out of traffic tickets on all continents and probably out of assault charges if she really tried, went wide.
“And debts?”
“Yeah. I’m square with Monique, but I owe quite a bit. Richard Maarsen has taken over that debt, so it’s not at a bank rate. But he and I agreed I’ll pay him four percent and try to pay off at least ten thousand a year.”
“On how much?”
“One thirty. It’s what I…”
“WHAT?” she shouted, not giving a toss about people looking at us. “How are you in the hole for one hundred and thirty THOUSAND?”
“Shhhh… Be quiet, Katey. I wanted to buy out Monique.”
“Buy out? Then why are YOU living in the Shrieking Shack? She should be paying YOU. You left that house.”
“It’s not that simple. Alimony. She was a shareholder. We had…”
“You are an idiot,” she declared. “That vulture took you to the cleaners. Alimony. You don’t even have kids. Shareholder. For what, sucking your dick twice a oh thank you, that looks fantastic. Can I have some more fizzy water? And my brother would like a beer.”
“I’m fine,” I protested, as my main course was presented.
“No, seriously, he wants a beer,” smiled Kate at the waiter. “Large one. And a shotgun, if you can manage. Make sure it fits in his mouth.”
Kate was fuming. She wanted to know the exact details of my financial arrangements. My accountant had actually said I had been too generous to just about everybody and had informally recommended a different course of action that would have required me to leave The Netherlands for five years. That would have left an awful lot of people in trouble, though, and I couldn’t bring myself to do that.
“It’s actually very nice food. You might want to taste some of it,” I said, as Kate was chomping her way through a salmon mousse and berating me at the same time.
“I eat nonsense like this every damned day,” she huffed. “And I would like for my brother to be able to do the same. You’ll be homeless in three months unless something comes up!”
“I won’t be homeless. I’ll be fine. And I’ll get a job where I get to go home at 5 p.m. and not worry if we’ll make payroll this month. That will be nice for a change. This Irish beef is fantastic, by the way. Who is paying for it? Shakira? Lady Gaga? Elton John?”
That was one of our family jokes for Kate. She always carried credit cards of the people she was handling, or at least a card from her agency that she could use to ply clients and solve problems. That’s why I let her pay for dinner: it wouldn’t come out of her own pocket, or so she said. I never really knew her clients. I’m not exactly up to date with modern music. And so when I was teasing Kate, I generally named the most obvious showbiz people I could think of, which in my case usually included a fair few that hadn’t come out with a proper song in ten years or so.
She mellowed, but only a bit.
“Come live with me,” she said. “It will be fun and you’ll save money.”
“Fun? You’re never home.”
“Sometimes I am. And anyway, that’s better for you. You can finally go on the prowl for a bit, find some girls to fuck. You’ll have the flat to yourself when I’m gone. Martin, please come with me! I don’t want to think of you living in The Cabin in the Woods. Join me in London.”
“Very hard to do job interviews in Holland if you live in London.”
“Then don’t do job interviews here. Do them there.”
“Katey, I need to come up with fifteen thousand euros a year just for clearing my debt. London isn’t the place for me to make that kind of money, it’s expensive. And I’m just… not as British as you are. I’m a foreigner in the UK. Nobody needs me there.”
When Kate was nine, my parents moved to England. My father got posted there and they rented a house in Pinner, near his new job. I was twenty-five at the time and because the house in Holland was large and I had no social life to speak of, I still lived at home. Dad was often away on business trips anyway and my mum liked having someone around to open jars and change light bulbs. It also meant there was always someone home for Kate, because mother often worked evenings and nights, as supervisor in a retirement home.
Living at home gave me the opportunity to try lots of different jobs without worrying too much about paying the rent, and so I like to tell myself it helped make me into quite a rounded individual. I’ve tried my hand at a lot of things: journalism, making music, being a tour guide and setting up my own web development business amongst them. I had a future in most things, but there was always something new to explore.
I got my diplomas, of course; I tried mathematics for a while but it wasn’t for me; even a shy guy like me was more of a people person than my typical classmate; I nearly went nuts dealing with those people. And so I ended up with a humble BA in business studies and some certificates that only make sense if you know the Dutch higher education system of the nineties. My CV doesn’t exactly translate well, unless I add a brief history of education reforms in the Netherlands, going back to just before the Dutch Republic of 1581. My BA, for instance, was awarded a year after I had graduated from an institution called ‘HBO’. No, not the movie channel. You can see how this got confusing, so they tried to align the system with international standards and that’s how I and a few hundred thousand others found a BA in the mail one day. I just found it amusing and said: ‘I pity the fool!’ a lot. To myself, mostly.