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Let’s wait till we get to our room. There’s something that might dampen your enthusiasm.’ She moved the fence to my mouth. She re-pointed to the canal colours. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’
    I replied yes, sarcastically. Yes, the moon is very…moony. Yes, the water is…watery.
    After a squabble with the pension manager we climbed the steep spiral to number 12. He wanted my passport for safekeeping. His safekeeping, not mine. ‘You young people don’t pay and one morning— phut ! You are gone.’ I gave him my passport to speed up getting onto those stairs.
    The room had a low double bed covered by a black eiderdown with windmill embroidery. Window glass was the headrest. Through the glass was a ledge with red and green flowers in a planter box.
    ‘Look at that,’ Tilda said, kneeling on the bed. ‘Across the street. You wonder how the whole façade keeps standing.’ She was referring to a row of bulging buildings, cracked from the ages and kept from toppling by telegraph poles propped against them.
    ‘Yes, it’s fascinating,’ I said. I knelt beside her, positioning myself to catch her lips with my lips when she turned. Sweet poison dripped through me. She turned and, lip to lip, we spoke into each other’s mouths.
    ‘Wait,’ she said.
    ‘For what?’ I fingered under her jumper, arms wedging open the wool. I fingered a layer of cotton singlet to ungoggle the bra wire from her breasts. She bit my bottom lip with her kiss. Her man arms were quivering. The taut skins of her ribs and drum belly were quivering. I was quivering too. She had hardly touched me with more than her mouth but that was enough to pluck my nervous system like a thumb.
    The ungoggling went smoothly; so too unbuckling her belt—one of those seatbelt arrangements that snapped together instead of a spur and hole. But when I slid my flattened hand down her fly-front she jackknifed away just as I reached the saliva parting. My wrist was locked between her legs—I had to shimmy after her as she jumped off the bed or risk a dislocation. She held my wrist in her hands as if I needed controlling. ‘That’s the thing I needed to tell you. My period has arrived. I hoped it might start tapering off by now. It’s tomato soup down there.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So it’s a mess.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So it’s not attractive.’
    ‘I’m used to blood.’
    ‘Ay?’
    ‘Calves and lambs. What farm boy ever baulked at blood?’
    ‘In my experience this kind of blood puts men off.’
    ‘I have no idea.’
    ‘You haven’t done it with blood?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It doesn’t bother you?’
    Even if it had I was quivering so much I’d have gone ahead whether blood or acid.
    ‘Sweet boy.’ She cradled my face. ‘The good thing is, I can’t get potted with it.’ She kissed me, a peck on the mouth. Another peck. Each kiss got longer until it was one long kiss that kept going while she slipped her tampon out and scrunched a pocket tissue around it for my non-viewing.
    The plastic bag from the rubbish bin made an undersheet beneath Tilda. Period blood smells the same as any other kind: rust, soil and briny water.

Chapter 18
    Art smells like turpentine. Like garages and machinery sheds. It dries into pictures, but turpentine, that’s what art is to me. Old baked-bean and tuna-fish cans filled with the stuff. It keeps the painter’s brush clean and makes the paint go further.
    The smell fumes up through the nook’s floorboard cracks, burns my eyes, makes my nose run like winter. My pacing circuit may creak and disturb Tilda’s concentration but my pages—my testimony, for want of a better word—get wrinkled in spots from my turpentine tears. Not real tears—I am the opposite of miserable. The testimony is liberating. There’s a jaunt in me, a skip in my mental stride. The swagger I once had is getting another life. It’s the perfect state to be in to write about our high spirits the next morning in Amsterdam.
    Sex, a café breakfast, then more