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by Amal Chatterjee
This is the story he told me. Exactly. I have changed nothing, except perhaps the names, places and the events. Otherwise everything is as he said.
I came to Amsterdam for love, he said, the gold ring on his finger glinting as he toyed with his coffee cup. I suppose a lot of people tell you that, I suppose you hear that all the time.
Too right.
There was this girl, he continued, I met her in Paris. Or maybe he said Marseille or Lyons, it doesn’t really matter. I was in this cafe and I looked across the room and our eyes met.
Nonsense.
He sighed. True, that isn’t really how we met. We met at a party. Some friend or the other. We were both drunk. Maybe we danced, maybe we didn’t. I don’t think either of us could have, we’d had so much to drink. We woke up the next morning beside each other, clothes half on, half off. We didn’t know how far we’d gone, neither of us did.
Sounds like you were too drunk to have gone very far.
He smiled, another glint of gold, this time in his teeth. Fillings, he seemed young to have so many.
Probably. It didn’t bother us anyway, there we were, sour breath and stale beer, brewing coffee in this kitchen that wasn’t either of ours. The other guys in the flat were cleaning up, like they had an inspection coming up. The bell rang and the girl she’d come with the night before, a brunette, came up. She’d waited for my blonde the night before, she said, but when no one had come out she’d gone home. Now this brunette was back. My blonde didn’t want to go with her though, so the brunette scribbled her number on a scrap of paper, stuffed it in my pocket and left.
I raised my eyebrows. Just went away?
The wedding ring on his finger caught the light. Yes.
His name was Raymond, I’d met him at the library, he was the only other person who read French magazines.
It wasn’t like they were close friends or anything, they’d met in Amsterdam so she felt obliged. When she didn’t want to go with her, that was it as far as she was concerned. The blonde and I went back to my place. I lent her my best blue shirt and a pair of jeans. She made them look good, my blonde Dutch girl. Six months later, there I was, at Centraal Station, waiting for her.
Six months later? What happened in between?
We made love a few times, then she went away, a week after the party. She left me her telephone number so I called her, kept calling her. After a while she stopped telling me anything so I said, I’m coming over. She said, if you want to, I don’t mind.
And did she come to the station?
She did. Wearing the blue shirt and the jeans I’d never retrieved from her. We went back to her place in de Pijp – he pronounced it ‘peep’ – and in that tiny flat things were like we hadn’t been apart at all, all those months.
He broke a bit off his biscuit and popped it in his mouth, glint of gold again. A month later, one morning, I found my shirt and the jeans in the rubbish. They were dirty, she said. So I asked her, why don’t you wash them? They’re not mine, she said, they’re yours. And she put on her jacket, went out the door, got on her bike. I ran out, after her. I’m coming with you, I shouted. No, you’re not, she said. I’m going to my mother’s. With that she was gone, leaving me with the flat, my bag and, I discovered, nothing much else. She’d moved all her things out without me noticing, everything except a dirty green T-shirt. I washed it and wore it for a few days, hoping it would bring her back.
Did it?
No. All it brought was a note from her, saying the landlord would be round for the rent on the Friday. I didn’t have any money, though.
So what did you do?
The only other person I knew in Amsterdam was the brunette I’d met her with. I still had that scrap of paper, so I called her. She laughed and said come over. She was living with her boyfriend at the time, but he was out most nights, working in a pizza place and he didn’t seem to mind having me around. She threw him out after a month. She found me a job in a small bookshop in the Jordaan. The old man who owned it didn’t really need any help, but he wanted company and liked the sound of French. The job paid enough for the rent and I got to read whatever I wanted. Then the owner’s daughter showed up. Fifty something, bad hair, bad clothes. She called me a parasite, said I ought to be ashamed of myself, taking advantage of an old man. And other things like that, only worse. I went back to my brunette and she said, will you marry me?
Just like that?
He touched the wedding ring and a gold chain peeped out under his collar. So much yellow metal on one man.
She was going to have a baby. We went down to the Gemeente. I had to get my birth certificate sent over but it worked out, we were married in the presence of two witnesses we’d met in a bar and her mother, who gave me a big hug at the end, slipped me €50, told me to take her daughter out for dinner and caught the train back to Friesland. Leaving me with €50, a wife and a baby on the way.
A small boy came up. Viens, Papa. I could have sworn he was Chinese, or East Asian at least.
Raymond stood up. Got to go. It’s been nice talking.
As he walked out the door with the boy’s hand in his, I remembered where he’d said he was from. Senegal. We were both a long way from home.
An author and creative writing tutor based in Amsterdam and Oxford, Amal Chatterjee’s writing includes novels, short stories, theatre plays, and non-fiction articles. He is currently working on a book, The Legacy of Empire: Why Countries Fail to be published by Hurst Publishers in 2026. Amal Chatterjee is a Senior Course Tutor for the University of Oxford’s MSt (Master’s Programme) in Creative Writing, and teaches on, and helps coordinate, the Paris Institute of Critical Thinking’s Creative Writing programme. He also created and teaches academic and creative writing courses for, amongst others, the VU Taalcentrum, the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam, and the NIAS (the Netherlands Institute for Arts and Sciences). His novel, Across the Lakes, was shortlisted for the Crossword India Best Novel Award in 1998, while his short fiction has been published in numerous countries including the Netherlands, India, and the UK. His non-fiction has appeared in publications such as Prospect, the Huffington Post, The Independent, and the Hindustan Times, and includes the book Representations of India, 1740-1840 (1998). He also edited and contributed to Writers on Writing (2013), featuring writing from the US, the UK, India, Pakistan, Ireland, and Australia. In 2017 and 2018, two of his short plays, Dreams of England and Finding José, were staged by the Tamasha Theatre Company and Pokfulam Road Productions at London venues including the Arcola and Theatre.
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